Love Edy Page 11

  Edy’s gaze fell on her mother, clustered in a group of half a dozen that included Kyle Lawson’s father Cam, a bruiser of a politician who had fielded accusations of questionable campaign contributions in the past. While Edy only knew his kindness, she also knew he’d once sucker-punched a reporter seeking clarification on how his wife had died. But Cam was nothing if not the people’s champ—a holdover from days of glory in Boston College football. And since the people loved Cam Lawson, then Edy’s mother loved him even more. In fact, if she were human enough to have something as normal as a best friend, Cam Lawson would’ve been it.

  Remembering Wyatt at her side, Edy took him around to meet the washed-up athletes, aspiring politicians, deans, scholars, and powerhouse attorneys that made up the crowd. She accepted the hugs and dollar bills pressed into her palm, the biggest of both coming from Cam.

  “Finished your parade route?” Matt said when Edy and Wyatt ran out of people to greet, having finally circled around to them. He embraced her before passing her on to his duplicate.

  “This is the last year we do this, right?” Mason said.

  Edy frowned. By “do this,” she assumed he meant the obligatory gathering for her birthday.

  “I guess,” she said and moved on to hug Lawrence, then Kyle.

  She stopped at Hassan.

  “Happy birthday, Cake.”

  Her gaze narrowed to nothing. Cake? Really? Wasn’t that a name better reserved for Sandra Jacobs, now? “Hi,” she said, arms heavy at her side.

  His gaze darted left, then right. “Can I talk to you?” Hassan said.

  Edy blinked. “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  Matt let out a low whistle.

  “Edy,” Hassan said, stiff against the smirks at his back, gaze forward, shoulders taut, determined. “Please.”

  “There’s nothing to say,” she blurted. “Nothing to . . . ” Edy shook her head, blinked, and swallowed a thousand times. Then she swallowed a thousand more.

  “One minute,” Hassan said and held his hand out. Edy looked at it, never wavering, waiting.

  Waiting for her.

  “One,” Edy said and pulled him to the fringes of the dance floor.

  At the moment their bodies touched, Matt handed Mason some cash.

  ~~~

  The first time they’d danced together had been ten years to the day on the very same floor. Layers of enveloping pink and a polished tiara had rendered Edy majestic. In true fairytale fashion, he’d insisted on the first dance, prince to her princess. Her birthday, his brashness. Hassan counted on it once again.

  But their dance was a stiff two-step. His one hand clasped Edy’s in the air, while the other rested fixed, arthritic-like, at her side.

  “I’m stupid,” he said. “Stupid and sorry.”

  He abandoned formalities for her waist, both arms wrapping it and pulling her in close. It was only after embracing her that he remembered they were supposed to be dancing.

  Edy stiffened in his arms. Rejecting him and his apology. “You don’t owe me anything,” she said. “Whatever happened—”

  “Nothing happened.”

  Except something had happened. But not what she thought. Sandra Jacobs had been a distraction, a convenient, impulsive one, roused in a moment of weakness, frustration, and another night of staring at Edy’s window.

  She’d called him, wanting to come over. He’d let her. Why had he let her?

  He’d remembered Sandra’s argument in the hall with Wyatt and saw her invitation as a means to get what he needed. She could be the distraction he wanted and she could tell him what he’d been desperate to know: who was Wyatt Green? Easy enough, right?

  So, he’d let her come over. Let her think what she wanted. When Sandra kissed him, he let her do that, too. He’d timed the moments where he’d pulled away, where he’d pressed with one question, then another, only to have her return with those stupid, irritating kisses. She was easy and her easiness grated. He’d thought that something would click, would really rouse him, and that there’d be some primal, overpowering urge, a legitimate response to easy sex with a beautiful girl. But damn if he hadn’t glimpsed a picture of Edy on the mantel and shot all that to hell. So, he got straight to his point with Sandra.

  “What’s Wyatt to you?” Hassan demanded and snatched her hand from his shirt.

  Her cousin was what she’d told him. A cousin that she only sort of knew.

  “Forget about him,” she’d insisted. “It’s only you that I think about. You that I want to be with.”

  Clarity snapped into place. Every mistake that had led to that moment, stood stark for examination. She thought he felt something for her. She’d taken his badgering as a mark of jealousy.

  She wanted him too, she’d said, wanted him to be her first.

  Her words were a wall dropped between them, a hurricane flinging him to the opposite side of the room. What was he doing? How desperate had he become? He hated this girl. He’d used her, manipulated her in the hopes of gaining something. But he wasn’t done wreaking damage. The worst had come in the morning.

  Rather than sending her home in the middle of the night, Hassan drew blankets from a closet and threw an extra pillow on the floor. He’d sleep down there, leaving her to take his bed.

  Edy saw her take out in the morning.

  What had she believed? That he had slept with Sandra Jacobs? That he loved Sandra Jacobs?

  “She slept in your bed,” Edy said.

  “I slept on the floor.”

  She loosened in his arms, relaxing a single degree beneath his touch.

  “It’s none of my business,” Edy said.

  He thought he saw something in her eyes. Something more powerful than annoyance, more dangerous than friendship.

  He pushed both the thought and the tendrils of hair in her face away. “She’s nothing to me. And I wish . . . ” His words died in an exhale. Where were his parents?

  “You wish what?” Edy said, so soft she nearly mouthed it.

  Was it possible? Could she really not know?

  A wild sort of funk pressed out the speakers, familiar to the old folks and rousing for the young. The twins whooped from the sidelines when their father swung their mother to the dance floor.

  Hassan grinned. “I wish you’d dance a hundred songs with me. But I’ll settle for my usual dozen.”

  He whipped her around and dipped her low, with show enough to earn a roar of approval from a dozen men. Edy flashed that smile of smiles and they were off, for one dance, two, two hundred, maybe.

  ~~~

  Wyatt stared straight ahead, face blackened with fury.

  “What the hell?” he said through gritted teeth.

  “Hey, I was surprised he took that long,” one twin told him and nodded toward a Hassan with not one but two arms around Edy.

  “Well, I don’t know,” said the twin with dreads pulled tight in a ponytail. “I at least thought you’d man up enough for the first dance. Since you had the balls to come at all.”

  He cut Wyatt a look out the corner of his eye.

  “And what did I tell you?” the other one said. “A hundred on Sawn to detonate on the runway. That plane wasn’t taking off. No way.” He tilted his head toward Wyatt and a sweep of neat dreadlocks brushed his shoulders with the motion.

  The ponytailed one pulled a face. “Well, if you were so sure, then you’re stupid. You should have made the bet two hundred since you know so much.”

  “Right.” The insulted twin gave Wyatt a once over. “He’s the one that’s here, showing up at chapter three and wondering why he’s a minor character. But I’m the stupid one.”

  “You two talked enough yet?” Lawrence said. “Or are you gonna give the password for the ADT system, too?”

  Another song began. Edy made a show of weaseling away from Hassan, only to be reeled back in and close. She laughed, exchanging words with him that the two of them alone would ever know. Was Hassan her date, or Wyatt’s? And was he really so e
asy to forget?

  It reminded him of a time with Lottie, back in Rhode Island. Wyatt shoved the thought from his mind.

  “I’d never put up with that,” the ponytailed twin said. “Ever.”

  “You’re right. He should go over there,” the other one urged. “As a matter of principle, they need to be straightened out. Now.”

  Wyatt looked at Lawrence, the sane one from what he could tell. Lawrence shook his head in silent warning. Wyatt turned away with a sigh. He waited through another song, and then another, as annoyance ebbed to rage and rage to chilling realization.

  “You’re benched,” ponytail twin said. “How about we give you a tour of the house in the meantime?”

  Had Wyatt been in his right mind, he would have said no. Had he not been distracted—no, dismantled—he would have said hell no. Going anywhere with a Dyson twin was the thing that Wyatt, of all people, knew better than to do. But he was a slack-faced dummy in the moment, standing in old clothes, numbed by his own stupidity.

  How had he not seen it before, when Wyatt slept with the feeling, dreamed of it, and reached for it in slumber each night? How many fantasies had Wyatt and Hassan inadvertently shared, yearning, haunted, defeated by the exact same girl?

  Except Hassan was a sham, a charlatan, a lie posing as the truth.

  Like family, my ass.

  The twins began the tour abruptly, leading Wyatt to a frozen-over and barren garden, worked in the spring by their mother and an overweight younger sister he didn’t know they had. They took him to one of their bedrooms next and showed him a personal collection of video games and sneakers. A visit to the room opposite meant waiting through a presentation of home-recorded games— of high schools and colleges he’d never heard of, of NFL teams he couldn’t care about. And through it all, he thought of Hassan and Edy, arm-in-arm below his feet, unchallenged.

  A bathroom followed on their tour, then another, with pantries, linen closets, nonsense and more nonsense. They worked in circles and rushed stairs and flipped lights while laughing, losing Wyatt in shadows and snickering nearby. Wyatt walked in the Dyson house until the new rang familiar and he tore around stumbling on stairs. Eventually, the twins lost interest. When they did, they gave him the relief he craved by showing him to the front door.

  “A plate for the road,” ponytailed twin said and handed him an aluminum foil-covered dinner. “I wasn’t sure what you liked, so there’s a bit of everything in there.”

  Wyatt’s stomach somersaulted. He hoped for some of their inch-thick steaks from the grill, flame-split lobster tails, and skewered shrimp, basted with a thickening sauce begging to be licked. Then he saw one of his TV dinners, with its palm-thin chicken thigh and ice-chunked mashed potatoes. Even the weight of this Dyson dinner strained the wrist.

  But he didn’t need a handout from these guys, especially when said handout came with the warning that he could never be good enough for their girl. Just when Wyatt opened his mouth to tell them so, the door closed in his face.

  ~~~

  On Monday at lunch, Edy dropped down before a sour-faced Wyatt, who refused to make eye contact. She opened a greased, brown paper bag and pulled out mattar paneer, an Indian vegetarian curry spiced with Rani’s heavy hand. An aluminum foil pouch of naan followed it, which she unfolded before jabbing a bit of bread in her mouth.

  “I’m sorry,” Edy said.

  Wyatt jammed a fork into his hamburger.

  “I looked for you,” Edy said. “They said you went home. That the twins walked you out.”

  Wyatt shot her a pointed look. “You could say that.”

  Edy peeled the lid off her bowl and sniffed. Rani’s food had no equal. The road to heaven smelled like the Pradhan kitchen.

  After a sufficient amount of indulgence, she looked up to see Wyatt’s scowl deepen two-fold.

  “Give me a break, already,” she said. “You were hanging with the guys. You know, like that spiel you fed me in the Don Corleone speech.”

  He stared. “You’ve got a lot of nerve, you know. Asking me out, ditching me at the sideline, and then trying to find some way to make it my fault. You think because you’re pretty you can treat me like crap. You think I’m soft, slow, a sucker. I’m none of those things. And I won’t let you treat me like it either.”

  Edy blinked. “I didn’t know you think I’m pretty.”

  “It’s beside the point.”

  Wyatt worked the fork back and forth, wedging it from its burrow deep in his burger. “You know, the next time you want to use me for retribution, or jealousy, or whatever game you and Hassan happen to be playing, find someone else.”

  He was right, of course, absolutely right. She’d been self absorbed, short sighted, thoughtless. As usual, her brain had snagged, unable to get past thoughts of Hassan. But there’d been something else. Something far less innocent. She’d asked him to be her date not because she’d wanted his company, but because he was an outsider, an other, a sure way to rattle them.

  She’d used him. She’d used her friend.

  Edy could scarcely recognize her own thoughts these days, choked in anger, drowning in jealousy and desire. Whatever she wanted with Hassan, whatever existed between them, gave her no excuse for treating people like crap. She had to do better. She would do better, and she’d start with Wyatt. Edy reached a hand across the table and took a deep breath.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Will you please give me another chance?”

  He looked up as if surprised.

  “Always,” Wyatt breathed. “Always.”

  ~~~

  Edy’s father spent two and a half weeks in Egypt before returning to the states. The first forty-eight hours of his time in the U.S. were spent in D.C., debriefing the feds on conditions in Cairo, Alexandria, El Mansoura, and elsewhere. He arrived in Boston in the manner he departed, by way of a single black sedan and overwhelming silence. Edy and the Pradhans met him at the front yard on arrival, snow crunching underfoot in their rush to meet him. Another legal case kept Edy’s mother away.

  Sallow eyes, sunken cheeks, shirt flapping in the wind, Edy’s father looked rung out and haggard, as if Egypt had banned proper eating and sleep as easy as they did free press.

  Edy clung to her dad all the way to the front porch. She had so much to tell him, about how the party went and Ali’s dress disaster, and how on attending ballet practice the previous day, she’d been pegged for a part in The Nutcracker with the company. Each year, the Boston Ballet chose the best among their students to perform alongside the professionals for one of their biggest shows. Last year, Edy had been the youngest ever selected. This year, with even stiffer competition, she had made the ranks again.

  “Daddy—”

  Her father glanced over his shoulder, searching, impatient, even though he’d just arrived. It wasn’t until Ali showed up that he deflated visibly.

  “Did you want to rest, or . . . ”

  “Only a shower,” her father said. “Then we have to get to work.”

  Edy’s father trotted up their abbreviated staircase and stopped at the front door, flanked on either side by her and Ali. For some reason, Rani and Hassan hung back near the fence.

  “You’re about to work?” Edy blurted.

  If anyone had heard her, they didn’t let on.

  “But our predictions were not so far off, were they?” Ali said. Concern twisted his face.

  Edy’s father placed a hand on the doorknob and turned. “That’s just it,” he said. “They were exacting. As precise as a scientific calculation. The timeline of government collapse, the uprising of the people, the bloody social protests. Our estimation of how influential the world’s instantaneous technology would be—Internet, cell phones, social networking—became eerily uncanny. And they had no idea you were so involved in the research. They would have insisted on your presence, too.”

  Ali sputtered, cheeks reddening as if he were an old lady fielding flirtations from a man half her age.

  “Oh no, it w
as an obvious outcome considering all of the variables,” Ali said. He dragged fingers back and forth across his forehead, as he always did when weighing a thousand different thoughts. “Vast income inequalities, gross human rights violations, a mimicry of autocratic rule—”

  Hassan appeared on the porch with them. “Edy—” he said.

  “Yes. Except we alone predicted it, my friend,” Edy’s father said. “Anyway, we’ll discuss my observations as soon as I shower, so we can incorporate them into the social movement theory.”

  “Dad? Tell me you’re not about to work. You just got here,” Edy said.

  Her father squinted at her as if he surprised and disappointed by her lack of decorum.

  He turned back to Ali. “Allow me time to freshen up before we meet in my study.”

  “Agreed,” Ali said.

  A hand found the small of Edy’s back, discreet under the conservative eye of Hassan’s parents.

  “Come on,” Hassan said. “We’ll hound them later.”

  She shot him an impatient look. Yes, she knew how they could be about work. Political science was the topic of discussion too many nights a week at dinner. But his father hadn’t been the one gone, the one dangling in the mouth of danger with little more than a pen and textbook to protect him. He hadn’t celebrated his birthday without his dad, or Thanksgiving for that matter. She opened her mouth to tell him that and found the words dissolved on her tongue, a lie never meant to be uttered.

  He was as close to her father as her, more so in some ways.

  Rani stepped up to them and Hassan’s hand fell away, smooth. While his father had been radically Americanized and prided himself on progressive thinking, his mother still fretted over the old ways and appearances and took to sweating anytime they were within three feet of each other.

  Like now.

  “Come over to the house and help me prepare dinner,” Rani said and dropped a critical eye to the hand that dangled at Hassan’s side. “Afterward, the three of us can play Scrabble.”

  Edy shot Hassan a look. He was notoriously sucky at Scrabble, known for hopping languages and creating portmanteaus as a matter of convenience. “You have to play right,” she warned, already warming to the idea. Cold weather and the smell of Indian spices, an afternoon with Hassan and the fireplace ablaze. Truth told, he could play wrong, and she wouldn’t mind much.