“We have to.” I don’t even care now that I’m a blubbering mess. Each word escapes my throat as a ragged splutter, and I’m unable to pull myself together. I want to be strong enough to do what’s right, but I’m not. I’m weak.
Suddenly he spins around, urgency in both his actions and his words. “Tell me what you want me to do it and I’ll do it. I’ll make this work.” One hand grips the steering wheel; the other reaches out to touch my knee.
I glance down at his fingers as they touch my jeans. I just stare at his hand as I force down the bile in my throat. I don’t look back up again. “Don’t make this harder.”
“I need to be with you,” he whispers. His fingers move from my knee to my hand, and he grasps it in his and presses his thumb down hard on mine so that I can’t possibly shake him off. He interlocks our fingers. I have no choice but to glance back up, to meet his eyes as they well up, and I’ve never seen him look so…so torn apart. “Don’t you get it? You’re not my distraction. This is me, Eden. This. Right now. You’re making me a goddamn mess, but I don’t care, because it’s me. I’m a mess. And the thing I love about you is that I’m allowed to be a mess around you, because I trust you. You’re the only one who’s cared enough to figure me out. I want to be your mess.”
“I’m still going to care,” I manage to say, even though by now there are so many tears flowing down my cheeks that I can barely see. “But as your stepsister.”
“Eden,” he pleads once more, squeezing my hand even tighter, like he’s terrified to let go. “What about last weekend? We…was all of that for nothing? Has the entire summer been for fucking nothing?”
“Not nothing,” I say, but I’m staring at our hands, at the way they fit perfectly together. My stomach knots. “We’ve learned a lot.”
“This isn’t fair!” he yells at the exact same time he slams his other hand against the steering wheel. He grips it so tight afterward that his knuckles turn white. “I told you everything about me. I told you the truth. I broke up with Tiffani, and now she’s probably already planning how she’s going to ruin my life even more than it already has been, but I don’t care because I thought it would be worth it. I thought it would be worth it because I was thinking of you. I was putting you first. You know what the only thing running through my mind was when I walked out of that house right now? I can finally be with Eden.” He falls silent, taking a moment to rub at his eyes as he exhales. His chest is rising and sinking rapidly as he releases his grip on me and places both hands back on the wheel, his eyes fixed on the rain that’s rolling down the windshield. “And then you come out here and tell me that you don’t want to.”
“Do you think I want to do this? Because I sure as hell don’t, but I’m doing it because it’s better for us both.” I’m trying to force his eyes to meet mine again, but they never do. He just keeps staring at Tiffani’s driveway, at the rain, because right now the weather outside beats the storm that’s taking place in here. “I don’t want to see you get worse if this goes wrong. What are you going to do if our parents find out and absolutely hate us? This isn’t the right time. We can’t handle this. You need to fix your life as it is, because you need to go to New York and you don’t need any of this added on.”
“What the hell is in New York?” he yells, exasperated, his fierce eyes snapping back to mine. “Why can’t you just tell me?”
“Because your mom wants to,” I tell him, but I sound like a sobbing catastrophe. I sniff a few times as I try to regain my breath, slowing down my breathing and attempting to compose myself. It doesn’t really work. “Whatever there is between us, we have to ignore it from now on. We need to stop this now before we get in too deep.”
He shakes his head, eyes tightly squeezed shut. The rain is still hammering against the windows, loudly and relentlessly. “If that’s what you really want,” he eventually murmurs in a low voice, but I just know he’s hating this as much as I am. “If you really, really want us to ignore this…then I guess I have to.”
I heave a tremendous sigh. I want this to be a nightmare. I want to wake up in Portland and for Mom to tell me that I’ve never stepped foot in Santa Monica before and that I don’t have a stepbrother called Tyler. I don’t want any of this to be real. It hurts too much to be real.
When he opens his eyes and turns to look at me, he just stares. I can’t bear the sight of them, pooling with emotion and hurt, but I can’t look away. His breathing sounds louder than the rain and it quickens as he leans toward me, and I know exactly what he’s thinking, and I want to kiss him too. So I do, because it’s the last time I ever will.
I pull myself up onto my knees and climb onto him, stretching out my hands and gently grasping his neck. It’s so sudden, but I can’t stop myself. It reminds me of when he took me to the pier, when we kissed in his car, in this exact position. And just like I did all those weeks ago, I press my lips to his once more.
But it’s so slow this time, so agonizing. Tyler places his hands on my waist and holds me tight against his chest, and all while his lips capture mine for long, drawn-out seconds. Over and over again, he keeps kissing me. I almost feel him sigh against me. It hurts to be kissing him, to know that I’ll never get to do it again, but it’s also calming in a way. It’s like closure.
The sound of the rain is drilling into our ears, and our bodies are damp, and my hair is all over the place, and Tyler almost just suffered a mental breakdown, and I’ve cried enough tears to fill the pool in our backyard, and it’s all just so messy.
It sums up our situation completely.
And for that reason, it’s perfect.
Tyler groans as he pulls away. When his lips finally tear themselves away from mine, my stomach drops, and I refuse to let go of him. Instead, I hold him there, his face by mine, and I exhale against his cheek. My eyes are still closed. I’m not sure if his are too.
“Stepsiblings,” I whisper, breathing the words softly yet firmly. “Nothing more.”
“Nothing more,” he confirms, but then his head hangs low and he pulls away from me, so I finally have to let go. He turns his face to his window and places his hands back on the wheel. I think he’s finally given up.
Reaching for my hood and pulling it back over my head, I tuck strands of wet hair behind my ears and rotate my body toward the door. I reach for the handle, pausing for a moment to see if he’ll say anything, but he doesn’t, so I step out of the car.
And just like that, I’m walking away from him. From us.
Quickly, I slam the door shut behind me to stop the rain getting in, and I make a dash across the lawn. I glance over my shoulder and rain blows into my face again, but it doesn’t stop me from seeing Tyler’s car peel out of the driveway and head west. Hopefully he’s making his way home. I stand there, out on the lawn in the pouring rain, waiting until his car disappears into the distance.
The thing I like most about the rain is that people can’t tell whether or not you’re crying. And right now the tears are streaming endlessly down my cheeks and soaking into my hoodie. The wind whips around me, and I turn around and run back to the front door. Thankfully, when I get there Dean is swinging it open for me. I stop the second I get inside, letting the water roll off my face, my messy bun toppling over to one side.
“Are you crazy?” he asks, but he’s laughing. “Hang on, I’ll grab a towel.”
He rushes off into another room, probably the bathroom, while I stand dripping wet next to the living room. I notice that both Jake and Rachael have disappeared. The house still smells like popcorn, and I can hear the low volume of the football presenter commentating on the game, and then Dean comes padding back over to me with a huge white towel in his arms. He unfolds it and throws it over my shoulder, and I immediately pull it around me and dry my face. I feel like I’m drowning.
Dean still has a playful smile on his lips, but the more he studies my expression, the more it fades away. Soon he’s frowning. “Are you okay?”
“I’ll be fine,” I sa
y, but it’s bullshit. Everything hurts and everything feels broken. I don’t know if I’m going to be fine, but I can’t let Dean know this, so I sniff and nod to the staircase. “Are they with Tiffani?”
“Jake and Rachael? Yeah.” He bites his lip as he laughs. “I look like a crappy friend standing down here instead of offering her moral support, but I was actually about to leave.”
“Leave?” I echo. “Where are you going?”
“La Breve Vita is playing another gig downtown,” he says quietly, and I like the way he mumbles, shy about the fact that he’s totally obsessed with this band. It helps to distract me. “I was gonna catch the end of their set after the movie, but I’m going to head over there just now instead. Hey, you can come! If you want to, of course. I mean, you’ve probably got better things to do with your time and you seem kind of upset, but I’m pretty sure they’d help cheer you up.”
“I’ll come,” I say gently, and I can’t help but smile as I let down my hair and attempt to towel dry it. Suddenly Tyler’s obsession with distractions is starting to make sense. Right now, I’m trying to distract myself with Dean, because the less your mind thinks about the things that are tearing you apart, the better you feel. “I really like them.”
“Are you sure?” He tilts his head and studies me, taking note of how soaked I am.
“It’s just water,” I say with a shrug, and then drop the towel to the floor as I gather my hair and throw it up into a damp ponytail. Right now, I couldn’t care less about how I look. My eyes and my cheeks burn. They sting. “I’ll dry out on the way there.”
Dean looks as though he’s about to protest, but then he just grins and pulls out his keys. “You have to go back out there now.”
So I steal the towel. Holding it above my head like a makeshift umbrella, I run outside to the car with Dean sharp on my heels, and we both dive inside the vehicle as quick as we can. The heating goes on full blast and La Breve Vita’s third album starts up in the CD player and Dean cracks a couple jokes about the towel, which aren’t even funny but I laugh anyway.
“I was right about the rainstorm, see?” He leans forward over the wheel as we make our way to the gig, and he glances up at the sky through the windshield for a moment. He blows out some air and leans back in his seat again. “It’s always so crazy.”
“How long does it last?” I ask. My eyes are fixed on the wiper blades as they struggle to keep up with the amount of rain that’s blurring the windshield, despite already being on their fastest speed. It’s been raining this heavy since morning.
“All day,” Dean says, but his tone is a little off as he grips the steering wheel and concentrates on the road. “Really, it’s hard to say.”
The gig is in the same venue as before, with the same crushed cups scattering the floor and the same cologne wafting around the air. Through the darkness, Dean leads me over to the back again, where we linger by the far wall. No one shoves you out of the way back here. I shrug my shoulders into my hoodie, giving up on getting dry. I just started to dry off in the car when, of course, I had to get straight back out and into the rain again. But Dean’s soaked too, and so is everyone else, so no one seems to give a shit.
“They’re working on a new album at the moment,” Dean tells me over the noise. The band is on the stage, but they’ve paused for a few minutes to drink some water and to tune the guitars. “It’ll be released in January. I’m stoked. It’s gonna be awesome!”
I smile at his excitement and enthusiasm, because it really is adorable seeing him get so hyped up about it all. His eyes are sparkling, but then he seems to think he’s embarrassing himself, because he looks away and rubs the back of his neck.
We’ve arrived just in time for the beginning of the next song, and the lead singer steps up to the microphone. He clears his throat and then squints at the small crowd through half-shut eyes. “It’s awesome to see so many of you here tonight despite the shitty weather,” he says with a hearty chuckle, “and it’s even more awesome that you’re here to see us. We’re about to perform one of my personal favorites from our second album.” The crowd cheers in anticipation of what song it might be, and I can see Dean biting his lip, his eyes glued to the stage. “We wrote this song a few years ago now, and it’s actually a pretty cool story, how this song came to be.” He rubs the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and then begins to pace back and forth across the stage, his head tilted down and his eyes on the floor. “I had this friend… Let’s call him Bobby. So I had this friend, Bobby, and Bobby was a hell of a guy. I went to college with him and we shared the same dorm building, and Bobby was majoring in law. And you know what? Bobby fucking hated law. Bobby wanted to major in musical theater, but he stuck to law, you know why? Because society is a piece of shit.” He shakes his head and pauses for a moment before continuing. “Bobby went through hell and back to finish that major. He wasted four years doing something he didn’t want to do, because all through high school people talked smack about him because of what he was interested in. You know how Bobby feels now? He feels pissed off that he’s stuck with a bullshit law major. So screw whatever the hell anyone else thinks about you or your decisions. If you’re gay, then hell yeah, embrace that shit! If you want to start up your own paint store, then start up your own goddamn paint store. Stop holding back from being you.” He clears his throat again and steps back into position in the center of the stage, his eyes flickering up to look at us all again. “So if you haven’t guessed it already, here’s ‘Holding Back.’ Enjoy. Tanto amore. Much love.”
I don’t know what it is about this band, but suddenly I adore them even more than I did before. I already loved the song, and I already understood the message it was trying to convey, but listening to the singer be so straightforward and to the point only makes me appreciate the lyrics even more than I already did. I can relate to them a hell of a lot. Especially this song, because it makes me wonder if I’ve done the right thing, if maybe I should run back home and tell Tyler I’ve made a huge mistake, that I really do want us to be together. But in my heart, I know we have to hold back. We have no other option. Tears spring into my eyes again as I listen to the song. It’s bittersweet.
I feel a huge pang in my heart, but I bite down on my lip and keep my eyes trained on the stage. The guitarist starts strumming, and then the bassist joins in, and then the drummer, and then finally the singer, and soon the song is blasting around us, deafeningly loud but all the more exciting. I can feel the music vibrating through my body as goose bumps surface along my arms, the hairs rising.
And it’s then that I feel Dean’s hand slip into mine.
He takes me by surprise, but his skin is warm, and he squeezes my hand tightly before rubbing soft circles on my skin with his thumb. I don’t let go. It’s partly because it’s so sudden and out of nowhere that I’m not quite sure what to think of it, and also partly because it feels almost…comforting. Dean’s always made me feel comfortable. And right now, of all times, I need all the comfort I can get.
When I glance sideways at him, his eyes are locked on the stage and he’s nodding his head in sync with the kick drum. But most importantly, he’s smiling.
Epilogue
Ten months later
If someone had told me last year that I’d be finishing up junior year in Santa Monica and not Portland, I would never have believed them. I would have laughed. Yet here I am, piling my marine biology textbooks into my locker and rummaging around for my car keys. When I find them and take a step back, Rachael comes twirling over to me from the other end of the hallway.
“Another day down!” she cheers, a huge grin on her face. She lifts her hand and waves two fingers in front of my face. Yesterday it was three; the day before it was four. “Two days to go until graduation!”
“Yeah, for you,” I mutter, pretending to be pissed off, but then I roll my eyes and laugh. Rachael’s been counting down the days ever since Christmas and she’s already perfected her method of tossing her cap, so
I’m cutting her some slack, despite how badly I hate the whole idea of her graduating. “When you’re in college, remember to spare a thought for your best friend who’s still stuck here.”
“You’re our little baby,” she coos as she stretches out an arm to pat my head, but I duck and step to the side, fixing her with a deathly glare. I quickly scan the hallway to make sure no one noticed, but Rachael just giggles and purses her lips together innocently. “You have to make sure our legacy lives on,” she says. “I want you to write my name on every bathroom stall to ensure that I become a legend within this building. In five years’ time, I want people to know that I walked these hallways.”
“Unfortunately, no one actually cares.” She whacks my arm just as I slam my locker shut, but then her laughter fades and her lips flatten into an awkward half smile. I know that expression like the back of my hand, so I heave a sigh and ask the daily question. I already know the answer. “Tiffani’s coming, isn’t she?”
Rachael quickly nods, and when I turn around, I see the same thing I see every other day. Tiffani and Jake, hand in hand, sauntering down the hallway. It doesn’t faze me. Honestly, I think they’re an okay couple. The rest of the school seems to agree, with the girls constantly telling Tiffani how jealous they are, to which she usually flashes a dazzling grin in reply. They’ve been dating for a while now. Tyler was scribbled off her “must have” list a long time ago.
“Hey, guys,” she says softly as she passes, and Jake gives us a clipped nod. But they don’t stop; they never stop, because Tiffani and I still aren’t on speaking terms. We can be civil, the same way Tyler and Jake are (although now the tension has grown worse), but we aren’t friends. Rachael and Meghan try to hang out with us separately. Thankfully, Tiffani’s going to UCSB, so she’s packing up and heading for Santa Barbara in the fall. Jake’s going to Ohio State, halfway across the country, so I’ve been wondering how long the two of them will be able to cope with the distance. I give it a month.