Just Like You Said It Would Be Page 22

  “I’m sure Kate and Frank would be happy to have you back sometime,” she said.

  But it wouldn’t ever be the same. “I know,” I told her, then listened to my mother describe the high points of the latest cruise stops until she handed the phone over to my dad.

  He immediately started getting sentimental about me turning seventeen. “You used to fall asleep while I was reading you bedtime stories. The minute I made a move to leave the room your eyes would pop open and you’d beg me to keep reading. Do you remember that?”

  “A little.”

  “I remember before you had hair,” my father continued. “You were bald for so long that people thought we had a little boy.”

  “I bet people never thought that about Rana.” Even at two my sister had long hair and endless eyelashes, the kind that would never require mascara to stand out.

  “No,” he agreed. “I don’t remember anybody saying that about Rana.” It’s not that my parents avoided talking about my sister; but mostly I only listened. It didn’t used to feel as though she belonged to me the way she’d belonged to them. Not when I was awake.

  “I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately. What she’d be like, what kind of friends we would’ve been.” I didn’t want to make my father sad, but it felt important that he know that.

  “I think about her every day,” he said. “She loved you so much.”

  “You and mom used to get so anxious when I dreamt about her.”

  “That was a long time ago.” My father’s voice was like a blanket warm from the dryer. “You were so young. We were concerned our grief was affecting you, shaping you.”

  I’d rarely consciously felt that way, but on some level their sadness would have been like a constant undertow. How could it not be? There was more I could’ve said to my father, if I thought it would’ve helped him—what my sister would’ve looked like grown, how she loved to dance still, that she wasn’t entirely gone. But being apart from my parents had made me understand that they didn’t need to know or accept that my sister visited me. Rana belonged to my mom and dad in one way and to me in another.

  “I feel like she’s here today,” I declared. It wasn’t quite the same sensation as when she came to me in dreams, but that special buoyant sweetness bobbed through the air.

  “I bet she is,” my dad agreed. “She’d want to be the one to choose your birthday outfit.”

  “Yeah.” I smiled into the phone. “I’m glad you’re moving home, Dad.”

  “Me too,” he said. “I probably should never have left.”

  ______

  Ajay was sentenced to six months in jail and two years’ probation after his release. The judge ordered him to write a letter of apology to Melanie Cheng and banned from driving for three years. It wasn’t the worst case scenario, but my face felt old when Jocelyn told me the news. We knew it was coming; this was how things were going to turn out all long. But when I pictured Ajay sleeping behind bars, each day the same as the last, some of the air went out of me.

  “He’ll be out just after the new year,” I pointed out, as though she wouldn’t have already done the math. In a couple of weeks I’d be home myself, helping Joss fill the days however she wanted, making up for lost time between us.

  “Yeah.” Her heavy-lidded blink pattern paused before picking up the pace. “My parents and I are going to visit in about two weeks. That’s how long it takes to get the visit approved. But we can talk to him before that. He can make collect calls.”

  That wasn’t nothing. A voice on the phone was a presence, even if it wasn’t the same as being there. The relief I’d felt at hearing Joss’s voice over the phone at Heathrow Airport proved that.

  “And how are your mom and dad?” I asked. “Are they holding up?”

  “It’s like a sentence for them too. But I think my mom wore herself out during the trial. Now she just seems sort of…like she’s given in. My dad keeps saying, ‘one day at a time, that’s how we do this, and then Ajay will be back home.’”

  While Jocelyn’s family lamented Ajay’s absence, Darragh had been putting as much emotional distance between him and his mother as possible, avoiding her calls since the day he’d returned from London. One night, after he’d driven me home and we were cozying up together in the shortcut, he told me they’d spoken again. “She gave me some vague bullshit about doing her best to keep unnecessary details about me to a minimum in her book,” he said.

  Darragh slid one hand down my back, curled the other into my hair and explained that the conversation had plunged them into a heated argument about the definition of unnecessary that had culminated in him hanging up on her. As our lips met, I realized I might never find out if they’d worked things out. Darragh and I hadn’t discussed what would become of us when I left—we’d been concentrating on living in the moment—but I didn’t want to be reduced to a social networking friend. Did it have to come to that? A choice between going cold turkey or downgrading our relationship to online friends status?

  We were at the one week and six days mark, our futures fast closing in. The mist too. It’d been dry when we’d slipped into the shortcut, but cool drops were beginning to descend, fog turning our surroundings creepily Victorian. “You better go,” I told him. “Before the rain gets worse.”

  Holding hands, we drifted in the direction of my aunt and uncle’s house. I stared at the summer flowers on their lawn and thought about how I’d never see the trees in their front yard turn colours. I’d never see Darragh’s winter coat or walk through a snowfall with him. Some other girl would be standing next to him then, his hand in her hair.

  “Come here,” Darragh beckoned, an intense look on his face that said he really didn’t want to go home. I stepped into his arms and he kissed me—a long hard goodbye kiss that instead felt like the start of something.

  Each time we were together felt more intense than the last and it was an act of sheer willpower to pull myself away. “I have to go,” I told him. I took two steps towards the house, glanced up at the light in my aunt and uncle’s bedroom window, and then back at Darragh, who seemed to have that come here expression firmly entrenched in his face. “I could get the shed key.” I didn’t so much say the words as exhale them.

  “We’ll have to wait until we’re sure my aunt and uncle are asleep before going back there,” I tacked on. We were lucky that the master bedroom faced the street rather than the backyard. If we could make it to the shed undetected they’d never know we were there.

  “We’ll be careful,” Darragh promised. His face brightened with possibilities and I had to wonder if mine was glowing like a beacon in the dark. “It’s a brilliant idea. How’re we going to do this then?”

  “Park your bike down the road and come back in about twenty minutes,” I instructed. Lately my aunt and uncle’s bedroom light had flicked off shortly after my arrival, as if on cue. “Make sure the bedroom light’s off before you come up to the house. I’ll open the back gate for you.”

  The plan sounded straight-forward enough, but when I strode into the house I had guilty footsteps and stomped around like a two hundred pound man. I couldn’t seem to help it and I took my two hundred pound stomp upstairs with me and waited in my bedroom for a full fifteen minutes before creeping out into the hall, shivering like my feet were sliding along ice. The little glow of light that’d been seeping out from under my aunt and uncle’s door was gone. I tiptoed back downstairs and snatched the spare shed key from its permanent space under the flowering potted plant on the living room coffee table.

  When I slunk out into the backyard, Darragh was standing next to Aunt Kate’s petunias and lilies, grinning at me in the dark. “I climbed over the fence,” he said. “I thought hanging around out front might’ve looked dodgy.”

  In seconds I had the shed door open and we were edging inside. The room smelled faintly of cigarettes, probably because of how much time Kevin spent inside it, and moonlight was streaming in through a break in the curtains.

&
nbsp; “Don’t turn the light on,” I warned. You never knew when someone could wander down to the kitchen for a midnight snack and stare out across the backyard. Besides, we didn’t need lights.

  “I know we can use the stereo,” Darragh said, sauntering over to switch it on in the dark. The shed’s soundproofing was a major advantage when a song by The National rocketed out of the speakers. Darragh swung the volume down to a background level and sat next to me on the larger of the two couches.

  “Hey.” He brushed my hair back behind one shoulder and glanced at the spot between my breasts where the History of Ireland necklace he’d given me for my birthday had naturally settled. “Now we can be as slow as we want. We have the entire night.”

  “All night and then again tomorrow.” It was his day off then; we’d have all afternoon together until his brothers got home. Maybe that meant we should’ve waited and not taken the risk of creeping into the shed together, but I didn’t think that at the time. I wanted that night, the next day and every single moment I could grab with him.

  We lay down together, pulling each other close. At first we took our time, our kisses tender and hands unhurried. My nerves dissolved as the ache between my legs deepened. I stripped off Darragh’s T-shirt, knowing I didn’t want to stop there and that he didn’t want me to either. My right hand was trembling a bit when I went for the button on his jeans.

  He helped me take them off and then went to work on my top and bra. I laid one of my hands against his chest and watched him fit both of his around my bare breasts. The sight made me shiver. “You’re gorgeous,” Darragh whispered.

  “You too.” I whispered back, my heart thumping savagely. Darragh’s hair had grown a bit since we’d first met and, thanks to all the time I’d spent running my fingers through it, looked thoroughly wild. I glanced at my unbuttoned jeans, loose around my hips, and breathed in as much oxygen as my lungs could hold. Impulsively, I reached down and tugged my jeans off so that there were only two thin pieces of fabric left between us.

  Darragh kept pulling back to look at me as we kissed and slid our hands over each other’s skin. His voice was hot and bothered and everything he said, every time we touched, made it seem ever more ridiculous to draw a line in the sand when it came to sex. My body trusted him instinctively. It craved him. When he rested his hand on my belly and asked, “Can I look at you?” there was an ache between my legs that I couldn’t resist.

  “You first,” I told him, my answer catching in my throat. Darragh knew what I meant and didn’t hesitate. He dropped his boxers over the side of the couch where a pile of our clothes had formed. Then he sat back giving me an unobscured view and letting me look him over in a way that made me feel shy, although I was the one doing the looking.

  There was nothing I hadn’t seen before, but never up close and personal, let alone with someone I liked so much. Inside my mind was galloping—thinking that for the first time I could understand how people found those parts of the male anatomy appealing and simultaneously wondering how it could ever comfortably fit inside someone else, let alone feel good.

  “Your turn,” he prompted. I shifted my stare to his face, not changing my mind but nervous all the same. “You don’t have to feel edgy with me,” he reminded me. “We both know we’re not going to take this too far.”

  Darragh rubbed his lips as he hung back and watched me inch off my underwear, and I guess it was within the realm of normal to want someone so much that your ribs hurt and be dying with nerves at the same time, but it’d never happened to me before. Not like that.

  Soon the only thing left I had on was my necklace. “I love your body,” Darragh whispered, his eyes wide and his lashes catching glints of moonlight. “I could just look at you all night.”

  With nothing left to separate us but air, he stroked my stomach, nuzzled my neck and kissed my mouth. I kissed him back, touching him skin on skin like I never had before, letting him show me what he liked. We were so sweaty our skin had fused together Band-Aid-like and when, for the first time, I came under the stroke of his hand, Darragh looked so pleased that you’d have thought he’d just won a Grammy.

  “I love watching that,” he said, his tone so throaty that I knew he must be close too. He shuddered, his eyes closing as I moved my hand faster around him. He looked as amazing in the moment he let go as he ever had when I’d watched him play guitar. I wanted to drive him over the edge all night. The thought of it turned me on almost as much as him touching me.

  I grabbed a tissue from the table next to us and wiped my right hand off, my left settling on the back of his neck where his hair was damp. The room itself was chilly enough to warrant a sweater and I stroked his curls and said, “You’re so warm.”

  He laughed and ran one of his fingers over my lips. “Because of you. And I’m a mess too.”

  “You’re not the only one.” There was no shower in the shed, only the tiniest powder room and we took turns squeezing into it to clean ourselves up before twining our limbs possessively around each other on the couch.

  Because of the cold my nipples remained on high alert and Darragh kept playing with them as we talked. I wanted him so much that I couldn’t think straight. The entire time I couldn’t stop wondering if he had condoms on him and what he’d say if I told him I wanted to sleep with him. Would he try to talk me out of it or would he rip a condom wrapper open and dive in?

  “Do you miss sex?” I asked, raising my head so that I could look him in the eye. “Is all this playing around making you crazy?”

  Darragh stroked my arm, looking sexier than he had any right to considering that I was trying to talk myself out of wanting him. “So you noticed?” he joked. Then he got serious and said, “I told you I was up for anything. I miss sex, yeah, but this is good too.”

  He cupped my chin in his hand. “I’m glad you invited me back here.”

  “I wish I’d done it sooner—that we’d gotten together earlier in the summer so we’d have had more time.” I draped my hand across his waist, feeling like I’d lost something that was still right in front of me and was experiencing the shockwaves before it’d happened.

  Darragh stroked my hair. His touch was so gentle that it made my eyes burn. “I don’t think that would’ve been long enough either.”

  “I just wish there was some way around reality.” I didn’t want to get emotional, but sadness had crept into my voice. It seemed that I’d been fighting myself over him in one way or another all summer long, pretending I was in control.

  Darragh looked down at me with an expression I couldn’t read, so quiet, so still, that he felt like a different person and then I realized that I didn’t feel like me either. Not the person I’d been up to that point anyway. That was the moment that I knew no matter what happened to us, I’d never completely get him out of my mind. That I could be forty-six years old with a screenwriting career and teenage son or daughter of my own and he’d still be in there, just waiting for a quiet moment to blink those amazing blue eyes of his at me and remind me what we were like together.

  Then Darragh cocked his head, like he’d picked up on the distant sound of someone whispering his name. “Maybe there is,” he said evenly. “Maybe I could come see you at home. For Christmas.”

  My heart was up in my throat as I opened my mouth. “Don’t say it if you don’t mean it.”

  “No.” His eyes flashed as they met mine, dead serious. “I mean it, Amira. I’d love to come see you in Toronto.”

  I saw a hint of that awe-inspiring smile on Darragh’s lips and hurled myself at him on the couch, throwing my arms around his neck. I buried my nose in his hair, taking in the smell of him, elation warming me from the inside out. My body and my brain never felt as united in pure happiness as they did in the minutes after Darragh said he’d come see me at home.

  I had no concrete idea how I’d get my parents to agree to his visit yet somehow I believed that I’d been given all the power in the world to convince them that a visit from the Irish guy I�
��d only started dating wouldn’t do any harm.

  Maybe that was denial, but maybe I could’ve talked my mom and dad into it. I’ll never know for sure the way things would’ve gone, just that when I fell asleep on the couch in Darragh’s arms I felt so lucky, so under the skin connected to him that the question of whether we’d have sex or not seemed almost trivial. Nothing aside from the magically full-up feeling under my ribcage mattered. We weren’t over. We were only getting started.

  Chapter 19

  Either take me out or take me back upstairs.

  When I jolted awake in the darkness later Darragh was standing naked at the far window, peering through a break in curtains as something pounded on the roof. “What is it?” I mumbled.

  Darragh turned to look at me from across the room. “Just a couple of cats. They woke me up a minute ago too.” He motioned to the window. “But they’ve jumped down now.”

  I stumbled over to his side to stare out the window, my eyes scanning the surrounding area as Darragh stepped back. A tabby and three adolescent kittens were stalking through my aunt and uncle’s backyard like they owned the place. As I watched them prowl the lawn and dart into a flowerbed, my aunt and uncle’s kitchen light blinked on. Stupidly, I glanced directly towards it and into the face of my uncle. My fingers released the curtain like it had erupted in flames.

  Racing to the couch, I reached down for my clothes. “Shit,” I sputtered, craning to glance up at Darragh as I pulled on my underwear. “My uncle saw me.”

  Our eyes froze together in dread. “Are you sure?” Darragh began yanking on his clothes next to me.