When I opened my eyes, the light was still green. And Jamie was crossing the street toward me.
CHAPTER 34
SUNDAY
AS SOON AS JAMIE SAW ME, he started to jog. He didn’t stop until he was standing right in front of me.
I held back a surprised laugh. I gripped the handle of my suitcase like I was worried it would fly away.
“How?” he asked. “How are you even here?”
He looked wonderful. Like, so wonderful it hurt. Bright green shirt, messy morning hair, freckled skin. His smile was perfect. I stared at his overlapping front teeth and his lips, which were the color of pale pink strawberries.
“You reset my watch,” I said.
Even though I was doing my best, I couldn’t maintain eye contact. My gaze stumbled down to his feet. He was wearing red sneakers with white stripes.
“You didn’t respond to my e-mails,” he said. “I figured you debunked the stupid watch thing and changed it back.”
“Please let me say I’m sorry.” My voice cracked. “Please.”
“Okay,” he said softly. “You can say it. But just so you know, I’m sorry, too.”
I refused to concentrate on anything except his graying shoelaces. My vision blurred with tears. “Don’t be stupid, okay?” I rubbed my eyes with the sleeve of my sweatshirt. “I’m the screwup in this scenario. Don’t try to take that from me, because I’ve earned it.”
He wrapped his finger around one of the ties of my sweatshirt and tugged. “Hey,” he whispered.
I didn’t look up. He tugged it again. “Hey. Sophia.”
My eyes met his.
He was so awake. He reminded me of the morning. Not this gray morning specifically, but morning in general. Something clear and hopeful. I could really see his green eyes now. They were as green as his shirt, as green as the stretches of land I’d seen from the windows of airplanes. Bright green. Neon green.
The light changed to red. People huddled on the cement banks of the crossing as cars filled the wide road. Someone’s umbrella partially covered our heads, but they weren’t paying attention to us. Everyone was looking ahead. And we were looking at each other.
“Ask me again,” I whispered.
He bit his lip and scrunched his eyebrows together. “Ask you what?”
“Ask me what I’ll miss about Tokyo.”
He looped the fingers of his other hand around my other sweatshirt tie. “Sophia Wachowski,” he whispered slowly, taking his time with my name. “What will you miss about Tokyo?”
I gripped the front of his T-shirt. “You, Jamie. Every time you asked me, I wanted to say, ‘you.’”
He pulled me toward him by my sweatshirt ties and kissed me just as the light turned green. The crowd moved forward and around us the way an ocean wave breaks around a rock and rushes to the shore.
Jamie rolled my suitcase for me. We went to Starbucks. He held my hand as we waited in line and as he ordered a green tea latte and as we walked out the door again. There wasn’t anywhere to go, no stores open or anything. The streets were small and twisty and deserted. We weren’t talking, so all I could hear was rain hitting the pavement.
We turned into the mouth of an alley that was even narrower and more deserted than the streets before it. Still not talking, still gripping hands. We walked and walked until we reached a brick alcove with a vending machine in it. There was no one else on the street.
I tossed the empty latte cup into a trash can and dropped my backpack on the sidewalk. Jamie let go of the suitcase and then he was pressing me into the alcove, between a brick wall and the vending machine. The machine made a droning noise, and I heard cars on the major avenues nearby. There were all these reminders that we were on a street, in public, but it felt like we were secluded.
I was pulling him toward me, bodies lining up, hip points connecting. And we were kissing each other like we had to, like it was the last time. And of course it was. Maybe that’s why I didn’t question my hands when they glided under the back of his shirt. Or my leg when it wrapped around both of his and tugged him closer and closer still. He broke away for a second, and I took that opportunity to yank my sweatshirt over my head and toss it on the ground.
Oh. Dear. God. I was out of control! I was doing exactly what you’re not supposed to do. You’re not supposed to throw yourself at someone. This, I had learned from movies and TV shows: If you throw yourself at someone, they will think you are sad and desperate. But I guess I didn’t care about these movie-made social conventions, because I was literally throwing myself at him.
No—not at him. Into him. Into his arms and chest and shoulders. When he shifted, my tank top lifted up and my stomach touched his T-shirt and it was perfect, this was perfect.
“Sophia,” he said, pulling away a little, his voice lower than usual. Hoarse. I rubbed my cheek against his, focusing on the heat of his skin.
And this was it, wasn’t it? Whatever happened now was all that would ever happen, and even though I cannot stress enough how much I don’t care about poetry, I started thinking about this other poem we’d read for English class called “To His Coy Mistress.” It’s about how we’re all going to get old and die so we might as well have sex, or something approximating it, while we still can. Which is terrible logic, and what if this wasn’t the last time?
But what if it was?
And why was I thinking about poetry?!
My elbow banged into the side of the machine. “Ow! Shit!”
“Shit.” Jamie pulled away from me. There was a beautiful red blush down his neck. “Shit. Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” I rubbed my elbow. “I’m fine.”
He took a step back. He was staring at me, every emotion from the last week etched in his expression.
“Maybe we should stop?” I said, like it was a question.
“Yes,” he said. “I don’t know. Yes?”
“I think I’m making a fool of myself.”
“What?” He shook out his hair with his hand. “Are you crazy? I can’t think of anything that’s more of a not-fool than you are.”
I laughed a little because I couldn’t help it. “Those were nonsense words.”
“Seriously,” he said, sounding less flustered. “There’s nothing you’ve said or done today I won’t be thinking about for a long, long time. Not foolish. All perfect.”
He lifted my hand, and I trailed my lips over the backs of his knuckles. Hidden together like that, the morning became something calm. Something secure. And I was glad just to be standing there, pretending we had more time.
“Can we walk?” I asked.
His eyes locked with mine and his smile was so self-assured and sexy, I could have died. “You read my mind.”
He helped me put my backpack on, and I saw what was across the street. “Jamie,” I said. “Oh God. Jamie, do you even realize where we are?”
We were facing the entrance of a love hotel, standing right across from its unlit doorway and the blinking red heart hanging on the side of the building. There was a placard out front listing the price per hour for each room and a yellow sign over the door with an arrow on it and one ominous word—IN.
I covered my mouth with my hand and laughed. Jamie started laughing, too. “Shit. Oh, holy shit.”
We were both laughing now. No, giggling. Hysterically giggling. Jamie took my suitcase and we broke into a run, still laughing, still holding on to each other’s hands.
CHAPTER 35
SUNDAY
WE WERE WALKING. AND KISSING. Less desperately, but still desperately. Every once in a while, he stopped to kiss my cheeks and nose and lips. I put my sweatshirt back on and tugged the hood over my head. He slipped his hand inside my hood and ran his fingers through my ponytail.
“Can we go somewhere to talk?” he asked. His cheeks were red and I was kissing them, one after the other. We were standing by a bakery and a clothing store with the shutters pulled down.
“This is somewhere,” I said.
/> “Right,” he said, smiling.
It had stopped raining, and his wet hair was pushed back again. I pulled a few strands of it down by his ears, momentarily straightening the curls. Then I smoothed my hands down his chest. I had this crazy thought that if I stopped touching him, he’d disappear completely.
“Are you never going to wear a hat again?” I asked. “Because of me?”
“I wore a hat to Roppongi,” he said.
“Yeah. Because you were pissed at me. You did it for hat revenge.”
He puffed out his chest, insulted. “It wasn’t hat revenge.”
I pinched one of his cheeks. “You’re such a liar.”
His chest deflated. “Okay, fine, it was hat revenge. But hey, speaking of that night…”
“AGH! NO!” I covered my ears. “Do we have to? Can’t we make a blood oath to never speak of that night again? Upon pain of death?”
He bit his bottom lip. “Why were you so mad at me?”
He sounded careful, like he was afraid of what I might say. Like, at any moment, we might fall back into that place we couldn’t come back from.
“I wasn’t mad at you,” I said. “I was just—”
“Really mad at me?”
“No.” I tugged one of his curls. “I was mad—about Paris. Alison said my dad doesn’t want me to move there. She said he’d never wanted me there, actually. So I called him and, big surprise, he really doesn’t.”
“He told you that?”
“No,” I sighed. “But he might as well have. I don’t think he thinks of me as family. Not his real family.” My voice weakened. I was trying to picture myself in Paris now, but the picture was even more confusing than ever. I saw a scared little kid gripping her big sister’s hand as their dad ushered them into a cab to the airport. I saw all those years of resetting a countdown, of resetting myself for another fall.
Jamie put both his hands in my sweatshirt pocket and touched his forehead to mine. His eyelashes caught the morning light. “You could have talked to me about that.”
“But I didn’t want to talk. I know it sounds stupid, but I didn’t want to care about anything when all of this has to end.” As soon as I said it, I realized it was true—I’d hurt him because I couldn’t face being let down. Not again. Not by someone else I trusted. I pressed my foot against his. “I couldn’t,” I whispered.
“Because you were leaving?”
“Yes. And because I’d probably never see you again and because I loved you…”
He pulled his head back, but his hands dug deeper into my pocket. “I love you.”
I tucked my face into his neck. Honestly, it freaked me out a little—saying it, hearing him say it back. Maybe we were being rash. Maybe it would be better if we’d just kept it to ourselves.
Why make this any harder than it already is?
“Well, I shouldn’t have blown up at you,” he said. “I shouldn’t have just walked away.”
“But I shouldn’t have gotten drunk,” I said. “Or kissed David.”
“Yes. I will concede that point to you.”
I laughed into his neck. A bicycle bell rang behind us, and Jamie led us closer to the storefronts. My suitcase clunked along behind.
“We should talk about something else,” I said. “Something not me. How’s everything with your parents?”
Jamie frowned. “My parents?”
“Yeah,” I said tentatively. “Mika mentioned that they’d been fighting the other day. About—your birth mom?”
He drew back. “She said that?”
I started to panic. Oh God, I had no idea why I’d picked that topic. It was clearly a mistake. “Sort of. Not really. She said she’d overheard them in the lobby, but she didn’t go into detail or anything.”
“Right,” he said, but his eyes were distant. Lost in a haze.
“Right,” I said, floundering now. “But it’s fine. Let’s change the subject.”
Across the street, an advertisement for a new superhero movie was painted across a huge white wall. I stared at the bright splashes of red and played with the ties of my hood.
“Everything is so screwed up right now,” he said. “My parents keep fighting because they don’t want my birth mom to see me after she bailed last Thanksgiving, and they can’t decide what to do if she tries. And that’s the thing. If they say she can’t, she can’t. Until I’m eighteen, I don’t have a choice.”
“Jamie,” I said. “All of that sucks.”
He shrugged. “It’s not like there’s some obvious answer. It’s not like I feel at home with any of them.”
I took a small step back. And I thought about the first time I’d left Tokyo. How that moment had always seemed like the one where I’d lost my home—my family.
And then I thought about what Jamie had said when we sat above Shibuya Crossing. About belonging. About how you can still choose where you belong.
I gripped the straps of my backpack. “I don’t think it works that way.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, just because you don’t have this perfect place to always go to, it doesn’t mean you don’t have a home. That can be everywhere—wherever you want.” I pressed my hands to his chest. “This can be home.”
The distance fell from his eyes, and he wrapped his hands around mine. “You know what the weirdest thing about this week is? That most of the time, it’s like I’m not really back. You’re the one person who makes me feel like myself. You make me feel like I’m actually here.”
“Is that why you love me?” I whispered.
“No.” He placed one hand inside my sweatshirt hood and touched his thumb to my cheek. “I think that is me loving you. I think all of those feelings are the love ones.”
“In that case”—I took a deep breath—“I love you, too.”
CHAPTER 36
SUNDAY
I HAVE TWO HOURS LEFT WITH JAMIE.
I have one.
I don’t have any.
CHAPTER 37
SUNDAY
THE NARITA EXPRESS IS THE TRAIN that will take me to Narita Airport, where I will get on the plane that will take me to Newark, New Jersey.
“Okay,” I say.
Jamie and I are standing in Tokyo Station, outside the Narita Express ticket barriers. I’m holding my ticket with one hand and his hand with the other. “Okay,” I say again. “My train leaves in fifteen minutes, but let’s not stand here. If my mom and sister aren’t on the platform yet, they’ll be here soon, and I actually can’t say good-bye to you in front of them.”
“Don’t be upset,” Jamie says. “There’s nothing to be upset about. Let’s just say good-bye in an easy and casual manner.”
“That was such a stupid statement, I have no words for it. I’m not going to punch your arm and say, ‘Later, bro.’”
He grins. “That wasn’t my point. My point was, it’s not a big deal, because we’ll see each other soon.”
Someone’s suitcase bumps mine. This is the most crowded place we’ve been all morning. Full of people with heavy bags and heavy, determined looks on their faces. “Come on,” I say. “Let’s just… Come on.”
We walk away, but there’s no place private enough for us to stand. This is one of the largest, busiest train stations in Tokyo. We flatten ourselves against the wall of a fluorescent hallway teeming with passersby and hold each other by the elbows. I know my hands are shaking, but I’m not mortified or anything because his are, too.
“What did you mean, soon?” I ask. “How will we see each other again soon?”
“I mean next year,” he says.
Although I should find the sentiment sweet, I don’t. It’s too illogical. “Um, no. There’s no next year, Jamie.”
“You can come back for graduation.”
“No,” I say, sterner than I mean to. “It’s just, my parents already spend a lot of money on plane flights to Paris for me and Alison. They can’t send me to Tokyo for graduation. And anyway, that’s just gradu
ation. It’s one day.”
“That’s twenty-four whole hours!” he says. “That’s approximately a million seconds! Right?”
“Don’t even joke.”
He seems worried now. The crease between his eyebrows is back. “I’ll get a part-time job. I’ll save money to pay for a flight for you. That way you can save your own money for MIT.”
I’m trying to memorize what he looks like up close. All his freckles, and the green and gold in his eyes. And even though I’m trying not to think about time, there’s still this countdown ticking in my head. Ten minutes from now, I’ll be gone. Ten minutes from now, he won’t be with me anymore. Something inside me threatens to break—I rub my thumb against his arm to remind myself he’s still here.
“Let’s not pretend this is going to work,” I say. “You’ve got two years at the T-Cad, and I’m going to college next year, and it’s not like we can date, because that would be crazy. The semi-adult thing to do is to let each other go. If we meet again someday, then fine.”
He grimaces. “I really hate the sound of that semi-adult thing.”
I remember how upset I was to see him in Shibuya Station at the beginning of the week, all those thousands of years ago. Too much has changed. There’s no going back now.
“You want to know something about black holes?” I say hurriedly.
“Um.” He crinkles his eyes in amusement. “Okay?”
“I know, I know. Just shut up for a second. So the thing is that time moves slower around them. Or anyway, it seems to. So if you were standing at a distance, watching a clock hovering next to a black hole, the clock would tick slower.”
“Right,” he says. “That was a good science fact. Will there be a quiz later?”
Seven Days of You Page 22