by Roy, Deanna
Corabelle turned to me. “Hey, you’re not even looking.”
“I already see what I want to see.”
She dropped her arms. “It’s different tonight, isn’t it?”
I glanced up at the sky, finally. “Colder, certainly.”
She punched my arm. “You know what I mean. We’re actually together.”
I lay back on the roof, dragging a backpack under my head. “Well, the first time we were in shock at seeing each other, and the second time we were fighting. So yeah, this is new.”
She eased down and curled up next to me, her head on my shoulder. I pulled her in tight, the way I’d wanted to that first night. I wasn’t going to take for granted that I could do it now.
“We’re a team this time. Life is just as hard as it was at the other two star parties, but this time we’re in it together.”
I squeezed her shoulders. “We are.”
Her breath puffed against my cheek. “It’s the last night before everything could change.”
“Nothing’s going to change.”
“If that boy belongs to you.”
“He doesn’t.”
She hesitated, then said, “I saw how much you cared about him.”
“I worry about what will happen to them. Her family was not kind about her situation. Tijuana isn’t an easy place to survive.”
She fell silent again, and the weight of her unasked questions pressed down on us like the stars.
“I think I see Delta,” I said.
Corabelle turned her head to look up. “I don’t remember which stars to compare it to.”
“Zeta, Epsilon, and Delta form a triangle off Cepheus,” I said. “Zeta is the corner of the house.”
“Hey! You have been paying attention!”
“Delta is the one farthest away.”
“It’s in between the other two in brightness.”
“3.9 then.”
“You know this?” Corabelle turned her face back to me.
“Hey, I wasn’t that bad a student in high school.” I smiled at her.
She nestled into my neck, her nose cold. “Classic underachiever.”
I borrowed a line from Jenny. “I have to keep everyone’s expectations low.”
“Mine are sky high.”
I took one of her hands in mine. “You’re the only one I aim to please.”
Her body tensed, but before I could ask her what was wrong, she asked, “How many times did you see her?”
“Rosa?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not really sure.”
“A lot then.”
“For a while.”
“When was the last time you were…with her?”
“I’m guessing you don’t mean talking.”
She didn’t answer.
I sighed. “Are you sure you want to go into this?”
“I want to know what I’m up against.”
I drew her in even closer, each curve of her body pressed against mine. “I don’t keep track of these things. All I know is that once I saw you again, nothing else mattered. I don’t want to see her again. I don’t plan to see her again. I’m anxious for all this to be behind us so I don’t have to even think about it.”
“She loves you, Gavin.”
“She thinks she does. I’m just a meal ticket.”
“That boy doesn’t see you that way.”
I lifted her chin so she could look at me. “I totally understand why you would be worried. But nothing, and I mean nothing, is going to come between us again.”
She watched me with quiet eyes, fearful and deep. I felt overcome with the need to keep her as close to me as possible, to never let anything hurt her again. I bent in close to kiss her. I always communicated to her best this way, able to pour into her all the things I felt without having to fumble with words.
Her arms came around my head, and she responded in earnest. I realized I had not gotten a chance to kiss her those other nights on the roof, when I wanted to, and now the chance had come, and I let it unfurl, holding her as tight as I dared, delving into her soft, warm mouth like a dying man.
She gasped, and I pulled away, afraid I had pushed her too hard, that breathing was still too much, but she whispered, “Please take me to your place.” And so I stood up, helping her rise to standing, and we raced away from the stars and the students and the TA and the cold uncaring sea.
31: Corabelle
Gavin was so careful with me, so good.
I’d never been more happy to see his weight benches, his listing bookcases, and the scattered possessions that were all uniquely his.
He made a show of carrying me through the living room, as though I were frail, but I let him. The sensation of floating through his apartment, carried in the cradle of his arms, helped the world fall away. I could forget Rosa and her little boy, the lab room, the test results we expected tomorrow. My parents disappeared, and the hospital, the suction tubes, and the unending stream of nurses.
He laid me carefully across the bed, removing my shoes and wrapping me in a blanket. He reached inside the bundle of cloth for the snap to my jeans, easing them down without letting the chill touch my skin.
“You’re going to keep those socks on,” he whispered. “Not going to let you get cold.”
“That’s sexy.”
“But it is.”
His hands moved to the hem of my sweater, pushing it up. When my belly recoiled from the chill of his fingers, he withdrew, rubbing his palms on his jeans, then returning. “Better?” he asked.
I nodded, inhaling sharply when his hands grazed the cups of my bra as he lifted the soft wool over my chest. I wanted him to move swiftly, but he kept things slow, intent on his purpose. He tugged my elbow down and out of the first sleeve, then the second, and pulled the sweater over my head.
The blanket loosened on my shoulders, and he tucked it back in. I no longer felt cold at all, heat spreading through me as he stood at the end of the bed and pulled his sweatshirt over his head. I still had not gotten used to the changes in him from when he was a teen. His chest was broad and hard, his arms thick with muscle. When he bent to untie his boots, the corded expanse of his back shifted with every movement. I couldn’t take it any longer and twisted around so that I knelt on the bed, extracting a hand from the blankets to run it along his spine, feeling each indentation of sinew and bone.
He grinned up at me, that wicked expression that I’d known since I was small and had haunted my nights during the years we were apart. When he kicked off the boots and started to unbutton his jeans, I pushed him aside, grasping the waistband myself and jerking it open one-handed. The zipper came down with a quiet hiss.
I couldn’t stand it anymore and let the blanket fall, tugging on his jeans and peeling them down. He was erect inside the thin fabric of his boxers, and I ran my hand along it, feeling the pulsing throb.
He kicked the jeans off and pressed me down again, insisting on keeping the blanket in place. I pulled one end open and drew him inside it, creating a cocoon around us, soft and dark. He rolled farther onto the bed, lying over me, his lips covering mine. His hips pressed into me and I thrust upward to meet him, reaching between us to get rid of the boxers.
He was hot in my hands, and I wanted to make him crazy, to feel as desperate as I did. I worked the shaft with my fingers, pressing into the tip, reveling in the slippery wetness that meant he was as needy as me.
He reached beneath me to unhook my bra and shoved it out of his way, taking a breast into his mouth with a hunger that shocked me into another level of urgency. I did not want to wait. I could not bear another minute without him inside me. I let go of him and pressed against his back, driving my hips into him.
Gavin grasped the edge of my panties and eased them down. I reached for him, wanting to thrust us together, but he shifted away, driving first one, then two fingers inside me. I arched up, crying out, and he braced my back with one hand, helping me hold position without strain. His mouth
left my nipple and it puckered in the cold until he folded me close against him.
I didn’t think I could take any more, his fingers fluttering against me, the pleasure spreading out but intensifying my need. He kissed me again, and my tongue lashed into him, frenzied, aching. His mouth trailed along my jaw, my collarbone, along the curve of a breast again, and heading down. I clutched his shoulders, unable to wait, wanting him now, stopping his descent. He understood and shifted over me.
I wanted to weep with relief as he slid inside, spreading everything open like a flower blooming. Emotion crashed over me. I did not want to let him go. I could not bear any space between us, any distance at all.
He braced himself on his elbows and cradled my head in his hands. His strokes slowed down, deep and drawn out. His lips caressed my forehead. The light from a streetlamp outside cast a feeble glow across his shoulders as the muscles shifted. I felt a round of weeping coming on and tried to stop it, not wanting to trigger any coughing or difficulty breathing. But something was changing between us, and I was so afraid of tomorrow, the test, what would happen if the boy was his. How I would manage, knowing Gavin’s son was alive and well but there might be no others, the only child of ours turning to dust in a powder-blue coffin in the ground.
“Shhh, shhhh,” he said, rubbing his thumbs along my cheeks where I had failed to stanch the tears.
The harder I tried to hold in the sobs, the more determined they were to come out.
“Hey,” Gavin said. “It’s going to be okay. We’re going to be okay.”
I wanted to believe him. I tried to imagine every scenario and work through it. The disappointed Rosa, turning away after the test was negative. The exuberant version, if she was right. Gavin’s expression, relief or shock. My own reaction, stalwart or embarrassingly overwrought.
“You’re thinking,” Gavin said, his body moving more steadily now, with more purpose. “No thinking. Let it go.”
He released my head and propped higher on his arms, biceps bulging as he worked faster. I gasped with the change of pressure and intensity, and seeing I was engaged again, he reached for my knee, lifting it up and giving himself the leverage to work even harder and faster.
I clutched his ribs, the pleasure radiating out from where we were joined. He took it another step, resting my ankle on his shoulder, and his freed hand returned to the folds between us, pressing into the already hot nub.
He knew exactly where to take it, and I spiraled straight into oblivion, the tightness blasting through me like a wave. My voice and my fear and my grief and my release all mixed together as he worked straight through the orgasm. When I began to come down, he let my leg fall back to the bed, but didn’t pause even a moment, moving his hands beneath me and flipping me over.
He gathered me against him from behind, still refusing to let me get cold. I propped up on my elbows and he slammed inside, each thrust sending a flash through my body. I wanted to scream with it, get lost, obliterate every other sensation that tried to crowd its way into my thoughts.
He reached around and pressed his fingers against me yet again. I thought I would be exhausted, spent, but instead I was exhilarated, frantic, pressing backwards into him, moving against his strokes to take it in harder and faster, until nothing existed but the crash of his skin into mine.
I felt it building again, tighter this time, more focused and intense. But I refused to let it unfurl, keeping it wound up. I was in control, and as Gavin moved, I met him with more force, until his body tensed. Only then did I release the pent-up tension, my cries mixing with his, the hot flow pulsing into me.
I collapsed down against the bed, Gavin crashing over my back. He withdrew and pulled me in close. Shivers ran along my body, and he jerked the blanket around us, tucking it in tight. “I got you cold,” he said. “I shouldn’t have started this.”
I rolled over into him. “I needed it. We needed it.”
He stroked my hair. “It’s not worth it if you get sick again.”
“It is. And I won’t. I feel fine.” I pressed my lips against the hard muscle of his chest, reveling in the heat of his skin. “I don’t want tomorrow to come.”
His arms tightened around me. “We’re going to be fine either way.” But his voice caught at the end, and I knew he was seeing the scene too, the one that proved the boy was his, and his fear at what I would do.
I couldn’t comfort him in this. I didn’t know myself.
32: Gavin
Waking next to Corabelle felt like the last good thing that could happen that day. I slid away from her, making sure the blanket was tight against her. Her breathing still wasn’t as deep as before, and I worried about this, hoping I had something hot I could make her to take with the antibiotics.
The floor creaked as I pulled on some sweatpants and headed to the kitchen. We’d dropped her bag by the door, so I fetched it, digging around for the bottle of pills her father had picked up at the hospital pharmacy. I read the label, the words blurring. We had hours to go until the meeting for the test results. I wasn’t sure how to spend a day like this any more than I had the day of the funeral, just waiting, unable to think about anything else.
I dug through my cabinets, pretty sure that somewhere along the way I’d been given herbal tea at some holiday thing — probably back when I worked at the grocery store. I shoved aside all the other stuff I never opened, some jams Mom had sent, a box of stoned wheat crackers that came from who knows where. Sure enough, in a little cheap basket, I found a selection of tea packets tied together with a red bow.
Peppermint. Orange Spice. Blackberry. I snatched up the peppermint and filled a pot with water. Mom had a kettle or something, but I figured hot water was hot water.
As I waited for it to warm up, I stared out the window at the empty trees, bare limbed and bleak. I tried to picture Rosa and the boy, getting up in some other house somewhere in the city. She seemed so sure that her son was mine. Probably this was a happy morning for her.
I still didn’t know anything. If Manuel belonged to me, the test wouldn’t make a difference at first. There was a birth certificate to change. Legal stuff. Child support. She was from another country. That would make it complicated. We’d probably need a lawyer.
My head started clanging and I pressed the heel of my hand into my eye. Maybe I would just drop out of school for a while, get things to some sort of equilibrium. Get Rosa set up somewhere, get Corabelle with me. If she still wanted me.
Damn.
I shook the bottle of pills, pulling one out. I didn’t even have health insurance for myself, much less the kid. I’d have to fix that.
Fix a lot of things.
I walked through the living room. I could sell the weights, maybe a few other things. Scrape enough together to get us started. The raise was going to help, once I got back to work. I had to do that, pronto. Bud had given me those insurance papers. I think he had some group policy I was eligible for now.
Time to fucking grow up.
I could hear the water bubbling in the kitchen, so I went back and dumped it in a mug with the tea bag. I didn’t even know the simplest thing, like if Corabelle would want sugar in it. I carried it back to the bedroom along with the pill, setting them on a rickety table beside the bed.
She was still asleep, her brows drawn together like she was dreaming fitfully, or in some pain. The tea needed to cool a bit, so I could let her sleep.
If there was ever a day that could change your life, this one was it.
33: Corabelle
Tina waited for us by the doors to the lab. “We’re actually going to move to one of the meeting rooms,” she said. “There’s some legal stuff involved here, so I asked one of the social workers to come along.”
I glanced at Gavin, to see if he also registered that this meant Tina knew what the results were.
Tina caught the look. “I haven’t peeked. I don’t know anything. So don’t try and read the results in my expression. Besides, I’ve got the poker face of
a hard-core gambler.”
“I bet you do,” Gavin said.
“I could lie about your mother and you’d buy it,” she said.
“I believe that too,” he said.
Tina leaned against the wall. “Rosa’s not here yet. We’ll just wait.” She’d skipped the pigtails today, her blond hair sleek on her head. She looked like one of those waif models you might find in a magazine, tiny and strangely dressed, her yellow eye shadow almost otherworldly.
Today her striped stockings were green and blue, two shades so matched in tone that they almost blended together. I decided staring at them was easier than looking anywhere else.
Gavin took my hand. He’d been attentive all day, fussing over tea and then breakfast. We’d met my parents for lunch and then driven them to the airport. I could not have been more relieved to see them go, but the meal had gone easily enough. No arguments. No awkward talk. Gavin and my father hadn’t exactly come to any understandings, but at least they could tolerate being in the same room.
“She’s here,” Tina said, looking behind us.
Gavin turned around first, and I watched his face to see if it revealed anything about what he was feeling. He put on a grim smile and said, “Glad you made it.”
I forced myself to face her as well. She was alone today, wearing the same teal coat, this time with a gray sweater and jeans, much less dressy than yesterday. She seemed calmer too, far more than I felt myself.
“Manuelito is with my cousin,” she said. “I decide he should not come.”
Tina pushed away from the wall. “Probably a good choice. Let the adults work this out.” She pulled out her phone and tapped out a message. “Just letting the social worker know we’re heading her direction.”
We all walked together, Tina leading, Gavin and I behind her, and Rosa alone at the end. I lost track of the corridors we snaked through, through an administrative office, then into a small room tucked away from the bustle of the medical side of the hospital.
Another woman waited there, thankfully not Sabrina and her cat’s-eye glasses, but a grandmotherly one, an official-looking folder on the oval conference table in front of her. I could not take my eyes off it, knowing my future rested in those pages. All of ours did.