Chapter Thirteen
Laila
I woke up on Sunday morning to the smell of bacon, the sound of traffic, and the weight of Cole’s forearm resting on my hip. And I was immediately able to make sense of all of that and put it into context, so the pill must have worn off.
If there’d been any doubt about that, the ache in my back confirmed it.
It had been a long time since I’d watched him sleep. I used to do it all the time when we were kids. Okay, that sounds creepy. It’s not like I was Edward Cullen sneaking into his room and disappearing before he awoke, of course. It’s just that when we all had sleepovers or went camping when we were little, Cole was always the last to fall asleep. It was like it wasn’t physically possible for him to pull back on the rpms until whoever was in his care was safe and settled. Not that we were ever in his care. Not really. Not officially. There was usually an adult around somewhere—Doc or Cassidy or my mom and dad or Wes’s mom—but that meant nothing to Cole. Truthfully, when the five of us got together, it meant very little to any of us. It didn’t matter how many times we were shushed or told to go to sleep, we couldn’t help but laugh and talk and play silly games into the night. After a while the adults stopped trying. And then eventually the adults stopped tagging along.
The thing is they were right to trust us. Even as we became teenagers together, they were right to trust us. When the five of us were together, it was about the five of us. Together. And we weren’t ever going to do anything to jeopardize the privileges we had earned.
In some ways I think it was hardest on Cole when the lives of the other three fell apart. He never said so—not in so many words, anyway—but I was pretty sure he felt like he had failed them. In his mind I think it was somewhat his fault that Brynn was gone, Wes was gone, and Addie was heartbroken by the time I turned eighteen—the last one, bringing up the rear. It was ridiculous, of course, but it was also part of what made Cole Cole.
So, Cole being Cole, when we all got together for camping trips or sleepovers, he was the last to fall asleep. As a result, he was the last to wake up. I couldn’t keep track of all the times in my life that a sleeping Cole was the sight that awaited me when I opened my eyes, but it had been a long time.
The arm across my hip had never happened before. At least not that I remembered. He was on his right side, and I was on my left, and I was closest to the edge. It didn’t take long for even that context to all click into place and make sense. I could remember absolutely nothing from the moment I’d lain down, but I had little doubt that Cole feared I would slip off in the night and adopt some dogs with sad eyes. Thus the restrictive arm.
Honestly, giving away all my money to the care of neglected pets was probably always a risk for me—with Schedule IV controlled substances in my system or not.
My left arm was bent up under me and my hand was resting on his forearm in front of his face on his pillow, but I slid my hand to rest on his chest, as gently as I possibly could. His breathing was deep, and it lulled me into its rhythm pretty much instantly once I could not only hear it but feel it under my fingertips. Even breathing came easier when I was with him, and I wasn’t ready to accept that soon enough I’d have to adjust to doing it without him. He had to snap out of his single-minded determination to leave Adelaide Springs. He just had to.
But for the next ten days, I wasn’t allowed to do any coaxing. That I remembered from the night before. We’d made a deal, and I would honor it.
A tear formed in the inside corner of my right eye, tickling my lashes until I had no choice but to blink. And once I blinked, the tear ran down my nose. And then there were more, streaming down onto my pillow, and I was biting the inside of my cheek to try to avoid making any sound that would wake him up. But then, while I was doing all of that blinking and crying and stifling, I noticed something about his face. At least I thought I did. It took me just a second to be sure. I leaned in as close as I could so I could see him clearly—where were my glasses, by the way?—and held my breath so that I didn’t breathe directly on him.
He’d shaved. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d completely shaved away his facial hair. For the past several years—or longer, I guess, since he’d really started growing it when Sebastian came to town rocking a pretty great-looking beard of his own—he’d been sporting what I had taken to calling the Chris Hemsworth in Lockdown. He always kept it neatly tailored, but he wasn’t one of those guys with balms and special boar’s-hair brushes and derma rollers and such. Nah. Cole just had style. Always had. And whoever his birth parents were, they had blessed him with thick, dark hair. And eyelashes that somehow fanned out and curled perfectly without any effort whatsoever. I, somehow, always managed to have one eyelash on each eye poking straight into my pupil and a couple that were just a little bit longer than the rest and continually practicing their downward-facing dog yoga moves. My lashes weren’t horrible, I knew, but there was just enough chaos happening to occasionally make me feel like I was a newbie bank robber who had accidentally slipped fishnets over my head. Cole had no such chaos on his face.
But, admittedly, over the past week since his grandfather died, his facial hair had been somewhat neglected. I had still liked it. Some gray had started slipping in amongst the black. (And wasn’t it interesting how gray hair among my peers could be distinguished and sexy, and yet every gray strand I found on my head was carefully followed down to the root and yanked out with a maniacal, “Die, sucker!”?)
(Also, while we’re at it, why are gray hairs thick enough to use as fishing wire? Asking for a friend.)
Now his beard was gone and I was a little bit sad. But mostly I was fascinated. Enthralled. He was twenty-five again. Okay, maybe thirty. A whole lot younger than me, that much was certain. The hair on his head was a completely silver-free zone, and when he wasn’t looking sad and he wasn’t laughing and showing those lines around his eyes that I liked to believe I had helped create, looking at him transported me back to a different time. A simpler one, I guess. Right then I was remembering visiting him in Boulder when he went to culinary school. Two years he’d been away from home. The longest two years of my life, probably. But it hadn’t felt like the end of anything. I hadn’t been worried about the future. I’d been excited by the possibilities. The idea of him never moving back to Adelaide Springs didn’t scare me then like it did now. Why was that? I’d known it was a possibility. In fact, it had been very likely.
I guess maybe then I didn’t feel quite so much like he was all I had. Like he was all I wanted. I’d just wanted great things for him, and I’d wanted great things for me. And wherever those great things took us, nothing would change.
How could I have thought nothing would change?
Back then, one or the other of us had driven the five hundred miles round trip at least once a month, and those weekends were everything. He’d practiced his new cooking techniques on me and made the most delicious things I’d ever tried. Things I couldn’t pronounce. And he’d teased me about how I couldn’t pronounce them—things like bruschetta and crudités and au jus—and I didn’t care one bit as long as he kept stuffing my face. We’d gone out to trendy hotspots and tried to act like we fit in, and then we just laughed so much about trying to fit in that we stuck out like sore thumbs.
And that’s when I’d really started sewing. Huh. I’d sort of forgotten that. It had all started because Cole had a T-shirt from every place he’d ever been that sold or gave away T-shirts. National parks and coffeehouses and his school, sure, but also ten-minute oil-change places and rallies for political candidates he’d never heard of and marching band competitions that we’d gone to in Grand Junction. Not that either of us cared about marching band competitions, but sometimes we were just desperate to get out of Adelaide Springs.
“Each one is a memory, Laila,” he would say to me as he threw his newest T-shirt over his shoulder like a bartender throwing a towel. “There is no reason whatsoever why I would ever remember that we were here. It would just be a forgotten day. But now I’ll never forget.”
While he was in Boulder I’d go over to his house in Adelaide Springs to visit Cassidy or his grandfather, or under the guise of watering his Christmas cactus (which I had forgotten to water and accidentally killed years before when he was on vacation with his family, but it had now been twenty-three years or so and I wasn’t sure he had noticed yet), and I’d sneak into his closet and steal a few of the T-shirts from the pile. When he moved back home, I gave him the quilt I had made as a graduation gift.
I hadn’t thought about that in years.
“Can I help you?” he muttered, and I shrieked a little. Right then my eyes were dead-on even with his lips, about an inch away, and I’d been so focused on Cole of the past that I’d forgotten to be considerate of the sleeping Cole of the present.
I pulled back and raised my eyes, probably about as abashed as I ever was with him. So not very abashed at all, really. But I did feel a little silly. “You shaved.”
His eyes fluttered open the rest of the way, from the slits he had first peered at me through. “I did.”
“I was just . . . you know. Looking.” I began to pull away and slip over to my side of the tent, but his hand was still on my hip, and he applied a little pressure to keep me in place.
He leaned his face in so his eyes were right in front of mine. He’d been blessed with great hair, great lashes, and perfect eyesight. I usually found each of those perfections very annoying. “And what do you think? Have I made a huge mistake?”
“A mistake? No. Though I do think it’s borderline cruel for you to shave ten years off your face the week I catch up with you in age.” I lifted my hands to feel his skin’s new smoothness. “Can you grow it back by Friday?”
“Absolutely.” His left arm stayed strung over me as he pulled up his right arm, leaned on his elbow, and propped his head on his hand. “Should I just forgo the Chris Hemsworth in Lockdown and commit fully to the Jeff Bridges in True Grit? As a birthday gift, I mean.”
“It would be the considerate thing to do, yes.” His eyes were locked with mine, and those creases were decorating the corners again. Thank goodness. If he lost those mementos of age and laughter and us, I might never recover. But the smooth face I could get used to. “No, I suppose I’ll allow the new look. Even through my birthday, if you want. You look handsome. Of course, I expect you to completely dress the part. Let’s see . . . what other style characteristics need to accompany the return of young Cole Kimball?”
Like I said, Cole had style and always had. Admittedly, I liked the current Cole style more than some of that which had existed in yesteryear. As he’d shifted more and more into the role of running a business—while still having to handle all the cooking and occasionally wait tables or tend bar—he’d adopted a casual professionalism that made him possibly the best-dressed man in Adelaide Springs (though my dad could wear the heck out of a bolo tie), but he never looked out of place. Fitted T-shirts, long-sleeved button-ups with the sleeves rolled up, an occasional fitted jacket over one of those fitted T-shirts . . . He would have fit in just as well pretty much anywhere.
“I’m sure I could track down some baggy shorts somewhere. And I definitely still have my skate shoes.”
I laughed. “Rein it in, Marty McFly. The time machine on your face didn’t take you that far back.” His eyes were sparkling beneath his lashes, and his lips were twitching in unison with the twitching of his fingers against my hip. “What is it?” I asked when he’d been staring at me that way just a little longer than was normal.
His eyes darted away and then back so quickly I probably wouldn’t have caught it if I wasn’t so close to his face. But when they came back, the smile had turned into an expression I wasn’t sure I recognized. There was a different dilation to his pupils. A different curve to his lips. Of course I probably just wasn’t used to seeing his lips on such unobstructed display.
“I was dreaming about you.”
“Ooh! Tell me!” I lowered my hands from his face and rested them on his chest. “Let me guess. Did you dream that I could cook? I don’t know why this is such an obsession for you, but, I mean, I guess you could try to teach me how to make rice or something. Rice is easy, right? Don’t they even call it ‘easy rice’ on the package? I like rice. It wouldn’t be completely inconvenient to know how to make rice, I suppose.”
Even lying down and relaxed, his shoulders slumped in visible frustration with me, causing a giggle to rise to my chest. “They call it ‘easy rice’ because it was basically a scientific breakthrough on par with getting a man to the moon to invent a foolproof way to cook rice. Cooking rice—really cooking it and doing it well—is not easy, Laila. It’s not easy at all.”
I shrugged. “The microwave stuff isn’t so bad.”
Cole sighed. “Anyway, no. You weren’t cooking in my dream. Even my subconscious knows the difference between ‘could only happen in a dream’ and ‘too fantastical for even a dream.’”
“So what was I doing?”
His eyes seemed to glaze over for a moment, and then he cleared his throat and backed up against the wall. As he did, he moved his hand from my hip to his own and caused my fingers to fall from his chest to the bed. “Zelda.”
He wasn’t quite as close now, so I had to squint in order to study him and try to make sense of the words. “‘Fitzgerald’ or ‘Legend of’?”
“‘Legend of.’ You were Link from The Legend of Zelda, and you were traveling all across Hyrule looking for Korok Seeds.”
“You know I don’t know what any of those words mean.”
“You had the pointy little ears and everything. It was cute.”
He shook his head and chuckled as he sat up with his back against the tent wall as he had last night, except his knees were pulled up to his chest and his arms were crossed over them. Now I really couldn’t see him, so I sat up next to him, but as soon as I slid into position, he pushed himself out of the bed and jumped to his feet.
“Did Seb make breakfast?” He bent over his duffel bag and pulled out a sweatshirt. “It smells good. Do you need in the bathroom?” He slipped his Peyton Manning hoodie on over his T-shirt and then straightened it all out over his joggers. “If you don’t mind, I just want to get in there real quick. Brush my teeth and such. Although it probably would have been more considerate if I’d done that before I breathed my morning breath all over you, huh? Sorry about that.”
“Oh, gosh, I bet mine’s horrible—”
“It’s not. I mean, I didn’t notice anything, so it can’t be too bad, right? Alright. I’ll meet you out there.”
What was happening? I hadn’t heard him string that many words together since seventh grade when we had to recite the Preamble to the Constitution and he could only remember it if he dumped it all out at once, in one big secure-the-blessings-of-liberty-for-ourselves-and-our-posterity breath.
“Cole?” I called out to him just as he shut the door from the other side of it.
He poked his head back in. “Heya. What’s up?”
I laughed at him. Not with him but at him. “You’re being weird. Why are you being weird?”
“I’m not being weird. You’re being weird.”
I squinted at his blurry silhouette. “No dice, home slice. I’m just being my normal amount of weird. You’re being, like . . . weird weird.”
“I think I’m just excited about the trip and stuff. Can’t wait. See you out there.”
“Hang on!” This time I stopped him before the door shut. “Can you get me my glasses? Or at least tell me where they are?”
“Oh! Sorry.” He hurried over to the built-in bookshelf by the window and picked them up, then stretched his hand into the tent with them. But before I could grab them, he opened them up with both hands, leaned into the tent, and gently placed them on my face.
As my eyes adjusted and he came into focus, he rested a hand on either side of me on the bed. He kept his face close to mine as he smiled. “I’m really glad we’re doing this. This trip, I mean. I’m . . . I’m really glad you’re here.”
I tilted my head and raised my hand to rub his smooth cheek with the back of my fingers. And then I responded truthfully, suddenly as sure of this one thing as I was pretty much anything else in my life. “Me too.”
He stretched in enough to kiss me on the cheek and then maneuvered out of the tent, and then the next sound I heard was him whistling Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind” as the door was closing behind him again.
Weird.