What Comes Next

by Desni Dantone

  The question worked its way up my throat as we climbed the ladder. Once inside, I pushed to my feet, and turned to wait for Ben to pull himself up. The words were ready on my tongue, but never voiced.

  The moment Ben was on his feet, I found myself enveloped in his arms. His lips crashed into mine, his momentum driving me back until I hit the wall. The unexpected impact forced my lips to part with a startled gasp. Ben took full advantage of the opportunity to deepen the kiss.

  At the same time, his hands gripped my hips to hoist me up. My legs hooked around his waist, supporting my weight and freeing his hands to slip under my shirt.

  Obscuring the tenderness I was accustomed to with him was a raw power that was foreign to me. Not in a bad way, but definitely . . . unexpected. Of all the kisses we had shared, none had come close to the intensity of this one. His hands and mouth were everywhere at once in a desperate attempt to make me entirely his.

  I considered the possibility that I had perceived his lack of a direct answer to my earlier question wrong. Maybe there wasn’t anything bad he needed to tell me. Maybe this was exactly what he had in mind when he suggested we leave the party.

  Maybe this was him giving me exactly what we both wanted tonight.

  His lips slipped from mine with a groan. My head rolled back as he nipped a trail of kisses along my jaw. His voice was a whisper in my ear.

  “I want to forget . . .”

  Something in his tone froze me. “Forget what?”

  “Everything . . . Help me forget . . .”

  I gripped the back of his head, and pulled his face up to mine. “What’s everything?”

  He stopped to take in my demanding tone, my thinly pressed lips, and blinked in confusion, as if he’d momentarily forgotten where he was, and who he was with.

  “Ben,” I pressed, pulling him out of his head and back into the treehouse with me.

  His eyes darted between his hands in my shirt and my legs wrapped around his waist, and he sagged. He pushed me into the wall as his weight wilted against me, and his face pressed into the wall behind me.

  My pulse raced out of concern for him as I waited for an explanation as to what was wrong. When he said nothing, I caressed his back with my hands. “Talk to me,” I pleaded.

  His voice was muffled by the wall, and the curtain of my hair in his face. “I can’t end up like him . . .”

  “Who? Mitch?”

  I felt his head roll back and forth. “Mitch . . . My father . . . I can’t . . .”

  “Okay.” I lowered my feet to the floor. He was still pressed tightly against me, and I wrapped my arms around him to keep him there. Something told me he needed that.

  “He came back from Korea a different man than the one my mama married,” he continued. “That alcoholic, abusive version of him was all I ever knew, and I can’t . . .”

  “Then you won’t.” His head lifted, and I saw the genuine concern in his eyes. He was terrified of turning out like his father, and like his brother had partially become. “Is that what you want to forget? Your father? Your fears?”

  His head bobbed up and down.

  “And I help you forget?”

  He swallowed hard, and nodded again.

  “Then focus on me,” I suggested with a smile. “Be with me right now, not him. Push your fears aside, and be with me.”

  I meant a lot more than just being there in the same place as me, and he knew it. He deciphered the double meaning behind my words with clear understanding.

  When his lips met mine this time, the desperation from a moment ago was gone, replaced by the tenderness he reserved only for me. He was finally out of his own head—finally in the present with me—but something still felt wrong.

  There was a hint of reluctance behind his kiss. Something held him back, but I couldn’t determine what. I didn’t know if he was reluctant for his own reasons, or hesitant for my sake.

  I momentarily pulled my mouth away from his to reassure him, just in case he had mistaken my intentions. “I want you to be my first . . .”

  His lips were already back on mine before I’d gotten all the words out. His mouth moved feverishly over mine, and then froze. He pulled away to stare at the floor beneath our feet. His jaw worked back and forth as he contemplated . . . something.

  His voice was low when he finally spoke. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  His eyes flashed to mine. “Why do you want to do this so badly now?”

  “I told you. I want to be with you—”

  “In case I go off to war, and die? In case I come back like my father and brother? Why?”

  My mouth snapped shut at his outburst. I shook my head—that wasn’t what I’d meant. Not at all. “No, Ben—”

  “You want me to be your first, Ana. Not your last. Not your only. Your first.”

  “That’s not what I meant, and you know it.” I shoved his shoulders hard, forcing him back a step. “Are you looking for a fight just so you have an excuse to not be with me?”

  His eyes popped. “Are you kidding me right now? Why would I not—no, you know what?” He turned away from me with a rapid shake of his head, leaving me to sag against the wall. He ran his hand through his hair before turning to finally look at me. “It’s not going to happen, Ana.”

  The somber tone he used nearly cut my legs out from under me. He wasn’t just talking about making love to me. He wasn’t only referencing now.

  He meant everything. He meant never.

  Tears welled up in my eyes as I watched him pace the floor in front of me, muttering statements that made no sense to me.

  “I’m not doing what he did . . . getting married won’t fix anything . . .”

  “Ben?”

  “It can’t be all about passing a name down,” he continued under his breath. He stopped pacing, his eyes slowly drifted up to meet mine, and he finally included me in his odd one-sided conversation. “All I care about is that you’re okay.”

  All I could do was stare, and wait for the rest I knew was coming.

  “I don’t want you to wait for me, Ana,” he declared. “If it works out when I come back, then fine, but I’m not going to ask you to put your life on hold for me.”

  “Is that what you think I’d be doing? Putting my life on hold?” My voice rose with every word, until I was shouting loud enough for Ma and Pop to hear if they were outside. At the moment, I didn’t care about anything but the gaping hole he’d just ripped into my chest.

  “Ana, please . . .”

  “Is that what you would call it?” I shrieked.

  “Ana, I’m trying to do what’s right for you,” he pleaded.

  “How is this right for me? This isn’t what I want. It’s what you want!”

  “You think this is what I want?” His palm slapped his chest as he took a step closer to me. “This is the last thing I ever wanted, Ana!”

  I lowered my head to the floor, and my voice softened as heartbreak stomped out the anger. “You said you would stick it out, and see what happened. What changed?” Thoughts of his father, perhaps? Is that what had prompted this change in him? “You can’t let what happened to your father—”

  “It’s not just him, Ana. I’d already decided—” He stopped abruptly, and squeezed his eyes shut when he realized what he’d said.

  “You already decided you were going to break up with me,” I finished for him. “When?”

  He shook his head. “Ana, don’t—”

  “When?” I screamed.

  “It doesn’t matter!”

  “It matters to me!” I waved my hands over the distance separating us. “What was all of this, Ben? Were you trying to sleep with me first before you broke up with me?”

  “No, Ana! I—”

  “You practically attacked me the moment we got in here,” I fired back. “That was definitely where things were heading, and you know it.”

  “No. I just . . . I just didn’t want to ruin everything. I wanted to hold on to this for as l
ong as I could, but I don’t know how.”

  “That’s easy! You don’t run when things get hard!”

  “I’m not run—”

  I quickly closed the distance between us. My palm connecting with his cheek silenced the bullshit line he was about to feed me. While he reeled back from that, I stalked toward the ladder, determined to get out of there before I had to hear another one of his excuses.

  He shouted my name as my feet pounded the wooden boards all the way to the ground. I glanced up long enough to confirm that he hadn’t followed me. Without another look back, I ran for home.

  Jen knew something was wrong the moment she laid eyes on me at school on Monday. At her persistence, I told her that Ben and I had broken up, but begged her not to hassle me for the details I wasn’t ready to discuss yet. Maybe never. The only thing that gave me pleasure was her report that Ben was exceptionally moody every time she saw him today.

  “I swear the boy didn’t crack a smile once,” she told me as we stopped at the mailbox at the end of my driveway after school. “And Heather said he—”

  “No offense, Jen, but I really don’t want to talk about him right now.” I withdrew the stack of mail, and slammed the mailbox door shut.

  “Yeah, of course,” Jen sighed. “I’m sorry.”

  She fell silent beside me as we walked toward the house. On instinct, I found myself glancing toward the barn, looking for Ben’s truck to be parked in its usual spot in the shade. It wasn’t there, though I assumed he would show up soon. Breaking up with me didn’t equate quitting his job, and the fence still needed to be mended in a few more spots.

  I called out to Ma as I pushed the door open. “Can Jen join us for dinner tonight?”

  She turned away from the stove, and wiped her hands on her apron as she smiled at my friend. “Absolutely!”

  I dropped the mail on the counter beside her, and her eyes turned worrisome when they darted to me. I hadn’t told Ma what happened with Ben, though I was pretty sure she suspected something after catching me with swollen, bloodshot eyes Sunday morning. She hadn’t pushed, and I appreciated her for that much.

  “We’ll be up in my room,” I told her softly before walking away.

  In the safety of my room, I pulled the letter I’d received from my father weeks ago out from under its hiding place under my pillow, and handed it to Jen. I’d already told her about it, and had asked for her opinion. This was the main reason why she’d come home with me.

  Since I first opened it Sunday morning, I’d read it enough to have the words memorized, and carefully watched Jen’s face as she read certain parts. From my position across from her, I could see that she had come to same conclusion I had.

  She swallowed hard before saying, “I don’t know, Ana. He sounds . . .”

  “Too desperate?”

  She nodded, and I sagged against my pillow. At first, I’d been hopeful when I finally read the letter. Maybe only because I’d been so torn up over Ben that a few promising words from my nonexistent father had actually given me hope. It wasn’t until I’d reread it a dozen or so times that I started to notice the desperation in his words.

  He’d made mistakes. He regretted them. He needed help. He wanted . . .

  The tone was consistent. It was all about him. There were no apologies, no explanations. The letter ended with an invitation for Jeffrey and me to come stay with him for the summer.

  “I figured it was too good to be true,” I mumbled. Like so many other things in my life right now.

  Jen fully supported my decision to not respond to my father. As the weeks wore on, and as news broke of my breakup with Ben, she remained a constant at my side. She steered me clear of the gossip running rampant in the hallways at school. She ditched parties to wallow with me in my room with a bowl of popcorn. When everyone started waging bets on how long it would take for Ben and Tracy to get back together, she reminded me that they were all idiots. And when Tracy directed her satisfied smirk at me, Jen grabbed me by the elbow to steer me away before I did something to get myself expelled.

  Because she was the friend I needed, she was the only one I told when I started to reconsider my father’s offer. With the school year quickly coming to an end, I started to wonder if some time away from Stone Creek, and Bennett Sawyer, wasn’t exactly what I needed.

  The weeks following prom couldn’t have been worse. I should have been excited about graduation, but only considered it a stepping stone to the next phase in my life that I wasn’t looking forward to. I should have been preparing for what was coming next, but I couldn’t get Ana out of my head.

  It only got worse the day Travis pieced it all together. Within five minutes of him guessing that Ana and I had broken up, the entire school knew. Most of the whispers I heard afterward were attacks on Ana. I couldn’t help but feel incredibly responsible for the sadness I saw in her eyes when I spotted her in the hallways.

  I reminded myself that it was for the best. I convinced myself that, eventually, she would understand. Then, a week shy of graduation, her friend cornered me at my locker, and I realized just how wrong I was.

  “I don’t know what happened, because she doesn’t want to talk about it, but there’s something I think you need to know,” Jen announced as she dropped a shoulder against the locker beside me. Behind her, the hallway was emptying quickly ahead of the weekend break.

  “What’s that, Jen?”

  “I might be wrong, but I think you actually care about her . . .”

  I turned to face Jen with a blank expression. She was right, of course, but my mouth was staying shut until I knew what she wanted.

  “Anyway,” Jen sighed. “She got a letter from her father. He offered for her to come visit for the summer, and because of you, she’s actually considering it.”

  “What?” I pushed away from the locker, and Jen flashed a smile at my abrupt reaction.

  “I knew it,” she mumbled to herself.

  “She can’t possibly be thinking about—”

  “She is,” Jen hissed. Her finger jabbed into my chest. “If she goes, I’m putting that on you.”

  She didn’t wait around for me to respond. She said nothing else before she walked away, leaving me to stare after her in disbelief. Surely she was mistaken. There was no way Ana would seriously consider running off to that lowlife after what happened the last time. Unless she really hated being around me that much . . .

  No. That couldn’t be it. If she was planning to run to her father because of me, she didn’t need to. I was the one that was leaving. No way would I stand back and let her do something stupid on account of me.

  Once again, I was reduced to waiting for brief glimpses of Ana while working on the Maxwells’ farm. I wanted to ask her about what Jen had told me. I wanted to hear it come from her mouth, but she did an excellent job of avoiding me. It was clear she wanted nothing to do with me now, and that stung.

  I knew I should have handled things differently that night. I’d reacted out of anger. I’d let my emotions get the best of me, and she had been the one to suffer for it. Sure, a part of me still thought that ending things between us now was the right thing to do, but a bigger part of me regretted it on a visceral level.

  I needed to make it right before I made myself sick.

  Though I never actually told Mama about our breakup, I suspected she knew. Either by instinct, or the permanent frown on my face, she’d figured it out. After a long weekend of working on the Maxwell fence, Mitch and I came home Sunday evening to some thick, juicy steaks—a meal that would normally get a huge smile out of me. But not tonight. No matter how good it was.

  Mama’s efforts to pull me up didn’t work. With Mitch having his own internal crisis, dinner wasn’t exactly the enjoyable experience it usually was.

  I was cutting off the last bite of my steak when a snort from outside sent Mitch to the floor. Mama and I shared glances—hers alarmed, mine puzzled—as Mitch crept past the table, yielding a steak knife.

 
“Mitch, hon—”

  I cut her off with a sharp shake of my head. This may have been the first she had seen one of his freak outs, but I still felt the lump in my throat from his perfectly executed karate chop the last time I saw it. If waking a war veteran was risky for me, I’d suppose a grazing cow outside the house came with its own risks.

  Mama and I watched as Mitch peeled the curtain back with the blade of his knife and peered outside. It took him a moment longer than it probably should have to confirm what Mama and I already knew, but eventually he rose to a stand.

  “Just a cow,” he muttered.

  “It’s the Maxwells’.” Since their fence took a beating last fall, the occasional wayward cow still found its way into our yard. I got out of my seat, and took my plate to the sink. “I’ll walk it over.”

  “No,” Mitch countered. “I got it.”

  “Really, Mitch, I’ve done it—”

  “No,” he repeated. “I need to. I need to get out for a minute.”

  I took in the wild look in his eyes, and relented with a nod. I could see that he was about to burst from pent-up adrenaline. While I didn’t mind walking the cow over, I realized Mitch needed to do it. He needed to do something before he exploded.

  I explained to Mitch where the cow needed to go when he got it there. I told him not to bother alerting Joe—it only stressed the old man out more. While he was gone, I helped Mama to clean up the kitchen, and tried to answer the questions she asked me.

  Yes, I had seen it before, and no, I didn’t know what was wrong with my brother.

  The concerns that remained unspoken between us charged the air in the kitchen like a bad storm cloud. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was what I had to look forward to. Would Mama have two alcoholic sons that freaked over a grazing cow? Would I come back from war like Mitch? Would whatever happened to him also happen to me?

  Mama hooked a disapproving eyebrow when I pulled a six-pack of beer from the fridge. “You have school tomorrow . . .”

  “I’m going to split it with Mitch.”

  Her scowl softened. “You’re not going out?”

  I shook my head. “Only to the front porch.”