Love and Other Words

by Christina Lauren

  I know she wants a serious answer, but I’m just done with the intensity of this conversation. “His place is so convenient.”

  She lets out a barking laugh that actually startles Viv in her sleep. “They’re fluffing your pillows in hell, Macy Lea Sorensen.”

  “I don’t think one gets pillows in hell,” I say, smiling back at her. “And I’m kidding. I’m just having a hard time trusting these new doubts, because a few weeks ago I was perfectly happy with Sean. What if this is a blip?”

  She lets out a skeptical “Mm-hmm.”

  I blink up to her. “Come on.”

  “You come on. You know I’m right. Sean is easy, I get it. He’s a cactus and Elliot is an orchid. I get that, too. Just…”

  “Just what?”

  “Just don’t be a testicle about this,” she says. Sabrina hates using pussy to mean weak, especially after birthing her ten-pound baby the old-fashioned way. “When you think about kissing Elliot, what does it make you feel?”

  My entire body explodes in heat, and I know it shows immediately on my face. I know what it’s like to kiss Elliot. I know how he sounds when he comes. I know how his hands become wild and roaming when he’s hard. I know how he learned to touch, and kiss and give pleasure, because he learned with me.

  I know how good it was, even for the short time I had it.

  “I don’t even need you to answer.” She leans back when our waitress comes by to take our orders.

  When she’s left again, my phone vibrates in my bag and I pull it out, laughing. It’s a message from Elliot, whom I haven’t spoken to since the picnic.

  I turn my phone around, showing it to Sabrina, and she laughs, shaking her head. “Intervention complete.”

  then

  saturday, january 14

  eleven years ago

  E

  lliot sprawled on the floor, pulling a new, furry pillow off the futon and tucking it beneath his head. It was nearly two p.m., and Dad and I had barely made it up here due to some terrifying dry rattling under the hood of the Volvo. While Dad and Mr. Nick had worked on Dad’s car, Elliot and I had devoured some cold leftover chicken on the front steps. Back in the warmth of the house, I was more likely to take a nap than read an entire chapter.

  Elliot’s voice seemed deeper than it had even the weekend before: “Favorite word?”

  I closed my eyes, thinking. “Excruciating.”

  “Wow.” Elliot paused, and when I looked over at him, he was staring at me curiously. “That’s a zinger. Update?”

  I kicked off my shoes and one of them barely missed the side of his head. We’d spent the past hour together, but something about being back in the closet, with the blue walls, and stars, and the warm bulk of Elliot’s body nearby, seemed to loosen everything inside me. Things had been hard in ninth and tenth grade, but eleventh? Definitely the worst.

  “Girls suck. Girls gossip, and are petty, and suck,” I said.

  Elliot marked his place in his book and closed it, placing it at his side. “Elaborate.”

  “My friend Nikki?” I said. “She likes this guy Ravesh. But Ravesh asked me to spring formal and I said no because he’s just a friend, but Nikki is mad at me anyway, as if I could help that Ravesh asked me and not her. So she told our friend —”

  “Breathe.”

  I took a deep breath. “She told our friend Elyse that I told Ravesh’s friend Astrid that I wanted to go with Ravesh just so he would ask me, and then I turned him down. Elyse believed her and now neither Nikki nor Elyse are speaking to me.”

  “Neither Nikki nor Elyse is speaking to you,” he corrected, and then, at my glare, apologized under his breath before adding, “Clearly Elyse and Nikki is bitches.”

  I laughed, and then laughed harder. Everything felt so easy in the closet. Why couldn’t it always feel this way?

  He scratched his jaw, watching me. “You should take me to your spring formal.”

  “You would go? You hate that stuff.”

  Elliot nodded and licked his lips distractingly. “I would go.”

  “Everyone wants to meet you.” I found myself unable to look away from his mouth, imagining being tasted.

  “Well, that is perfectly lopsided. I have no desire to meet everyone.” He grinned at me. “But I do want to see you in something other than pajamas, jeans, or shorts.”

  “You would really go to spring formal with me?”

  He tilted his head, brows drawn. “Is it so hard to accept that I want to be the only person you’d consider taking to a stupid formal?”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re my best friend, Macy, and despite your ridiculous reticence —”

  “Good alliteration.”

  “— you are the girl I want. I want to be together.”

  My stomach flipped in thrill and anxiety. “You kiss other girls.”

  “Rarely.”

  “Uh, ever.”

  “Obviously I wouldn’t if I could kiss you.”

  I sighed, chewed my lip, fidgeted. “Why can’t everyone be like you?”

  “I can be enough of your world that it feels like everyone is.”

  I smiled up at him, softly, pressing down the familiar bubble of need. It was getting harder and harder to ignore that I really, truly loved Elliot.

  “What’s your favorite word?” I asked him.

  He sucked on his lower lip for a moment, thinking. “Vex,” he said quietly.

  now

  wednesday, november 8

  A

  fter that one text during lunch with Sabrina, things with Elliot snowball and we’re doing something we didn’t do even in high school: talking nearly every day. Maybe only for a few minutes. Sometimes it’s just over text. But I feel his presence almost constantly, and no matter how much I want to talk myself out of it, I know the gentle hum of relief in my thoughts is because of him.

  Perhaps relatedly, things with Sean are… weird, at best. We’ve had zero arguments. We’ve had zero conversations about what we’re doing. When I happen to catch them awake, Phoebe seems happy to see me, Sean seems happy to see me. I’m sure if I planned a big wedding tomorrow, Sean would still happily show up. I’m sure if I put off planning it indefinitely, Sean would never ask about it.

  I’m also sure I could leave and he would be fine with that, too.

  It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever been a part of, and yet, it could be so fucking easy. It requires nothing of me, requires no involvement from my heart, and I know without a doubt that he doesn’t need me. We could have a relationship that gives us both sex, financial security, a roof over our heads, and stimulating conversation at the dinner table, but otherwise live entirely separate lives.

  But the critical truths – that we aren’t really in love, never have been, and its absence troubles me – don’t seem to come in little drops of awareness. They’re suddenly there, in stark black and white, shouting This Relationship Is So Very Over every time we smile politely as we shift around each other at the bathroom sink.

  I’m sick over it. I’m desperate to find the best way out. Unfortunately, I worry that Sean’s chief reaction will be disappointment. I am as convenient a lover to him as he is to me; but in his case he may not need more: he has the love of his life already, in the form of a six-year-old daughter.

  A good start seems to be to make sure I can afford to live on my own in the city. I take a rare vacation day and drive to El Cerrito to do something I’ve been putting off for months: meeting with my financial adviser. Daisy Milligan is Dad’s old finance whiz, and I kept her more out of sentimentality and laziness than any particular knowledge about her skill.

  That said, though she’s approaching seventy, she barely needs to refer to my file while lecturing me on what I have in my trust (enough to cover home repairs and taxes, but not much more) and why I should sell one of my houses (I need a retirement account more than I need two properties). I don’t dare mention that I’m living in San Francisco and not even making rental inc
ome from the Berkeley house.

  I hate talking about money. I hate even more seeing how badly I need to get organized financially. Afterward, I’m sort of high-strung and buzzy, and when Elliot texts asking how my day is going, and I tell him I’m on his side of the bay… meeting up seems like a pretty obvious choice.

  He suggests Fatapple’s in Berkeley, having no idea how close that is to my house. So instead I suggest we meet at the top of the Berkeley hills, in Tilden Park, at the entrance to the Wildcat Creek Trail.

  I get there before he does, and outside my car I pull my fleece higher on my neck to battle the wind. The fog rolls in over the hills, making it look like the gray horizon is sinking down into the valley, an inch at a time.

  I love Tilden, and have so many memories of coming up here with Mom, riding the ponies, feeding the cows at the Little Farm. Dad and I would come nearly every weekend after Mom died to feed the ducks at the pond. We’d sit in silence, tossing torn-off pieces of bread into the water, and watch the ducks snatch them up, quacking at one another competitively.

  The nostalgia of Tilden seems to mix with the nostalgia of Elliot and forms a potent brew in my blood, tearing through me. Even though he and I have never been here together, it feels like we have. It feels like he’s part of my nuclei, entwined with my DNA.

  So seeing him emerge from the fog of the parking lot and move toward me with his long, loping stride and tight black jeans… it makes my anxiety just… evaporate.

  In a pulse of Obvious Epiphany, I realize Sabrina was right: I haven’t been living without him. I’ve been merely surviving.

  I want to share this life with him somehow. I just… have no idea how that looks.

  He seems to read my mood as he lowers himself onto the bench beside me, sliding his arm along the back. “Hey, you. Everything okay?”

  The impulse to hug him is nearly debilitating. “Yeah, just… long day.”

  He laughs at this, reaching with his hand to wrap a gentle fist around my ponytail and tug. “And it’s only noon.”

  “I met with Dad’s old financial adviser.”

  With his other hand, he reaches up, scratching his eyebrow. “Yeah? How’d that go?”

  “She wants me to sell one of the houses.”

  Elliot falls silent, digesting this. “How does that feel to you?”

  “Not great.” I look up at him. “But, I know she’s right. I don’t live in either of them. It’s just that I don’t want to get rid of either of them, either.”

  “They both carry a lot of memories. Good and bad.”

  Like that, he cuts right through everything. Even since the first time he asked about my mom, he’s gently relentless.

  I pull a leg up and turn to face him. We’re so close, and even though we’re outside, in a public park, there’s no one around us and it feels so intimate. His eyes are more green than brown today; he’s a little stubbly, like he didn’t shave this morning. I slide my hand between my knees to keep from reaching out and cupping his jaw.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  Elliot’s eyes dip briefly to my mouth and then back again. “Always.”

  “Do you think I keep things bottled up?”

  Straightening, he looks around, as if he needs a witness. “Is this a serious question?”

  I push him playfully, and he feigns injury. “Sabrina suggested I have a habit of keeping people at arm’s length.”

  “Well,” he says, choosing his words carefully, “you always talked to me, but I had the sense you didn’t really do that with anyone else. So maybe that’s still true?”

  A car drives past, and its diesel engine chugs loudly around the parking loop, pulling our attention momentarily away from each other and out to the grass-lined lot. The faint noises of animal life trickle to us from the Little Farm, just up the gravel road.

  When I don’t respond, he continues. “I mean, maybe I’m biased by our current circumstances, but I feel like maybe you don’t really… talk about stuff. And I might be pushing my luck here, but I get the feeling that Sean is that way, too.”

  I choose to ignore that part, wanting to avoid the Sean conversation with Elliot entirely. I know now what I have to do, but I owe Sean enough to discuss it with him first. “I used to talk to Dad,” I say, sidestepping like a pro. “Not like I did with you, maybe, but about school. And Mom.”

  “Yeah, but we’re talking about now,” he says. “You were always pretty insular, but do you have anyone? Other than Sabrina?”

  “I have you.” After an awkward beat, I add, “I mean… now I do.” Another pause. “Again.”

  His expression straightens and Elliot picks up a twig from the ground, resting his elbows on his knees and spinning the stick between his fingers and thumb. Fidgeting.

  I know —

  I know —

  I know what’s coming.

  “Macy?” He looks over his shoulder at me. “Do you love Sean?”

  I knew it was coming, yeah, but the weight of his question still propels me up off the bench and two paces away.

  “I’ve seen you in love,” he says gently, not standing. “It doesn’t look like you’re in love with him.”

  I don’t answer, but he reads me anyway.

  “I don’t get it,” he growls. “Why are you with him?”

  I turn back around to catch his expression, brow furrowed, mouth tight with emotion. It takes a few breaths for me to put the words together in a way that doesn’t feel supremely melodramatic.

  “Because,” I tell him, “we have the totally fucked-up agreement of emotionally messed-up people – that was unspoken, I guess, until recently – that we only give each other a fraction of ourselves. Losing him would never wreck me.” I shake my head and look down at my shoe, toeing the dirt. I feel my epiphany from earlier about a robust, shared life starting to fade as Elliot pokes at my self-preservation instincts. I hate that Sabrina was right. I hate that retreating to my cocoon is my first reflex. “I realize how cowardly that sounds, but I don’t think I could take losing someone I love again.”

  “It hurt that much,” he says quietly, not really a question. “What I did. When are we going to talk?”

  “I didn’t just lose you,” I remind him.

  I stop, needing a second to breathe. The memories of the last time I saw Elliot used to make me physically sick. Now they just send a wavy lurch through my body.

  I can see he’s processing this. He studies my face, turning the words around in his mind and looking at them from different angles, like he knows he’s missing something.

  Or maybe I’m just being paranoid.

  “What’s his story?” he asks.

  “You mean Sean’s?”

  Elliot nods, picking up another twig. “He was married?”

  “Yeah. She was in finance, and got addicted to cocaine on a work trip.”

  His head shoots up, eyes shocked. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. Terrible, right?” I look past him, out into the parking lot. “So, I think part of it for him is that he has his daughter, and he never really got to get over Ashley. It’s been… really easy for both of us to just fall into something permanent without really needing each other.”

  Elliot leans forward. “Macy.”

  “Elliot.”

  “Are you staying because of Phoebe?”

  I stare at him, genuinely confused. “What?”

  “Phoebe.”

  “No, I heard the name. I just don’t understand how – Oh.” I get what he’s saying. “No.”

  “I mean, she’s this sweet little girl without a mom…” He says it like it’s obvious why I’d stick around, and okay, from the outside I can see why he’d think that. But he doesn’t know them.

  “She doesn’t need me,” I reassure him. “She’s got an awesome, involved dad. I’m this…” I wave my hand around, unsure. “This accessory. I mean, let’s be real: I don’t really know how to… ‘mom’ anyway, so she doesn’t seem to need anything from me.”
<
br />   He grunts a little, looking down at the twig he’s slowly and methodically shredding. “Okay.”

  I glare. “What does ‘okay’ mean?”

  “It means okay.”

  “You can’t think that long before giving me an ‘okay.’ That’s a condescending ‘okay.’”

  He laughs, and tosses the stick to the ground before looking up at me. “Okay.”