The night melted by. I delivered order after order of Finch’s cornmeal-fried catfish and smiled blandly at dozens of customers, losing myself in the hum and clatter of forks on plates and the steady one-two step of the band set up by the bar. I’d almost managed to wipe every stray thought from my head when I rounded a corner, slammed into one of the cocktail waitresses, and sent a full tray crashing to the tile floor.
It was only a couple of dishes, broken china the busboys could take care of in under a minute, but it was enough to completely undo me. I hurried through the breezeway toward the patio, ducking around a barback and squeezing past the line for the ladies’ room. My heart was a trembling snare inside my chest. Why did you think you could do this? I wondered desperately, edging around one of the prep cooks idling on his break. It’s not working.
“What’s not working?” That was Cade, materializing behind me in all his football-star, Abercrombie glory and catching my arm. I hadn’t even realized I’d spoken aloud and was burning under his close big-brother scrutiny. I really, really didn’t want to talk.
“Too hot in here,” I muttered, brushing past him. “Patio open?”
“It’s raining,” he warned even as he stepped back. I think he was afraid of me, too.
“It’s always raining. I’ll be fine.”
I left him behind and pushed through the double glass doors. The sprawling back patio was sanctuary-silent, deserted owing to the rain, which, I realized now as I stood beneath it, wasn’t really rain at all but the kind of sneaky mist you can’t even feel until the moment you notice you’re somehow soaking wet. Milkweed wound through the wrought-iron fence; white lights twinkled in the palm trees. A few deep breaths and my frantic heart had almost slowed before I realized I wasn’t alone.
“Oh!” I yelped when I saw him, sitting with his head bent and his elbows on his knees on the giant glider at the far end of the yard. It was reflex, just the one skittish syllable. I stopped so fast I almost tripped.
Sawyer glanced up with the barest flicker of interest, stared like he didn’t know who I was. I’d seen him that morning at the funeral and the blankness of his expression had intrigued me, made me wonder if there was anything beating and alive beneath it. Even close up, there was no way to tell.
“Sorry,” I said, almost over my shoulder as I turned to run away from this place forever, or probably just for tonight. We hadn’t talked since the scene at the hospital. I couldn’t imagine what we’d possibly begin to say. “I didn’t … nobody told me you were out here. Sorry.”
“No,” Sawyer said, not entirely friendly. “You’re all right. Stay.”
I stopped and looked at him. He was still wearing his clothes from that morning, gray tie hanging loose from his neck, funeral shoes shining like onyx. In church he’d kept his eyes fixed straight ahead. “I don’t think—I should really—”
“I mean it.” He glanced at me sideways. “Don’t look so scared, Serena. I’m not going to hurt you.”
God, that wasn’t what I was afraid of, not by a long shot: What scared me was that I was a person capable of still feeling the things I felt for him after everything that had happened. What scared me was that my best friend was gone. Sawyer was the one person in the world who could maybe understand that, the one person who knew what we’d done, and for a second I almost told him everything: why Allie and I had stopped being friends to begin with, how I’d wanted him for so long I didn’t even remember what it was like not to. In the end I chickened out instead. “I’m not,” I lied, shaking my head like even the idea was ridiculous.
Sawyer snorted, a low animal noise. He slid over and made room. “Prove it,” he said.
“I … Fine.” Annoyed and bewildered and unprepared, I crossed the expanse of patio between us and perched carefully on the edge of the glider. He smelled faintly of soap and sweat and the air was warmer near him, like his body gave off more heat than normal. “Here I am.”
“Here you are.” He was holding a half-empty green bottle and he ran his thumb once around the rim, offered it to me without looking me in the face. “You working?”
“Yeah.” I took it from him, wrapping my hands around the cool glass and hoping he wouldn’t notice if I didn’t actually drink any of it. “Well, sort of.” There was a feeling in my chest like a moth against a windowpane, the desperate scrape of wings. “I just broke a bunch of plates.”
Sawyer raised his eyebrows. “On purpose?” he asked.
“No.”
“No,” he repeated, looking at me finally, smiling a small, languid smile I’d seen a hundred times before in the decade and a half I’d lived on his periphery. “I guess not.”
Sawyer sighed. I waited. We sat quiet as death and just as still and listened to the wasps as they sang their elegies high in the leaves above our heads.
15
After
Aaron and Shelby’s mom lives in a kitschy little bungalow out in Poinsettia Heights, cool tile floors and spiny green succulents exploding like alien life-forms all over the raised deck that surrounds the pool. Hannah’s in heaven, drifting through the cool blue water in her yellow plastic baby raft, no shortage of middle-aged women in neon-flowered bathing suits to coo over her and her star-shaped kiddie sunglasses.
Eventually her small fingers go pruney, and we climb carefully up onto the deck, water from my hair running in cold rivulets down my back. Hannah’s body feels cool and slippery, like a seal’s. I wrap her in a hooded towel that looks like a bug-eyed frog and take her inside to get changed, stopping in the kitchen on our way back to pull some snacks out of the bag I packed this morning. Shelby’s rooting around in the fridge for a lime to go with her beer. “Was wondering where you got to,” she says, holding out the bottle. She’s wearing cargo shorts and flip-flops, wet hair knotted at the nape of her neck. “You want?”