Page 37 of Let It Be Me

“Us,” she says, flicking her eyes upward to meet mine. “You said you think about us.”

“Us.” I nod while a slow panic moves through me. I wonder whether I can sue Dr. Halpert. “I don’t remember that.”

We look at each other, and even though every fiber of my being is focused on appearing neutral, Ruby knows me better than that. I see it in her eyes, the second she recognizes regret coursing through me. She turns her head so I can barely see her face, but I still catch her tightly drawn mouth and the hurt in her eyes.

I sit on the edge of the bed. “Hold on, Ruby. I’m sorry. I was obviously doped up, but that doesn’t mean?—”

She meets my eye, and I realize that every single word I say right now has an entire world of meaning to her.

“I do think about us. How could I not?” I swallow, remembering the full weight of her body on mine. That’s when I realize the tension in my muscles isn’t due to the awkwardness between us. It’s my body straining with the urge to lean over, kiss her, push her back onto the bed, and keep going until we both get what we’ve wanted for years. But I force myself to steamroll right over that and keep talking, pulling out the next words like an old line I’ve been rehearsing for years. “It’s hard to imagine you and me together would be anything less than amazing. But I don’t know if this is the right time for us to find out.”

“Yeah. You’re right. I was drunk and I wasn’t thinking,” she says, but her voice gives away her disappointment. I shouldn’t be surprised. She kissed me last night, and maybe she was drunk, but I’ve known for a long time that on some level, she wants us. I just haven’t let myself acknowledge it.

Ruby recovers quickly, suggesting we take a walk to grab some food, and with that, she confirms something I’ve suspected for four years: Ruby doesn’t know last night wasn’t our first kiss.

In high schoolRuby and I ran wild together—as wild as it got for sheltered, straitlaced prep school kids, anyway. Skipping class, sneaking out, breaking into Lakeside’s plentiful summer homes during the offseason. Always trying to escape, to stretch the confines of our small town as far as possible without actually breaking free from the safety it offered. That was the best time of my life.

All along, it was there, thisthingbetween us: Attraction, magnetism, temptation. I don’t know what you call it—an energy. Something that ebbed and flowed but that was alive every second we were together. We never acknowledged it, except maybe on a rare occasion when we were burning with the energy of being teenagers and everything felt amazing and we had the safety of darkness or a crowd of friends around us. That’s when there might be a lingering touch or I’d find her hand in mine. Only for a second. Just long enough to suggest something beyond friendship and just short enough to write off as best friends being best friends.

But it felt safe. Nothing was ever going to happen, because if it was going to happen, it would have already. We were horny, drunk teenagers with too much freedom and too many hiding places, and we’d never so much as kissed. And I knew my reasons—there was no rush. Someday maybe we’d be together, but we’d be adults, completely different versions of ourselves, and I’d know exactly how to take care of a woman.

Then came the night she took it too far.

We always told people the scar cutting across my eyebrow happened because I beat her ex’s ass. It’s “the story.” But I didn’t get the scar fighting Tate, I got it running to Ruby.

It happened just before senior year on the last night of summer. Life had been shitty to Ruby that year. Her parents’ disapproval was at an all-time high, and she was fresh out of a dramatic relationship with the shittiest dude in her long string of shitty dudes—the one who’d gotten her pregnant a month earlier. We were both partying too much, feeding off each other’s bad habits but protecting each other at every turn.

My parents were gone, and it was supposed to be only a few friends coming over to sit around the fire, jump off the dock into the warm lake, share a few beers, and pretend senior year wasn’tstarting the next morning. Of course, it was never just a few beers in those days.

Some of my football buddies were over and Ruby showed up with a few girls whose names and faces I’ll never remember, just some chicks she’d met in the spring and would move on from by the time Halloween rolled around. We drank, we laughed, and some of the girls took their tops off and hopped into the lake; not Ruby, though, because she never did things like that unless I wasn’t around.

People were starting to trickle out when he showed up. Tate. I knew how arrogant he was, how stupid, how entitled he felt to Ruby, and I still never thought I’d see him again.

I was coming out of the house, and she was standing at the end of the dock. He walked right up to her like he owned her, not a hint of shame in his eyes. Now that there was no pregnancy to deal with, now that she’d finally stopped crying on the daily,nowhe was going to show up and smile at her and take her hand like he was entitled to a mere inch of her skin?

Before and after that night, I didn’t get into fights. Before and after, I wasn’t a violent person. But in that moment, I went wild.

I was already at a full sprint when I reached the dock, too blind with anger to bother with spatial awareness, and when I barreled into him, we went straight off the side and into the water. From there, the memory is a confusion of punches, screams from the dock, water burning my nose and lungs. We were on our feet in the shallow water, which might account for why no one needed hospitalization; Tate was always more muscle than brains, and I was a complete fucking animal in those minutes.

My buddy told me later I smashed Tate’s head against the dock, but I don’t remember that. I just know that whatever was unleashed inside me scared him in a way I’d never managed to before. I remember him hurrying out of the water with his shortssagging off his ass, leaving me standing there with my hands on my knees and gasping for breath, hungry for more. I caught up to him before he got to his car, but my friends stopped it there, and he took off.

When I stumbled back down to the lake in the dark, Ruby was standing there alone on the dock. She was either shaking or shivering. When I saw that, I ran for her, and halfway down the dock, I wiped out. The angled edge of a splintered wooden framing post sliced an inch-long cut through the skin above my eye, something I wouldn’t feel until much later, when I realized I needed stitches. Ruby was a drunk mess, and the sight of blood running down my face made her cry harder than she’d already been crying. I held her tight, and she pressed her fingers so hard into the skin on my back I still remember what her desperation felt like. Then she kissed me.

It felt like the most natural thing in the world. Like the only thing that could possibly make sense in that moment. The only thing that made the world feel okay.

“I love you, Lorenzo,” she whispered against my lips, then kissed me harder. And that felt natural, too, but dangerous. I nodded. Of course we loved each other. We were best friends. But then she said, “No, Lorenzo. I’m in love with you.”

In the moment, the words filled me up in a way I couldn’t explain. But as I tucked a passed-out Ruby into my bed half an hour later, with the warmth of her kiss evaporated and the adrenaline coursing through me long gone, hearing those words echo in my head terrified me. She’d broken the rule, and she’d done it way too early. I was a kid, and not a particularly mature one, and Ruby was a mess. I worried for her all the time. She needed so much love and attention, the basics she never got from her parents. She was hungry for it, and her life reflected that fact. Was I really ready to be her everything?

Two hours later I got my answer when I let my drunk younger cousin nearly kill both of us in the car accident that turned his life upside down. After that mistake, I knew I couldn’t take care of someone else. I couldn’t even take care of myself.

And Ruby never mentioned the kiss again. I figured she didn’t remember or maybe that confession was misplaced. Something she wanted to give to Tate but couldn’t so it landed on me. Maybe her feelings had always been platonic, because nothing like that ever happened again.

But nothing was the same either. Desire for her raged inside me for months, this sleeping beast her lips had woken now unleashed inside me. I wanted her so badly, and fighting that want sometimes felt like fighting for my life, that’s how hard it was. But I had to fight it because Ruby’s ability to act like that kiss never happened was bewildering. Sometimes I even wondered if it hadn’t really happened at all. I was drunk, dazed, a mess of anger and feelings I didn’t have names for. I almost thought I dreamed it up.

Except for the memory of her lips. I still remember every aspect of that kiss in perfect detail, too perfect to be a dream. The taste of her has been on my lips for four years. No matter how many other girls I kissed, none could take the edge off.

So maybe I shouldn’t be surprised I told her I wanted her when I was coming out of surgery. It was a long time coming, that truth spilling out. Things have shifted lately: Ruby changing, Ruby inviting a guy toourplace, maybe even Ruby falling in love. That feels dangerous, maybe more so than the idea of us together.

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