“That’s fine,” Matt said. “Get your feelings hurt. ’Cause no girl can resist—” he gestured to his taut body. “All this.”
“Edith!” her mother shrieked.
Hot oil. Hot oil down her back followed by a sheet of cold ice.
That was her mother’s voice.
“Edith, I’m talking to you!”
She wished she wouldn’t. If there were anything she could have, anything at all, it was for her mother to turn around, march back to her room, and not talk to her for the next few lifetimes.
Edy turned on her heels, slow, in a measured about-face. Behind her, Mason, Matt, and Hassan stood in an arc, frozen and in their underwear.
“Mom, we—”
“Who saw you come in?” she blurted.
“I—wait. What?” Edy said.
Her mother marched over to the window and yanked the curtains shut. She went back to the door, closed and locked it.
“You must have come in through the window. Were you seen? Did anyone see you?”
Hassan shook his head.
“Then get dressed. You’ll not be leaving here tonight. I can’t take the risk. Lawrence, you’ll have the couch. Hassan, take the sofa in the study. You two will have to figure out the guestroom. We’ll have breakfast in the morning and you’ll leave in a respectable manner. Understood?”
“Mom, I—”
She held up a hand. “I don’t want to know. Goodnight.”
She slammed the door behind her.
~~~
Edy woke to a breakfast that might have been catered. Poached eggs on smoked salmon. Silver-dollar pear pancakes with caramelized figs and berry compote. Turkey bacon, Canadian bacon, Irish bacon, and brown sugar bacon piled high around ham, smoked salmon, chicken, and pork sausages. A pile of fluffed biscuits stood in the center like a crowning achievement, accented on all sides by a jubilee of mixed grapes and cheeses. She stood at the swinging door of the dining room entrance, watching as the boys crammed their mouths with meats and cheeses, piled their plates with breads, and washed it all down with a colorful assortment of juices. Edy’s mother looked up from her end of the table, chewed momentarily, and turned to a tall glass for a sip of orange juice.
Dismissed.
The word curled through her limbs and curdled her blood until nothing but the fire of fury remained.
She thought nothing of Edy.
Less than nothing of Edy.
Hardly worth the trouble of worrying over when found in a room of half naked boys. Who could want Edy? One by one, Edy’s fingers curled until they resembled a fist. Two fists. She marched into the kitchen with them at her side.
“Who cooked?” she said on passing her mother. “Certainly not you.”
Her mother paused, lips parted in anticipation of a sliver of Canadian bacon. A table’s worth of eyes stared back at Edy, motionless, waiting.
“You’re right,” her mother said, after taking a survey of the table. “Breakfast is compliments of Sullivan’s Catering Service. They work on short notice.”
Edy ventured over to the buffet cabinet to retrieve a plate and piece of silverware. She helped herself to the fruits first before retrieving a cut of salmon.
“Where’s my father?” she said.
Her mother snorted. “Somewhere penning his ninety-seventh book about why people overthrow governments. As if the answer weren’t simple.”
Simple. Everything was simple with Edy’s mother. Horrifyingly simple, brutishly simple, in fact.
“So, tell us then,” Edy said, knowing the words that would follow could upend her mother’s career. But then again, half of what she said in private could upend her career.
Her mother sighed. “Fine. People do things because they can. Everyone wants power. Dominion. But they’re stupid. Left alone, most would be reduced to hungry, cowering creatures, quaking and yearning to be loved.” Her mother laughed and before treating her to a crawling once over.
These little jabs, when she made them, were hot stabs just for her. Stupid. Left alone. Yearning to be loved. What a Lifetime movie pair mother and daughter made: one merciless district attorney who squeezed power by throat, the other a ballerina so shy she couldn’t tell her best friend and lifetime crush she’d probably been in love with him only forever.
But more stood between them than contrary personalities. More even than differing takes on life. Her mother acted as if she’d been bested in some way by Edy, as if she held some grudge against her, as if Edy had outmaneuvered her in a loss she couldn’t quite get over. But none of that made sense. Her birth came years after her parents’ marriage and her mother’s career was absolutely admirable as the first female and African American district attorney. She would forever be remembered. Maybe it all did boil down to personality.
From across the room Edy caught Hassan watching her. He followed her with his gaze as she continued preparing her plate. Fruit. A bit of toast. Jam. Edy took a seat.
“Plate’s a little thin,” her mother said. “Trying to lose weight, I take it. Not that I blame you.”
Edy gripped her fork, poised to spear the smoked salmon. A thousand thoughts went through her mind, of being too thin, too fat, too broad in the hips for classical ballet. She strained against a false image.
Edy wondered if her mother had never felt it. The gnawing hole of imperfection. The aching doubt. It seemed both possible and impossible.
“Edy’s beautiful already,” Hassan said. “Perfect.”
When her mother took him in with a raised brow, Hassan met her with an even stare.
“Is that so?” she said.
“It is.” He sat up straighter.
Edy looked from one to the other. What was happening? And why?
“Yeah” Mason said. “Everyone says that.” He looked around for affirmation. “Edy’s perfect. Gorgeous. A real stand-out. Right boys?”
“No doubt,” Matt chimed in.
The table turned to Lawrence.
“Well?” her mother said.
“She’s a’ight.” Lawrence shoved a cluster of berries in his mouth. His eyes studied the stripes of the tablecloth, the swirls of a wooden floor, the particles of air, perhaps.
“Careful, Lawrence,” her mother said. “Much more and she’ll swoon.”
Edy snorted on a laugh. It caught just there, between her nose and her throat, thrashing and desperate for relief. She shook with the force of the laugh, tears welling with the effort. It burst like water from a detonated dam, spewing until she trickled to nothing.
When it abated, even her mother smiled.
“I had a fascinating conversation with Rani the other day,” she said, upturn of her mouth steady despite the movement. “And it was all about how much you each have grown. How you’re all shaping into such handsome men. And how Edy, pretty as she’s become, how Edy must incite such jealousy from the girls with the way each of you hover.”
Their grins melted. Like icing on a too-hot cake, they thinned and slipped away, until only Edy’s mother remained amused. “I wonder, sometimes. Which of you it’ll be.” Her gaze skated like a stone skipping pond water from one boy to another to another. “So many years together,” she said. “Of shared smiles. Secret moments. Memories. Exhales. And now this. My daughter, the unexpected beauty. I wonder. Who will it happen to? The moment of realization, of dawning understanding, that the fervor driving your loyalty, your need to protect her has nothing to do with the past and everything with the future you want?”
She tsk-tsked, mirth like a festival in bottomless brown eyes, full of lights and color and joy as her gaze danced from one to the next. Mason. Matthew. Lawrence. Hassan. Hassan, a little too long.
“I could force it from you,” her mother said, eyes like two gaping maws of laughter as she pushed away from the table. “But I like a good show. So, we wait. For now.”
Her mother nodded toward the invisible staffer in the corner, the one who took notes at family meetings, poured cereal, and wiped her behind, app
arently. Together, the two disappeared and the table exploded.
Mason yelling about Hassan’s recklessness, about attempting to provoke Edy’s mother, Lawrence yelling about the stupidity of having a party in her room, Matt yelling about their endless attempts to protect them and their relationship, while Hassan warned them to stay out of his business.
Edy slipped up to her room, unnoticed, and locked away the shouts. She hadn’t known that her mother thought her beautiful.
She hadn’t known that she cared either way.
Twenty-Two
Edy sat at the “it” table for lunch. Ushered over with a wave from Alyssa, she sat wedged between the two girls. None of their boys had arrived yet. As she settled in with a leftover bowl of lukewarm curry, the two peppered her for details about the party. Was it true that they hung up balloons? Streamers? True that her mother walked in on them half naked? They guffawed at Edy’s weak nods, faces contorting with the pain of reckless laughter.
The news spread up and down their table like a wave, scissoring back again when the boys arrived.
“All of you stripped down? In Edy’s room?” Sandra Jacobs said from the other end. Scandalized laughter rippled.
No one answered. And while Edy knew that neither Alyssa nor Jessica thought much of the boys coming to her room, she knew what the others would make of it. Would they whisper it in corridors? Strip it down to its seediest meaning before stringing it up on a flagpole for all to see? Parade her through the streets of Rome, the Cleopatra of South End?
“Only me,” Hassan said. “Hoping to get lucky and failed.” He shrugged.
And there it was. The silence was something like tendrils of smoke, curling from every pore of Sandra Jacobs, venom as toxic as carbon monoxide
“So, why try?” Sandra spat. “Why grovel behind some homely girl artificially inflated by the company she keeps? Why chase her? Watch her the way you do? You look stupid and everyone says it behind your back. That of all the girls you could have, you pick the plainest, dullest—”
She couldn’t see the way he clutched his spork, all five fingers invested in the act. Nor could she see the set of his mouth, set with a line so deep and sealed it could have been tarred.
“Hassan, don’t—” Edy reached for him, missing entirely as he leapt from his seat. In two steps he was at Sandra’s side. He dropped into the seat behind her, attached to another table.
No one could hear what he said to her. They could only go off the sudden blanching of her skin and the pained pinch of her face. When he withdrew, Hassan met her gaze straight on. “Do we understand each other?”
Sandra nodded once, sharp, and swallowed.
Hassan rose. But instead of returning to the chicken tacos on his plate and back to his friends, he made for the door, picking up speed until he punched it on the way out.
Edy flew after him, down a narrow walkway lined with gaping eyes, under the stare of florescent lights and disapproving adult frowns. A burst through double doors later and she was colliding with his backside like a bike on the tail end of an interstate pile-up.
“What did you tell her?” Edy demanded, taken aback by the desperation in her voice, scalded by the heat of her fears. “That you still had feelings for her? That you’re torn? That your summer with her was—was—”
Her mouth wouldn’t cooperate. She knew Sandra had been one of the girls he’d had that summer. Would have guessed it if she and her friends hadn’t made a point of announcing it anytime they were within a mile of each other. But until that moment, she hadn’t allowed herself to consider what it meant: that he’d wrapped arms around her, pressed lips to her, given her the heat and strength of his body, shared himself with her in ways he wouldn’t with Edy, even if she had wanted him to.
She turned away from him, eyes flooding.
“Edy . . .”
Her name could have been a sigh, an afterthought; a natural course of his breathing, in and out, in and out, so natural was the sound on his lips.
Still, he’d given others more. Maybe even promised them more.
“Edy,” he repeated. “Look at me. I can’t . . .”
She turned to see him rake a hand through his hair, grip a fistful, and throw his head back.
“I don’t want to do this now. Not like this. I want to—” Hassan hesitated.
And then she knew. Knew that whatever he’d said to Sandra would be a source of tremendous pain, a throbbing ache impossible to heal or mask or alleviate or bear. Impossible to ignore.
“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me right now.”
His lips parted. “I said I loved you. That I absolutely always have. And that if she opened her eyes, she could see that.”
Edy gasped. But she admonished her heart, chided it for leaping with the sudden, unexpected words. Of course he loved her. Mason loved her. Matt loved her. Even Lawrence did. She loved them, too.
“Not like that,” Hassan said, breathless. “Not like that for a long time.”
Her throat clogged. Disbelief, still, after all that had happened.
He kissed her, gentle as a feather’s stroke before sealing it with a fire’s brand. She was weightless with him and floating. He backed her to the lockers and pinned, searing her mouth with a groan.
Edy’s heart thumped-thumped between her ears as his hand cascaded, first high on her ribs, then low on her waist, until hunger had him squeezing her backside. She pushed into him, marrying their limbs in a tangle of heat shattered as the warning bell rang.
Hassan pulled away with a sigh.
Edy pulled him again. “I love you too,” she said softly, shyly.
The hall clogged with students. Guys wolf whistled at them. Girls gaped.
Hassan wrapped his arms around her and they pressed forehead to forehead. “Tell me we can figure this out.”
They could. They had to. In the end, growing up worked in their favor. That was their trump card and it meant they could love and marry whoever, no matter the fallout behind it.
“We can figure this out,” Edy said. “Together.”
~~~
Since they’d been old enough to ride the subway alone, Hassan and Edy had taken to walking the streets of downtown Boston during the holiday season. The mere mention of shopping on Black Friday was enough to make her squeal, but as was the case with all Edy-plus-Hassan traditions, she suspected he enjoyed it more than he let on.
Christmas time between the Phelps family and the Pradhans wasn’t as awkward as it could have been. They were Hindu, yes, but as Hindus they believed that God had many names and that all faiths offered truths man should seek. Not only were they not offended by Christmas, but they embraced it, recognizing Jesus as a Prema-Avatar or divine embodiment of love. Nonetheless, theirs was the house that remained dark at the helm of the season, so they embraced the spirit of Christmas without all its trappings—sort of.
Edy made homemade cocoa in a too-bright, starkly gleaming, and freshly remodeled kitchen as she waited for Hassan to arrive. It was the day after Thanksgiving, their day for festivities downtown. What began as a reckless search for presents following Hassan’s propensity for procrastination each year eventually became an accepted part of their seasonal plans. On that day, they would purchase gifts for each other apart before shopping for the others together.
When Hassan stepped into the Phelps’ kitchen, he wore a black, fitted thermal and blue jeans, which peeked out from an open parka. Even still, Edy saw hints of raw power beneath, contours curving and unyielding in their hardness. She went to him, slipping arms around a dime-sized waist and gliding hands up a broadening back. He was soap. And heat. And everything that was right. She wasn’t sure if she could let him go. Maybe shopping could wait.
He pressed lips to her forehead, stole a glimpse at the door, and pressed his lips to hers. He could part her there without trying, with only a hint that parting her was what he wanted. She returned his gentle kiss with a flood of heat, intense and perfect and right.
He pulle
d away with a sigh.
“Parents?” he said.
“Mom’s traveling. Dad’s shopping.”
He returned to their kiss with two hands at her waist, mouth steady, deliberate, thorough its search.
The house escaped her. Breathing escaped her. She was lips and hips he insisted on touching, and oh my, he was too much. Too much of the right thing, of all things, of one thing she rocked hard against him, eager and breathless to have.
He disappeared.
He stood a million miles away from her with his back pressed to the kitchen counter, chest rising and falling.
“What?” Edy said, though she knew.
His gaze slipped over her, memorizing.
“Nothing,” he said and went for the cocoa.
Edy couldn’t shake the notion that he’d scrambled from her every time kissing got intense and that he scrambled from her now. She wished she had no idea why, but the truth was he was still one of her boys.
“You always make the cocoa so bitter,” he said with a wince.
“And you don’t make it at all.”
She heaped a few weighty spoons of sugar into his cup and turned to fix her own. With her back turned, she knew he’d heap in a few more.
He slurped loudly.
“What do I get your mom?” he asked.
“The election. Can you fix it for her?” She took a seat at the nook. Hassan pulled up nearby.
Edy lowered her gaze to the table’s floral arrangement. Nestled into a grooved bamboo vase, the bouquet was an odd assortment of green roses, lotus pods, Kermit mums, and dandelion clocks, none of which she would have known without Rani’s green thumb.
Hassan plucked a dandelion from the lot and leaned forward, dog tags dangling from his neck. He blew a gust of flower into Edy’s face, white clocks shooting and swirling till she snorted and sputtered from the inhalation.
“Hassan!” she cried, batting in vain.
He watched; face solemn, as if bearing witness to the loss of her sanity. When she stilled, allowing herself but a final giggle, he held out a hand to her.
Love Edy Page 24
