Wandering Wild

by Jessica Taylor

  “Wen, stop it,” I whisper. “I need to do this.”

  “And you don’t care what that makes you?”

  Tears stream down my cheeks.

  “Oh shit. I’m so sorry. I meant because you’re engaged. I didn’t . . .”

  I wipe my eyes on my sleeve and try to push past him.

  He lodges his shoulders in the doorway, blocking my path. He’d only have to yell out, and every trailer, camper, and tent would be aglow. Everyone would come running, and there would be no leaving, no night between me and Spencer, and no good-bye. All I’d leave behind me would be a trail of dust and maybe even Spencer’s broken heart.

  Wen would say he did it for my own good, and he might be right.

  I try to move past Wen, but he stands his ground.

  “Why would you do this?”

  “Because Felix made me an offer. I should have told you. Sonia knows, so she’s bound to tell you soon enough. Felix said if I’d marry him without causing trouble, he’d talk to Lando—he’d pay Lando, even—so you’d always be with me and Felix if we went to another camp. You and me’d always be together.”

  Wen stares at me in a way that would make my throat ache if I didn’t look away. “Oh, Tal. Not for me. You can’t—”

  “I might.” Emotion thrums over my vocal cords. “The point is, I don’t know. Everything’s uncertain. Tomorrow, we’re going to be somewhere else, somewhere far away from Cedar Falls. I’m never going to see Spencer again, but I want tonight. I’m not sure how many choices I’ve got left that’ll be my own, but I want to make this choice. I want this choice to be mine.”

  Wen’s bare feet shift away from the door. As I step past him and into the night, he says to my back, “I trust you.”

  I only wish I trusted myself.

  CHAPTER 30

  The house is dark when I step into the foyer. As I replace the key under the Sway family doormat, screeching comes from the tree in the yard behind me.

  I take three deep breaths. I’ve heard this in the forest before. An owl.

  Without turning around, I push the front door shut and block out the sound.

  The stairs creak under my shoes. I imagine Marcus and Ella flipping on the lights, tumbling from their room in their bathrobes to find me standing in their house all alone after midnight. All the lies I’ve ever told will run together, leaving nothing but the truth sitting on my tongue. That’s how I’ll vanish from Spencer’s life, not with a bang or a whisper, but a midnight confrontation. But the hallway stays dark all the way to his room.

  A ribbon of light glows from under the door.

  As I turn the knob, my hands shake, because doing this means the distance between the outside world and me is about to crumble.

  Spencer’s sitting at his desk, scrolling through a website. In his Google search box are the words typical college interview questions. He whirls around in his chair. He’s still dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt, all the buttons undone and a T-shirt underneath.

  His lips part, but I say, “Shh,” and cross the bedroom.

  He meets me at the end of his bed, the very center of his hunter green rug. “You’re breaking into my house now?”

  I inch forward until our bodies almost touch and work my hands into the space between his plaid shirt and his T-shirt. His warmth radiates outward so that I don’t know where his body heat ends and mine begins. “Come down to the basement with me.”

  “You don’t have to whisper, Tal. My parents are at a fundraiser, and they won’t be home until after three, and Margaret’s at a sleepover.” He hooks his thumbs into the belt loops of my jeans, tugging our hips closer but still a respectable distance apart. “I don’t really care where they are. All I want to know is what I did to deserve this surprise. And how I can do it again.”

  I shift my gaze to the bed. “I guess we can stay right here.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “What do you mean? For what?”

  I press my fingers to his lips, then replace my fingertips with my mouth. Crushing my whole body against him, I answer his question without speaking. He doesn’t sink into me, not at first, but when he does, I’m oh-so-aware his body wants this, too.

  He gasps into my mouth and tilts his chin toward the ceiling, breaking away. “Um, Tal. What are you—” His jeans scrape the comforter as he backs away from me.

  I could tell him everything—that the next few hours are the only thing standing between the road and me—but there aren’t words that don’t sound like good-bye. I want tonight. This one memory. Perfect or terrible, I want this to be ours, unmarred by him knowing this is truly the end.

  No matter what happens, wherever I go, we’ll both carry these parts of each other forever. I want to share this with him more than I’ve ever wanted anything. It’s not going to be perfect, not this night, not with the doomed-from-the-start history of us, but it’s the only shot we have of giving each other something to hold on to long after my wheels hit the road.

  I crawl over him, and as I grab his belt buckle, his breath catches. “I don’t know about this.”

  “It’s okay, Spencer. I’ll respect you in the morning.” But my fingers tremble and don’t cooperate. The control I’m trying to keep is slipping through my hands.

  Spencer wraps his fists around mine, steadying me. “Are you all right?”

  I stare at his hands, still holding mine tight. “In the car, I should have told you, but I’ve never done this before, either.”

  Our gazes connect, and his eyes are oceans I’ll never cross. “If you want to stop, Tal, we can stop.”

  Rona would kill me. Sonia could never understand me taking off my clothes for a markie.

  I realize what I’m really afraid of—he’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted that hasn’t made any sense.

  “I don’t want to stop.” I dip into the depths of myself and say, “There are few things I’ve ever wanted more than this.”

  From an orange shoebox in his closet, Spencer locates a little foil packet that manages to make my always-steady pulse race like hell. As he kicks his jeans to the carpet, I prop myself up on my elbows to get a better look at him. He’s wearing navy boxers with a plaid waistband and little yellow airplanes that won’t take either of us anywhere.

  My stare makes him blush down at the carpet.

  Seconds pass without him touching me, leaving me fully dressed while he’s damn near naked. I find his hands and guide them to my body, making him aware I’m not look-don’t-touch. Not anymore.

  “Spencer.” My voice runs away from me as I whisper, “Please.”

  His fingertips find the edge of my T-shirt, carefully exposing a small slice of my stomach. His mouth meets my skin, and warm bubbles fizzle under my surface.

  We undress each other the rest of the way until there’s only the slip of the sheets against our skin. He slides into the bed beside me, and my heart nearly pounds out of my chest. As I stare up at the plaster ceiling, his traveling hands take me to places that don’t exist in anyone’s atlas, all the way over that edge he’s always talking about.

  Our bodies frozen inches apart, he says, “There’s something I have to tell you.”

  “Will it make me want to do this more or less?”

  “Knowing you?” He cringes. “Less.”

  “There’s tomorrow,” I say, even though tomorrow for Spencer and me won’t come. There’s my tomorrow and there’s his, but never a tomorrow the two of us will share. “Tell me then.”

  All apprehension vanishes, and he looks at me, really looks at me, so even though we’re naked beside each other, his gaze connected with mine makes me feel the most exposed.

  He says my name, breathes it into my neck. Here, in Spencer’s house, in his bedroom, with the weight of him over me, there’s no markie world and no Wanderer world.

  There’s only Spencer Sway and me.

  CHAPTER 31

  With my eyes half open, I breathe the scent of laundry detergent and new clothes. The smell of Spencer. The
world around me comes into focus, and I’m in my own bed, in our tent trailer. Alone.

  I peel back my quilt, and I’m still wearing Spencer’s plaid shirt.

  The screen door swings open, and Wen glances at me and then looks away. His face turns the most horrible shade of red. Maybe Wen and I should be spared those private details of each other’s lives. I’m not ashamed. It’s just that I never imagined this would drive a wedge between us, when nothing had before.

  I pull my quilt under my chin and tame my bedhead with my hands. “Hey.”

  Wen doesn’t look at me. “I guess you want to know why we didn’t leave?”

  Everything spins as I sit up too quickly. The sun is bright through the screened-over window beside my bed. The day is wasting away, and we’re all sitting still in Cedar Falls. “I didn’t even think about it.”

  He hops on his own bed. “Some people got up real early this morning—way before sun-up—so they could start loading their RVs, and Lando wakes up Boss, and—get this—Boss said we have to stay.”

  “Said?” Said is for those who speak. “What are you talking about? He spoke?”

  “Yep, he crooked his finger to Lando. Whispered one word: Rona. Lando brought him his chalkboard, and Boss scratched, Not without Rona. But Lando said the camp still doesn’t have enough money to bail her out.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. So, um, now that we’re not leaving, will you still get her out?”

  “A promise is a promise.”

  The gift of time doesn’t leave me the relief I might have expected. Not after the way I left last night.

  The buzzing of Spencer’s garage door opening was what woke me. The clock on his nightstand said it was 2:23 AM. Spencer didn’t budge. Beside me, he lay asleep on his stomach with his fingertips grazing my rib cage and his other arm slung over the bed. The front door slammed shut, and Ella’s and Marcus’s voices trickled up the staircase. They were home from their benefit and oblivious to the fact I was naked in their son’s bed.

  I listened as his parents shut themselves inside their room, and when the house went quiet again, I slipped free from Spencer’s touch, crept from his bed, and threw on my clothes.

  In the dark of his bedroom, I stood still for one moment that stretched to infinity, eyeing the place where the sheets moved low on his back as he breathed. I couldn’t wake him and tell him I was leaving for good. For someone who only ever said good-bye to places, it wasn’t a word that easily dripped from my lips when it came to people. Every time we packed, there were farewells to be said. I was afraid there were only so many good-byes inside me, afraid of what would happen when they were all used up.

  I couldn’t, wouldn’t say good-bye, so I wrote my farewell on an oversized Post-it from his desk and stuck it to the bed, inches from his splayed fingers.

  I wanted nothing more than to climb between his soft sheets and arrange myself beside him. Or wake up in the Sway house and know all the Wanderers were gone from town and that I wasn’t one of them anymore.

  A sliver of light from the hallway lit up the rug as I cracked open his bedroom door. Spencer’s plaid shirt was balled up on the floor, taunting me. I was never any good at resisting temptation.

  I slipped my arms inside the sleeves, tiptoed down the stairs, and took off out the front door, taking with me two pieces of Spencer Sway, neither of which he’s ever getting back.

  Wen hops from his bed and walks down the trailer to the spot beside me. He digs into his pocket and flicks a few bills between his fingers. “Oh, I almost forgot. Seventy-three extra bucks.”

  “Where’d you get this?”

  For each day he’s taken off into town, he’s come in with forty or fifty dollars to add to our pile. Whatever he’s doing is working well.

  “You forget I’m capable of making money without you, Tal.”

  Making money—a phrase that has become synonymous with stealing, scamming, conning, and even risking our lives.

  “But how?”

  “Chess,” he says. “Hustled some old guys in the park.”

  “You keep it.” I hold it out to him. “My pockets are bulging as it is.”

  Chess is a game I understand all right, but I’m no chess hustler. My mind doesn’t work the same way as Wen’s, mathematical and always five moves into the future. It’s a shame, because the hustling money is good.

  “We have more time here,” says Wen. “I thought you’d be glad.”

  I must be frowning. “Sure.”

  “You’re not going to see him again.”

  He knows me too well. I’ve closed the door on Spencer and me, and I won’t open it again.

  Last night was supposed to make everything better. I don’t regret what I did, not at all, but now I don’t know how I’ll marry Felix. I can’t possibly stand the feeling of his hands moving down my body or the weight of him crawling over me.

  “Spencer’s my past. I’m scared as hell Felix is my future.”

  Wen squeezes his knees until his knuckles turn white. “You’re not doing it for me. You’re not. I can’t live with that.”

  He’s got tears in his eyes. It’s hit him, how serious the threat of Felix is, and it’s an ugly thing seeing it rip him apart.

  I lay my head on his shoulder. “The only way out of this is to come up with the money or leave. And if we leave, they’ll find us, and we’ll be right back where we started.”

  “But how are we going to get the money? We can’t run any cons now. Not with those yayhoos and their fliers.”

  Usually the cons silently call to me, like the crackle of electricity down telephone lines, but today there’s no wishing a plan into action.

  Cedar Falls is off limits, like Wen said, but maybe that’s the answer.

  “That’s it,” I say. “We’ve got to head to another town.”

  CHAPTER 32

  There’s a widely known maxim in the world of grift: You can’t cheat an honest man.

  So as I watch Wen screech into a parking space in front of the Denny’s in Pike, I hope it’s not an honest man he finds.

  Down the street from the restaurant, I sit lengthwise on a park bench, kicking up my heels. Wen disappears inside, wearing a starched shirt and slacks. I close my eyes and imagine the exchange inside.

  He’ll strut through the doors, order some food at the lunch counter, and make small talk with the waitresses and the other diners. On his right hand, he’s wearing this great big emerald ring—fake emerald, that is—and he’s talking with his hands, flashing it as he talks, drawing every bit of attention to it he can.

  When he goes to pay, he’ll shake an amount of cash most people have never laid their eyes on, every bit of our savings from the Cool Whip container. He’ll say good-bye to everyone inside, and right as he’s about to step onto the sidewalk, he’ll declare, “My ring! It’s missing!”

  They’ll scramble to the diner floor, everyone who’s inside, combing the tile, over dropped forks, dried-up french fries, and not-so-lucky pennies. But no one, not no one, will find that ring.

  “A reward!” Wen’ll yell. “Four grand for anyone who finds it. I’m staying in room forty-five at the Holiday Inn. Room forty-five at the Holiday Inn!”

  My brother knows this con as well as the back roads of the South. He’ll come through, I’m certain.

  Imagining my brother working the room like a pro brings a smile to my mouth, the first smile since I left Spencer’s bedroom. For a few moments, I had let him slip my mind.

  I don’t know if it’s the part of me I left in Spencer’s bedroom or the part of him I’ll always carry with me, but I’m either less of a Wanderer or more of a markie.

  There’s this image I have of future Spencer with gray hair around his temples and a closet full of business suits, a wife who wears pearls, and 2.3 children. And me, I’m a flicker of a memory to him. I wonder where I’ll live inside Spencer’s mind. A faceless girl with a long-forgotten name. Some easy girl he laid.

  Where I�
�ll fit him into my memory, I don’t know, and that hurts most of all. By creating that night with Spencer, I thought I’d have something to carry with me forever, and that it would be enough. Now I don’t want to live in the shadow of that one night forever.

  I look up, and the Chevy’s already coming toward me. Wen cranks down the window, wearing a cocky grin that a good scam brings.

  He drops the ring into my palm. “Do your thing. It’s looking good in there.”

  “That’s what I like to hear.”

  “Try the suit by the lunch counter. Meet you two streets over at the park. Be safe.”

  The Chevy roars down the road as I saunter toward the Denny’s with the ring, a small lump in the pocket of my bomber jacket. That’s not the only thing I’ve got on me. Over five thousand dollars is pressed around the waistband of my jeans. That makes my heart rate pick up. It’s one thing to walk around with that much money and another to con with it. One wrong move, and my money could be gone in a flash.

  The bells on the door jangle as I step inside. I stand beside the gumball machine, the earpiece of my sunglasses resting against my painted lips and my hand on the hip I’m popping. There’s a feeling in the air, a rhythm I can feel pulsing through the room. Maybe it’s the knowledge I’ve got at least five hundred dollars coming my way.

  The patrons look me up and down. I take them all in. I notice the leer of a fortyish man wearing shirtsleeves and dress pants, his suit jacket slung over the back of his chair.

  I pull up a seat, leaving one bar stool between us. There’s no reason to appear too eager, and it’s more natural if I let the mark come to me. I order a Coke with cherries and wait for him to strike up a conversation, let me pull him into my trap

  Not ten seconds later, he shoots me a grin. “Just how is your day going, miss?”

  “Not half bad.” I dip my fingers around in my drink, fishing out a cherry. “How about you?”

  “Couldn’t ask for more.”