Every Other Weekend

by Abigail Johnson

  “Adam!” I didn’t think my heart was trying to escape anymore so much as it was trying to smash itself to a pulp. My ribs felt splintered and I didn’t trust myself to open my eyes. I could not let him say what I thought he’d been about to say. The terrified, desperate thing in my rib cage was frantic now.

  “I will say it to you eventually, but if you’re not ready tonight...”

  I opened my eyes again, my heart collapsing in relief.

  He shrugged. “This—you here with me right now—it’s enough.”

  I felt bruised and battered inside and my heart moved in shaky half beats, weary but ready to start slamming again if given the provocation.

  “You here on my birthday?” He smiled. “It’s the best gift I’ve ever gotten.”

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” I said, glad for the reprieve and the reminder that I had something else for him. My fingers still felt stiff from the cold and the adrenaline my heart had been flooding my system with, but they functioned enough to dig into my bag and pull out a small cardboard box. I handed it to Adam. “Open it.”

  He did, and his smile made me feel warmer than when he’d given me his coat. Seeing his face was worth the cold. Way worth it.

  “It’s apple cinnamon,” I said, nodding at the cupcake. As if he couldn’t tell. It smelled amazing, all spicy and buttery vanilla. I hoped it tasted almost as good as his mom’s apple pie, which he’d once said was like eating summer. I dug back into my bag and pulled out a candle and a pack of matches. The tiny flame flicked to life and made both our faces glow as I lit the wick. “I’m not going to sing to you, but you do get to make a wish.”

  He glanced at the cupcake and the flame added liquid gold to his hazel eyes. “That’s easy. I already know what I want.”

  My heart missed a beat, then made up for it with two more right on top of each other, not painful, but fast. Adam said what we had right now was enough, sitting together, talking together, keeping those last few crucial inches between us. My insides warned me that if I let him get any closer I wouldn’t survive, but I knew with a burst of heat that chased away every last bit of cold from my body that I’d never truly live if I tried to keep him away. I was ready for my heart to make one last brutal assault trying to protect itself, but it never came.

  Because when Adam blew out his candle and his gaze locked with mine, I knew he’d wished for me.

  I could feel it in the way his lips fit to mine: warm and so soft, with a trace of the mint toothpaste he must have used that night. I inhaled when his mouth touched mine, and it wasn’t just air that filled my lungs, it was Adam. That too-heady feel and scent and taste. My heart was racing again, only this time I wasn’t afraid of the way I felt. He overwhelmed me in the most frighteningly perfect way. A camera could never capture it, and for once I didn’t get lost trying to imagine the moment as any better that it was. The kiss made me light-headed, and when his still-warm hand rose to lift my chin so he could kiss me deeper, that dizzy, tingling heat consumed me.

  It wasn’t just the sensation of Adam’s mouth against mine; it was what I knew he meant when he said I made him happy. Me. Comparing every other touch or hug or kiss I’d had before Adam was like comparing salt water to sweet. One took and the other gave. They’d all carried baggage and motive, but what Adam gave me was free. He kissed me because I was exactly what he wanted. He made me feel all the things he’d said on my birthday—that I was amazing and beautiful and the one thing I’d never let myself hope I’d ever be.

  The thing I hadn’t let him say.

  In his empty red barn that was a million miles away from anywhere I’d ever imagined, Adam Moynihan made me feel loved.

  ADAM

  I woke to the smell of bacon and what I thought were voices downstairs. Jeremy typically woke up just early enough to put on pants and grab a handful of whatever Mom had made for breakfast—he was notorious for eating scrambled eggs out of a paper towel with one hand while driving us to school with the other. But according to the clock, that still left him a good forty-five minutes.

  I was groggy from the late night with Jolene, and my senses overflowed with thoughts of her. I smiled, hoping they stayed that way until I could see her again, kiss her again.

  She’d tasted better than summer. And she’d let me kiss her, hold her. She hadn’t made a single joke about how shaky my hands had been, or the one time I’d accidentally banged our teeth together. It was like she hadn’t noticed any of that.

  She’d noticed me.

  And I hadn’t noticed anything beyond how right she felt in my arms and how maybe I’d found my way into the heart she pretended not to have. If she didn’t know before last night, she had to know after that she was forever in mine.

  I’d had one panicked moment when I’d tasted her tears. I’d thought I’d done something wrong, or she hadn’t wanted me to kiss her, but then she’d given me the most achingly beautiful smile I’d ever seen. She hadn’t been crying because I’d done something wrong, but because I’d done something right.

  I’d kissed Jolene.

  My stupid/happy smile lingered as I showered and got dressed, and it was still on my face as I sauntered downstairs, replaying the night in my mind.

  When I walked into the kitchen, it felt like I’d traveled back in time. Mom, still in her rose-print bathrobe, flipped a pancake onto an already high stack by the stove while Dad manned the toaster. She had only to glance at him before he silently moved closer to her and reached up to grab the powdered sugar shaker from the top shelf for her.

  I couldn’t stop my head from snapping to the kitchen table and the spot where Greg always sat. But of course he wasn’t there, and the rush of grief that punched me in the gut told me never to make that mistake again.

  Everything else was the same though. It was exactly the same.

  Only the longer I stood in the doorway, watching my parents watching each other when they thought the other wasn’t looking, the differences began slamming into me.

  Mom was still in her robe, but Dad was dressed, and there was gravel and mud on his boots from the driveway. Faint tracks on the floor from the back door where he’d come in, too. Not to mention the snow that had melted on his head and shoulders, leaving both wet. Mom’s hands didn’t reach out to touch Dad whenever she passed behind him, and he wasn’t whistling some off-key song that he’d insist was perfectly in tune even when Mom played it back for him on the piano in the next room.

  Dad also wasn’t yelling to Jeremy to get his butt downstairs, and Greg and I weren’t at the table arguing baseball over glasses of orange juice.

  We weren’t laughing. We weren’t happy. We weren’t together anymore.

  The old floor creaked when I shifted my weight, and my parents both jumped before turning toward me.

  “It’s the birthday boy.” Mom, metal spatula still in hand, hurried over to hug me. “Sixteen. I can’t believe it.”

  My gaze slide past her to Dad. “Me either.”

  She tugged the sash of her robe tighter. “He called last night,” she said, her hands shaking, along with her voice. “He didn’t want to miss your birthday. I thought maybe you wouldn’t want him to either.” Then she returned to the pancakes, probably needing to stay busy before she started feeling more than she wanted. “I’m making you sixteen, so I hope you’re hungry.”

  I told her I was, but I was distracted by the fact that our whole family was apparently about to eat a meal together for the first time in months. He’d called her? Invited himself over? Where the hell was my brother? Not that he’d know any more how to respond to the situation than I did, but he’d talk, say something, which was more than I appeared to be capable of.

  I moved all the way into the kitchen and pulled out a chair to sit down.

  “Juice? Coffee?” Mom was hovering halfway between the fridge and the coffeepot as she waited for my answer.

&n
bsp; “I can get my own drink.” I started to stand up, but she was at my back in a second, her hands urging me back down.

  “It’s your birthday and you’re going to let your mother make you breakfast.”

  “You’re already making me breakfast.” I plucked a piece of crispy, hot bacon from the plate on the table.

  “Juice or coffee?” she repeated, not moving from behind my chair.

  “Coffee would be great. Thanks.”

  She smiled and a second later a mug was in front of me. “Give me one second to finish this last batch of pancakes, then I’ll grab some syrup and heat it up for you.”

  Dad set the toast next to the bacon and eggs and joined me at the table with his own mug, taking the chair next to me instead of the one at the head of the table, where he usually sat.

  He stirred his coffee with a spoon to busy himself as though he thought I might forget that he always drank his black, but then he sighed and let the pretense go. My shoulders hunched, because I knew he was waiting for Mom to leave before saying anything to me, and as soon as she disappeared downstairs—our house was old, which meant our kitchen didn’t have a pantry upstairs—I felt his gaze settle on me.

  “I should have told you I was coming.”

  I didn’t take my coffee black, so I had every excuse in the world to stir mine. Bent over my mug, I said, “Yeah.”

  “I was worried you’d tell me not to come.”

  My spoon stilled, weighing the statement in my mind. It was sad that I had to consider it, but we’d changed a lot since the last time he’d been in our kitchen.

  “No,” I said. “I wouldn’t have told you not to come.”

  I felt more than saw him nod. Then he drew his chair closer to mine and rested his arm on the table where I could see it in my peripheral vision. “I wanted to be here for your birthday, but I also want you to know that I heard you, okay? I’ve been doing what I thought was best, but if you’re saying it’s not—son, look at me.” There was no command in his voice. He was asking me to face him, all the while being fully aware that I might not be able to.

  I might have surprised us both when I met his gaze.

  “If you’re saying that it’s not enough, then I’m going to do more.” He glanced at the open cellar door, the one he’d made with his own two hands before I could walk. “I’m going to try as much as she’ll let me.”

  I dropped my gaze then, not because I couldn’t look at my dad anymore but because I didn’t want him to look at me. I was blinking too fast, and every muscle in my body was pulling too tight.

  My dad put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “Happy birthday, Adam.”

  I nodded and let him add a couple pieces of toast to my plate. “I’m, uh—” I had to push the air from my lungs and suck in a new breath before I could say “—glad you’re here. Dad.”

  ELEVENTH WEEKEND

  February 12–14

  Jolene

  I was waiting for Adam in the hallway outside his dad’s apartment when he and Jeremy got there.

  “Hi,” he said with a smile I knew Jeremy would mock him for later, but when his eyes traveled over my hair, hanging loose and free down my back, his smile grew, and I knew he didn’t care. I’d worn it that way for him, and as he closed the distance between us, looking at me like he was remembering exactly what I tasted like, I wondered with a huge leap of my heart if he was going to kiss me in front of his brother.

  And I wondered what he’d do if I kissed him first.

  ADAM

  I wasn’t used to Jolene being shy around me, but for once she was the one with too much color in her cheeks (though I liked it), and she was the one chewing on her bottom lip (I probably liked that more). If my brother hadn’t been standing right behind me, I would have said something like how the mighty have fallen and touched her cheek. But I wanted to make her blush for me, not because I’d embarrassed her. Assuming such a thing was possible. Looking closer, I realized that the redness in her cheeks probably wasn’t from blushing but due to being windblown and cold. But the lip bite, I thought, was for me.

  The hair, too.

  Jeremy said hey to Jolene—a first since we’d started coming here, and it made me happier than it should have to see the truce between them was still holding—then gave me a look as he brushed past us. I knew what he was telling me, what I’d agreed to. “Five minutes, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I said to Jeremy before he went inside and left me with a confused-looking Jolene.

  Jolene

  “You only have five minutes?” I liked to pretend that I was impervious to pain, but either I wasn’t trying very hard with Adam, or he knew me well enough to pick up the trace of hurt in my voice.

  He drew closer. “I want way more than five minutes.” He swallowed and dropped his gaze to his hands. “I didn’t want to tell you about it over text, but my dad came over for my birthday. He’s going to try harder to get us all back together.” He tried to keep elation from his voice, but there was no missing how happy he was.

  ADAM

  Apart from Jolene coming to dinner with my dad and brother, I hadn’t gotten to spend any time with her on our last weekend, and after that night in my barn when she’d finally started looking back at me the way I’d been looking at her for months, all I wanted to do was spend time with her.

  Well, that wasn’t all I wanted to do.

  But my family had eaten breakfast together. All four of us. I’d been silently—and not so silently—screaming at my dad for months to make something like that happen, and the fact that he’d done it meant that I had to try more, too. Not the one-word responses that I’d worked up to either.

  But it was hard to think of any of that when Jolene looked like I’d just hit her.

  Jolene

  I stepped back as unobtrusively as possible. I’d known it was coming, that his family wasn’t severed the way mine was. I’d known they’d start finding their way back to each other. I just hadn’t known it would happen so fast...or that it would hurt so much.

  After the night in his barn, when I’d felt our hearts beating together, it was like a cruel joke to feel mine breaking when his was so full.

  ADAM

  She moved away and nodded too many times. “Oh, wow. That’s great. I’m really happy for you,” Jolene said, but her tone lacked conviction. Not because she was lying, I knew, but my birthday had gone very differently than hers. I hadn’t meant to brag or rub my happiness in her face, but maybe it had come out that way.

  “It’s not like everything is going to be better overnight,” I told her. “My dad—he’s not moving back in, and when my mom dropped me and Jeremy off just now, she still wouldn’t come up to see him.”

  And I’d really wanted her to, a fact I hadn’t tried to disguise the way I would have in the past.

  Which just meant we’d have to try again next time—me, Jeremy, and Dad.

  Jolene

  How could he not see that he was making it worse? He stood there trying to convince me that nothing had changed, when I could tell that everything inside him was screaming that it had. It didn’t matter that his dad had come back to our building, or that Adam and his brother were still spending every other weekend here with him. All of that was technically true, but it wasn’t going to last. It was as though someone had put a giant countdown clock above our heads, and the numbers were racing.

  My heart was racing, too, pounding so fast and so hard in my chest that I felt sure he could see it.

  ADAM

  I didn’t know who I was trying to convince, me or her, but I could tell that neither of us believed me. The truth was that everything had changed, and not just because Dad had come over on my birthday. I’d changed. I could see how much my anger had further driven in the wedge that was keeping my family apart, and I was beginning to understand that no one per
son had been responsible for putting it there.

  I’d already decided to go with my dad to his next support group meeting, and this time I wasn’t going to stay in the hall. And when he dropped us off at home on Sunday, Jeremy wouldn’t be the only one inviting him inside. It was starting to feel like we might have a chance, and it hadn’t felt that way since Greg died. But Jolene...

  Jolene

  I saw the exact moment he realized what it would mean for us if more days like that one on his birthday followed. If his dad started coming around his house more and his mom saw both of her sons wanting him to be there. If his parents started to realize what he and Jeremy had known from the beginning: that they were better together, as a family.

  His words cut off midsentence, and his hands stilled. He went the opposite of red, and if I could have seen into his chest to his heart, I thought I would have seen a crack spilt right down its center.

  My heart had seen the crack coming, and since it had never been whole to begin with, the fissure didn’t show as much on the outside. For me, there had never been any hope for a happy ending. I didn’t have to lay my anger aside in order to help heal my family, because anger had never been my problem, and my parents were never going to reconcile. My problem was something that made me so much more vulnerable than I’d ever wanted to be.

  My problem was that, just when I realized I could be loved, that love was being pulled away.

  ADAM

  I didn’t mean to rush at her, but I didn’t have time to check the impulse before I had my arms around her.

  “I’m not letting you go,” I said, more than a flicker of the anger I’d decided to abandon surging into my voice. “I only just found you, and I won’t give you up. I don’t care what that means.” I didn’t let go, not even when it took way too long for her arms to come up and hold me back. I’d been so happy since my birthday, both from that night with Jolene and the morning with my family, that I hadn’t for a second considered what that potential happiness would cost me, cost Jolene. If things went the way I wanted them to with my family, these weekends would end, and Jolene and I would... What? Drive out to see each other twice a month in the cars we didn’t have?