Lost and Found (13 page)

Cliff started to rub my shoulders as we sat next to each other, watching the latest episode of his show,
Next Door.
We used to do this in LA, comfortably stretched out on our sectional, a piece of furniture artificially monstrous, like Alex Rodriguez. He would tell me about his day and I would rub his shoulders. And then we’d watch
Next Door,
which usually involved Cliff kissing a very pretty, very thin blonde, who Cliff insisted was a terrible kisser.

I should have known that things were going sour when he stopped commenting on actresses’ kissing skills.

“You’re tense,” Cliff said on my noticeably smaller-than-a-sectional sofa.

“I had a rough day at work. I’ve had a lot of rough days. Students seem to think I’m their personal assistant. One dropped an assignment on the keyboard at the refe
rence desk and told me to find her sources,” I said. “Like I was a servant!”

I closed my eyes when Cliff hit a knot. “God that feels good.”

“If you hate your job, then quit.”

“I can’t quit. I need the money, not to mention the health insu
rance,” I said.

“You could always move back to LA. With me,” he said, and I turned. His hands fell from my shou
lders as I examined him.

“You’re serious?” I asked. He nodded. “That’s why you’re here?” He nodded again,
then bit his lip. He always had the best mouth, soft and full bodied, full of sweetness. It was a dessert mouth, meant for indulging. “But what about Kelsey?”

“Kelsey’s not you,” he said with
a tenderness in his voice. “No one is you.” He brushed a hair from my forehead, and then leaned in and kissed my patch. I stiffened. Cliff hated my patch.

“Cliff,” I said with a strained voice.

“Delaney, I was wrong. I was an idiot. Give me a second chance. Please.” He wrapped his arms around me, and pressed his forehead to mine.

I closed my eyes and sucked in a deep breath. “Give me some time to think about it?” I said.

“Of course. My flight leaves on Sunday, though. You could be on it with me.”

“Sunday?
That’s only three days away.”

He trailed a finger down my cheek and said, “I love you. I’ll love you forever. Please come back.”

I nodded and said, “Give me until Sunday.”

“Sunday, then.
I know you’ll make the right decision,” he whispered, right before he kissed me.

There was a knocking on my door, followed by a paw scratch, and when I opened the door and looked down, I saw Jenny, and my eyes trailed up to see Delaney standing there, nervously twirling a piece of hair around her finger.

“Hey,” she said, not meeting my eyes. “I was wonde
ring if you could be a sounding board for me. I have a dilemma.” She lifted the plate in her hand. “I brought pie. Apple.”

I stepped aside and motioned her into my apartment. “Come on in.”

She put the pie plate on the coffee table and sat down on my large leather sectional sofa, which took up the entirety of the living room. “I never told you thank you for letting me sleep here. So thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Cliff used to have a sofa like this,” she said. “What is it with guys and big sofas?”

“It makes us feel important.”

“Well, you are important. You save lives. I don’t think your sofa needs to get involved in your ego.”

“What about Cliff? Why does he need a big s
ofa?”

“Because it’s comfortable?”

“He’s not overcompensating?”

“You’ve seen him. What reason would he have?”

“You tell me.”

“This is weird, Oliver.” She picked up the pie and walked over to the kitchen, putting it on the cou
nter. She started rummaging through drawers. “Do you have a knife? And if you have vanilla ice cream, it will make it even better. The pie’s still warm.”

“Stress baking?” I asked. “Yup,” she said.

I came up behind her and she jumped when I put my hands on her shoulders, putting a hand to her chest. “Sorry,” she murmured.

“Go, sit.” I turned her hips back toward the sofa and got ever
ything.

I said, “So, ou
t with it. What’s the dilemma?”

“It’s about Cliff,” she said, and I stiffened.

“Go on,” I said, clattering everything on the coffee table and kneeling near it to cut and dish the pie and ice cream.

“It’s just—I can’t talk to Emily, because Emily’s a
lways been prickly about Cliff. And I don’t know what’s gotten into Ursula, but lately I can’t talk about Cliff without her getting all pale and Regency-era secretive with me, which is to say not very secretive. She clearly doesn’t want me to go back to LA. So I need an objective, impartial listener to hear me out.”

“That’s me?”

“Of course. I can’t imagine you’ve formed a lasting opinion of Cliff. Have you?”

“Nope,” I lied. “So let’s hear the dilemma.”

“See, well, Cliff kissed me,” she said. I stopped cutting. I breathed in through my nose and counted to ten as I closed my eyes. “And he asked me to move back to LA with him.”

“And you’re thinking about going?” I said, trying to keep my voice even and modulated.

“Yes.”

I put down the knife and looked at her then. She looked like a big-eyed, scared owl. I said, “Why?”

“Because he says he loves me. Because he’s Cliff.”

“Do you love him?” I don’t know why I asked it, b
ecause I didn’t want to hear the answer.

“Yes. No.
Maybe. I think so.”

“How long have you two been together?”

“Five years, on and off.”

“And you don’t know if you love him?”

“I mean, I definitely loved him. And then I definitely didn’t love him. But now I just don’t know. I think I’ll always love him. He’s a great man, and, I mean, God, he’s Cliff Burns. And he wants
me
.”

I didn’t try to keep the disgust out of my voice as I said, “Of course he wants you. The question is why you would ever want
him
.”

“Well, because,” she said. She looked confused. “What do you mean, of course he wants me? You realize he lives and works in Ho
llywood. He could have any woman he wanted.”

I shook my head. “No, he couldn’t. If he could have any woman he wanted, you wouldn’t be sitting in my li
ving room, wondering if you should go with him.”

“He’s Cliff. He’s the love of my life.”

I turned and stared at her. “But
why
?”

She shrugged. “Love is hard to explain.”

“I think you’re obsessed with appearances. You think if something looks good, it must be good. Like your damn sofa. It’s awful. There are springs that practically stab me when I sit on it.”

She crossed her arms. “Then don’t sit on it.”

I edged closer to her. “You’re not listening.”

“I am. I have an awful sofa, which, by the way, is beautiful and I love it and I always have.”

“Because of the way it looks.”

“Right, so I have a sofa you hate, so Cliff can’t be the love of my life.”

I stood up and walked around the sofa once in a loop, my hands in my hair. I came back around in front of her. “You just—don’t you see? You don’t think anything of yourself because of how you look.”

“I see,” she said, her eyes dropping to her hands in her lap. “I think I’m going to go.”

I sucked in a sharp breath. “Delaney.” She stood. I nodded. “Okay, we can talk later.”

“I mean, I think I’m going to go to LA. I hate my job. I know I’m not going to ever be with anyone be
tter than Cliff, if I’m ever with anyone at all. I thought I could be alone, but I’m not good at it. I miss being with someone, and Cliff is offering me exactly what I want.”

I pushed her down on the sofa,
then sat next to her abruptly, our hips bumping. “Ow.” She moved down the sofa, away from me.

“Delaney, no.
Don’t go. You are not a supplicant.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that you believe that Cliff is as good as your life could ever get, and you should go along with whatever he wants. But it’s not true. It’s not the truth.”

“It’s not?” She peered up at me.

I scooted closer to her on the sofa, and put my hands on either side of her face, feeling the softness of her cheeks. My fingers slipped to the back of her neck, tangling in her hair, which was softer and thicker than I’d expected, and I felt my whole body awaken as her breath landed on my neck. “Delaney,” I said. “Stay.”

And then I kissed her.

Oliver put both hands on my cheeks, and I felt a rush in my ears right as I closed my eyes. Then he was pulling me close to him and his lips were on mine, his tongue tangling with mine, and it felt so good that I kissed him harder, pressed into him, and a heat that had been si
mmering in me flared.

He pulled away, gasping, and ran a finger down my neck, to the crook, to my collarbone. Lower. “Delaney, don’t move back to LA,” he said, and then he kissed me again.

I touched my lips after I left Oliver’s apartment. I touched them as I sat down on the sofa, hoping Cliff was already asleep. I touched them as I lie down.

I never understood when Emily talked about kissing Sam the first time, how she said she could feel it all over her body, in her hair and behind her eyelids and in her toes and inside her lungs, like the kiss had gotten caught in her air.

But now I understood. Oliver was caught in me. Or I was caught in him. 

“Delaney?” Cliff padded out from the bedroom. I tilted my head backwards on the pillow near the armrest to get a better view.

Cliff was shirtless and in boxer briefs, and beautiful and perfect and desirable, looking exac
tly like he had six years ago when I’d bumped into him outside of the dorm bathroom. I’d been in my college uniform of a t-shirt and jeans, my hair dyed black and severe, pulled back from my face. I was walking out of the bathroom after carefully reapplying cover-up to my patch so my roommate wouldn’t have any clue what I really looked like.

That had been Ursula’s suggestion when I was worried about rooming with a stranger, even though she’d added that I didn’t look “that bad,” and didn’t really need to go through the extra e
ffort, I was glad I did, especially right then, bumping into a shirtless Cliff. I’d seen him around the floor and the dorm cafeteria. We all had. It was hard to avoid the best looking guy we’d ever seen.

“Perfect Man approaching,” Ursula would say whe
never he walked past our table at dinner. Then she’d sigh and shake her head at his beauty and his ridiculous wardrobe, which consisted back then almost exclusively of various gas station attendant and bowling shirts with different names sewed on, “Art,” and “Buck,” and “Horace.”

“I bet his name is something extra sexy,” Ursula said. “Like Grant.”

“He looks rich, so his first name is probably something named after capitalist royalty, like Carnegie, or Reynolds, or Procter-Gamble,” I said.

“And he was probably the apple of his mother’s eye, doted on,” Ursula said.

“Oh, precious little Procter-Gamble is taking his first steps!”

“Procter-Gamble just won the spelling bee!”

“Yeah, the word was ‘diaper.’ He spelled it ‘L-U-V-S.’ Good job, Procter!”

Standing in front of him in the dimly lit co-ed bat
hroom, I quickly forgot all my quips as I stared at his chest. I’d never seen a naked male chest so close, or so muscled. I stepped aside and looked down. “Uh, sorry,” I said and moved away.

“That’s okay,” he said, and then he walked in. It was a magical first meeting.

The next day at dinner, Procter-Gamble nodded to me as he walked by with his tray of food, and Ursula squealed with delight. “What was
that
?”

“I met him last night.
Near the bathrooms. I swooned, he went in to pee. We’re probably getting married.”

“Did you find out his name?”

“No, of course not. Are you crazy? I can’t go talk to him.”

She gave me big pleading eyes as she asked, “For me? Will you go talk to him for me?
Pretty please?”

“Uh, no.”
But I had. It had taken me a week to gather up the courage, but when he nodded and started to walk past, I said, “Hey! Do you want to sit with us?” He said, “Sure,” and sat down. And then promptly started hitting on Ursula, and I sat at dinner pretending to be wildly interested in my turkey tetrazzini, or turkey meatloaf, or turkey surprise (“surprise, we still have turkey”). Three days later, Ursula and Procter-Gamble, by then known as Cliff, were an item, and I was a third wheel.

I started skipping dinner, telling Ursula I had study groups or library reserves, so I had to stay in the rea
ding room. “Okay, you’re avoiding me. What’s up?” she said, stopping by my room one night when my roommate and I were sitting on opposite sides of our cinderblock prison, pretending we were far away from each other.

I slipped my noise cancelling headphones off and said, “Where’s Cliff?”

“Oh, so that’s it. You don’t like Cliff.”

“I like Cliff,” I said. “I mean, I don’t
like
Cliff. I just like him. I’m glad you’re with him. I’m…”

“You like Cliff?”

“Sure.”

“Wait, you
like
Cliff.”

“Can we stop saying ‘like’?”

“No. You like Cliff. That’s it, isn’t it? It’s weird. I’m sorry, I should have caught it all along. Well, good news, you can have Cliff.”

“What?”

“We broke up. He was lame. He was always talking about his ‘acting’ and his career and whether he should get his teeth whitened and making me feel his abs and avoid carbs. I was starting to feel fat.”

“You’re not fat. You’re the perfect size,” I said.

“Size 12.” She frowned.

“Marilyn Monroe was a size twelve, I heard.”

“That was, like, a 1950s size twelve, which is like a size zero now. Which, why does a size zero exist? If you’re a size zero, shouldn’t you not be alive? Shouldn’t you be air?”

“I guess.”

“So, you can have Cliff for some fun times. He wasn’t for me. He’s nice and all, just a little too self-involved.”

“I’m not going to take Cliff.”

“Why not?”

“Because…” I stared at her, trying to transmit all of my self-loathing through my eyes.

“Because?”

“Because I’ve never had a boyfriend.
I can’t go from zero to Cliff.” But I had. At first he still hung around with us at dinner, but when Ursula kept staring down at her plate instead of asking him questions, Cliff stopped coming to dinner. He found me at lunch one day, though, and plopped his plate down. “Hey, Lane,” he said, giving me a lazy smile. I loved that he called me by my nickname.

“Hey Cliff,” I said. “How were your auditions for
Godspell
?” After that, Cliff started talking, and I didn’t need to do too much else. When he leaned in to kiss me a few weeks later, I was so surprised that I didn’t tell Ursula about it. The kiss turned into more kisses, which turned into time alone in his room, and then time alone in my room, and then Ursula walking in behind my roommate while Cliff’s hand was on my breast as our legs were tangled up together on my bed.

It had taken a while for me and Ursula to talk after that, but eve
ntually I told her. “I love him. I know I’ve only known him a little bit of time, but I love him. I’m crazy about him,” I confessed to her. He made me feel special. Of all the girls he could pick, it was
me
.

“But if you love him, why were you hiding him?”

“I was afraid that he’d change his mind,” I said in a small voice. It wasn’t just in my imagination. He’d told me not to tell anyone until we were sure of what we meant to each other, and I’d agreed. By the time I was so crazy for him I was dizzy with it, I didn’t know what to do. “Please forgive me.”

She stormed from my room and for one miserable week I thought I’d lost my best friend. But eve
ntually she started eating dinner with me and Cliff again, and Cliff started holding my hand while we walked to class, or nuzzling my neck, or kissing me. “That’s your boyfriend?” one girl in my econ class asked me after Cliff had dropped me in front of the lecture hall.

“Yeah,” I said, still in a daze from his kiss. “It is.”

I would have done anything for him, so when he got a callback for
Next Door
, and then another, and then the show, and then knelt down and asked if I’d go with him, of course I said yes. “But you’ve only been dating for a year!” Ursula and Emily and my mother told me.

“But it’s Cliff. He’s The One.” I’d known he was The One because he was the only one who saw through me. When I’d lie in bed with him, he’d skim his finger over the patch on my sto
mach and say, “I love you in spite of this,” and then he’d touch the back of my knees, “in spite of this,” and then my forehead, “and in spite of this.” I’d taken off the makeup by then, wanting to be honest about who I really was. I didn’t want to sell him a false bill. He told me he thought I was pretty anyway, and I couldn’t contain the smile beaming in me. He thought I was pretty.

So of course I left Prairie Glen. Of course I left Ursula and Emily and my college degree and my part-time job at the library. I was pu
rsuing my dream. I never thought I’d be with anyone, that anyone could love me, and now I had Cliff.

Except Cliff worked, and I had to enroll in a comm
unity college in LA, and then college, and then graduate school, and get jobs in customer support, in tech support, in retail, in anything I could find, to pay my tuition and our rent, and we never saw each other. It seemed like Cliff only came home to sleep in the same bed, and sometimes we’d go days without touching.

But it was still Cliff. He was the love of my life. He was beautiful and successful and now he was even getting a little bit rich. He loved me. I couldn’t ask for more. Until I went on set and found his fi
ngers on the back of a beautiful blonde actress’s neck, kissing her deeply, kissing her in a way that I knew meant that they’d done much more than just kiss. When they broke apart and Cliff saw me, I walked back to my car,
our
car, as he ran after me and then talked at me. “It was just the one time. It meant nothing. She’s not important.”

Except that it had been going on for a year, and that actress, Ke
lsey, was in love with him, and she’d begged me to break up with him. “He’s the love of my life,” she said, in tears, as she called me late one night when Cliff wasn’t around. If he wasn’t with Kelsey and he wasn’t with me, I wanted to tell her, he was probably with someone else. Cliff was dipped in Technicolor now, and I could see him the way Ursula had years before.

I didn’t say anything to Kelsey that night because I was too full of sadness for her. Someone as beautiful as
Kelsey deserved someone other than Cliff, but there was no way to tell her that. I hung up on her. And I came back to Prairie Glen.

Back at my apartment, I sat up on the sofa as Cliff sat down next to me. “Where were you?” he asked, pulling the blanket up over both of us and putting his head on my shoulder.

“I was with Oliver,” I said.

“That guy.”

“Yeah?”

“He’s kind of an asshole, Lane.”

“No. He’s definitely an asshole,” I said.

Cliff laughed and I felt it against my ribs, and then he put his arm around my shoulder and hugged me to him, and said, “Come back home. Please. I miss you. I love you. You’re it, Lane. There’s no one else for me.” Beaut
iful, perfect Cliff wanted
me.

I closed my eyes tight and then shook my head. “I a
lready tried this once.”

“It will be different.”

“I’m sure it will, Cliff, but I still can’t. I never got why you wanted me.”

“Because we’re soul mates, Lane.
That’s why.”

“We’re not,” I said. “We can’t be.”

“Why not?” He pulled away from me. “Is it because of Oliver? Is
he
your soul mate?” he asked as his lip curled.

“Surprisingly, not all my decisions are based on men. I have a job and an apartment and my friends. I’m not lea
ving just because it makes your life easier.” I stood up and threw off the blanket. “You sleep on the sofa. I’m going to my bed.”

But after I pulled the covers up to my neck, I couldn’t even close my eyes. I was trading in one Cliff for another with Oliver. “No,” I said to m
yself in the darkened room, feeling stupid. “You will stay away from Oliver.”

At the thought of Oliver, my body remembered my kiss with him. I closed my eyes and felt him all over, the way his hands pressed into my back, and then later how they tangled in my hair.

He had pressed into me, pushing into me like he couldn’t get close enough, climbing on top of me. “Delaney,” he said, pulling away from the kiss, his chest rising and falling in rapid breaths. Then he kissed me again, his hands skimming my waist, his chest pushing against mine. It felt like every single one of the nerves on the surface of my skin had just had its first ever cup of coffee.

It
took me hours to fall asleep.