Always the Last to Know(26)
“I should get back,” he said.
“Oh, right. Sure.” My conversation game was red-hot.
“All right if I kiss you?”
I may have twitched. “I . . . What did you say?”
He grinned and half shrugged, so I leaned toward this wild boy, and our lips met, a soft, gentle kiss. The deep scarlet in my heart flared with such heat and beauty, I already loved him.
When the kiss ended, he rested his forehead against mine, his eyes still closed. “Wanna be my girlfriend?” he whispered.
“Okay.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
And that was that.
My parents didn’t mind too much; I was that age when kids started dating, and everyone knew the Pelletiers as a good, solid family. Besides, Juliet was pregnant, and our mother was obsessed with throwing her a ridiculous shower (as she’d been obsessed with the wedding two years before). Me having a boyfriend barely registered.
Noah’s parents didn’t mind, either. He was an only child; they loved him and welcomed me, seeing me as a nice girl for their boy, though his mom’s forehead did pucker when I mentioned traveling and applying to schools in San Francisco and Barcelona.
Noah had a job on the weekends; his father was a general contractor, and a lot of his work was expanding houses for the summer people that populated Connecticut’s long, gentle shoreline. He’d worked on Juliet’s house, in fact. Noah would put in long hours most Saturdays and Sundays, not returning till late, when he would come to my house or, if it was super late, to my window, tossing pebbles against the screen until I came out. In these cases, I was Juliet. Juliet Capulet. Or Montague. I always forgot who had which last name.
“Hey, Special,” he’d say softly, and that glowing red would pulse in every molecule of my being. You bet I’d sneak out to be with him . . . to the town green down the block, where we could lie on a blanket and kiss, or, in the off-season, to the dock of one of the summer “cottages,” the waves lapping and lifting us as we fitted together, wrapped so tightly around each other it almost hurt.
In school, his black eyes would rest on me like I was the only person in the world. My friends were jealous; not only was I dating the cutest, nicest boy, but he loved me, and made no secret about it. He loved me. When we were together, everyone else fell to the wayside, and every spare minute was given to each other. It made my friends irritable, but I couldn’t help it. I was smitten. Utterly, completely in love.
For our first Valentine’s Day together, I gave him my first big canvas oil painting—a periwinkle-blue sky just before sunrise, golden clouds tipped with the same color of glowing, lush vermillion that lit up my heart. He hung it in his bedroom and took down all his movie posters and memorabilia so my painting was the only thing on that wall.
Oh, the kissing, the sweaty tangle of young limbs and heated murmurs that painting saw . . .
In our junior and senior years, Noah went to a vocational school part-time, taking a bus to New London on Thursdays and Fridays to learn carpentry, since he loved woodworking as much as I loved painting. I thought we were perfect for each other, both of us artists, though he’d laugh when I said that and say making door frames or coffee tables wasn’t exactly art. Though I’d never thought of myself as unhappy before, being with Noah—so seen, so important . . . it taught me what happiness was.
He had one flaw: he wanted to stay put. He wanted life to be exactly like his parents’ and grandparents’. He wanted to marry me in a few years and raise a bunch of kids, preferably five. (How many teenage boys say they want five kids?) I loved that he saw us together, because I did, too. Just . . . not here. I pictured us traveling, hiking on the moors or walking through the streets of Rome, on the Great Wall, in the spice markets of Mumbai. How we would fund this was unclear, but we were young. We could, er, backpack or however it was that people without rich parents traveled.
But as graduation drew closer, things got a little prickly. Noah had no problem with my plans for the next four years, but there was always a hint of condescension somewhere in there. Like once I’d gotten this “see the world/live in the city” bug out of my system, I’d understand that Stoningham was the only place to be.
But there was no way on earth I wanted to live in the town I’d grown up in. A thousand year-round residents, thick with pretension because of the brushes with celebrity or true wealth—Genevieve London of the handbag empire; an Oscar-winning actress who spent all of two weeks a year in her six-thousand-square-foot house. I didn’t want to run into the same people on the same streets in the same places I’d already been every day of my life. Staying here was an admission of fear of something greater . . . or a total lack of ambition. Only people like Juliet, with her Ivy League degrees and brilliant success, could come back to Stoningham without seeming like a loser. Or so it seemed to me.
I didn’t want to be Barb and John’s daughter and Juliet’s not-as-amazing sister. I didn’t even want to be called “Noah’s girlfriend.” I wanted to be myself . . . with Noah, still my parents’ daughter, but I wanted to be Sadie Frost, yes, that Sadie Frost, the artist.
Change. The word was a siren call that filled me with an energy and thrill I couldn’t describe. When you grow up in Connecticut, you’re defined by the absence of things. We had hills but not mountains. A shoreline, but not really the ocean. Farms, but not exactly farmland. Cities, but either scarred by urban blight or too small to hold their own with Boston and New York just a train ride away.