Page 8 of When Love Gives You Lemons
His face twisted like an evil Disney villain right before the sneak tickle attack. Shooting up between my pits, his fingers wriggled until they found my switch, and my entire body convulsed, folding into the sand. Writhing, scream-laughing, begging him to stop, I eventually got him to concede, and he pulled me into a hug on top of his chest. His lips pressed against my forehead.
I caught my breath and kissed the fabric of his shirt.
My head tried to find comfort nestled into his neck, but his body writhed out from under me, and I fell off him.
My phone screen lit up in a small, dark pocket of sand. Itmust have fallen out of my shorts when he tackled me. There were hundreds of new notifications from that latest video. I muted my notifications and looked back to where Ricky had been lying. But all that was left was an impression of his body in the sand.
Ricky was at the water’s edge.
The smooth sand was cool against my bare feet, and it grew chillier the closer I got to him. The moon hung overhead like an ethereal night-light, illuminating the peaks of small waves. The salt water rushed toward us and splashed our legs as we teetered between land and sea. Ricky felt miles away.
“You ready to talk to me?” I borderline begged. Okay, maybe I whined. But there was a knot in my chest that moved up into my throat the longer the night waned.
He looked away.
“Dude, really?”
“Did you justdudeme, bro?” he asked.
“Did you justbrome, homeslice?” I mimicked. This was our routine; usually it happened in the middle of our epic make-out session where we pretended we were straight bros using ancient slang.
“Did you justhomesliceme, buddy?”
“Nah, pal.” I pushed him, and he puffed out his chest.
His temporary smile flickered and I was over it.
“Okay, Riccardo Guiseppe DeLuca, spill.”
“Not the full name!” His voice shook.
With my Spidey-sense tingling, my heart started to race, faster and faster and faster until it throbbed in my ears. Since I was a kid, I suffered from panic attacks, which my therapist thought started when Ma and Dad would scream at each other,fighting all night. They continued after Dad left, and got worse when he moved back in years later because it all felt so fragile, and they fully kicked into high gear when Dad passed. It was like playing a never-ending game of midnight manhunt without flashlights, always on edge waiting for someone to dash out from a bush and grab you. Ricky was supposed to be a safe zone, my home base.
“Look at me.”
He refused.
“What’s going on with you?” The words burst through my chest like a parasite, latching on to him. The therapist I started seeing after Dad died said I had a tendency to say what was on my mind, unfiltered, especially in moments of intense emotion because I wanted people around me to show up authentically. So I pushed for a reaction. It wasn’t intentional, but subconscious.
Ricky braced for a Fielder blowup, but all I could say was, “You’re so far away. Talk to me?”
“It’s hard.” He picked his head up, but the way he did it, slow and pained, his head looked like it weighed a million pounds. “To look at you.” His lip quivered.
“Why?” My eyes stung.
His body tensed, but he didn’t look away. “Because you’ve been my everything. For as long as I can remember, Fielder.”
“And you’re mine—”
“That’s the point. I don’t know who I am outside of you.Us.” He paused, licked his dry lips. “Do you ever think we moved too fast?”
His words retreated into the ocean, lost in the undertow.
“Too fast?” I repeated, unable to grasp his question.
“Yeah, like, we did everything backwards. Fell in love at freaking five years old, and planned out our entire lives before taking the SATs. This is, like, the time when everybody is supposed to grow up and move away and find themselves. I need to find myself.” He was breathless, his voice soaked and shaky.
Nonna used to say I was born with sneakers on my feet, that once I came out of the womb, I was unstoppable, rolling, crawling, running, bouncing off the walls. Sometimes, when she would watch me and put me to sleep, she let me keep my shoes on because she knew once I woke up, I’d tear off down the halls and she wanted me to be ready. This resulted in me habitually putting my shoes on before pants, and it became a theme in my life that everything happens backward.
