Love and Other Words

We were lying on the flat roof over his garage, basking in the sun. It was a summer break routine we’d had for nearly two weeks now: meet on the roof at ten, lunch around noon, swimming in the river, home to our families for the rest of the evening.

For as much as he enjoyed my company, Dad liked the quiet of solitude. Or maybe a teenage daughter was exhaustingly alien to him. Either way, he seemed content to let me stay out doing whatever I wanted with the Petropoulos kids until the bugs grew louder and the sky grew dark.

Andreas was on one side of me, Elliot on the other. One brother playing something on his PSP, the other reading Proust.

“You two cannot possibly be related,” I mumbled, turning the page of my book.

“He’s a loser.” Andreas laughed. “No game to speak of.”

“He’s a meathead,” Elliot said, and then grinned at me. “Ruled by his—”

A horn honked below in the driveway and we all sat up to see a rusty Pontiac come to a crunching stop on the gravel.

“Oh,” Elliot said, glancing at me and then jumping up. “Shit. Shit.” He spun in a half circle, fisting the front of his hair and looking like he was panicking, then climbed into the window to the family room. A minute later he appeared in the front yard. A girl climbed out of the car and handed Elliot a stack of papers.

She was medium height, with thick dark hair in a cute bob and an average, pretty face. Vaguely familiar. Sporty but not thick. With boobs.

I growled internally.

She said something to Elliot and he nodded and then looked up at where Andreas and I sat watching them.

“Who is that?” I asked Andreas.

“Some chick named Emma from his school.”

“Emma? Prom Emma?” My insides froze. “Does he like her?”

Andreas looked at my face and laughed. “Oh, this is so good.”

“No, Andreas, don’t—” I hissed, frantic.

“Elliot,” he called out, ignoring me. “Bring your girlfriend up here to meet your other girlfriend!”

I closed my eyes and groaned.

When I looked back down at the ground, Emma was looking up at me, inspecting, eyes narrowed. Elliot was watching me, too, with a wide, terrified expression, and then looked at her.

I waved. I wasn’t going to play the petty game.

She waved back, calling out, “I’m Emma.”

“Hi, I’m Macy.”

“Did you just move here?”

“No,” I called down, “we live next door on the weekends and some vacations.”

“Elliot’s never mentioned you.”

Elliot looked at her in shock, and from the expression on his face I would have guessed he mentioned me plenty. Well. Apparently Emma was going to play the petty game.

“She’s my best friend, remember?” I heard Elliot say stiffly. “She goes to Berkeley High.”

Emma nodded and then looked back at him, putting her hand on his arm and laughing at something she whispered to him. He smiled, but it was his tight courteous expression.

I lay back down on my blanket, ignoring the nausea rising in my stomach. His words from only a week before—when he’d been on the brink of sleep on the roof and admitted quietly that he was more himself with me than anyone else—cycled through my mind.

I’d told him I felt that way, too. During the school year, my weekdays were a blur, hours smoothed together in a mess of homework and swim and crawling into bed hoping whatever I’d packed into my brain that day didn’t seep out onto my pillow at night. In a sense, my time away from him felt like going to work, and the weekends and summer were coming home—unwinding, being with Elliot and Dad, being myself. But then things like this happened—and I was reminded that most of Elliot’s world existed without me.

Several minutes passed before I heard the car start and drive away. Moments later, Elliot was climbing through the window back onto the roof. I quickly pushed my nose into my book.

“Smooth, Ell,” Andreas said.

“Shut up.”

His feet came into view in front of my book and I pretended to be so engrossed that I didn’t even notice.

“Hey,” he said quietly. “Want to grab a snack?”

I continued pseudo-reading. “I’m good.”

He kneeled down close to me, ducked lower to catch my eye. I could see his apology written all over his face. “Come inside, it’s sweltering.”

In the kitchen, he pulled out a pitcher of lemonade and two glasses, and started making us sandwiches. Andreas hadn’t followed us inside and the house was cool, dark, and quiet.

“Emma seems lovely,” I said dryly, rolling a lemon across the countertop.

He shrugged.

“She’s the one you kissed at prom, right?”

He looked up at me and scrunched his glasses up his nose. “Yeah.”

“Do you still kiss her?”

Turning his attention back down to the sandwiches, he spread the peanut butter on the bread and added jelly before answering. “No.”

“Is that a lie by omission?”

When he met my gaze again, his eyes were tight. “I have kissed her on a few occasions, yes. I don’t still kiss her.”

His words hit my ears like bricks dropped from an airplane. “You kissed her other times besides prom last spring?”

He cleared his throat, turning a brilliant scarlet.

Jerk.

“Yeah.” He shifted his glasses up higher again. “Two other times.”

I felt like I’d swallowed a jagged ice cube; something cold and hard lodged in my chest. “But she’s not your girlfriend?”

He shook his head calmly. “No.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?” I wondered why I even had to ask this. Wouldn’t he tell me? Or spend time with her during the summer instead of me? He was always honest, but was he forthcoming?

He put down the knife and assembled the sandwiches before looking at me with a smirk. “No, Macy. I’ve been with you every day this summer. I wouldn’t do that if I had a girlfriend.”

I wanted to throw the lemon at his head. “Would you tell me if you had a girlfriend?”

Elliot gave this full consideration before answering, his eyes locked on mine. “I think so. But, I mean, to be honest, this is the one topic where I’m never sure how much to share with you.”

Even though a significant part of me knew what he meant, I still hated this answer. “Have you ever had a girlfriend?”

Blinking away, he returned his attention to the sandwiches. “No. Not technically.”

I rolled the lemon again and it fell onto the floor. He bent to pick it up and handed it back to me.

“Look, Macy. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I wouldn’t want to hear if you kissed someone if it didn’t mean anything, and kissing Emma didn’t mean anything to me. That’s why I never told you.”

“Did it mean anything to her?”

His shrug said everything his silence omitted.

“Maybe it isn’t my business,” I said, “but I do want to know those things. I feel weird that I didn’t know you have a thing with her.”

“We don’t have a thing.”

“You kissed her on three separate occasions!”

He accepted this with a nod. “Have you kissed anyone?”

“No.”

He froze with his sandwich midway to his lips. “No one?”

I shook my head, taking a bite and breaking eye contact. “I would have told you.”

“Really?” he said.

I nodded, face burning. I was sixteen and hadn’t been kissed. His No one? echoed inside my head, and I felt completely pathetic.

“What about Donny? Or . . . what’s his name?”

I looked up at him and stared meaningfully. He knew Danny’s name.

“Danny?”

He smiled, busted. “Yeah, Danny.”

“Nope. Not even Danny. Like I said, I would have told you. Because you’re my best friend—jerk.”

“Wow.”

He took a ginormous bite of sandwich and stared at me as he chewed.

I thought back to all the weekends we’d spent together, all the stories he’d told me about Christian being a maniac or Brandon having zero game with girls at school. I thought about his updates about his brothers and their girlfriends, and wondered why Elliot was always so tight-lipped about his own escapades. It threw me. It made me feel like maybe we weren’t as close as I thought we were.

“Have you kissed a lot of girls?”

He mumbled, “A couple.”

Something inside me was rioting. “Have you done more than kiss?”

He turned a new shade of red and finally nodded, taking another big bite so he wouldn’t have to elaborate.

My jaw slowly lowered to the floor. I waited until he was done chewing and had taken a sip of lemonade to ask, “How far?”

Countries were established, went to war, and split into smaller countries in the time it took for Elliot to answer.

“Elliot.”

“Shirts off.” He scratched his eyebrow and nudged his glasses up his nose again with the tip of his finger. Stalling. Avoiding eye contact. “Um . . . and with one girl—not Emma—hands in pants.”

“You have?” I felt my eyes bug out. “Who?”

“Emma was just shirts off. The rest was this other girl, Jill.”

I put my sandwich down, my appetite completely gone. The kitchen was on the darkest side of the house this time of day, and it suddenly felt too cold. I lifted my hands, rubbing my bare arms.

“Macy, don’t be mad.”

“I’m not mad! Why would I be mad?” I took a shaky sip of lemonade, trying to calm down. “I’m not your girlfriend. I’m just your best friend who apparently knows nothing about you.”

He took a step around the kitchen island, and stopped. “Macy.”

“Am I overreacting?”

“No . . .” he said, and took another step closer. “I would definitely take issue if I knew some guy had his hand down your pants.”

“I think you’d also take issue if it happened and I never told you.”

He seemed to give this fair consideration. “Like I said, it depends. It would bug me, yeah, so I wouldn’t want to know about it unless you felt something more than . . . momentary attraction.”

“Is that what it was for you with Emma?” I asked. “ ‘Momentary attraction’?”

He nodded. “Absolutely.”

“When was the last time you fooled around with someone?”

He sighed and leaned a hip against the counter where he stood.

“If the situation was reversed, you would be giving me the Spanish Inquisition,” I pointed out. “Don’t sigh at me.”

“Emma and I fooled around in March, then went to prom in May, and kissed again the weekend after, but it was nothing. It was sort of . . .” He floundered a little, staring up at the ceiling. “If you haven’t kissed anyone, then it’s hard to say what I mean, but we were all at a park, and she came up to me, and it just sort of happened.”

I pulled a face at this and he laughed uncomfortably, shrugging. “Jill is Christian’s cousin. She was visiting last December and we made out once. I haven’t talked to her since.”

I dismissed Jill with a wave of my hand. “So you don’t like Emma, then?”

“Not the way you mean.”

I looked away, taking a minute to calm down. I realized it would have been dramatic, but I wanted to storm out and make him follow me and grovel for, like, an entire day.

“I fooled around with Emma because she’s here,” he said quietly. “You’re in Berkeley and we’re not together and I’m in this tiny Podunk town. Who else am I supposed to kiss?”

Something shifted in that exact moment, something that would never shift back.

Who else am I supposed to kiss?

I looked at his big hands and his Adam’s apple. I let my eyes linger on the muscular arms that used to be so thin and stringy, on legs that stretched, defined, beneath his torn jeans. I looked at the button-fly on the front of said jeans. I blinked away, up at the cabinets. Look anywhere but at those buttons. I wanted to touch those buttons, press my hand to them, and for the first time I realized I didn’t want anyone else touching them.

“I don’t know,” I mumbled.

“Then come over here,” he said in that same quiet voice. “You kiss me.”

My eyes flew to his. “What?”

“Kiss me.”

I thought he was calling my bluff, but I was worked up from the Emma situation and the way he looked, leaning against the counter, watching me. I was warm from the way his hands seemed so big now, and his jaw so angular . . . and the buttons on his jeans.

I walked around the center island and stood right in front of him. “Okay.”

He stared down at me, a smile playing on his lips, but it straightened when he realized I was serious.

I pressed my hands to his chest and moved closer. I was so close that I could hear every quickly accelerating inhale and exhale, could see his jaw twitch.

Fascinated, he moved a hand to my lips, pressing two fingers there and staring. Without thinking, I opened my mouth and let his index finger slip inside and against my teeth. When he grunted quietly, I ran my tongue over his fingertip. He tasted like jelly.

Elliot pulled it back sharply. He looked like he was going to devour me: eyes wild and searching, lips parted, pulse a hammering presence in his neck. And because I wanted to kiss him, I did. I stood on my toes, slid my hands into his hair, and pressed my mouth to his.

It was different than I would have guessed. Different than—I could admit to myself—I had imagined it would be. It was both softer and firmer, and definitely bolder. A short kiss, another, and then he tilted his head, covering my mouth with his. His tongue traced my bottom lip and it felt like instinct to let him in, to taste me.

I think that was probably his undoing. It was certainly mine. After that the moment dissolved for me into only sensation; everything else fell away. All the forbidden images of him, flesh and fantasy, secrets I kept even from myself, tore through my mind and I knew, somehow, that he was thinking the same thing: how good it felt to be this close . . . and everything else that touching like this could lead to.

One of his hands moved up my back and into my hair, and it was the weight of that touch, I think, that kept me from floating off the floor. But when his other hand slid up my side to my ribs and higher, I stepped back.

“Sorry,” he said immediately, instinctively. “Shit, Mace. That was too fast, I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s just . . .” I hesitated, my mouth suddenly crammed with words that I didn’t want to be thinking, let alone say out loud. “Doing that might not mean anything to Emma,” I said, touching my lips where they tingled. “But it means everything to me.”