The Accidentals(84)

“It’s on Choate Street,” Frederick is saying.

“What is?” I ask. He’s trying to explain something.

“This house that’s for sale. I want you to come and see it.”

“Oh, okay,” I say, shaking off my distraction. “I’ll see it this weekend.”

“Don’t you have Spanish now?” Aurora asks.

“Yes. I should go.”

Frederick pushes his tray toward the edge of the table and slides out of the seat. “Nice place you’ve got here,” he says.

“Come back any time!” Aurora grins.

I walk my father out. “Guitar next week?” he asks.

“Absolutely.”

“Good.” He ruffles my hair and walks away smiling.





Chapter Twenty-Nine





The next evening, I sit alone on the window seat in our room, watching the sky turn pink over Claiborne. My phone buzzes, and I have to turn away from the sunset to get it. I hope it’s Jake. I’ve been thinking of him all day.

But the message is not from him.

When I open it, I see a single photograph. The glove compartment of Haze’s old car is framed in the shot. The compartment stands open, with something resting inside—the envelope I’d mailed him, containing my apology.

“Oh, Haze,” I whisper, touching the screen. I look back up to the sky, but the color has already deepened to gray. I get up and go into my bedroom.

My mother’s photographs lay on the dresser, and I pick them up. I’ve studied them many times already, memorizing the details. At first, they were shocking. Young and in love, the Jenny in the photographs looks like an entirely different person.

Now the two women are blending together in my memory. In fact, I’m probably ruining my ability to recall my mother as I’d known her. But I don’t care. I prefer to think of her as someone open to love, and not bitter.

Mom had been very clear that she didn’t want a repeat of her own heartbreak for me. “Finish college, be your own person,” she’d said. “That’s what smart girls do. It’s the stupid ones who are busy trying to catch a guy.”

But now I know that’s risky too. I’ve just spent most of a year trying very hard not to let anyone know how much I care. And here I sit alone, while upstairs someone who loves me waits.

So I text Jake, asking him to come over.

He replies immediately, saying he’ll be right down.

While I wait, I tidy up my room again and light one of Aurora’s candles. My father’s advice to me was to know my heart ahead of time, and to tell Jake my fears. That sounds like a nice lyric for a song. With a little work, we could probably get it to rhyme.

Hell, it’s probably easier to write a platinum single than to look Jake in the eye and tell him all the things that scare me.

But here he is already, knocking on our door.

“It’s open,” I holler.

A moment later Jake peeks around the bedroom door, his eyes shiny in the candlelight. He walks in. “It’s nice in here.” He sits down on the bed next to me and puts a hand on my lower back. Even that simple gesture fills me with happiness. I’ve missed him so much.

Turning, I wrap both arms around him. “I’ve been thinking about you all afternoon.” He feels warm and solid against me.

With one finger, he stretches the neckline of my top aside and kisses my shoulder. “That’s me on a good day. Hopefully I won’t flunk this term.”

Jake is not the scary thing, I remind myself. Very deliberately, I take his face in both hands and kiss him, picking up where we’d left off on the street corner yesterday morning. He makes a little noise in the back of his throat, and the sound of it sends shivers down my spine.

His kisses are sweet and slow. But this is not what I’d called him downstairs to do. And if I let it happen, we’ll probably end up taking yet another trip to Awkwardville.

I force myself to pull back. “Jake,” I say, my heart skittering. “I absolutely can’t get pregnant.”

With cheeks flushed pink, he raises his hands like a perp on a cop show. “Uh, okay?”

That sure didn’t come out as smoothly as it could have. “I mean, I know we haven’t…” I clear my throat. “But you probably want to. And that’s why I panic. Because nobody ever lied to me. I was the pregnancy that messed up my mother’s college education. And then her social life. And now I’m messing up Frederick’s, and I think I cost him a million dollars this year alone…” I look up at Jake, whose mouth is hanging open.

He closes it and reaches for me, folding me into a hug. “Just slow down there for a second, so I can follow you,” he says, rubbing my back.

“Okay.” He smells like clean T-shirts and soap. I’ve missed this so much.

“First of all, I’m really glad you messed up your mother’s life and Frederick’s, if that’s really even true,” he says.

“Oh, it is,” I mumble into the cotton at his collarbone.

His arms tighten around me. “Either way, I get it,” he says.

“You do?”

“Yeah. I wish you’d just said that before. That you feel all this extra pressure not to…”

“Repeat history,” I supply.