Chapter 22 #2
“I won’t. I’m not even eligible for the festival.” I feel like I’ve done so much to avoid this, and yet, here we are. Back at the beginning. “You don’t even have a piece.”
“Everyone goes to the festival. You don’t need a piece to attend.” The way he’s talking to me, as if I’m a child, did he always?
I need to fix this. “Maybe we should go to Florida during the festival instead. Do something different.”
“The festival is the best thing the school does all year. Everyone parties too much, gets naked, and swims—” His eyes go wide. I can hear my heartbeat in my ears as this moment seems to stretch on.
He’s remembered. He knows.
“I forgot.” He whispers it.
Carter remembers. My throat tightens.
“You’re afraid of water.”
Oh. I thought my heart was done breaking, but his words feel like a punch to my chest. He doesn’t remember anything.
“I’m sorry, Nieve. I didn’t mean to—”
I’m so stupid for hoping. So stupid. It doesn’t matter, because Carter is still going to the festival. He’s still going to get into the water. He’s still going to drown.
Nothing I’ve done will stop him.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
I’m not. I won’t be okay. “I just need some air.”
Carter looks around and then smiles down at me. Dismissive like always. “We’re outside.”
“Yeah,” I say, my hand grasping my throat. I need to get out of here. “I mean, like, away from everyone.”
His eyes sparkle with something I recognize from before. “I’ll go with you.”
“No.” It comes out a rebuke, and Carter looks at the faces staring back at us, already plastering on a fake smile. “No.” I put a hand on Carter’s forearm. “I’m gonna head inside.”
He lets me go without an argument, and it only stings a little as he moves on to someone else.
Before I can get too far, I’m stopped again by someone else who knows my family.
As soon as I walk away from one person, I’m pulled toward another.
A band starts up and people ask me to dance, which I politely decline.
Much later than I want to, I excuse myself from a group of people chatting about the rise of pop art and its effects on culture.
My plan is to walk to the bathroom, but I can already see a line forming at the one downstairs.
“Excuse me?”
I turn and see a beautiful woman with black hair and a formfitting gold dress. Her eyes are large and sincere. “You were just with Carter?”
Alex Moreno. Alexandria. Here with her fiancé.
She looks like she might cry no matter what my response is, and I’m reminded of the way Carter looked when he said her name.
“Yeah, he’s…” And then I remember he wanted to avoid her. “He left.”
Her face falls. “Oh.”
There’s nothing more to add, so I walk away and take a moment in the hallway to breathe the way Grandee taught me when I was young and felt like the world was too big and might swallow me whole.
Closing my eyes, I count to ten.
Open your eyes, Nieve.
The party feels loud. The kind of noise that you feel physically. I head up the left side of the double staircase, which opens to a large balcony. Next to the railing, I see a familiar back.
Max stares at the party below, and I take a minute to watch him. He plays with the cuff link at his wrist and stretches his neck from side to side as if he can relieve the tension there. On Christmas Eve, he looked so calm and peaceful as he slept on the couch.
Now he looks like someone who is fighting his own demons.
I go to stand next to him, both of us looking out at the party below. “It’s cold up here.” I say it because it is and because, even now, I’m not sure what to say to Max.
His hand drops from his sleeve. Without speaking, he shrugs out of his jacket and places it around my shoulders. It’s still warm, and the scent of his cologne greets me. I lean my face into the collar.
“Does it smell bad?” he asks.
I shake my head and try to hide my blush at being caught. “It smells like you.”
What an insane thing to say. At Carter’s house, on New Year’s Eve, with him only one floor below us.
Carter tucks a piece of hair that’s fallen from my bun behind my ear. “You really do look amazing tonight.” His eyes are on my mouth when he says it, and even though we are dancing in the middle of a ballroom, I feel like we’re the only two people here.
“So do you,” I tell him in a whisper.
Fireworks light the sky above us.
“Nieve,” he whispers against my skin. “I love you.”
My steps falter, and I pull back so I can see his eyes. To make sure he knows what he’s just said, but Carter only laughs and pulls me to him, never missing a beat. “I’ve fallen in love with you, and there’s not a lot you can do about it.”
“I thought you would have been down there.” Max points to the garden where our friends are opening a bottle of champagne. In his hand is an unlit cigarette and a glass of whiskey on the rocks.
“Since when do you smoke?” I ask with a laugh.
He looks confused for a moment. “I don’t know,” he tells me. “I found them in my coat and I just … an old habit, I guess.”
Maybe this version of Max smokes. This one that makes soft comments about my art and vulnerability and stayed late at the studio to walk me home, even on his days off.
“You don’t have to stay up here,” he tells me, and I know I’ve been silent too long. “I’m good with the quiet.”
And I know he is. We both feel broken in the same way. Two people that are haunted. I don’t need to know what’s chasing Max, because whatever it is, it feels the same.
Down below, Carter is singing to an older woman, who laughs at him, and even from here, I can see her cheeks redden. “I’m good. I’ll leave Carter to play Gatsby.”
Max laughs once, but it’s a dark chuckle, and we both fall silent again.
“It’s so different now.”
“What is?” Max asks, and takes a drink. The ice cubes tinkle against the glass.
I take a deep breath and look out at the party. “Everything. It just doesn’t feel like I thought it would.”
Max agrees with a deep hum. And I wonder if he’s going to ask what the hell I’m talking about, but he surprises me by asking, “Is it better or worse?”
Taking a moment to contemplate this, I look at him finally and say, “I don’t know yet.”
And then we’re silent again, watching the world underneath us like Greek gods on Olympus. People laugh and dance and sing along to the band. And for the first time in a long time, I don’t hate them for it. Their happiness and joy and optimism. Maybe they can have all those things, keep them.
If they want them.
“How come you’re up here?” I ask eventually.
“I prefer this.”
I know what he means, away from the crowd but still seeing it. “What’s your perfect New Year’s Eve?”
He shakes his head and smiles. “My grandparents lived on this lake, and every year, my grandfather and I would put on warm clothes, and he would pack me a thermos of hot chocolate, and we would take his boat out to the middle of the lake. At midnight, the fireworks would go off right over us. They would reflect off the water, so it felt like they were everywhere.”
I’m holding my breath as Max tells me this truth about himself. Personal and honest. Something I could never imagine him telling me before.
“Did you just tell me a secret?”
He shakes his head. “A secret would be telling you that sometimes I go to a graveyard to draw.”
My eyes go wide. And I wonder …
“It’s quiet there. I like it. No one bothers you.” He moves to put the cigarette in an empty planter nearby, and when he catches me watching, he shrugs. “What about you?” he asks. “What’s your perfect New Year’s Eve?”
I think back to those New Year’s with Linden, dressing up. Even though we were playing at being grown-ups, it felt realer than anything I’ve done recently. “Maybe something where I don’t have to pretend.”
Max doesn’t ask me to explain; he just lets the words exist on their own. As if they are the only explanation he needs. The quiet that was between us feels heavy again, because no matter what I say to Max, everything feels like it means more.
My eyes close, and I take a deep breath. In through the nose and out through the mouth.
Open your eyes, Nieve.
“Do you have a secret?” he asks, but he’s not pushing, more like he’s curious what I’ll say next.
“Why are you so nice?” I ask.
“I told you. I’ve always been like this.”
Max, who tells me that I was missed. Who tells me I’m pretty with more than just words. Tells me that I am enough. Just me, as I am.
“Max?” I say it like a question.
He frowns at me, his brows pulled low and his body turned toward me.
Someone in the crowd announces a countdown will begin shortly, and I stare at Max. His lips are shiny from the drink he’s just set on the railing, and his throat bobs as he swallows. I watch his chest rise and fall with each one of his breaths, and I wonder what he would taste like.
“I had a dream…” He never takes his eyes off my lips when he speaks.
“One of your nightmares?” Our voices are low, but we’re so close I can hear him perfectly.
“No. A dream that you kissed me.”
My throat tightens hearing him say that. Max dreams about me. Like that.
“Oh yeah?” I whisper it. There is one thing I can do to make sure that I don’t end up with Carter at the river.
Ten.
Nine.
I tell myself that’s the only reason I’m considering kissing Max.
Eight.
Seven.
Six.
Not because of Max’s eyes, or his lips, or his hands that are reaching for me.
Five.
Four.
I lean forward, and later, I will tell myself this was for Carter.
Three.
Two.
Max’s eyes widen, and suddenly, I know I’m not thinking of anyone but Max.
One.
I kiss Max Emerson.