Page 46 of Let It Be Me

He means it. He just doesn’t know how much his life is going to change after college. But even so, his words fill my chest with the kind of warm, soft comfort that no one else but Lorenzo can create.

EIGHTEEN

lorenzo

I know what happens next.

I can almost see the swirling thoughts behind Ruby’s brown eyes as we lounge at the bow of the boat. When self-doubt hits her, it hits like an avalanche, and that’s when she gets messy.

I glance down at the open cooler on the floor of the boat and take a quick inventory. Seven beers left. That means Ruby’s had none. I think about setting aside two for me. If it’s going to be one ofthosenights, I need a little buzz. “You want to head in soon?” I ask. If she’s going to get shit-faced, better it be on dry land.

She stares out at the water. Glares, actually. “Soon.” But she doesn’t reach for the cooler.

Ruby’s got a mean self-loathing streak, and the hard thing is, she’s not completely off base when she criticizes herself. She did blow the opportunities she had in high school. She put in zero effort and still managed mostly C’s, and she was a talented swimmer before she quit in ninth grade. And she’s always been kind of aimless. She has her reasons, though, starting with her asshole parents, who don’t hide the fact they would have preferred a daughter with a completely different disposition. And I like that Ruby is who she is.

“I know what you’re doing,” I tell her. When she looks at me, I add, “Stop comparing yourself to private school kids and Shafer assholes who’ve had their futures plotted out since middle school.”

“Why?” She bends down for the cooler, but instead of getting a beer, she pulls a plastic-wrapped red Popsicle from the ice—her favorite boat snack.

“Because you’re not like them.”

Ruby yanks the wrapper off the Popsicle. “Exactly.”

“None of them could have turned day eighteen of my miserable recovery into the best day I’ve had in months.”

Slowly, her glare melts into a reluctant smile. “I guess that’s true.” She takes a bite out of the Popsicle. “So what do you want to do when we get back?”

“I thought we had an exciting evening ahead of giving the cats dose number two.”

“After that.”

I’d already mentally given my night over to working Ruby through her tearful outbursts and making sure she didn’t trip over something and end up in the hospital, getting stitches. For the third time. But to be fair, she hasn’t done that in a long time. “We could do a game night. Maybe ... Pictionary?”

There it is, finally, a real smile. “I thought you had PTSD.”

“I do.” I take a deep, steadying breath for dramatic effect, hoping to make her laugh. “But I think I’m ready to face my past.”

One time in middle school, Ruby and I got roped into playing Pictionary with her parents. I’m an abominable artist, so when I had to draw a mushroom for my partner—Ruby’s dad, of course—it ended up looking undeniably like a fat dick. Everyone in the room knew it, but I couldn’t do any better, no matter how many times I erased it and tried again. Every detail I added to distinguish it from a dick only made it look more like a dick.And every time I erased it and tried again, Mr. Hayes’s face got redder and his eyes darted faster from the dick drawing to his wife and daughter. Back then, he was still convinced I was a threat to his only child’s virginity. And he was practically spitting as he choked out his guesses, both of us knowing he had zero faith in them and was just throwing shit at the wall and hoping I’d accept one and end the nightmare, which is what I should have done. But he kept glaring at me, obviously thinking I was doing this on purpose to be an asshole, and I hoped if he finally guessed right, I could show him the stupid Pictionary card and he’d realize I wasn’t a punk, just a supremely bad artist.

Then, finally, it happened. “It’s a penis!” Mr. Hayes had angrily declared. The room went silent, that word—PEE-nus!—reverberating endlessly. I capped the marker and mumbled, “It’s a mushroom.”It was the worst game I’d ever played. And in the dozens of times I’ve eaten dinner at Ruby’s parents’ house since then, they’ve never once served mushrooms. I’m not kidding.

Ruby runs the Popsicle over her lips. “We’d have to remove all vegetable and fungi cards from the deck.” She gives me a tiny, playful smile.

“Probably flowers too.” Jesus, why are we making thinly veiled references to penises and vaginas right now? I cut my eyes away from the sight of her juicy red mouth, trying not to imagine how her cherry-stained lips would taste, but for probably the fiftieth time in a few days, my mind goes back to the way she kissed me. Her heated body on top of me and the soft sound she made when she put her lips on mine. With me still half wrapped in sleep, it was like a dream. I couldn’t re-create that moment if I tried.

And I shouldn’t, not even in my head. Her kissing me isn’t a free pass to start living out the sexual fantasies that have been lingering at the back of my brain since puberty. I need some self-control. But I don’t know why, after years of successfullytraining myself not to look at her that way, I suddenly can’t help imagining what it would be like if we didn’t stop at kissing the other night. Kind of like I couldn’t stop myself from licking chocolate syrup off her neck. I need to get a grip. I grab my phone, ostensibly to check for anything from Dr. H, but it’s really not my doctor I can’t stop thinking about. And when I look up again, I catch Ruby staring at my bare chest. Her gaze lifts to mine, and when our eyes meet, there’s that energy. Undeniably powerful. Undeniably uncomfortable. Because we already made the call: We’re just friends.

Abruptly, she stands up and clears her throat. “Want to swim?” She doesn’t wait for an answer and instead takes off her mirrored sunglasses and walks to the back of the boat, dropping the Popsicle into the bucket that serves as a trash can. I shouldn’t turn around to watch her, but I do, staring as she steps out of her jean shorts and yanks the tank top over her head. She moves like she’s in a hurry; this isn’t a seduction. Even though, watching her bend over like that, I wish it was.

She steps over the side of the boat onto the swim platform, her ass jiggling in a way I can’t ignore. But there, with her toes at the edge, she pauses. Ruby hates cold water. My eyes have enough time to zero in on the curves of her waist. Like a jolt, a memory hits me of the night she came into my room and of the sensation of her skin when I put my hands around her waist. Her body in my hands. My fingertips tingle, remembering perfectly. From some small, feeble part of my brain comes the signal that I’m staring at her in a way I’m not supposed to, but the rest of me is in a caveman trance, lapping up the sight of her bare skin in the few seconds she gives me before she dives smoothly underwater.

When we get backto the house, I try to ignore the way her now-sheer clothes stick to her wet bikini as she walks upstairs to shower. After we get cleaned up, I cook some ramen noodles and soft-boiled eggs while Ruby scrubs at a few sticky spots still left on the kitchen floor from our food fight. I add chicken to my bowl of noodles and, even though it makes me cringe, a slice of American cheese to Ruby’s. We both get green onions on top. After dinner we give the cats their medicine and dig around the living room for Pictionary, but it seems to have been exorcised from the house.

“Bet he burned the whole thing after I left that night,” I tell Ruby.

We settle instead for playing cards and taking turns deejaying, quizzing each other on the memories from the old days that the songs stir up. It’s all very domestic, and Ruby declares us the most boring pair of college kids in the state, but I don’t think she minds. I know I don’t. Nights like this remind me of the early years of our friendship before we’d ever tasted alcohol, when we thought kissing was repulsive and just being together was as much fun as we could ever imagine anyone having. At least that last part hasn’t changed. But it hits me that this might be our last summer like this. Everything is changing.

And for some stupid reason, as we carry dishes over to the sink, my brain goes to Brad bragging about how she’d bring him up here. The prospect of it strikes me in the dead center of my chest, totally fucking intolerable—some guy in my place, laughing with her, seeing how her body fills out a swimsuit, brushing against her as they dock the boat and inspect every inch of it for signs of use, sitting around playing cards under thedimmed lights of her childhood kitchen. And even though the name Brad has been conspicuously absent from her vocabulary lately, it doesn’t matter. Whether it’s him or some other guy, this summer or five years from now, someday there’s going to be another man here with her. Unless I do something about it.

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