Regretting You (34 page)

“No.”

“You’re losing control of her. She hates you. She blames you for everything.”

“She’s sixteen. She’ll get over it.”

“She’s
seven
teen. And what if she doesn’t?”

I can’t have this conversation with him right now. “She’s right. You should go too.”

Jonah doesn’t protest. He grabs Elijah’s things, and they leave. Jonah doesn’t even say goodbye.

I stare back at the kitchen table—at all the uneaten food and the near-perfect cake.

I slump into a chair, grab a fork, and take a bite of it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CLARA

I’m leaning against Miller’s truck with him when Jonah comes outside with Elijah. I turn and stare toward the road so I don’t have to look at him.

As evidenced in class today, I get a lot angrier when we make eye contact. And even though he was nice enough not to punish me, and then later gave me his phone, I realize he did both of those things out of guilt because he knows what he’s done. And now he’s here, having family dinner with us like my father never even existed.

I hear him as he’s buckling Elijah into place in the back seat of his car. Then I hear the door close. I blow out a quiet breath, relieved he’s leaving, but then suck in another rush of air when I realize he didn’t open his car door. I glance toward the front of Miller’s truck to see Jonah making his way over to us. My posture grows rigid when he stops two feet in front of me.

He places both his hands firmly on my shoulders and then leans forward and kisses me on top of my head. “You’re better than this, Clara. We all are.” He backs away. “Happy birthday.”

When Jonah finally pulls out of the driveway, I roll my eyes and push off Miller’s truck. I lean against his chest, just wanting to feel the soothing sound of his heartbeat against my cheek. He presses his chin against the top of my head as he wraps his arms around me. “Is this how it always is?” he asks.

“Lately, yes.”

Miller’s chest rises and then falls, just once. Heavily. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

I pull back and look up. “You don’t have to come over anymore. I wouldn’t even blame you.”

Miller is looking at me regretfully. “I don’t mean dinner with your family.”

I stare at him a moment—long enough to make out irritation in his expression. I take a step back. His arms fall to his sides. “It’s my birthday.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“You’re breaking up with me on my
birthday
?”

He drags a hand down his face. “No. I’m just . . .” He can’t even finish whatever it is he’s about to say. Probably because he knows what a jerk he’s being right now.

I take another step back. “You slept with me last night, and now you’re dumping me?
Really?
” I spin around and head back to my house. “Guess I was wrong about you too.”

I can hear him sprinting after me. He intercepts me before I make it to the front patio. He grips my face with both hands, but it isn’t a gentle grip. It’s not a rough one, either, but based on the anger in his expression, it’s not a touch I really want right now.

“You don’t get to throw that in my face, Clara.
I
was the one who was taken advantage of last night.
Not
you.” With that, he drops his
hands and walks back to his truck. When I hear him open his door, I flinch.

“I’m sorry.” I face him. “I’m sorry. That was a really shitty thing to say and an even shittier thing to do.” I walk back to his truck. “But why are you doing this? This morning, in my car, you acted like you forgave me for last night.” I feel panicky. Miller’s expression is torn as he taps his fist against the frame of his door. Then he slams it shut and pulls me in for a frustrated hug.

“I know you and your mother aren’t getting along right now.” He looks down at me, his hands tilting my face up to his. “But I feel like you’re using me as your weapon in all these fights against her. It’s not fair to me.”

“I didn’t know it was going to turn into what it turned into.”

“It’s your fault it turned into that. You weren’t the victim in there tonight, Clara. You were the instigator.”

I shrug myself from his grip. “You have a bad memory if you think tonight was my fault. In case you forgot, I found out my
mother
has been having an
affair
with
Jonah
.”

Miller opens his door and gets in his truck. I plant myself in the space between him and his door so that he can’t shut it. His head falls against the back of his seat. “I want to go home.”

“I’ll go with you.”

He rolls his head until he’s looking at me. “I want to go alone.”

I’m not going to beg. I did enough of that last night. “That’s unfortunate.” I back away so that he can shut his door. He cranks his truck but rolls down the window.

“I’ll see you at school tomorrow.” His voice has lost its edge, but it does nothing to make me feel better. He’s leaving me alone on my birthday. I realize dinner was a mess, but my entire
life
is a mess.
What’s new?

I turn around and walk away from his truck.

“Clara.”

He’s confusing as shit with all this back-and-forth.

I spin around and march back to his window. “You know what? I don’t need this. I don’t want a boyfriend who makes me feel worse when I’m already down. I don’t want to date you anymore. I’m breaking up with
you
.” I back away but realize I’m not finished with my point, so I step back toward his truck. “They disrespected the two most important people in my life. They disrespected
me
. Am I just supposed to pretend I’m fine with it? Is that the kind of girlfriend you want? Someone who just gives up and lets other people win every time?”

Miller’s arm is hanging casually over his steering wheel. His voice is calm when he says, “Sometimes you have to walk away from the fight in order to win it.”

Hearing him repeat those words infuriates me. I stomp my foot. “You don’t get to break up with me and then quote my dead aunt!”

“I
didn’t
break up with you. And I’m quoting
you
.”

“Well, you should stop. Don’t quote
any
one! It’s . . . it’s unattractive!”

If it’s possible, Miller somehow looks amused. “I’m going home now.”

“Good!”

He looks behind him and begins to back out of the driveway. I’m standing in the same spot, confused by our argument. I don’t even know what just happened. “Did we just break up? I can’t even tell!”

Miller presses on the brake and leans out his window. “No. We’re just having an argument.”

“Fine!”

Again, he looks amused as he backs onto the street. I want to wipe the smirk off his face, but he’s already leaving. When he rounds the corner, I walk back inside the house. My mother is standing in the living room, staring down at her phone. It’s on speaker. She’s listening to a voice mail. I walk in on the tail end of it.

“. . . she didn’t sign out at the office, so we’re just calling to let you know she’ll need to bring a note to excuse her from her afternoon classes today . . .”

My mother ends the call before the voice mail is over. “You skipped school today?”

I roll my eyes as I brush past her. “It was only three classes. I had to get out of there. I couldn’t breathe. I
still
can’t breathe.” I slam my door, and tears are streaming down my cheeks before I even fall against my mattress. I grab my new phone and call Lexie. She answers on the first ring because she’s dependable like that. She’s the only dependable thing in my life right now.

“This . . .” I suck in a series of quick breaths, attempting to choke back tears. “This is the worst birthday. The
worst
. Can you . . .” I suck in more breaths. “Come over?”

“On my way.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

MORGAN

I pull a few of Chris’s shirts out of the closet and remove the hangers from them. I drop them into a trash bag I’ll be donating to a church.

Lexie showed up half an hour ago. I debated on not letting Clara have her over, but I’d almost rather Lexie be here than for Clara to be alone right now. I was relieved to see her when I opened the front door earlier because I could hear Clara crying from my bedroom, and she refuses to speak to me. Or maybe I don’t want to speak to her.

I think it’s best if we just don’t speak until tomorrow.

Now that Lexie is here, Clara is no longer crying, which is good. And even though I can’t make out what they’re saying, I can hear them talking. At least I know she’s home and safe, even if she does hate me right now.

I pull two more of Chris’s shirts out of my closet.

Since the week after Chris died, I’ve slowly been getting rid of his stuff. I’ve been doing it a little at a time, hoping Clara doesn’t notice. I don’t want her to think I’m trying to rid this house of the memory of
him. He’s her father, and erasing him isn’t my goal. But I am trying to rid my personal space of him. I threw his pillow away last week. I threw his toothbrush away this morning. And I just finished packing up the last of his dresser.

I expected, in all my digging around, that I would find something he was sloppy about. A hotel receipt, lipstick on a collar. Something that would show he was a little careless in his affair. Aside from the letters he kept locked away in his toolbox, I find nothing else. He hid it well. They both did.

I should probably take the letters out of my dresser and put them away before Clara accidentally runs across them.

I pull a box of his things down from the top closet shelf. After I got pregnant with Clara, Chris and I moved in together. We didn’t have much because we were just teenagers, but this box is one of the few things he brought with him. At the time, it held little mementos like photographs and awards he’d won. But over the years, I’ve been adding other stuff to it. I consider it
our
box now.

I sit on the bed and look through loose pictures of Clara from when she was a baby. Pictures of me and Chris. Pictures of the three of us and Jenny. I inspect every picture, assuming I’ll find some kind of hint of when it started. But every picture just paints a portrait of a happy couple.

I guess we really were for a while. I’m not sure where it went wrong for him, but I do wish he’d have chosen any girl in the world other than Jenny. That was the least he could have done.

Or maybe it was Jenny who chose him.

I pull an envelope out of the box. It’s full of pictures developed from a roll off one of our old cameras. Jenny isn’t in many of the pictures because she was the one who took most of them, but there’s a lot of me and Chris. Some include Jonah. I stare hard at the pictures of Jonah, trying to find one where he looks genuinely happy, but there isn’t one. He hardly ever smiled. Even now, it’s a rare thing. Not that he wasn’t
happy. He seemed happy back then, but not like the rest of us. Jenny would light up around him, Chris would light up around me, but no one made Jonah light up. It’s as if he was stuck in a perpetual shadow, cast by something none of us were aware of.

I flip through the final three pictures, but something about what I see causes me to pause. I pull the three pictures out, taken in sequence, and study them. In the first picture, I’m in the middle, smiling at the camera. Chris is smiling down at me. Jonah is on the other side of me, looking at Chris with a desolate expression.

In the next picture, Chris is smiling at the camera. I’m looking up at Jonah, and Jonah is looking down at me, and I remember that moment.
I remember that look.

In the third picture, Jonah is out of the frame. He had broken our stare and walked off.

I’ve tried not to think about that day or the ten minutes before that picture was taken, and I haven’t. Not in a long time. But the pictures force me to recall it in vivid detail.

We had been at Jonah’s house because he was the only one who had a pool. Jenny was on a towel laid out on the concrete, trying to get a tan near the shallow end of the pool. Chris had just gotten out of the water to go inside the house because he was hungry.

Jonah was holding on to a raft a few feet away from me, his body submerged in the water, his arms stretched out over the raft.

I couldn’t touch, and my legs were tired, so I swam over to him and grabbed onto the float. The raft was poorly inflated and probably a few summers old, so it wasn’t very reliable. Especially with both of us hanging on to it. I started slipping, so Jonah grabbed my arms, then slid his leg around the back of my knee to anchor me in place.

I don’t think either of us expected to be jolted by the contact, but I could tell he felt it too. I could tell because his eyes changed shape and darkened at the same moment I shuddered.

I’d been dating Chris for a while at that point, and in all the times he’d touched me while we dated, I had never felt that kind of current pass through me. The kind that not only left you breathless but left you fearing you’d die from lack of oxygen if you didn’t back away. I wanted to slip with Jonah under the water and use his mouth for air.

The thought startled me. I tried to pull away, but Jonah held on to my arms. His eyes were pleading, as if he knew the second I pulled away, he’d never get to touch me like that again. So I stayed. And we stared.

That’s all that happened.

Nothing was said. Other than the way he was keeping me afloat with his leg wrapped around mine beneath the water, I wouldn’t even say our touch was inappropriate. Had Chris seen it, he wouldn’t have thought a thing about it. Had Jenny seen it, she wouldn’t have even been mad.

But that’s because they didn’t feel what was happening between us. They couldn’t hear everything that wasn’t being said.

A few seconds later, Chris walked back outside and dove into the pool. Jonah unwrapped his leg from around mine, but he didn’t let go of my arms. The ripples from the waves Chris’s dive had left caused the float to rock, but our eyes never unlocked. Not even when Chris sprang up out of the pool next to me and splashed water on us.

Chris wrapped both arms around my waist, pulling me away from the raft. My arms began to slip out of Jonah’s, and I watched Jonah wince when my fingers slid through his and then left him empty.