Chapter Thirty-Five
Curtis
I awoke the next morning in a patch of gray light. Allie lay beside me, and for a moment, I panicked, wondering if we had gotten drunk the night before and how we had ended up here. But then I remembered the fight with Lizzie and the glow in my heart as I watched Allie defend me.
There’d been a couple of times since we’d begun dating when she had gotten dangerously close to conquering my heart. Last night, she had really done it. Now I was irrevocably and completely hers.
After I had put on my shirt, I lay there for a few minutes watching her breath gently rise and fall. I felt a pride and delight in lying next to her that I hadn’t felt before. Even though it was mostly unspoken, there was a sense now that we belonged to each other. For better or worse.
“You wanna know something interesting?” I asked Allie when she woke up.
“Always,” said Allie groggily, running her hand across my shoulders.
“For a long time after Christine’s death,” I said, “I couldn’t feel much of anything. I was neither dead nor alive, and it was like all the color had been sucked out of the world. I got hooked on booze and screens to the point where I couldn’t even feel my own heartbeat. You changed that.”
“Did I?” asked Allie, sounding amused but pleased. “In what way?”
“By putting me in situations where I had to feel things. There’ve been a lot of long, lonely nights since I met you, wondering if we’d ever be together. Those nights after our fight were some of the worst since her death. But there’s been a lot of joy, too, joy I didn’t think I’d ever have again. The other night when I thought we were breaking up, I remember sitting on my couch crying, and at the same time feeling weirdly happy because I hadn’t cried like this since just after she died. If that was the only thing you did for me, it would have been enough.”
Allie smiled and pulled me back down onto the bed, a flicker of pride in her eyes. “Well,” she said, “hopefully it won’t be the only good I do. I still think we have a long way to go together.”
“I suspect we do,” I said quietly, and we kissed.
Allie pulled herself away and rose reluctantly from the bed. “Anyway,” she said in an irritated tone, “the boss texted me last night and wanted me to come in early, so I can’t stick around very long, otherwise we could stay in bed all day. But if you need something to get you through the work week, Lindsay and I are planning on going dancing on Friday night.”
“How is Lindsay?” I asked with a note of concern in my voice.
“Not good since Zach left. She’s taken to locking herself up in her house and not really wanting to go anywhere. She blames herself for getting so attached to him, knowing he would be leaving. That’s why I wanted to take her out on Friday night. I thought it might be good for her.”
“Zach’s a great guy,” I said sadly. “I know me and my whole family was rooting for them to get together. It’s just hard when you live halfway across the world from each other.”
“Yeah, I guess we were lucky in that sense,” said Allie, coming over and resting her hands on either side of my neck. “Out here, I couldn’t get away from you even if I wanted to.”
***
After spending the night with Allie, I wasn’t looking forward to leaving home and going on the trail ride that morning. And I was even less happy about it when I found out Darren would be joining us.
“Your brother’s gonna be coming with us this week,” Dad said as we loaded up the horses in the stable. “It’s about the only way I can think of to keep him out of trouble. When he’s left on his own, he goes hanging around the paint and body shop, and he’s already gotten the wind knocked out of him twice. I don’t want to get a phone call from the police telling me Darren’s been killed.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Mom and Dad had been deferential to Darren for way too long. “Dad,” I said angrily, “we’re not responsible for him. He’s a grown-ass man, not some kid that we’re babysitting.”
“I realize that,” Dad said wearily, rubbing the back of his neck. “Believe me. But I don’t have much choice.”
Dad took Bessie and led her out of the stable. Not more than a minute later, Darren came walking in. He stood in the doorway framed in morning sunlight, his shadow filling the stable. “You got somethin’ you want to say?” he asked.
I shook my head, ignoring the hot anger bubbling up inside me. “Nothing I haven’t already said.”
“K, ‘cause it sure sounds like you’re upset. Dad told me you wasn’t happy about me wanting to come along.”
I swore under my breath. There was an unspoken rule in our family against telling Dad anything you didn’t want the rest of the family to know. “Yeah, alright,” I said. “I’ll tell you straight-up: I don’t know if this is the best thing for you. Do you have the slightest experience horseback riding?”
“A little bit,” said Darren. He seemed unusually proud of the fact. “I took lessons one summer when I was in high school, out at the Shadow Creek summer camp.”
I climbed up onto the saddle of my mare. From this vantage, he didn’t seem so tall and threatening. “Alright, fine,” I said shortly. “But when you go falling off and break your neck, don’t come crawlin’ over here blaming me.”
So what did Darren do not more than ten minutes into the ride? He tripped over a log about the size of my arm and went flying off the horse.
Dad and I stopped and turned our horses around immediately. “Darren?” I asked, a shrill note of panic in my voice. My hands and face were sweaty, but not from heat.
It was the strangest thing. I thought I had been so mad at him until the moment that happened. I had half-hoped he might fall off because it would teach him a lesson and we probably wouldn’t have to put up with him for the rest of the week.
But when he actually fell, all I could think about was what had happened to Christine, and the fact that if he died now, our very last conversation would have been an argument in which I told him off.
Remorse ate away at my insides as I rode over to the spot where he lay prostrate. He turned his sweaty face up to me, gritting his teeth. It was obvious he didn’t want me to know the amount of pain he was in.
“You alright?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m alright,” he said slowly. “Nothin’ feels broken, anyway. Just do me a favor and throw me one of them watered bottles.”
It was a measure of how worried I was that I didn’t even think to make fun of him for calling them “watered bottles.”
As I was helping him to his feet, he leaned over and said low in my ear, “And Curtis, one more thing.”
“What’s up?”
“Don’t you ever, ever say I told you so.”
Then, to my amazement, he climbed back onto his horse, and we continued on our way as if nothing had happened.