Chapter 25 – Kat
TWENTY-FIVE
KAT
Gazing at the spacious two-story home we toured last spring, my heart begins to race and my palms start to sweat. Memories and an overwhelming sense of anxiety fill me as I stare at the bright red door, a feature that made me fall in love with the house now like one big sign warning me not to go past the threshold.
Why did I think it was a good idea to live with Elijah this semester? Even if we were together, it was a bad idea. Now, all I can think about is how uncomfortable this is going to be.
At least I’ll have Jenna, even if she isn’t coming until tomorrow afternoon.
With a box teetering precariously on the edge of my foot, I hoist another onto my shoulder and carefully balance both as I make my way toward the stairs. My arms strain under the weight, but I’m determined to minimize the number of trips I have to make. That, and I’d like to get everything into the house so I can avoid leaving my room for the rest of the night. I have no idea when Elijah is supposed to arrive, or if he’s already here. I deeply hope he isn’t.
My arms strain under the weight of the heavy boxes, but I finally manage to drop them onto my bedroom floor. Turning around, I don’t notice the tall figure standing directly in front of me until it’s too late. My hands instinctively fly up to protect my face as I collide with a solid wall of muscle covered by a tight cotton T-shirt that belongs to someone I used to know; someone who still holds a piece of my heart.
My chest tightens in discomfort as I look away, feeling his gaze upon me. I hastily choose to pay exponentially more attention to the crown molding above my head than it calls for.
“I didn’t realize you were here,” I say, shifting my attention and picking at my cuticles, the all-too-familiar nervous tic giving me a semblance of calm, though I’m still ready to jump out of my skin.
“I got here this morning,” Elijah says after clearing his throat.
“Did you need something?” I ask coldly.
He stands in the entrance, his broad frame blocking my escape. I shift uncomfortably, avoiding eye contact until finally I muster up the courage to meet his gaze. His face is a blank canvas, but I can see the gears turning behind his eyes as he ponders something. Is it contemplation? Disappointment? The unknown is almost more agonizing than the awkward energy filling the space between us.
He’s always been hard to read.
“I was hoping we could talk…”
Talk—talk?! He wants to talk now ? After a summer of radio silence, he finally wants to talk?!
“About?” I try to feign disinterest, but my irritation is bubbling up to the surface.
“Kat, please.” If I didn’t know him better, I would think it genuine anguish in his tone. I, however, do know him better, and I’m not falling for it again.
“You want to talk? Talk.” Crossing my arms over my chest, I pin him with a glare.
He appears to realize something—what I can’t be sure, but whatever it is causes him to cower backward. “No, it’s fine. We can talk later.”
The old me would have gone after him, chased him down the hall, demanding an answer, asking him to talk to me. It’s all I ever really wanted, anyway: for him to talk to me.
However, I’m not that girl anymore. At least, I don’t want to be. So I let him leave the room, and as he disappears down the hallway, I feel a weight lift off my chest—a giant boulder that I didn’t even realize was there until it’s gone.
After spending hours locked in my room, I finally gather the courage to venture out again. As I carry the last few boxes and bags up to my bedroom, I can’t help but feel grateful for my decision to bring most of my belongings from home. After three years, I’ve learned that having familiar possessions around me makes this foreign place a little less intimidating. And as I settle into my senior year, I know one thing for sure: I don’t want to be here without everything I need.
That, and I have a tendency to find comfort in familiarity—something I desperately will need, given my living situation.
“Katarina Marritt, as I live and breathe,” a warm and familiar voice intones from my bedroom doorway.
The moment I turn around and find Tanner grinning back at me as he leans against the doorframe, any sort of irritation from before is gone. Gone and replaced with nothing but elation.
“Tanner!” I squeal, lunging across the room and wrapping my arms around his neck. Despite my sweat-dampened skin, he squeezes me tightly, lifting me off the ground in the process. “I thought you weren’t heading up until tomorrow!”
“I wasn’t, but my brother broke the garage door, and given how pissed my dad was, I figured it best to dip out a little early.”
The memory of his family’s love and kindness at Thanksgiving fills me with so much joy. Despite the present issue between Tanner’s brother and dad, I know with certainty they’ll bounce back. I long to experience that kind of family, where you know without second-guessing that any sort of fight or argument will be resolved because they love you.
I know my mom loves me, and in most cases I know she’ll come around if we get into an argument. However—and this has nothing to do with my mom—there is still always that nagging feeling in the back of my mind that one of these days I’ll manage to do or say something that wakes her up to the fact that maybe she’d like to leave too.
I wouldn’t blame her if she did.
“You should come downstairs and hang out,” Tanner says as he releases me from his grasp.
Mentally recoiling, I look up at him. “I will…but right now I just need to get unpacked.” It’s a disingenuous response and we both know it, but he doesn’t call me out.
“That’s fine. We can hang out in here!” He then proceeds to jump onto the bed that I just made with about as much grace as you’d expect from a baby deer.
“You want to hang out in my bedroom?” I pose the question with a barely stifled laugh. “You don’t think that’s a little weird? Just the two of us hanging out in my bedroom…on my bed.” I raise a brow and he laughs.
“Why? Are you worried you can’t resist my natural charm?” he says as he lifts his hand to his chest in mock affront. “I am but a gentleman—I would never. Besides, I’m saving myself for marriage.”
Given the three girls who have very boastfully and enthusiastically shared with me that they’ve slept with Tanner, I know this isn’t true. I throw a pillow at his head.
“Idiot,” I say, and we both erupt into laughter, me collapsing onto the bed next to him.
Just as we are adjusting to sit on the bed, there is a knock on my bedroom door.
“Come in!” I yell.
The door creaks open to reveal Jenna holding a giant pizza box and a two liter of Coca-Cola.
“Room for one more?” She smiles as she sets the pizza and pop on my dresser.
“Jenna!” I shriek before I leap off the bed.
We embrace each other tightly, our laughter filling the room. Finally, my two favorite people are together with me.
“What the hell? You told me you weren’t coming today!” I smack her arm, then approach my dresser to investigate the pizza.
She just shrugs. “I only managed to survive a few days at home after my internship before wanting to strangle my mom, so I decided to come early.”
I fight off the urge to call both her and Tanner out on their answers that are almost undoubtedly excuses to be here the day I get in, but I know that it comes from a protective place. How can I question it when that kind of love is all I’ve ever wanted? Even if it only ever comes in the form of friends.
“Thank you,” I say sternly to both of them, fighting off the emotion venturing into my words.
“For what?” they ask in unison.
“For coming today. It helps.”
Jenna nods in response, recognizing my appreciation while still managing to hold onto her plausible deniability.
However, when my eyes meet Tanner’s, he just stares back at me with an unreadable expression on his brow. As quickly as it’s there, it’s gone, and he breaks into a smile. “I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about—I just wanted to get away from the crossfire between my dad and Theo.”
“Who’s Theo?” Jenna asks.
“His youngest brother,” I say as Tanner says, “My youngest brother.”
Jenna’s brows lift, but she shakes off her confusion as she steps to my side. She gently lifts the lid of the pizza box and a tempting smell wafts through the air, making my mouth water. The rich, melted cheese stretches and oozes over the smoky pepperoni slices, the tangy tomato sauce peeking out between each piece. My senses are overwhelmed by the delicious scent.
We each grab a piece—or, in Tanner’s case, three pieces—and sit cross-legged on my bed.
Jenna fills us in on how her summer internship went and Tanner tells us about what actually happened to the garage door. Apparently, Theo gravely misinterpreted the difference between the gas pedal and the brake.
I’m thankful when they don’t ask about my summer…even if I know it’s because they’re both well aware of how it was spent .
We spend a disproportionate amount of time discussing Brendan’s new haircut and how someone needs to tell him it doesn’t look good. Jenna and I both agree that, of the three of us, it should be Tanner, but he insists it is weird and that we should just wait until it grows out.
“People are going to make fun of him,” Jenna says, stuffing her last bite of pizza in her mouth.
“He’ll be fine.”
The sunset passes and we continue to talk incessantly about the most random topics, but it isn’t until Jenna is standing up and stretching her arms—the telltale sign that she is ready for bed—that I realize this is the first time in months I’ve truly felt at peace.
“I’m gonna head up to bed.” Jenna yawns and I can’t help the disappointment that washes over me.
“Oh, uh—okay.”
Silence creeps in before Tanner speaks. “Do you want to watch Community ? I seem to recall you agreeing to watch it with me last semester and we never picked it back up.”
Jenna relaxes her shoulders when I say, “Sure.”
She kneels, her arms encircling me in a warm hug. She whispers “Good night” before she slips out of my room, leaving Tanner and me alone. The silence is heavy and suffocating.
He quickly turns on the television, opens Netflix, and queues up the show. Within minutes, booming laughter fills the room as we watch the episode where the crew plays Dungeons and Dragons.
“No, it one hundred percent makes him an asshole. Why would Jeff call him Fat Neil?” I ask, holding my hands up to emphasize “Fat Neil. ”
“Because it’s Jeff—he is inherently an ass, but it doesn’t mean he hates him more than any other character.”
“Jeff is the worst.”
“Not as bad as Dennis from Always Sunny .”
“Dennis is also a predator, and probably a serial killer.”
“See! So you agree Jeff is tame by comparison!” His voice elevates as he tries not to laugh.
“Two wrongs don’t make a right.”
“I don’t think that applies here.” He finally breaks and laughs at the absurdity of the argument.
I can’t help but fall into the same laughter before smacking him in the arm. “Forget Jeff, you’re an ass.”
“You know what they say, you are what you ea?—”
“Tanner!”
We both burst into uncontrollable laughter as I shift to hit him with a throw pillow, but Tanner manages to jump off the bed just in time to evade it. He walks over to the pizza box and sets our empty paper plates atop the cardboard. He leans down to grab a water bottle from my freshly stocked mini fridge before nodding in my direction. I nod back, and he grabs a second cold bottle.
“Milady,” he says with an overly dramatic inflection—the term of endearment used in Jeff and Annie’s interactions throughout the show—and he bows, holding the water out to me.
“Milord.” I grab the bottle and he plops down on the bed next to me again, this time laying his head against the pillow.
We stay like that, lying on the bed, watching the equal parts hilarious and perplexing show he initially forced me to watch last year, except now I’m deeply entranced…and I’ve never been so content.