Anywhere But Here (26 page)

Shae

January 3

Senior year . . .

Are you ready for tomorrow?

I read and re-read the text message probably ten times without typing out a response. It was just a question, a simple one that shouldn’t have caused me so much anxiety, but it did. We’d had two whole, uninterrupted weeks together. It hadn’t been perfect. Christmas had seen us through a rocky patch right out of the gate.

After spending nearly every day leading up to it together, I hadn’t understood why he was so against us sharing Christmas. When I pushed for us to make plans to see each other at some point during the day, he’d shut me out. It meant we both went Christmas Eve and Christmas day without hearing from each other. Eight days in and I’d been ready to face that we were already over, and I didn’t even know why. All I knew was that it felt just as terrible as when I’d found Jeremy with Daisy. Eight days and I was grieving Kellen like I had almost two years with Jeremy.

Mom’s Christmas tradition since Dad had died was leaving me with Didi and Papa while she checked herself into a spa retreat for three days. As I’d gotten older, she stopped dropping me at their house and just started leaving me a note and a check, but on Christmas Eve Didi would still pick me up. We’d get big trays of cinnamon rolls ready to bake the next morning before we stayed up late watching Christmas movies, drinking hot cocoa with peppermint and marshmallows, something we’d always done. When Papa was alive, he’d join us, but never made it through the first movie. He’d be snoring in his chair halfway through
Miracle on 34
th
Street.
It might have been the peppermint in his cocoa that came from a bottle of schnapps instead of the syrup Didi put in ours. We’d had three years without him now, and our tradition hadn’t changed, even though that first year without him was somber.

This year I was as quiet and withdrawn as I’d been the first time we sat down with our cocoa and I looked over and saw Papa’s chair empty. Didi noticed and pried subtly, but let it go when I gave up nothing. I tried to be more cheerful the next morning when we got up early to bake the trays full of cinnamon rolls and then deliver them to all the neighbors. At each house there was a tray of cookies, or a tin of popcorn, or a handmade blanket or scarf waiting when we arrived with the cinnamon rolls.

Seeing all the familiar faces I’d been visiting with Didi since I was a little girl, lifted my spirits some, and I tried not to put a damper on the rest of the day when Didi and I returned home to exchange our gifts while we enjoyed the hot, gooey cinnamon rolls we’d left warming for the two of us.

It was when I hugged her goodbye and drove back home later Christmas night, and walked into a quiet, empty house that the loneliness got to me and I wished I could call Kellen to come over. I didn’t even know how he spent the holiday because he wouldn’t talk about it any of the times I’d brought it up.

It was the next morning when I woke up to find him at my front door, ridden with guilt and remorse, that I found out he’d spent the past two days feeling as awful as I had. I let him in and we shared one of the leftover cinnamon rolls Didi sent home with me and he explained why he’d gotten so touchy. He was still embarrassed with the way he lived. He didn’t want me spending Christmas at his place, because he was ashamed, but he had his own Christmas traditions with Trinity that they’d started together because their parents hadn’t ever given them any. He was also feeling bad that that he couldn’t get me anything. With flushed cheeks, and downcast eyes, he explained that what money he made working at Derek’s dad’s restaurant was what had to keep their power on and food in the cupboards and the little extra he’d had, he used to get something for Trin.

I’d never cared much about the money and life I was born into, but I guess it’s easy not to care about money when you’ve never had to struggle for it. That didn’t mean I wasn’t grateful or aware of how fortunate I was. I liked having nice things, but after years of my mother just buying me off with things, they’d come to mean very little. Making Kellen see that wasn’t easy. It was obvious there was this big gap between us and I didn’t know how to close it. My money bothered him, even more than I realized at the time, even though I tried to make him see that this big house, full of expensive stuff, was still empty.

He detected right away that I was feeling resentful toward my mom, and after we’d polished off the giant cinnamon roll, we went upstairs and laid on my bed. He dragged all that bitterness and anger and hurt out of me. There were tears that he dried, and when he didn’t have the words that would make me feel better, he just held me. When I admitted out loud that I’d trade everything we had, because maybe if the house wasn’t so big and we didn’t have so much money she wouldn’t be able to get away from me, and she’d have to face me and our problems, he just commented dryly that even poor parents could find a way to leave their kids.

Suffice to say, my pity party stopped abruptly when his words, devoid of emotion, but only because I knew he was blocking it, caused my heart to crack. The truth of it was there, and he was right. Poor or rich didn’t matter. Everyone had problems. Rich people are just better at covering theirs up. I just wanted him to see that it didn’t matter to me. Who he was and how I felt about him had nothing to do with where he lived or whether or not he could afford to buy me presents, but I knew it was going to take time for him to see that.

We spent the rest of that day together and I kept the gift I’d bought him put away, knowing it would only make him feel worse, and we found different things to talk about. The scowl was gone from his brow, and my favorite soft smile was back on his face. I felt hopeful that we would get past this rift between us. I was determined not to let him feel it. I told myself right then that I wouldn’t ask to go out to movies, or dinner dates. I wouldn’t make a big deal of holidays or events. I was perfectly fine if the only thing we ever did was this right here. I didn’t care what we were doing or where we were, I just wanted to be with him.

But I was seventeen, and so hopeful and naïve that I didn’t realize just how badly life had beaten Kellen down, or how deeply ingrained the lessons he’d been taught were, or the role my mother would play in reinforcing those notions.

Lying in his arms, I was happy, and I believed that we could get through anything.

I was still in his arms when my mother returned home from the spa. It wasn’t the first, or even the second or third time she’d come home to find Kellen in our house, or been here when I brought him over. I did my best to keep them apart and hold off her rants until he was gone, but for whatever reason when she came home that night, she was on a tear.

The kitchen door off of the garage opened and slammed shut, and I ignored it, expecting her to just go to her room, or pour herself one of many glasses of wine and retire to the living room. His car was in our drive and there was no way she’d missed it, so when she hollered my name instead, I knew what it would be about.

“Shaeleigh!” her shrill voice called up the stairs.

I pried myself out of Kellen’s arms and told him I would be right back.

I found her in the kitchen, and my first thought was that she’d wasted her money on three days at the spa because it’d done nothing to help her relax. She looked pissed, not refreshed. She started in right away about how I was spending too much time with
that boy,
wouldn’t even use his name. She’d tolerated it long enough, let me have my little rebellion with the bad boy, but she’d grown tired of it. She and Jeremy’s mother were on the board of several community foundations together. Kellen was nothing but a delinquent, not even juvenile because he was eighteen, and she had an opinion about that too and the fact that the mayor had seen me kissing Kellen last week outside of Brook’s, Derek’s family’s restaurant, when I was visiting him on his break.

His father was a criminal, his brother was a criminal and she was sure that criminal genes must run in that family. He had no future. He would hold me back and drag me down. Already she didn’t like the changes she was seeing in me. I’d developed an attitude problem and was defiant and argumentative and my priorities were grossly skewed.

Of course she wouldn’t like that for the first time since our family broke, I was standing up for myself, expressing my own opinions and not cow towing to please her, or pretending to be the perfect daughter or perfect anything else. She just couldn’t accept that this was the real me, and wanted to blame Kellen.

I reminded her that she hadn’t bothered to try to be a parent for the last nine years and it didn’t suit her now. I left her in the kitchen and went back upstairs to Kellen, not knowing that he’d stood at the foot of the staircase and listened to the entire argument and every awful thing she’d said about him, or that it wasn’t the last time her words would cause irreparable damage.

I did have my eyes open though, and I knew whatever was ahead of us, wouldn’t be easy, which is why I stared at his text message now, without replying. Was I ready for tomorrow? For Christmas break to be over and to go back to school where it wouldn’t just be my mother trying to come between us? Was I ready to listen to everyone tell us how we didn’t belong together? No. I was not, but I couldn’t tell him that.

I took too long to text him back and the text message on my screen was replaced by an incoming call with a picture of the two of us I’d taken yesterday out in the hot tub. I was smiling at the camera, my back to his chest. His head was bent in the crook of my neck, kissing my shoulder.

“Hey,” I answered softly.

“Are you worried about going back to school?” he cut right to it, correctly guessing where my head was at.

“I just don’t want things to be different once we’re back around everyone else.”

A heavy breath came over the line. “It won’t.”

“I’m afraid it will.”

“But it won’t. I know I’m still figuring this out, and the Christmas thing sucked, and I’m sorry I messed that up.”

“You didn’t mess it up. We’re both still figuring out how this works, how we work.”

“And we will, at least that’s what I want. I want us to figure this out together.”

“I want that too.”

“Then what are you scared of? We don’t know what’s going to happen, we can’t control everything, but I know how I feel about you.”

“And I know how I feel about you,” I echoed back to him.

“Okay, then everything else is just stuff, and we’ll deal with it as it comes up.”

It sounded so easy when he said it, and I think he actually believed it and that confidence bled into me. The next morning came and we walked into the school hand in hand, and it wasn’t the big deal I’d built it up to be in my head. Some people talked, and rumors made their rounds again, but most didn’t care. They were so wrapped up in their own drama. I got looks from the girls, but they kept their opinions to themselves and the ones who couldn’t, well they weren’t my problem.

Jeremy kept his distance, and when we did run into each other he was civil. We were a long way from friends, but he gave up the vendetta with Kellen. He and Daisy were dating now, and I found it didn’t bother me. Kellen and I settled into our version of normal and it was good.

He’d tease me when we walked down the hall and I was in my cheer uniform and he was in his ripped jeans and worn boots, but he kept my hand firmly in his and even showed up to the last few basketball games of the season.

I bullied him into studying and doing homework, which saw a spike in his GPA. He was so damn smart, but never saw the point of putting in the effort when work was his primary focus. I found creative ways to make it worth it for him, some of which involved slightly less clothing than others.

January faded to February, and February to March, and there were still people who hated our relationship, namely my mother, and some of the girls who were used to Kellen being a readily available hookup. I didn’t care. I was less than three months away from my eighteenth birthday and a couple weeks after that was graduation. Our futures were coming at us fast, and I knew that whatever came next, I wanted Kellen with me.

He pushed and challenged me and believed in me in a way that made me believe in myself. Not even Didi, with all of her support and encouragement over the years, had been able to give me what Kellen did. I tried to do the same for him, make him see what I saw, the talent and intelligence, but he was never as open to talking about his future and his plans. It would have worried me except that I saw in his eyes a reflection of everything I felt, and I knew we’d figure it out.

I never once doubted that what he felt was any less than I felt. I hadn’t said the words yet, but I think he knew. I showed him in every way I could, and he gave it all back to me. We didn’t need the words. Sometimes I wished he’d say them, but with everything I knew, every part of him he let me see, including finally letting me into his house and his past, they would never come easy to him. I also knew if I was the one to use them first, before he was ready to hear them, he’d think it was one more thing he couldn’t give me. He wanted me to have all that I wished for. His dreams for me were far bigger than for himself. He wanted to give me everything I wanted.

His mistake was thinking that I wanted the world, when all I wanted was him.