Caught Together

Those words bring a small bit of comfort to me, but I’m still spiraling. Her words bring back memories of days with Jackson, and that’s not a place I want to go. Not now. I hear frenzied whispers as I enter the kitchen, noting that the adults are conspicuously absent from the dining room. The whispers are coming from the hallway to the bathroom. Unfortunately, the whispers aren’t quiet enough that I can’t hear them.

“Still, you know she’s sensitive about it.” I hear Anna’s voice.

“I just want her to be happy,” Bradley says. “I feel bad for her. Now that Brad’s off at s

chool, she lives here alone. She has to be lonely. I keep hoping that maybe us bringing it up will help her want to break out of her shell a bit.”

“We’ll have to think of another way.” That’s Maria.

Sadness pours into my chest, and I can’t take it. How did everything spiral like this? What is so wrong with me that my family thinks that I can’t be happy? What did I teach my son that he’s willing to be in a relationship just like the one that cost me everything? I grab my coat from the rack and go out the back doors as quickly as I can. I just can’t be in this house right now, and the front door is blocked by the blonde bitch.

But in the back yard there’s nowhere to go. I’m not going into the tree house where all I’ll be able to think about is how many orgasms Trevor gave me. With a sigh, I sit on the steps of my back porch, pulling my coat closer around me to keep out the cold. But the silence feels good. I focus on my breathing, trying not to think. I look down at the snow, flurries gathering and filling in our foot prints from the other day.

The door slides open behind me, and I close my eyes. If it’s one of my siblings, I really don’t want to talk to them at the moment. I feel the air shift as someone sits down on the steps with me. I peek out to find Trevor sitting with me. He’s not touching me, but close enough that he could. His expression is bordering on angry, and he’s looking at the snow. “Are you all right?” he asks. His voice is soft, not angry. I realize that he’s frustrated. For me.

“No,” I say, looking back at the ground.

That deep sadness is still welling in my chest, and I feel like I should be crying. But I can’t. There’s too much there to even cry.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“For what?”

He reaches a hand for me, and changes his mind. “For what they said in there. For not saying anything about it. For not helping you throw Leigh out of your house.”

I give him a grim smile. “It’s okay, Trevor. None of those things are your fault.” We’re silent for a moment. “I’m just not sure what to do. I can’t seem to convince anyone that I’m okay. That my life is really fine. And then I see Leigh, and I wonder if it’s not. If I somehow taught him that being with someone like that is okay.”

“She wasn’t like that in the beginning,” Trevor says.

“They never are.”

Another silence. I look up at the flat white sky and let the flurries collect on my lashes.

“So,” he says, overly cheerful, “I finally thought of an embarrassing Christmas story for you. It’s definitely on par with the tree and the broken arm.”

“Oh?”

“It’s about how I got grounded for a month on Christmas day.” He ducks his face down, trying to make me meet his eyes. I do, and he makes a silly face at me. In spite of myself, I crack a smile.

“Okay, what happened?” I ask. “It better be good.”

“I was twelve,” he says, clearing his throat, “and my parents had invited some important person from the local government to Christmas dinner. I’ve been wracking my brain trying to think of who it was, but I don’t remember. It might have been the mayor.”

“The mayor of Boston?”

“Yeah.” He ignores my shock completely. “Anyway, I was bored, and this isn’t just a one course meal. We’re talking three or four courses. I’m twelve—the last thing I want to do is sit at a table for hours when I could be off with my presents.”

I nod, trying to dismiss the fact that my sadness is easing. I don’t want to think about what it means that he’s been the one to do it more than once.

“So I decided that I would experiment at the table. Small at first, just my own plate. I wanted to see what sort of things I could catapult off a fork.”

“You didn’t.”

“Yes, I did.” He’s smiling, and so am I. “I tried a couple of beans, a pad of butter, piece of chicken. They all flew well, and I figured I could really make something fly. By the time I came to this conclusion, I had basically forgotten that I was at an important dinner. So I decided to go for it.”

“Food of choice?” I ask.

“Meatball.”

I groan. “I can already see what’s going to happen.”

“I put the meatball on the handle of my fork, and I just smash the living hell out of that catapult. The meatball flew, landed right in the middle of the guest of honor’s plate. Sauce splattered everywhere.”

I start to laugh, a deep belly laugh that chases all the lingering anger and sadness from my chest. “I would have loved to have seen that.”

“It was a great sight. And I was grounded for a month.”

“But I hope you learned your lesson,” I say, nudging him with my elbow.

“Never.”

The silence this time is easier. I find myself wanting to lean into him. I can’t think of anyone else, not even Brad, who would have been able to pull me back so quickly. Make me smile and laugh. That kind of easy freedom that I felt with him at the tree farm slips inside me again, and I feel…happy. Not just fine. Happy. Better than I’ve felt in a long time. I like my life, my life is good, but he’s made it better. I realize that I’ve been staring at him for a couple of minutes, and he’s been staring back. He sees when I realize it.

“Where’d you go?”

“Just thinking,” I say, not sure I’m ready to confess my own realization.

He nods. “I just have to say, that you’re amazing, Stella. You’re a great person and a great mom. Nothing that happened today is because of you. Your family loves you, even if they are misguided in the way they show it, and Leigh is a terrible person—that’s not your imagination.”

I laugh softly. “Thank you. And for what it’s worth, I think you’re an amazing person too. I think if Brad’s dad had been more like you, my life—our lives—would be very different.”

“So you’re saying you wish you’d had a guy like me?” He smiles.

“Yeah. I guess that is what I’m saying.”

He reaches over and takes my hand. “When I go back to school,” he says, and my heart flutters, “I don’t want this to stop.”

I swallow, my mouth going dry. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” he says, and the smile on his face makes me feel like the sun is shining.

“Good,” I whisper. “I don’t want it to either. You want to know where I went just now? I was thinking about how happy I’ve been. These past few days.”

He shifts closer to me, and it feels like we both breathe easier. My heart picks up a little, beating faster just because he’s looking at me. He wraps his arms around me, tilting my face up to his. Our kiss is sweet, laced with happiness at the idea that this isn’t just a fling. We’ll see where it goes, even if it isn’t conventional.

I try to wrap my arms around him, and fail, laughing, since my arms are shorter and our coats are bulky. Instead I let him pull me closer, deepening our kiss. I have a thought that he might warm me up so much that we might not need our coats anymore. I slip my tongue past his lips, tangling with his and relishing the feeling of freedom that he brings me.

Laughter suddenly breaks the trance, and I hear the worst voice in the world say, “Well isn’t this rich.”

12

Leigh is standing in the door, and the look on her face is one of disgust and triumph. The door behind her is open, and I see at least two members of my family looking out. Brad appears behind her, his face livid. “Don’t just walk away from me into my house, Leigh.” Then he sees me, us, and my stomach plummets into an anxious free fall. There’s no mistaking the way Trevor and I are wrapped around each other.

Brad stops, all the anger draining out of his face to be replaced by surprise and confusion. Trevor carefully extricates his arms from around me, pulls me to my feet. Pulls me towards the house. He’s right. If this is going to happen, it should happen inside. I hear Leigh laughing under her breath as I pass. Brad closes the door behind all of us and I take off my coat, take Trevor’s too. Everyone is comp

letely silent.

Until Leigh says, “Well, I guess things look a little different now, don’t they Brad? You call me a liar, but it looks like I’m not the only one. At least my lie was small, nothing like mommy dearest lying about fucking your best friend.”

I hear the hushed whispers of June as she sends the twins upstairs. I don’t look to see if they go.

“Is it true?” Brad asks.

I swallow, trying to find my voice. That nervous pit at the base of my stomach has turned into a chasm. “Yes.” I pause, not knowing how to phrase it. I don’t want to put it as crudely as Leigh did. It feels like more than just that. “We’ve been…seeing each other.”

Anna’s voice: “Oh, Stella.” I can hear the disapproval and the shame. I look at Maria, and the same look is on her face. Bradley refuses to meet my eyes. Inside, I’m warring at myself, furious at them for being ashamed of this—something that they wanted, and also sick with shame because I knew this would happen.

“How long?” Brad asks, and I can’t get a read on what he’s feeling.

“Just since you’ve been home.”

Leigh laughs viciously. “The truth hurts, Brad. Not even your own mother wants you to be the only man in her life.”

“What the hell is wrong with you, Leigh?” That’s Trevor’s voice. I look up to find his face dark with anger. “What makes you think that this is even remotely the same as what you did to Brad? Should I tell the rest of the house?” He gestures to everyone else. “I guess I will, since you seem to think that this is your business. Leigh cheated on Brad. Not only did she cheat on Brad, she cheated on him multiple times, and every time she came back and was sorry. She swore it would never happen again. And because Brad is a good guy, he gave her another chance. But when he finally caught her fucking not one, not two, but three guys at a party, I guess even Brad had enough.”