Chapter Four: Screw Lemon Sherbet, Ice Cream Is the Magic Word
“Hey.”
Everybody talks about that feeling when you tilt a chair too far back. You know that split-second fall in the pit of your stomach that is a culmination of all your nerves? Yes, well, the feeling of someone addressing my butt as I lean in to the trunk of my car is somewhat similar.
With a yelp, I whip around and nearly jam my elbow into Cole’s eye. He has the good sense to back away before I injure him seriously. Glaring at him, I try not to show how badly my pulse is racing just knowing that he’s here. Nope, I’d sooner sentence myself to the grave than give him that kind of satisfaction.
“Is it that difficult to wait until I turn around to scare the living daylights out of me?”
He grins sheepishly, “Well, I didn’t mind the view, but I thought you wouldn’t want me appreciating your…”
I turn red almost immediately. “Whoa there, Stone, boundaries.”
He immediately becomes somber, and I kick myself for feeling bad about it. It’s not like I promised him that we could go back to what we were. There’s still an ocean worth of issues between us, and for him to fall so easily back into our old pattern is unnerving. We’re not on equal footing here, not by a long shot. But, as I open my mouth to lecture him on our situation, I’m reminded of why he’s going with us on the trip. I’m doing this for his family, for him. There’s no one who understands better what alcohol can do to both a person and a family. Travis sought it after everything that went on at college and with his ex. For nearly two years, he was almost nonexistent. I couldn’t see Cole going down the same path. So, if I have to suck it up and risk my heart getting broken all over again, then so be it.
He shoves his hands into his pockets and kicks a pebble, almost like a child. “Sorry. Sometimes when you look at me like that, it’s easy to forget what things are like now.”
I blink a couple of times and then tear my eyes away from him. Breathing raggedly, I stumble away from him and let his words wash all over me. How do I look at him? Do I still look at him like he’s the center of my universe, or, well, if we’re being honest, like he is my entire universe? The feelings are so instilled in me and feel so second nature that they might possibly be pouring out of me without me even realizing.
Wonderful, just so damn wonderful.
I clear my throat and point to the duffel bag slung on his shoulder. “You want to put that in the trunk?”
He nods and proceeds to do so, along with dragging all my luggage to the car with ease, and, let me tell you, my suitcase may or may not weigh as much as a baby elephant. I try resisting the temptation to watch his muscles flex as he does the heavy lifting, but my eyes are glued to him and he knows it. There’s a smirk forming on his face, the sneaky little douche nozzle.
“Well, if he keeps that up, I’m not sure you’ll be able to keep your hands off of him for long.”
I jump at the sound of Beth’s voice. She’s standing over my shoulder, studying Cole’s movements as closely as I was. Does she not have a boyfriend, a boyfriend who’s my brother?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about how you were looking at Cole like you wanted to rip the clothes right off him.”
“You’re wrong,” I say flippantly and push past her to go inside the house. Travis is staying here since he needs to catch up on his online college courses in order to go back to “real” school in the fall. I did the groceries, and there are enough frozen meals in the fridge to save him from starving to death, but I need to check. Dad doesn’t come home a lot, just checks in once or twice during the week, and my mother is too busy going through a midlife crisis to care. Beth’s going with us, which means that my brother will be on his own for a while.
It scares me.
“All I’m saying is that if you want to try being in a relationship with him again, you shouldn’t hold yourself back.”
Beth follows me into the kitchen as I check the fridge and the pantry. Once I’m sure that Travis won’t go without food for at least a year, I turn to her.
“I’m not holding myself back. It’s not even about Erica anymore, Beth. I get it, I understand mistakes, and I think I’ve come to terms with it and know why he did what he did, but…”
“But what? Why can’t you just give him a second chance? Don’t you think he deserves at least that? The guy changed your world and that, too, for the better. He made you so happy. Isn’t that worth anything?”
Of course it is. She’s right; he did change my world and made everything better. But what she doesn’t realize is that there’s something so terrifying about loving a person like that. Because when you do fall for them, you fall with your entire entirety. Every single fiber of you is addicted to simply the presence of them; you would do anything for them, even stay when you know they could tear you apart with the flick of a wrist.
That’s what the most terrifying part is. It’s knowing that someone has that kind of power over you and jumping headfirst into the relationship anyway. The month I spent away from him, drowning in my misery and not caring about anything but my own broken heart, isn’t something I ever look forward to doing again. But something tells me that if Cole and I were to get back together, there would always, always be something that could send both of us spiraling back to what we just went through. The crux of it all is that I am a big, fat coward and don’t want to do anything to fix that.
***
We both watch Cole from the kitchen window as he leans against my Jeep and stares into the distance. He looks better already than the last time I saw him, but the guilt is gnawing at my insides. He has a different idea of what could happen between us than I do. What I want is to end the summer and go to college unscathed, but something tells me he won’t allow that. He’s following me to the same college, for Christ’s sake. Does that sound like someone willing to let go?
An arm comes across my shoulder, and Travis squeezes me to his side. “She can do whatever she wants, no pressure, Tess.”
He must have come from the back entrance, having gone out earlier to run some errands. I sink into him and nod into his shoulder. “Thank you,” I whisper.
“I’ve talked to him. He knows not to expect anything and just see where things go. You don’t have to feel obligated to go back into a relationship with him. That’s not the way to fix your problems.”
I breathe a sigh of relief, thanking my lucky stars that I won’t have to have that conversation with Cole now. Times like these make me grateful that my brother can be so dang protective. It helps when I choose to be a wuss, so you won’t hear me complaining.
Soon it’s time to leave. Our first stop is New York, where a friend of the family has an empty apartment for the summer. It’s only a three-and-a-half-hour drive, so we leave relatively late. I’ve been to New York before with my family, but it’s always been those stuffy trips with ritzy hotels and ten p.m. bedtimes. Obviously, I’m excited, especially knowing that I’ll be in the city that never sleeps, without my parents and, more importantly, with my best friends.
And Cole.
Alex is coming along, too, so it’s no longer a girls-only trip. We invited Lan, too, but he said he’d meet us in the city rather than drive all the way there. Actually, what he specifically said was that he couldn’t stand being around that kind of sexual tension. I’d nearly died of embarrassment when his eyes narrowed between Cole and me, a smug grin on his face.
We have lunch at Rusty’s before leaving for the road. It’s Megan and Alex, Beth and Travis, and lastly Cole and me squeezed into a rounded booth. Since my brother isn’t coming with us, I’m subjected to watching him and Beth stare at each other longingly, and you can clearly see that they’d rather be somewhere else, doing something that would traumatize me for life.
No, thank you.
Cole has been strategically sitting next to me, and I can feel the heat of his thigh, searing into mine even though he isn’t touching me. He’s leaning forward in his seat, joking with Alex about something, but what that does is give me a first-row kind of view of his lips. Darn it; he really is testing my patience. But I’m glad that he’s out and about, that he no longer looks like death and reeks of a bottle of Jack. If him being happy and well means that I’ll have to stab myself in the eye to avoid molesting him, then so be it.
I’m jerked back into reality when I see that everyone’s finished their food and that Beth is leaving with Alex and Megan. Wait a second; someone needs to hit pause right now.
“I thought you were driving up with me?” And then my heart sinks because I know that look in her eye. It’s also not that difficult to figure out what she’s up to when my brother starts glaring at her.
She’s playing cupid.
“Oh, I thought I’d drive with these two.” She points toward the sheepish-looking couple standing near the exit to the diner. “No offense, but that monster Jeep of yours scares me.”
She loves my car. She named my car Joplin, for crying out loud.
“But you can’t leave me alone!”
I can feel Cole’s stare, and I don’t want to hurt his feelings by saying that I don’t want to be alone with him. But that’s the truth; I can’t handle three hours in an enclosed space with him. But apparently everyone else has made up their minds.
“Look, if it’s a problem, then I’ll go home…you don’t have to do this, Tessie.” Cole gets up from the table and stands in front of me, blocking everyone else from view. His shoulders have sagged and he looks dejected; the hurt in his eyes is back. I’ve done it again, and it makes me feel two feet tall.
“No…I’m sorry. That didn’t come out right. Don’t go.”
“Are you sure? If you’re not comfortable…”
“I’m sure,” I interject quickly, “I want you to come with me.”
That’s the most honest I’ve been with myself for a long time.
Once the tension has melted away, we all get in our cars to leave. Travis hugs me and gives me “the talk.” The embarrassing moments in my life seem to be never-ending, and by the end of our conversation, I’m left like I’m having sunstroke, well, at least my face does. Honestly, no girl should have to listen to her brother talk about protection and unplanned pregnancies. Now I can’t even look at Cole without…without picturing what Travis just put inside my head. He also warns me that he may check in unannounced if I don’t call him twice a day and that he “knows people,” so he will find out if I participate in my own version of girls gone wild.
Super, now I have to worry about him being in the mafia.
It’s around two in the afternoon by the time Alex’s car with Megan and Beth in it drives away and I’m left in my own Jeep with shaking hands clasped on the steering wheel. Suddenly, I’m all nerves and can’t even look at the guy sitting next to me, let alone drive. This is such an awkward situation, and the way I’m handling it is even worse.
“Do you want me to drive?” Cole asks softly, and no sooner has he said the words than I get rid of my seat belt and jump out of the car, answering his question. If I were to drive in the state I’m in, I’m sure we’d end up wrapped around a tree. That’s how shaken I am, but it’s not that unusual. You put Cole anywhere near me and I’ll be reduced to a quivering mess, and that still hasn’t changed.
After the initial awkwardness wears off and we pull out of the town limits, Cole and I fall into a companionable silence. Everything’s going absolutely okay, until the radio decides that the universe cannot possibly be happy with things being relatively normal for me. As the notes of Edwin McCain’s “I’ll Be” start, we both tense. He doesn’t change the station or turn the radio off, and nor do I.
We listen to the song play on and on.
It’s kind of masochistic of us, really, but who cares.
“Do you remember how nervous you were that day?” he asks, chuckling.
“I had every right to be! You and I dancing would’ve normally meant me landing flat on my butt and you laughing at me.”
“It was a good day,” he says softly and then looks at me with sadness in his eyes.
Of course it was. It was the best day ever, not because I won a stupid tiara but because the next day everything changed.
“It was,” I agree and then return to looking out the window.
But now I can’t get the stupid song out of my head. I can’t get rid of the memories of that day, the image of us dancing, and all the feelings and emotions that swirled inside me that day, the day that made me see how this boy was changing my life as I knew it.
And look at us now. It crushes me to see how different we are now than we were then.
He must have been having the same thoughts since he says, “You know I want you back, right?” His voice is gruff; his fingers clutch the steering wheel tightly. “Maybe Travis is right; maybe this is a pity trip for you, but for me, it’s another chance. I intend do to whatever it takes.”
My breath catches. His intensity is so overwhelming, and sometimes it’s so easy to forget everything, to forget the reasons behind why we’re here right now. Because all I want to do in this very moment is to crawl toward his lap and kiss the life out of him.
When I finally find my voice, I tell him, “It’s not a pity trip, and I’d appreciate it if you would tell me about these talks that you seem to have with Travis all the time. Maybe then…maybe if you told me more than just assuming things, we wouldn’t be in this position.”
He sighs, and then after a few long moments, I distinctly hear him say “fuck it.”
“I told you before that I came to see you before I left for military school, right?”
I nod and he takes a deep breath. “I also told you that Travis and I had some words; he didn’t let me see you, but he told me he’d tell you that I’d been there. He told me that he would tell you how sorry I was about everything.”
But Travis hadn’t done that.
Before I’d disregarded it because of what had happened with Travis later on, but the issues with school and Jenny took place nearly two years later, and I could no longer use that as a reasonable excuse. The truth is that my brother did a shitty thing; now it’s just time to know why.
“Before I left, I was into some pretty bad stuff. I’m not that person anymore, but back then, it wasn’t so simple. You hated me; I had started to hate my brother and my dad…let’s just say he didn’t like me much, either. So, I got involved with things that I should’ve stayed miles away from.”
“What…what things?”
He takes another deep breath. “There was a lot, but the worst part was the drugs. You saw me these last few weeks, right? You saw how bad it got? It was so much worse back then, and I was barely fourteen.”
Fourteen…just a kid. What the hell had he been into, and who would give drugs to someone his age?
“One of Travis’s friends from the baseball team sold the drugs to me and a bunch of other kids. Travis found me one day with a needle in my arm.”
I gasp, and Cole cringes at my reaction. “I nearly OD’ed that day; there were too many things in my system, but he…he took care of it. I couldn’t go to the hospital because Cassandra would find out, and Travis had the kind of pull that would get a nursing student to pump my stomach or whatever. I don’t remember a lot of it, but when it was over, I knew I had to go away and get clean.”
“Military school,” I whisper.
“Yeah, I told my dad parts of the story I just told you but not everything. He made the decision, and I didn’t fight him on it. But I wanted to do one last thing before leaving. I guess your brother didn’t want someone like me to be part of your life back then…maybe even now.”
I have no idea what to say to him, nothing at all. It’s a lot to take in, but what I feel the most strongly is sadness for the lost boy he used to be. He’d been in pain, and he’d turned to the wrong source to help fix that. I had a big part to play in that, even though the idea seemed laughable to me. An overweight, awkward girl with absolutely no social skills or a social life was the reason why the most loved bad boy of the town nearly took his own life. A few months ago and I would not have believed that, but now I do.
“Say something, Tessie…anything. I know you won’t look at me like you used to. Maybe you’re disgusted by me; maybe you hate me. Tell me what you’re feeling,” he rasps.
“I could never hate you or be disgusted by you; that’s not possible, not for me. What am I thinking? I’m thinking about how we manage to hurt each other so much without knowing that we’re doing it. I mean for two people who claim to love each other, we sure do enough damage, don’t we?”
He smiles sadly. “Who said love was easy?”
“Don’t go all cliché on me now, Stone, not now.” I shake my head.
It’s a lot to take in, and the conversation we just had isn’t really the road trip kind, but if it takes being in the middle of nowhere with a two-hour drive in front of us to get us to spill our guts, then I’ll take it. There’s so much more I want to know, so much that I want to ask, but this confession is enough for now. I’m done trying to make him miserable and in turn making myself feel miserable. We deserve a break.
“So, college, huh? Are we really doing this?”
He grins and shakes his head at my not-so-subtle change of subject. “If you’ll have me, then I’ll follow you anywhere,” he declares theatrically, and I slap his arm.
“You’ll follow me, and those sorority girls will put a price on my head. Shouldn’t you try to sow your wild oats in college?” I say playfully but realize that I’ve said the wrong thing when his expression hardens.
“I have tunnel vision when it comes to you, so no, I don’t care about anyone else.”
“So, you want to go to college…”
“With a girlfriend, yeah, that’s what I want. Do you want to be single?”
His eyes bore into mine, and I’m half afraid that he’ll crash into something, but the road’s mostly empty with only a few cars lagging far behind.
“We still have so much to talk about…you can’t ask me that now.” My voice comes out all breathy and ruins the impact I was going for, one where I actually have a stance.
“It’s a simple question. Do you want to date other people, Tessie?”
“No,” I say softly, feeling my cheeks flush.
He uses his free hand to tip my chin up so that I’m looking at him. “Good, because I really wouldn’t like getting in too many fights my freshman year.”
“And about what you said before, us talking. Well, I plan to do that. I’m not hiding anything from you now. If it helps us get back to what we were, then you can ask me whatever the hell you want, baby.”
***
It’s not long before we enter New York City and a kind of excited energy thrums through me. I’m here, and now I’m in a good place with Cole. A weight has been lifted off my shoulders, and there are things I’m fairly certain of. I still am madly in love with him, more so than ever. He needs me to take away his past and his insecurities as much as I needed him to do the same for me in the past. I also know that we have problems, a certain redhead being the biggest of them all. But he said we’ll talk, and I know he won’t lie to me. He didn’t lie when he first told me about what had happened with him and Erica, even when he wasn’t sure of it himself, so my trust in him is now unwavering.
But I’m still cautious; we still can’t jump headfirst into a relationship. Baby steps, that’s what we need, because the wounds are still fresh, and we’re both a bit fragile right now.
“Hey,” Cole says, bringing me out of my thoughts. “How about we get some ice cream before we join the others?” He grins, and I can’t help myself.
Screw lemon sherbet; ice cream is the magic word.
I remove the seat belt and watch as his eyes widen when I lean toward him and kiss his cheek. He breathes raggedly when I move back and wink at him.
“That would be perfect.”
And when we walk into Serendipity later, I try not to overanalyze the workings of the universe.
But sometimes the universe does tend to throw some love my way, and when Cole gently brushes his hand against mine as we walk together, I beg the very same universe for some courage and then take his hand in mine.
The smile that then comes on his face weakens my knees, and I know that this boy will be my undoing. I welcome it, of course, because I know there’s no one else for me.