26 | Taylor
Taylor
Melina uses her pinky to move my chin up and to the right. “I have to say this is weirdly erotic,” she mumbles.
I snatch her wrist to stop her from sponging my neck. “Excuse me?”
“I don’t know. Something about you being all still and quiet is getting me hot and heavy.”
I look down at her body, sitting on my lap as we fly to New Hampshire. Maybe the eroticism comes from her straddling me.
“This is torture, Melina.”
I migrate my hands from her thighs to her waist and squeeze. She bucks before moving them to her hips.
“You act like you don’t like it,” she says.
Melina’s been muttering less-than-sweet-nothings in my ear all morning. I’ve been pretending I don’t hear them. And I thought I had dirty thoughts.
She cocks her head at my bruise that in the night shifted from being Florida-shaped to Alaska-shaped.
I almost surprised myself in the mirror this morning until I remembered I got punched yesterday.
In Cape Cod of all places. Aren’t people supposed to be friendly in quaint seaside towns? They are in St. Claire.
The jumbo hair clip I found in Melina’s makeup bag suddenly falls apart in my palm. I’ve been opening and closing it to keep my hands busy.
“I broke your thing,” I say, holding up the mangled object.
“That’s fine. It’s just the claw clip my great grandma gave me before she died.”
I squeeze her tighter. “Really?”
“No. They break all the time. I buy a new one like once a year.” She flips some hair over her shoulder. “This lying stuff is so fun.”
“I think honesty suits you better.”
She makes a pouty face, then bends to kiss me.
Maybe she just went in for a consolation peck, but I lean in before she can pull away.
The make-out session becomes our most graphic yet.
We go at it like sticky teenagers who’ve just discovered open-mouthed kissing.
She makes that little humming sound again that I want to bottle up and drink.
I move my mouth down her jaw, then to her neck.
My hand slides into her jeans, then under the waistband of her lace panties so I can feel what I can of her ass.
Melina sitting on my lap gives me good vantage of her chest. When she arches back, I move my lips to her cleavage until I’m stopped by the V-neck of her sweater.
I’m about to claw it off until she pushes on my shoulders, prying herself from me.
“We’re not going to get anything done.”
“Too hot and heavy?”
“Exactly,” she says, getting back to work. “You have very nice skin by the way.”
She sounds so normal for having just given me a semi.
Melina fishes an orange lipstick from her bag. When she starts going towards me with it, I put my hand up.
“What are you doing?”
“Your bruise is very blue today and I didn’t bring any orange color corrector, so this is the best I got.”
“Orange is the opposite of blue,” I mumble to myself.
She seems to know a lot about this stuff. Earlier she mixed part of her concealer with the one Cassie gave me to match my skin color.
“Have you always been good at art?”
“This isn’t art,” she says, holding up the pink sponge. “You’re just discovering something every girl discovered in grade eight.”
“But the paintings in your apartment. They’re yours, right?” I ask like I don’t know the answer.
I’ve inspected them close enough to see their tiny Melina signature. She’s like me, too extraordinary for last names.
She nods.
“Tell me about them.”
Melina scrunches her face like that’s a weird command. “Why?”
“What do you mean ‘why?’ I like them. I thought you were an open book.”
“I used to paint,” she says, leaning back on my knees. “I don’t anymore.”
“Why?”
“You sound like a toddler.” She flaps her hand. “Why, why, why.”
“Fine.” I cross my arms. “Keep being cagey and standoffish.”
“People lose hobbies, okay? I did them when I was in my early twenties, then I got a big girl job, and now I don’t have time anymore. My brother’s the artist anyways.”
Something about the way she trails off intrigues me.
“Can there only be one artist in the family?”
“No, but being a twin is a constant comparison. Mateo paints and draws and fucking sculpts. His tattoos have been on the covers of magazines. People travel to the country for appointments they’ve booked a year in advance.
Being creative is his thing. If he’s the ‘good at art’ twin, then I don’t want to feel like the ‘mediocre at art’ twin.
I’m proud of those paintings, but you know what I thought right after I did them?
Mateo could do this ten times better. I just got sick of it after a while. ”
“But you liked painting?”
“Yeah. I loved it. I painted when I needed to de-stress. I think that’s my problem. To be a good artist I should be, like, fighting my inner demons with every stroke or something.”
“I think your brother would be disappointed if you quit doing something you loved because of him.” Not that I know anything about Mateo, frankly, he scares me, but I do know some things about being a brother.
“What did you say to me? Anyone can be good at anything. Even if you’re really shit at first? And your art is nowhere near shit.”
“Yeah, maybe.” She starts with the makeup again. “All right, no more questions about me. You’re the cagey and standoffish one.”
“I grant you one question.”
She thinks for a second like she doesn’t want it to go to waste. Obviously, I’ll let her ask any amount of questions she wants.
“Do you know where your mother’s missing necklace is?”
“No.”
She squints at me.
I squint back.
She squints harder.
“I’m serious, I don’t know.” I really don’t.
“They think it was one of our staff who took it.” Which is still hard for me to believe.
I wouldn’t say I’m a trusting person, but I’ve known some of the groundskeepers as long as I’ve known my own father.
I think my mother offered more tea, coffee, and biscuits to the housekeepers than they offered us.
My heart wants to believe they would never steal her necklace.
Melina dismounts from my lap and sits next to me. “Maybe we’re living in a Disney movie, and it’ll magically appear for the next Princess of St. Claire.”
“Disgusting,” I say, wincing.
She laughs. “So it’s not a conspiracy? I can’t believe you know as much as I do.”
“I was even questioned,” I say. “Which is a really cool thing to be accused of right after your mom dies.”
I might’ve cussed my Dad out when he politely asked if I knew anything.
I was in the anger stage of grief for a while.
Maybe part of my short temper could’ve been excused given the circumstances, but there came a point where I was making it harder on everyone by no fault but my own.
Dad tried his best to walk eggshells around me, only coming in my room to ask questions like, ‘Are you eating’, and ‘When’s the last time you showered?
’ Weeks went by without me or my brother talking to each other.
It was 2:06 in the morning when he found the courage to text me.
It wasn’t anything prosaic, mostly stream-of-consciousness with not a lot of periods and a whole lot of typos.
He signed off by saying, It feels like you died too.
Gut-wrenching. I’d rather he shot me in the face.
That night I finally emerged from my hovel.
Tom and I rewatched Cowboy Bepop and consumed high-fructose corn syrup until the sun came up.
“I’m done, by the way.” Melina holds up a compact mirror. “You’re good as new. Well, the bruise is still there, but at least no one can see it.”
I adjust her hand to see my jaw. Her work is impressive. The remnants of the coastal douchebag are gone. At least from what I can see, which is nothing. The amount of shit I’ve bumped into or knocked over today is embarrassingly high considering it’s only the early afternoon.
“What would I ever do without you?”
She tucks some hair behind her ear. “Can I ask you one more question?”
“You can ask me as many questions as you want.”
“What was your mom like? I know she never really spoke to press.”
Melina asks like this is a touchy subject, but it’s not anymore. When I look back, I’m less angry that she’s gone from life and more grateful that she got to be in it at all.
“Charlotte was an overprotective, hopelessly sarcastic, control freak,” I say with all the affection in the world.
Melina hums. “Must be hereditary.”
“She didn’t like crowds or public speaking or English.
” Or pantyhose or the color orange or most prime ministers, she didn’t like a lot of things.
“But it’s hard to describe her as shy because it didn’t feel like that at home.
She was one of those people who are talented at everything, cooking, sports, and musical instruments.
And Mario Kart for some reason, she was really good at Mario Kart. ” We played that a lot during the end.
“She sounds like a cool person.”
“She was a cool person. And a rampant chain smoker. Sometimes I wonder if she was still around, I would be less of a bastard.”
Melina leans her head on my shoulder. “You’re not a bastard, Taylor. Just because you hide some of your, uh, personality quirks from the public, doesn’t mean that deep down you’re not just a guy trying to do something useful for the world.”
I don’t respond. I have done and probably will do some shitty things because of my mother’s death.
What I most regret in life is leaving my thirteen-year-old brother alone as our dad was figuring out the whole single-parent thing, only coming back a few times out of the year to not be reminded that she isn’t there.
I finally return from Dartmouth to find out he’s planning to enlist. My little brother.
The one who has trouble reading and is obsessed with Pokémon.
Him. He’s going to be given a machine gun?
Between boarding school and college, I’d missed his childhood.
Her necklace wasn’t the only thing that disappeared after Mom was gone.
Interpersonal connection might be what therapists call it.
Mom was our glue. She made us talk to each other and apologize and share, you know, normal human shit.
My dad, brother, and I are all too stubborn and masculine to put in the effort with each other, and we’ve just learned to live with it.
I can’t tell my father that I’d be a wreck if I lost him.
And I can’t tell him that every time he puts a cigarette to his lips it scares the ever-living shit out of me.
It’s difficult to describe exactly what we lost and it’s hard to mourn things you can’t label.
Better to just repress the feeling down into a diamond with the hopes of one day passing it like a kidney stone.
“Stay an extra night,” I say, putting my arm around Melina. “Please.”
She sits up. Only a month ago I wouldn’t believe she’d ever look at me with such care and compassion.
“I was planning on going back after Dartmouth, but there isn’t anything I need to do at home right away.”
Also, being in a foreign country and ignoring phone calls with my Melina is a new favorite hobby.
“What about seeing?” she asks. “You need to see, right?”
I lower my voice. “I’ve seen enough.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Whatever you want. I have a plane.” And two pilots, but they shouldn’t mind if I pay them.
“I’ve never had a guy offer to take me anywhere before.”
“Not anywhere. Preferably something on the East Coast.”
She snaps her fingers. “New York.”
I lean in and kiss her because she lets me do things like that now. “New York.”