The Reason I Stay (20 page)

She smiles like a child does when talking about their father. “Eighteen years. They met in Mobile a year before my mother decided she wasn’t cut out for motherhood, and dumped me with Dacle. Because he’s the best person in the world, he took me in and, despite his dislike for Jolene, moved back here so I wouldn’t have to part from my life. He and John continued to date, but they never had a full life as a couple, because I was Dacle’s first concern in life.

“And then, three years ago, John was transferred to Florida for work, and asked Dacle to go with him. He was reluctant to leave me, but after six arduous months of convincing him that I was an adult, and that after abdicating most of his life to fix his sister’s mistake, he deserved a chance at happiness, he finally went. They got engaged last Christmas.”

“Congrats to them.” She thanks me on their behalf, making it clear, once again, the daughterly love she feels for him. “And now that I’m educated about the tenth date—one I look forward to, by the way—what happens on the third date?”

She looks at me with a mixture of endearment and wonder as we reach the end of the narrow street we’ve been walking on since turning right. The street meets the one where The Jukebox is located. I wait for Lexie to tell me to which way we’re going, but she just keeps walking forward, crossing the dead street toward the beach. She stops where the sidewalk meets the sand, and unlinks her fingers from mine.

“We go barefoot from here on.” She reaches down to remove her shoes and I follow, taking my arm from around her and bending over to take my Converses off. I’m done with one foot when she clears her throat and says, “Third dates are when the magic shirtless make-outs happen.”

I almost lose the precarious balance I have in my crouched position. I glace up at her and see a flirty raised brow and a wide grin, and I’m so happy I could dance.

Waiting three dates for shirtless make-outs are not too bad. Not too bad at all. I can wait that long, and the wide spectrum of amazing things that can be done in shirtless make-out sessions is enough encouragement to help me through. In addition to that, if shirts get removed in three dates, pants may get removed in four or five. Those are good odds.

When I straighten my back again, bringing my shoes up with me, we stare at each other for a moment, and then she says, “At church.”

I blink a few times in confusion, because I’m making sex math and she’s talking about church, and those two things don’t usually go together. But then she clarifies, “Your original question of how I met the Wolfs and the Valentines. We met at church.”

“Oh.”

Lexie smiles, and bobs her head as I drape my arm around her neck again. Her hand comes back up to hold mine.

“Is there a story?” I ask.

“There’s always a story, but this one I only know what I’ve been told because I was a baby.” I motion with my hand—and shoes—for her to continue as we start walking down the fluffy sand. “It was the Sunday before Christmas, and Tanie, Leigh and I had dirty diapers at the same time. When our moms went to the nursery for a clean-up, they realized that they had forgotten one baby hygiene product each—I think my mother forgot the wipes, Jill forgot rash cream, and Georgia forgot the diapers. They ended up sharing their supplies and apparently that created a special bond between us babies, because from that moment on we became inseparable.”

“Is Leigh Kodee’s mom?”

A light, salty breeze blows around us. Lexie takes a deep breath and nods. “Was.” She pushes her right arm up forward, and points with her nose toward the woman inked on her forearm. “That’s her.”

We stop walking again, and without removing my arm from around her neck, I drop my shoes and cradle her arm in my free hand. The full moon’s silver gleam allows me a good view of the tattoo. And for the first time, I really look at it.

From shoulder to wrist, her arm is covered in beautiful and colorful flowers. Some are small and arranged in bouquets, and others are big and surrounded by leafs. They are all extremely feminine, pretty, and somehow seem to accentuate Leigh’s face.

Even in a tattoo, there’s no denying that she’s Kodee’s mother or Jill’s daughter. If you put the three faces one next to the other, they would look like the natural aging of the same person. “She looks exactly like Jill and Kodee.”

Lexie’s lips curl in a tender smile. “Jill says that her family’s eggs are resistant to the father features of the DNA. They could make a baby with Freddy Krueger, and the child would come out looking like the mother.”

I laugh. “Were you closer to Leigh than to Tanie?” I ask as I let go of her arm, collect my shoes and we start walking again. We make our way to the damp patch of sand, where the cold ocean water washes over our feet.

“Not really.” She shakes her head and pulls her brows together, creating a crease over her nose. “We were all equally close, but Tanie has sisters, and Leigh and I don’t. We filled that void for each other, which is why I’m Kodee’s godmother. She used to say we were soul sisters, and as freaky as it sounds, when she died it was like a part of my soul died too. So I guess she was right.” Her lips turn into the saddest smile as she looks down at the portrait. After a moment, she clears her throat and asks, “Why do you ask?”

“I was just wondering why you have a tat of her, but don’t have one of Tanie.”

She raises her brows, and gives me a big grin. “Oh, but I do.”

On Sunday at the beach, I’d completed a full-body scan of her. The images produced are stored in a special place in my brain that I revisit often, and that assures me that other than her arm—and perhaps the places covered by her small bikini, which seems unlikely—she doesn’t have a single tattoo on her. And since I just looked carefully at her arm and saw no other face there, I don’t see where she could have a tattoo of Tanie. My brows pull together in confusion.

Lexie brings her free arm, the tattooed one, up to smooth my frown, and then lowers and twists her arm in front of me. “Do you see the big lily?”

I look down and see the large, white flower smack bang in the middle of her upper arm. I nod. “Well, lilies are Tanie’s favorite flowers, so that’s her.”

“Do all of the flowers have meanings?”

“All but the red rose on my shoulder. I added it because
I
love roses, but it’s unclaimed.”

She gives me the flirty cocked brow, and I wink at her as an unbearable desire to claim that rose washes over me. She giggles, giving me hope that it may happen someday. We’re locked in a great moment, one filled with our teasing that have become so vital to me in so little time.

“When did she die?”

Lexie’s shoulders stiffen, the way shoulders do when getting ready to go through something painful. It breaks my heart, and I wish I could take that question back. I open my mouth to tell her it’s okay, that she doesn’t have to reply, but her voice reaches me first. “Four years and one month ago.”

It’s obvious to me that she’s pushing through the sadness this subject brings, and I admire her for it. The kind of strength she has is rare and beautiful, just like her. I let go of her elbow, which she brings back up to the arm I have around her neck. She laces her fingers with mine and we continue to walk down the shoreline.

I know I’m going to regret asking this, but still, more stupid words come from my lips. “Do you mind if I ask how she died?”

Lexie takes a deep breath, and shakes her head. “Car accident. We were all eighteen, Kodee was just three. Tanie and I were going together to the University of South Alabama, where we’d share an apartment. On the day we got the keys, we all went out to the city to celebrate. We used fake IDs to get into this club, and it was great, up until the point when Damian, Kodee’s dad and Leigh’s asshole of a husband, got drunk, and started being mean to Leigh. That was no big deal, since it happened more often than not, but still, Leigh got angry, and they had this big fight.”

I look down at Lexie. Throught the moonlight’s soft glow, I see her beautiful face twisted in a painful frown that breaks my heart.

“They always had big, ugly fights that I hated. I know people always talk up dead people, but Leigh really was the best person in the world: a great mother, a loyal wife to a man who didn’t deserve the crap beneath her feet, and the most loving friend a girl could wish for. She was perfect, and Damian never saw that. He constantly disrespected her, and I hated him for it. Actually, I still hate him for it.

“Leigh was the kind of person who deals with their pain alone, so when I saw them fighting, I knew she’d go home early. That made me so mad, because it was my and Tanie’s big night and that douche-face was robbing us of our best friend. So when she came to say goodbye to me, I let the many shots of tequila I had that night speak for me, and though the shit I said to her was all true, the way I said it was awful and mean.

“She left the bar crying, and I felt like shit. I knew I should go after her, apologize and be a better friend, but I was wasted. I waited until I sobered up a bit, got Quick, and started driving after her. Half way to Jolene I saw police cars and an ambulance, and a familiar blue sedan wrapped around a black pickup truck.”

She takes deep breaths and for a moment I think Lexie might cry, which I’d totally understand, but she never does. She just continues to speak in a shaky voice. “Leigh died instantly and the other driver, the one who stole the truck he was driving and hit her, fled before anyone arrived. The police tried to find him, but no one ever did. And that’s what pisses me off the most. Knowing that someone just thought they were better than us, that their freedom was worth more than Leigh’s life, or mine, or Kodee’s, or Jill and Larry’s. That’s wrong, and sad, and awful.”

Her words fall on me like a sack of bricks. It’s no secret that I’ve always been a very selfish person, but in this moment, as Lexie takes a deep breath that is filled with hurt and guilt and so much pain, I’m acutely aware of my selfishness, and for some reason it changes my outlook on life.

She becomes more important to me than I am.

I’ve let the death of my mother, my own personal tragedy, change me and ruin me. I was sixteen when I let it turn me into a person I barely recognized, into a person who I didn’t even like. But despite having been abandoned by both parents and having suffered a terrible loss, it didn’t change her. She’s still positive, happy and pure.

Because of that, I want to be her shield against the ugly things in the world, because I know them, I’m made of them, and she’s not. So I tighten my arms around her, and will those terrible emotions to leave her body and lodge into mine so she won’t have to carry them anymore. I do that because I want to hurt for her so she can live without worry and pain and any other bad feeling, because she doesn’t deserve them, and they shouldn’t belong to her.

In that moment of putting someone else above myself, of feeling a sense of responsibility for another that I’ve never felt, Lea’s face comes to mind.

A few years ago, when she landed her first big runaway show, she invited me to go watch. I sat in the second row of chairs and watched, bored out of my mind as she modeled outfit after outfit through the long catwalk. She was gorgeous and I was lucky, because we’d been casually screwing each other for years, and I knew that I’d be screwing her that night. So when the show was over, I made my way backstage to congratulate her.

I didn’t take flowers or chocolate or any shit like that, because we didn’t date. It wasn’t like that, and I never wanted to encourage her to think otherwise. However, when she saw me, she swung her arms around my neck and kissed me, which wasn’t our—and especially my—usual thing, but I didn’t complain. When her friends came over to meet me, they asked if I was Lea’s boyfriend, and I actually choked on the champagne I was sipping. I was no woman’s boyfriend, and Lea knew that. So she lessened the punch of my vigorous
no
by saying that I was just her lover.

In all honesty, I never grasped the real meaning and depth of that word. I just thought it was a fancy term to call a fuck buddy, so I didn’t object. But as time passed, I realized that in Lea’s mind, we were lovers in the sense that she loved me.

She loved me so much to be okay with having me but never going on dates. She loved me so much to be okay with being another one of many, when she really wanted to be the only one. She loved me so much that she got in my car and let me take her seatbelt off so she could blow my dick on the freeway, even though it was snowing and I was high as kite, all because it was my birthday and she wanted to please me. She always went above and beyond to please me, and I took advantage.

Despite all that, I never spent a second giving two shits about all the many ways in which I hurt her.

I never cared that she lost her virginity, her dignity, many possible boyfriends, one of her legs and her career because of me. I never cared that I entered her life like a tornado, and fucked her up because she was hot and willing and in love. And then, just like a storm, I simply vanished, leaving her alone to deal with the aftermath, not even caring that she was blown to pieces and broken. I also never cared about all the other people I hurt, less frequently than I hut Lea, but in no lesser way. And in that sense I’m no better than the thief who stole that car and Lexie’s best friend, which really is wrong and sad and awful.

The amount of self-loathing running through me is immeasurable, and I know without a shadow of doubt that I don’t deserve to be near Lexie. I don’t deserve any feelings she may have for me, or the time she spends with me.