But I’d be lying.
“There’s a guest room on the other side of the basement,” I say, standing up. “Follow me.”
CHAPTER 5
HUDSON FOLLOWS ME out of the cave, past the flip-cup game, the Ping-Pong table, the couches, and the flat screen. I don’t look over when people scream and throw their hands up in victory or turn when they laugh at something on TV. I just stare straight ahead at the door on the far end of the basement and picture what’s behind it: two bedrooms on the left, both small and blue and traditional, and one on the right, enormous, with lavender walls and an attached bathroom. It’s hard to forget the bathroom. It has shell-shaped soap, shell-patterned hand towels, and a glass-door shower with shell etchings. Or, at least, it used to.
I push open the door and step into the dark hallway. Hudson follows me, shutting out the sound and light from the rest of the basement with a soft click. I flatten my palm against the side of the wall and slide it around, searching for the switch. It should be right here, but for some reason I can’t find it. The farther I reach, the faster I breathe. Hudson must hear me, because by the time I finally find the switch, so does he. Our fingers meet. I feel high—dizzy, disoriented, like I’m spinning. And it’s not from the secondhand smoke or the warm beer. It’s him. In the dark. On the fringe. It’s how we’ve always been.
The first time Hudson held my hand was on a Saturday night, sophomore spring. Cal’s parents were out, so he threw a party at his duplex. And since Cal was friends with pretty much everyone, the place was packed. Kris was with Jim. Bella was dancing. Cal was bartending. Jolene was off with her latest plaything—each boy fell hard, then fell away. Jolene always came back to me. But she wasn’t finished yet, so I did what I’d always done at parties: I searched for a corner, a place away from all the noise and voices, to wait for her. I found it in a small den off the living room, lit blue by a finished movie. That’s where I found Hudson, too.
He was sitting on the couch, running his thumb over the ink he’d penned on the rubber strip that lined the side of his sneaker, like he was by himself instead of at a party. I sat down next to him. We didn’t talk at first. It wasn’t what either of us had gone in there for. But after a little while he looked at me (steadily, studiously) for so long, it started to feel like he was the only person in the world who’d ever seen me. I’d caught him looking at me before, a few times in the hall, but it had never felt like this.
When Hudson finally spoke (his thumb never leaving the side of his sneaker), he asked me about loyalty, whether or not I thought it existed. I took my time answering, the way I imagined he did, choosing each word, and each person who heard it, only after careful scrutiny. I said I hoped loyalty did exist. He said he hoped so, too, but that it was hard to believe in when your mom—the person who is supposed to be there no matter what, the one who’s supposed to keep promises—just up and leaves, and all that’s left of her is boxes. What does that do to loyalty, he wanted to know. Promises?
I shook my head, said I didn’t know. He said he didn’t know, either. Then he kept working on his sneaker. And I kept sitting with him. And the sitting was a kind of speaking, too. Just being together. We sat as music swelled and glasses spilled and words slurred in the other room, as kisses finished and doors opened and girls went in search of their best friends. We sat until the party began to feel far, foreign, a forgotten star. We sat until Hudson wasn’t the distant one anymore; they were. Then I felt his fingers run lightly across my knuckles, draw circles on the inside of my palm, thread between mine, and settle into the grooves, like they’d always been there.
We flip the switch and blink.
“Sorry,” I say.
“No worries.” He takes his hand off mine. He’s still looking at me, though, waiting. And it takes me one, two, three counts of staring back at him until I realize I’m leading. He doesn’t know where he’s going.
“It’s this way,” I say. I close my fingers over my thumbs and fight the memory as I walk down the hall and swing open the door to the lavender room.
“Interesting,” Hudson says, pausing in front of the enormous bed.
I forgot about the bed.
Hudson shifts his weight and brushes a nonexistent hair behind his ear.
I bypass the lavender canopy and decorative pillows on my way to the reading chair in the corner.
“What?” I ask, in a lame attempt to make light of the massive mattress. “Your room’s not like this?” I try for a smile, but the corners of my mouth sink as soon as I lift them. Hudson and I never made it to his room. We met on stoops and sidewalks and driveways. We talked about family and fear. Loyalty. For a few months we shared things that felt more intimate than kissing (which we did) and more sacred than sex (which we didn’t).
And for fifteen months we haven’t talked at all.
I slip off my shoes, sit down, and fold my legs under me, as if by making myself small somehow I can shrink the room and transform the bed into the couch off Cal’s living room, where it was small and dark enough for us to be honest.
“Not quite.” Hudson runs his finger along the metal bed frame as he walks across the room. He sits down on the wide, white cushioned chair opposite me.
We listen to the tread of feet above us, a smattering of dull thumps on the ceiling. Soon my heart joins in, thudding for each second I don’t say the words swelling in my chest and screaming in my head. But after nearly a year and a half of being ignored by him, and ignoring almost everyone myself, I’m good at holding my tongue.
Hudson stares at the loose laces of his Vans, runs his fingers inside the loops. I sink farther into my chair. Voices drift in from the hallway. A high giggle. A deep murmur.
A door shuts.
The longer we sit, the more I get used to it.
The silence stretches, tethers us together. And as I sit here, with the hum of the bass above me, in Hudson’s company, the more my anger wears away. Being with him stops feeling strange.
“Why are you here?” Hudson asks finally.
I sit up in the chair. “You asked if I wanted to get out of there.”
“No, not in this room. Why are you here? Tonight?” Hudson slings his sneaker over the worn knee of his jeans and leans the full weight of his gaze on me. As if the blue of his eyes, or the way they crinkle at the sides, will act like some sort of truth serum.
“The bonfire,” I tell him. “Didn’t want to miss it.”
“You didn’t want to miss a bunch of people you don’t like, doing something you’d rather ditch?” Hudson drops his eyes and starts tracing the hand-drawn letters scrawled across his sneaker. My heart pangs at the familiar pose.
“Unlikely,” he concludes.
“Why do you think I’m here?” I ask him.
“Don’t know.” He shrugs. “Why are you here tonight? Why weren’t you there last year? I’ve stopped trying to figure you out.”
Guilt seeps, thick and viscous, through my chest. It was slow, getting to know Hudson. Every word was earned. Each confidence a gift. But losing him, that was easy.
Quick.
“Kris needed me.”
Hudson’s hand hovers over his sneaker.
“I needed you.” Each word is quiet, clipped. The same way he sounded the night of the manhunt game. Meet me, he’d said, mouth pressed close to the phone. Promise.
But I wasn’t there.
I clutch the arms of my chair and think about Jolene, bare shouldered and buzzed on the couch upstairs, waiting for him.
“Seems like Jolene was a decent stand-in.”
Hudson sinks back in his seat and stares at a point in midair, as if Jolene’s sitting here, between us.
I look in the same direction.
“She was there.” He casts a quick glance my way, drops his crossed leg to the floor, and runs his hands up and down the thighs of his jeans. “She got what I was going through.”
The back of my throat burns. Jolene didn’t get him. I gave him to her. She drew him out of
me on so many June afternoons. Word by word. Story by story. I told her how he hated to talk on the phone. How his hand felt in the dark and his skin smelled up close. How his mom had left and his dad was drinking, picking fights with him. How he was shy, then bold, closed, but opening. I talked and talked and talked, and she ingested everything I said until it was hers, and so was he.
“At least she did back then,” he says.
“And now?” I ask tentatively.
“Now? I don’t know.” Hudson tenses at some memory, like it physically pains him. I don’t know what he’s thinking, but I don’t have to. I know Jolene. I’ve got plenty of my own scars itching to open up and bleed.
“I shouldn’t have mentioned her,” I say. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s okay,” he says, and sighs, resigned. “That’s why I broke up with her.”
“No shit,” I exclaim. The idea of Hudson, or anyone, willfully disobeying Jolene seems completely impossible to me.
“Shit,” he confirms, rolling a stray strip of sneaker rubber between his fingers.
And then everything about tonight falls into place. Why Hudson was hanging back in the shadows at the bonfire. Why he told me I was blowing his cover. It wasn’t just about him keeping the usual distance from everything. It was because he didn’t want Jolene to see him.
“Don’t act so surprised,” he continues. “It’s not like I’m the first person to walk away from her.”
I lower my eyebrows. He raises his.
“Really?” he asks. I shake my head. I don’t know what he means.
Hudson props his elbows on his knees and leans his whole body toward me. “You didn’t just leave me that night. You left her, too.”
I left her.
Technically, he’s right. I walked away from Jolene. Twice. But it didn’t feel like leaving. It felt like being bent. Like breaking.
“Hey,” he says, his voice closer to me now, so close I can smell his breath—the mix of mint and beer. “Are you okay?”
My hands are shaking. Hudson takes them in his and tightens his grip until they’re still.
“Thanks,” I say, staring at his hands, how they cover mine completely.
“It’s cool,” he says. And for a second I worry he’s going to take his hands away, but he doesn’t. Instead he runs his thumbs up and down the insides of my wrists.
Now that my hands are still, the rest of me trembles.
Until heavy thuds beat down on us, shaking the ceiling and swaying the chandelier. The dance party must have started. Either that or a stampede—people running from the police. I stiffen again. Hudson’s grip tightens. I can feel the curve of his silver ring on my wrist.
We look up. Listen. The heavy thuds settle into a rhythm. So it’s dancing then, not a signal to escape. We’re safe. I relax my hands into his.
“I still can’t believe you left,” he says under his breath.
Something plummets in the pit of my stomach. Even here, with my hands in his, even now that I’ve told him Kris needed me—he’s still angry.
“Look, I know I didn’t show up for you, and that I stopped speaking to Jolene that night, too, and that you guys probably bonded over how much you hated me; but whatever Jolene told you, whatever she said, it isn’t—”
The burn from my throat has climbed to my eyes. I blink.
Hudson squeezes my hands. When I look up at him, his eyes are clear—blue water, sparkling. “Jolene told me you left. Nothing else.” Of course. She didn’t have to say anything else. Breaking my promise to Hudson, not showing up for him right after his mom left, would have been enough, and she knew it. “I was pissed,” he says with a quick breath and a small nod to himself. “But now I get it.”
“Get what?” I still haven’t told him why Kris and I left. But before I get a chance, Hudson lowers his head to our hands and takes a breath, then blows it out through the tight circle of his lips. It warms our fingers.
“You left with Kris.”
“Yes, and—”
“You stuck with her.”
“Yeah.”
He lifts his lips from our hands, but not enough for me to see his face; only that he’s nodding again.
“I would have done the same thing. For Cal, I mean. If he needed me. That’s loyalty.” Hudson looks up, finally. I can see the brown specks in his eyes, like markers on a map I have memorized. “And the rest,” he says. The rest. There is so much more. Hudson still doesn’t know what Jolene did. “—how you guys unplugged from everything. No parties, no posting. You two didn’t join in, and you didn’t give a shit. That was hard-core,” he says solemnly. “Brilliant, really.”
My thoughts of Jolene and Kris get cut off.
Hudson thinks I’m brilliant. And even though I know he’s wrong, that he’s making history into fiction, I don’t stop him. Because I like his version so much better than reality. I want to hear more about the me that he sees.
“Really?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
In the few seconds that follow, there is only the sound of our breaths, the feel of his hands, the dig of his ring. Hudson studies me: cheeks, nose, neck, and eyes in quick succession.
“I’m not her,” I say, chin up, back straight. See me, I think. Choose me. I wait, and so do the dull thuds above us. It’s like time is suspended, until he leans into me and whispers:
“That’s the point.”
Hudson runs his thumb along my cheek, above my chin, across the length of my bottom lip, and pauses. I dip my head into the curve of his neck and brush my lips against his skin. Not quite a kiss. More like a memory. It was my favorite place on him. And it’s there, burrowed in the familiar winter scent of him—as Hudson runs his hands up my neck and through my hair, as he sifts his fingers through the strands and tugs on them just enough to lift my head until we’re facing—that I lose my sense of time and place.
Then my phone rings.
Kris. Shit.
I freeze. Hudson and I are tense and tangled, holding each other tight; but with each ring, the room comes back to me: the metal headboard, the crystal chandelier, the lavender walls, the glass end tables. My phone, still ringing. I should be reaching for it. I have to reach for it. But I’ve crossed a line, and I’m not sure how to get back. I want to talk to Kris, but I don’t want her to tell me this is a mistake. I’m still trying to decide what to do—take my hand off Hudson’s neck or put it farther into his hair—when the ringing stops.
I exhale.
Hudson untangles himself, but his eyes never leave me. Instead he drops his chin and lowers his forehead until it’s resting lightly against mine. A stray strand of his hair falls against my face. I can’t feel anything but the one spot where we’re touching. I can’t think anything but It’s not enough. For over a year I’ve waited, stepped aside like a swinging door, while Jolene walked down the halls with him—with everything we could have been. And all that time, this is what I was missing. This is what she took from me.
Now I’m taking it back.
“Stay with me,” he says. And I do.
CHAPTER 6
AFTER SAYING GOOD-BYE to Hudson behind Bella’s house, I can still feel his imprint on my collarbone, cheek, and chin, like bruises. Not because he kissed me—we never made it past almost—but from the way he held me. (Head on my shoulder. Nose to my neck. Palms pressed flat to my back.) The spots where our skin met are tender, cold when the air blows over them. Pieces of my hair whip across my face. I sweep them out of my eyes and look down the long, winding driveway.
No sign of Kris. She’s probably superpissed, and she has every right to be. I didn’t answer the phone. I can’t believe I didn’t answer the phone. And now she’s not answering hers. My stomach twists. I have to find her. I have to tell her.
I have to tell her about him.
And that’s where I get stuck. Because I should want to tell her. She’s my secret keeper, my mind reader. I should want to tell her everything. But I don’t. For the same reason I didn’t pick up th
e phone—because it was this perfect moment, and she would have ruined it. Which seems impossible. Kris makes everything better. But I can already see the steely way she’ll look at me when I mention Hudson. She’ll say she warned me. She’ll be disappointed. And that’s not how I want to feel. I want to be happy.
I turn back toward the house. It looks deserted from down here. Dark. Quiet. I’m about to start back up the steps when I see a flicker of white in the window above me. I stop, look again, but there’s nothing. Then the window flashes pink, then green, then blue. A dozen hands pump the air. Great. I’m going to have to walk through a late-night dance party to find Kris. Can’t wait.
Just then a few senior guys stumble by—the flip-cup players—shirt collars ringed with beer and sweat, fleeces unzipped, hats low over their faces. A girl in hot-pink heels follows, slipping on the final step. She catches herself at the last second, puts her arm out to steady herself, then pulls at her miniskirt. The guys don’t turn around. “Hey, wait up!” she calls, running after them. Her heels hit the pavement hard: click, click, click, click.
Eventually the sound of heels disappears, but my heart picks up the beat. If Kris did stay to wait for me, it means she’ll miss curfew. I look at my watch. She’s got ten minutes. If she’s even a second late, her parents will totally lose it—take her phone, computer, maybe even her car. Because of me.
I look up at the house. The dark window, the pumping arms, the flashing lights. Then I push off my right foot and take the steps two at a time.
I don’t pause at the kitchen. I don’t worry about how I look leaning up against the cup-covered counter or care that my sneakers squeak and stick to the floor. I scan the faces as quickly as I can—a few junior guys from drama and some sophomore girls spilling liquor and loud cackles. Kris isn’t here. I walk past the tapped keg, through the living room, to the dance floor. The dining room is all lights and music. A disco strobe hangs from the chandelier. Pop music pumps from the wall-mounted surround sound. Everyone jumps to the beat. I squint into the pulsing light.
Underneath Everything Page 4
