The Art of Holding On

by Beth Ann Burgoon

  Like being right, Sam loves to win.

  After the game, Sam and I go into the kitchen and he gets us both glasses of water. The kitchen is my favorite room in Sam’s house. It’s huge, with sunlight streaming in from the bank of windows in the breakfast nook overlooking the pool and, as every time I’ve been here, spotless.

  Over the rim of my cup, I watch Sam gulp down his water, his head tipped back, his throat working. His hair is damp at the temples, the sweat darkening it to almost black. His shirt has wet spots under his arms and the collar, down the middle of his stomach.

  There’s a weird sensation in my chest and I rub my hand over it but it remains, a tugging inside of me.

  Like my heart’s falling at his feet.

  Catching me staring, he lowers his glass. Gives me a quizzical look. “You’re smiling.”

  “Am I?” I ask, lifting my hand to my mouth, and his gaze zeroes in on my fingers as they trail over my lips.

  He clears his throat. “Yeah. It’s nice. You look happy.”

  My smile falters at the surprise in his tone. “Don’t I usually?”

  As soon as the question comes out, I regret it.

  Never ask a question you don’t want to hear the answer to.

  “No,” Sam murmurs. “Not nearly often enough.”

  He holds my gaze and my breath catches and I want to tell him that I am happy. That being here, with him, in this new way, makes me very happy.

  But I can’t. It’s too scary, sharing what I’m feeling. Makes me too vulnerable.

  And gives him even more power over me.

  So I stay quiet and unmoving as he sets his glass down and steps closer. Reaching out slowly, he curls his fingertip around a strand of hair stuck to my damp neck, his fingertips warming my skin as he pulls it free.

  My lips part on a soft exhale and his gaze drops to my mouth. He wraps my hair around his finger once…twice…three times, taking a step toward me each time. Closer. Closer.

  But not close enough.

  It’s frustrating.

  Especially when he lets go of my hair and takes a sudden quick step back. He grabs his glass, refills it at the sink and drains it in three long gulps.

  When he looks at me again, his expression is clear.

  “I’m gonna jump in the shower,” he says as if nothing happened. As if he hadn’t looked like he wanted to kiss me. As if I hadn’t wanted him to. “You can wait in my room.”

  I follow him out of the kitchen. I wanted to go slow and he’s respecting that decision.

  And now that be-careful-what-you-wish-for hindsight is kicking me in the pants.

  28

  Sam didn’t make his bed.

  He used to. All the other times I’ve been in his room it was made, all neat and tidy, the lightweight gray comforter pulled up and wrinkle-free.

  Today the comforter is piled on the bottom corner, like he kicked it there at some point in his sleep. The white-and-gray striped sheets are rumpled. One pillow is lined up against the headboard, smooth and plump. The other is at an angle and still has a slight indentation.

  It unsettles me, that unmade bed. Those rumpled sheets and slept-on pillow. I tear my gaze away, watch Sam get clean clothes out of his dresser.

  He tosses a T-shirt over his shoulder, holds shorts in his hands. “I’ll be right back.”

  He leaves and my gaze once again flicks to his bed.

  Definitely unsettled.

  I grab the corner of the comforter and pull it over the sheets.

  That makes it worse. It smells of him. His bed, his sheets. Like the laundry detergent his mom buys, the body wash Sam uses and, faintly, the scent of his cologne. I’m literally leaning over, trying to get a good sniff of his pillow before I realize what I’m doing and jerk upright.

  Everything about the boy messes with my head. Makes me weak.

  But I’m here. At his house. In his room. Because no matter how much that weakness scares me, no matter how badly I want to protect myself, I want this more. Us, together.

  I want him more.

  I sit on the end of the bed, my bare toes grazing the carpet.

  Something niggles at the back of my brain. Something’s off with the room. Something’s different, and not just the messy bed.

  I slowly get to my feet. No, not different.

  Missing.

  Which doesn’t make sense. Everything’s where it’s always been. Wide, three-drawer dresser next to the closet. Desk and chair across from the window. Bookcase against the far wall, arm chair in the corner. Nightstand with lamp at the head of the bed. Framed, signed Stephen Curry jersey and Warriors posters--

  My mouth dries and I walk toward the wall across from the bed. Reaching out slowly, my fingers trail over the empty space.

  I cross to the dresser. Ignore my reflection as I check out the items tucked into the edges of the mirror. Pictures and notes and ticket stubs from sporting events and concerts. Heart pounding, I move on to the desk next. There are framed photos on the surface, more tacked to the huge bulletin board on the wall. Pictures of Sam and his family, of Sam and Jackson and Graham in their basketball uniforms, of Sam and the friends he made in LA. One of Sam as Deb from Napoleon Dynamite (complete with side ponytail) next to Kenzie, who’d dressed up as Pedro, and Tori, who’d been Napoleon.

  I slide onto the desk chair, try to catch my breath.

  It’s me. I’m what’s missing.

  I sit there, emotions rioting, until the sound of my name has me turning toward the doorway.

  Sam, freshly showered and dressed, his wet hair combed back, steps into the room. “You want to get some dinner? We can try that new Mexican place.”

  Dinner. Right. Because we’re moving on. Letting the past go. Exactly what I want to do. What I have to do in order to be with Sam.

  I glance at the pictures on the bulletin board.

  One of us is better at letting go than the other.

  “You erased me,” I say and, God, I hate that I sound so pitiful. So resentful.

  Hate that I feel so small.

  That it hurts so much.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You erased me,” I repeat. I get to my feet. “You erased me and you lied to me.”

  He sends a quick glance into the hall, then shuts the door. “I didn’t lie to you.”

  “I missed you, Hadley,” I say, imitating his deep voice. “I thought of you every day. Lies.”

  His jaw tightens. “Truth.”

  “You took down Steph!” I cry, pointing straight-armed at the blank wall where the life-sized Steph Curry decal I got him for his sixteenth birthday used to be. “And you threw out all the pictures of us.”

  The pictures that used to take up the most space along his mirror. The ones that outnumbered everything else on his bulletin board two to one.

  “I put Steph in the game room.”

  “Out of sight, out of mind, huh?” I know he moved the decal so he wouldn’t have to see it. So he wouldn’t have to think about me. “What about the pictures?”

  “I didn’t throw them away,” he says quickly.

  “But you took them down.”

  He nods, his gaze steady on mine. “I thought it would help me forget you. It didn’t work.” With a snort, I turn away, only to have him take a hold of my arm and turn me back to face him. When I refuse to look up, he ducks his head to meet my eyes. “It didn’t work.”

  Doesn’t matter that I believe him. Or even that I understand why he did it—that I’d done something similar by un-following him on Instagram, distancing myself from his friends.

  He wraps his other hand around my free arm. Pulls me closer. “I thought of you every day,” he tells me, his eyes searching mine. “Every. Single. Day.”

  I shrug free. “You wanted to pretend I didn’t exist. That I’d never existed. Why even bother? It’s not like you were here. But I was. I was stuck here, reminded of you everywhere I went. With everything I did.”

  He stills
as my words hang in the air between us. My confession. “You…you thought of me?”

  I want to deny it, but I can’t very well be self-righteous and ticked off about him lying if I don’t give him my own truth now.

  “I thought of you,” I admit. “I thought of you every day.”

  He reaches for me. “Had--”

  I step back. “You got rid of me. It’s like I was never a part of your life.”

  “I wanted to move on.” His voice drops to a deep, frustrated tone, as if I’m the one being unreasonable here. The one who is wrong. “I couldn’t go back.”

  “Was any of it real?”

  “Was what real?”

  “Us. You know, the years we were friends. The years I thought we were friends.”

  His face scrunches up into that stupid expression guys get when they think a girl’s saying things just to piss them off. “We were friends. You were my best friend.”

  “I don’t think I was. Because a best friend doesn’t just stop talking to their friend because they had a fight. They don’t walk away because they didn’t get what they wanted.”

  “I never wanted to lose your friendship, but things changed for me and I couldn’t hide how I felt.”

  “Exactly. Things changed for you, and when I didn’t fall in line with your plans, you decided to erase me from your life.”

  He stabs a hand through his hair, leaving finger marks in the wet strands. “I didn’t have plans.”

  “You did,” I insist, my words, my suspicions and fears coming faster than my thoughts. Outpacing reason and control. “You planned all of it, right from the beginning. You never wanted to be my friend. Not really. You wanted this.”

  “Are you serious?”

  I give a quick, jerky nod. “All those times when you tried to get me to sit with you at lunch, when you tried to talk to me, when you asked me to join you and your friends on the playground…all those months you were so nice to me, it was because you had feelings for me. And instead of just telling me that, you pretended you wanted to be just friends.”

  “You mean all those times when we were in grade school? So you’re saying that when I was ten I came up with some grand plan to…what? Trick you into being my girl?”

  Put that way, it sounds sort of idiotic. But I can’t let it go. It’s had a hold of me ever since he kissed me last summer. The sense that he’d been dishonest.

  The feeling that while I’d spent all that time content with our relationship, secure in the knowledge that our friendship was rock solid, trusting that my heart was safe, he was biding his time until he could spring his feelings on me.

  “I don’t know,” I mutter, blushing so hard I take off my hat and wave it in front of my face—pretending I don’t care that I have the worst case of hat hair ever recorded. “It was your plan.”

  He grabs my wrist, lowering my hand and stopping all my hat fluttering and waving. “I told you, there was no fucking plan. I didn’t have feelings for you when we were kids, or even when we first started being friends.”

  “Then why did you want to be my friend?”

  Why didn’t you give up on me?

  “Because you needed one.” He rubs his thumb across my inner wrist. My pulse flutters. “You were always so alone. Seemed so lonely. Jesus, Had, you needed a friend more than anyone I’ve ever known.”

  And that’s it. The great truth I’d been seeking. The answer to my question. To so many of the questions I’d had since we were ten years old.

  Sam Constable befriended me because he felt sorry for me.

  So freaking glad I asked.

  I tug my hand free and slap my hat back on my head. “This is a mistake.”

  “It’s not,” he says simply, as if he has utter faith we’re right where we’re meant to be, standing at the foot of his bed arguing about ancient history. “You’re just scared. You’re always scared.” His words are quiet, his gaze intense. As if he’s trying to see inside my head. Trying to get to the truth I keep hidden from him. “Always so terrified of opening up. Of letting someone see the real you. Or get close to you.”

  Yes, this boy knows me too well.

  “Sam, I--”

  “But you can trust me,” he says and my own words get stuck in my throat. He lifts a hand as if to touch me and once again I’m unsettled, but not by his bed. By how much I want his touch. How disappointed I am when he slowly lowers his hand. “You can let me in. I swear I won’t hurt you.”

  My heartbeat is echoing in my head, each pulse of it a painful thump in my ears. No. No, he doesn’t get to say that. Doesn’t get to sway me with his sweet words and pretty promises.

  “You left me. You stopped talking to me.” I sweep my hand around the room to encompass the missing Steph, all the pieces of me that are gone. “You erased me. God, Sam, don’t you get it? You already hurt me!”

  I’m breathing hard, my scalp tight and sweaty under my hat while Sam stares at me, lips parted in surprise, body stunned into stillness and silence.

  “I know I hurt you, too,” I continue hoarsely. “Everything that happened last summer…it all got messed up. The past and the present get so mixed up inside of me. And I want to be brave. I want to have faith. But I don’t know if I can.”

  “You can.”

  There’s that confidence again. That assurance that he’s completely, totally, one hundred percent right.

  “You’re right. I can. But I don’t know if I want to.” I lift my head, meet his eyes as I give him one more weapon against me. A truth that will give him entirely too much power over me. “You broke my heart, Sam. And I’m terrified you’re going to do it again.”

  29

  Sam takes a quick step toward me, because nothing—not my lies, my fears or my confession that he broke my heart—can stop him from going after what he wants. “I won’t. I promise, I won’t.”

  He’s so earnest. Sincere. I want to believe him. I want to so badly. Isn’t that the problem?

  Wanting something impossible?

  “You can’t promise that,” I say. “And neither can I.”

  “But that’s what you want, isn’t it? Promises. A guarantee. Jesus, Hadley.”

  He whirls around. Paces to the dresser, keeps his back to me, his hands on his hips, his head tipped up. I watch as he takes a couple of deep breaths. Then he faces me.

  “Valentine’s Day.”

  I look around, trying to figure out what corner he picked those two words out of and why he’d think an overly commercialized, barely-even-a-real-holiday is relevant to this conversation. “What?”

  “Valentine’s Day. Sophomore year. Do you remember it?”

  “Sam, what--”

  “Abby and I were together. I bought her a necklace and took her out to dinner. Do you remember?”

  “I remember.”

  He’d showed me the necklace, a delicate gold chain with an open-heart pendant. He’d asked me if I thought Abby would like it.

  She’d loved it—like I’d told him she would. Abby’s the kind of girl who wants typical V-Day gifts—hearts and flowers and a box of chocolates.

  “But I came to see you first,” he reminds me. “Before I picked her up. I stopped at your place.”

  I nod, unsure where he’s going with this. “You brought me croissants.”

  A dozen freshly baked, perfectly flaky, melt-in-your-mouth croissants from the Davis Bakery. He’d been so handsome in dark slacks and a deep blue button-down. His hair had been shorter then, the curl almost cut off, the ends waving wildly.

  I was so jealous. Of that stupid, unimaginative necklace and the dozen roses in his SUV and the dinner. Jealous that Abby got to be the one to sit across from him, gazing at him in the candlelight.

  I told myself it was because Sam was in a relationship and I wasn’t. A pity party for the single girl, stuck at home with her sisters and a newborn on Valentine’s Day. That it was because of the time he spent with her—time that took him away from me. From our friendship.

&nb
sp; Oh, yeah. I’m a liar from way back.

  “I gave you that box of croissants,” Sam says, coming closer, “and it was like I’d given you a box of diamonds. You were so happy. So…bright.” He stops inches from me and I tip my head back to maintain eye contact, looking at him from under the brim of my hat. “You hugged me.”

  “Did I?” I ask, shooting for nonchalance, as if I don’t remember. As if a hug from me didn’t matter.

  Sam’s having none of it, none of my games. None of my lies. Not now. “You hugged me. For the first time ever.”

  “We’d hugged before.”

  “No. I’d hugged you before. That night, you hugged me. You reached out to me, you touched me and…God, Hadley…I didn’t want to let you go.”

  “But you did.” I remember the moment exactly. I’d launched myself at him, knowing he’d catch me. “You let me go and you took Abby to dinner.”

  “I was freaking out. I had a girlfriend. And you were my best friend. I wasn’t supposed to feel that way about you. I told myself that I didn’t, that it’d been a fluke. But the whole night, the whole time I was with Abby, I wished I was with you and after I dropped her off…”

  “You came back.” But my words are barely a whisper of sound. I clear my throat. Raise my voice. “You came back to me.”

  “I had to know if it was real. I didn’t want it to be.”

  I nod. “I know.”

  One more thing we share, the fear of losing what we had.

  “When I got there, when you answered the door and saw it was me, you smiled. It’s such a rare thing, your smile. It hit me” –he taps two fingers against the center of his chest— “here and I couldn’t breathe. It was like my heart just stopped.”

  I know the feeling. I’m struggling to take in enough air right now, each inhale and exhale shallow and shaky. My heart pounding so hard I’m sure he can hear it.

  That he knows it belongs to him and always has.

  He lifts a shoulder. “That was when I realized it.”

  He doesn’t have to finish. I know what his realization was. But I’m selfish enough to want to hear him say it. To want him to give me the words.