I reached over and traced the outline of his lips with my fingers. I watched as he swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
We fell asleep that way, touching but not touching. Close but not close enough. I knew right then that I wanted to do everything with him, but it had been just a few weeks. This was only the beginning, and we still had so much time, so many more minutes and hours and days, so I closed my eyes and slept.
NOW
I’m lying next to Luke on Tuesday evening as the sun bounces off the roof of Willow’s massive house. Her huge infinity pool glistens a few feet away. Luke and I lie on separate beach towels next to each other. Separated from us by a pair of lounge chairs, Willow and Brett are sitting on their own beach towels.
I close my eyes and try to enjoy the feeling of the warm air against my skin. I tell myself to relax, that everything is okay, but none of it feels true when Luke is close enough for me to feel the heat of his body. He is wearing nothing but a pair of swim shorts, and the sight of his chest sends me back months into the past, then years. When he was mine—and way back when it seemed like he never could be mine.
Somehow, now we seem closer to who we were when we were kids. When the only string holding us together was his brother and his mother. When I would try to think of excuses and reasons to talk to him—because I felt so sure that, without constant reminders of my presence, he would soon forget I existed.
“Tell me whenever you’re ready to get in,” Luke says, nodding toward the pool and drawing me out of my thoughts. I glance over at him, but he’s staring up at the sky, dark sunglasses over his eyes.
I say nothing, and a few moments later he speaks again. “I called you.”
“When?” I ask.
“That night. You asked whether I saw your messages after,” he says. “Did you see mine before?”
My heart drops. I can’t believe we’re talking about this. That he’s bringing up the night when everything changed.
“Only when I got home hours later.”
He nods.
“Why?” I ask, but he doesn’t answer. His question sounds random, but it tells me that he’s still stuck in the past. Dreaming about it, reliving it, wanting it back, and wanting it as far away as possible. It tells me he’s still sifting through all the details of that night, trying to find the exact moment before everything fell apart. The same thing I used to do for months after.
If only I’d never gone out that night.
No—if only I’d never kissed Luke the very first time.
If only I had never met Rowan.
If only I had stopped him . . .
If, if, if.
“Okay, rise and shine, sleepyheads,” Willow says, coming over to us. “We’re getting in the pool. Do you want to play volleyball?”
“Sure,” I say, standing up too quickly.
“Us against you guys?” she asks.
Behind me, Luke is standing, pushing his sunglasses up on his head and brushing off his shorts.
“I don’t know if they can handle our trash talk,” Brett says, wrapping an arm around Willow’s waist, and she giggles.
“We’re both competitive. Like, supercompetitive,” Willow says.
“If that’s you trying to scare us, it’s not working,” Luke says as he dips a toe in the water.
Brett laughs. “Why do I get the sense you can handle our trash talk?”
“Hey, so can I!” I protest.
“It’s true,” Luke surprises me by saying. “She might seem all quiet and delicate, but Jessi’s not afraid to get her hands dirty.”
I run his comment through my mind, checking for any possible hidden meanings. When I find none, I say, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Which is the last thing I remember before his arms wrap around my waist and I’m fighting to stay afloat in Willow’s pool.
“Luke!” I squeal, too shocked to form any other words. “You jerk!” I cry, but when I see him doubled over laughing, I can’t help but grin too.
“Your face . . .” Brett says.
“Are you okay, Jessi?” Willow steps closer to the pool and calls over the sounds of Luke’s and Brett’s laughter.
“Barely,” I say, which makes the boys laugh even harder.
“I’m so sorry,” Willow says, shifting even closer to Brett. “It’s just so mean—” On ‘mean,’ she shoves Brett with all her might, and then he’s falling belly-first into the pool and sputtering. I can’t help laughing too. The timing was perfect.
“That was deeply satisfying,” she says. She holds out her hand to Luke, and they high-five.
“You planned that?” I ask.
“Yep,” Luke says with a grin. It makes him look younger and mischievous, like someone else. Like Rowan.
My heart plummets, but before I have a chance to think anything else, Brett is coughing and flailing a few feet away from me. Luke’s and Willow’s laughter stops abruptly.
“I . . . can’t . . . swim . . .” Brett pants between breaths.
Luke and Willow exchange a look.
“Are you serious, man?” Luke asks.
“Brett, you better not be lying,” Willow says.
Sensing my cue, I say, “I don’t think he is, you guys.”
I start swimming toward Brett.
Within half a second Luke and Willow are both in the pool. Luke reaches him at the same time I do, but when he tries to lift him out of the water, Brett lunges and pushes Luke down. It’s the perfect time to exact my revenge, so when Brett lets Luke go, I use all my force to push him back under.
Luke manages to writhe his way out from our grips, and then he’s shaking out his wet hair, laughing a full belly laugh. I’ve heard it maybe three times in my life. Once, before Sydney was housetrained, she pooped in Ro’s tennis shoe. When Rowan went to put it on, he squealed out a string of expletives that were totally inappropriate for a ten-year-old but completely hilarious. Another time was during a movie Mel took all three of us to. The third time was with me. I made him laugh with his whole being.
Now I just stand and watch, watch him being happy and carefree and fun. I always thought of Luke as serious, kind of high-minded, but it’s not until I see him now that I remember he wasn’t always like that. He used to giggle when we were younger. He used to love practical jokes and making fun of his younger brother. It was after his father left that he changed and became more conscientious and practical, more concerned for his mother and Ro than he was with friends or having fun, or even with school. He was happy when we were together. I know that with all my heart, but he was also always scared. Everything with Mel wouldn’t have allowed anything else. It’s nice to see him as he would have been if his father had never left, if his mother never got sick, if I’d never ruined everything.
While Brett splashes Willow, Luke swims over to me, his eyes still sparkling. “You enjoyed that, didn’t you?”
I swallow over the lump in my throat. I want to tell him how much I love seeing him happy, how much I miss him, how sorry I am for everything. Instead I smile and say, “What can I say? Payback is a bitch.”
We both float there for a second, treading water, and then he lifts his hand and moves a strand of hair away from my eyes.
“Thanks,” I breathe.
He just looks at me.
His gaze is like the pull of gravity, strong and magnetic. His eyes slide all over my face, lingering at my lips.
My first thought is that Brett and Willow are preoccupied with themselves; he doesn’t have to look at me like that.
My second is that I really, really want to kiss him.
So I do.
I close the distance between us, loop my arms around his neck, and press a kiss to his lips. He kisses me back, his tongue pushing my lips apart and sweeping over the inside of my lower lip. We drift until my back is against the edge of the pool, our bodies pressed against each other. His hands roam the bare skin of my side, my stomach, my thighs, while my hands are trapped agai
nst his chest. Everything feels familiar, but different and terrifying, like walking through the city you grew up in after a war.
When we finally break apart, Willow and Brett are lobbing a small beach ball back and forth and trying to seem busy.
“I keep forgetting we should be doing that,” Luke says, his voice husky. He steals a look in their direction again. “Think they’re buying everything?”
“Yeah,” I whisper, my knees like jelly. “I think they are.”
12
THEN
It was twenty-four hours after I spent the morning in Luke’s bed, and Mel patted the side of her king-size bed, waiting for me to climb in next to her. A vague joke about bed-hopping between the Cohens crossed my mind and I smiled to myself. Mel adjusted the pillow behind her, and I was brought back to the present moment.
“I’m sorry you feel so gross,” I told her. The tennis tournament in Millwood seemed to have taken everything out of her, but she got to witness Rowan win the whole thing, so she was adamant that she didn’t regret going.
She gave a weak smile. “Thanks, Jessi-girl. The company’s not so bad, though.”
I leaned back against the headboard and watched her. Everything about her was tired, from her breathing to the skin under her eyes to the sound of her voice, but she seemed to feel that acknowledging it meant yielding to it.
“So,” she said. “How are things going with my firstborn?’
I struggled to fight my grin, and Mel laughed.
“That good, huh?”
“Is it weird?” I asked, turning so I was facing her.
“You want me to be completely honest?” she asked, and I nodded. “I’m not the least bit surprised. I saw it coming a mile away from both sides.”
“Both sides?” I repeated. Okay, I had been more than obvious about my crush, but I wondered what hints Luke could possibly have given his mom that he had feelings for me.
“You know I’m a hopeless romantic, so it was hard not to try to play Cupid,” she said. “But I tried as hard as I could to stay neutral, not to push or pull in any direction, and let you figure it out on your own . . . The thing I cared most about—the thing I care most about—is that you are safe and that nobody gets hurt.”
We were silent for a moment, and then she said, “I’m glad you’re happy.”
“I am,” I said. “I just feel like I don’t see him enough.”
Mel snorted. “When Gary and I started dating, I was off in Hungary on an exchange program and he was starting medical school in Michigan. There was no FaceTime, no WiFi. It was snail mail and calling collect in some kitschy European phone booth. That’s what I call not seeing each other.”
And look how that turned out, I thought but didn’t say.
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about,” she said now.
“Okay.”
“I worry so much about what will happen to Luke and Rowan when I’m gone.” Her voice was soft and sad in the dark room. “I worry about you, too.”
“They’ll be okay,” I said over the lump in my throat. “We’ll be okay.”
It was a flat-out lie. How would we survive without Mel’s advice, without her warmth and her baking and her unconditional love? The answer, I was afraid, was that we wouldn’t. That somehow without her holding us together, we would crumble and fall apart.
“I worry about Luke,” Mel said.
“Luke?” I repeated. “Ro has been kind of a mess.”
“Isn’t he always, though?” she whispered conspiratorially, and we laughed. “No, I absolutely worry about Ro, but Luke scares me. He bottles everything up and carries the world on his shoulders, and my fear is that one day it’ll all suddenly get too much for him. Ro—he acts out and makes bad choices, but you always know how he feels. There are no secrets.”
It was a complete one-eighty on the way I had been seeing things. As far as I was concerned, Ro was the one who seemed ready to explode at a moment’s notice. Ro was liable to make bad decisions and date the wrong girls and lose the tennis scholarship he’d worked so hard for all his life. Luke was . . . Luke. Calm, collected, dependable. Sad for his mother, for sure. Afraid of losing her. But strong.
The realization that we couldn’t both be right scared me. Either Mel—whose eyes always saw more than I imagined they could—was wrong, or I didn’t know Luke as well as I thought I did.
“I wish they were closer to their father,” Mel said now. “I think I made the mistake of letting my feelings about him trickle down to them. When it’s just you, you forget sometimes that your kids are not your friends, they’re not your therapist, not your doctor. They are just kids who will one day have their own view on the world, with or without your input.”
Mel’s words reminded me of what Luke had said a couple of weeks earlier about the way his mother had handled the divorce. I cringed now at the way I’d defended her. My blind devotion to her hadn’t allowed me to even consider that he might have been right. But now here she was saying the very same thing.
“Gary went to see Luke last week,” I said, hoping that would make her feel better. I wondered belatedly whether Luke had mentioned it to his mom. Why couldn’t I keep my mouth shut sometimes?
“I know,” she said, to my relief. “He’s so secretive, though. You ask him how it went, and all he’ll say is ‘Fine.’” Mel sighed. “I swear, I got a big mouth as compensation for the fact that I’d have two boys and they would never say a word to me.”
I smiled at her. “They love you.”
“I know that too,” she said, looking at me with a serious expression. “I would never ask you to look after them—that would be so incredibly unfair to you.”
“You know I will,” I promised her.
She took one of my hands in hers, her palms slick with sweat. I worried that she was running a fever and putting on a brave front. “Thank you,” she said. “The only thing I’ll ask of you is the same thing I’m going to ask of them. That you three always remember that you’re family. They’re your people.”
When a tear plopped down on our joined hands, I realized for the first time that I’d started to cry.
“Don’t say that. You still have so much time left.”
“Oh, I know,” she said, rubbing my hand in an attempt to comfort me. “I’m not saying this for today or tomorrow. But whenever the time comes, I want you to have each other’s backs.”
My vision was now completely cloudy, but I could make out a trail of liquid on Mel’s cheek. Or was it sweat? Would she let me take her temperature?
“Do you promise?” she asked me, and I nodded.
“I promise.”
“Good girl,” she sniffed. I snuggled closer to her, and she held my head to her chest and ran her hand over my hair the way she had when I was a little girl. My mother hugged me sometimes too, but her hugs were seconds long, quick and controlled, as if to remind me that I couldn’t have her for too long. She belonged to something bigger and stronger than I am.
“Mel—” I said before I could stop myself. “Why did you . . . When we were kids, why did you choose me?”
I sat up so I could look at her.
“Well, first of all,” she said, smiling, “it’s cute that you think you’re not a kid now.”
I rolled my eyes but smiled too.
“Second, I didn’t choose you.” She said the word choose like there were quotation marks around it. “I mean, Ro was your doubles partner. You guys became best friends.”
“I know, but like, how did you know that I needed . . . you?” My face heated as I said it. That was another of the few things Mel and I had never really talked about. The actual surrogacy, the way she had taken me in. As far as I was concerned, it had just happened. One day I wasn’t part of the Cohen family; then one day I was. “Was it my clothes? Could you tell that my dad was clueless and didn’t know how to take care of my hair?”
Mel laughed. “None of the above, actually,” she said. After a moment her face s
obered. “I don’t really know what you’re asking me, Jessi. I treated you like I’d have treated any of Ro’s or Luke’s friends, but from the beginning, you just . . . you fit.
“I don’t know what that means,” she continued. “Whether it was destiny, meant to be, or any of that stuff. I couldn’t care less about the mechanics of the whole thing. I only know that whenever you were with us, it felt like you’d always been here, you know? Like you always would be.”
I nodded, feeling my heart swell.
I’d always be a part of them.
What she was describing sounded a lot like what I’d always thought, what I’d hoped they felt too. It sounded like family.
“Love you, Jessi-girl,” Mel said now, and hugged me again.
“Love you, too.”
When I told Mel that her body felt warm and asked if she wanted me to call her doctor, she shook her head and insisted that she just needed to sleep.
I was back home, fast asleep in bed, when Ro called, his voice strangled and quiet, as he told me she was in the hospital.
NOW
I still feel a pinch of relief every time I walk into her house and find Mel sitting in the living room, smaller but alive. She’s still here, a voice in my head says, but there’s another voice, a quieter voice, that says she’s not really. She’s not the Mel I knew, and with every day that passes, she drifts further away from that person and becomes someone else.
“Jessi-girl,” she says today as I come into the living room, and I’m hit with a wave of guilt.
Just because she looks different, it doesn’t mean she isn’t still Mel.
“Hi,” I say, going around the couch to hug her. As I do, she throws a blanket over what looks like a pile of papers in her lap.
“What are you doing?” I ask, trying not to sound as hurt as I feel at her secrecy. She never used to hide stuff from me.
“Oh, just this and that,” she says vaguely. “Luke’s out for a run.”
“That’s okay,” I say. “I’m here to see you.”
Some Other Now Page 17
