Sapphire giggled. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Thank you for a wonderful night, Jimmy.”
She closed her eyes and her face moved closer to Jimmy. Jimmy was taken aback for a moment, and then he leaned in. Their lips met.
Jimmy had seen kisses presented with fireworks on television and in movies and cartoons. However, he had never believed that such a thing was actually possible. That all changed the night he kissed Sapphire. At first her lips felt cold against his, and her tongue felt like ice in his mouth. Then there was a sudden feeling of electricity, and an overwhelming feeling of warmth that passed from Jimmy into Sapphire and then it was returned to him. She pressed closer to him, her arms wrapping around his waist. He wrapped his arms around her; she felt solid and alive beneath his fingers. He felt time spin out and he could swear he could feel the motion of the Earth beneath him. For a moment, he had the irrational fear that the planet would just fling them off, hurling them into the endless void of space. They felt connected, yet disconnected from nature and everything around them. They were lost, together, in that moment, and nothing existed save for Sapphire and her body beneath his hands and the smell of her hair, which still smelled like whatever shampoo she had used that morning.
Then, just as suddenly, it was over. She pulled back and blinked at him. She opened her mouth to speak, but was unable to find her voice, and she closed her mouth, opened it again, and then closed it again. Then she laughed.
“Good night,” she said.
Jimmy nodded and then waved. He hoped that by doing so he looked cool. Inside, however, he felt like he was about to pass out. He staggered back to the car, grabbing hold of the door to support his own weight when he reached it.
He turned and watched her walk away, down the road, toward the bridge and then turned right, heading past it to the small embankment that would take her down to the river. Jimmy had a momentary pause, a single doubt about where she was headed, and then the remembrance of the feeling of her mouth against his filled his brain again. Sapphire turned back, just once, when she neared the embankment, and then she disappeared down into the darkness toward the river below. Jimmy got into the car.
“How ya doin’ there, Valentino?” George said once Jimmy settled in.
“Shut up, George,” Jimmy said.
George snorted in a way that, on any other night, Jimmy would have found annoying. Instead, George shifted into drive and headed back out onto the road. Jimmy’s eyes lingered at the spot where Sapphire had disappeared, and he turned his head and continued to stare even as the car drove past.
“So,” George said, “do you think that was the weirdest girl you’ve ever met or what?”
Jimmy laughed. “Why would you say that?”
George laughed derisively. “Why? Did you just ask me why? Well, let me run this down for you. First, we meet her on the side of the road, having never seen her before in all of the years we have lived here. Then, she doesn’t tell us where she’s from and is evasive about her past for most of the night. Somehow, she falls for you, and then convinces you to dance all night, even skipping dinner, something I have never seen you do. Ever! Then she tells us to drop her off, in the middle of the night, on the same side of the road where we found her earlier in the evening. Then, to top it all off, she disappears down the embankment, which is completely uninhabited. Did I miss anything?”
Jimmy sighed. He found he was having trouble erasing the smile from his face. “Just that she smelled like shampoo and soap and she was a great kisser. Oh, and she wants to see me again tomorrow night.”
George let out another snorting laugh. “Great. Just be sure you have long arms so you can reach around to pull the knife out of your back.”
Jimmy laughed. He would normally have been mad at George, but he was feeling too good right now. He was still remembering the taste of her lips and the feeling of her hips beneath his hands.
George grumbled to himself, but kept quiet the rest of the way home. Jimmy barely noticed. It wasn’t until he was almost home that he discovered he had left his jacket with Sapphire.
“Damn,” he whispered.
“Just realized you forgot to get your jacket back, didn’t you?” George said as he pulled onto the road leading to Jimmy’s home.
Jimmy nodded. “Guess I really have to make sure I meet up with her tomorrow.”
George sighed and pulled into the driveway.
“Good night, George,” Jimmy said as he opened the car door. “Thanks for driving.”
“Yeah,” George said. “It was interesting, to say the least. See you tomorrow.”
Jimmy waved absently. He wondered if he would be able to get to sleep tonight. In the end, he decided he didn’t really care. All that mattered was tomorrow, and seeing her again.
5
Jimmy awoke the next morning with a pounding headache. He felt like he had been drinking all night. His mouth had that telltale cottony feeling. When he stood up, his entire world seemed to spin, and he sat back down on the bed. He held his head in his hands for a moment and then groaned.
“Time to get up, Jimmy!” his mother said, pounding on his bedroom door. These days she seemed to prefer the knocking over the barging she used to do. Jimmy guessed that she probably thought she might enter the room to find him doing something she did not want to see him doing. He was a teenager now, after all.
“Right,” Jimmy said and groaned.
His next coherent thought helped snap him out of the doldrums. Sapphire. He remembered the feeling that kiss. He remembered the feeling of her body in his arms. Most of all, he remembered dancing with her. He had never loved dancing as much as he did last night.
Jimmy realized he was supposed to meet her again. Tonight. His heart raced and pounded harder. When that happened, his head pounded worse.
He shuffled his way down the hallway and into the bathroom. He stared at his reflection dumbly. His face looked the same, but he felt that, maybe, something was different. He remembered stabbing the football star in the hand. His stomach tied in knots. He was going to have to pay for that at some point down the road. Still, he thought about Sapphire’s smile and he smiled, feeling like maybe he could fight them off. He would likely end up bruised and battered, and might end up in the hospital, but they would know they had been in a fight.
He washed his face, brushed his teeth, and decided to take a hot shower. He also gulped down four aspirin. By the time he was headed down to breakfast, the headache was starting to fade and his step had a slight bounce to it.
“Well?” his mother asked when he sat down at the kitchen table in front of his bowl of cereal and milk.
“Well, what?” Jimmy asked from around a spoonful of cornflakes and milk. He was grinning. He knew what she meant, but he was going to make her work for it.
“Don’t make me smack your head into your bowl,” she said. “How did the dance go?”
Jimmy ate another spoonful of cereal, just to make her wait for a bit. Then, he decided he had tortured her enough. He told her everything. He told her about heading out onto the road with George. He told her about the mysterious girl on the road and that her name was Sapphire. He told her about the trip to the school and the amazing night spent dancing. The only thing he left out was the fight with the football jocks at the end and the kissing. There were some things a kid did not tell his mother, and making out with a strange girl he had danced the night away with was one of those things.
“Who is this girl?” his mother asked when he was done. By this time, she had sat down at the table with him. When she asked there was a tone of extreme concern in her voice that Jimmy found odd.
“I have no idea,” Jimmy said. “I’m supposed to meet her again tonight.”
“What? When?”
“Tonight,” Jimmy said.
She shook her head. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea. This whole story sounds a little bit crazy to me, Jimmy. Who is this person? Where did she come from?”
Jimmy shru
gged and finished eating his cornflakes. Then he drank the milk out of the bowl.
“Mom,” he said, “you always say you want me to meet a girl and go on dates, but now I have a girl who is interested and you want to find drama. Make up your mind.”
He stood up, put the bowl in the sink, and then walked back to the table. He leaned down and kissed his mother on the head. She looked like she wanted to say more, but couldn’t find the words. Jimmy headed past his mother and down the hall. He had a bit of a smirk on his face, but he also felt a bit sorry for his mother. He never talked back to her like this. For Jimmy and his mother, it had always been him and her against the world. Jimmy always did what his mother asked, even wearing a bad tux and going to a dance he did not want to attend. Talking back like this, showing open rebellion, defying her, was a complete 180 from the person who had left for the dance the night before. This was not like him at all, and even he knew it, but he still felt good. At the same time, what was his mother’s deal? Shouldn’t she be happy that he had met someone? Yeah, they had met under strange circumstances, but so what? Kids met at dances all the time, right? Of course, he had met Sapphire standing beside a road, but that was just semantics. Why was his mother reacting like this? It seemed way out of proportion to events and it made Jimmy nervous and put him on the defensive.
He had a lot on his mind as he got dressed. He was wondering how he would get through work, listening to George asking him questions all day and mocking him at every turn. He wondered how he would get back down to the bridge tonight. He wondered what he would say to Sapphire, if she even showed, and what might happen if she did. He wondered when the football jocks were going to show up at some point and just how badly he was going to get beaten. Given the fact that he had injured one of them pretty badly—an injury that could have ended a potential football career—he bet he was in for a good beating. He wondered if he would end up in the hospital.
Then he thought about Sapphire again. Despite his protests, George was right. When he stopped to think about it, so was his mother. Everything about Sapphire and the events of the previous night made little to no sense. When he tried to think of where she might have been going when she vanished down beside that bridge, he came up with nothing. There were no homes down there. There was no path leading to homes down there. It was as if she were living in the river. He shook his head and smiled at the thought. There had to be an explanation, but what it was eluded Jimmy.
Instead, he thought about Sapphire’s laugh and the feel of her hair and how it bounced around her head when they danced to the up-tempo music. He remembered the feeling of her body against his, beneath his hands, as they danced to the slow ones.
He had never kissed a girl. He certainly had never French-kissed a girl. Now he had done both, and he had to admit he was feeling tingles in places he had never felt them before. He guessed he might be falling in love, even though that seemed like a ridiculous proposition since he had just met her and, well, there were all of those weird things about her to deal with. Jimmy smiled when he thought about how they had dazzled the entire crowd at the prom and that he had had his first kiss. And with a girl who is pretty as Sapphire, no less.
He was dressed and ready to go in record time. He sighed at the thought of a day stocking shelves at the local Shop Smart. He would be answering questions from old ladies and mothers with children in tow. All the while, his mind would be thinking about her. He would eat lunch with George, and George would tell him he was crazy and not to head down to the bridge, but he would ignore him. He would ignore his mother, as well, when she tried to tell him that he was being foolish and that he shouldn’t pursue this girl.
He was still daydreaming when the car pulled up outside and honked. Jimmy waved to his mother, grabbed his lunch, and headed out the door. George was not his smiling self, he could tell already. It was going to be a long day.
It seemed to take forever for lunch to arrive. Jimmy’s back was killing him. Today was the day to re-stock the canned goods and the pallets were exceptionally heavy. Plus, his stacking partner remained stoically silent. No matter how much Jimmy tried to talk to him or joke with him, George remained silent. He would mumble something, grunt, or make sounds to indicate he had heard, but he did not join in the conversation.
Jimmy and George had been working at Shop Smart since it opened. The store was gleaming white and had an open ceiling where you could see the steel beams that held up the roof. The aisles were packed with goods at discount prices. There was a kind of ordered chaos to the whole affair that Jimmy liked. They had been all of about sixteen years old when the store had opened, and they had immediately signed up to stock shelves some evenings and most weekends during the school year. During the summers, they worked there all day, every day. The pay wasn’t great, but it was better than not having money.
Most of the time, Jimmy actually liked stocking on weekends. George and Jimmy had the trust of the management and they were left pretty much alone. They would often find a relatively secluded spot and then goof around. They got their work done, but they had fun while doing it. They would quote Monty Python and other English comedians to one another. They would talk about the last movie they had seen, but since they had very different likes and dislikes when it came to movies, they would often argue. Every Saturday night they would hang out, sometimes watch a movie, and pretend like they had lives outside of work and school.
The fact that it seemed that Jimmy might now actually have a life outside of school and work seemed to be making George just a little bit testy. Whenever he looked over at George, the young man was scowling. Why did everyone around him seem to want him to stay away from Sapphire and why was everyone reacting to her like she was poison?
“You ready for lunch?” Jimmy asked.
George nodded and shrugged at the same time. “I guess.”
They finished pushing the pallets and boxes out of the way of the customers and then headed for the back of the store. They both stopped at the fridge in the break room and removed their paper bags. Then they bypassed the tables in the break room and headed for the picnic table behind the building near the alley. Not far away, a truck had backed up to a loading dock and a couple of other workers were moving boxes into the stockroom.
George sat down opposite Jimmy and immediately opened the brown bag he had placed in front of himself. He pulled out the sandwich and began eating without saying a word. The sandwich looked like ham and cheese to Jimmy, which normally would have produced a bout of complaining from George, who preferred turkey. This time, unlike most of the lunches they had shared, George lowered his head and seemed entirely focused on devouring the ham and cheese.
“OK,” Jimmy said after a couple bites of his tuna sandwich. “Are you going to tell me what’s bugging you? I thought you talked too damn much until you decided not to talk to me, and then I found out that was even more annoying.”
George threw down his sandwich and glared at Jimmy. “I’m annoying? Did you just say that I’m the one who’s annoying? How dare you!”
The vehemence and vitriol with which George shouted took Jimmy aback. “What the hell did I do?”
“Are you completely stupid?” George said. His voice was rising. Jimmy looked back and saw that the guys on the loading dock had stopped to look at them. Jimmy felt the blood rising up his neck to his face. “Did last night not happen in your world? Did you not completely ignore me and the rest of Knorr High School to dance with some mysterious chick we met on the side of the road who, for reasons that make zero sense to anyone with a brain, then had us drop her off in the same place and vanished beneath the bridge? Have you not been walking around moon-eyed all damn day as if all of your prayers have been answered, even though you know that most of the football team is going to murder you on Monday? Don’t you feel, like I do, as if you were drinking all night when you know good and well that neither of us touched a drop? Jesus, Jimmy, nothing about last night made any sense from the moment we saw her on the side o
f the road, and you act like this is the same thing that happens to you every weekend!”
With that, George crumpled up what was left of his lunch and threw it in a garbage can near the picnic table. He grabbed his can of soda, guzzled it all, and threw that into the garbage, belched angrily, and got up. Without looking back at Jimmy, who still sat in his spot with his mouth opening and closing like a dying fish, he stormed back into the Shop Smart. Jimmy watched the door close slowly on hinges that prevented the door from slamming. Had those hinges not been designed that way, he was certain George would have slammed the door.
Jimmy suddenly did not feel like eating. He alternated between being outrageously angry at George and wondering if his best friend could be that jealous, and then feeling waves of uncertainty and fear. When he paused to really look at the situation, he knew that George was right, the night with Sapphire was odd in the extreme. At the same time, whenever anyone met anyone, what did they really know about them? In his gut, she was good. And surely there was some kind of rational explanation for why Sapphire had been at that spot beside the road and then asked to be dropped off there when they had come back later. What was a little less understandable was how no one, not even George and Jimmy, could have not heard of or seen Sapphire before. He planned to ask Sapphire about that later when he saw her.
That was another thing that caused a stab of fear to enter his gut. What if it had all been a joke? Maybe one of the jocks or someone else who enjoyed making Jimmy’s life miserable had brought a friend or relative in from another town just to play a horrible trick on him. Maybe Sapphire had been in on the joke all along. Maybe, if she was legit, she was having second thoughts in the clear light of day and just wouldn’t show. Jimmy could end up spending a long and cold evening standing beside a dangerous road near a bridge over a cold and dark river. What if she just didn’t show? Jimmy had never had a girlfriend. He had never been on a date in his life, and he certainly had never been on a second date. What if he screwed things up? She could end up being real, with a real explanation for everything, only to end up running away from him anyway.
Sapphire: A Paranormal Romance Page 4