The Edge of Always teon-2

by J. A. Redmerski

The only part of his body that moves are his eyes popping open much like mine did, and when reality sinks in, the rest of his body follows suit.

  “Shit! Shit! Shit!” He gets out of the bed and stands in the center of the room, naked.

  I never get tired of looking at him—naked or clothed, it doesn’t matter. How I ended up with him still defies my comprehension to this day. He raises both hands to his face and runs them over the top of his hair, resting them on the back of his head, his arms hardened with well-defined muscles. And then a long, defeated sigh deflates his chest.

  “I’ll have to catch a later flight.”

  I climb out of the bed and grab my robe from the floor so I can get in the shower.

  “Not that I mind staying here with you for a few more hours,” he says, coming up behind me.

  “I don’t know, Andrew.” I slip the robe around my body and tie it at the front. “I was kind of looking forward to getting rid of you.” I’m totally smiling with my back facing him.

  Silence bathes the room.

  “Are you serious?”

  His stunned voice makes it impossible not to laugh. I whirl around and kiss his lips.

  “Hell no, I’m not serious. Maybe I was the one who turned the alarm off last night. Maybe I planned this all along.”

  His smile widens and he kisses me back and then walks around to the side of the bed to find his boxers.

  “Did you?” he asks, stepping into them.

  “No, I didn’t. But it’s a good idea. I’ll remember it for next time. Want to shower with me?”

  At that second, there’s a knock at my bedroom door. Knowing it’s probably my mom, Andrew’s posture stiffens a little and he sits down on the bed to cover his lower half with the blanket.

  I open the door to see my mom in all her bleached-blonde glory standing there. She’s wearing a light pink button-up top and soft pink blush in her cheeks to match it.

  “Are you up?” she asks.

  No, Mom, I’m sleepwalking. She’s funny sometimes.

  I notice her glance at Andrew once. She has already expressed her worry about me getting pregnant again, but surely she can’t expect us not to have sex. It’s what she wants, but yeah, not gonna happen.

  She smiles weakly at me and asks, “Do you want to go with me to Brenda’s today?”

  Definitely not. Love my aunt Brenda, but not so much being choked to death by her cigarette-smoke-filled house.

  “No, I’ve got plans with Natalie.”

  Really, I don’t have any plans at all, but whatever.

  “Oh, all right. Well…” She glances at Andrew again and then back at me. “Thought he was going to Texas this morning?”

  I tighten the rope around my robe and cross my arms.

  “Yeah, well we overslept, but he’s going to take a later flight out.”

  My mom nods and looks across the room at him one more time. She smiles slimly and he does the same. Awkward. She really likes Andrew, but she’s definitely not used to a guy sleeping with me in my room, even if he’s been here with me for two weeks. If I wasn’t almost twenty-one and engaged to him, he definitely wouldn’t be in here at all. At the same time, she knows we love each other and after what happened with the baby, she wants him here for me. But it’s still awkward. For all of us. Yeah, Andrew and I are seriously gonna have to get a place of our own.

  A place of our own… here in Raleigh. My chest feels like there’s something heavy sitting on top of it all of a sudden.

  My mom finally leaves us, and I gaze over at Andrew, who looks all uncomfortable with the sheet draped over his lap and a sort of nervous frown.

  “Shower with me?” I ask again, but I can tell he’s not up for it anymore.

  He flinches. “I think I’ll get one after you.”

  I chuckle at his boyish awkwardness and then soften my face. “I’ll look for a place this weekend. I promise.”

  He stands up. “If you want me to look with you, just tell me. I only suggested Natalie in case you wanted something to do while I’m gone. Y’know, get that girl opinion on drapes and color palettes ’n’ shit.”

  I laugh out loud.

  “I won’t be picking out any drapes,” I say. “Curtains maybe, but drapes are for interior designers and rich cougars.”

  He shakes his head at me as I leave the room and head to the bathroom down the hall.

  I feel like Jekyll and Hyde. All the time. When in front of Andrew I put on my happy face, but not as if I’m faking it. I am happy. I think. But the second I’m alone again, it’s like I become someone else. I feel like someone invisible is always standing behind me, flipping a fucking switch inside my brain. Off. On. Off. On. O—no, On.

  I sit in the bottom of the tub with my knees drawn up against my chest, and I let the hot water stream down on me forever. I think about the inevitable apartment I’m bound to find, the good time I had at the Underground last night, the load of laundry I need to start, and how that logo is starting to fade from the top of the soap bar. When the water begins to cool, the change in temperature wakes me up enough from my strange daydreaming to take notice of how long I’ve actually been in here. I don’t even shave before I shut the water off and get out, purposely avoiding the bath rug because I hate the way it feels underneath my feet. I throw a clean towel over it and then I just stand here, gazing at myself in the mirror. Absently I begin to count the flecks of toothpaste staining the glass. I stop at fourteen.

  Pulling open the medicine cabinet, I sift through the bottles and tubes of stuff in search of Advil. Thankfully, my so-called hangover only requires a couple of headache pills. When I find it, I go to pluck the bottle from behind a few brown-orange prescription bottles, and then I pause. I take down one of the prescription bottles instead and read the label. Percocet 7.5—Take one tablet every six hours as needed for pain—Nancy Lillard. No idea why my mom has a bottle of pain pills, which she obviously hasn’t taken, but she’s had back problems for a while, so maybe she finally saw a doctor about it. Or, maybe my mom, being an RN, is turning into a criminal on me and taking advantage of her easier-than-the-average-citizen’s access to prescription drugs.

  Nah. That’s not likely, considering this bottle was purchased a month ago and is still full. She’s the same old mom I’ve known all my life who’s never been fond of taking anything for pain beyond the harmless over-the-counter stuff.

  I start to put it back when I find myself stopping just before the bottle touches the tiny shelf. I guess it can’t hurt. I do have a headache and that qualifies as pain, right? Right. I push down and turn to twist the childproof cap off and shuffle a pill into my hand. I swallow it down with a handful of water from the sink, dry my body off, and wrap my hair in the towel afterwards. Slipping back inside my robe, I tie it closed and go back into my room to get dressed. I hear Andrew talking in the kitchen, but his laid-back tone tells me it’s not my mom he’s talking to. He’s probably on the phone. When I hear him mention his brother Asher’s name, I’m satisfied that my assumption was right, and I get dressed.

  I was going to have to tear Natalie a new one if it had been her again. She’s got to stop with that worrying stuff and plotting against me behind my back with Andrew.

  After combing out my wet hair, I head toward the kitchen to join him.

  “I know, bro, but I don’t think it’s a good idea right now,” I hear Andrew say, and I fall back a little so I don’t intrude too soon. “Yeah. Yeah. No, she’s doing better. She’s definitely not as messed up as she was after the first week. Umm-hmm.” I look around the corner to see him standing at the bar with his cell phone pressed to one ear and his other hand resting on the bar top. He nods here and there, listening to whoever is on the other end, which I get the feeling is Aidan. I’m right again when he says, “Tell Michelle I said thanks for the offer. Maybe we’ll visit in a month or two after Camryn’s had time to—No, maybe in the spring. Chicago is way too fucking cold for my blood in the winter.” Andrew laughs and says, “Hell no, b
ro, why do you think I prefer Texas?” He laughs again. Finally I round the corner completely, and he sees me.

  “I would like to go,” I announce.

  Andrew just stares at me for a moment and then cuts Aidan off. “Hold up a second.” He covers the mic part of the phone with the palm of his hand. “You want to go to Chicago?” He seems mildly surprised.

  “Sure,” I say, smiling. “I think it would be fun.”

  At first, he seems to be working through something in his head. Maybe he doesn’t believe me, or maybe he’s just considering the idea and all he can see is wind and snow. But then his face lights up and slowly he begins to nod. “OK,” he says, hesitates, and puts the phone back against his ear. “Aidan, let me call you back in a few, all right? Yeah. OK. Talk to you soon. Later.”

  He runs his finger over the phone and hangs up. Then he looks across the room at me again. “Are you sure? I thought you’d want to stay here for a while.”

  I walk into the kitchen and get a bottle of orange juice from the fridge. “No, I’m sure,” I say, taking a sip. “Sounds like it was Michelle’s idea.”

  He nods once. “Yeah, Aidan said she’s been worried about you. She offered to put us up for a few days if we wanted to visit.”

  I take another sip and set the bottle on the bar top. “Worried about me? Well, that’s nice of her and all, but I hope we don’t go up there and I find myself in the same situation as I’m in with Natalie here.”

  Andrew shakes his head. “Nah, Michelle’s not like that.” He backtracks that comment to put more emphasis on just how true it is. “Michelle is nothing like Natalie.”

  “That’s not what I meant, Andrew.”

  “I know, I know,” he says, “but really, she’s all right.”

  Knowing Michelle enough myself, I know he’s right.

  Then that pill hits me out of nowhere, and suddenly my head feels like it’s sort of loose on my shoulders. My whole body from my toes to the center of the top of my head is tingling, and it takes me a second to straighten my vision. My hand comes down on the edge of the bar instinctively to hold myself up.

  “Whoa.” I swallow and blink my eyes a few times forcefully.

  Andrew looks at me curiously. “You OK?”

  A smile stretches so far across my face I feel the air from the room hit my teeth. “Yeah, I’m totally fine.”

  He tilts his head to one side. “Well, I haven’t seen you grin like that since I slid that ring on your finger.” He’s vaguely smiling, too, but his curiosity dominates it.

  I bring my finger up into view and admire my engagement ring, which cost under one hundred bucks and probably isn’t considered an engagement ring by brides-to-be all over the country. I saw it in a little shop in Texas one day and just briefly mentioned how pretty it was:

  “I love this,” I said, holding it up to the sunlight at just the right angle. “It’s simple and there’s something special about it.”

  I handed it back to the woman behind the makeshift booth, and she placed it back in the glass case between us.

  “What, you’re not a diamonds-are-a-girl’s-best-friend type of girl?” Andrew asked. “No wedding rock so big you have to carry your ring hand around in a wheelbarrow?”

  “No way,” I said and laughed. “Nothing meaningful about a ring like that. It’s usually about the price tag.” We walked out of the jewelry shop and along the sidewalk. “You said so yourself once, remember?”

  “What did I say?”

  I smiled and slipped my hand into his as we came to the street corner and took a left toward the café. “Simple is sexy.” I leaned my head against his shoulder. “That day in your dad’s house when you were preachin’ about why I shouldn’t spend an hour on makeup and hair, or whatever.”

  I looked up to see him smiling, lost in the memory of that day, and then he pulled me closer.

  “Yeah, I did say that, didn’t I? ‘Simple is sexy.’ Well, it is.”

  “It’s also beautiful,” I said.

  The day after that, Andrew came home with that same ring and held it out to me. Then in proper Andrew style, he got down on one knee and old-schooled it, except a little more dramatic than how it usually goes:

  “Will you, Camryn Marybeth Bennett, the most beautiful woman on the planet Earth and the mother of my baby, do me the honor of being my wife?”

  “I grinned and looked at him in a suspicious, sidelong glance and replied, “Just planet Earth?”

  He blinked and said, “Well, I haven’t seen the chicks from other planets yet.”

  Neither of us could resist a laugh. And so we laughed together. But then he became very serious, and his mood shifting like that only made mine do the same.

  “Will you marry me?” he asked.

  The tears streaming down my face. The long, deep kiss I gave him, which caused us both to fall over onto the carpet, said yes a million times over.

  Sure, he had asked me to marry him that day I told him I was pregnant, but on this day he did it right, and I’ll never forget it for as long as I live.

  “Are you alive in there?”

  Andrew waves his hand in front of my face.

  I snap out of the past and wake up back in the present, high as a fucking kite from that pill. And I realize immediately how fast I need to gather my composure so he doesn’t know what’s going on.

  12

  I guess the mood swings hang around even after… well, after pregnancy for a while. Camryn flip-flopped from average to frolicking in La La Land in under an hour. But she’s happy, it seems, and who am I to judge her on how she chooses to express it?

  But the fact that she suddenly wants to leave Raleigh and go somewhere entirely different, even just for a weekend, is strange to me, and I just have to ask, “Why so soon? I mean I’m all for going if you want to, but I thought you wanted to be here, find an apartment and all that?”

  “Well, I do…,” she says unconvincingly. She’s still vaguely smiling, which is so damn odd to me. “I just think we should go visit while we have the chance, because once I get a job here, finding free time on a weekend will be hit or miss.”

  She brings her hands up near her stomach and folds them together, her fingers moving over the tops of her knuckles like she’s fidgeting.

  “Are you—” I stop myself. I’m not going to do exactly what she said she wanted all of us to stop doing: worrying constantly about her and asking if she’s all right all the damn time. I smile instead and say, “I’ll call Aidan back and tell him and Michelle that we’ll be there this weekend.”

  I wait for her to agree to the time frame, or not, and when she doesn’t say anything, I add, “So this means there’s no point in me going back to Texas for our stuff until after we get back from Chicago.” It was really more like a question. I have to admit, all of this uncertainty about where we’re going to be the next day is starting to make my head spin. It’s different from when we were on the road, living in the moment and defining the word spontaneous. At least then it was our goal to not know what the next day would bring. Right now, I’m not sure what’s going on.

  She nods and pulls out a kitchen chair, where she never sits unless she’s eating breakfast. It just seemed like she needed to sit down.

  “Wait,” I say suddenly. “Are you OK with getting an apartment? We can get a little house somewhere.” I guess this is my way of probing for answers as to what might be wrong with her without actually saying: What’s wrong with you?

  She shakes her head. “No, Andrew, I don’t mind an apartment at all. That has nothing to do with anything. Besides, I’m not gonna let you spend your inheritance on a house in a state not of your choosing.”

  I pull out the chair next to her and sit with my arms across the table in front of me. I look at her in that you-know-better-than-that way. “I go where you go. You know this. As long as you don’t want to buy an igloo in the Arctic or move to Detroit, I don’t care. And I’ll do what I want with my inheritance. What else would I do with i
t anyway, besides buy a house? That’s what people do. They buy the big stuff with the big stuff.”

  We’re sitting on $550,000 that I inherited from my father when he died. My brothers got the same. That’s a lot of money, and I’m a simple guy. What the hell else would I do with money like that? If Camryn wasn’t in my life, I’d be living in a modest one-bedroom house somewhere in Galveston by myself, eating ramen noodles and TV dinners. The small bills I have would stay paid, and I’d still work for Billy Frank because I happen to like the smell of an engine. Camryn is a lot like me in this frugal sense, and that makes our relationship kind of perfect. But it does bug me sometimes how she just can’t seem to accept the fact that my money is her money, too. She wouldn’t even let me pay off the credit card she used on her bus trip when we met. Six hundred dollars on a card her dad gave her for emergencies. But she insisted—very stubbornly—that she pay it off herself. And she did with her half of our earnings from performing at Levy’s.

  If anything at all bothers me about her, it’s this one issue. Taking care of her is what I’m gonna fucking do whether she likes it or not. And she’s gonna have to get over it.

  “Let’s just enjoy a few days in Chicago, and when we get back, we’re going house shopping. Together.”

  I stand up and push my chair in as if to say This isn’t up for debate.

  She looks surprised, but not in a good way, and the weird smile has dropped from her face.

  “No, if we’re going to buy a house then I’m going to save—”

  I slash the air in front of me with both hands.

  “Stop being so damn stubborn,” I say. “If you’re so worried about ‘your half’ of the money, you can always pay me back with sex and a striptease every now and then.”

  Her mouth falls open and her eyes grow wide.

  “What the hell?!” she laughs beneath her failed attempt at being offended. “I’m not a hooker!” She stands up and gently slaps the palm of her hand on the table, but I think it’s more to keep her balance than to protest.

  I grin and start to walk away. “Hey, you brought that one on yourself.” I make it to the den entrance, and I glance back briefly over my shoulder to see that she hasn’t budged, probably still in shock. “And you’re whatever I want you to be!” I shout as I get farther away. “Nothing wrong with being my hooker!”