Who Do You Love(40)
Author: Jennifer Weiner

Lunch came in brown paper bags, sandwiches and fruit, packaged cookies and bottled water. Andy took two, then handed me one and led me to a scant patch of shade underneath a scabby-looking tree.

“Wish this house had a swimming pool,” he said, pulling his T-shirt away from his chest, where sweat had darkened the fabric until it was almost black. Normally I hated sweaty guys. When Troy would try to hug me after his matches I’d endure it, then hand him a towel. I found that I didn’t mind Andy’s sweat at all. “What’s your father do?”

“Commercial real estate,” I said, hoping Andy wouldn’t ask too many questions and reveal how little I knew about how my dad made a living. I was eating my apple, daydreaming about Andy and me swimming together, how I’d float in the water with his hands underneath me.

“Do you wear jewelry?” he asked.

“Huh?”

He leaned over and brushed the skin at the base of my neck with his fingertips, then touched the bump of the scar through my shirt. My skin flushed. I felt color rise in my cheeks as I leaned toward him, the way the faces of flowers follow the sun. “You should have something pretty, right there.” He looked me right in the eyes, and I held his gaze, not smiling, not making a joke or a funny face, just seeing him and letting him look at me.

•••

I spent the night and the next day in a daze, pulling weeds, carrying boards, sorting through secondhand dishes and silverware, always aware of precisely where Andy was, feeling his eyes on me, or imagining that I did. On the bus to and from the work site he sat next to me. He told me about his paper route, his mom, his friend Mr. Sills. “I got in a few fights when I was little.” He shook his head. “Almost got kicked out of my elementary school.”

“Why were you fighting?”

He stretched his legs out into the aisle. “Ah, you know.”

“No, I don’t. Girls don’t fight. We just spread rumors and steal each other’s boyfriends.” I wondered if he thought I was using the word boyfriend a lot as a hint.

“Like, someone would say something about my clothes. It was kids’ stuff. I grew out of it.”

“Did you win your fights?”

His teeth flashed white against his skin. “Every one of ’em.”

“The winner!” I said, and took his hand, lifting his arm in the air, like a referee would do to a victorious boxer, while I wondered about his clothes and why kids had laughed at them.

On the ride home, the air-conditioning felt wonderful after a day in the sticky sunshine, and we’d sit, sometimes not talking. The silence felt easy, not weird, as the neighborhood out the window changed from vacant lots and boarded-up businesses to the tended lawns of the houses around Emory. At dinner, he would sit with his friends and I would sit with mine, listening to my classmates complain about the boring work and the stifling heat, wishing they’d be quiet so I could replay the conversations I’d had with Andy, or think about how his leg had felt, pressed up next to me.

With a boy from home, I might have made the first move, especially if we’d been at a party together and he’d had a few beers and maybe I’d been drinking, too. I would sit on his lap or squeeze in next to him on a couch, or put myself in a position where he’d be more or less forced to kiss me. Here in Atlanta, there were no parties, and if there was booze, I hadn’t heard about it. And I still didn’t know how Andy felt about me—if he liked me or liked me–liked me (“I don’t know what’s up with Andy, but you should definitely not be an English major,” Marissa had counseled when I’d described my dilemma in those terms).

The fourth day of work was brutally hot. “Drink lots of water!” Alex told us in the morning, and there were extra thermoses full of ice water set up for us as we measured and marked lengths of lumber in the sun. Andy brought me a cup of water and reminded me to put on sunscreen, and I concentrated as hard on not sweating in front of him as I did on my job.

The workday ended early, at three o’clock, when it was almost ninety-five degrees. Gratefully, we piled on the cool bus. Once Andy and I had taken our usual seats, I closed my eyes, and as we began the drive back to campus, I found myself half-asleep, drowsy from the heat. My head came to rest on his shoulder, not because I’d planned it, but because that was where it landed. I woke up when my cheek hit his shoulder, and froze, holding my breath, feeling the heat of his skin through the cotton, wondering if he’d move me back. Instead, he shifted his body so that I was resting more comfortably next to him and then, so gently that at first I thought I was imagining it, he began to stroke my cheek, just rubbing the side of his thumb against it, so gently that I could hardly feel it.