Chapter Twenty
Going Back in Time
Archer
Three days of this, and I’m losing my mind.
Three days of Sydney being polite, helpful, and present, yet completely, deliberately gone. She makes the twins’ breakfast and asks about my schedule, but then she disappears. Off to the senior center or out with Tori or Winnie. Somewhere. Anywhere but home.
The couch sits empty after bedtime. She goes straight to the guest room, and I hear the door close, followed by silence. I sit alone in the living room, watching TV that I don’t care about.
On Thursday night, I put the twins to bed.
Luke wants the octopus book. He lies very still, the blanket pulled to his chin, eyes wide open, absorbing every word as if he’s going to be tested on it later.
When I finish the chapter, he says, “Daddy, did you know an octopus can change color in two hundred milliseconds?”
“I did not know that, buddy.”
“Now you do.” He rolls onto his side, pulls his shark blanket up, and closes his eyes. That’s it. Luke’s done. Goodnight delivered, information transferred, sleep initiated.
Lily is a different operation. She wants to be tucked in a specific way—blanket up to her chin, giraffe on the left side, not the right, nightlight on the one that looks like a moon, not the star—and then she wants to talk.
“Daddy.”
“Yeah, Lil.”
“Are you sad?”
I stop straightening her blanket. “What?”
“You look sad.” She scrunches up her entire face—eyebrows down, mouth flat, jaw tight—and holds it for three seconds. It’s a disturbingly accurate impression.
“I’m not sad,” I say.
“You and Syd are being weird.”
“We’re not being weird.”
“You are. You don’t sit on the couch together anymore. And you don’t laugh.” She looks at me with her mother’s eyes, steady and unblinking. “Did you have a fight?”
“No, Lil. We didn’t have a fight.”
“Then why are you sad?”
I sit on the edge of her bed and brush the hair off her forehead as she watches me. She’s too perceptive, this kid. She reads rooms the way Luke reads books—thoroughly, seriously, missing nothing.
“Sometimes grown-ups have a lot on their minds,” I say. “It doesn’t mean anything is wrong.”
“Okay.” She considers this. “Can you tell Syd to come say goodnight?”
“She already said goodnight, Lil.”
“I want her to say it again.”
“Once is enough.”
She pulls Jeffrey the giraffe closer to her chest.
“Go to sleep, Lily.”
“I love you, Daddy.”
“I love you too, bug.”
I kiss her forehead, turn off the overhead light, and stand in the hallway, looking at the guest room door.
The light is on underneath it. She’s in there reading, probably. Or maybe texting with Lauren. Or lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling the way I’ve been staring at mine every night this week.
I knock before I can talk myself out of it.
Silence. Then I hear her soft voice. “Yeah?”
“Can I come in?”
A longer silence. Long enough that I almost walk away, and then the door opens. She’s standing there in her sleep shorts and an old t-shirt, her hair pulled back, her face bare. She looks tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey.”
“Can we talk?”
She leans against the doorframe and crosses her arms. “About what?”
“About—uh.” I run a hand through my hair. “About everything. About the birthday. About what Bree said. About the last four days, where you’ve been looking through me like I’m furniture.”
She releases a long, slow exhale. “Sure. What’s on your mind?”
“We never talked about that night.”
The air in the hallway changes. Her arms tighten across her chest, and her eyes hold mine; she doesn’t pretend not to know which night I mean.
The night.
“No,” she says. “We didn’t.”
“Can I come in?”
She steps aside. I walk into the guest room, which smells like her—her shampoo, her lotion, the particular warmth of a room someone has been living in. I sit on the edge of the bed because there’s nowhere else to sit, and she closes the door and leans against it.
We look at each other.
“You go first,” she says.
“I don’t even know where to start.”
“Try.”
I press my hands together between my knees and stare at the floor. The hardwood has a knot about six inches from my left foot, and I focus on that knot because looking at Sydney right now feels like looking directly into the sun.
“It wasn’t nothing,” I say. “That night.”
“You picked me up for school the next morning and asked about coffee.”
“I know.”
“Like it was a normal Tuesday.”
“I know. And it wasn’t. It wasn’t a normal anything.” I rub the back of my neck. “Syd, you were my first too.”
She goes quiet. I can feel her staring at me, but I keep my eyes on the knot in the floor.
“What?”
“You were my first. I never told you that.”
“Archer.” Her voice is different now—softer, confused. “You said—you told me you’d already—”
“I lied. I was eighteen, and you were asking me to sleep with you. I didn’t want you to think I had no idea what I was doing. Which I didn’t.” I look up at her. “I had no idea what I was doing. With any of it. Not the sex, not the feelings, none of it.”
She’s staring at me like I just told her the earth is flat. “You lied about that?”
“I was a hockey player in high school. I wasn’t going to admit I was still a virgin. And well, you never directly asked…”
“So we were both—”
“Yeah.”
She presses her hand over her mouth, and I can’t tell if she’s about to laugh or cry. Maybe both.
“I woke up the next morning, and I knew something had changed,” I say. “I felt it. But I didn’t know how to talk about it, and you seemed—fine. You were acting normal, so I acted normal. Then, a few weeks later, you started dating that guy. Tyler, or Trevor, or—”
“Travis.”
“Travis. You started dating Travis, and I took that as a sign. Like, okay, she’s moved on.
It didn’t mean the same thing to her; I should get over it.
” I look at her. “So I tried to get over it. I thought I did. I left for college. I met Bree, and she was good and kind. She didn’t make me feel like I was standing at the edge of a cliff every time she walked into a room, and I told myself that was better. That safe was better.”
“Was it?”
“No. But I didn’t know that until you showed up on my porch with a suitcase.”
She’s quiet now. Her arms are still crossed, but her grip has loosened, and her jaw isn’t clenched anymore. She’s looking at me the way she did across the kitchen the night of the birthday—searching, careful, trying to decide how much of this to believe.
“I was dating Travis because I was trying to get over you,” she says. “I went on that first date two weeks after we slept together because I thought you didn’t want me, and I was trying to prove to myself that I could want someone else.”
“Did it work?”
“What do you think?”
We look at each other.
The room is quiet. I can hear the clock in the hallway ticking, the hum of the refrigerator downstairs, and Sydney breathing. When I take my hands away from my face and look at her, she’s crying. Not sobbing—just tears running down her face, silent, her lips pressed together.
“Syd.”
“Don’t.” She holds up a hand, but she’s not telling me to stop this time. She’s trying to hold herself together. “Just—give me a second.”
I give her a second. She stands in the middle of the guest room with tears on her face and her hands at her sides, and I watch her process everything.
“You should have told me,” she says.
“I know.”
“I would have—” Her voice breaks, and she presses the back of her hand against her mouth.
The words hang in the room between us. She would have what? Said yes? To me? To being more than friends?
I stand up and close the distance between us. My hand comes up to her face, my thumb brushing the tears off her cheek. She tilts into my palm and closes her eyes, and I can feel her shaking.
“Syd, look at me.”
She opens her eyes.
I place my palm on her cheek and lift her face to mine.
Then I lean down and kiss her. It’s slow, my mouth finding hers as if it has been waiting to land there.
Her breath catches, and her hand comes up to my wrist, fingers wrapping around the arm cradling her face.
She kisses me back, tentative at first, then with increasing confidence, her other hand gripping the front of my shirt, pulling me closer.
I slide my hand from her cheek into her hair, and she makes a sound against my mouth—quiet, almost wounded—and I feel it everywhere.
I kiss her the way I should have kissed her when I was eighteen, but I was young, stupid, and reckless.
Her hands flatten against my chest, and I can feel my heart hammering under her palm; I know she can feel it too.
She rises up on her toes, and I bend into her because the height difference between us has always been ridiculous.
Her fingers curl into my collar, and I wrap my arm around her waist. For a few seconds, the room, the house, and the fifteen years fall silent; it’s just her mouth and mine and the sound of our breathing.
She pulls back first—just an inch or maybe two. Her forehead rests against my chin, and her hands remain on my chest as we stand there, breathing each other’s air.
“What are we doing?” she whispers.
“I don’t know. But I’m done pretending I don’t want to.”
She rises up on her toes and presses her mouth to mine again. Her lips part, and my tongue slides against hers. The sound that pours out of me is involuntary, raw, and borderline embarrassing.
Two years of no one touching me and fifteen years of wanting her all release at once. Her fingers tighten in my shirt, pulling me closer, and I let her take whatever she wants because I have been so goddamn empty for so long. Her mouth is the first thing that makes me feel full.
She grips my shirt with both fists and pulls, and I walk her backward until her shoulders hit the door.
I press into her, and she gasps against my mouth, which I swallow.
Her hips arch into mine, and my hand finds her waist, sliding under the hem of her shirt until my fingers hit bare skin, and she shivers.
“Archer.” My name in her mouth, breathless and half-wrecked.
“Yeah.” I’m kissing her neck now, the soft spot under her jaw. She tilts her head back against the door, her fingers dragging through my hair, and I’m shaking. “I don’t have all the answers, Syd. I’m still figuring out what this is. But I’m not pretending anymore.”
Her hand rests on my chest, right over my heart, and I can feel every beat pushing against her palm.
“I need time,” she says. “Not a lot. Just—I need to sit with this, Archer. I’ve wanted this for so long that I don’t trust it yet.”
“Take whatever time you need.”
She nods and steps back. Her hand slides off my chest, and the absence is immediate.
“Goodnight,” she says.
“Night, Syd.”
I walk to the door, my hand on the knob when she says my name.
“Arch.”
I turn.
She’s standing in the middle of the room, her arms wrapped around herself, her eyes still wet, and her lips still flushed from my mouth.
“Thank you for telling me,” she says. “About it being your first time too. I, uh—I wish I’d known that a long time ago.”
I nod because my throat has closed, and I walk out, closing the door behind me. I press my back against the hallway wall and look up at the ceiling.
She kissed me back. After fifteen years of telling myself that Sydney would only ever be my friend. And now she’s asked for time, because she’s smarter than me, and she always has been.
I go to my room and sit on the edge of the bed.
I can still feel her mouth on mine.
She kissed me back. I have no idea what it means or what happens next, but right now, that’s enough.