“I’m willing to find out, and I want…” he paused once more, inhaled a deep, shuttering breath, and then took my hands. “Abigail, be my girlfriend.”
There. ‘Be my girlfriend’. Three simple words, and yet they meant so much.
I knew the answer before the word was even out of my mouth. “Yes.”
Gideon searched my face. “Are you sure?”
I nodded. “Yes, I’m sure.”
And then just like that, Gideon’s lips were on mine. We kissed until I was gasping for air. When he pulled away, I wasn’t confused about how I felt about him. I didn’t care about who he was or what he’d done. I only cared about the angel he was when he was with me. I cared about the angel who’d made me laugh and who’d listened to me cry, the angel who was avoiding hurting anyone because he wanted to make me happy. In that moment I knew exactly how I felt about Gideon. I liked him. A lot.
“YOUR MOTHER SCARES me, and it takes a lot to scare me. ” Gideon said after he’d parked his car in the lot behind the school. Gideon had showed up this morning to pick me up for school, and my mother had taken the chance to invite him for breakfast. She’d also made a point of casually mentioning she owed a gun. Several guns, in fact. He’d sat in trembling silence all through breakfast, clutching tight to a glass of orange juice that he never got around to drinking. Even after seeing how thoroughly she had cowed Gideon, she insisted she would only allow him to drive me to school if Ben tailed us.
“It’s about time somebody scared you,” I teased him. “And where exactly did you get an R8? Do you even have a driver’s license?”
“Do you really want to know?” I realized that I didn’t.
Gideon and I walked to homeroom hand in hand. Tristan was already there when we arrived.
“So, what do I call this?” he asked as Gideon and I took our seats at the back. “Are you two like, together?” You’d think he hadn’t been there during all our romantic moments, a guardian angel chaperone.
“Dude, stop making my girlfriend uncomfortable,” Gideon said.
Tristan laughed nervously. “Oh, so it’s girlfriend now? This is, um. Hmm. I mean, you are Gideon. You know—” He made claws with his fingers and waggled them, “—rawr.”
“Go away.” Gideon said this in the most gentle voice he could muster, which wasn’t very gentle. Tristan was unfazed. He looked quickly over his shoulder, then back at us.
“Oh, you meant me?” He pointed at himself in feigned surprise. “All right, then. I’ll leave right now.” But he was still there. Both Gideon and I narrowed our eyes at him. I was going for intimidating, but I’ll admit I might have just looked nearsighted. I narrowed them a little more, to be sure I was getting my point across. “Sorry, I’m going.” He turned around and started to walk away.
Gideon started counting, “And one… two…”
Tristan turned around right on three, “But, it’s just—”
“Tristan, go away.” This time, Gideon said it through clenched teeth, and while I perhaps should have been more supportive, I couldn’t help laughing.
“Whoa. Fine. You don’t have to bite my head off. But, before I forget, Valoel said you were looking to borrow Abigail’s file. You’re welcome to borrow my copy if you want.”
“My file?” I asked. His statement was aimed at Gideon, but he’d made it looking straight at me. He was clearly asking about the file in front of me for my benefit.
Tristan’s eyes never left mine. “When we’re assigned to a human, we’re given an extensive dossier that contains every bit of information on that human, from the moment of birth. For example, your favorite stuffed animal when you were a toddler was a dog named Squeaky. He’s not gone, by the way. He’s in a box in the attic. Your mom forgot she packed him away.”
Crap.
“Wow. So you know everything about me?” Tristan nodded. This wasn’t creepy at all. “You too?” I asked Gideon.
He shook his head. “I burnt my copy of the file when I got it. You know how I feel about reading. The first time I saw you with a gun, though, I found myself wishing I’d read it.” He held up his hands in a show of surrender. “But I don’t want the file. I’d prefer to get to know you on my own.”
That was just the sweetest thing. I was so busy feeling mushy after that comment that I didn’t even notice Tristan finally leaving us alone.
“Now tell me you don’t think he’s weird.”
“He’s not. I really don’t understand why you don’t like him. He’s Tristan.”
“You do know you’re supposed to say nice things about your boyfriend and not his archenemy, right?”
“What, are you jealous?”
He nodded. “Very,” and then he leaned in and pressed his lips to mine.
I liked his kisses, but cut him short, because I didn’t want any PDA to get the media in my business.
I SAT BESIDE Sarah at lunchtime, and she commented on my socks, which were covered in brightly-colored strawberries. “This outfit cut off every other avenue of personal expression! Lay off my socks.”
“Are you sure what you want to express is best conveyed through day-glo strawberries?”
“Maybe it is. Strawberry fields forever.”
I pulled a copy of Barron’s 501 French Verbs out of Sarah’s backpack, and held it up between my thumb and forefinger, as though it were a smelly gym sock.
“You? This is cheating, Sarah. You should just learn the paradigms.”
“It’s not cheating any more than having the answers to calculus problems in the back of the textbook is cheating. You work through the problem, or the paradigm, and use the book to check yourself. Now get out of my bag, Strawberry Queen.”
She took the book back and wrinkled her beautiful, perfect nose at me. I tried narrowing my eyes at her. It didn’t work any better on her than it had on Tristan. I was going to have to practice my steely glare.
Speaking of Tristan, he walked up at that moment and waved at me from behind Sarah.
I stood up, “Well come on Tristan, let’s go.”
“Go where?” Gideon was quick to ask.
“Yeah, where are you two headed, Strawberry?”
“We’re headed to the teacher’s lounge to ask Mr. Bernard if we can do a parody of a scene from 1997’s Titanic.” I walked around, and without a word, took Tristan’s hands and started dragging him out of the cafeteria.
I could still feel Gideon’s eyes on me as we left.
“Way to play it cool.” Tristan laughed as we headed out.
I bumped my shoulders into his, “Shut up.”
“For both our sakes I hope Mr. Bernard says yes. There’s not a lot of time left in the semester if we have to come up with another topic. By the way: Strawberry? What’s that about?”
“Maybe I’ll make my living selling strawberry milkshakes and French fries at a drive-through thanks to my plummeting grades.”
“Nah. I’ll help you come up with another topic if this one falls through. I’ve got brains to spare.”
“Oh you do, do you?”
“Yep. I’m the complete package, baby.” He brushed back his hair with a dramatic swoop like one of my mother’s models, and set me laughing. He really was model-perfect. There was a time, before Gideon had entered the picture, when I would have been happy to entertain the prospect of a Tristan-and-Abigail pairing. Now though, dashing and funny though Tristan was, I couldn’t picture the G without the A.
CARPE DIEM
Tristan
I like to move it, move it!” I grabbed a woman nearby by the hand and spun her around with each “move it!”
Letting her go and blowing her a kiss, I moonwalked through the crowd on a busy London street. Well, I did something that looked vaguely like a moonwalk. People were watching, and some of them were filming me on their camera phones. YouTube, here I come!
I couldn’t be happier if I tried. I’d just left Abigail with Gideon, and I hadn’t thought twice about it, because I knew he wasn’t going to hurt he
r.
If someone had told me months ago that this was how things were going to end up when Gideon walked into Abigail’s life, I’d never have believed it.
I never thought I’d have time to do some of the things on my life to-do list, but today I had finally had the time to do seven of the things on the list.
#13: Sing “Oh Happy Day” at the top of my lungs on the Great Wall of China
#2: Go skiing on Mount Everest
#8: Moonwalk to “I Like to Move It” in the streets of London
#2: Wear pink sunglasses and go to the beach
#10: Ride a bike
#7: Go to the cinema and see a black and white movie
#1: Breathe
Yeah, maybe some of the things on the list were childish and flat-out stupid, but I did them anyway. The happy truth was, I’d left Abigail and Gideon right after school and hadn’t gone back to check on them even once. It had been three hours since then, and I wasn’t planning on going back for another hour. And I wasn’t worried at all
“Happy day?” the woman I’d randomly span around asked dizzily, and I nodded with the biggest of smiles on my face.
“A happy day indeed, madam.” It was as if I was finally alive, really living for the first time. And then I heard Abigail calling me.
Tristan? My breath caught, and then I heard her say. OK, am I doing this right? Here I am, talking to myself. I realized she was fine, and my smile returned.
OK, you did say if I needed you I should just call you. Well, I need you, so… I’m talking to myself. This is great!
I bowed down to the little girl I’d just been dancing with and then hurried away. I made sure I was around a corner and out of sight before I let myself disappear.
A second later I was in Gideon’s room in Grands.
“Talking to yourself isn’t a problem. It’s only a problem if you answer yourself.” Abigail was sitting on a blanket on the floor, surrounded by her schoolbooks.
She brightened. “You heard me?”
I nodded, “I’m pretty sure all of London heard you” I took a seat beside her on the blanket. “So, where’s the fire?”
“No fire, just wanted us to work on our Titanic project.” This was not on my to-do list.
I tried not to show how disappointed I was “Must we? Can’t we go ice-skating or something?”
“Gideon and his sister left, something about needing family time. I figured it was an opportunity to finish writing up our speech. I can’t believe I let you talk me into reworking a scene from the movie.”
Abigail opened the sound file on her computer, and the strains of Céline Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” filled the air.
“How about I stand in the corner and play the triangle while you sing this song?” I offered. She was having none of it. “Fine, how about the chimes?”
I stood up and offered Abigail my hand. “Fine, come on then. I’m Jack, and you, my beautiful headstrong rich girl, are Rose.”
“I’m not singing. This is supposed to be a parody, not a tragedy.”
TITANIC
Abigail
“Some mistakes, are worth making.”
He’s serious!
Tristan was sure that the class would be immediately caught up in our presentation. His enthusiasm was adorable, and it was catching. He held the blanket up between us. “Come on. This is the floating debris. Grab on, or you’ll drown.” I took hold of the blanket.
Tristan leaned in close to me. “Winning that ticket, Rose, was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
His expression sobered me. “Hmm…” I mumbled. “I believe your next line is ‘Glub! Glub!’”
“Stop it.” He pretended to splash for a moment, and then he took one of my hands and looked me straight in the eye. “You must promise me that you will survive—no matter what happens.” Immediately my smile disappeared. My cheeks flushed as I realized how close together we were standing.
“I don’t see why we shouldn’t both survive. Look at the size of this piece of debris. There’s plenty of room for both of us on here. Climb on up, Jack.”
Tristan cut me off, trying not to laugh, and grabbed my other hand, “It’s not so much a question of room, Rose, as buoyancy. This thing is physically big enough, but it can’t keep both of us afloat. Oh, um, glub! Glub!” He let go of me for a moment to go through his pockets for the list of equations he’d worked out for measuring the buoyant force of the large piece of wood Jack and Rose had clung to while awaiting rescue. While he searched his pocket with one hand, he pretended to tread water with the other. I laughed and held out my hand to him.
He took it, and I pulled him closer, to save him from the icy ocean water. He was still having no luck finding his list of equations. “I think that what I’ve proven is that Jack would die of hypothermia before he was able to finish explaining the math.” He put a hand on each of my shoulders and pressed his forehead to mine. “Promise me, and never let go of that promise.” At this point, we were so close together that I could feel his body heat.
Without meaning to, I found myself whispering, “I promise.” I pulled him closer and continued, “I’ll never let go. I’ll never let go.” Then both Tristan and I slowly leaned closer into each other. Our lips were inches apart. I felt a surge of electricity crackling between his body and mine, and I knew nothing good was going to come of it.
I couldn’t pull away—no, that was a lie. I could have pulled away. I just didn’t want to. Why, I didn’t know.
Our lips touched, and suddenly Tristan pulled back, shaking his head.
And then I remembered where we were: Gideon’s room.
Oh, my God, Gideon! What just happened? Did I just…? Did we almost…? I found myself wishing I could disappear in an instant, the way Tristan and Gideon did. I had had a boyfriend for what, two seconds, and already I was about to cheat? What the hell was wrong with me? And even now, only half of my brain was worried about Gideon, while the other half was still on Tristan and how much I had wanted to kiss him.
“Please tell me you felt something just now, because I feel terribly guilty, and if I’m going to feel this bad I would like to at least have earned it,” I breezed.
“Can I lie?” He placed his hands on my cheeks, and I shivered, not because I was bothered by the Grandinian cold and damp, but because his touch somehow amplified the current between us.
I shook my head. “No, I want the truth.”
“I can’t tell you the truth, Abigail.” His voice dropped down to a whisper. “So if you asking if I feel this…” once again, we leaned closer into each other and the crackling in the air between us intensified “… well, the answer is no.” He gently brushed my cheek.
“Your first lie,” I said.
“I didn’t lie,” he whispered, pressing his forehead against me. “I’m practicing being selfish.” And then once again, as if by clockwise, we started leaning into the space between, our lips almost touched when… “I should have brought some popcorn.” At the sound of the voice, we both jumped, pulling away from each other, and shattering the connection between us.
There in the doorway was Valoel. I thought I should say something to defend myself, but I couldn’t imagine what that would be. “Valoel, I—”
She cut me off. “I was never here. I saw nothing. Leave you two to solve this.” I looked up just in time to see her disappear.
“This is… I… Air. Lumens. I need to… I need air.”
He needed air all the way in Lumens? Yeah, that sounded about right.
Nodding was all I could manage, as the voice at the back of my head kept saying, “Oh. My. God. Abigail. Cells. You. Are. In. So. Much. Trouble!”
DESIRE
Guilt.
It was eating away at me.
“Abby, are you all right?”
Dammit, Gideon could tell there was something wrong.
My thoughts were at war. Tell him. Don’t tell him. Nothing happe
ned. Of course something happened. Tristan is just a friend. Oh, that phrase isn’t helping anymore. Don’t tell him. Tell him. Don’t tell him.
“So, Valoel came back but you didn’t…where did you go?” I asked to distract myself.
“I stopped by your house on the way back to check if your mother was home. She’s not, but there’s a new book on your bed.”
I turned my full attention to him. “A book?”
“Yeah, about a girl who ruined her future when she got pregnant at fifteen. I think she’s just worried about you.”
“I suppose if I look at it from her perspective, I can understand. A little. All she knows is that I suddenly have a boyfriend, one who has mysteriously managed to show up at her well-guarded compound more than once. But honestly, it’s getting on my nerves. My common sense didn’t just evaporate overnight. I’m not going to jump into bed with you, and I don’t know what I can say that will make her believe that.”
“You could remind her that you’re well-armed. That might work.”
“If only it were that easy.”
“Besides, hold on just a second.” Gideon pulled my face close to his. “You’re not going to jump into bed with me? Never?”
“No. I mean, yes, I’d like to. I want to, someday, but right now, I’m not ready.”
“I understand, but can I get a date and time here?” he asked teasingly.
“I’ll understand if you don’t want to wait, but… ”
“We’ll wait as long as you want,” he said, backing away from me in mock horror.
“Thanks for being so understanding.” Now that he was being all sweet and reasonable my guilt doubled. “I think I have another thing I need you to be understanding about.” Gideon pressed his nose to mine and then planted a kiss on my forehead. I actually wished he were being sarcastic now, instead of sweet. It would make it easier for me.
“So tell me. What do I need to be understanding about?” I was having trouble swallowing around the huge dry lump that had suddenly formed in my throat.
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