Sarah Dessen - This Lullaby

He sat up, rubbing his face with one hand. Not much the worse for wear: at least nothing was broken. Then he looked at me, as if now it was my turn to say or do something.

“You don’t want to get involved with me,” I told him. “You really don’t.”

He stood up then, wincing a bit, and walked over to the bed, sitting down. Then he leaned in to me, sliding his hand up my arm around the back of my neck, pulling me nearer to him, and for a second we just stayed like that, looking at each other. And I had a sudden flash of the night before, a part of memory opening up and falling into my hands again, where I could see it clearly. It was like a picture, a snapshot: a girl and boy standing in front of a phone booth. The girl had her hands over her eyes. The boy stood in front of her, watching. He was speaking, softly. And then, all of a sudden, the girl stepped forward, pressing her face into his chest as he lifted his hands to stroke her hair.

So it had been me. Maybe I’d known that all along, and that was why I had run. Because I didn’t show weakness: I didn’t depend on anyone. And if he’d been like the others, and just let me go, I would have been fine. It would have been easy to go on conveniently forgetting as I kept my heart clenched tight, away from where anyone could get to it.

Now, Dexter sat as close to me as I could remember him being. It seemed like this day could go in so many directions, like a spiderweb shooting out toward endless possibilities. Whenever you made a choice, especially one you’d been resisting, it always affected everything else, some in big ways, like a tremor beneath your feet, others in so tiny a shift you hardly noticed a change at all. But it was happening.

And so, while the rest of the world went on unaware, drinking their coffee, reading the sports page, and picking up their dry cleaning, I leaned forward and kissed Dexter, making a choice that would change everything. Maybe somewhere there was a ripple, a bit of a jump, some small shift in the universe, barely noticeable. I didn’t feel it then. I felt only him kissing me back, easing me into the sunlight as I lost myself in the taste of him and felt the world go on, just as it always had, all around us.

“Don’t you give me no rotten tomato, cause all I ever wanted was your sweet potato.” Dexter stopped as the music did. Now, all we could hear was the fridge rattling and Monkey snoring. “Okay, so what else rhymes with potato? ”

Ted strummed his guitar, looking at the ceiling. On the couch by the refrigerator, John Miller rolled over, his red head bonking the wall.

“Anybody?” Dexter asked.

“Well,” Lucas said, crossing his legs, “it depends on if you want a real rhyme, or a pseudo rhyme.”

Dexter looked at him. “Pseudo rhyme,” he repeated.

“A real rhyme,” Lucas began, in what I already recognized as his eggbert voice, “is tomato. But you could easily tack an o onto another word and make a rhyme of it, even if it’s not grammatically correct. Like, say, relate-o. Or abate-o.”

“Don’t you give me no rotten tomato,” Dexter sang, “just ’cause to your crazy shit I cannot relate-o.”

Silence. Ted plucked out another chord, then tightened a string.

“Needs work,” Lucas said. “But I think we’re getting somewhere.”

“Can you all just please shut up,” John Miller moaned from the couch, his voice muffled. “I’m trying to sleep. ”

“It’s two in the afternoon, and this is the kitchen,” Ted told him. “Go someplace else or quit bitching.”

“Boys, boys,” Dexter said.

Ted sighed. “People, we need to focus on this. I want ‘The Potato Opus’ to be ready for that show next week.”

“‘The Potato Opus’?” Lucas said. “Is that what it’s called now?”

“Can you think of something better?”

Lucas was quiet for a second. “Nope,” he said finally. “Sure can’t.”

“Then shut the hell up.” Ted picked up the guitar. “From the top, first verse, with feeling.”

And so it went. Another day at the yellow house, where I’d been spending a fair amount of my free time lately. Not that I liked the setting, particularly; the place was a total dump, mostly because four guys lived there and none of them had ever been introduced formally to a bottle of Lysol. There was rotting food in the fridge, something black and mildewy growing on the shower tiles, and some sort of unidentifiable rank smell coming from beneath the back deck. Only Dexter’s room was decent, and that was because I had my limits. When I found a pair of dirty underwear under a couch cushion, or had to fight the fruit flies in the kitchen that were always swarming the garbage can, I at least could take comfort in the fact that his bed was made, his CDs stacked alphabetically, and the plug-in air freshener was working its pink, rose-shaped little heart out. All of this work on my part was a small price to pay, I figured, for my sanity.

Which, in truth, had been sorely tested lately, ever since my mother had returned from her honeymoon and set up her new marriage under our shared roof. All through the spring we’d had workmen passing through, hauling drywall and windows and tracking sawdust across the floors. They’d knocked out the wall of the old den, extending it into the backyard, and added a new master suite, complete with a new bathroom featuring a sunken tub and side-by-side sinks separated by blocks of colored glass. Crossing over the threshold into what Chris and I had named “the new wing” was like entering an entirely different house, which was pretty much my mother’s intention. It was her matched set, with a new bedroom, a new husband, and new carpet. Her life was perfect. But as was often the case, the rest of us were still adjusting.

One problem was Don’s stuff. Being a lifelong bachelor, he had certain objects that he’d grown attached to, very little of which fit my mother’s decorating scheme for the new wing. The only thing that even remotely reflected Don’s taste in their bedroom, in fact, was a large Moroccan tapestry depicting various biblical tableaus. It was enormous and took up most of a wall, but it did match the carpet almost perfectly, and therefore constituted a compromise of taste that my mother could live with. The remainder of his belongings were exiled to the rest of the house, which meant that Chris and I had to adjust to living with Don’s decor.

The first piece I noticed, a couple of days after their return, was a framed print by some Renaissance painter of a hugely buxom woman posing in a garden. Her fingers were big, pudgy, and white, and she was stretched across a couch, buck naked. She had huge breasts, which were hanging down off the couch, and she was eating grapes, a fistful in one hand, another about to drop into her mouth. It might have been art-a flexible term, in my opinion-but it was disgusting. Especially hanging on the wall over our kitchen table, where I had no choice but to look at it while I ate breakfast.

“Man,” Chris said to me the first morning it was there, about two days after Don had moved in. He was eating cereal, already dressed in his Jiffy Lube uniform. “How much you think a woman like that weighed?”

I took a bite of my muffin, trying to concentrate on the newspaper in front of me. “I have no idea,” I said.

“At least two-fifty,” Chris decided, slurping down another spoonful. “Those breasts alone have to be five pounds. Maybe even seven.”

“Do we have to talk about this?”

“How can you not?” he said. “God. It’s right there. It’s like trying to ignore the sun or something.”