I hefted her up and out of the chair and shifted her toward the bed. But at the point she normally let go of me, when her full weight was on the edge of the bed, she didn’t. She hung on. And then she was sobbing into my shoulder. I wrapped myarms around her, holding her tight. We didn’t hug and this felt foreign to me.
“I’m so sorry, Mom,” I said. “Things will be better soon.”
“I wish you weren’t here,” she said, and my tight grip on her faltered. “If you weren’t here, he would be. He would be taking care of me.”
Hurt clogged up my throat, gagging me. I knew she meant that she wished he was here in this moment instead of me. But it felt like so much more than that. It felt like she meant that if I had never been here to begin with, then he would be. I wanted to tell her that he’d had every opportunity, every excuse, to come and he hadn’t. ThatIhad come. I had dropped everything, like I always did, and come. I didn’t say that because I knew it wouldn’t help anything in this moment. She was hurting in more ways than one.
“I know,” I said instead. “It hurts.”
After a few more minutes of clinging to me, she settled down and I helped her the rest of the way into bed, tucking her beneath the covers. “Your bell is right here, Mom. If you need to get up, ring it, or call me, your phone is also right here.”
“I thought I could do it. I wanted to do it. You should’ve let me try.” Her eyes were already closing, drifting back into sleep. I watched her for a moment as her breathing evened, as the worried, hard expression she always seemed to wear on her face relaxed into something almost soft. Then I turned off the light and walked back out. I paused in the hall to collect myself, breathing for several minutes. My chest hurt. If I had been seeing a therapist for my actual issues, I wondered what tools she would’ve given me for this moment. I wanted to call my dad and tell him off, but I didn’t think that was the right tool. Maybe it was.
Or maybe I could let myself be ravaged by the really hot guy I’d left in my bedroom. Maybe that would take my mind off everything, make me feel anything but this. Was that a tool?
I walked quietly down the hall and back into my bedroom. After shutting the door behind me, I faced Elijah. He was on my bed, still shirtless, obviously, since I was wearing his shirt. But he was also still pants-less, just lying there in his underwear.
“Everything okay?” he asked. It had been at least twenty minutes, maybe thirty. He was on his back, my pillow tucked under his head, his phone in his hand like he had been using it to pass the time.
I nodded because I wasn’t sure I could speak properly. He reached over, depositing his phone onto the nightstand. I sat on the bed next to him.
“You look adorable in my shirt,” he said, pulling on the bottom of it. “You should wear it all the time.”
I offered him a smile and then lay on my side next to him, my cheek on his chest.
He kissed the top of my head. “Talk to me, Sutton. What’s going on?”
I shook my head, then stretched up and kissed him. He didn’t resist, kissing me back. I deepened the kiss, slipping my tongue past his lips and tasting him. His hand gripped my upper arm, pulling me closer to his mouth for several blissful minutes. But he wasn’t exploring my body like earlier, not even when I bent my knee so it was on his thigh, traveling the length of it and then higher.
That’s when he stopped our kiss.
“What?” I asked.
“Something is wrong.”
“This doesn’t feel good for you?”
“That’s not what I mean. It feels good. You feel good. But something happened. You look…” He didn’t finish, just studied my eyes as I stared at him. I rolled onto my back, which was a mistake because I almost rolled right off the bed. He caught me around the waist, pulling me closer to him and shifting onto his side to make more room for me.
My palm went to my forehead, where I rubbed at the ache I could feel growing there. “I look what?” I asked.
“Haunted?” he said.
“This house is haunted,” I said. “Ghosts of the past just walking around like they own the place.”
“What does that mean?” he asked.
I sucked in a deep breath and counted to three before letting it out. I didn’t talk about my mom. “She can’t get over him. He left and she can’t get over him. And she blames me.” I choked on the last word, and the hot tears finally came, pouring out of my eyes and down my temples into my hair. My hand was still on my forehead, and I hoped that hid most of the evidence of my breakdown. This wasn’t what he signed up for when I’d promised him excitement in a twin bed.
“She blames you? In what world is it your fault?”
“In the world where they were happily living a life without me, and my existence changed everything.”
“Sutton,” he said, in a deep, sympathetic voice. “Tell me they haven’t said that to you.”
“You know that we believe in actions around here and not words.” I turned on my side, away from him. “But in this case, there have been both.” I wiped at my eyes. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. I don’t tell people this. This is the kindof stuff people are supposed to bury deep down and only let out in long grocery store lines or LA traffic as bursts of unjustified anger.”
He was quiet.
