“You know…”
Before I even finished my sentence, we were standing face-to-face. Well, sort of, Abe was awkwardly hanging from the branch and my ledge and I was facing him, wondering if it was a good idea to invite him into my room.
“If you don’t want me to come in…,” he started but trailed off, obviously unsure of what to do now that he was this far up.
“No, it’s fine, you just surprised me, that’s all.” I said in my defense, thinking that I needed to hide my emotions better. I’d studied with Abe many times in my room. The crazy baseball player said that he needed help tutoring and I knew it was a lie, but I played along with it. After all, he could easily be Liam Hemsworth’s identical twin brother. How could I resist?
I was thinking about hitting the shower, brushing my teeth and putting on a hot dress but I realized that I was too late. Any form of grooming to make my overgrown bangs behave or doing my nails was out of the question. I was too late, and I hated myself for it.
Why did I open up my window?
I should have turned off the lights. I was eighteen and in the last few days I’d become too scared to sleep with the lights off. Just because as mom started to count down the days until we came back here, I started reliving the night before we left. My emotions would eat at me in the dark and now I had to wonder if I should have come clean and told my mom about what had happened.
It was like the Cosby case. Everyone said, hey why did those women wait so long to talk. Sure, in my case, it wasn’t years but there was this impression that if women are attacked then they should come clean on the night or not say anything at all. I wasn’t sure who made up this rule, but that seemed to be it. So, I did what women had done before me, like the Cosby women, and just kept quiet. Now, I had to live with my silence and part of me felt guilty for it. This was the reason that I couldn’t sleep as mom counted the days down until we left. I couldn’t even begin to think about sleeping tonight, even if it was pretty early.
“Sure. Sorry, I wasn’t sleeping. It’s not that late even if I do feel a little sleepy.” I said and brushed my hands through my hair as if to straighten it. Now, I didn’t know who was more nervous? Him or I?
I tried to figure out what to say, but I decided to just step back from the window and smile. As I did, he hesitated for a second as if he wasn’t sure if it was a good idea or not.
“Come in. Before you wake mom and Stuart.” I didn’t know if they were sleeping, neither did I really care. I just didn’t want him hanging outside the window in case my nosey neighbor was watching. If she was, I would be in trouble, because gossip was her forte ever since she retired from being a teacher and decided that she would take up a new job. Sometimes mom knew that I was up late, not because she heard me in my room, but because the neighbor told her, “She looks tired. Maybe if she had more sleep, she wouldn’t be so tired. I mean sometimes she’s up till the early hours of the morning.”
Really?
Mom would look at me as if she was shocked about my late, night hours or rather early hours, and I would look at my neighbor with a definite what the fuck expression. She couldn’t have mistaken the tone of my glare at all.
Abe slipped through the window and he lifted his legs with ease as he came into my room and stood there, waiting. I backed away from him, unsure whether it was out of fear that a male was in my room after dark or if I was happy that he was there. I was sending mixed signals and I knew it but between the brown bird’s nest that was my hair and my blue eyes that had turned a dull shade of blue, something that I noticed as my reflection caught the light of the window, I wondered if letting in him was really a good idea. If, and there was a big fucking if, he was interested in me before then he sure the hell wouldn’t be right now.
Hell, I wouldn’t be interested in me right now.
I looked messed up and I smelled it as I lifted my arm up slightly and came to the realization that if I lifted it any higher then Abe would be back down that tree a lot faster than he came up. And if my neighbor was up, hell she could probably smell the stench from across the road. Well, maybe it wasn’t that bad, but I wasn’t about to find out by lifting my arm any higher and letting the odor escape. It needed to stay nicely tucked away under there.
“Why didn’t you just text me, Abe? Why go to all this trouble?” I really wanted him to just go back home, give me time to shower and dress, then come back. I sighed with frustrations as I looked up at him from beneath uncurled eyelashes.
“Ah, I was worried that you would say no if I text you that I wanted to come up and talk. You didn’t act as if you wanted to open the window and I haven’t heard from you in over three weeks.”
Four. It had been four weeks. But it was sweet that he was counting.
“I was going to call,” he said catching his breath and trying to come nearer.
Don’t come any closer, or you may regret it. No, make that you will fucking regret it.
The words were rolling off his tongue so fast as his eyes dashed across my room and then it froze on my door. The chair bolting the lock gave him a concerned look and he raised an eyebrow while his finger moved to point at it.
I avoided the thought that was on his mind and tried to distract him as I moved in front of the chair.
“Sorry, I came back last night, and it’s just been crazy. School starts so soon and I need to get ready, you know. And as you can see my hair’s a mess.” I needed a shower, but, I wasn’t going to say that to him, some things I needed to keep to myself.
“And Mom’s exhausted from the trip and you know Stuart was home alone for those weeks.”
Thank God!
“And I think that they’re just catching up. You know. Newlyweds.”
And now, I was just talking shit. Them being newlyweds stopped the minute that he put that ring on her finger. He drank and started to hit her while she tried to hide it. But she was bad at lying and I wondered for a split second if I was bad at it too.
The realization made me even more nervous and I started to shift my weight from one-leg to the next, all the time avoiding his stare. He wasn’t thinking about the chair, but probably wondering why he wanted to come up and see this craziness when he could have just texted me. A part of me was wishing that I told him that I was tired and kept him down there on the ground before he could climb up to my window.
“You ok?” He asked as he stepped closer to me. There was so much fucking anger and frustration growing inside of me as I tried to think happy thoughts - him, and my best friends Ava and Teresa-while I tried to push away those bad thoughts that made me feel frustrated and angry, helpless as I thought about that other him.
I shook my head. “No.”
Nodded. “Yes.”
Then shook it again, “No.” I didn’t know if I was ready to confess the pain inside of me to anyone yet, let alone him. I didn’t even know if Abe and I were friends or potentially something else, or maybe simply next-door neighbors. It was all so up in the air, and the one thing I needed right then was a lifeline of any kind.
He took my hand and motioned for me to sit on the bed next to him. My bed, the thing that I’d avoided since I’d been home. So much so that last night I’d slept on the floor. It was the only way that I found peace long enough to go to sleep.