His smile faltered, and he appeared to be fighting something. He brought it back though, and took a deep breath as he gave her a questioning look.
“Is this true confessions night?”
She tilted her head. “I think so.”
He stared into her eyes for a long moment, and then looked down at the shingles between them before meeting her gaze again and holding it. “Because you’re all I’ve ever wanted.” I heard her deep intake of breath, and I remembered the feeling behind it. “And I can’t believe I just said that out loud,” he continued, shaking his head with a little laugh and breaking eye contact.
She took his hand and interlaced her fingers with his, making him look at her again. “Want to know my confession?” she asked finally after a forever silence.
She let go of his hand and gently took the front of his shirt in her hand, pulling him to her until her lips were on his. She kissed him softly until he responded with kisses of his own, his hand traveling her face.
“Em,” he said against her lips. “What are you doing?”
“Confessing.”
His mouth broke into a smile. “I like your method.” His hand moved behind her head as he pulled her in for more. After a moment, he stopped with difficulty, both of them breathing a little faster.
He rested his forehead against hers. “There was a reason not to do this.”
“Mm-hmm, because you wouldn’t be able to stop,” she said.
He ran a finger along her cheek. “No, because you’re the real deal,” he whispered. I could have recited that line in my head, I still remembered it that well. “It wouldn’t just be sex with you. You’d take my heart.”
The tears fell freely down my face. I wanted to go back. I wanted to put fingers in my ears and go “la-la-la” and not see or hear any of this again.
She touched his face and his lips and then wound her fingers into his hair. I couldn’t see her eyes but I knew they were misty. I knew she was trying to say the words.
“And that’s a bad thing?”
“Em, if we cross this line, I can’t watch you be with other men,” he said. “I can’t watch you go back to Kevin again.”
“I don’t want anyone else,” she whispered against his cheek, and I saw him close his eyes as one tear squeezed out. He quickly rubbed it away before she could see, and my heart ached to know that. “And you already have my heart.”
I watched his eyelids flutter and his hands tremble a little as he pulled her face to his again, and kissed her slow, soft, and from what I remembered, agonizingly thorough. He pulled her body close, wrapping her up in his arms as he cradled her head and dove deep.
I wanted to leave. I didn’t want to sit that close to myself and Ben as we made love. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes, listening to their words, their breathing, their laughter over awkward angles and hard surfaces, the sounds of their kisses and soft moans when places were touched just right. Their confessions of love and how Ben wanted to see her face as he made love to her. Their build as they moved together to come at the same time, crying out, and then actually crying. I opened my eyes to find that I was, too.
“Oh my God, Ben,” she said, her voice shaking with tears as she wrapped herself more tightly around him.
“You’re crying,” he said.
“You’re shaking,” she responded.
He laughed and kissed her forehead as tears trickled from his eyes, too. “It’s because it’s you, Em. That was—I swear to you, I’ve never made love before. I’ve never—”
“Me, either,” she said, little sobs jerking her breaths. “I’ve never felt anything like that before.”
“Emily—”
“I love you, Ben.”
He dropped his head and held her tight. “I love you, too, baby.”
The words echoed in my ears, and it made me sit up. Was it coming? The ringing? “Please, God, let it be over,” I said. “There’s nothing new here.” Tears streamed down my face as I struggled to my feet and yelled at the sky. “There’s nothing new here! Enough, already!”
The jerk backward made me grope for the wall of the house as my vision went black and all the air was knocked from my lungs. I shut my eyes tight, hearing only the rush of the wind go past me until a giant intake of breath brought me back to the present.
• • •
“Shit!” I exclaimed, blinking my room back into focus as I found myself back on the window seat. I got up quickly, pushing away from the seat, and then reaching for my bed as my head spun, unable to catch up. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“Mom?” Cassidy’s voice said from somewhere near the door. I held my pounding head in my hands and kept my eyes closed. “Mom, you okay?”
“Mm-hmm,” I said as I sank onto the bed and tried to swipe at my eyes with shaking hands.
“No you’re not,” she said, rushing to kneel in front of me. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
I just watched the rerun of your conception.
“Nothing, baby, I just—” I looked up and saw Ben leaning against the doorjamb, a crowbar still in his hand from—whatever he was doing with a crowbar. Like he’d come running for something. My stomach contracted at the sight of him, standing there looking concerned, when my last image of him was making love to me—her—me. “I just tripped and landed hard on my knee, that’s all,” I said, focusing on Cassidy again. “You know how wimpy I am about my knees.”
“But my God, you don’t usually sob over it, Mom; are you sure you’re okay?” She was looking at me intently. “Ben and I both heard you from where we were; we about collided in the hallway.”
I shook my head, taking slow breaths to get myself back under control. “I’m fine, Cass, it’s okay. Go back to what you were doing.”
She looked at me with skepticism. “I don’t know, Mom. Nana said you’ve been acting funny.”
“Funny?” I said. “What kind of funny?”
“I don’t know—odd?” She raised her eyebrows to enforce the point. “Kinda like now?”
I put my hands over my face for a couple of seconds to get my gears realigned, and then I ran fingers under my eyes again and smiled. “Hopefully, I will never tell your children that you are acting odd. I’m fine, I just lost it for a second—when I fell. Please quit hovering.”
I stood up and pulled her with me, wrapping her up in a mighty hug at the end.
“Okay,” she said, not sounding totally sold, but headed that way.
“Okay,” I echoed.
I met Ben’s steady gaze over her shoulder. The look in his eyes said he knew where I had gone, just as I’d known before I got there. He didn’t want to talk about that one, and that just burned me up even more. Time had dulled the edges, but reliving that night cemented the hurt and betrayal all over again. How could he have declared such hardcore feelings as he did, and then walk away. Run away. Out of town, out of state, wherever the hell he went. How could he have left such an amazing love behind? Because I had other plans? Bullshit. I felt raw.
I stroked Cassidy’s hair and tried to shoot those feelings at him like daggers, but he didn’t look guilty. Or defensive. He just turned away and walked back down the hall without a word.
Her phone buzzed, and as she dug it from her pocket, I saw the image of her dad. Which was followed by a sigh of disgust as she realized she couldn’t ignore him with me watching.
“Hello?”
I went to the window and closed the blinds before anything else decided to yank me around. Without any more thought, I started grabbing the Madame Alexander dolls and laying them on the bed. Then as Cassidy’s voice got increasingly edgy, I grabbed the desk chair and stood on it to pile book after dusty book into my arms. Four sneezes later, I stepped down carefully and dumped all the books on the floor. Cassidy was pacing by that point, her express
ion taking on its trademark glaze-over that always infuriated me to no end. When it involved me. With Kevin, I figured it was his problem.
It was about school, as usual. Her lack of it and his opinions on that matter. While I somewhat agreed with him, at least in the beginning when she’d dropped out after one semester, the horse was beyond dead. Two and a half years of beating that carcass had done nothing to change her mind about college, and had only created a canyon between them that his constant harping kept widening.
She finally lied about her phone going dead and cut the call short, pressing the plastic against her forehead afterward with her eyes closed.
“He makes me so crazy,” she said to the room. “I want to go run for days without stopping after I talk to him, just to blow the jitters off me. How the hell did I come from him?”
I gave her a small smile and rubbed her arm, mentally shaking off that question. “You know, you used to be inseparable. Always talking, always working on projects together.”
“And then I grew my own brain instead of branching off his, and he can’t stand that he isn’t calling every shot.”
I sighed. “I know, doodlebug. He just wants you to have everything in life you can have and not have to struggle.”
She twisted away from me, irritation making her itchy. “I’m happy with my life, Mom. I like what I do. It may not be out of a book or a diploma, but it’s me.” She dropped cross-legged onto the floor and picked up books randomly, turning them to see their covers one at a time. “I like not having everything mapped out line by line, dot by dot. I live my life. I don’t schedule it to death.”
“You also miss things that way, baby.”
She held out her hands, a book in each one. “What am I missing? I don’t sit home and lay around watching TV. I go out every day and make a point to talk to someone new, do something new, take a new route to work, walk on the wrong side of the street—whatever. I may not follow the rules but I see my life in color. Not in bullet points on a calendar.”
Her cell phone buzzed again, and she glanced at it.
“Text from Josh, he’s almost here,” she said, the sulk firmly implanted in her voice. I helped her up and hugged her before she walked away.
As hard as it was from the parent perspective, I envied her. She was making her life more challenging, no doubt, but—to be so comfortable with living day to day. To be so comfortable in her own skin and with who she was. I would have loved to know what that felt like.
• • •
I FOUND SOME BOXES DOWNSTAIRS AND LOADED UP WHAT I’D disrupted, feeling a little guilty about disturbing such a long- and deep-rooted location. I stayed far away from the window and any other revelations it felt it needed to show me. Every time I saw us making love in my mind, heard Ben’s voice telling me he loved me, remembered the emotion and the tears, I had to grip my middle to keep it together. The raw, mean, jagged hole had reopened there and threatened to pull me in every few minutes.
I didn’t want to see him again. I didn’t care anymore what his reasons could have been. I’d been dancing around the subject because time had taken some of the details away, and I wasn’t sure it was worth asking. Twenty years later, was it really relevant? I mean, outside the Cassidy factor that he wasn’t even aware of.
After going down the home movie trail, I realized that nothing could fully justify his leaving. Not after the monumental connection we had that night. No love before or since had ever been that strong, at least for me.
No, it was best to just let it be. Let him finish whatever work he had left to do, and then he’d be back at his own house with no reason to see me again.
I was searching for my keys in the kitchen so that I could make a quiet exit when I heard the commotion at the front door. Or on the front porch, I realized as I rounded the corner and saw the door wide open and Cassidy and Kevin arguing.
“Damn it, Kevin,” I muttered.
I headed for the door and felt Ben walk out of the hallway behind me. And just the fact that I didn’t even see him and could feel his presence—get goose bumps on my back because of it—completely pissed me off. By the time I got to the door, a whole four feet later, I was primed to join the fight.
“Seriously?” Cassidy was saying to Kevin. “God, Dad, let it go!”
She was bowed up and waving her arms in the middle of the porch, the tiny light above her making her golden head appear to glow. Josh stood to one side, leaning against one of the wooden posts, looking as if he wished the concrete would open up and suck him through it. Kevin stood on the bottom step, hands in his jacket pockets, looking worn out.
“Cass, you won’t listen to me when I call you, if you even answer the phone.”
“I told you my phone was going dead.”
He held his hands out. “And so I came to you.”
“Why?” she said, turning in a circle and catching sight of me. “Mom, please tell Dad what I told you.”
“No, you tell your dad what you told me,” I said, leaning against the doorjamb. “Y’all talk to each other for once, not through me. But does it have to be in the front yard? Can you do it inside?”
“I have,” she said, raising her arms again. “Over and over. He didn’t understand it any of the ten times I’ve repeated it.”
I pointed at Kevin. “Him, Cass, not me. Talk to him.”
“Oh my God, whatever,” she said, storming down the steps and past him, Josh on her heels. She turned around and walked backward, the dark absorbing her. “I’m telling you both—see, my words are flowing your way—I’m not going back to college. I’m not going to business school. I’m not going to sit down and write a life plan on career paths or opening a restaurant, or a bookstore, or a toilet factory. I am fine. Leave me alone.” On that, she got into her car, Josh scrambled to climb on his bike, and they were off like a speedy parade.
Kevin watched her, looking defeated as he usually did regarding her. They were so close once. When she was little and didn’t have her own brain yet.
“Well, that went well,” he said to the retreating taillights.
“Kevin, what did you expect?” I said, walking out and away from the heat at my back. “You know how she gets when she feels cornered.”
“And why am I always the bad guy?” he said. “Why does she always feel like I’m cornering her? Why can’t we just talk?”
“Because you don’t just talk, Kev, you lecture. You tell her what she’s supposed to do, instead of asking her what she’s going to do.”
Kevin frowned. “She’s twenty-one. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do.”
I remembered being twenty-one and clueless. And pregnant. Unable to balance a checkbook. That wasn’t Cassidy. “Yes, she does. In fact, she knows herself better than we did at her age.”
“We were having her at her age,” he said, and it was everything I could do not to turn back and see if Ben was still there. “Our options went away. She’s throwing hers away.”
“We have to trust her,” I said. “She’s smarter than you’re giving her credit for.”
“I know,” he said, looking at the sidewalk, then behind me. “Can I help you? Are you ever not here?”
I turned around to see Ben coming out the front door, keys in his hand, clearly leaving for the night. He hesitated a step to give Kevin a look, then moved it to me as if to tell me I was a moron for ever loving such a dipshit.
“Good night, Em,” he said, handing me an envelope. I remembered the papers.
“Oh—thank you. Forgot about that.”
Ben didn’t respond, just walked to his truck. Kevin’s face showed disgust and the urge to say something, but I cut him off.
“Good night, Kevin.” I went in the house to turn out the light and lock the door and found him still standing there when I shut it behind me. “What?”
/> “If we wouldn’t have gotten pregnant—”
I groaned. “Oh, come on, it’s late.”
“Just—I’m serious,” he said. “If all that wouldn’t have happened, would you still have come back to me? Would you still have married me?”
I blew out a breath and decided not to play the game anymore. “No,” I said, and the word seemed to bounce around. “I would have gotten my archaeology degree and moved to Africa or Egypt or—somewhere.”
Kevin blinked, looking stunned. “Huh.” He turned and walked toward his car, very slowly.
I felt a little bad. “What would you have done, Kevin?”
He stopped but didn’t turn around. “I don’t know. Gone to college somewhere, then come back and married you. But I guess you would have been in Africa.”
“And you would have gone and gotten laid.”
He chuckled and resumed the journey to his car. “Yeah, probably so.”
• • •
I WASN’T GOING TO RIDE IN BIG BLUE. AUNT BERNIE, HOLLY, Cassidy, myself, and my mother were dressed to go out, looking good, feeling good, and I wasn’t about to ruin that by piling in a giant trailer.
Aunt Bernie was the one who’d brought it up, pointing out that we all had smallish cars and five people would be crowded. Holly eyed the monstrosity warily.
“I think we’ll be just fine,” I said. “It’s just across town, we won’t be in the car long.”
“Seriously?” Cassidy said, looking like she was ready to burn up Manhattan instead of Main Street. She had on a tight little red dress that fell off one shoulder and was made to bring men to their knees. “Come on, Mom, it’ll be a hoot!”
I stared her up and down. “Dressed like that, you want to drive around in a Smurf-mobile?”
“Hey!” Aunt Bernie said, hands on royal blue hips. Royal blue everything. It was evidently the color of the day. “You know, we can just leave your little butt here on the curb,” she said loudly.
I held up my hands. “Sorry. I just pictured a little nicer evening.” I gestured at Mom in her black pantsuit and pearls she wore to any nice event, and Holly in her little green dress that was eerily similar to my requisite little black dress, but made her hair look gorgeous. “I was told to dress nice for Mom’s birthday.”
Before and Ever Since (9781101612286) Page 17
