Page 99 of People Like Us

August pulled the icepack away from his cheek, and I began to protest but he cut me off with a pinning stare. His cold finger found my knee, and traced gently against it, as if he was trying to work out the equation of it all against my skin.

His mouth thinned as he asked: “You broke up with him?”

I nodded. My heart was racing, and I wanted so badly to be touching his face again. To smooth the deep wrinkle between his eyebrows, and tell him that everything the voices in his head were telling him weren’t true. But I needed him to be able to say it himself.

I was fighting every feral part of myself waiting for him to realize how badly I wanted him. For him to stop second guessing himself; or to gain the confidence he deserved to yield. I’d almost lost the will to do so when he surprised me.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” his voice was hoarse, and his attention was entirely fixed on the pattern he was still mapping out across my knee.

I slid back on the table immediately, out of his reach. The movement seemed to startle him, and his eyes shot up to find mine. Like he could find exactly which of those words were offensive in my expression.

“You think I broke up with Andy because I felt guilty?”

He swallowed tightly, and gave a pathetic lift of his shoulders. “I don’t know, Lola,” he admitted with defeat.

“August,” I said too sharply.

His pupils dilated a bit at the sound of his name, which sent another heated thrill to my center I forced myself to ignore.

“I broke up with Andy because I want to be with you. I want to be your girlfriend. I want to hold your hand in the hallway, and play dungeons and dragons with you every Friday night until we go to college. And then I want to call each other on the phone and talk about our day, and drive hours to see each other every weekend until we can have a normal life together. I want you, August. All of you. I don’t know how else to make you believe me.”

I could feel my pulse radiating in my throat, my ears, and between my legs.

His shoulders fell back against the sofa cushions, as if he were a cornered animal. As if the answer to the question he was about to ask me was going to hurt him, and he was bracing himself for the impact.

“I don’t know how you could want me like that. How anyone could ever look at me, and see anything but something temporary.” He stared at me so intently that I wondered if he could hear the way the organ in my chest ripped apart.

“August,” I breathed out slowly. I placed my hands on his knees, and pushed them apart. I fit myself between them as I sank to the floor, and leaned into him. Grabbing a fist full of his shirt, I pulled him toward me. His face hovered over mine, just inches away, as I craned my head back to look up into his green eyes. I wanted him to know that he can take control any time he wanted. He could pull away the second he needed to.

His tongue swiped across his trembling bottom lip and I felt his cool breath against my face as I asked, “Do you want me like that?”

He nodded slowly, his glistening eyes not leaving mine. “Tell me what you want then,” I pleaded.

His swallow was audible before he said, hesitantly, “I want all of you.”

I ran my fingers through the curls that had fallen into his face, pushing them backward. My cheek grazed his as I said tauntingly in his ear “I want you to have me.”

“No you don’t.” He removed my fingers from where they were still tangled in his shirt, and threw himself against the couch cushions again, the loss of his warmth devastating. “Do you really want to hear about every terrified little thought that goes through my head on a daily basis? Do you want to hear about how miserable I am because there’s a part of my brain that won’t stop trying to convince me that my sister hates her body because I bought her a shirt that was too small three Christmases ago? Do you want to hear that my mom stopped going to church because I couldn’t stop scrubbing my skin raw at twelve years old after hearing a sermon about how cleanliness is next to Godliness? Is that the kind of pillow talk you want to grow old with, Lola?”

His chest was heaving as he went on, working himself up. My own heart is thumped wildly against its cage.

“If you even get the chance. Who knows, maybe I’ll end up like my father and try to drown the voices in alcohol until I drive myself into a telephone pole,” he added with too much apathy in his voice. “I love you, Lola. But I will not put you through what my father put my mother through. I can not give you what Andy could.”

Panic surged through me then. “What is it that you think he can give me that you can’t, August? You’ve been saying that for weeks, and I still don’t know what it means.”

“Peace,” his voice was a broken desperate plea as he said the word like it should’ve been obvious.

A strangled sound left me as I looked up at him through wet lashes. “There is no peace on this earth for me in a life that I have to live without you, August.” I took his hand, pressing it to my chest.

“You don’t know that,” he argued, trying to pull his hand away, but I wouldn’t let him. “You’d find someone to make you happy.”

“I do,” I pleaded. “I see it every day with my father. He used to be so full of life. He used to follow her around to these little witchy festivals, and take care of the garden of herbs she used in spells she thought would protect us from invisible demons. And every time her brain would convince her that we were better off without her, he would track her down to the ends of the earth to bring her back home.”

I sucked in a sharp breath, as I stood, forcing myself to say the things I hadn’t even admitted to myself. “And the last time she left, when he couldn’t find her again, he went mad with it. He threw himself into a religion he’d always hated because it was the opposite of what she loved. He changed the gaelic music she always kept on to a christian radio station to fill the silence. The only person he ever lets close to him is a woman who looks just like her. He will not look at me, because I am the painful reminder of the one thing he loved and lost. It haunts him every single day, August. And you would haunt me just the same. I know it.”

He leaned forward after a moment, his long fingers coming up to fidget with the hem of my skirt. He surprised me when he said “You wore this the first time you came over. Drove me absolutely mad when you got out of your car is this short little thing, after being in those jeans at school. I hadn’t expected you to change, and I thought you’d be able to hear my heartbeat from ‘cross the room as you sat right there.” He pointed his chin in the direction of where I’d sat, not taking his eyes away from the fabric in front of him, “with your long legs folded under you like a fawn.” His fingertip dropped to my bare skin. His finger traced from the front of my thigh to the back of it, making my knees weak.

His eyes snapped up to mine as if he could tell, as if his stare could pin me to that place above him.