The Shape that Breaks
Chapter 14: Again and Again

My mom was stronger than I gave her credit for. This did not break her, the way it had seemed that night in the hospital. She gave me a hard hug when she got home and then we didn’t talk about it afterwards. Maybe some people will tell you that it’s unhealthy to deal with grief that way, but it was the only way I knew how. If I let myself feel it, it hurt too much, to think I’d never see my grandpa again, never hear his voice over the phone, never listen to him sing me happy birthday even though his voice was like that of a dying duck’s. So I put it away. And that worked. Everyone deals with things differently.

Aiden woke me up the next morning by jumping into bed with me and throwing the blankets off of me. He was back to his old self again; bouncy and talkative and my boyfriend. And he kissed me good morning and didn’t stop kissing me until we heard a door creak open down the hall and we knew his mom was up. My lips were still tingling when we walked out of the door to go to school.

Things weren’t different. He was just holding my hand and I loved him and the sun was bright and my skin was warm and despite the sadness I’d experienced in the days before, I knew that this was one of those perfect moments that you look back on and the memory of it makes you feel alive, makes you feel the blood in veins and the beating of your heart and the air in your lungs. And when he kissed me, I could feel all of those things, and I felt small because of the way my heart felt, so big in my chest. I wanted this to last forever.

Logan was tanner than I thought she could’ve gotten, sitting in a sundress at the lunch table. She attacked me with a hug that almost knocked the lunch tray I was carrying out of my arms and then looked at Aiden’s hand, callused and protective, joined with mine. “Finally!” she gushed. She seemed to be herself and I felt bad for not calling her when I got back from Hamer, but Logan had been the last thing from my mind.

As I ate my disgustingly greasy piece of pizza from the school cafeteria, she described her torrid love affair in Tahiti. Well, she’d actually met a boy who lived in Washington on vacation there and he was gorgeous and nice and she didn’t know if they’d keep talking now that school was in, but he called her his honey boo boo sweetheart and she thought he was just the cutest thing in the whole wide world. I noticed her glance, quickly, so no one else would notice, towards Jess, who sat with Mark and Auggie and Anna. Then she blinked and kept telling us about Connor, her honey boo boo sweetheart.

Aiden kissed me in the hallway and I couldn’t concentrate for the rest of the period. I just kept thinking about it, replaying it over and over in my head, because it felt so good to have this back, to have something better, to have someone who got me better than I did sometimes. It made me feel real; it made me feel alive. I looked at the ring on my pointer finger, at the tiny little amethyst nestled there, and I didn’t hear anything about World War I or the assassination or Franz Ferdinand. Boys were the reason I didn’t have straight A’s.

My mom’s car was in the driveway when Aiden and I turned the corner. His hand slipped from my grasp as soon as I started running and I didn’t even notice that he wasn’t right next to me when I stormed through the door, right into my mother’s arms. It was strange, how much I’d missed her. Now that I saw her, the relief was huge: she’s alive, she’s here, she’ll be fine. She looked haggard, though; when I pulled away from her, I noticed the huge bags under her eyes and the greasiness to her hair. She didn’t smell very good either. “Hey, Celeste,” she said wearily. “I just got home. I’m going to take a shower, OK? I have a suitcase of dad’s stuff in the living room, go through it and see what you want. I just need to rest. The flight was really long.”

She disentangled herself from me and went down the hall, into her room. There was a knock and I turned around, startled, because I’d forgotten Aiden was still there. He strode forward and kissed me on the forehead, pressing his warm warm lips against my skin, and said, “I’ll come by later, OK? Call me if you need me.”

He was gone and I was left alone with the suitcase, sitting abandoned right next to the coffee table. But I didn’t go look at it. I didn’t want to touch it, because it would make me cry again and it would bring everything, all the vulnerability and the loss and anger and frustration and fear that I’d felt that night. I didn’t want it back. I didn’t want to think about it. I dropped my backpack on the floor and went into my room to be with the warm smell of books and the sun shining through my curtains and mark of Aiden’s lips that burned my skull. I went to be alone because it hurt too much.

I must’ve fallen asleep because the next thing I knew, there were warm hands pulling a blanket over me and I turned over, pulling whoever it was closer to me. Then Aiden was kissing me and I wanted to cry for a moment because I’d thought that those hands, as callused as they were, belonged to another boy, one who’d written a song for me, one who’d been my first kiss. I was half-asleep and I curled into myself, away from Aiden, and I was confused and he thought I was still asleep and I heard the door close and he was gone for the night and I slept the whole night through.

I forgot about it when I woke up but I remembered the next day when I was eating breakfast and it was stupid of me but even though I knew I was over Alex, I still wanted to cry because he’d always haunt me, no matter what I did. My first kiss, my first love. And then Aiden was knocking on my door and I forgot about it again and I didn’t let myself think about it anymore. I just went on with my day and stole kisses in the hallway and listened to the smile in Logan’s voice as she told me about Connor and it was gone from my head for a while.

There’s that time between spring break and summer when school feels like it goes on for an infinite amount of time. Every day seems like it gets closer to approaching that last one, but when you count the days until the end, there’s always a greater number than you’d thought before. And people give you false hope; they tell you it’s three weeks left when it’s really four, they tell you about all the days off that you have, they tell you about the easy work that you’ll do. And even though it seems like a huge span of time, it always that finals just stab you in the ass, right when you least expect it, and the only time you study is the night before.

Aiden was lying on my bed, staring at my fan, the way the blades whirled the warming air around. It was the last day in May, the days before summer really began, and my window was always thrown open, sunshine slanting in the curtains. I had a math book open in my lap, puzzling over numbers and equations that slipped from my mind the moment that I read about another set. “Hey, how do you do this?” I asked, pressing my shoulder against his and pointing at some shape that didn’t make sense to my mind. I’d scribbled something in my notebook, but he shook his head, taking my pencil away from me and erasing it, doing it the right way. He was a terrible tutor because he just did my homework for me.

“Oh,” I said softly, and he fell back onto the bed again, nuzzling his face in the comforter. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, because it was too hot for him now, he said, and I stared at the birthmark that crept up his side, just a shade lighter than the rest of his skin. It was very hard to concentrate when he was shirtless, all bones and tanned skin. It wasn’t like he had a body to dream about, but dream about it I did. All the time. It was scary because every time things got hot and heavy, he was the one stopping us, he was the one talking sense into me. With Alex, it had been different. I’d always stopped him. Maybe he’d just wanted me more than I wanted him. Maybe that’s how it was now. Or maybe he was just better at controlling himself.

I closed my math book and shoved it and my notebook off of my bed, scooting closer to his body warmth. His skin felt like it was on fire when I touched his cheek, but that was the way it always was. There was something different about him today, something off, something silent. “What’s wrong?” I asked and he turned his head towards me, the glimmer of a smile on his lips.

“I’m just gonna miss you when I go to Greece,” he replied and I bit my lip, trying not to think about it.

“You aren’t leaving for another week, OK? Let’s not discuss it.” But the look on his face told me it was something more, something further and longer than his two weeks in Greece. I pressed my lips against his cheek and he rolled over, on top of me, and pinned my arms to the bed. He had that strange, half-empty smile on his face and even though I knew there was probably something else wrong, I let him kiss me, soft and sweet at first, and then harder, all hands tangled in hair, without saying anything. He smelled faintly of sweat and his lips were salty, but he tasted like heaven and I found myself trying to kiss every part of his body, just to be close to him, so he didn’t have to leave me all alone, so I could make use of every single second until his leaving.

Suddenly, he disentangled himself from me and turned over, his back toward me. “I gotta tell you something.”

“What?” I asked and I was still out of my breath, my heart still beating hard hard against my chest.

“My mom wants to move.”

I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. “Move… where?” I sputtered and I could feel the tears pricking at the corners of my eyes, already there to humiliate me. I took a deep breath, trying to clam myself. “Why?”

He sighed, but didn’t turn over to face me, so I sat up and grabbed his chin so he’d look at me. “Celeste, you know why I’ve been coming over here so much. Her and Will have been fighting constantly and she thinks that this place is toxic, just like every other place we’ve ever lived.”

“But… you guys just moved here. You can’t move, Aiden, please, you can’t leave me, please…” And I was pleading and I was crying, goddamn it. But he couldn’t go, he couldn’t leave me, not like Alex, not again. “Please.”

He looked closer to crying that I’d ever seen him and he grabbed me and kissed me, my tears mixed with wanting, and for a moment, we forgot about moving and leaving and I was sucked under, into the beautiful harshness of skin on skin and lips on skin and fingernails on skin and everything was blotted out but this fire in my spine, the want of him bleeding through every pore, and maybe he wouldn’t leave if I just let him hold me forever.

I clung to his hand as we strode through the airport and I felt like my heart would crack to pieces the moment I had to let him go. He had a tank top and flip flops on, ready for a climate much milder than our northern Oregon summers, and a pair of sunglasses topped his hair, which, from the summer sun, was almost as fair as his eyes.

Will hadn’t come with us to say goodbye; Aiden told me he’d been holed up in his office since his mom had announced they were moving back to Asheville. I clenched Aiden’s hand tighter at the through. He was leaving me now, but at the end of the summer, he was leaving me forever. He’d been stoic, the past few days, like he was getting ready for our inevitable separation. But last night he’d snuck into my bedroom and helped me until I fell asleep, my face
still slick with tears. I knew the real him was still there, but he was hiding.

The airport smelled like rubber shoe soles as we approached the security checkpoint, approached the point where I’d have to let go of him. His mom said something in Greek and Aiden chuckled, pointing out a woman striding by in a light pink muumuu. And then, too suddenly for my liking, he was hugging his mother and turning towards me, a sad smile on his face. “I’ll call you when I can, okay?”

I bit my lip and threw my arms around his neck as an answer, pressing my face tight against his chest. I had to stand on my tiptoes to hug him properly and her picked me up from the ground, my feet skimming the carpet. His lips close my ear whispered, “I love you,” and for a moment I was sure I’d imagined those words, but he said them again, like he had to tell me as many times as possible before leaving, and I felt part of my heart breaking because I knew I couldn’t say it back, even though I could feel it in my bones. He was leaving me and it hurt too much to admit this out loud. So I kissed him so hard it hurt, lips mashed against lips, chest crushed against chest.

And then he was gone and I’d never told him I loved him, too.