19. Present Day
Present Day
A battered paperback. A lighter. A balled-up pair of clean socks. A dirty pair of dark-blue boxer briefs. A frayed toothbrush. A stick of deodorant.
She thought there would be more.
The first night Lindsey got home from the trip, she kept finding pieces of Graham. Today the tiny, inconsequential remnants of their relationship barely filled the bottom of the box she collected them in. It wasn’t much to show for a year together.
She was still carrying the box, scouring the living room for anything of Graham’s she’d missed, when there was a sharp rap at the door.
On the other side, Helen waited breathlessly in the second-floor hallway with two iced coffees, flushed cheeks, and the unease of a woman unsure why she knocked.
“Hey,” Lindsey said, equally unsure.
“Hey.”
Helen looked behind her, as if for an exit. Lindsey was a little amazed she raised the cup in her left hand instead of bolting.
“What’s this for?” Lindsey asked.
“Helping me carry the drunk weight last night,” Helen said. She entered slowly, surveying the living room cluttered with boxes and already devoid of anything personal.
“I’d say any time, but I really hope it doesn’t happen again,” Lindsey said.
“You and me both,” Helen said. “All Graham’s done since we got back is drink.”
“That’s all he did before, too,” Lindsey said. “Does he know you’re here?”
“I doubt he’s even conscious. They’re having the nastiest duel ever—who can snore the loudest and stink the most.”
“Gross.” Lindsey sat on the couch and dropped the box of Graham’s belongings on the coffee table. “For you,” she said.
Helen reached into the box and picked up the boxer briefs with the tips of two pink nails. “Well. If that’s not a visual.”
“No worse than listening to all the work he’s been putting in with you,” Lindsey said, sipping from her straw.
Instead of firing back, Helen was feeling the underside of the coffee table.
“What are you doing?” Lindsey asked.
With a dramatic flip of her long, dark hair, Helen came up with a single, tightly rolled joint from under the lip of the table. “Some things never change,” she said.
“Hm, I thought I found them all,” Lindsey said. She slipped into the kitchen and returned with a baggie of five identical joints. Graham’s favorite game: hiding joints like Easter eggs. “Want to get lit?”
A few minutes later they were relaxing on the couch in a cloud of blue smoke and Lindsey was asking, “Did you ever think you’d be getting stoned at my apartment at nine in the morning?”
“Not a chance.” Helen coughed out a laugh. “You know what’s even crazier? You’re, like, my only friend in Ohio.”
“What, did Graham get all the friends in the divorce?” Lindsey chided.
“Short version? Of our collective friends, which were mostly his to begin with, yes,” Helen said. “In college I lost track of almost everyone from back home. You know how it is. People disperse, and none of my friends wanted to stick around Greenville.”
“Greenville? That’s north, right?”
Helen nodded. “In the middle of nowhere. I got out, went to college, met Graham, and became super absorbed in our relationship, to the detriment of everyone and everything else.” She glared pointedly at Lindsey, as if any of this was her fault.
“In case you haven’t noticed, we function with an unhealthy dose of dysfunction. ”
“The only part about you two I didn’t care for was your blatant lack of respect for ongoing relationships,” Lindsey said.
She tried keeping a straight face, project some of the anger she felt on the road that she didn’t feel anymore, but her cheeks cracked, and the rest came tumbling out around giggles.
“And having to fucking listen to you fucking.”
It was the first time Lindsey heard Helen laugh.
She allowed herself a rare long look at the exceptionally beautiful woman who was slowly becoming her friend.
Physically Helen was striking and intense, from her high cheekbones to her sleek, gazelle-like legs that were crossed and propped on the coffee table.
Lindsey was soft and understated and literally pale in comparison to Helen’s golden, sun-kissed skin.
Freckles dotted Lindsey’s nose, and her blue eyes bordered on gray and weren’t about to pierce anyone’s soul, while Helen’s bordered on ethereal and, if narrowed, could probably shoot ice daggers into the hearts of her enemies.
When she stopped laughing, Helen’s slightly less frosty gaze roamed the room again, as if she couldn’t understand how she ended up there.
Losing track of their friends was finally something, other than Graham, they had in common.
“I don’t have many friends anymore either,” Lindsey said. “Everyone seemed to know what they wanted to do and where they wanted to go except me, and they just kept going until there wasn’t anyone left.”
“Have you figured it out yet?” Helen asked. “What you want to do and where you want to go?”
“Not really.”
They puffed quietly on their individual joints and sipped their coffees from opposite ends of the couch, and Lindsey contemplated the strange state of limbo she’d entered.
It wasn’t her intention to move into the house, yet all her clothes were already there except for the jackets hanging in the closet by the apartment’s front door.
She’d taken pictures of her furniture to list for sale online but wasn’t sure if she’d actually post them.
The kitchen cupboards were empty, and the living room floor was covered in boxes of dishes, reused takeout containers, and utensils she didn’t know what to do with.
If she kept the house, she wouldn’t need any of it.
If she didn’t, she certainly wouldn’t pillage the Young estate for dishes and furniture.
“I’m definitely leaving this apartment,” Lindsey said, the one clear decision she’d made.
“Don’t give them the house.”
Lindsey studied Helen through the smoke.
“Whatever you do, don’t give it back to them,” Helen said. “Keep it.”
“I’m the last person who should live in that house,” Lindsey said. “It’s full of terrible memories.”
“So make new ones.”
“And ghosts.”
Helen blew out a cloud and drew her eyebrows together. “Real ghosts?”
“Real enough,” Lindsey said.
After stripping the Jetson bed of sheets, she’d closed Jason’s bedroom up tight again, doubting she’d ever sleep in the sprawling main-floor primary suite even if she officially moved in after Jase and Graham moved out.
“They’ll go away, won’t they?” Helen asked.
“How am I supposed to get over it if I never get away?”
“Get over what? Jason’s death? The breakup?”
“Y-yes,” Lindsey drew the word out into two syllables. Those two very important events should’ve been the hardest on her heart.
“Ah. Jase,” Helen exhaled his name in a puff of smoke.
Yes, Jase. The reason Helen was able to sit on Lindsey’s couch, in Lindsey’s apartment, talking about men.
“What’d he say when you talked to him?” Helen asked.
“That he was sorry.” Lindsey shrugged.
“That’s it?”
“Pretty much. Why?”
“Well, that’s disappointing,” Helen said. “I thought he’d come up with something better after the whole airport thing.”
“What airport thing?”
“The airport.” Helen sat up and held the tip of her joint away from her face. “Are you serious? He didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“No way. No way.” Helen briefly covered her mouth. “I can’t believe you still don’t know. Jase came to the airport after we left them at the storage unit.”
Lindsey rubbed her sandy and swollen eyes. She must’ve been super stoned. There was no other explanation for what she was hearing.
“You’re messing with me.”
“It’s true. He tried to catch you, but he was too late.”
Eleven days ago Lindsey sat on a plane staring out at the tarmac, waiting for Jase to come blazing up on his chrome horse to stop her. And, of course, he hadn’t, except—
Jase came to the airport.
“Hey, did you hear me?” Helen prodded Lindsey’s leg with her sandal.
“You saw him?” Lindsey asked. “Did you talk to him?”
“I told him you were already on a plane for home.”
Lindsey tried imagining Jase—as red-faced and out of breath as he’d been after sprinting to the bus station in Austin—bursting into the airport, searching for her.
Why? To appease his guilt? The trip was over.
He was going to be a millionaire because she’d stayed, or so they thought at the time. Why chase her down at all?
“Okay, can I just ask?” Helen leaned closer. “What actually happened between you two? Don’t say nothing. I saw you making out at the pier.”
Lindsey closed her mouth when nothing almost came out.
“Were you guys fooling around while you were still—”
“If you say while you were still with Graham, I’ll go for the punch I missed,” Lindsey said, referring to the swing she took at Helen that cracked Graham across the jaw in the middle of the desert.
Helen sighed. “Fine. Then when? And…what?”
Lindsey also sighed, sending the blue smoke into a tornado between them. “Great questions. It was this wild…” Her head fell back against the couch. “It started in Austin, after Graham went to see you. We were alone. I was…heartbroken.”
Helen averted her eyes and took another hit of her joint. “Would it be super bitchy of me to say you couldn’t have felt too bad about Graham if you moved onto his brother immediately?”
Helen had a way of making Lindsey want to choke. Or maybe it was the weed.
“I’m seriously considering taking that swing,” Lindsey said.
“I asked if it would be super bitchy.”
“It is.” After a pause, Lindsey admitted, “It’s also true. Graham and I were hanging on by a thread. I spent more time with Jase on the trip than Graham. In Austin we were drinking and he…”
She trailed off, her veins humming at the memory of Jase’s body formed around her back to line up a ball on the pool table, the immediate ache between her legs the first time he kissed her.
The kiss had been for show, but the dormant fire it ignited inside her core was as real today as it was in Austin.
“He made me feel something,” Lindsey said, for lack of a better explanation. “Something I’ve never felt before.”
“It was more than a one-time thing, then?” Helen surmised.
“It wasn’t supposed to be.” Lindsey took a hit, her words straining around the weed in her lungs. “I thought he actually cared about me.”
“Jase going to the airport proves he does, right? Otherwise he could’ve just let you go, not drag Graham there on his motorcycle.”
Lindsey choked on an exhale. “Graham rode with Jase?”
“Talk about something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime.”
Her laugh started small as she imagined Graham clinging to Jase’s back through San Francisco traffic. Graham, who hated motorcycles and his brother, with his arms wrapped around Jase, his butt cheeks probably clenching every time they hit a bump or went up a hill.
“Graham must’ve been so miserable,” Lindsey squeaked out.
Helen didn’t try to hold back the guffaw from exploding from her chest. Then Lindsey erupted, and they laughed uncontrollably until tears leaked down their cheeks.
Lindsey clutched her sore belly. “I can’t—I can’t even believe that.”
“Right?” Helen exclaimed. “Serves them both right.”
A few minutes of hysterics later, Lindsey managed to ask, “So, what do you think I should do?”
Helen carefully dabbed under her eyes to keep her mascara from smudging and said, “I don’t know. Jase doesn’t exactly strike me as the flowers and poetry kind of guy.”
“Definitely not.”
“Dynamite in bed?”
“Yes,” Lindsey said emphatically.
Helen tamped a hand on her chest as if to hold in another laugh. “I’m trying to be serious, but I keep thinking about them on the bike.”
The laugh she couldn’t hold in either snorted out Lindsey’s nose.
“Okay, okay.” Helen pinched the end of her joint between her fingernails in the most delicate yet badass way to snuff a burning ember Lindsey had ever seen. “Other than Jase being…Jase…what is holding you back?”
“For starters, he lied to me.”
“So did I, and here we are.”
“Which has me seriously questioning my sanity.”
“So should falling for Jase.”
“Last night I told him I loved him.”
As soon as the words flew out, Lindsey clamped her hands over her mouth. Helen shimmied across the couch.
“You did?”
Still covering her mouth, Lindsey shook her head.
“You did,” Helen said.
“He was wasted,” Lindsey explained. “There’s no way he remembers.”
“You really do, though? You love him?”
“I don’t know what this is,” Lindsey said, her hands falling hard at her sides.
“I don’t know what do with how I feel. It’s like running toward the edge of a cliff, and it’s scary and exciting and feels like no matter what, I’m headed for disaster.
There’s no way this plays out where I don’t end up heartbroken. Again.”
“What would you have, if you could have anything? What’s the big dream?”
She saw Jase riding his bike into the sunset, only he wasn’t running away from her. She was holding on to his back.
Lindsey shook her head and that big, totally impossible dream away. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Why not?”
She frowned and forced out the truth as she knew it. “He might be sorry for what he did, but it doesn’t change the biggest thing. The only thing that really matters.”
Helen squeezed Lindsey’s wrist. “Out with it.”
“He doesn’t want me.”
Helen slumped and the sharpness returned to her bright-blue eyes. “You are such an idiot.”