She’s lucky I’m calling her anything, so I don’t like that she’s got the balls to keep correcting me. The old Juniper never would’ve done that.
Actually, no. I do like it, for exactly that reason. I think.
Unlike this fucking shower, my feelings towards her easily switch from hot to cold and back again. That’s the problem with letting baser instincts do your thinking when your brain’s too exhausted. Just when the full gravity of what she did to me—all my valid reasons to totally despise her—sets up camp in my head, she’ll do or say something that makes me forget again. Rinse, and repeat.
My best course of action would be to accept her karmic-balance ride and other gifts of guilt without speaking a single word to her, but she’s got a way of tricking me into talking. I think it’s naïve persistence.
Maybe that’s the cousin of narrow-minded, dumbass determination.
“Yeah,” I answer finally, spitting water and suds from my mouth. “They’re for my mom.”
She doesn’t respond.
I open my eyes in the spray.
She’s gone. In her place is the towel I forgot to bring outside with me, draped just within my reach.
* * *
While Juniper drives, I sleep. The second I lie down, I feel her watching me in the rearview and make a big show of rolling to face the backdoors.
Okay, so I’m a hypocrite. But at least I had the decency to make sure she didn’t know I’d watched her sleep.
The scent of her sticks to me, every time I turn. My erection strains against the center of my boxers until I pretend to stretch so I can shift it to my thigh.
She’s probably touched herself here, I think.
Then my brain, that impulsive, reckless bastard, takes it way too far.
She’s probably gotten fucked here.
I fall asleep to a burn of fury in my gut, imagining some granola hiker boy with an androgynous name like Devin or Bailey, the type who goes shirtless every chance he gets despite having zero muscle tone, screwing Juniper in this bed.
I don’t want to want her. But maybe that old guard dog isn’t completely dead, because the more I think about someone else banging her, the more pissed I get, even while drowning in sleep.
Dogs are like that—only wanting a bone because another dog got to it first.
When I wake, it’s just past noon. I roll over and realize the Transit is still, and the driver’s seat is empty.
My head’s hazy. I chug a Powerade from the mini-fridge before throwing open the door and letting the sun assault my eyes.
“Good, you’re up! Here.”
Through the fog, I recognize the object she hefts to me: my favorite board, reeking of lemon disinfectant. She must have scrubbed it for twenty minutes straight, because it didn’t just lose the stink of Lake Linon; it shines like new.
I realize I never did thank her for saving my clothes, either. Feels too late, now.
You could thank her for cleaning the board, you know.
Yeah, I guess I could. But I don’t. Seeing her smile and blush isn’t good for me.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“Ohio.” She pivots slowly on her heel, finishing up a video for her Instagram story. While she pairs it with some folksy music, I grab my skate shoes from the back. Goddamn, she cleaned these, too.
“There’s supposed to be a good trail here, according to the internet,” she says. “I thought we could get some footage for your channel, then post some captures on your Instagram.”
I want to correct her use of “we” again, but can’t. Without my helmet cam and tree mounts, I need another human to control the camera. Besides, I am about three percent curious to learn how she plans to revamp my social media.
The other ninety-seven percent hates that I actually have to care about that shit, now.
The parking lot is nestled halfway up the mountain. It’s actually more of a glorified hill, but the view’s still nice. I spend a solid minute just staring at the curling road and clear, bright sky.
“Nature’s not so bad, huh?” she asks, stepping up to elbow me.
I glide away. “At a distance.”
The trail is set up well, with a straight footpath right next to it. I survey it as we walk and notice the calculated twists and jumps, every bit of surface area optimized. For every foot we walk, I’ll be riding four times that on the board.
“No tree roots,” she points out.
“No rocks,” I nod.
At the top, she hangs back on the footpath while I cut over to the trail. It’s not as wide I’d like, but adrenaline still tears through my veins the second I gear up and get on my board. Already, I know this will be one hell of a run.
“Ready, and...action!”
“Don’t do that. Just tell me if you’re recording or not.”
“That’s what ‘action’ means, but fine. Recording.”
I ready myself with some deep breaths. It’s nice out here. Instead of employing my usual tunnel vision, I take the scene as it is. Easy wind. Endless sky.
Beautiful, filthy dirt.
The start is rough; my calf is still sore from yesterday, so my launch isn’t as solid as I’d like. But once I gain some ground, some speed...I’m so far in my element you couldn’t pry me out with a crowbar.
The turns are practically nonstop, but the trail is so well-planned I find my rhythm instantly, swaying with them like getting swept into a river. I smell the soil kicked up behind me and hear nothing but the air crashing past.
When the first jumps arrive, I hit them like the sky’s yanking me up with a string.
It’s fun, but I’m not flying. Not yet.
There’s a final jump before the trail levels, and it’s steep and narrow. I’ve got to hit it just right, and suddenly I don’t think I can. My pulled muscle burns. My lungs threaten to cramp up.
Breathe. Go.
I bend my knees a little, planting myself closer to the earth. Wishing it a fond farewell before I leave it behind.
In a single second, I’m airborne.
The wind stops. Time itself stops, or at least slows way, way down.
I’ve got my heart pounding in the sky and my stomach stuck in my chest. The sun’s glare takes everything below and washes it out to a bleached memory while I pull the board up and grip the underside for a little more speed.
A little more time for Icarus to enjoy the sun.
By the time I land, I’m grinning and panting and hoping my organs never catch up, the weightlessness still feels so good.
I make a clean stop and let out a raspy, amazed noise that echoes down the hillside the way my dust settles behind me.
“That,” Juniper calls, “will make one hell of a post.”
Her voice is way closer than I expect.
I jerk my head to the right and see her sitting at the bottom of the footpath, camera still trained on me.
“What the fuck?” I fish my inhaler out from underneath my shirt and fix my lungs while squinting back up the trail. “How’d you get down here so fast?”
“Same way you did,” she says, and scoots through the brush to show me.
She’s sitting on one of my other boards, legs painted in dirt, shoes filthy from controlling her speed down the path so she’d keep pace with me.
“Hid it behind a tree at the top before you woke up,” she explains, clicking off the camera with a smartass smile. “Let’s be real: if I’d actually asked first, you never would’ve said yes.”
The altitude must be screwing with my brain, because I just shake my head at her and laugh.
We spend two hours on the trail. Somehow, Van manages to make every ride look brand-new, bending his body different ways, hitting the last jump with increasingly complicated turns and flips. He falls once, but refuses to let me help.
“Just film,” he pants, jerking away when I try to clean the massive scrape on his elbow.
His final run is the best, at least to me. He performs a turn (I’m later informed, wi
th a long eye roll, that it’s called an aerial) that places him directly against the sun. On camera, it looks like an eclipse.
“That was pretty smart, using my board the way you did.” He mops his face with his shirt on our way down the footpath. I keep my eyes on the camera screen between us, and not his glistening abdominals. Or carved hipbones. Even his navel gets me thinking things I shouldn’t.
Remember: not worth it.
“Even though,” he adds, “you don’t know how to ride it worth a damn.”
“Hence I sat on it. I knew better than to stand.”
“We’d get pretty sick video, if you did.” Van takes the board from underneath my arm and sets it down. “Here, get on.”
“Not a chance.”
“Just see if you can keep your balance long enough to make it to...” He squints ahead, then points. “That tree stump.”
“I already know I can’t. I’m not an athlete, Van, remember?”
Ignoring me, he takes the camera from my other hand, and the water canteen I had looped around my neck. I look away while he chugs it. The early afternoon light hits his Adam’s apple from way too perfect of an angle.
“I’ve seen what you can do, Fairy Lights,” he breathes, lowering the canteen and wiping his forehead with his wrist. “Some of that yoga is Cirque du Soleil shit. If you can balance doing that, you can handle a board for a few yards.”
The heat must be getting to me. All that sweat and dirt on him is making me forget what’s underneath.
Cautiously, I step onto the board.
Van sets his stuff down and straps my feet in. “All right,” he says, “just lean with the board; don’t fight the terrain. It’s a smooth path, yeah, but there’s still dips and peaks to it, just like a real trail, and your instinct will be to overcompensate for them. Don’t.”
“You’re not exactly inspiring confidence, you know.” My palms sweat. I wipe them on my shorts and hate the shakiness of my own heart. “What if I fall?”
“Then you get back up.”
And with that, he nudges the small of my back to start me down the path.
I’m probably going at a snail’s pace compared to what Van did on the trail, but that doesn’t stop my fear. I hold my breath so I don’t scream, trying to remember the advice he gave me: lean with the board. Don’t fight the terrain.
Whatever that entails, I obviously don’t do it correctly.
I skid into some brush and topple, the scream of fear I held back coming out in a squeal.
Van jogs up behind me, laughing as he undoes the binding around my feet. “Not bad for a beginner. We’ll work on it.”
I watch him. More specifically, the muscles in his forearms I shouldn’t be watching.
“Did these hurt?” Without thinking, I touch both tattoos on his wrists.
He freezes, both of us staring as my fingertips trail all the way to his inner elbows where the ink stops.
He’s got “Andresco” on one arm, “Durham” on the other.
“They’re tattoos,” he answers, after a long silence. “Of course they hurt. But, you know...the way tattoos hurt. Painful, but not real pain.”
“Okay,” I shrug, spreading my hands. I have no idea what he means.
“You’ve never gotten one?”
“My ears are pierced, if that counts.” It was one of the first things I did, when I left the ranch. Those little silver studs glimmered in the mall kiosk mirror like two lighthouses in the distance. Too small to be of much use, but just enough to assure me I was headed in the right direction.
“Your body is a temple. Never damage it with the baubles and stains of this world.”
I touch the baubles in my ears: two pearl studs. Then I stare at the stains on Van’s arms.
I decide our temples are decorated, not damaged.
“Imagine the sting when you got your piercings,” Van says, lifting me by my elbow with one hand, grabbing the board with the other, “times, like...ten-thousand. That’s a tattoo. Did you feel a weird rush afterwards?”
I nod.
“Exactly. Adrenaline, dopamine, all that: your brain pumps out a shit ton after you get a tattoo. That’s why people say they’re addictive. If I could afford more, I’d be covered in them.”
Back at the Transit, Van opens up all the doors to take advantage of the wind, cooling it down while I program the A.C.
“What about your other ones?” I ask. I pass him a water, then roll mine up and down my neck. For a second, I think he watches me.
“The moon and paper airplane?”
I nod. “Which ones were first? Those or the names?”
“Names first, then the airplane. Moon’s new.” He pulls up his sleeve, showing me.
Little as I know about tattoos, it’s obviously the work of an expert: the details are stunning and crisp, yet blend with the blank spaces of his skin as effortlessly as paint.
By contrast, the paper airplane is a simple geometric outline, but I find myself admiring it just the same. I know what paper airplanes mean to him.
My seventh night at the ranch, he told me his mother used to write him messages. Sometimes they were silly jokes when he was sad; most of the time, they were announcements that dinner was ready, or just reminders she loved him. She’d stand in his bedroom doorway, he said, and sail them to wherever he was—the top bunk of his bed, his desk.
By the time he’d open them, she would vanish from sight. Sometimes he’d write one back and send it into the hallway, listening for the crumple when she unfolded it.
“She loved that Sinatra song,” he told me, “‘Fly Me to the Moon,’ so sometimes I wouldn’t write anything back. I’d just draw a picture of a moon for her. When she died and we had to go through her stuff, I found a box with all those airplanes inside. Every moon I’d ever drawn for her.”
I’d confessed that I had never heard that song, and his face lit up as he added it to my iPod, took one earbud for himself, and placed the other in mine. We listened to it on repeat until I fell asleep on the couch, leaning right into him.
“Ten years,” I say now, as the math works itself out in my head. “That’s supposed to be a really hard anniversary for losing someone.”
“They’re all hard.” He pulls his knee up onto the running board and props his arm on it, then winces, remembering his scrape. I grab the First Aid kit and clean the wound while he looks like it tortures him to let me.
“Is that what made you decide to take a road trip, this year?”
“Pure coincidence.”
“No such thing.”
Van snorts through his nose and watches me apply the bandage we both know he’ll peel off in mere minutes. “I lost my sponsors, remember? That’s all this trip is about.”
“And taming your temper.”
“The temper that cost me my sponsors,” he corrects sternly, getting up as soon as I’m done. He clambers around the Transit, closing doors and putting his gear in the rear storage compartment. “It’s all a business decision. The fact I started the trip on the anniversary is irrelevant.”
I sit there a moment, gathering up the bandage trash a piece at a time. “Huh.”
“‘Huh,’ what?”
“Nothing,” I shrug. “Just that, the same year was proof enough for me to suspect it. But the fact you left on the exact anniversary? Now I’m convinced, if I’m being totally honest.”
“There’s a fucking first.” Van slides the center door shut, directly in front of my face.
I wait until he’s flung his way into the passenger seat before climbing into the front. “You don’t have to respond to everything with anger, you know.”
“You don’t have to dissect my brain like you actually have any clue what you’re doing.” He punches the Power button on the radio. It fills the car with a furniture store commercial. “Not everything is connected in this great circle of life, all right?”
“Okay,” I exhale, stretching my fingers against the wheel. “I wasn’t saying it like it’s ba
d, though. Just...proposing a possibility that, in some subconscious way, it wasn’t just because of your sponsors and skating career. I mean, you could’ve easily worked on all this stuff in one place, renting a cabin for the summer somewhere and doing nothing but local trails for your footage. But you chose to travel for a reason.”
The way his limbs tense, I expect another blow-up. Van wasn’t kidding with that “harsh personality” assessment that, I assume, came from whatever poor soul was tasked with dropping him as a sponsee: when he gets like this, everything about him hits you like a desert wind.
Miles stretch behind us before he speaks. “I mean...I guess it’s possible, when you explain it like that.” Quickly, he adds, “But the way you said it was annoying. You’ve gotta stop that know-it-all tone. You’re not in my head.”
Thank God for that. I know it’s an absolute mess in there.
“I’ll work on it,” I tell him.
Twelve
Wes: Your dad sent something. Feels light. Open it?
I stare at the text longer than I need to: it’s pretty clear. When Dad sends a light envelope, it’s a check. One I always send right back, with a note saying something to the effect of, “Thanks, but no damn way.”
Heavier mail, while rare, always means a real letter, usually some kind of travel summary from his year-long cruise with Megan.
Wes doesn’t wait for my answer. His next text informs me it’s not a check, but a one-page letter.
“Big news,” he texts, with a cringe emoji. “Want a spoiler?”
I already know. Dad’s been with Megan long enough for a proposal to not sound crazy. Leave it to him to put the announcement in a letter, of all things.
He just doesn’t want to hear your reaction.
I’d actually congratulate him, but I can’t be too mad if he assumes I’d flip my shit over it. When he first brought Megan around, I wasn’t exactly pulling the Welcome Wagon.
I tell Wes no, just bring the letter with the rest of my mail to the Hamptons.
Juniper returns from grocery shopping with ninja silence, until she sees that I’m not asleep: just flopped across her bed texting. “I thought you wanted to nap.”
Seven Sins: Durham Boys, Book 2 Page 8