Safely tucked behind the door, Hassan cupped hands around his mouth and hissed. “Edy! Edy!”
Maybe she’d be tired. Sleeping in. Eating breakfast. Cooking breakfast. Anything other than cavorting down the hall at the wrong freaking moment. But if she was awake, she could just bring him a towel. And if she wasn’t, he could run. He had speed. But speed meant nothing if he took off at the wrong moment.
He called her twice more before she stuck her head out. She had a cell phone at her ear, first thing in the morning.
“What is it?” she said.
“I need a towel.”
Her mouth spread into a smile. “Are you naked?”
“Who in the world are you on the phone with?”
“Hold on,” Edy said into the phone. “Of course, it’s Hassan. Yes, he’s na—just hold on.”
“Edy,” Hassan said, pressing back the irresistible urge to bend something. “Lose the spare and bring me a towel.”
He said it loud enough for his voice to carry.
“I’ll call you back, Wyatt.” Edy paused. “I said I’ll . . . I don’t know where my parents are. I —later, okay?”
She hung up the phone and her mouth spread wide. Devilment lit her eyes.
“Towel,” he said, stone in his voice.
She disappeared into her bedroom.
Hassan exhaled, cool air catching him wrong. He shifted from one foot to the other, wondering if he could make a stab for the linen closet. When Edy reemerged, her lips pursed.
“Sorry for the delay. Had to put the phone on the charger. Battery’s low.” She went to the linen closet and pulled out a washcloth. “This good?”
She held it out low, as if offering him a loincloth.
“Come on, Cake. Steam’s only gonna keep me warm so long.”
Edy returned to the closet as if rummaging desperately. Perfectly good towels fell to the floor, large towels, plush towels, but she rummaged nonetheless.
“Ah. Here you go. How about this?”
A pillowcase, this time.
“Just forget it.”
Hassan stepped out and strode toward the closet, tracking footprints in his wake. In the center of the hall and right next to Edy, he grabbed an oversized towel and dried himself. He made no effort to shield his junk or the delight it took in having her for an audience. Once he’d rid himself of moisture clear down to the bottom of his feet, Hassan tied the towel loose around his waist.
“What?” he said.
Edy’s blinked a thousand times. “N-nothing.”
“Breakfast then,” he said. “When I change.”
Dressed in a black t-shirt and basketball shorts, Hassan ventured to the kitchen for breakfast. Since he and Edy seemed to be the only two up, he put on a bit of instant oatmeal for the both of them. Thinking they could use some fruit, he rummaged till he found strawberries, a kiwi, and a batch of blueberries. He threw the kiwi back, remembering that they were Nathan’s favorite, and grabbed a bag of bagels instead. With those in the toaster, Hassan whistled out the R&B tune from the shower as he fixed up the two bowls of oatmeal, careful to count out Edy’s berries. Done, he ventured to the bottom of the stairs and shouted for her to join him.
“You’ll wake the house,” Edy said and dropped into a seat at the breakfast table.
He poured her a glass of milk before sitting down with a cup of water for himself.
“So,” he said, cutting right to the point. “Were you up on the phone with him all night or just up really early, eager to hear him?”
Edy stared at him, stiff. “We were on the phone a long time, yes. He couldn’t sleep—”
“He couldn’t sleep,” Hassan snapped.
“Yeah. So, he texted me. You know how those things wake me up.”
“Yeah. Right. Whatever.”
“What’s with you?” Edy said. “What difference does it make?”
Hassan burst from the table, went for the bagels, and found them scorched, which pissed him off even more. But two were burned worse than the others, so he dumped those before Edy. She giggled.
“You are so mad at me,” she said.
He opened the refrigerator, grabbed butter and cream cheese, and tossed them both to the table, not caring that they bounced.
“You’re not even thinking straight. I was up most of the night with you, remember? And not that it’s any of your business, but he called me upset. His parents were fighting again.”
Didn’t she say he woke her? Who the hell fought first thing in the morning?
Hassan dropped into his seat and shoveled a spoonful of oatmeal in his mouth, finding it too hot. But he chewed anyway, allowing the heat to fuel his anger and incense him more as the food clung to his tongue. Even the way she looked at him pissed him off, gentle-like, as if mocking him while simultaneously wanting to make amends.
“Eat your food,” he snapped.
She lowered her gaze to the oatmeal and smiled at the blueberries. “Twenty?”
“Should be. Count them.”
When they were kids, her father had taken a trip to El Salvador to study conditions following the civil war. For twenty days he was gone, each marked with a blueberry in her oatmeal, placed there by Hassan.
“Nineteen.” She pouted.
He went to the fridge, retrieved one, and hurled it in her bowl.
“You can’t help yourself. You try to take care of me even when you’re mad.”
So she was mocking him. She plopped a berry in her mouth and smiled.
Hassan watched her chew, fascinated with the contours of her mouth and the way it moved, despite trying to hold onto fast melting anger.
Edy stuck a blue-stained tongue out at him and the last of his will dissipated. Hassan reached for it, as if to snatch it from her mouth. She giggled and swatted him away.
~~~
She’d seen Hassan naked. Completely naked, with not a thread to hide behind. She’d seen the contours of his abs, the carving of his thighs, and parts of him that made her blush and hide even when alone.
She’d seen every inch of him.
He sat across from her, wolfing down a proper brunch, oblivious to the staining of her cheeks.
“Hassan, you must be so excited about the upcoming season,” Edy’s father said. He placed a few slices of Canadian bacon on his English muffin and topped it with a poached egg. Edy’s mother handed him the Hollandaise sauce without looking up from her cell phone.
Across from him, Hassan’s father, Ali, was busy earning stinkeye from Rani for the fistful of sugar-glazed bacon he munched on.
“The season. Oh yeah,” Hassan said. “Should be a good one.”
He sounded as if he were trying to get his bearings, trying to emerge from whatever thoughts he’d submerged into.
Meanwhile, Edy’s cell buzzed. She didn’t want to look at it, not in front of him, not when everything Wyatt-related seemed to irk him, not when they’d spent a whole summer apart either and seemed somehow closer because of it . . . as long as Wyatt Green didn’t come up.
The phone vibrated again, and Edy slipped a hand into her pocket, covert, to silence it. She thought of that same hand, under Hassan’s the night before, and of the assertion that they had always been linked, eternally, repeatedly, forevermore.
“West Roxbury has a new middle linebacker,” Hassan said and stole bacon from his father’s plate. “Me and Lawrence peeked in on him at a practice. He’s a beast.”
West Roxbury and South End met mid-season, two meteorites colliding in the atmosphere.
“We’ll see if we can find some footage online of him. Break down his style, his mindset, get at the heart of his weaknesses,” her dad said.
Hassan looked doubtful.
Edy brought a slice of mango to her mouth with a frown. “What’s the guy’s name again?”
“Leahy,” Hassan said. “Robert Leahy.”
“That guy?” Edy scoffed. “What a slob. Kinda slow in the head, too. I’ve seen him on YouTube.” She had, of course
, never, ever seen him. “You’d get past him every time.”
Hassan laughed. “He’s actually pretty fast. You’d know that if you’d seen him.”
She brought apple juice to her lips, considering how quickly he’d honed in on the lie. “You’ve been training, haven’t you?” His body certainly argued the case.
“Yeah?”
“Well, let me see.” Edy hurled the juice into his face and bolted, upturning a chair as she fled for the shore.
Hassan hurdled over the toppled furniture, leapt the stairs, and swallowed the space between them in a measured sprint. He snatched her with a scoop and barreled onward for the water. Edy shrieked, wild, laughing, thrashing to get free. She caught an earful of his mother’s shouting before landing headfirst in the bay.
Four years ago, on a trip to India, they’d visited the beaches of Goa, where cows and sunning bodies shared the same sand. A moment of teasing and tussling had ended the same way, with a scandalized Rani professing her utmost shame before taking Hassan and Edy back to the hotel. She fussed about what her parents would say if they had been there, what her brother would say, her sister. She wasn’t raising Hassan right, Rani insisted, if he could be so indecent and not care about how it affected the family. A female had no business being touched by a man who wasn’t her husband or son, and, clearly, they were neither. They’d been provocative, unforgivable.
Edy now emerged from shallow waters, sputtering and laughing, to find Hassan looming over her, large. She knew he’d be impossible to tackle head on, football players found that out routinely on Fridays. So, she used his saturated polo to pull herself up before a wave made her tumble. Smile smug, he lent a hand on her scramble up but found she used it as leverage to tickle him. Hassan fell into the waves, his laughter uproarious, on the defensive, and pushing Edy away. They tangled and fell into the water as one, his mother fussing in Punjabi the whole time.
Ali always came to their defense, usually, with some well-reasoned premise posited by a sociologist he admired. Stuff about gender, expectations, identity, and cinematic constructs in the Asian Indian diaspora. No one dared argue with him. One, because he was the final authority in his family, and two, because no one knew what the hell he was talking about. But this time when they emerged, drenched and dripping, Ali said nothing, eye on his son, attentive instead.
Fourteen
Edy lived for their days on The Cape. Snapshots in time they were, frozen moments, where the laws of the outside world didn’t apply. It was an impossibly positive place, bursting with memories, brimming with promises.
The spot where their land met the beach was roughhewn. Tufts of wild grass and rocks jutted in unexpected places. Edy balanced on a massive one, arms arched and extended in classic demi second. She placed weight on the back leg and offered a demi-plié, opposite leg bent, then straightened in a sleek slide forward. A clean turn, a pirouette, and a grand battement followed, leg thrown up in the last so that it paralleled her head. The crashing of waves was her music, the howl of wind her beat. Below her was a drop. But if she was good, it wouldn’t matter.
Applause shattered her concentration.
“I haven’t seen that in awhile. I’d forgotten how perfect you were.”
Hassan scaled the rock, crowding her so that dancing was no longer possible.
“I was trying to shift into something new. Bean showed me something and I . . .” Edy sighed. She’d been unable to seize the caustic fury from the pit, unable to morph it and make it her own. Though she’d absorbed every technical detail she’d been exposed to, she couldn’t rattle her muse. All this time, all these years, she’d been a parrot of dance, enslaved to choreographers and instructors. Everything she attempted on her own felt stilted and tepid. Bean had warned her though; she would find no focus until she abandoned fear for courage. Choreography was nakedness. Edy wondered if she could ever embrace it.
Hassan took a seat on rock, and she dropped next to him, watching him as he examined its surface.
“This is the right one?” he said, gaze still searching.
She nudged his side and he shifted, revealing the thing he sought. Their names, carved on the underside, long, long ago. No dates, no hearts, nothing so complicated. Just “Hassan”, then “Edy”, like always.
“I’m going to tell your father that you exposed yourself to me,” she said, eyes on her bare feet, dangling above water.
Hassan grinned. “Exposed myself? I should’ve charged you for a show that good. You saw me and you liked it. You know that.”
The heat returned, hundredfold in its fury, painting her face and body, leaving her nowhere to hide. So, he’d seen her. Not just looking but gaping, wondering what he felt like.
But he couldn’t know, couldn’t know the extent that he’d affected her, no matter how hard he kept on grinning. And even with the thought, she saw the smile and saw past it, to their days beyond the Cape. What would happen when they returned to school, when football started, and he went from being hers to being theirs once again?
“What?” Hassan said, smile drooping at the edges.
Edy turned from him, horrified by what pooled in her eyes.
“Nothing.” She hesitated, knowing he would never be satisfied with the answer. “I only wish I didn’t have to share you.”
Centuries passed in a second.
“Share me,” he echoed.
She couldn’t understand the irritation in his voice. With his eyes clamped shut, vulnerability sharpened his features and heightened his intensity. It painted him in stark relief.
His face turned to steel.
“You’ve got it wrong,” Hassan said in a voice that made Edy want to shrink into herself. “You’ve always had it all wrong. Look at the way you are with my parents, with my mom especially. Our lives change the second we do. A brick wall goes up and it doesn’t come down. You know what happens next?” He gestured between them, eyes narrowed, voice raw with bitterness. “They take us. We don’t get family like we know it; we don’t get us like we know it.”
He dragged a shaky hand through his hair, trailing sand and exhaled mightily. “And for the record you don’t share me,” he mumbled. “Not even close.”
Edy bore the weight of someone expected to speak. But the words wouldn’t come. What good was love with an expiration date? What use was inevitable heartbreak? Yes, he cared and she could cherish that, but to what end, to what purpose? Predetermined paths waited for them both; his laid out and hers what she made of it. She had nothing but leftover crumbs when it came to Hassan. Loving him was a waste.
“Edy?” he said. “Talk to me. Please.”
She didn’t have the words for this conversation. With fingers pinched to the bridge of her nose, she shook her head and concentrated on breathing. At first, his glare draped her, bathed her, willing her to bend to his will. But this life, their life together, didn’t contort to anyone’s will.
So Hassan retreated, Goliath on the football field, something else with Edy.
~~~
Fourteen phone calls unanswered on the “eve” of Hassan’s birthday. Why Edy felt the need to call it that was beyond him. Was it some great big holiday, a day of reverence, of devotion? For the mighty Hassan Pradhan, every day was a day to prostrate oneself before his altar of muscles.
What a jerk. What a scheming, greedy, hoarder. As if the girls at school weren’t enough, he had to show his naked body to Edy. And what for? In the hopes that she acted like them, that she’d throw herself at him like them?
Wyatt shoved aside his Banquet TV dinner of fried chicken and sighed. He drummed fingers on the surface of a rickety pine table. The lamp perched on its end provided the only source of light.
Calling her would do no good; all day Edy’s phone had gone to voice mail. Texting her got no response. Seven of those already and not a single one in reply. It was selfish of her, shallow of her, cruel of her to treat him that way. But, Hassan Pradhan was in her midst, and of course, she couldn’t resist.
/> “Put that damned phone down,” Wyatt’s father said. “You’ve been staring at it for two months.”
Two months. Two months of loneliness.
His father popped open another beer and dropped down across from him, eyes laughing.
“I want to make a phone call,” Wyatt said.
This time his father did laugh.
“You haven’t got anybody to call,” he said. “Nobody that’ll call back, that is.”
Wyatt’s jaw set. He knew someone who would call him back. Someone who had asked for him by name.
“Maybe I’ll call Lottie,” he said.
His father set aside his beer, all pretense of amusement now gone.
“That’s not part of our deal,” Roland Green said.
Wyatt swallowed. “Maybe I don’t like our deal.”
His father snatched him by the forearm, upturning his bottle of beer so that it ran a river from table to floor. Four of his fingernails dug into the tender flesh of Wyatt’s forearm, blanching it under the power of his grip.
Wyatt gasped. “Dad . . . stop. You’re hurting me.”
“I’ll do a lot more than that if you go off the rails again.” His father hurled his arm. It bounced off the table, elbow first.
Wyatt cursed.
“Eat,” his father said and shoved the TV dinner back at him.
The lamp on the table flickered. Either the bulb needed replacing, or his father had forgotten to pay the bill again. A minute later, Wyatt received his confirmation, when he and his father were drenched in darkness.
~~~
When Hassan woke to their final day on the Cape, his birthday, it was only because he’d grown tired of Edy nudging him.
“Why won’t you let me sleep?” he moaned.
“Because I can’t take it anymore. Get up. You have to get up.”
She leapt atop him, straddled him, then shook him with vicious enthusiasm.
Hassan let out a torturous groan. “Edy! You have got to stop jumping my bones. Now, get off. Please.”
Love Edy Page 16
