Me After You (22 page)

When I glare at him he chuckles and asks, “What?” But he knows exactly what my eyes are conveying. “Just thought I’d do something nice for a friend. Nothing more.”

“Dang straight it’s nothing more.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

We sit on the park bench closest to the pond, near where I first saw him with Lily, and I instantly feel uneasy. She couldn’t possibly be okay with us hanging out. Not that I’m all that worried about her feelings. She obviously has no respect for mine. But this couldn’t look good to anyone else who passes by. I know I shouldn’t care about what everyone else thinks, but I do.

“So, what was he like?” Dean breaks the silence.

“Wow. You’re really ready to dive right on in.”

He chuckles. “I’m sorry if I overstepped. We don’t have to talk about him if you’re not ready yet.”

I glance over at him to really gage his interest. “You really want to talk about Grayson?” It surprises me how easy Grayson’s name falls from my lips when I couldn’t say Dean’s name during all of those years.

“Yeah.” He talks around chewing his burger, trying to cover his mouth to be polite. “He was your husband, Sawyer. You loved him. He was important to you. I want to know how he stole your heart.”

My fingertips cover my lips. That last statement was so off base, if I speak now, I’ll give away the truth. It’s hard to steal a heart when there’s hardly one there to take. Grayson patched my heart. He took what fragments he could find and pieced them together to create something barely capable of beating, but that’s all it needed. Sometimes, I think if only I could have met Grayson first, things would have been so much different. I might have lost him in the end, but I wouldn’t feel this damaged. I wouldn’t feel so jaded.

I haven’t been able to talk about Grayson since I came back to Willowhaven, but for some reason I feel like I can talk about him with Dean. He makes me feel at ease. He always did—that hasn’t changed.

I finish my bite, debating on where to start. “Gray… Grayson always knew the right thing to say to me. I could be fuming mad at him, and he’d find the button to shut it off, and I hated him for it.” I chuckle. “I wanted to be able to stay mad, but he couldn’t handle that. He’d crack a joke or smile just right, and my anger would melt away.”

“Did he keep a manual somewhere? I’d really like the directions to that skill.”

My smile broadens, and I look to the ground.

“What else?” he prompts.

“Umm, he used to make these faces that creeped me out, while somehow making me laugh without fail every time.” I chuckle again. “My favorite was the goat. He’d pull out his upper lip and bottom lip and ‘bah’ like a goat.” I peer over at Dean who’s watching me carefully. “I know it’s stupid.” I smile, looking back to the concrete. “But he was actually really good at it.” A small laugh leaves my lips when I hear Grayson’s goat noises play in my head.

“I don’t think it’s stupid,” he says quietly. “He sounds like he was good for you.” He pauses.
Yeah, he was
. “Is it getting easier?”

I meet his eyes. “No.” I shake my head and take a sip of soda, buying some time. “The pain isn’t as fierce, but it hasn’t faded. I think it’ll always be there. I’ll just get used to living with it.”

He nods with understanding.

Maybe he does.

I shrug because I have nothing else to add. Not that I couldn’t talk about Grayson for hours. I just can’t talk about him with Dean anymore. I want to keep him to myself. I don’t want to give his memory away. As if sharing things about him could take them from me. I’m not ready for Dean to take him away from me.

“So, Lily.” It pops out before I can stop myself. It felt like the progression in our conversation. We talked about Grayson, so now it’s his turn. It’s not as if I want to talk about her. If we talk about her, I know I’m going to start saying things that I don’t want to get into now. I’ll say things I’ll regret. Not that I’ll regret saying them, per se, but I’ll regret saying them to him.

He shifts. I should retract it, but the words are out there now.

I decide to approach it more casually. “What’s she up to tonight?”

His shoulder lifts. “She’s probably at home watching some sitcom reruns. She really likes those detective shows that don’t have much of a storyline. The ones you can jump into and try to solve the crime of the current episode.”

“I remember that about her.” I nod and ask the question that has been nagging at me for months. I’m not sure I want to hear the answer, but I ask anyway. “Does she make you happy?”

T
HE
QUESTION
HANGS
in the air, and I have no idea how I’m supposed to answer her honestly. In her eyes I see hope. Whether it’s hope that Lily doesn’t make me happy or hope that she does, I can’t be certain.

Does Lily make me happy? Or more accurately, did she ever make me happy? She was good at making me temporarily forget. Was that the same as happiness? Probably not. She was good at making me feel a little lighter, but never in the same way that Sawyer ever did. What I liked most about Lily was that somehow, though they were best friends, she didn’t remind me of Sawyer. Nothing about her brought back memories of Sawyer.

I take too long to answer. “You know what?” she says. “I don’t know why I asked that. Don’t answer that.” Sawyer lifts her fingers to brush her waves of hair behind her left ear.

Her wrist flashes the black dandelion on her porcelain skin. I catch sight of something more to it and my curiosity gets the best of me. “Can I see the tattoo?”

She swallows, but nods her head and hands me her left wrist uncertainly. It’s a small tattoo, covering about two or three inches of her arm. The dandelion has a patch missing as if it’s been blown away. A few specs of fuzz drift up toward her palm and end with a single little black bird. My thumb brushes over it, and I hear her small intake of breath.

“What kind of bird is that?” I ask gently. Just touching the soft skin on the inside her wrist makes me question, Lily who?

“It’s a sparrow,” she says quietly.

“Why a sparrow?” I ask. “Does it mean anything?”

“The simple answer—love.”

I look up at her, cradling her wrist in the palm of my hand. I’ll always be gentle with her. “And the complicated answer?”

“We will have to save that for another day,” she states, pulling away from me and getting up swiftly. She stands, waiting for me to join her. “You ready?” Her voice is full of false cheerfulness, and I want to call her on it, but I don’t.

I should be disappointed that I haven’t been able to gain her trust again, or that she wants to leave already, but I’m too grateful that she gave me hope for another day to be truly disappointed.

“Okay,” I say and reach for the food wrapper she has balled up in her other fist. After I throw out our trash we get on my bike and I take her home.

I cut the engine when I pull up in front of her house and help her off. She has to be the one to take her hand out of mine because I don’t want to let go. She doesn’t give me the option to walk her to her door.

“Thanks for the dinner, Dean.” She tosses a wave and begins a hurried walk up the stone pathway to her porch.

“Do you think maybe we can do this again?” I call. Even if she gives me a breadcrumb I’ll be happy. I can work with a breadcrumb.

After pausing on her steps, Sawyer turns around to look at me. “We’ll see.” She doesn’t smile, but she also doesn’t glare, nor does she shoot me down completely, so I take that as more progress. She lifts another wave and walks inside of her house.

I remain by my bike, looking up at her house. It hasn’t changed. The white paint is curling a little more around the edges of the siding, and the trees have grown taller, but that’s the only difference. I see the curtains in her front window flutter, and take that as my cue to leave. Mrs. Hartwell definitely hasn’t warmed up to me over the years. But I’m going to have to change that.

“D
EAN
?” M
OM
QUESTIONS
after I close the front door. She’s peeking through the curtains, and I’m certain Dean is in an awkward staring match with her.

“I got tired of being angry at him.”

“Is that all?”

“What else is there to say?” I really don’t want to talk about this with her. Being with him for those couple hours took all the emotional sanity I had for one night, possibly for the week.

I hear the engine of Dean’s motorcycle rev to life before he takes off. She finally releases the curtain back in place and looks at me. “He’s not good enough for you, Sawyer.” Those words hold no meaning to me anymore. She used to repeat them to me nearly every day.

Before I can react she says, “Don’t pretend like that boy didn’t ruin your life.”

“
I
decide that. I decide who ruins my life.” I point to my chest. “
Me
. It doesn’t just happen. I get to make decisions for my life. If he ruined my life, it’s because I let him. And if I want to spend one night with Dean, so be it. You’re supposed to be on
my
side.”

Her face softens, and she strides over to me. “I’ll always be on your side, baby. Why do you think I have such a hard time watching that boy come around again? It was hard enough to see him come back after you left. And now I have to watch him crawl back on his hands and knees, while you stand with open arms. That boy doesn’t deserve that.”

“What open arms?” I retort. “It’s taken me all of this time home to feel comfortable enough to have a conversation with him. You call that open arms? I’m doing everything I can to hold myself together around him. Give me some credit. I’m treading carefully.”

Her shoulders sag, and I finally see in her eyes the one thing I can’t stand to see. Pity. “Sweetie, you’re grieving. You’re finally grieving. I don’t think you ever let yourself grieve all those years ago. There were tears and heartache, but then you bottled it up and moved away to Seattle. Just because you moved away doesn’t mean you moved on. Dean isn’t the answer. It’s time to let life take its course and then you can heal and move forward.”

The tears start to form in my chest, clogging my airway. I swallow them back. “Mama, I want that in the past. Can we please keep it in the past?”

“The past can’t stay there if you haven’t even worked through it to move forward.”

“I’ve struggled every
damn
day to work through it. You don’t know what I’ve been through. You don’t understand half the pain I’ve felt. I’m doing the
best I can
.”

“Then tell me, Sawyer,” she urges, walking closer to me. “Talk about it. Let out your anger and frustration. You’ve been bottling it and all it’s doing is piling up and festering. You can scream. You can cry. But at the end of the day, that won’t do a dang thing if you can’t talk about what you’re screaming about.”

I grit my teeth. “I’m going to bed.”

She sighs. “Okay.” There’s disappointment in her eyes, and it’s too much to look at any longer.

“Goodnight.”

“Night, baby.”

I walk into my room and lock the door. Before my thoughts are making sense, I dive to the ground to look under my bed. My eyes spot the box pushed to the center. I don’t know why I’m going to it now. This box hasn’t been touched in over five years. Before I moved away I toyed with lighting it on fire, but in the end, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. There were too many memories in this box. And I need these memories now.

I reach for it and drag it out. Taking a deep breath, I lift the lid. All at once, my brain fogs and goes on overload. I immediately slap the lid back on and breathe.
What am I doing?
This is a horrible idea. I don’t know what I hope I’ll gain from looking in it. Nothing good can come from looking through this box. But in the end, the rational side of my brain loses the fight. I’ve got to figure out why I’m willing to risk my emotional sanity for the boy who stole everything from me. It’s like I have a sick vendetta against myself. As if I have to punish myself for ever feeling that way. I don’t know why, but I don’t actually want to forget.

I lift the cardboard lid and set it reverently at my side. Delicately placed on top is a plastic bag with a dried up dandelion inside. Some fuzz is still attached, but the rest of it has settled at the bottom of the bag. Not one dandelion have I passed and not thought of him. I take out the bag and gently place it on top of the lid.

The box is filled with pictures of us and notes we wrote back and forth during school and traded during passing periods. I can’t look at the pictures. Those snapshots tell everything. They remind me of the good. They paint a happy picture of what we used to be in my head. They remind me of how much I loved him. I flip them over and shove them behind my back.

There’s a concert ticket to see Novice and movie ticket stubs to every movie we ever went to together all stacked on top of one another. Underneath it all, I pull out one lone folded piece of paper. It looks like he tore off the corner of some notebook paper. I know what it says before I flip it open and see his handwriting in black ink.

Surrender?

Loving Dean is like fireworks when it’s not the Fourth of July. It’s sudden and explosive and it scares the crap out of me. Not because I don’t want to feel this way, but because I know he is my end game.

I look at him, and I know.

We’re wrestling in my backyard. He thought he could take a girl, but he’d never wrestled with me before. I don’t fight fair. I have an older brother. My strength isn’t enough to win in a match. I had to learn how to hold my own.

He almost has me pinned on the ground. I’m facing him, and that’s his first mistake. His smile is wide across his face with a triumphant glow in his eyes. He’s taken hold of one of my arms and is frantically trying to grab hold of my flailing free arm that I refuse to give up.

I stick my finger in my mouth and shove it in his ear.

“SAWYER!” he hollers, choking on his laughter. I know I really caught him off guard because he says my real name. He sits back, rubbing his ear. “Did you just wet willy me?”