Chapter 2 #2
any eye contact, but we’re used to it by now. Then Wesley stands, and he puts both arms around Annica and Dani, roughing up
Annica’s hair in the way that a brother would, which she absolutely hates. The two girls remove his arms from around their
shoulders, moving on to the rest of the gang, and leaving Wesley and me alone.
“Hey,” he says, opening his arms when I do for the most awkward hug of the century. My left arm goes up when his right does,
causing one of us to have to change direction, making for a strange fumbling situation. Anyone watching might think we just
met. Like we haven’t known each other for years. Like we didn’t sleep together this past summer.
I catch a whiff of his cologne in our short embrace.
I always thought he smelled like detergent and rain.
Like fresh laundry during a summer storm.
It’s usually a comforting scent, but now it makes my heart ache.
His eyes are cast down at our feet when we separate, and I look toward the door, where my friends are talking to Asher and Jake.
Annica quickly looks away, like she had witnessed this whole interaction.
“So how are you?” I ask to break the silence.
He takes a deep breath and answers on the exhale, “Yeah, uh, good. You?”
“I’m fine.”
Wes nods, taking a sip of his beer and looking off to the side, where the setting sun casts a golden glow over his face. I
could get lost in the way the light shimmers in his green eyes, but I snap myself out of it. This conversation has run its
course.
“I’m going to grab a drink.” I give him a tight smile and step around him, but he catches my wrist. Gently, like a whisper.
“We should talk later.” He doesn’t say about what; he doesn’t have to.
It’s about last summer, it has to be. I walk through their house imagining one specific scenario of this conversation: It
plays out in my head like a movie scene. At the end of the night, everyone will be gone, and he’ll catch me as I’m leaving
the party. Small droplets of warm late-summer rain will fall around us and he’ll tell me he hasn’t stopped thinking about
me, and damn it all to hell, let’s just be together. We’ll kiss as the rain comes down harder around us, like something out
of a Nicholas Sparks novel.
A stray Ping-Pong ball hits me in the side of the head as I make my way through the living room, pulling me from my daydream.
This is not The Notebook, this is college.
I toss it back to the table where Dani and Annica are already in a game of beer pong.
I keep down the hall toward the kitchen.
The floorboards creak beneath me and my shoes stick to the ground with each step.
Cream-colored paint chips from the walls, which are lined with mismatched couches and random pieces of furniture.
It’s obvious a group of boys has been living here for three years.
I grab a seltzer from the fridge and almost run into Asher when I turn around. He clicks his tongue and wags a finger at me
as he leans on the wall. “Sloane Sawyer, you naughty girl.” He crosses his tan arms and sports a smug smile, looking as though
he just caught me doing something I shouldn’t have.
“Asher.” I give him a tight-lipped smile. “If this is about last year, everyone’s over it by now.” The boys loved to tease
me about both the affair and the DUI. I let them make their jokes and waited for the next big thing to steal their attention.
“I saw you this summer,” he says, eyebrows rising up to his sandy-blond curls that brush over his forehead. Wesley and Asher
have the same light green eyes, being that they’re cousins. And I wonder how it’s possible to melt when I look into one pair
and boil at the other.
“You all saw me this summer. I came back here for Jake’s birthday party, remember?” I edge around him to walk back to the
living room.
“I saw you after the party, and I saw whose bedroom you walked out of in the morning.” That stops me dead in my tracks, and
I turn again to face him. “You and Wesley. Interesting.”
I walk back toward him, bringing the conversation down to a whisper. “I think you’ve just had too much to drink, Asher. You
don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He looks down at my unopened drink. “Maybe you just haven’t had enough.” He pops the top of the can. “Loosen up, Sawyer, it’s
a party,” he says with a smile as he tips the can to my lips and puts a hand on the door to the backyard.
“Wait,” I call out before he leaves. “Who all knows?”
He taps a finger to his mouth, pretending to think about it. “I think just me. For now.” He gives me a wicked smirk. He thinks
this is funny.
“Asher,” I say through clenched teeth. “Please keep this to yourself.”
He leans back against the door. “What’s in it for me?”
“What is it that you want?” I bite out, not able to fully believe he would require anything from me just to keep a secret.
But it’s Asher after all.
He doesn’t even need time to think about it. “Free drinks at the wine bar you work at, anytime I come in.”
I gape at him. “I can’t just make those free. I’d have to pay for them myself.”
“Do you think Annica knows about what happened? Or Marissa?” I can’t hide the flicker of my expression when he says it. “Oh,
you didn’t know her and Wes are back together?”
“Fine,” I grit out. “Free drinks.” He doesn’t venture out of Pembroke anyway, so I likely won’t have to give him free anything,
but Asher was always the biggest asshole of the group for seemingly no reason, so he just might.
When Asher walks out the back door, I stand there alone in the kitchen, taking a breath.
Wes is back together with Marissa Wilder.
Of course. Of course! We’ve been friends since freshman year, why would that change just because of one drunken hookup?
My mind switches back to Jonah as another stab of guilt pierces my gut.
He hasn’t been dead a full twenty-four hours and I’m already worrying about someone else.
But Wes is in my mind like a song you just discovered and love.
You play it over and over again until you’re tired of it.
It’s been four years and I’m still not tired of it.
I bring the seltzer to my mouth and start to chug. Then grab another.
The party fizzles out around midnight, when most people leave for the bars or other house parties. Annica left an hour ago
for the hockey house and Dani is now wanting to head to the bars as well.
“You ready?” she asks, grabbing her purse and pulling the strap over her shoulder. I glance around the party, now thinning
out, and catch Wesley’s eyes. He tilts his head toward the stairs. To his room.
“Uh, no. I might go home. I’m just not feeling it tonight.” It isn’t a complete lie.
Dani gives me a sympathetic frown. “Okay.” She rubs my shoulder. “Text me if you need anything.” I watch as Charlie places
a hand to her back to guide her out, and I wonder if anyone will ever love me like Charlie secretly loves Dani, with longing
stares and light touches. He’s her fallback. Her casual hookup whenever she’s lonely. I can only hope for his sake that one
day she gives him a real chance.
Jake and Sam follow the two of them out the door and that leaves just me and Wes. And Asher. At the base of the stairs with
my hand on the railing, I look around the living room before going up. The last thing I need is Asher catching me leaving
Wesley’s room a second time. I wonder what I’d owe him then. He’s nowhere in sight, so I climb the rickety wood staircase,
then walk down the hall and into the last room on the left. Wesley’s room.
It looks the same as it always has. Just a bed, no bed frame, a dresser with a TV on it, and that stupid high school flag he won’t get rid of. “Wow, I love what you’ve done with the place,” I joke, pretending to admire it.
“I actually added a new flag. You didn’t even notice.” He points to a small American flag in a mug on his nightstand.
“Wow, so patriotic, a real nationalist.” It’s easy to joke with him after a few drinks. Easy to pretend we’re back to normal.
He starts to take off his sweatshirt, and his T-shirt underneath comes up in the process, briefly showing off his bare abdomen
and chest, and I catch myself staring before he pulls the T-shirt back down and throws the sweatshirt into a hamper.
“Jake spilled a beer all over me,” he says, ruffling his dark wavy hair and setting his hat on the dresser. “You’d think this
kid would know how to hold his alcohol by now.”
I clear my throat and look away from his toned arms, and his hands, the same ones that touched me and— God, get it together,
Sloane. “So you wanted to talk?”
He crosses the room and sits on his bed. “Yeah.” He looks down at his hands, then up at me still standing here. “You can sit
if you want.” He motions to the bed, but when I look at it all I can think about is last summer. I slowly take a seat, careful
to create distance between us.
“I feel kind of weird about it, with what happened,” he says finally.
I take a breath, wiping my sweating palms on my jeans. “Weird?”
“Yeah, we were both so drunk I almost feel like I took advantage of you or something.”
“You didn’t take advantage of me. I wanted the same thing,” I say quickly, not wanting him to spend another fraction of a
second thinking I didn’t want this. That I didn’t want him.
He nods before saying, “I think about it a lot.”
My heart is beating so fast, it feels like it might leap out of my chest. “I do too,” I admit, albeit a little too enthusiastically.
Suddenly his next words seem like the most important ones I’ll ever hear and all I can do is take in a breath, one almost
too fragile to hold.
“And that’s why I think it can’t happen again,” he says. “We’re better as friends, and I just don’t want that to go away.”
I blink, as the feeling of electric anticipation turns into the sharp sting of loss, even though nothing tangible was taken
from me. We are just as we once were. We are friends.
“Okay, yeah,” I say, because I don’t know what else to say. I could tell him what I really want to say. I could tell him that
I think about him all the time. Even before what we did last summer. That all the alcohol and all the other guys are just
a distraction. But instead, I lie. “I agree.”
Friends. I can do the friend thing; we’ve been doing the friend thing. So why does it hurt so bad to hear him say it?
He clears his throat. “I’m sorry about your ex. Annica told us what happened.”
“It’s fine, I’m fine,” I say, a little too clipped. I don’t want to talk about Jonah, not with Wes. I stand from the bed.
“If that’s all you wanted to talk about . . .” I trail off.
“Are you . . . coming to the bars?” he asks, standing up with me.
“No, I think just home actually. I’m trying this new thing this year where I’m not a total disappointment.” But the real reason
is that I can’t go out after this conversation and pretend to be happy. I can’t drink and dance knowing I’m now the victim
of unrequited feelings.
I tuck a loose strand of blond behind my ear. He tracks the movement. He told me this summer that he loves my hair, especially when it’s down and long like it is now; he said it drives him crazy. He said that. Friends don’t say those things to other friends.
His eyes meet mine again as his lips turn down. “You know, just because you made a few bad decisions doesn’t make you a bad
person.”
I feel my eyebrows rise slightly. He pities me. Not only does he not want me, but he feels bad for me. And all I feel is embarrassment.
“Thanks, Wes, I’ll see you,” I say, leaving his room before this conversation can get any worse.
I take out my journal when I get back to my apartment and flip to the last page. The one with Wesley’s name, and nothing else.
I didn’t see or speak to him for the remainder of the summer, but the night after we slept together, I opened my journal and
I wrote down his name. I didn’t have anything else to add because I didn’t feel brokenhearted over what happened, and I certainly
didn’t want him to be dead to me. I still don’t. I sit with the pencil poised to write, but I pull it away. I consider ripping
out the page entirely, but it’s only the beginning of the year.
There’s still plenty of time for him to break my heart.