Page 60 of Hold on Tight

He was so angry. All the lust and the desperation that he’d needed to pour into her had nowhere to go now. Everything about him—the stiffness in his shoulders, the tightness of his jaw, the way he’d half turned away from her—kept her at bay. Until the moment when he lifted his chin and turned to her, and she saw his eyes. They were dark and naked and needy and she was willing to be slapped down by him if that was what was going to happen, because he was Jake and he’d taken care of her, of Sam, today, and if he needed her, needed something, neededanything, she would not run away from him, no matter how scary he looked.

“So don’t talk. Just sit here. I won’t ask you questions. Just don’t run away. I don’t care if you talk. You can sit there and stare into space and say nothing. But stay. Stay with me.”

For a moment, she thought he would ignore her. Then he turned and came back to her. Sat heavily on the couch. “Don’t try to psychoanalyze me.”

“I don’t want to.”

They were quiet, so quiet she could hear the ice moving in the fridge ice-maker in the next room. The low hum of her next-door neighbor’s heat pump kicking on. But it was not a bad silence. It was a silence in which she could feel him doing what she’d asked. Staying.

“Don’t move,” she said. She got up and went to the bookshelf, pulling several thick volumes off the bottom shelf. She came back and sat beside him, not close enough to touch, but close enough that she could feel the warmth of his body. She set the volumes next to her and pulled one onto her lap. Opened it.

“Is that him?”

She nodded. The first page was all Sam, on the warming table, swaddled in the bassinet, held in various people’s arms. She’d bled, badly, so they’d been busy stabilizing her and she wasn’t in any of the pictures, not those early ones.

He examined them closely, one by one.

She felt a wave of regret and remorse. It was partially the memories the photos brought on, the terror of being alone with such a vulnerable little creature, the desperate wish for someone who would take half the responsibility for keeping him alive. But it was also the awe on Jake’s face, the realization that when she’d made the decision to stop searching for him, she’d also made a decision about what moments in Sam’s life to deprive him of.

She led him through the moments, through the photos. Sam sitting up for the first time, canted forward, in imminent danger of a face plant that came the moment after she took the picture. Sam crawling for the first time, chasing one of her shoes across the room. Sam’s first step, Sam’s first restaurant, Sam’s first insipid, folksy kid-music concert.

Jake got stuck on Disney World, his hand suspended with the page half-turned as he pored over the shots of Sam—in mouse ears, sandwiched between his grandparents, high above in the people mover.

“Did you ever go?” she asked.

“Yeah.” There was a look on his face.

“Good?”

“It was one of our better family trips,” he said. “It was not too long after my dad stopped being able to work, before he was drinking so much.”

Their ride on the Ferris wheel seemed like a paltry substitute for five days of watching Sam gleefully shoot neon aliens and communicate directly with characters fromMonsters, Inc. Although on the plus side, Jake had escaped Sam’s pink cotton-candy vomit and his epic meltdown at the hotel pool.

She wanted to apologize to Jake for what he’d missed.

Instead, she reached out and took his hand. At first there was only passive resistance, his fingers lumps of unwilling flesh. Then, as if making a decision, his hand grabbed hers, hard. A lifeline.

“You know it’s not you.” He said it fiercely. “Why I—why I couldn’t—”

She did. “I know. And it wasn’t you. At the lake. I was a virgin.”

“I know.”

“I was scared. I was really young.”

“I shouldn’t have pressured you,” he said.

“You didn’t pressure me,” she said. “I was the one who rushed everything that night. I didn’t want to go off to college still a virgin. And—I wanted you.”

“I had more experience. I was older. I should’ve known better.”

“You were two years older,” she said. “That hardly makes you a real grown-up. It’s not like you were thirty-five, and had all this romantic past to draw on.”

He shook his head, refusing to let himself off the hook, and his eyes scanned the far corners of the room as if there were an answer hidden there.

“I was—confused.”

“Me too,” she said.

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