Imagine if I could get over him.
I take my coffee and cereal out to the back porch with me. The swing creaks when I sit and sways gently under my weight. I shovel the congealed mush in my bowl into my mouth and masticate thoughtfully as I watch Romeo. He’s wearing an old pair of shorts and work boots with loose laces. He’s shirtless and his hair hasn’t been brushed. His back is tanned, but a sliver of skin above his waistband is paler. A thin band that’s only exposed because he’s reaching up to prune the climbing rosebush that grows along the back fence. It’s a sliver of skin I want to touch. Skin I want to kiss. Skin I want to lick. And bite.
He gardens for ages. Snipping this and snipping that. Tossing the dead wood onto the ground in a pile to his right and acting like he knows what he’s doing. He moves around the garden as if unaware I’m watching him. Maybe he is. It’s a good-sized garden, and I didn’t call out when I got here.
The scent of a lilac bush mingles with the sickly-sweet taste of the Lucky Charms. It’s almost too much. I should hate it, but it falls just short. Instead of hating it, I find myself feeling worryingly giddy. The smells, the sugar, the sight of Romeo and all his fucking golden skin are making me feel unhinged.
Romeo drops his secateurs onto the grass and saunters back to the house. The gold chain around his neck glints in the sun, and the pendant he’s worn since the day after Sal’s funeral sways slowly from side to side on his chest. I’m acutely aware that I need to stop looking at him. It’s inappropriate and deeply embarrassing to be such a simp. It’s pathetic. I know that.
I don’t stop looking though. I can’t. Instead, I roll my gaze over every inch of his exposed skin, and I don’t stop until he’s standing in front of me, a few feet away, leaning against the porch railing.
Our eyes meet, and it’s fire and ice. Fuel and a flame.
“Jude.” He says it as if it’s a whole sentence. As if it’s the start and the end. As if it’s something that means something to him. His eyes are so sad when he says it that I find it hard to maintain eye contact. The sight of Romeo hurt or in pain has always been my kryptonite. My greatest weakness. My total downfall. “You really came back, huh?”
“Yeah, I, er, it was a mistake. I’m sorry. I shouldn’tha—”
A visor slams down. The soft, glimmering warmth turns icy. His jaw clenches. “You still thinkthatwasyour mistake?”
14
“The day is hot”
Then
The summer after thefirst year of college was long and sultry. Charged in a way that was beyond anything I’d ever felt. Everything was intense. Every interaction between Romeo and me was exaggerated and seemed in crystal clear focus. Everything that wasn’t him was pale and lackluster.
His new college friends were around a lot. Kellie loved reading and seemed blissfully unaware that people don’t usually read during conversations with others. She hung out with Romeo a lot but didn’t participate in many discussions other than to look up and say, “What the fuck?” now and again. Sean was studying art history and English literature. He had a lot to say about almost everything. Some of it was actually pretty funny. Just not as funny as Romeo thought it was.
When I met them, Kellie dropped her book a fraction and peeked over it, nodding and giving me a little smile.
“Well, well, well,” said Sean, “check it out, Kel. If Romeo’s to be believed, we’ve just met the best human being in existence.”
Romeo slung his arm loosely around my shoulder and pulled me so close his hair brushed against my cheek. His laughter was soft, but that close, I could feel the sound reverberating in his chest.
If I’d been shot at close range right then, I’d have been unharmed. Completely unscathed. Not a scratch on me.
That was the power Romeo had over me.
Summer crawled by in a way that left me in no doubt whatsoever that there really was a tear in time. Days were long and weeks were short. It was boring and lovely and carefree, and I was so desperately in love with Romeo I could hardly think straight.
At the end of July, my parents rented a camper van and took a road trip to Isle Royale National Park. Lexi had finished college by then and was working in Detroit, and I’d already spent a full year at college. Still, it was the first time my parents felt comfortable leaving me home alone for more than a night or two.
I loved it. I used all the money they left me and ate nothing but pizza for the first three days. I hung out at Romeo’s pool during the day, and at night, he came over and chilled at my place. The pace of life in Alabaster musthave been getting to Kellie and Sean because, for the first time that summer, they found things to do that took them out of town.
I had Romeo all to myself, and let me tell you, I lapped that shit up. I gorged myself on his attention. I saw him morning, noon, and night and still wanted more. The day in question was a Thursday. It was mid-afternoon, and we’d eaten all the good snacks at Romeo’s house and were at my place looking for something better.
“I could make nachos,” I said after staring into the pantry cupboard for long enough to feel sure its contents weren’t magically going to morph into something that didn’t need cooking or effort.
“Hmm,” said Romeo in that wistful way that let me know his attention was drifting. “Maybe later.” His eyes didn’t drift as much as I had expected. They started to wander and then stopped and livened instead. He tilted his head toward my dad’s booze cabinet. “How ’bout something stronger?”
Now, Romeo and I had raided my dad’s booze cabinet before. We’d taken our first drink together while sitting on Inferno a few years back after sneaking out one night. Both of us laughed our asses off at the faces we made as the liquor went down. We’d each gone to college with fake IDs in our wallets, but neither of us was a party animal. We hadthe odd drink now and again, but we didn’t get shitfaced, let’s put it like that.
Romeo suggesting a drink wasn’t unheard of. It was something that had happened a bunch of times before, so I didn’t think anything of it. I poured the bourbon—neat—into two of my dad’s cut crystal tumblers and handed one to Romeo. Normally, when we drank, we took rushed swigs straight out of the bottle or decanted it into a mug or something like that for plausible deniability. The crystal made us feel so fancy we took turns saying, “Cheers” in terrible British accents and clanking our glasses together.
There was a heady freedom to knowing my parents were well and truly miles away. Maybe we still felt a little illegal about what we were doing, though, because we took the bottle and our tumblers upstairs to my room instead of drinking downstairs. Romeo sat on my bed, long legs crossed in front of him, back squished into the corner between the headboard and the wall. I had a big exercise ball in my room, and I sat unsteadily on that. Half-bouncing, half-rocking.
The bourbon went to my head. I could literally feel the first sip burn its way down my esophagus and then shoot up my chest and throat and sizzle my brain. My face felt warm. Too warm.
