Chasing Before (30 page)

I kiss his forehead, and he closes his eyes. Our heads emerge from the blanket.

All that’s left of the fire are embers, but for now they’re enough. Because Neil settles behind me and rests his arms around my waist, tucks his legs in behind mine, and tickles the wisps of hair at the base of my neck with his soft exhales of breath. I love the contrast between the cozy heat under the comforter and the cold air of the room on my face. It reminds me of being outside in the winter, immersed in a hot spring in Japan, catching the swirls of snow with my tongue while my body toasted in the hot spring.

My eyelids grow heavier, and I slowly lose consciousness and start to dream.

Memory me is sleeping, and most of the me reliving the memory is too. Only a tiny sliver, like a pilot light, stays alert.

In the dream I have during that after-school nap, I stand on a highway in the searing sun, and the asphalt melts around me, causing me to sink like I’m in quicksand. But before I’m buried alive, the scene changes.

I’m in Neil’s bed, inside his dream, and the bed is slightly blurred around the edges. I am looking out from Neil’s naked body, which is entwined with someone else’s, his fingers running through long dark hair. He opens his eyes, but he’s not looking at me. He’s looking at some other girl.

I’m dumped out of the memory, a memory of a time when Neil had a racy dream. And I was somehow able to hijack that dream during our viewing of the memory. Neil backs away from me, and I can tell by his horrified expression that he knows what I saw.

“Felicia, why are you invading my dreams? I trusted you!”

As upset as I am about the content of Neil’s dream, his accusation forces me to go on the defensive. “I didn’t mean to! It just happened. I swear . . . I’d never . . . I didn’t even know I could do that.”

“I can’t believe it.” Neil gets up and paces the room. He shakes his head and wrings his hands, and he looks everywhere but at me. “Here I was, working up the courage to tell you. But you couldn’t wait. You had to poke around my mind and take it from me.”

Neil’s words slap me out of my stupor, and I sit up, wriggling out from under the blanket. The fact that he’s
freaking out this much confirms my suspicions that he has been hiding something big from me. And now I really, really need to know what it is. “Neil, calm down. I’m sorry, okay? I wasn’t trying to pry.”

He stops and twists in my direction, glaring down at me between heavy lids. And for the first time I’m seeing flashes of a Neil who doesn’t want to be with me anymore. This recognition is the scariest and most heartbreaking I’ve ever had.

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It was only a dream, and you have no control over what you dream.” I say it as much to convince myself as I do to convince him. And then, because I can’t help myself, I say, “Was that Gracie?”

“Yes. That was Gracie.”

His admission stabs me in the chest. Why was he dreaming of Gracie when he was sleeping next to me? A deadly cocktail of anger and mortification flows through me, and I jump up, run through the door, cross the hall, and push into my own room so that I can hurl myself onto my bed.

“Wait!” Neil calls behind me. Chasing me.

“Get out of my room!” Reaching my bed, I whirl around to face Neil, and as I do, my foot catches on something underneath. I kick my leg to free it and accidentally catapult the metal wire and the memory globe it holds straight at Neil. I reach out my arm to deflect it at the same time Neil does, and after a brutal squishing sound, I realize with absolute horror we’ve both touched it. And then we’re sucked in.

thirty-three

AS I EXIT THE AIRPLANE and walk though the terminal, my palms sweat and my heart races. What if Neil didn’t get my text message with my new flight information? What if he did and he decided he didn’t want to come pick me up? We haven’t talked since the phone call in Paris when I practically proposed to him. And his few texts back to me have been short and generic. Maybe I scared him.

When I enter baggage claim, my eyes lock on to Neil. It’s almost like slow motion—the way we run toward each other, the way he hugs me so tightly that he lifts me off the ground.

“I’m so happy you’re back.” He sets me down. His cheeks are flushed and his whole body shakes in excitement.

He grips my hand tightly, interlacing our fingers, and as we wait for my bag to come out on the carousel, he pumps me for details about my trip. When I point out my suitcase, he grabs it with his free hand, pulling me with him. He doesn’t want to break off our contact for a second.

Even in the car he keeps only one hand on the steering wheel. The other rests on my thigh except when he has to shift gears. When we get to my apartment, I thank him for taking a half day off from work to come pick me up.

He looks at me as though I’ve lost my mind. “Of course I came. But I didn’t take off. I went in early.” He deposits my suitcase next to my closest in my room.

“You must be exhausted.” I strip off my sweater and my shoes and hop into bed. “Come take a nap with me.”

We lie side by side facing each other. I take a deep breath and plunge right in with my most burning question. “So, remember our last phone conversation? What do you think about us getting married? I mean, obviously it doesn’t have to be now or anything. But it would solve so much, wouldn’t it? We could live together.”

“Uh . . . do we have to talk about this now?” Neil avoids my gaze.

My heart plummets. I’m starting to think that as clear as it is that he loves me, Neil doesn’t think I’m marriage material and doesn’t want to have to tell me yet. Or maybe he thinks eighteen is too young—it is too young—and that there are infinite women in his future who are better for him than I am. Maybe I have to be much more convincing, even when I’m not all that convinced myself.

I push him onto his back and straddle him, lifting his arms over his head and pinning them down. “Yes. You’re my prisoner, and I have ways of making you talk.”

Neil goes totally still and squeezes his eyes shut. Then his body starts to shudder under me. He’s crying.

Neil has never broken down in front of me like this. Ever. I don’t know how to react. “Neil . . . what’s wrong?”

“I—I’m not good enough for you. You don’t want to marry me. Trust me.”

My head spins. He can’t be serious. “Are you crazy? If anyone’s not good enough, it’s me.”

“I’m not a virgin,” he blurts. His cheeks blaze crimson.

Those words are the last ones I ever expected to hear come out of his mouth, and for a long, terrible moment time stands still.

But then it sinks in, and I roll off him, jump up, and press myself against my bedroom wall. “What do you mean you’re not a virgin?” I screech. My eyes must bug out of my head. My pulse is racing and I might faint. I can’t believe it. All those rules he made about keeping our clothes on. All that bullshit he said about signing the virginity pledge. All that self-control that I hated but admired. He was my example of purity. He’s the one who made me want to be good. But it was based on a lie.

“This is why I didn’t want to tell you. I was ashamed, and I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

“You’re right. I don’t understand. Because you gave me a reason to be happy again. You’ve seen everything I am, and
you still love me. But you couldn’t do the same for me and show me who you really are. I never needed you to be perfect. I needed you to be real.” I’m so angry, I could punch a hole in a wall.

Neil’s eyes are rimmed in red, but his tears have given way to righteous fury. He gets up and stands opposite me. “Well, now you know the real me. I’m no saint. I’m nobody’s savior. I’m just as fucked up as anyone else.”

I fall back onto my bed. Curl into myself. Close my eyes. “Was it Gracie?” I say in a small voice.

“Yes.” That one word has the power to crush my heart in its fist.

My head and heart are heavy with the weight of the thought of Neil and Gracie having sex. It’s so unimaginable. And I can’t explain it, but for some reason it makes me feel dirty. Like everything he and I did together was a lie.

The room is silent and as cold as winter. As the minutes tick by without either of us daring to speak, I envision snow falling swiftly and burying me alive.

The bed shifts under me. Neil reaches out and brushes my hair behind my ear, but I won’t look at him.

“I’m naked,” he says. And my eyes can’t help to fly open and rove over his body when I hear that. The sheet is strategically placed so I can’t see everything, but I can tell by the bare skin of his hip that he’s telling the truth. “I remember you once thought you had to be naked in order to bare your soul.” His tone is wistful, and my heart hammers in my chest, remembering the day I confessed my sins to him.

“So how did it happen?” I ask grudgingly.

“After Gracie and Nate broke up, the church gossip was that Gracie must have had sex with him and that’s why she didn’t come to services anymore. At school, when she was there, we only saw her alone. The day she came to see me at my house, it was the day after she told Nate she missed her period and she thought she might be pregnant. She didn’t tell me that, though. Nate told me later. She was hysterical and crying, and I couldn’t understand a word she was saying. When she finally calmed down, she asked if we could go to my bedroom. No one else was home at the time, but she wanted privacy. She insisted. And I was still so in awe of her. Even when she closed the door behind us, I didn’t protest. I didn’t think about it. I was consumed by the improbable fact that Gracie Logan, this older girl, this gorgeous girl, was in my room.” Neil shakes his head at the memory.

He goes on. “She told me that she hated Nate. Everything with him had been a mistake. She had been in love with me all along but hadn’t realized it. I had never felt so dizzy in my life.”

I cough. I’m not sure I want to hear the rest of this story, but I don’t want him to stop telling me either.

He inhales deeply. “She said—and I’ll never forget this—she said ‘Look at me, Neil. I want you to look at me like you always do in church. When you think I’m not watching.’ I was so overwhelmed, but she didn’t seem to care. She pushed me against the wall and kissed me, and I . . .” He stops, the last words mangled by emotion.

He covers his mouth with his fist and squeezes his eyes shut. “I don’t really even know how it happened. One minute we were standing, and the next we were on my bed and . . .”

I hold my breath, bracing myself for the awful details.

“And then it was over. She kissed me and put her clothes back on and left.”

I let out my breath.

“I felt terrible. I mean, it was magical. It was. But it was also wrong. I didn’t know how wrong until the next day. Gracie called me and told me to meet her at the bridge over the creek on Route 4, the one where all the couples go to park. I took my bike. I had to, because I was too young to drive. I wanted so desperately to see her again. I wanted to apologize to her for being so weak. I wanted to ask her to be my girlfriend, as if that would make it less of a sin.”

He’s shaking now, and there are goose bumps on his exposed skin. “When I got there, she was standing on the outside of the guardrail. She was kind of swaying, and I remember thinking that if she weren’t careful, she’d lose her balance. There’d been a lot of rain that spring, so the creek was pretty full, but still, it wasn’t that deep. I was only about twenty yards away from her when she saw me. She opened her mouth and whispered something I couldn’t hear, and then . . . she let herself fall. I screamed and ran toward her, but it was too late.”