Chapter 15. #2
“I couldn’t agree more,” she says, though I don’t suspect she’s hearing quite what she’s agreeing with, making her words seem a touch empty to me.
She giggles at a thought and peers over at me with a shake of her head.
“Where’d your brilliance come from? I can’t take the credit.
I was just awful in algebra. Three tutors and I still flunked and had to finish in summer school.
Have you seen TJ solve math equations? He’s a genius! Absolute genius!”
“I’ve seen him solve a thing or two,” says Austin, eyeing me, “but can’t say a math problem’s been one of ‘em yet.”
“What’s he solved for you?” asks my mom, delighted to hear.
He studies me with sincerity. “TJ keeps me from drownin’ in my own head, every day.”
The thoughtful sentiment of his words linger in the air for entirely too long.
Is that something a friend says to another mere friend?
My mom drinks in his answer, unaware of the subtext, as she nods, picks up her sandwich, and says, “Well, we all sure can use someone like that in our lives, can’t we?” before taking a bite.
Austin and I meet each other’s eyes across the table.
It’s almost too much, what he does to me with his words to my mom. I don’t know what I expected, but it certainly wasn’t that he’d turn out to be a secret parent whisperer.
After lunch, my mom says, “You boys go ahead and do your thing. I’ve taken enough of your time. No, no, really,” she insists when Austin tries to help with the dishes. Then she teases with, “If only my own son offered to help half as much as you do.”
I can’t escape to my room fast enough, dragging Austin with me. The door shuts and my back’s immediately against it. “That … can’t happen again.”
Entirely unworried, Austin walks around my room, taking in everything a piece at a time.
I stay with my back against the door, watching him for a while, as the quiet atmosphere of my room settles in my ears.
After that talkative and eventful lunch, I suddenly realize how desperately I needed this silence.
He stops in front of a picture on the wall. “This your prom?”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t go to mine,” he says, crossing his arms and sighing at the picture.
“Didn’t have a date. Buddies wanted to go in a group, singles-crashing-the-prom sort of thing.
But I wasn’t about that. I was too much of a romantic.
I was still holdin’ out, tryin’ to work up the courage to ask my crush to the dance.
” He shakes his head. “Didn’t happen. He took someone else.
I just stayed home with my guitar and wrote my very first heartbreak ballad.
” He faces me. “I guess what I’m tryin’ to say is …
I learned pretty early on not to sit on chances that can slip away—” He snaps his fingers. “—like that.”
I swallow. “Is … that what I am? A chance?”
He moves away from the picture and stands in front of me. He gently takes my hands into his. “I don’t know what you are, TJ, but it’s somethin’ I’ve needed for a long time. And I sure don’t want to miss out on it.”
I pretend my guts aren’t leaping around inside me even still, despite the calm between us now. “I would’ve taken you to prom.”
He smiles. “That so?”
“And I want to hear that heartbreak ballad sometime.”
“We’re queuing up a whole setlist I owe you someday.” After a second, he smirks. “I think your mom likes me, by the way.”
Panic is still sitting in the driver’s seat, racing through every horrible way this can go so wrong. But the confidence in Austin’s eyes keeps me grounded right here in front of him, a tether of serenity in my ocean of crazy.
I need to tell my mom Austin isn’t just a friend.
It’d be so easy. Just a short cluster of words and it’s over.
But what is he? What would I replace the word “friend” with?
And why have I built coming out to her so much in my head? For someone who seems constantly starved for a big change in my life, am I actually afraid of it?
“Yeah,” I finally admit. “She … She does like you.”
“She cares a lot about you, too.”
I avert my eyes. “Well, then, you’d better not break my heart,” I say as a joke, then realize how awful that sounded.
Austin doesn’t take it that way at all. It’s like he accepts it as a challenge, bringing a hand to my chin and lifting it up, bringing my eyes right back to his. “I’ve got no intention whatsoever,” he softly says, lips near mine, “of ever hurtin’ your heart.”
I stare back at him. I can suddenly picture him joining us for dinner later. Meeting my dad whenever he gets back. Making my parents laugh and fall in love with him. Me, sitting there at the table, dying inside slowly as I watch them get along better than I ever could’ve dreamed.
Neither of my parents realizing this guy is so close to stealing me away from them forever. From this business. This life I never wanted. This future they’ve painted for me.
How much would they like him then, if they knew I wanted to run away with him and never look back?
The next instant, our lips are together again.
To my bed we stumble—my bed, upon which I have dreamed this circumstance countless times, hugging my phone to my chest with my earbuds stuffed in, Chase Holt’s voice lulling me to another world, rain on the window, dreaming of lips—and now it’s happening in the flesh.
I wish I could capture this feeling in my chest right now and never let it out—my prisoner of pleasure, happily dancing around inside me, treasured and radiating in me forever.
He makes everything seem so easy.
So possible.
“You were scared to share all of this with me,” he says after we’ve both calmed down, now lying side by side, gazing into each other’s eyes. He keeps stroking my hair. “I don’t know what you were afraid of. Your mom is sweet.”
“That’s how she gets you,” I tease, then wonder if I’m joking or not. “I mean, my parents aren’t evil. They just … have expectations for me.” I frown. “Maybe you can relate, with all of your Chase Holt obligations.”
“Of course I relate,” he says softly, fingers playing over my ears, barely tickling the hairs there.
“A lot of people depend on me to … well … be me.” He gives a tragic, lopsided smile.
“But I can tell you, none of that crosses my mind when I’m here with you.
I don’t have to be anything but the guy in your room right now strokin’ your hair and feelin’ dizzy with happiness. ”
I can’t help but smile. “Dizzy with happiness? That’s what you feel right now?”
“More than you know,” he murmurs so softly, I barely hear it.
One of my hands is on his side, gently running up and down over the smooth, soft texture of his shirt. “Me too,” I say back.
It’s crazy how, just by lying next to each other on a bed, we help each other feel more like ourselves and less like the people everyone in our lives wants us to be.
Help me out of your quicksand, and I’ll help you out of mine.
Seems our little deal is still intact.
Believe it or not, we don’t spend the rest of the day making out on my bed. Not because we don’t want to, hell no, but because there’s a sudden freedom in the air neither of us can deny.
There’s so much more I want to show him suddenly.
Austin, curious and bright as ever, drinks up every bit of it.
The gardens outside, for example. The afternoon turns out to be way hotter and sunnier than what was forecasted, so we stick mostly to the shade.
Thankfully, there’s plenty of it around here, from the covered pathways around the edges of the house to the veiled groves.
He takes off his boots at one point and walks in the grass barefoot.
I decide to do the same because why not?
He’s awed by the mixed-up rainbow of roses that run along the low brick wall extending out from the main house, saying it’s like something out of a fairytale instead of something I’ve walked past a thousand times without appreciating it.
He stops to touch everything. The thorns on the roses.
A decorative stone feature at the end of the fence.
A statue of an angel in the back courtyard.
We sit on the edge of a fountain. He runs his hand across the water. “You ever come here to make a wish at night?” We listen to the water bubbling in its center. “Ever had one come true?”
I avoid saying some obvious thing sitting at the very top of my heart right now, that this moment, this day, this whole time with him has been the stuff of so many of my dreams.
So instead I just say, “The poor fountain has no coins sitting at the bottom. Why should I expect to have any wishes come true if I don’t toss a single coin in?”
He shrugs. “Not all wishes cost money.”
I eye him with a smirk. “So we’re supposed to just … expect happiness for free?”
He looks at me sincerely. “All happiness is free.”
My smirk drops away.
I think Austin is making me see my own life for the first time.
The privilege. And the emptiness. And the joys right in front of my face that have nothing to do with my parents’ wealth or my own confined placement in the world. Things I could simply reach out and just … have. If I let myself.
I’d kiss him right here and now if I wasn’t certain my mother was lurking at one of the twenty windows facing this fountain and wondering about us.
Austin nods at the water. “So, uh … any chance those adorable little ducks from town ever flock all the way out here?”
I squint at him. “Don’t you dare go naming the rest of them.”
He laughs.