The Night Before(46)

“Laura…” Jonathan Fielding stands behind me. I feel his hand on my shoulder. And I stop. I stop looking for my phone. I stop looking for a way to leave.

My body moves back until it touches his. It is disconnected now. It doesn’t listen as I remind it of the things that are wrong.

“Shhh…” he whispers. “It’s all right. Catch your breath. Your phone is dead, remember?”

A chill races through me. His voice is soft, but his words … are they ominous? Is he trying to remind me that I am helpless now, trapped between the counter and his body? The door on the other side. Another hand touches another shoulder and suddenly no part of me is free.

We have different phones. Different chargers. It’s already been discussed and acknowledged that I can’t do anything until I get back to Rosie’s. The chill morphs into a heat wave.

And I like the heat.

“Do you want me to get you home?” he says then, but he might as well ask a child to put down an ice cream cone.

“It was a black Chevy Impala,” I say. Suddenly I need to finish the story. I need to know why he’s been asking me to tell it, and if he knows the ending, maybe the truth will reveal itself. He’ll have no further need to pull it out of me.

I have to know what this is. From ignorance comes insanity. And he seems so real to me, this man. I have been observing him. Listening with such care, making my list, those little things that seem wrong. But there are so many things that seem right.

“I used to tease him about his car because it was an old man’s car. His father gave it to him when he upgraded to a Lexus, so it was, actually just that. An old man’s car.”

Jonathan’s arms grow tighter around me, locking together in front of my chest. I can feel every inch of him now. The metal buckle of his belt against the small of my back. The front of his thighs pressing into the back of mine. His chest running up my back, so warm and strong.

He whispers again. “You don’t have to do this.”

But I don’t stop.

“I’d been there with him before—in the back of that car. Many times. And many times he had asked me. Many times he’d pulled me just a little closer to that point they warned us about in school.”

I laugh then, and when I do, I realize I’ve been crying. The tears that come find old tracks down my face.

“Sex Ed…” he says, laughing as well. “The point of no return.” He says this in a deep, mocking voice and I feel his body move with the laughter that rolls from his belly.

“Exactly,” I say. I don’t know why I’m laughing as hard as I am. It’s not funny. A few more words and a boy will be dead. But the sadness seeps out of every seam.

“I remember being scared. And I remember being excited. I was seventeen. Already late to the party. No one would have cared and at least it would have been over, you know? All the anxiety and anticipation … I think the only reason I waited that long was because of him. It was all I had left that I hadn’t given him.”

I think carefully about what to say next. The words that line up are not the ones I want him to hear. It felt like this … just like this.

There is heat between us. Tension. One hand strays until it reaches my stomach. His lips find my neck.

I feel him melting.

“And then we were there, in the car, and everything else—the other girl, the way he’d been all summer, my sister’s warnings—it was all on the outside. All the noise, shut out of our world. I remember the quiet when the door closed. Just the sound of us.”

I quiet myself then, and listen to the same sound. The sound of us. Breathe in. Breathe out. A hand over silk. Another hand over starched cotton. A sigh.

“You really don’t have to tell me.…”

“My intentions were good. I was going to test him—see if he would really go through with it, our first time together in that car, at a party we both wanted to get back to, and with that girl waiting for him. And if he didn’t stop, then I would be the one to pull away, to tell him he was an asshole and end things for good.”

I rest the back of my head against Jonathan’s chest and close my eyes.

“I think maybe it was just an excuse. Permission I gave myself to be in that car with him, to let things go too far. Part of me wasn’t ready to let go. Part of me still believed that I could … I don’t know, break through, maybe. It made no sense to me, why he would keep coming back if he really felt nothing.”

The memories spring from hiding, the months of analyzing his every move, his every word. Rationalizations. Justifications. Advice from my friends. Maybe this, maybe that. I wish I’d met Dr. Brody sooner. I wish someone had told me the truth.

It’s an illusion. He’s never going to love you.

But then I also wish I had never met Dr. Brody. I wish I still had my illusions. Nothing has filled the empty space they left behind.

Jonathan slips his arms away. He takes a step back, leans against the refrigerator door. I turn around to face him.

“What?” I ask.

“I don’t want to get carried away. I’m very attracted to you, but we’ve just met.”

My mind twists with this new information. It would have been so easy. But he’s pulled back.

“I’m not seventeen anymore,” I say.

“I know that. I’m just trying to be respectful. It sounds like you’ve had some bad experiences and I don’t want to be one of them.”