Chapter 17
Jasmine
We’re three weeks into our mission of staying low, and I’ve never been this happy in my life.
That's the thought going around my head on a random Tuesday on Caleb's crappy couch, and I don't know where to put that thought, because happy is not a thing I’m familiar with.
We're boring now, on purpose. No stairwells, no banter with each other on campus, the paper clip retired.
We're so boring, my father has gone back to barely seeing me, which is the safest I've felt since the night he clocked us across the rink.
It also, in a way I would not say out loud, hurts, because being invisible to him again is the price of being safe, and I used to think that was a fair trade.
I don't think it's a fair trade anymore. That's new too.
“You're doing the thing,” Caleb says from the kitchen.
“What thing?”
“The one where you stare into the distance and keep your feelings to yourself.” He drops a bowl of popcorn in front of me and keeps one for himself. “Talk or eat. Dealer's choice.”
“I was thinking that I'm happy,” I say, because we have a rule about the truth. “And that I can't figure out how to hold onto it.”
He sits down next to me. “Yeah, I understand that.”
“You do?”
“I've spent my whole life waiting for the floor to fall out from under me. You learn to enjoy some things while holding your breath.” He bumps my knee. “Pair of romantics, the two of us weirdos are.”
“The most romantic,” I agree. “A Slithering and a Ravenclaw.”
He laughs. “Only you would make a Harry Potter reference.”
I love Caleb’s laugh; it’s raw and honest, but the trouble is, I can feel a weight underneath it. Happy, for us, is a thing stacked on top of two lies and a calendar. I know exactly how many days are left on it. I always know the number. Tonight I'm choosing not to say it out loud.
“Stop thinking about losing our happy, Dixon,” he says. “Just stay in the moment with me.”
“I’m staying.”
The show plays. I narrate. He gets it wrong on purpose to make me correct him, which I caught him doing two weeks ago and have decided to permit.
It’s cute. And somewhere in the middle of a rose ceremony, with my cold feet shoved under his leg because he runs warm, he goes quiet in a way that makes me look over.
He's watching me. Not the show. Me.
“What?”
“I'm going to say a thing,” he says. “I need you to let me get all the way through it, and I need you to know you don't owe me anything back.”
My heart starts beating faster. I don’t know why. “Okay.”
“I love you,” he states plainly. “I started loving you when we first met, and I've been falling every day since.
I'm done pretending I started this for any reason except that I looked at you in those bleachers my first day here, and something in me just went, there she is.” He shrugs.
“That's the speech. I love you, you don't owe me a word, eat your popcorn.”
And here's what my body does with that. The thing it always does when something's too big to hold. I go still. The words I'm supposed to say back are right there, but they're jammed behind twenty-three years of stuckness.
“Hey, it's okay.” He doesn't move in. He leaves me the room. “I told you. You don't have to say anything. I didn't say it to get it back. I said it because it's true, and you should get to hear it at least once from me.”
“I'm not frozen because I don't feel it,” I make myself say, fast, before I can’t. “I'm frozen because I do, and I've never said it to one person in my life, and I'm scared that the second I say it, it turns into a thing somebody can take.”
“Jasmine, you don't have to.” He looks down at his bowl of popcorn when he says it. He’s caring for me in the way he always does, but I know him. He needs to hear it back. He wants to hear it back. And I want to say it.
“I love you.” It comes out cracked and too loud. “I love you. There. It's out. You can't unhear it.”
He looks at me like I handed him the one thing he's been hungry for his whole life.
“No,” he says, roughly. “I really can't.”
He kisses me, telling me first, and it tastes like popcorn and salted butter, and when he pulls back, he keeps his forehead against mine.
“Say it again.”
“You're greedy.”
“I’ve always been greedy. Now say it again.”
“I love you. Caleb. I love you.” It's easier the second time. Nobody tells you that.
He makes a sound I've never heard out of him, and pulls me into his chest, and his heart's going fast, just like mine.
“That's the thing I was scared to want,” he says into my hair.
“You. Scared?”
“Love has meant a lot of complicated things for me.” His arms tighten.
“Okay.”
We don't talk for a while. In fact, we do one of my favorite things that requires very little talking.
“You sure you want to do this?” he asks with low eyelids as I drop to my knees in front of him.
“Practice makes perfect.”
“You’re a good fucking student, Dixon.” His head falls back.
“That’s because I want an A.”
Later, I lay in his arms, we’re both satiated, but everything between us still lingers.
“Carolina's eight states away,” I say to him, because even after great sex, I can’t turn off my brain.
“Forty-one hours by car. I checked.”
“You checked?”
“I check everything when it comes to you now.” He tucks my hair back.
“We'll figure it out, Dixon. I make camp, you finish out the season and hand your dad his shiny program, and the day there's nothing left to hide, I will tell him myself, man to man. It might not be pretty, but I’ll take whatever he throws.” He says it like he’s determined to make us work, and more than anything, I want to believe him.
But like a badly scripted episode of my show, my phone lights up on the arm of the couch, face up, one word.
DAD.
Caleb goes still under me. We both look at it. It's nine-forty on a Tuesday night. My father does not call at nine-forty for nothing.
I answer in the voice, the regulated one, sitting up off his chest like distance over a phone line is a thing that works.
“Hi. No, I'm up.” I listen. Caleb watches my face the way he watches everything. “Tomorrow. Seven. Is it about a player?” A pause that runs a beat too long. “Okay, I’ll be there.”
I hang up.
“What?” Caleb says.
“He wants me in his office tomorrow morning. He wouldn't say why.” I set the phone face down, like that helps. “He said, we need to talk about how this season ends.”
Neither of us says anything for a second. The show keeps playing, strangers handing each other roses.
“It's probably nothing,” Caleb says, which is the thing you say when you both know it might be everything.
“Right,” I say.
I lie back down against his chest because I’ve learned to take the good thing while it's in front of me. His heart's going faster than it was a minute ago. So is mine.
“Hey.” He lifts my chin with two fingers. “Whatever it is, we hold to the plan. There’s only us now.”
“Only us,” I parrot back.
And for the length of one more Tuesday night, I let myself believe we have a foolproof plan. That's the part I'll think about later, when it all comes apart. That I knew I was fooling myself, but I let myself believe it anyway.