How to Love by Katie Cotugno Read Free Book Online Page A

more than seven months. “It’s not nice.”
    Sawyer shrugged and just kept standing, like he had no place in the world to be other than here. “I’m not teasing,” he told me, and in truth, he didn’t actually seem to be. “‘Bring It On Home to Me’? That’s a good song.”
    “That’s a
great
song,” I corrected, and he grinned.
    “You sound like your dad.”
    “Nah. He likes Otis Redding.” I tore a receipt out of the printer, smiled back. “What are you doing here?”
    Sawyer tilted his head. “Looking for you.”
    “Right.” I snorted, slipping the cards back into the billfolds. “Your mom was floating around earlier.” Lydia wasn’t super involved in the day-to-day running of the restaurant, though her fingerprints were everywhere if you knew where to look: the formal antique portraits affixed to the doors of the restrooms, the Edison bulbs hanging above the bar. Lydia was an artist herself, a photographer, but her familyhad made a fortune with a chain of successful steak houses up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and she probably had a better head for the food business than either Roger or my dad. She’d turn up from time to time, watchful, an expression on her face like she was working out secret sums in her mind. The busboys were all terrified of her; Shelby called her Dragon Lady behind her back. I tried to stay out of her way.
    The one person Lydia never seemed to turn her cool, eagle-eyed artist’s scrutiny on was Sawyer. He was her only son, her Best Beloved: He’d had surgery when he was a baby to repair a literal hole in his heart, a fact Allie and I had always thought was enormously, unbearably romantic, and as long as I’d known Lydia she’d been ferociously protective of him. “She probably makes you have a blood test before you’re allowed to be his girlfriend,” Allie’d hypothesized at my house late one night, both of us dissolving into giggles—not that it seemed to have stopped her, in the end.
    I was about to head back toward the floor when Sawyer reached out and grabbed me by the wrist. “Reena.” There was something urgent and unexpected about the way he said it, like he’d almost told me a secret and then changed his mind. “Why don’t I ever see you around anymore?”
    I blinked at him, disbelieving. He was still holding on to my arm. “Maybe I’m better at hiding than you thought.”
    Sawyer took just long enough to answer that I was sure he had no idea what I was talking about: It had been along time since that night in Allie’s yard, after all, and he’d probably forgotten it immediately. I was about to back-pedal when he smiled. “Maybe,” he said, letting go but not moving away at all. “But I’m serious.”
    “Yeah, well.” I felt my eyebrows arc. “Me, too.”
    “What are you doing tonight?” he asked.
    I cocked my head, glanced around. The band had segued into “It’s All Right.” I could see my father talking to a couple of regulars at the other end of the bar. “Working?” I said.
    Sawyer rolled his eyes at me. “Thank you, princess. I mean after that.”
    “Going home?”
    “Come hang out.”
    “With you?” I blurted, and Sawyer smirked, lazy as the Cheshire cat disappearing from the tree.
    “Yeah, Reena. With me.”
    In all the years I had known him—and I’d known him, more or less, since I was born—Sawyer had never once asked me to go anywhere. It took me a second to recover. Still, I shook my head like an instinct, like something I knew in my gut. I thought of the party at Allie’s, Lauren Werner and the crowds of people I didn’t know how to navigate. “Listen, Sawyer. Allie and I don’t really …” I trailed off, tried again, wondered what she’d told him. “I mean, we’re not so much … hanging out.”
    Sawyer frowned, and there was that expression again,like he’d come here to tell me something specific. “I didn’t mean with Allie,” he said.
    Oh.
    “Oh,” I said. I looked at him for a moment, then