Chapter 23 Now
Now
My eyes were drooping. It had to be past midnight.
Probably past one. The ground was hard, but the sweatshirt under my head was soft, making it bearable.
And Beau’s voice was soothing as he read another chapter out loud from the book.
He’d already read three. This was the fourth.
It was a good book, but I was starting to lose the storyline the sleepier I got. I didn’t want to fall asleep.
Beau was still sitting against the wall.
He didn’t seem sleepy or stiff or uncomfortable.
He looked like an art model. Like someone was going to come paint his portrait as he sat there, one knee up, the opposite foot beneath it, the book resting on top.
One hand held the book with strong fingers.
The other gripped the back of his neck, occasionally massaging it.
His lashes looked extra-long with his eyes downcast like they were, on the page.
His hair flopped onto his forehead and over his ears.
After our hug earlier, we’d both been awkward. I’d pulled away first, feeling like I didn’t deserve any kind of comfort or forgiveness from Beau, if that’s what it was. His gaze had moved to his hands, where he picked at a hangnail.
“Should I read another chapter?” he’d asked.
“Yes,” I’d answered too quickly.
Now things felt less awkward as I lay there listening and he sat there reading. Now things felt almost normal. Well, if normal was six months ago.
“Do you want my socks?”
My eyes flew open. “What?”
“Are you asleep?”
“Probably,” I said.
He chuckled and set the book aside.
“It’s good,” I said. “I like it.”
“Yeah, it’s good.” He pointed to his feet, which were still in shoes. “Do you?”
“What? No. I’m not going to steal your socks.” I was surprised he was offering. I was sure that having bare feet in a public bathroom was the last thing he wanted.
“They might help you sleep better tonight,” he said.
“No, it’s okay…thank you, though.”
He bit his lip as his eyes traveled the room. Had he always been a lip biter? He had full lips. I didn’t remember that. No, I remembered that.
“Um…”
“What?” I said.
“I’m tired too.”
“You should sleep.”
His eyes landed on my sweatshirt.
“Oh.” I sat up. “Do you want to use it?”
“No, I mean, yes, but can we both use it?”
“It’s not that big.”
“Back to back?” he asked.
“I guess we can try.” I stretched out the sweatshirt as much as possible while still trying to keep it wadded up in order to provide padding.
I nodded for him to lie down first. He did.
I followed, facing the other way. Our bodies touched from our heads down to our butts.
Both of us had our knees bent, and my bare feet pressed against the bottom of his sneakers.
“I don’t need your socks, but you should take your shoes off,” I said.
“Would that help?” he asked.
“For yourself,” I said. “For comfort.”
“Right.” He toed out of them.
“I mean, if you’re worried about germs, I had my foot in the toilet. It can’t get more disgusting than that.”
He let out a low laugh. “I’m not worried about germs.”
We lay in silence for several minutes. From this angle I could see a spiderweb under the bottom lip of the cupboard below the sink.
I hoped the spider that built it had abandoned it at some point.
A memory rushed into my mind. I was eight or nine.
I saw a spider on the floor in my bedroom and let out a bloodcurdling scream while flinging myself onto my bed. My dad rushed into my room.
“Are you hurt?” he asked, out of breath and red-faced.
“There’s a spider.” I waved my arm around, pointing at the floor.
He followed my finger to where the spider sat frozen by the Barbie doll I’d just been playing with. “A wolf spider,” Dad said joyfully. “These are the good ones. They keep the bad bugs away. You should let him hang out in your room.”
“No, Dad. I don’t like spiders. Please smash it.”
“You want me to smash a good one?” he asked, pretending to be offended.
“Please, Dad.”
“I’ll get a cup and take him outside.”
“Hurry!” I’d called after him.
Beau took a deep breath that I could feel along my back, bringing me out of the memory. My throat felt tight.
“Do you think people can change?” I asked.
“Like fundamentally change who they are?” Was my dad the guy who rescued the “good” spiders or the guy who committed fraud?
If that’s what he’d done. Wouldn’t they have figured out by now if he hadn’t?
In my brain those two people couldn’t coexist in the same body. And that meant he had changed.
“I don’t know,” Beau said thoughtfully. “Maybe. But I think people are who they are at their core. Maybe they put on a mask sometimes, but who they are will always be there. I think. I don’t know,” he said again, as if he didn’t have confidence in what he’d just said.
Rare for Beau. “What about you? Do you think people can change?”
“Yes,” I said. I was different now, wasn’t I? Or maybe deep down I’d always been this angry, bitter girl. She’d been just waiting to come out.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said. Was he thinking about how different I was?
I could feel his heart beating against the center of my back.
“This is really uncomfortable, isn’t it?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
He sat up. “What if…”
I sat up too. “What if what?” I asked when he didn’t finish.
“What if I lay on the sweatshirt on my back and…”
“You want to be my pillow, Beau?” I asked with a smirk.
“I don’t want to,” he said with his own smirk. “But I’d be willing to sacrifice.”
“For the greater good.”
“At least for our good,” he said.
“Which, at the moment, is the only good,” I said.
“True.”
I nodded.
“Yeah?”
I nodded again.
He pulled my backpack closer, then arranged the sweatshirt on top of it, then lay on his back. “So much better,” he said.
I sat there, hugging a knee to my chest. I wasn’t sure I could lie with my head on his chest and not have all sorts of feelings rise to the surface. Not just the feelings of the past few months—hurt, sadness, anger—but feelings I’d buried deep a long time ago.
“You change your mind?” he asked, arm stretched out to the side, waiting for me.
I cleared my throat. “I was just deciding whether I should turn off the light or not.”
“Probably,” he said. “If we actually want to sleep.”
I nodded and moved to the light switch. Right before I flipped it off, we met eyes. Then it was dark.