Page 25

Then, before words could form and spill off my tongue, I reached out to hold her face between my hands and brought my lips to hers, nearly crushing her with the force of my gratitude for seeing her and every ounce of pent-up aggression from uncovering the truth about my friend and sister.

And without saying another word, she pulled me inside and let the door slam shut.

** *

It had been my first time sleeping with someone.

I wasn’t sure that it had been hers—I hadn’t wanted to ask. Not before, not after. Not when we lay in a postcoital bliss so good that I hated the world and my life for not allowing me to have it sooner.

And I was so glad that it’d been with her .

She fell asleep in my arms, and I stared at the ceiling, listening to her breathe and the ticking of her alarm clock and the tiny sounds she made when she was deep in a dreamland I couldn’t touch even if I wanted to.

My mind was buzzing, drifting off somewhere else, to a house deeper in town, where I knew my father was sleeping peacefully—maybe beside his negligent wife …

or maybe not. I thought about how he was the reason I couldn’t have this in the truest sense.

He was the reason I was always away . His threats and his insistence that I needed to enlist in order to be worthy of anything good in this life.

But …

Wait. I’m an adult , I caught myself thinking. I’m a full-grown man with the capability of making my own choices. If I want to retire now, who the hell is he to stop me? What would he do? Threaten me? Okay, fuck him. Hurt Lucy and Grace? I fucking dare him. I’d kill him if he even tried.

The thought energized me even more. Yes, fuck him.

Fuck my father straight to hell, where he had come from.

God, I wanted this. I wanted Laura. I wanted to be with her—for real this time.

I wanted to tell her I loved her, live in this apartment—or wherever, it didn’t matter—and make her my wife.

I wanted to be just like Greg Dumass and have as many kids as I could have and be the father my own never was.

And I could be—no, I would . I would be exactly the father he was incapable of being to me because fuck him .

I did fall asleep then, and I slept well. Neither of us woke until the sun was already high in the sky with the promise of a warm day in early September, and when she first opened her eyes, she rolled over in my arms to press her naked body to mine, a sleepy smile stretching across her lips.

“Hey,” she whispered, nuzzling her face into my neck.

“Hey,” I replied as I brushed the hair from her face, tucking the dark strands behind her ear and smoothing them down her neck and back.

“What are you doing today?”

Her sleepy smile was pressed against my skin, and I smiled back.

I kissed her temple. “Whatever you wanna do.”

She laughed, like I wasn’t serious. “Oh, come on. I know you probably have stuff to do. You need to see your sisters, Ricky—"

I pressed a finger to her lips and reared my head back enough to find her eyes.

She looked up, a tinge of bashful shame hidden somewhere in her soul, almost as if she hated to admit she hoped I’d be with her.

Had I put that look there? I supposed I had—no, of course I had.

I’d been shutting her down since we had been in high school, making her feel like she was second best … if she was best at all.

God, what a dick I’ve been.

“I want to be wherever you are,” I gently said, hoping she believed me.

I lowered my fingers, and she captured the spot I’d just touched between her teeth before replying, “You’re just saying that because I finally put out.”

Repulsed by the thought, I shook my head. “What? No. I’m saying that because I—"

Bang, bang, bang!

The sound of urgent knocking on her bedroom door startled us both out of the moment, and Laura jolted out of my arms so quickly that I almost believed we’d done something wrong by sleeping together.

“Laura!” Molly shouted from the other side, continuing to rap her fist rapidly against the door. “Oh my God, Laura!”

Laura’s eyes darted toward mine as she climbed out of bed, grabbing my undershirt from off the floor and throwing it over her slender frame.

I found my boxers and dress pants, tugging them on quickly as Laura unlocked the door and threw it open to reveal Molly, her back to the bedroom door and her eyes on the living room TV.

“What’s going on?” Laura asked, breathless and afraid.

“Watch,” Molly whispered, holding a hand over her mouth.

I came up behind them. Molly only glanced over her shoulder at me, and the faintest touch of a smile graced her lips before it fell away. My eyes met hers for a brief moment, finding a deep fear and sorrow there that I couldn’t quite understand, not yet.

But it would only take a moment for me to find out.

“Oh my God,” Laura gasped, clapping her hand over her mouth.

I followed her gaze and saw the TV, glowing bright and showing a sky as clear and blue as the one outside Laura’s bedroom window. But marring that sky was a billowing black cloud. Smoke. Streaming from the side of one of the Twin Towers in Manhattan.

“Oh God,” I uttered, my stomach dropping as the hairs on my arms stood on end.

Laura sobbed into her palm. “What is happening ?”

Molly gasped for air, sniffling and pointing at the TV. “Planes. Th-th-they flew into the b-b-buildings. I-I woke up, turned on the news, a-and … oh my God, did you see that?! Oh my God!”

None of us answered though. We all saw the people—God, those poor people …

those poor, poor people—jumping from the upper floors of the burning buildings.

I tried so hard to imagine the fear, the pain, the horror they were experiencing—how horrible it must’ve been to believe that jumping was a better option than enduring—but I couldn’t.

The capacity of my understanding and empathy couldn’t touch whatever hell they were going through.

Or maybe I just didn’t want to as the tears pricked my eyes, and my hands gripped Laura’s and Molly’s shoulders, and I began to do something I hadn’t done since I was a child.

“Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name … ”

Before I could register what my mouth was doing, the words fell from my lips, as if I’d rehearsed them all this time, for all these years.

I prayed and prayed for those people, not knowing what was happening or why—oh my God, why ?

!—as the South Tower collapsed. I stared in terrible shock as we took to the couch—me in the middle, Molly and Laura at my sides—and for the first time in years, I cried.

We all did. We cried together as the North Tower crumbled to the streets of New York like it had been made of nothing but playing cards.

I held my hand over my mouth as the reporters in Manhattan continued to talk, bravely withstanding the terror they’d witnessed firsthand to inform the world of the tragedy.

I looked at the falling ash, the fluttering papers, the desolate streets, and with a hollow pit in my stomach, I thought, New York looks like a war zone .

And that was when my phone rang from Laura’s bedroom.

I jumped at the cheery jingle, playing a horrific contrast to the terrors on the TV, and turned to look over my shoulder, as if the sound itself had taken on a physical form and was about to walk out of her room.

“Maybe it’s one of your sisters,” Laura said, breaking me out of a spell that had somehow befallen me.

“Right,” I said, my voice hoarse.

I got off the couch, leaving Laura and Molly to sit together, holding hands.

My bare feet hurried over the floorboards to find my ringing phone somewhere in the heap of clothes beside Laura’s bed.

It stopped its shrill tune, but started again by the time I found it, and there was Sid’s name lighting up the little rectangular screen.

I flipped the phone open and put it to my ear.

“Sid,” I gasped, unable to waste time with formalities.

“You see the news?”

“Yeah,” I replied, sliding a hand over my bristly chin as I turned to stare at the TV, replaying the morning’s footage, like something out of a scary movie.

“I don’t know what the fuck is going on, man, but I’ll tell you one thing I do know.”

“What’s that?”

“We’re going to fuckin’ war, man. I’m telling you right now, we’re going to fuckin’ war.”