Who Do You Love

by Jennifer Weiner

  Nana kissed my cheek and squeezed my hand. I checked myself in the mirror—the long white eyelet sundress with the tiered skirt that I’d bought, and my new boots, ankle high with a low heel, pale-blue leather with embroidered birds and flowers in turquoise and silver and pink. Cowgirl boots had been the fad at my school, and I’d asked for and received my pair for Chanukah. I glossed my lips, gave my hair a final spritz of spray, then took the elevator to the lobby and stepped out the door.

  There was a fountain in front of the hotel. At its center was a bronze sculpture of a slender girl in an ankle-length dress, balanced on one foot like she was running. Andy was waiting in front of the fountain, in a plain blue T-shirt and jeans. His hair was still short, but he looked bigger, more solid and adult than I’d remembered, as he raised a hand in greeting and his lips formed my name.

  I had imagined a scene where I’d throw myself into his arms, where he’d lift me up, holding me against him, raining kisses down on my face. The reality was more awkward, with the two of us looking but not touching, not quite meeting each other’s eyes. Even with all the letters, all the calls, so much time had gone by. His shoulders had filled out; his back looked broader; his face looked even less like a boy’s face, more like a man’s. “You look pretty,” he said shyly. He started to reach for my hand, then stopped and reached up to tug gently at a curl. I was the one who took his hand and pulled him close, playfully bumping my hip against his, feeling something inside of me start to unclench as I thought, This will be fine.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked. Up in the hotel room, I had been, but now the logistics of having a meal—finding a place, ordering the food, chewing, swallowing, paying the bill—seemed overwhelming and endless, fraught with dozens of possibilities for potential shame. What if I spilled something, or he made dumb jokes with the waitress, the way my great-uncle Si sometimes did? (“It’s too bad a nice place like this doesn’t allow tipping” was one of his favorites.)

  “Are you? Hungry?” I asked Andy.

  “I’m kind of always hungry,” he said, and I smiled, remembering the way my brother used to come home from school, take a mixing bowl, fill it with cereal, dump in a quart of milk, and eat the whole thing, and then follow it up with an enormous dinner an hour and a half later. “Come on,” he said.

  We walked down Walnut Street, past blocks of fancy shops, and crossed Broad, which, Andy explained, was the city’s major thoroughfare. “Every May they shut down the street and there’s a race, the Broad Street Run. It’s ten miles long.”

  “Have you ever done it?”

  He smiled at me. “I won the eighteen-and-under age division last year.”

  “Of course that’s only because I didn’t enter.”

  “Oh, you,” he said, the way he’d said it in Atlanta, before the horrible fight with Bethie. I pulled him close and stood on my tiptoes to kiss him, feeling beautiful as the wind swirled my dress around my ankles.

  The Reading Terminal was filled with hundreds of people, dozens of stands, and all kinds of mouthwatering smells—cinnamon rolls and doughnuts, pork sandwiches and roast turkey, falafel and gyros and dumplings. Andy and I walked past the places that sold Greek food and Mexican food, deli and sushi. Then he found us a table and asked what I wanted. “I don’t know,” I said. “It all looks so good.”

  “I’ll surprise you,” he said, and came back in ten minutes with a roast pork sandwich with greens and sharp provolone, two warm pretzels, glistening with butter, and a quart of soup filled with noodles and dumplings. “A little of everything,” he said, and even though I thought I would be nervous or feel awkward, the sandwich was so delicious that I devoured half of it, then wiped my mouth and daintily dipped a chunk of pretzel into the cup of honey mustard that had come with it. “Better than the Home Free stuff,” he said, and I said, “Oh, God, remember those sandwiches?”

  “I don’t think they would have been so bad if they hadn’t been warm.”

  “Yeah, sitting in a bus for four hours in July doesn’t do much to improve turkey and cheese.”

  He’d bought bottled water to drink, and on our way out we stopped at Bassetts for ice-cream cones, chocolate for me, strawberry for Andy. “What now?” he asked. “Want to see the Liberty Bell?”

  “Nothing against our founding fathers, but I want to see where you live.”

  His face clouded, but all he said was “Okay.” When we’d finished our cones he took my hand, and we walked down Market Street and followed a pack of people down the stairs to a subway station. Andy gave me a token and we passed through the turnstiles and boarded a northbound train. I’d ridden the subway in New York and the Metro in Washington, but always with my parents, never alone. Sitting next to Andy, with my leg pressed along his, feeling his warmth, the way he smelled like sunshine, like springtime, I felt very grown-up, nervous and excited.

  After six stops, we got off at Kensington and Somerset, descended a flight of metal stairs, and started to walk. Ken­sington Avenue couldn’t have been more than ten miles from Walnut Street, with its Tiffany’s and its fancy boutiques, but it was completely different. There were five-and-dimes, with broken neon signs and flyblown, age-warped posters—BUY ONE GET ONE LADIES SLIPPERS; CHILDREN’S COATS 30 PERCENT OFF. Even the chain stores and restaurants, places I knew, looked different. The Burger King in Clearview was freestanding, on a neatly mowed patch of lawn with a parking lot that got repaved every summer. This Burger King was in a storefront, its broken windows patched with cardboard and tape. The sidewalks were stained and dirty, marked by blackened clumps of stepped-on chewing gum and glistening puddles that I didn’t recognize until I saw a man hawk and spit onto the street, as casually as if he’d been dropping an empty cup into a trash can.

  “Not much like Clearview, is it?” Andy asked without looking at me. He had never been to my town, but I’d described it and sent pictures—the pastel-painted Spanish-style houses, with red tile roofs, the lawns, the pools, the beach. It was true, this wasn’t much like the placid, quiet, safe place where I’d grown up—it was dirty, noisy, crowded—but it had a kind of thrumming pulse, an energy and vigor that I’d never seen before. Everyone walked faster here, like they had somewhere to be, and there were all different kinds of people—a girl with elaborate braids and big, rectangular gold earrings singing to herself, in a voice just as good as anything I’d heard on the radio; two women in black robes and headdresses that covered everything but their eyes pushing strollers containing regularly dressed babies, one a girl, one a boy; and a man leaning against a telephone pole, on legs that looked like they were about to collapse underneath him, wobbling back and forth. He had on dirty blue jeans and no shoes and no shirt, and he looked like he was drooling as he stood there.

  Andy kept one hand on the small of my back, steering me past the homeless people, past the medical-supply stores with unsettling displays of canes and walkers and portable toilets, and past an off-track betting parlor. The air felt like it was leaving a thin film of grime on my skin as he led me around a corner, up a short block, then to a brick building that I recognized from the pictures he’d sent, three stories high with the door painted green. “This is it,” he said, and unlocked the door to the row house where he lived with his mom.

  I held my breath as I stepped inside. Andy had described the place, had said that it was small, that it didn’t get much light, that the ceilings were so low his mother told him if he grew any more he’d start bumping his head. What I’d imagined wasn’t anything close to how sad, how poor the little rooms looked, especially after the luxurious Rittenhouse Hotel, where the heavy drapes were held back with tasseled gold ropes, where the carpet was thick and deep and the pillowcases smooth and white and cool. Andy stood in the center of the living room, not meeting my eyes. A television set dominated the room; a coffee table in front of the couch held a few out-of-date copies of People and Vogue. There weren’t any bookcases or books, no pictures on t
he walls except one that I recognized—Andy’s graduation picture, a shot of him in a red cap and gown. He’d sent me the wallet-sized version. The one on the wall was blown up much bigger. Looking around, I saw a few other pictures, all of either Andy or his mother or the two of them together, one from what must have been his eighth-grade graduation, because he was, once more, in a cap and gown. He’d explained to me once why graduations were such a big deal—because not everyone in his school made it through high school, much less college. I wanted to stay longer, to study a younger Andy, but he took my hand and walked me to the kitchen.

  “Do you want anything to drink?”

  I wasn’t thirsty, but I was nervous and curious. The kitchen smelled like bacon grease, even though every surface was scrupulously neat, the white and gold-flecked Formica counters wiped down spotlessly, the stainless-steel sink empty, and the drainboard filled with bowls and silverware. Andy reached into the cupboard, took down two plastic glasses, then looked at me.

  “Just some water,” I said, and he filled both glasses from the tap. I sipped, and he drank deeply, his throat moving as he swallowed. I was overwhelmed with an urge to kiss him there, where I knew the skin would be so soft.

  “Philadelphia’s so pretty,” I said, and then immediately realized how stupid that sounded, given what I’d seen on our walk to his house. “Do you go there a lot? To the Reading Terminal?”

  He nodded, with a look of amusement on his face. The kitchen was so small that I felt especially aware of him, as if every time he moved he disrupted the atmosphere and I could feel the air moving against me.

  “Are there parks around here?”

  The expression on his face was hard to read, amused and a little exasperated. “They sell drugs in the parks around here.”

  I didn’t know what to say about that. I’d tried pot, and more than once, at parties I’d seen cocaine, laid out in lines on a mirror. A boy in my class named Seth Riccardi was the one who seemed to have it. Marissa had told me that Seth’s dad used it, and had so much that he didn’t notice when Seth borrowed from his stash. I’d seen it, but I’d never tried it—pot and beer were one thing, but cocaine was something else.

  “Have you ever?” I asked. “Tried anything?”

  “Just beer,” he said. “And not much. I’ve got to be careful. If Coach finds out you’ve been drinking or anything else, you’re off the team.” He picked up his glass again, and I watched him drink.

  “Where’s your room?” I asked.

  “Upstairs,” he said, pointing to a staircase so narrow that I imagined his shoulders brushing the wall as he walked up or down.

  “Can I see it?” My throat was dry, and there was an upswelling of feelings surging through me, fear and nervousness that I’d say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing, a feeling that if I could just hold him everything would be all right.

  His room calmed me a little, maybe because it felt like Jonah’s room, like the rooms of the boys that I’d dated before, although it was by far the neatest boy’s room I’d ever seen. Books were piled against the wall in a careful stack, some schoolbooks, books about running or about runners or by them. Posters covered the wall, one from Scarface and one from The Godfather, one of the rapper Tupac Shakur, with his bandana and his old-looking eyes. There were also half a dozen different runners. I recognized Steve Prefontaine from his long hair, and Bruce Jenner from the Wheaties box. His room smelled like he did, a little bit like sweat and the inside of sneakers, like soap and clean clothes and cologne. On the dresser I saw a bottle of Old Spice and a stick of Mennen deodorant, next to a bowl full of loose change and a rolled-up necktie, red and blue, and a picture in a wooden frame. I stepped up close. A black man in profile held a baby in his arms, gazing down into the baby’s face with a delighted smile.

  “Your dad,” I said.

  “My dad,” said Andy. Beside the picture were a candle, a short, fat white one, and in a frame, a picture of the two of us in Atlanta that Marissa had taken. He was standing behind me, with his chin resting on my head, and I was giving the camera a goofy smile. “Oh, you kept it!” I said, and clapped my hands, imagining that I could feel my heart swell.

  “I just moved the one of Heather Locklear,” he said, so I punched his arm, like he probably expected. One wall was filled with newspaper clippings, stuck up with plain silver tacks. Andy had sent me copies of a few of these, the ones that featured pictures of him breaking through a finish-line tape, his arms lifted in triumph, mouth open in a shout. His acceptance letter from Oregon and a typed note from the coach were both on the wall. I walked over to look at them, and Andy walked with me, his hands on my shoulders as I read out loud.

  “Congratulations. I am looking forward to welcoming you to Oregon in September.”

  The bed was just a mattress on the floor, but it was a big one, queen-size, I thought, the same as my bed at home. It was covered with a plain dark-blue comforter, and there were two pillows on top, in light-blue pillowcases. I wondered if he’d cleaned his room for me, if he’d changed the sheets and pillowcases, and the thought sent blood rushing to my face and between my legs. There was just one window, and I could hear street noises through it, radios and cars and conversation and the rumble of the train. I thought about my bedroom, the flowered wallpaper, the canopied bed and the corkboard covered with pictures of my friends, the full-length mirror beside my dresser. I would lie on the bed with the windows open, hearing the ocean, but nothing else—no cars, no people, sometimes not even a lawn mower. It was a lonely feeling, and I thought that living in a city, even if you were all by yourself you would never be lonely; you’d always be reminded of how close you were to other people.

  “Not real romantic,” said Andy. His eyebrows were drawn down, his big hands hanging by his side, and there was a faint frown on his face, and a tiny nick on his jawline where, I thought, he’d cut himself shaving. I wondered if he was nervous, too, embarrassed by his bedroom or his house or his neighborhood.

  “It’s perfect,” I said. I was the one who took the two steps across the distance that separated us and pressed myself against him, feeling his chest, his strong legs, the heat of his body through his clothes. I put my arms around him and he bent down, holding the back of my head and kissing me, gently and carefully, like my mouth was a fruit he was trying for the first time.

  He tasted like strawberries—from the ice cream we’d eaten, I thought—and he sighed when the tip of my tongue brushed against his, shivering and pulling me closer. “Is this okay?” he whispered.

  “Okay,” I whispered back . . . and then, to prove it, I slipped one hand up the back of his shirt, gliding it over the smooth, warm flesh underneath, and I nibbled his earlobe, then the side of his neck. He sighed, pulling me closer, and it was as if the sound had gone straight to the slim span of flesh between my legs. I could feel myself swelling, becoming more tender, an insistent, tickling itch.

  His hands fumbled with the clasp of my bra. “Here,” I said, and unhooked it. Then his shirt was off, and my shirt was off, and we were pressed together, my breasts, my scar, all bare in the dusty afternoon light.

  “Hang on,” he said, and pulled away. I could see his erection, pressing against his jeans, and watched as he casually slid one hand down his pants to adjust himself. Boys, I thought, and felt an overwhelming tenderness toward him, affection at that unself-conscious gesture, at the way he could live in his own body and be completely at ease in a way that I didn’t think girls ever could.

  Reaching into his back pocket, he pulled out a book of matches and lit one, and touched the flame to the plain white candle on his dresser. Painted metal blinds covered his window. He twisted a plastic rod, rolling them closed, and the room got darker, full of flickering shadows and candlelight.

  He kicked off his shoes and lay down on the bed, and then I tried to kick my boots off, except they were too tight and I ended up having to sit on the edge of t
he bed, pulling.

  “Everything okay up there?” I could hear the smile in his voice.

  “Just fine,” I said, pulling harder, finally working my feet free so that I could lie down beside him. I felt anticipation and a little fear, and a wish to slow down time, to notice everything, so I would be able to replay the whole scene perfectly in my head. Turning on his side, Andy slid one arm underneath me, pulling me close. But he didn’t kiss me, didn’t touch my breasts, even though my nipples were puckered and hard. With one finger, he traced the raised and knotted flesh of my scar, and when I shut my eyes, he whispered, “Look at me.” When I kept my eyes shut, he said my name—“Rachel.”

  I made myself relax, made myself look into his eyes, and for the first time since I’d seen him on the train platform, I felt the ease of our Atlanta days returning. My Andy, I thought, leaning toward him just as he was lowering his face toward mine. Our noses collided.

  “Ow!” I said as tears filled my eyes.

  “Oh, jeez,” Andy muttered. “Are you okay?”

  “No, no, I’m fine.” Was my nose too big? I worried that it was, sometimes. Then Andy was cupping my head in his hands.

  “Maybe just hold still,” he said, and then he kissed me, slowly at first, then harder. He touched my scar, then my breast, a tentative brush, and I arched my back, pressing myself into his palm.

  “Okay?” he asked again, and instead of answering I pulled him close, gripping his shoulders, feeling the heat of his skin, the muscles beneath it, smelling him, feeling his mouth against mine.

  We kissed and kissed, and then he bent his head to take my nipple in his mouth, circling it with his tongue. I felt the muscles in my thighs and belly clench, felt my hips lift toward him without knowing that they would. I wanted so badly for him to touch me between my legs, where I was slippery wet, as aroused as I’d ever been, and for the first time I felt an absence there, a new understanding that this was a part of my body that could be filled . . . and I wanted him there, wanted him inside of me so badly I thought that if I didn’t get it I wouldn’t be able to stand it.