I barely remember to breathe. "What happened?"
"The usual," he says. "Tearful farewells. Parting is the sweetest sorrow. Blah blah blah. I thought my heart was being ripped out of my chest but...I don't know. You can't keep that up forever." He sighs. "What about you?"
I swallow. "Same." I want to add 'but worse', except I feel like that would be an asshole thing to do. I'm in bad shape. Everyone's paid so much attention to my feelings when surely they should be telling me to pay attention to other people's, right? That's what makes you a good person - how much you care for others.
Was it really that simple? You could just...move on? And not be a broken, defective person because of it?
"We're nobody unless we belong to one another," Justin used to say. "Don't you feel that?" And I'd nod and say yes, yes, I felt it. I felt it right deep down in the roots of my soul where I was supposed to feel it, sometimes so fierce and hot that it felt as though my heart was squeezed in a fist.
Then one day I didn't feel it any more. And it was like the world had ended.
I'm crying again. Jaime puts his arm around me - as brotherly as can be. "Don't," I say, shrugging away from him.
He withdraws and for a moment I don't know what to say. He doesn't persuade, he doesn't cajole or ask me flat out if I love him. I'm not used to men who do as I ask. The sick thing is I'm not even sure if I like it. "Don't touch me unless you mean it," I say, and go back into the cabin.
I hear him sigh, hear the door close behind him. "The first time I ever touched you," he says. "You reacted like you'd been shot. So excuse me if I don't grab you by the hair like a caveman."
I turn back to face him and flop on the couch. "Why? Do you want to?" He wants to fuck me. He has to want to fuck me. I've made it obvious enough. What else are we going to do all night? Make up ghost stories? Talk about our exes? I lean back and stretch out my legs. Justin would have been on me already by now.
Jaime just smiles and shakes his head. "Sorry," he says. "Not my style. I prefer to start with dinner and a movie.”
"Don't you like me?" My voice sounds ridiculous to me, a cartoon coquette, a blonde so dumb she can't relate to herself as anything but sexual prey. Is this part of it? Did he do this to me? Or did I do this to myself?
"I like you just fine," he says, and then there's a knock at the door. Dinner. Thank God we're too hungry to talk.
Chapter Thirteen
Jaime
I used to think it would be nice to have Amber's kind of problems. No worrying about money, no worrying about whether the school district where your nephew is growing up will still be a good one when he's old enough to enroll. Rich people. Famous people. They're all a bunch of big crybabies, right? It's so difficult having money and fame and a house in the Hills and a pony for every day of the week. We love to hate them for complaining - that was the whole principle behind those dumb Paris and Nicole shows when I was a kid. Remember them? Hard to believe they were even a thing.
But the more time I spend with Amber the more I realize I would pay actual cash money if there was some guarantee that I'd never get fucked up the way she's been fucked up.
There's a time in a boy's life when girls go from being 'just girls' to these magical, sophisticated, unattainable beings. It starts, weirdly enough, round about the time when they're about twelve or thirteen, when they're done streaking skyward like beanpoles and start filling out. Sometimes it's like it happens overnight. One day she's a person you could borrow a pencil from without blushing and the next day when she walks into class it's like she exploded overnight - pow! Beauty. Holy shit - where the hell did they come from?
They leave us guys in the dust. We're the poor pendejos nature has left lagging a couple of years behind in terms of maturity. We can only gawp and yearn while they giggle at the guys two grades above, huge hairy monsters whose voices have stopped wobbling, guys who have actual muscles.
Then a weird thing happens when you get older. Those beautiful girls, and the older guys they went out with? They turn into children. They shrink before your very eyes as you grow upwards, and then the next beautiful girl you see might be your friend's little sister, or your own niece, and when you see her fluttering her eyelashes at older men your heart starts thumping for all kinds of different reasons. No - don't you dare smile back at her; she's only fifteen.
Amber is a little like that. She flirts hard but I don't think she really knows what she's doing. She's a kid - I have to think of her that way, even if she's only two years younger than me. It's the only way I can protect her like I'm supposed to.
After dinner she goes out to fetch wood, which is not a euphemism no matter how much she wants it to be. To my surprise she builds a decent fire that catches almost immediately.