“Like you had to let her in your truck that night? You couldn’t have just fucking said no and closed the door?”
I sucked nicotine into my lungs, hoping it’d morph into some kind of explanation for that night. I understood why she was paranoid after what she’d witnessed with her dad, but I didn’t need Tiffany throwing that in my face the rest of our lives. “I tried.”
“Try harder.”
I didn’t want to. Tiffany didn’t know that trying harder meant me walking away from the whole situation. I’d given her as much as I was able these past couple years. This moment wasn’t about her, though. Lake was hurting, and it was my fault, and I had to attempt to fix it. I kissed Tiffany on the forehead and started for the shore.
“She did this to herself,” she called after me. “It’s not your job to make it better.”
Sand filtered into my sneakers until I made it to damp ground. The shore chased me up and down as I closed the space between Lake and me.
When I was at her back, she stopped and turned around. She didn’t look surprised to see me, probably because she knew I’d come. “How could you do this to me?” she asked. “Why? I’m eighteen now.”
I inhaled through my nose, then took one final drag of my cigarette. Maybe it was my fault Lake got so hung up on age. Had she thought she’d turn legal and we’d ride off into the sunset on a fucking bicycle? “It’s not as simple as that.”
“Summer?” she asked, sounding strangled.
“I know it’s soon.” Admittedly, the urgency of it made my collar tight. “But does it really matter when?” I asked. “Would it be easier if we waited a year or five?”
By the way her face fell, I had my answer. It was the same for me. Putting an end to this for good would never be easy. Maybe having the wedding now would give Lake the closure she needed to go off to school and live the life she was meant to. In that respect, summer wasn’t soon at all. In fact, sooner was better than later.
“You’re really going to do it?” she asked. “You want this?”
I squatted to put out my cigarette. “Yes.”
“You won’t even smoke in front of me,” she accused. “I’m old enough to buy cigarettes, but I’m still a child in your eyes.”
I looked up. The night sky spread out behind her. The stars weren’t as clear as they’d been up in Big Bear, but it didn’t matter. She was the only star I saw. No, she wasn’t a child in my eyes, because if she was, that’d make me the same monster as my dad. I saw her naked underneath me. I saw her as a woman opening up for a man. I saw her soft parts giving way to my hard ones. And it sent my heart racing. “One day—”
“Don’t tell me ‘one day,’” she said.
Her beauty fucking radiated when she hurt like this. She couldn’t control her pain, so it just seeped out of her. I wanted to tell her it’d go away soon. She’d meet someone at school who’d do far better for her than I could. Some rich, California asshole who’d go on to run a Fortune 500 company or produce movies or something. Some finance guy like Corbin, maybe. She’d be his star, not mine. She’d forget about me in no time. If I had the smallest doubt about it being the right thing, I would’ve taken her somewhere right now. I’d have made her mine for real, even knowing there was a large chance she’d figure me out one day, and I’d end up the one with a broken heart.
“There’s only now,” she said. “There’s no more time. You have to be selfish, even if people get hurt.”
“Selfish?” I stood abruptly, training my eyes on her so she’d understand I wasn’t fucking around. I gestured toward the parking lot. “This is me being selfish. I stayed when I should’ve gone. For you. Now, I have a life here. A family. Now, I’m not sure I could leave if I wanted to. And I don’t want to.”
She turned away from me, toward the ocean, her chin wobbling. “Whatever you say, whatever she says, I know the truth. I saw it.”
I had to crane my neck to hear her over the waves. “What are you talking about?”
“Your tattoo,” she said. “That night at your apartment in the kitchen. I know what it is.”
Hands on my hips, I hung my head. What could I say? I’d been desperate. Locked up, unable to talk or even think too hard about the things that mattered most to me. Trying to forget the memories I’d made just months earlier. A lifer had been trading tattoos for cigarettes and I’d asked for the stars. It’d cost me three packs and a little bit of my bad-boy image, but having those three stars on my body had bought me some peace.
“It’s for Madison,” I said, which was partly true, and easier to swallow than the whole truth.
“No, it’s not.” Her long hair blew into her face with a breeze, and I had to cross my hands under my pits to keep from brushing it away. She took a breath, the words floating out on her exhale. “It’s for me. It’s Summer Triangle.”
She fucking knew I’d put her star on my body, even though it didn’t belong to me and never would. Wasn’t that enough? I couldn’t tell her I loved her. I couldn’t tell her I didn’t. It killed me, but that was how it was. It wasn’t going to be any other way, no matter how many times she put me in this goddamn position.
“I love you,” she said.
Hearing it aloud, from her mouth, made my throat thick. I allowed a second for the pleasure to sink in, for that euphoric warmth to spread from my chest to my face, to the lower half of my body. She loved me, and those words alone were doing things to me. She was going to get me hard with one sentence? Goddamn it. I was a grown man who thought with his head, not his dick. I had to get ahold of myself. “Don’t do this, Lake.”
“I can’t just sit back and watch. I have to say something.” Her face, open and sweet, pleaded with me. “You know it’s true, Manning, you have to. You’ve always known that my heart doesn’t function right without you, that food doesn’t taste the same and air is too thick, and my mind is always wandering back to that night on the lake, because I’m all wrong without you, because I’m in love with you.”
23
Lake
Manning hardly moved an inch, arms at his sides. His gray hoodie hugged his biceps but opened as a breeze came off the water. My confession hung in the air between us, and then slowly, pieces of it caught on the wind, scattering away from us.
I’m all . . . wrong . . . without you.
Meeting Manning had taken me apart, and he hadn’t been around to put me back together properly. My limbs had been stitched on, my heart cut out of red construction paper, my cloth outside wearing thin. I wanted to be a real girl, but without him, I was just a bundle of body parts.
I’m in love with you.
I needed to hear it back.
Instead, Manning closed his eyes and asked, “Why are you telling me this?”
My paper heart tore a little. “Because I’ve never said it, and you need to know before you—”
“I do know, Lake,” he said loudly enough to make me jump. “You’ve told me. Maybe not outright, but some way or another, you’ve told me, and it hasn’t always been subtle. You told me that night in the truck. In the lake. On the horse.” The waves had nothing on him, the way he grew bigger, his voice booming. “You told me in the car when I picked you up from the prom. You told me on your eighteenth birthday. You seriously think I don’t fucking know?”
His anger vibrated between us, as loud as the ocean, as acute as the sharp pains in my heart. “You don’t know,” I argued. “You can’t know, or you wouldn’t go through with this.”
“I do know and I am going through with it.” His words, cold and hard, came down as if the sky stormed bricks. “You think I don’t know how you feel? You think I don’t carry the burden of our love on my shoulders just to keep it from crashing down onto you?”
What I wouldn’t give to bear that crash. Couldn’t he understand how badly I wanted that? That I could take on anything with him by my side? “I can handle it,” I said.
“I can’t, and I’ve told you that, but you don’t care how hard it’s been for
me.”
“I don’t care?” I whispered. I hiccupped, my nose tingling. The threat of my tears only seemed to make him angrier as he thrust a hand in his hair. “How can you say that?” I asked. “You’re all I care about.”
“No, I’m not. You don’t care about all the ways I’m dying inside. It kills me to know I’ve made you sad and that this strains your relationship with your family.” He flexed his hands, his fingers curling, then reaching for the ground. “It kills me to know there are a million better men out there for you than me, including Corbin. If you cared, you wouldn’t be standing here right now, asking me to pick you when you know, you know I can’t.”
My mouth hung open. He was acting as if I was the selfish one, when all I’d done was love him and do everything in my power to keep it to myself. Or so I’d thought. “Why can’t you? Is it because of her? Do you love her?” One rogue tear escaped, sliding over my cheek. “Do you love her . . . more than me?”
He smacked his fist against his chest. “I am not the man for you,” he said. “I can’t give you the life you deserve.”
“You can.” I called on all my strength to inhale back my tears and show him he was wrong. “I’ve never been more sure of anything.”
“All right, Lake,” he said. “If you’re so sure, then tell me how it works.”
“What do you mean?”
“You want me to pick you? Fine.” He threw up his arms. “To hell with it. I pick you. What happens next?”
I shook my head slowly, my stomach fluttering. “I . . . what?”
He opened his arms, showing me his impressive wingspan. “Tell me what the fuck we’re going to do. We go back to the bonfire and what? You going to tell Tiffany the wedding’s off and I’m leaving her for you, or should I? Then what?”
I swallowed, my heart pounding at just the thought of telling Tiffany, at the pain I’d cause. Was I ready to do it right this instant? No, but I would find the strength—for him. “Then we be together.”
“So how exactly does it work? Do we go to your parents’ tonight and tell them the good news? Because if we don’t, Tiffany will. So we pack up your things and go . . . where?”
“I—I don’t know.” I could hardly wrap my head around what he was saying, because the details didn’t matter. We mattered. This love mattered. I burrowed into my sweater, suddenly freezing cold. “I’ll stay home, and you can go to . . .” He couldn’t return to Tiffany’s. As it was, she’d probably burn his things. “A hotel. Go to Gary’s.”
“What makes you think your dad won’t wring my neck before I walk out the front door? Why the hell do you think he’s so happy about this wedding?”
A wave crashed hard, and water slithered up around my ankles. Manning walked backward, up to dry land.
“It’s only a few months,” I said, pushing my feet through the sand, following him. “Then I’ll be in the dorms.”
“And me?” He fisted his shirt, right over his heart. “What will I do? I can’t live in a dorm.”
“We’ll find you an apartment in Los Angeles—”
“My parole mandates that I live within county lines.”
“Then I’ll drive back and forth.” I grasped at straws, feeling like I was losing a battle I’d always been so confident I’d win. “I’ll come nights, weekends—”
“Between classes, homework, exams—not to mention all the fun shit you’re supposed to do in college—you really want to be driving two hours each weekend to stay with your ex-con boyfriend?”
“Yes,” I said quietly. My hands began to shake as my dreams sifted through my fingers. I’d been holding on at any cost, but Manning insisted on smashing everything into smaller and smaller pieces until our future was nothing but grains of sand under my feet.
“Even if I could move to L.A.,” he said, “I’d have to find a landlord willing to rent to a felon, and then I’d have to come up with first-and-last month, security deposit, and rent each month.”
I shook my head hard. “We’ll find a way.”
“My savings went to the court, to some woman I supposedly traumatized when I was with you,” he said. “And your dad has a job for me. A good one, in construction.”
“My dad?” I asked. “Why are you bringing him into this? Who cares about him?”
“I do. I care, Lake.” Up until now, he’d been heated, but suddenly, his voice became grave. “I want the same things for you and Tiffany that he does. He’s not my enemy. In fact, he’s going to look into wiping my record clean. I want that so much, Lake, you can’t understand.”
“I can, because I want that, maybe even more than you.” I touched the base of my neck, my pulse thumping under my fingertips. “You aren’t the one who has to live with the guilt of knowing your hands are constantly tied because of decisions I made.”
“Exactly. I’m the one with the tied hands. You think he’ll do anything for me after this? You think he won’t spend every free minute he has scheming to get me out of your life?”
“We don’t need him.” Even as I said it, guilt panged in my heart. He was my dad. As much as he frustrated me, I loved him, and I cared what he thought. Manning was right—Dad’d never be okay with this. I hadn’t really considered that having Manning in my life might mean losing not just Tiffany, but my dad, too. “You’ll find another job.” My voice weakened. “Another apartment.”
“It’s not that simple, Lake. I have nowhere to live, no car, no money, my credit is shot and I’m on parole. I’m a criminal. These things matter.”
“No, they don’t. They’re just dumb details—”
“They’re life, Lake. Relationships, marriage, they don’t run on love alone. I tried to tell you that, I . . .” His throat rippled as he clenched his teeth. “My parents were as different as you and me, and they thought love was enough. My dad loved my mom so intensely, he sometimes hurt her. And us,” he added quietly.
My chin shook. He had to know we weren’t his parents. I did. He was my soul mate. Didn’t that mean we’d be together one day, no matter what? Wasn’t that the definition of a soul mate? Tiffany would always be able to find someone else. Her soul mate was still out there. But me? Manning? This was it for us. We could fake it all we wanted, but the truth was, there was nobody else out there for me, or for Manning. We needed each other. “You’d never hurt me,” I said. “And even if I thought there was a chance you might, I’m still willing to take that risk.”
“I’m not.” The way his voice broke squeezed my heart, sending more tears down my cheeks. “What can I offer you? How will I take care of us?”
“I’ll ask my dad for money,” I said. I never had, not in the way Tiffany did, but I could do it for a while.
“No.”
“But he gives it to you and Tiffany.”
He took a step toward me, seeming to double in size, and to my surprise, I moved back. “That’s different, and you fucking know it.”
“That isn’t fair.” I dug my toes into the ground, seeking comfort in the soft sand. “Why would it be any different than him giving you money to take care of Tiffany?”
“Because that’s Tiffany and this is you.” He gritted his teeth, looking up at the sky. “I can’t do that with you. I can’t expect you to understand, but I need to you to. I need you to understand this is best.”
“It’s not best, and I don’t understand how you can say it is.” I laced my hands over my heart. “You asked if I could go up there and tell Tiffany? I could. I would say goodbye to her, to my dad, for you. Don’t marry her, Manning. Be a man, and tell her you don’t love her.”
His neck thickened, veins rising from under his sleeves, cording his forearms. “Don’t tell me to be a man,” he said, his fists curling. “What do you think I’ve been doing? Why do you think I’ve been doing it? For you, Lake.” His body vibrated as he ran both hands through his hair, pulling. “You don’t know what you’re asking of me.”
“I’m asking you to walk away from all of this.” I’d never seen Manning so
angry, but I needed him to see I wouldn’t break. I wouldn’t be pushed away. Instead, I stood taller. “I can be enough for you.”
“They’ll never forgive you.”
I stepped up to him, into the force field of anger pulsating around him. “I don’t care.”
He looked down his nose at me. “I’m not going to take your family away from you, Lake.”
“You’ll be my family.”
“You should have the world. Fuck the world—you should have the universe, the sky, and every star in it.” As close as I was, I could see every fleck of pain in his eyes, the frown lines etched in his skin, the anguish in his tensed muscles and jaw. “I can’t give that to you. I’ll never be able to. I’ve seen too much. Had too much taken away. I can’t be happy enough to make you happy, and I can’t provide for you the way you deserve. You’re at the start of your life, on your way up, and I . . .” He inhaled a breath through his nose, wincing like it pained him. “I can only bring you down.”
My tears fell faster now, but I wouldn’t lose hope. I couldn’t. Because there was something he couldn’t deny, and if he did, he’d be a liar. “Even if all that’s true, you’re forgetting one thing. You can love me more than anyone else could. How can you ignore that?”
He hesitated. “It’s not enough.”
It’s not enough. You’re not enough. I shook the crushing thoughts out of my head. “It is enough.”
“It’s not. I’ve seen it firsthand with my mom and dad—”
I got in his face. “I don’t care what you’ve seen. You’re making excuses.”
“Why would I?” he asked. “What makes you think I want it this way?”
“So you can be miserable! Because you think that’s what you deserve.” I wasn’t sure where it came from. Maybe I stunned us both because for a second, we each went silent. It all boiled down to the simplest equation—Manning thought I was too good for him, and that he was bad, and those two things were enough to keep him away. “You’re not bad,” I told him. “You are not your father.”
Somebody Else’s Sky: Something in the Way, 2 Page 24
