Chapter 10 #2
The moment my palm slipped into his, he yanked me off of the stool and twirled me around the kitchen as the song picked up.
“What is this?” I tried to catch my breath between words, although I wasn’t sure if it was Brooklyn’s wild dancing or how close our bodies were that made my lungs beg for fresh air.
“I really refuse to believe you’ve never heard KC and the Sunshine Band.” Brooklyn shook his head. “It’s a classic.”
Before I knew it, he was singing out loud, trying not to laugh as he belted out the chorus. He wasn’t even a particularly good singer, but the way he crooned out the lyrics so naturally made my heart swell.
We both danced like idiots across the kitchen floor, so tuned in on laughing and trying not to trip over each other’s feet that we didn’t hear the front door open.
“Why the hell does it smell like burnt cheese in here?” Stella scurried into the kitchen with two bags of Whole Foods groceries and carelessly dropped them onto the countertop.
Brooklyn and I stumbled over each other as we stopped our lurid dancing and realized there was bread and cheese burning on the stove.
“Oh shit.” Brooklyn dashed to the stove and managed to salvage one of the sandwiches.
“Brooklyn.” The warning tone of voice came from his mother, who walked into the kitchen shortly after Stella with her own bags of groceries. “How many times have I told you if you use mayonnaise instead of butter, it won’t burn.”
“I know, I know, except there’s one problem with that: mayonnaise is disgusting.” Brooklyn scrunched his nose up.
“Right. Of course.” She chuckled and leaned up on her toes to kiss his cheek.
“Nice to see you again, Natalie.” She turned to me and gave me a white-toothed smile that shone against her naturally tan skin. I felt like I was looking at Stella thirty years into the future, with her high cheekbones and lightly freckled nose.
“You too,” I replied as I slid back onto my same stool at the kitchen island.
“Anyway, I have to talk to you.” Brooklyn dropped a plate with half a sandwich on it in front of me but kept his eyes on his mother.
“If this is about that trip with Alec to Japan again, I already told you it’s not happening.” Brooklyn’s mother brushed him off as she continued putting fruit away in the fridge.
“What? No, he’s not even going anymore.” Brooklyn crossed his arms over his chest. “Earlier today, I tried to buy a stupid DVD at the movie store, and Dad apparently locked my damn credit card.”
“You mean his credit card,” she corrected him.
“That’s not the point,” Brooklyn continued. “Can you just tell him to lay off? I don’t know what he thinks I’m getting myself into, especially considering he’s not even here to see what I’m not getting myself into. It’s like he’s out to get me or something.”
“He’s not out to get you. He’s only trying to prevent you from doing unnecessary things with your money.
But you can tell him all that yourself when he calls later.
” Even her words seemed to tiptoe. While her voice was nothing short of soothing, it was almost as if she was afraid to say the obvious.
Meanwhile, Brooklyn looked more uncharacteristically unsteady by the moment.
“Mom, drug dealers don’t take credit cards.” He groaned.
On the other side of the kitchen, a snort escaped Stella’s lips before she clapped her hand over her mouth.
“Brooklyn, maybe we should go start the movies,” I interjected. “Before it gets too late.”
Thunder rumbled outside, and that seemed to be the end of this tense but clearly familiar conversation. Finally, Brooklyn let out a resigned sigh and nodded. “Yeah, let’s go.”
I briefly made eye contact with Stella before leaving the kitchen, and a flicker of relief flashed over her before she turned away and continued unpacking groceries.
I followed Brooklyn down the front hall to the staircase, where photos lined the walls leading up to the second floor. I brushed my hand over the silver frames of Brooklyn’s and Stella’s senior high-school photos, all airbrushed with their white-toothed smiles and sun-kissed summer skin.
“I had baseball pants on in that picture,” Brooklyn told me with a gentle grin, as if the last five minutes hadn’t happened at all.
“Really?”
“They scheduled all the pictures during fall practice, but we only needed to be dressed from the waist up. So I kept my baseball pants on, threw a suit jacket on, took the picture, and went back to practice.”
His smile made me smile. It was that simple.
“Cute,” I said.
“I know.” His grin widened.
As we walked farther up the stairs, the photos became older and faded, and Brooklyn and Stella got younger and younger as I passed each one.
One trip to Disney. Junior travel baseball and cheerleading.
A few Christmas dinners. They were so painfully normal, they even had one of those awkwardly staged family photos in white turtlenecks and jeans.
Looking at them all in one place made my chest tighten.
I didn’t know how much I’d missed not having these kinds of family photos—picturesque and so complete—until I saw someone else’s. It was a weird, hollow feeling.
“Is that your dad?” I pointed at one of the photos at the top of the steps, where Brooklyn, who couldn’t have been older than seven or eight, was sitting on the shoulder of a muscular man, tall and wide and built like a tree.
Brooklyn clutched a shining trophy in one hand, and they were both sporting big smiles.
“Yep.” Brooklyn nodded, admiring the photo. “He looks pretty much the same now, except he’s mostly gray.”
“Your dad looks kind of intimidating.”
“He wrestled in college,” Brooklyn offered with a shrug as I followed him down the upstairs hallway to a room at the end. “But actually soft spoken, and he’s a smart guy. I obviously completely take after him.”
We shared another laugh before Brooklyn led me to his room. The way a man kept his bedroom said a lot about him. I didn’t know what I expected Brooklyn’s to look like, but it definitely wasn’t what I walked into.
A queen-sized bed with gray sheets was pushed against the right-side wall, and a black comforter was kicked to the edge of the bed.
A few Nike shoeboxes were neatly stacked next to the door, and a small, four-drawer dresser sat against the wall next to the boxes, the paint chipping at the edges.
A TV hung on the wall across from the bed with a few wires and cords hanging down from it, but any other wall space was empty.
The air felt thin, like there was too much empty space for it to fill.
Everything looked shrunken and tiny, and the big windows that overlooked the ocean only added to the openness of the space.
“You can sit on my bed,” Brooklyn said as he kicked off his sneakers and placed them on top of one of the shoeboxes. “Sorry I don’t have a chair for you or anything. I got rid of most of my stuff moving from Clayton back home.”
I nodded and slipped my sandals off by the door, then padded across the carpet to his bed. It creaked when I sat on the edge, and the sheets smelled like him—fresh and clean, like the air when it rains.
“This thing is ancient,” Brooklyn said, waving around an Xbox controller. “But it gets the job done.”
“Which one are we starting with?” I asked, trying to get comfortable but not too comfortable on his bed.
“Ladies first.” He grinned and shook the DVD box for Gummo.
He loaded the DVD on the console, then flopped onto the bed and put his hands behind his head, his T-shirt sleeves straining against his arms. How was I supposed to sit next to him, desperate to keep enough distance between us for fear of spontaneous combustion from the heat his body gave off?
The beginning of the movie was grainy, and the sound quality was shoddy at best. The town in the movie was ravaged by a tornado, and the child narrating the film seemed almost amused by it.
I glanced over at Brooklyn, who seemed engrossed in the bizarre imagery of the movie. His breathing had steadied, and every so often his eyes would droop shut, just for a moment, before snapping back open. Looking at him was like driving by a car crash—it was wrong to stare, but impossible not to.
I tried to turn my attention back to the movie. The boy in the movie held a dirty gray cat by the scruff of its neck, then put it in a trash can and aimed a shotgun at it.
“Oh my god, are they actually going to shoot that cat? I can’t watch that.
” On instinct alone, I turned my body into Brooklyn’s, burying my face in his chest. His body vibrated under me as he chuckled, and I felt him gently snake his arm around my shoulder, but he kept the weight of his arm suspended over me, like he still wasn’t sure if that was where it belonged.
The sound of the gun went off with a muffled bang.
“We can change it to the other movie if you want to,” he said.
“No, it’s okay. It’s fine.” I shook my head and lifted it off of his chest, smoothing my hair back. “I can handle a lot in movies, but animal cruelty is not high up on that list.”
“That makes sense. I can watch someone get hacked up and not bat an eye, but I cry every single time Atreyu loses Artax in the first Neverending Story.”
“Exactly.” I threw my hands up. “You get it.”
In fact, I was growing exceedingly aware of how much Brooklyn got it. He got a lot of it, and the speed with which this was all making sense was much faster than the logic of it not making sense.
I let out a sigh and slowly, more cautiously this time, leaned my head on Brooklyn’s chest. His fingers grazed my arm gently, sending goose bumps prickling up my skin.
His chest heaved as he exhaled, and he finally let his arm rest on my shoulders.
I eased my eyes shut, listening to the slow, rhythmic pounding of his heartbeat.
I felt safe in his arms, like the world could end and we would still be exactly where we were, untouched and unscathed.
Our bodies fit together perfectly. Almost too perfectly.
>> <<
“Is she sleeping?” a voice whispered.
I slowly opened my eyes, my cheek still pressed against Brooklyn’s soft T-shirt and my hair obscuring most of my face.
“I think so,” I heard Brooklyn say. He shifted his body underneath me, and I squeezed my eyes shut as tight as I could.
“Dad’s calling,” the voice whispered again. I finally recognized it as Stella’s, but more tense and uneasy. “Mom thinks you should talk to him.”
“Why?” Brooklyn hissed. He shifted again under me, this time gently sliding me off of him and resting my head on a pillow. I felt the bed rattle as he got off and walked to the doorway. I inhaled deeply and held my breath, trying to focus on their hushed words.
“I haven’t done anything wrong, but he acts like he knows even though he’s a thousand miles away.” Brooklyn continued, “I was trying to buy a $12.95 movie, do you have any idea how embarrassing that was? And in front of her?”
“Brooklyn, I don’t know.” Stella sounded tired now, like she’d had this exact conversation before. “In fact, all I do know is that you’re both being stubborn.”
“I don’t care how bad it looks, he needs to get off my back.” Brooklyn spoke again, his voice tight. “Maybe if he fucking trusted me, we wouldn’t have this issue.”
“You avoiding him doesn’t help your cause.” Stella sighed. “Go talk to him.”
Brooklyn let out a groan before his footsteps faded away down the hall. I opened my eyes to see Stella still standing in the doorway. The perfectly manicured facade she usually wore was gone, replaced by her hair up in a messy bun and tired eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Stella mumbled. “We didn’t mean to wake you.”
“It’s fine,” I said as I sat up. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, everything’s okay,” Stella said hurriedly. “My brother and my dad, they just bump heads sometimes.”
Stella twirled a lock of dark hair around her finger. I thought maybe I could hear the faint sound of Brooklyn’s raised voice, but Stella sighed and walked over to me, sitting on the side of the bed. She rested her hands in her lap.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
“I’m fine.” She let out a hollow chuckle and shook her head. “I love my brother to death. Really, I do. But sometimes he can be really selfish.”
I gave her a puzzled look, and Stella had just opened her mouth to say something else when Brooklyn appeared in the doorway. His cheeks were flushed.
“I should probably take you home now,” he said.
“Okay. Sure. Yeah.” I nodded tensely as I got up, leaving Stella still sitting on Brooklyn’s bed. I glanced back at her as I left the room, and she mustered up a faint smile.
After we left, Brooklyn flipped through several heavy metal songs on his car stereo before letting out a frustrated groan and shutting the music off.
The rain pounded hard on the windows, and I couldn’t steady my bobbing knees.
In my head, I toed the line between asking out of care and keeping my mouth shut so I didn’t overstep the whole damn thing.
After all, what did I know about any of this?
I could read about it as much as I wanted, but like I’d been learning with Nikki, real life experience was the only way you could really learn.
When we pulled up to my house, Brooklyn kept his hands white-knuckle tight on the steering wheel.
“Thanks for today,” I said. “I had a good time. Despite the weird movie choice. That was on me.”
“You’re welcome,” he replied. “I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to watch the other one.”
“Next time, then.” I nodded.
“Right. Next time.”
And that was the end of that. I fumbled with the seat belt as I readied myself to step into the downpour. Before I shut the door behind me, I turned back to him.
“Will you text me when you get home?” I asked.
He finally looked up at me, his blue eyes glazed over with an emptiness that made my heart clench. “Of course,” he said softly.
I shut the car door and watched him pull away. Rain came down on my head in fat blobs, and despite getting soaked, all I wanted was a warm shower.
I did just that, and afterward, I lay in bed, wrapped tightly in my plush blanket. When I checked my phone, there were still no messages from him. After some internal tug-of-war, I decided to leave him be. If I was in his shoes, I’d want some space too. At least, that was what I told myself.