Stay Until We Break by Mercy Brown Page B

he’s looking at me now. He moves his thumb across my cheek and I realize he’s brushing my tears away and that’s the look on his face. I smile because I desperately want him to know I’m okay. This is all so much better than okay.
    “How about you?” I say.
    “What about me?”
    “Can I, you know?” I glance down in the general direction of his crotch, and damn, I really wish I still had some of that nice buzz on so I wouldn’t feel so fucking awkward.
    He looks down, and when he realizes what I’m trying to say, he kisses me sweetly on the lips. “Sunshine, if you were to touch me right now, I’d ruin that dress of yours in about ten seconds flat.”
    “That’s okay,” I say. “I have other dresses.”
    He exhales, pulls me closer, and sort of laughs, but I can’t quite figure this out. Since when do you hook up with a guy and he doesn’t want you to get him off?
    “Cole?”
    He runs his finger along my tattoo. It’s on the inside of my left forearm, a small birdcage with an open door, with a tiny bird flying away from it.
    “Tell me about this one,” he says.
    “Oh,” I say, resting my head against his shoulder. “It’s kind of a long story.”
    “I’ve got nowhere to be,” he says with a smile that breaks me.
    Maybe it’s the fact that I’m coming down off my buzz, and down from that exquisite orgasm, or that his arms are wrapped around me, but I start talking. And I say a lot more than I ever have to anyone about it. Not everything, but a lot. I tell him how my mother planned for me to be a professional cellist, and how I started on the violin at four years old and then spent all my time outside of school going to lessons, camps, orchestra, and every afternoon after school practicing, all the way through high school.
    “You play the cello?” he asks. “Really?”
    “Not anymore,” I say.
    “Why not?”
    I was getting to that. See, I was good on the cello. Really good. I’ll be the first to admit that my music obsession started because of how much I love playing an instrument. As long as I was in lessons, or at orchestra rehearsals, or just practicing in my room, I was happy. But, put me in front of an audience? Hork central. My mother, who never missed an opportunity to tell me how she gave up her lifelong dream of being a concert violinist so she could marry my father and stay home with me, insisted that I play anyway. I can’t count how many therapists and doctors I got dragged to, just so I could get over my fear and get on a stage. I learned how to deep breathe and that Benadryl can stop a panic attack, but I still never got over my stage fright. Still, I was trying to be a good daughter. To make them happy. So, as expected, I applied to Juilliard—and I got in, too.
    “But you didn’t go? Seriously?”
    “Yup. My parents almost disowned me. Think my mom is still on the fence.”
    “Holy shit,” he says. “I never knew that.”
    “Yeah,” I say. “You know, what was she going to say at the club when all her friends’ kids were off to Vassar and Brown? That after they wasted all that money sending me to Princeton Day School, I ended up at Rutgers? A state school? The shame!”
    Now I feel like an asshole, because Cole didn’t even go to college. Even if he’d wanted to go, his family couldn’t afford it. There’s not a thing Cole has that he didn’t work for himself.
    But just when I’m sure he’s judging me and deciding I’m a spoiled, rich brat, he hugs me tighter.
    “It’s not easy to go against your folks on something big like that,” Cole says. “You’ve got guts, Sunshine.”
    I exhale.
    “After I got to Rutgers, Emmylou and I took a trip to New Hope and I got this tattoo to remind myself to live my own life, not just live up to someone else’s expectations. I’m never going back inside that cage.”
    Cole is quiet and his eyes are glassy as he looks at me.
    “That probably sounds really dumb,” I say.
    “No way, not at all,” he says. “If