And then I stumble upon one I haven’t watched in years. Nine, to be exact. I was in a far less fancy room than this one when I watched it, with my favorite person in the world. Kate.
A tear trickles down my cheek and I wipe it away as quickly as I can, but James sees it.
“Serena, what’s the…?”
“Nothing,” I answer and turn away, because I can feel more tears forming behind my eyelids.
James wraps
his arms around me, and for once, I wish he wouldn’t, because it makes withholding the tears so much harder.
“You can tell me anything,” he says in a low, warm voice.
His words shatter all my defenses. Before I know it, sobs choke me and words start pouring out of my mouth. Words I have never uttered before, not even to myself, let alone to another living soul. They speak of pain and guilt. And of the agony of missing her every single day.
It’s a while before I notice we’re sitting on the floor, James leaning against the wall and me, curled up in his arms, resting my head on his chest. There’s something calming about listening to his heartbeats, echoing so clearly in the silence between us. Then the realization of what really happened hits me and it occurs to me that the silence might be because I completely freaked him out with my meltdown.
“I’m so sorry,” I gasp, cold dread starting to creep in. “That was so silly of me.”
“Don’t apologize,” he says, planting a soft kiss on my head.
“It happened so long ago, and I never talk about it…”
“Doesn’t matter when it happened,” he says softly. “The pain never really goes away. You just learn to survive with it.”
My heart skips a beat. He’s the first person to tell me what I knew all along. What Jess, Michael, even my mother have vehemently denied. They always said I should give it time, because time heals everything. What a lie. It’s a lie we tell others when we can’t find the right words to say. It’s a lie we tell ourselves in the darkest of times, in the hope that it’ll help us crawl out of the giant abyss of despair.
It didn’t help me, so I stopped repeating that to myself after a while. I put on the widest smile I could muster so others would cease chanting the blasphemy as well.
I’m grateful for James’s honesty. It’s liberating. And maybe it’s his honesty, or the fact that I’ve never felt safer or more deeply understood than at this moment, that causes the thought plaguing my nightmares, the root of my guilt, to slip out.
“If I’d looked more closely after her,” I whisper, my voice trembling so hard with the effort of withholding tears that I nearly can’t understand myself.
He does, though. And he pulls me closer to him, caressing my cheeks with the back of his fingers.
“Then maybe she would have lived a day, a month, a year longer. But how much longer, Serena? You can’t be someone’s guardian angel forever,” he says firmly.
Guardian angel… The words bring back a very old memory. I was ten when Kate’s problems began. I didn’t understand what was going on, I just knew that my sister wasn’t behaving like my sister anymore. So I used to pray every night after my mother tucked me in bed, asking my guardian angel to leave me and go at Kate’s side, because her angel seemed to be a tad overwhelmed. When it became clear to me that either my guardian angel wasn’t listening to me, or she had listened to me but she too was overwhelmed, I decided to take the matter in my own hands. Some help I turned out to be.
“Don’t blame yourself for something that was out of your control. There was no other end to the path she’d taken.”
“Maybe,” I say, “but it didn’t have to end that day.”
“Any other day would’ve hurt you just as much. Do you have nightmares?”
I shudder in his arms. How can he know?
“Sometimes,” I admit, “but not very often.”
The truth is, I do have them often. But I can’t bring myself to say out loud that I have them at least twice a week. All I can hope is tonight of all nights, I won’t wake up in the pitch-black darkness drenched in sweat, pulling the bed sheets in my clenched fists. Yet as I lie here, cuddled against his chest, I suddenly know I won’t. The certainty of it scares me almost more than the perception of having a nightmare. Because I don’t need one more reason to dread the moment when I won’t be in his arms anymore.
“You’re a remarkable person,” James says, and the suppressed tension in his voice sends cold jitters down my back. “To carry all that pain and not lose yourself on the way.”
I freeze in the act of caressing his bare chest. What kind of hurt did he see in me in that bar? One of a betrayed and abandoned lover, or something more? Did he see the pain that no one else sees? The one I carried with me for so long, I almost don’t see it myself?
“I didn’t really have a choice.”
He gives a humorless laugh. “There’s always a choice, Serena. And trust me, most people don’t choose your way.”
“What do most people choose?” I raise my head slightly, searching for his eyes, but he’s looking in the opposite direction. Something tells me the real question is, What did you choose?
And it finally dawns on me why he can see the pain, why he knows about the nightmares. He, too, lost someone. In a different way, but he did. He must have loved Lara very much to still feel her leaving him so deeply. With a pang, I realize he must have loved her much more than I loved Michael. How else could I claim that I all but buried my grief in less than a month when he still mourns after years?
I run a finger along his neck and he turns toward me, gazing at me with kind yet determined eyes. I know he won’t tell me anything. Not tonight. Another time, if I’m lucky, I’ll hear his story. I will learn about his pain, and maybe I will be able to soothe his wounds the way he soothed mine.
Maybe, just maybe then he’ll forget her.
“So, what’s it gonna be?” I ask playfully. “The Lion King? Or do you prefer The Godfather?”
“Your wish is my command,” he answers in an equally playful tone, planting gentle kisses on my neck, then gets up, pulling me after him.
Natalie’s warning plays in my head as we head to the computer, hand in hand, and I know she was right. I am the center of his world tonight.
But what about tomorrow?
The longer I stand on the burning pavement, the more tempted I am to jump in the fountain in front of the Stanford Memorial Auditorium. The fact that almost one thousand students will witness my rule breaking doesn’t seem reason enough not to do it. The fine I’d get for doing it does, though. But the rivulets of sweat forming on my back might make even the fine seem insignificant in a few minutes.
“I still don’t get why you dragged me to this conference. I don’t care about the economic downturn or whatever crap they always talk about,” Jess complains, holding her notebook on the side of her face, in a poor attempt to block the blinding sun.
“It’s not about the downturn. And listening to some smart people won’t hurt you,” I say, still eying the fountain. I take a sip from my ice-cold smoothie, the only thing standing between me and a jump in the fountain.
“Smart is relative. I should be preparing for my phone interview tomorrow.”
Jess’s job search has been going so much better than mine. She credits it to her vision board, a complex extension of her own pink What I Want to Do in My Life paper. I credit it to her mind-blowing confidence, which makes her apply for jobs that she isn’t half-qualified for. And get interviews for almost all of them.
“You had enough time this morning but chose to waste it by questioning me about James,” I say.
She scoffs. “You were gone with him the entire weekend, and then shut yourself in the library for three days working on your damn assignments. What did you expect?”
In truth, I expected just that. It was the reason, aside from my monstrous amount of work and Aidan’s promise to help me prepare for (hopefully) upcoming interviews, for which I locked myself in the library with Aidan after classes, coming home late at night when Jess was asleep and leaving long before she’d get up. Aidan took me by complete surprise when we started role-playing interviews. He played the interviewee first. My jaw dropped. The timid boy who can’t get through a conversation with a girl without turning bright red at least once, transformed into a perfectly confident interviewee under my eyes in a matter of seconds. No wonder he has two job offers lined up already. I turned into a tongue-twisted, brain-frozen idiot when my turn came. How I ever got my internship last year I will never know.
The crowd starts moving inside slowly, and Jess jiggles her foot impatiently.
“Let me finish this,” I say, si
pping the last remains of the smoothie.
“Oh, I’m sure if you tell James how much you like kiwi smoothies he’ll take you to a kiwi plantation or something.”
And here we go again. Somehow, after painfully detailed questioning of my weekend, Jess decided that James is the perfect boyfriend. She blatantly ignored me when I pointed out that he made it crystal clear he isn’t my boyfriend.
“Cut it, Jess.”
“How can this guy be real? He introduced you to his friends, took you out to a candlelight dinner, and finds your movie obsession cute.”
“He’s a movie freak too.”
“I’ve lied to myself my whole life that guys like him don’t exist,” Jess says, as if she hasn’t heard me, “so I wouldn’t fall into a depression about all the assholes I’ve gone out with, who can’t introduce me to their friends after six months of dating.” She grits her teeth, snatching the smoothie from my hand and sipping the very last bit.
I know exactly who she means: Ethan, the guy she proclaimed was the love of her life until three months ago, when she abruptly dumped him. But she all but forbade me to ever talk about him, so I switch back to James.
“Those things don’t mean anything to him, Jess. Besides, he’d slept with half of those friends and probably more than a dozen others and has no plans to quit doing so. For all I know, he spent the last two nights with Natalie.” My heart stings violently at the thought. “I’d say that trumps candles and movies.”
“I don’t think he has,” she winks. “You said he called you every day.”
He did. My stomach jolts every time his name appears on my screen and frightens me like nothing else. I spent the last weekend desperately wishing I’d had the strong will to disappear from his apartment. But I didn’t. Not when he asked me on Saturday morning whether I want to spend the day with him. Or when day morphed into night and then another day. Every ounce of sanity dictated me to leave, to run, because every second I spent at his side fed my illusion that everything was real: his arms around me and his lips on mine, his comforting words when I talked about Kate and the absence of even one nightmare, our endless discussions about which Superman movie was the worst, and his unbelievable patience in listening to me talk about my job application woes.
It was so perfectly fake it felt real.
“Let’s go inside,” I murmur. “Oh shoot-turn around,” I command and swirl around, grabbing Jess by the shoulder.
“Ouch. What was that for?” she complains.
“Abby just passed by. I told her I missed the last two Saturday volleyball games because I had chickenpox.”
Jess bursts out laughing. “You’re an awful liar.”
“She is.” I raise my gaze and find James standing a few feet away from us, in front of the fountain. He’s dressed in a suit, something he told me more than once he despises. And whether the weekend was real or not, there’s nothing fake in the sudden lightning-fast beats of my heart and the racing pulse in my throat. I curse my wardrobe choice-an above-the-knee gray cotton dress with short sleeves. I thought it made me look like a smart, would-be professional when I chose it. I feel like a desperate schoolgirl now.
Jess steps forward. “I’m Jessica Haydn,” she says, almost out of breath.
“James. Nice to finally meet you.” He kisses Jess on both cheeks then turns his attention to me. “You look perfect for someone who was supposed to be down with chickenpox for two weeks,” he muses.
“I had to come up with something,” I mumble, staring at my feet.
“Are you joining us in the auditorium, James? Getting bored to death by lousy speeches is much less painful when in good company,” Jess says.
“I’m actually here to deliver a speech.” He smirks at her.
“I’ll make sure not to fall asleep during yours, then.” She winks. “I’ll be eternally grateful if you crack a joke or two. You’re twenty-eight, which makes you a good fifteen years younger than all the other speakers, so I’m putting all my trust in you.” Jess will never cease to amaze me. Is there anything that could ever throw her off, or shake that fantastic confidence of hers even a bit?
“You were not on the speaker list,” I say to James. “I checked it twice.”
“I promised Dean Kramer that I’d show up spontaneously if I had time.”
“I’ll wait for you inside, Serena. Nice meeting you, James,” Jess dismisses herself, and I wonder if it’s finally a sign of embarrassment or she just wants to give us some space.
“Let’s go somewhere in the shade,” he says, undoing the top button of his shirt.
We stop under the valley oak next to the auditorium and I lean against the rough bark.
“We should go inside. The first speech will start in a few minutes,” I say.
“I didn’t come for the speech,” James says, his lip curling into a delicious smile. He leans so close I can feel his warm, sweet breath on me. “I wanted to see you.”
My heart skips a beat. How can I not melt at such words?