This Sky (14 page)

    “Then you can’t keep doing this to me. This is not my life anymore.”

    This time she doesn’t respond. She steps out of the car, slams the door behind her, and disappears into the night.

Gemma

“I can’t believe you haven’t heard from him,” Claudia says as she places a fork and a knife on one side of an open napkin and begins to roll them like she’s making sushi.

   
Unfazed, I shrug my shoulders. Yes, early last week I was upset that Ren hadn’t even made an attempt to reach out to me. But I find myself thinking about it less and less with each day that passes.

   “I emailed him yesterday with Julie’s address and asked him to ship more of my things.” I hold back that these things include a massage chair, a set of solar powered patio lights and a three-pack of embroidered holiday sweaters. “But other than that, we’ve had no contact.”

    “You’re definitely a bigger person than I am,” she observes as she picks up another fork. Aunt Zola’s is in a post-lunch lull and Claudia and I have been prepping tables and making silverware bundles for the better part of an hour. “After seeing that picture of him making out with that hussy, Sierra Simms, I probably would have hauled ass back to L.A. just so I could snip out the crotches of all his underwear and scrub the toilet bowls with his toothbrush.”

    “Eww, that’s disgusting,” I breathe.

    Claudia makes a bored face. “Chica, I was just getting started.”

   
Swallowing, I say, “Ren isn’t even worth the effort or the money I’d spend on gas. He and I are over.”

    She lifts an eyebrow. “Is that so?”

    I nod sharply. “It shouldn’t matter to me what he does or who he does it with.”

    “It
shouldn’t
, but does it?”

     Looking over the never-ending pile of napki
ns beside me, I think about her question. Am I bothered by the fact that Ren is probably screwing around with every girl in Hollywood now? Do I wish that he was calling me and trying to win me back? Do I miss him even a little bit?  

    “No, not really,” I answer truthfully.

    
Huh.
When did that happen?

   
“Get the fuck out,” she says, her hands wrist-deep in a bucket of forks.

     One corner of my mouth lifts. “You get the fuck out.”

     Claudia chuckles and shakes her head, throwing the white-blond strands from her dark chocolate eyes.
They are so similar to her brother’s
—
such a strange mixture of warm and fierce.
With that stray thought, I look away, the back of my neck heating.

   
“Now that I know and love you, I’m completely over my crush on that slimy mo-fo.”

    “Oh yeah?”

    She flicks her hand. “Yeah. Anyway, I think I’m moving on from actors.”

    “I’m sure Smith will be happy to hear that.” I still don’t understand how that relationship works, but I’ve mostly kept my curiosity to myself. The one time I did ask, Claudia told me that they have
very liberal boundaries.
Whatever that means.

    “I was on campus the other morning and the men’s soccer team passed by and it occurred to me that I should be paying a lot more attention to sports,” she says with
a sly wink.

   
“Oh really?”

    She eyes me
. In a softer tone, she asks, “How about you? Have you given much thought to soccer players? Or… ah, I don’t know…
surfers?
”

   
Realization dawns. I almost choke on my laughter. “Oh my God! Was this whole conversation an elaborate set-up to ask me about your brother?”

     Her dark
brown eyes widen innocently—a dead giveaway. “Who me?”

     I laugh some more
. “Yes,
you
!”

    
“I was trying to be diplomatic.” Claudia grins and adds, “For once.”

     I scrunch my nose. “Diplomatic doesn’t really suit you.”

     “You’re probably right,” she sighs, giving me a
tell-me-about-it
eye roll. Then she turns to face me fully and braces her hands on her hips. “But the not knowing is killing me, Gemma. Landon won’t talk. You won’t talk. A person can only be expected to take so much uncertainty.”

   
Confused as to what I’m feeling—excitement, trepidation, nausea—I shake my head. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea for us to have this conversation. You’re his
sister
,” I say the last word as though she’s forgotten.

 
   She exhales slowly, flicks a lock of hair away, and pouts prettily. “Fine. If you insist on hurting me in this manner, I suppose I’ll have to learn to move on.”

    “I guess you will.”

    “I guess,” she repeats, looking dejected.

    We both grow quiet.
Claudia continues to work on her sullen expression, throwing in a begrudging sigh every now and then. I try to stay focused on the task in front of me. Fork. Knife. Napkin. Roll and repeat.

     Finally, when the quiet
gets too intense, I cave. “Okay. Hypothetically, if we were going to talk about Landon,
what
would you want to talk about?”

    This perks Claudia up
like I knew it would. “Yes!” she howls in victory. “You like him. You
like
like him, don’t you?”

    “No,” I say quickly
. “It’s not what you’re thinking.”

    “It is!”
    I drop the napkin in my hand and rub at my eyes. My skin is so hot it feels like I’ve got a fever coming on. Landon left the restaurant a half an hour ago, but still, I feel sure that he can hear this whole embarrassing conversation through the walls of time and space. I cringe and make a
lower your voice
motion. “Maybe it is? I don’t know. I’m so out of practice with the whole flirting thing that I’m not sure I’m reading the signals right.”

    “Why do you say that?” she asks
, seeming baffled. “He took you surfing, didn’t he?”

     “How do you know
about that?”

     “He borrowed my wetsuit for you.”

    “Oh, right.”

     Claudia grins
and points her finger at me. “He took you surfing. What other confirmation do you need?”

    “Well,
” I say, taking a deep breath, collecting my thoughts. “It seemed like things were progressing, and then today, things were weird again.”

    She rolls her hands in the air
and bobs her head. “Please explain.”

    “Well, he—
”
ignored me
“—barely said anything when I came in to the restaurant.”

 
  “He was working,” Claudia replies in an assuring tone. “And Landon’s not good with other people around. Gossip and that kind of stuff makes him anxious.”

   
Well, I can understand that. “Maybe—I, uh, don’t really know what I was expecting and I don’t want to compare my life to a Katy Perry song, but ever since Landon bought my gas, he’s hot then he’s cold. He’s yes then he’s no.”

    Claudia laughs. “He’s in then he’s out, he’s up then he’s down?”

    “He’s wrong when it’s right.”

    “Gemma, you’ve got to understand that my brother is careful.” She looks around
like she’s making sure no one in the restaurant is listening in. “He knows that you’re just getting out of a relationship. He knows it ended badly.”

    “So he’s going to stay away
from me?”

     “Not necessarily. But, h
e’s probably not going to chase you unless you let him know that it’s what you really want. And, let me tell you, sometimes, you have to make that shit crystal clear.”

    “Thanks for the advice.”

    “That’s what I’m here for.” She says, slipping another silverware roll to the pile. “Anything else you want to know?”

   
I chew on the inside of my cheek. “I guess I’ve also been wondering about what Smith said last week?”

    “You mean about Landon being damaged goods?”

    I nod cautiously.

    “I knew that came off wrong. Landon isn’t damaged,” she says. I can tell that she’s carefully editing herself, but I don’t know what to make of it. Here, a girl who proudly declares that
she doesn’t filter her thoughts is filtering her thoughts. Why is that? “The past couple of years haven’t been easy and—” She stops herself and shakes her head. “Look, I don’t know how to explain everything to you so you’re going to have to trust me on this. Just don’t believe anything you hear about him.”

    
Don’t believe anything I hear about him?

     Claudia must understand the unsettled look on my face because she quickly follows that statement up with more. “He’s had some setbacks.”

     “Setbacks?” This is sounding more and more forbidding.

     She winces slightly
like she understands she’s not exactly helping. “I’m getting this all wrong! Landon and I… we had a rough childhood. He paid for it more than I did.” For a moment, it’s as though she’s staring through me. Then she shakes her head and her eyes dilate and refocus on my face. She smiles guardedly.

    “I don’t understand.”

    “Sometimes I don’t either. Maybe with you he has another chance.” Her smile becomes more determined. “The thing you have to keep in your head is that this isn’t a romance movie or a Nicholas Sparks novel. You don’t have to play the part of the sad princess who needs to be rescued after an evil witch locked you in a tower. In this life you save yourself, Gemma. And if, along the way, you see something you want? Then fucking take it.”

***

I squint into the storeroom and let my eyes adjust to the dim light. The room is wider than it is long, broken into maze-like sections by sturdy metal shelves that reach all the way to the ceiling.

    When I get to
a crate of liquor bottles, I pause and run my fingers across the labels. Checking the list that Claudia gave me, I start to pull bottles from the shelf. “You and you,” I mutter absently to the bottles as I scoop them up.

    “Do you always talk to inanimate things?”

    The disembodied voice makes my heart skip and the fine hairs on my arm stand straight up like I’ve been electrocuted.

    “Or do you only talk to alcohol?”

    I catch my breath and cautiously peek around the shelving to find the source.

    Landon is sitting in the farthest corner of the storeroom. His dark head is tilted to the side and his knees are pulled up to his chest. A small beam of light from the hall
way streaks across his face, tracing his pronounced cheekbones.

    I need a moment to steady myself before wringing out, “God, you freaked me out. I-I didn’t know you were back here.”

    Landon smiles sheepishly and that small movement sends another tremor through me. He pulls two white earbuds from his ears. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

    “No.” I swallow hard, concentrating on breathing normally. “It’s not that. I just thought you left work over an hour ago.”

    He moves his shoulders up and down. “Still here.”

    “I see that now.”

    “It’s the quietest place I can come to get shit done for class. If I go home, Wyatt will be all over me, begging me to take him for a walk or throw a Frisbee with him. And I’ve discovered that the chairs at the campus library are worse than the floor.”

    This is when I notice a small spiral notebook in his lap.
I walk closer until I’m hovering over him. “You’re writing back here?”

   His eyebrows twitch. “Surprised?”

   “It’s not that,” I say even though it is that. It’s exactly
that.
“I just figured—” I shift the liquor bottles that I’m carrying to the floor and slide down the wall until I’m sitting next to him. “Isn’t it a little dark in the storeroom to get anything done?”

    “I manage.” He picks up his phone and shows me how he uses it as a light.

    “So what’re you working on?” I ask, pointing to the notebook, enjoying the warmth of his body sinking in around me.

    “It’s a journal for a creative writing class.”

    “Creative writing?” I ask, incredulous.

    One corner of his mouth turns up. “It’s an elective. And it’s a stupid assignment. I keep having to come up with these entries—poems and short stories and stuff.”

    “Uh-huh. So what’s your major?”
Gah
, such a dumb question.

     Landon arches an eyebrow. “Undecided.”

    “Hmmm…” My mind is spinning with Julie and Claudia’s advice.
Move your ass. Squish your boobs. Do whatever it takes to seal the deal. Fucking take it.

   
A tingle slides up my body when Landon shifts and his thigh brushes up against mine. Exactly eighteen seconds of silence tick by. I know this because my bursting heart is keeping the time like a stopwatch.