Loud Awake and Lost

“…and to be as happy as Eleanor and I have been these past thirty-four years. Marriage is the most important decision you can make. It takes work, it takes commitment, and it takes one incredibly important sentence: ‘Honey, you’re right.’ ”

“He sure packs in the hammy clichés,” whispered Rachel.

“Drew, my son, I hope you know that your family thinks you knocked the cover off the ball with this girl.”

“Yikes, with a bonus sports metaphor,” I whispered back.

“So please join me in raising your glass as we wish Drew and Raina health and happiness.” Mr. Wilde swiped the air before he drank deeply to the scattered applause and hear, hears.

“Thirty-four years, gawd,” said Rachel, with another sly check on her phone. “Doesn’t that sound like a gruesome amount of time to be married?”

“It sounds like a gruesome amount of time to be anything,” I answered.

“Check it, Jake just texted that he’s at Floyd with the guys and he’s ordered a couple of pizzas. So we can head over—want to say in forty-five minutes?”

“Sure. My allergies can’t take too much more of these flowers, anyway.”

The conclusion of the toast had rearranged the room into different conversation nests, and I watched as Holden broke from one of them to give Raina a brotherly embrace before he beelined for me, sidling up and looping his arm around my shoulders in a tight squeeze. He might have had another beer, I could sense from the way he kissed the top of my head—casual, almost goofy.

“Come to my room,” he said, his voice thick and hopeful in my ear. “Away from all these poison weeds, right?”

“Ha, no kidding.” I sensed my friends pretending not to notice Holden’s and my closeness. Their tiny nudges, their spidery-watchful energy. This was how it had been. This was how it was supposed to be, in everyone’s minds. Friday Follies and parties and everyone together forever, all the way up to Mr. Wilde’s sweaty champagne toast, for the rest of our lives.

But would the Wildes really and truly think their son had “knocked the cover off the ball” if he wanted to spend his life with a girl who had broken his heart? A girl who’d dropped everything she’d been, and then one night driven herself over a bridge, killing someone else in the process?

Or would they be (more likely) endlessly brooding and suspicious, always ready to expect some act of self-sabotage or recklessness, the very worst of me?

Ice, fever, ice. I felt light-headed as my resentment seethed. It wasn’t for the Wildes to decide. Holden was mine and I was his, if we wanted each other. And if a future together was our landscape, it was a personal map for us to unfold, for us to plot the journey.

“Yes,” I whispered. “Let’s go.”

20

One Guy, One Decision

Holden’s room was just as I remembered, but at the same time it felt antiseptic. There were a few things I hadn’t seen—the graduation picture, and Holden’s cobalt-blue Lafayette mortarboard hung rakish over an old Super Soccer Stars trophy. Except it was a phantom presence of Holden here now. I could sense it in the stark surface of his desk and in the absence of his personal presence, that stuffy yet comforting, lived-in bedroom odor of gym socks and sweat and aftershave and a hint of fast-food French fries.

Noise pumped upward through the floorboards. If the Wildes knew one thing about a party, it was how to keep it going. But I never liked the sound of adults getting silly on red wine. Which would be most of the Wildes’ friends. It was yet another way that Holden’s parents and my parents were different. And while mine might be less “fun,” at least they never became giggle-boozy like Mrs. Wilde, or made dirty jokes with a hot face like Mr. Wilde. I was always surprised that Holden wasn’t more irritated or upset, but I guess he was used to them.

Holden clicked the door shut. We each yanked up a few Kleenex—the flower arrangements were killing us—to get control of our weeping noses, laughing grimly about our shared allergy issues, before lying stomach-down and side by side on the bed, where we pored over the Lafayette senior yearbook. Holden got up once to get his iTunes going, and to lower the light. My body was a squeeze of nervous anticipation as Holden returned to the bed and then pushed away the yearbook to pull me close.

I could taste warmth and beer as Holden kissed me hard—there was something defiant about it. I wanted this, didn’t I? I shifted position. I was having trouble relaxing; I couldn’t seem to find the right place to put my arms and legs. Holden slipped my dress over my head, then undid the clasp of my bra and scooped a hand inside.

“Oh!” We hadn’t hooked up for real in such a long time. Of course I’d agreed to it. Just in letting Holden’s index finger link mine as we’d stolen away up the stairs, there’d been acknowledgment. We’d been flirting all night, wanting to end up in just exactly this space, alone together.

But now did I want it? I didn’t want to overthink it. I wanted to be loose and warm and untrapped. I kissed him back as I cracked open my eyes to stare at Holden’s shadowed face. He was undeniably cute. That tousled hair, the slight cleft in his chin—it all worked.

Holden was tugging down my tights—I helped wriggle and peel them off, dropping them over the side of the bed. Sexually, I’d gone pretty far with Holden, nearly all the way to actual sex, and the funny thing about that was no matter how much time had passed, the unspoken rule now seemed to be that all the things we’d done before were ours to do again, speedily, and only because we’d done them all before.

He kicked out of his gray flannels, and I helped him unbutton his shirt, and here we were down to nothing but underwear, facing each other in newly unwrapped shyness. Our mouths met, skin on skin. I could feel his fingertips trailing my spine, finding the bolt—though I’d shown him before, I hadn’t let him pause there. In the heated, heavy darkness, his fingers learned and accepted it, and then he carefully rolled over on top of me. His body on mine was a familiar excitement.

Was I betraying Kai tonight, with Holden? The thought triggered another future, only this one was not the Wildes’ parlor. Kai’s life was less ordered, less safe; his world was explosive with the dry, glittery desert heat of Burning Man, it roared with the baseball crowd in Yankee Stadium, it trekked the green farmlands of the Glastonbury music festival, it teetered at the apex of the Coney Island Ferris wheel. In a split second, I saw all of it distilled as clearly as if a fortune-teller had let me gaze into her crystal ball.