Authors: Lauren Gilley
He touched her face, the smooth porcelain of her cheek warm and slick with tears in his palm. He traced the dewy soft edge of her bottom lip with his thumb – it had teeth marks in it. “I love you,” he repeated, a smile threatening, “and you better believe I don’t throw that around when I don’t mean it.”
He expected tears, or a kiss, or an
I love you
. Instead he watched his words go in through her wide, startled eyes and get dissected to pieces in her brain. People, he realized, didn’t very often tell Ellie that they loved her. She needed to savor it. She needed to figure out, no matter how emphatic he’d been, whether he was telling her the truth.
“Ellie.” His hand trailed down to the slim, white column of her throat. He leaned in and pressed a slow kiss to her lips, lingered until she responded. “I love you,” he repeated when he pulled away. He’d thought it would be so much harder to say, but it flowed off his tongue like the most natural thing in the world.
Then the tears came, welling up in the corners of her eyes. She reached up with tentative fingers and pressed the very tips against the scabs on his cheek. “What happened to your face?”
He grinned – a real, true, inside and outside smile. “You’re not the only one with family issues.”
**
“Elbows in your ribs? Really?”
Dawn was maybe an hour off, the night between the gaps in her wooden blinds the most perfect shade of navy she’d ever seen. Jordan’s chest pushed against her back every time he inhaled. She felt the roughness of the healing scabs on his road rash cheek where his face was tucked against her neck. She held one of his hands between both of hers, tracing his knuckles with one black-nailed finger.
“Hey, I couldn’t make the stuff up,” he said with a snort that ruffled her hair.
Somehow, that little detail made
I love you
even more real. With his body he’d told her, shown her, all his favorite parts of her. It was true what everyone said about makeup sex. But her elbows and his ribs – that was something he couldn’t explain with a kiss, and had used words instead. Such a small effort went a long way in melting the candy coating of her heart.
“Can I ask you a serious question?” he asked, and opened his mouth on the side of her neck, grazed her skin with his teeth and sucked at her until she shivered.
“You won’t get a serious answer if you keep doing that,” she warned, and he chuckled.
He kissed her throat and then settled in again, every exhaled breath rushing cool across the damp patch of skin where his tongue had been. “How soon,” he said in a careful voice, “do you need to think about having kids?”
She shivered again and it had nothing to do with body contact. “Where did your sarcastic side go? Is it coming back?”
“It’s rejecting suppression, trust me.” She was still playing with his hand, but his arm tightened around her. “But I wanna know.”
“You wanna know so you can run away screaming?”
“
Because
I wanna know if you can wait till you graduate, or if it’s more pressing than that.”
Ellie pulled her lower lip between her teeth and held her breath. “It could wait until I graduate…but, Jordan, don’t agree to anything if - ”
“Do you think I would come back, knowing this about you, if I wasn’t…well,
prepared
?”
She let go of his hand and twisted around within his embrace until she was facing him. The lamplight landed softly against the taut lines of his thin face, his damaged cheek against the pillow, the gold flecks in his eyes shining.
Ellie put her hands on his chest, felt the steady, comforting thump of his heart. “I didn’t tell you about my health,” she said as she studied her fingernails against his bronzed skin, “because I didn’t want you to think that the only reason I was with you was to get myself impregnated. I’m not one of those girls. If the timing never worked out I was fine with…” She trailed off as she tipped her head back to regard him and saw the concentrated way he was staring at her.
The same swell of emotion that had accompanied him telling her that he loved her returned, smoothing across all her tattered nerves. “I sound stupid, don’t I?” she asked, blinking. “But I swear that I wanted you to be the one and it had nothing to do with my ticking clock or whatever you want to call it.”
His hand went down her spine and tucked her in even closer to him. “Do you still want that?” he asked, and his voice was just loud enough for the distance that separated their faces.
She rolled her eyes because this intense, serious side of him was asking all the questions she wanted to say “yes” to.
“Ellie,” he prompted, and leaned in until their foreheads touched.
“Yes, okay?” She smiled, but could feel it shaking. “And don’t make fun of me for being - ”
He kissed her. An invasive, sweetly aggressive kiss that kept going and going and had her hand sliding up his neck and into his hair. He rolled, moving her onto her back and settling on top of her between her parted legs.
“I’m glad you want that,” he said when their lips broke apart, and Ellie watched the light dance in his eyes. “Your ticking clock doesn’t scare me, sweetheart.”
And for the first time, it didn’t scare her either.
38
T
he best thing about Certainty – Jordan’s proper noun kind – was that it had never been fleeting. As he studied his scabby reflection three mornings later while he brushed his teeth in Ellie and Paige’s girly bathroom, he was one hundred percent certain he wouldn’t rather be anywhere else. Because, as it turned out, once he got out of his own way, Ellie’s life clicked in next to his like they were interlocking puzzle pieces. School had just ended for the semester and on their first morning off, he was going for his usual run and then…whatever she wanted to do.
The bedroom was awash with pre-dawn shadows when he went for his shoes. Ellie had curled into a ball beneath the covers in his absence, her hair black silk against the ghostly white of the pillow. He retrieved his Nikes from under the bed and then stroked a hand along the crown of her head, smoothing her hair, and pressed a kiss to her temple. “Are you cold?”
“Mmhm.” She was an early riser, but he always had her beat by about ten minutes.
“Maybe that’s because you’re naked,” he suggested with a grin, and pulled away as her eyes snapped open.
“Maybe me being naked is your fault,” she retorted, but smiled, the sheets rustling as she stirred.
“Probably.” He sat down on the edge of the bed and laced his sneaks. “I’m pretty irresistible.”
“Uh-huh,” she snorted. He got away with zero bragging, and that was a good thing. Her foot touched his hip through the comforter. “You’re gonna freeze out there.”
“I’ve got my hat.” He pulled his blue stocking cap out of the pocket of his shorts to demonstrate. “And you know what would really help is if there was breakfast when I got back.”
“Oh, that would be nice. Call when it’s done.”
“Ha.”
The old bedframe creaked and the comforter made a sound like dry, rattling leaves as she pushed it back and got up on her knees behind him. Her hands touched the base of his neck and then slid down his chest, nails teasing at him through his sweatshirt. He felt her breasts against his back, her hair tickling at his cheek as she dropped her chin on his shoulder. “What do you want for breakfast?”
“You.”
She chuckled.
“But I could go for some kind of potatoes.”
“And toast?” she suggested.
“With too much butter.”
“God, I’d weigh three hundred pounds if I ate like you,” she said, and kissed the side of his neck. “Go run.”
His morning routine was always tested in winter; the first shock of his feet on cold floorboards was something to be suffered through. The prospect of her company if he rolled back into bed made the idea of a run in thirty degree weather even more abominable, but Ellie was up now, already climbing out of bed and pulling on her robe, feet going into her slippers.
“I’ll be back,” he promised, and picked his iPod off her dressing table on his way out.
Downstairs was still black with night. There was a wall clock somewhere – he’d never really bothered to look for it – that ticked in the empty, hollow quiet of a world still asleep. It was peaceful. It felt just as much like home as the house he’d grown up in.
The girls were smart about keeping themselves locked in, and the key to the front door was tucked up on a decorative wall sconce to the left of the sidelights. He plucked it down and unlocked the door, slipped it in his pocket with the intention of locking them back in while he was gone.
He expected the sharp, angry rush of cold morning air that slapped him when he opened the door. What he didn’t expect was the huddled form of a girl who’d been leaning against the door that fell in across the threshold at his feet.
**
“Nikki,” Ellie said gently as she poured coffee into two mugs and put the carafe back on the warmer. “I’m pretty sure only dogs can hear you. I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me.”
Jordan had come back upstairs while she was brushing her teeth, a careful, blank look on his face.
“I think you need to come down and see this,”
he’d said, and there had been Nikki, sitting on the floor in the foyer, shaking with cold and bawling her bloodshot gray eyes out.
Ellie took the coffee to the table and set a mug in front of her still-hysterical sister, took her own seat at the head of the table and glanced out through the moisture glazed windows. The sun was just hinting at its arrival, a thin line of magenta behind the tree line separating earth from sky. It was going to be a gray, windswept day; she could already see the curled-up corpses of leaves tumbling across the lawn.
Nikki was underdressed in a spaghetti strap camisole and sweatpants. She’d dropped her thick Columbia parka over the back of her chair, but she shivered now, too thin and covered in goose bumps. Mascara and liquid eyeliner had been carried down her cheeks by tears and were long, black stains on her spray-tanned skin. Her hair was full of snarls and she looked, alarmingly, like she’d spent the night huddled up on Ellie’s front stoop.
She had three crushed paper towels she was using for tissues and mopped at her nose again, sniffled and took a rattling, shattered breath. “I don’t understand!” Her voice was tear-choked, but at least she’d brought the high frequency dog whistle whining down to a controlled level. “I am…” She shredded the towels and pressed them to her nose again. “A
varsity cheerleader
! I’m skinny and blonde and I’m…I’m hot, damn it!”
“Yes you are,” Ellie said flatly as she added cream to her coffee and stirred.
Little damp bits of paper towel rained down on top of the table as Nikki twisted her makeshift tissues between her fingers, fat tears rolling down her stained cheeks. “I just-just don’t understand!”
“Understand what?” Ellie sipped her coffee.
“He cheated on me!” she exclaimed, flinging her hands, tissues flying. Her face crumpled before she folded her arms over the table and dropped her forehead on her wrists, sobs shaking her body.
More than a year ago, Nikki had perched sideways on Kyle’s lap and given her the nastiest of smirks. She had not been Ellie’s sister in that moment, but the triumphant victor: the girl who’d stolen a boy away from a rival and wanted to gloat about it.
“Can you blame him?”
she’d asked while Ellie cried into her pillow. Ellie had asked herself almost every day since how she could love and forgive a sister who would do such a thing to her. How could it be worth the heartache to love someone who so clearly didn’t love her? Kyle had been cruel – losing him had been a hidden blessing, freedom and confidence and a jaded understanding of men the necessary byproducts – but losing a sister who by all rights should have been her best friend had been the sort of devastating blow that left her questioning every relationship in her life.
Had Paige been awake, she would have laughed in Nikki’s face and sent her packing. Jordan had given her a look via the bathroom mirror that suggested she do as much.
Instead, Ellie stroked a hand down her sister’s tangled nest of hair. “I know,” she said softly. “That’s why I was trying to help you. When I told you - ”
“Oh, what do you know?” Nikki wailed. “Of course he cheated on
you
! But why did he cheat on
me
?”
Ellie sighed and retracted her hand. Outside, the sky was starting to blush, pink creeping into the charcoal canopy draped over the black silhouettes of the trees. Jordan was back: he was coming up the front walk with his ear buds dangling around his shoulders, his light sweatshirt clinging to the perspiration on his chest, short cowlicks of hair curling from beneath the brim of his stocking cap.
In truth she should have been thanking them – Nikki and Kyle both – because the boy coming up her sidewalk proved that whatever she’d once felt for Kyle was a pitiable excuse for true emotion.
With another sigh for her grief-stricken sister, she got to her feet and went to pull a bowl of leftover homemade hash browns out of the fridge. She’d bought the bagged, freezer kind only once; now she chopped and seasoned red potatoes and made her own that she portioned out and heated in the mornings. Jordan had come back to her Friday, and she’d gone to the store Saturday to stock up on potatoes and good, crusty French bread for toast.
“Are you hungry?” she asked Nikki as she filled a cast iron skillet with shredded potatoes and added salt and pepper.
“No,” Nikki sniffled.
The front door squealed open and shut again, she heard the spare key get set back up on the wall sconce, and Jordan crept silently into the room.
“Breakfast will warm you up,” she pressed, and rolled her eyes for Jordan’s benefit.
Will it make her go away?
He mouthed and she bit back a laugh.
There was more sniffling, probably some tissue retrieval and nose-dabbing. “Do you have any yogurt?”
“No,” Ellie lied, and got no further response. She slid the skillet into the already warm oven and moved around Jordan to get the bread out of the freezer.
He pulled his iPod out of his pocket and slowly wound the white cords around it, staring across the room at Nikki like she was an alien who’d crash landed amid their happy little morning. Which, technically, she had. “Why is she here?” he whispered, and Nikki’s head snapped up in sudden fright, red-rimmed eyes wide.
“Because.” Ellie made no attempt to keep her voice low as she sawed a knife through the flaky crust of the thick French loaf. “Kyle’s a cheater - ”
“Shock,” Jordan snorted.
“- and she’s broken up with him. Apparently that warrants sleeping on my doorstep.”
Nikki’s eyes bounced between them. “You can’t…you can’t just talk about me.”
“Can’t we though?” Jordan’s tone was bored. Ellie bit back a smile she felt guilty for as she arranged her toast slices on a cookie sheet and popped them into the oven with the potatoes. “I mean…Nikki, right? Or is it Brittany?” Ellie took the tip of her tongue between her teeth to keep from laughing and busied herself with pulling butter and ketchup out of the fridge. “You do understand what a bitch you are to your sister, yeah?”
Ellie snuck a glance toward her and saw that Nikki had gone pale under her layer of orange tan, her unblinking eyes and compressed lips the product of anger and a mental slap the likes of which she’d never been dealt.
“If I were her, I sure as hell wouldn’t be offering to feed you.”
For maybe the first time in her life, Nicole Grayson was speechless.
“Nikki,” Ellie said in as sweet a voice as she could manage. “Do you want to go watch TV and I’ll bring you a plate?”
Wordlessly, Nikki gathered her jacket and tissues, slid out of her chair and moved with wooden stiffness out of the kitchen, across the foyer and into the living room. A moment later, Ellie heard the TV come on with a low rumble.
“That,” she said in an undertone, “was pure magic.”
He pulled his stocking cap off and his hair sprang up in its absence. He dragged a hand through it. “Shame she and Kyle couldn’t make it work,” he deadpanned, “they deserve each other.”
“Both bitches,” she agreed.
The food came out of the oven and Ellie distributed it among four plates – Paige’s went back into the oven at a low temp until she finally dragged herself downstairs – and she left Jordan to doctor his with butter and ketchup as she took a plate to Nikki.
Her sister was watching
Jump Start
on VH1 and chewing on a strand of hair like she had as a little girl, socked feet propped up on the coffee table. She looked small and helpless, her face swollen and splotchy from crying, and if Ellie hadn’t known her she might have thought her some poor, innocent victim deserving of sympathy. Even knowing the truth, she set the plate on the coffee table with fork and napkin, a glass of orange juice, and patted the top of Nikki’s head on the way out. No thanks was offered, but Ellie heard the clip of the fork against her china as she crossed the foyer.