by Rachel Gold
“You know, Sierra’s going to try to kill Cypher and Zeno again,” I said. “We should come up with a way to prevent that.”
“I’m not sure I care right now. She can’t touch us.”
“Ha! So there is an us!”
Blake laughed. “When you’re here,” she said.
* * *
I told my father I wanted to go down to the Cities for the last weekend in October. Cyd was moving into a new place with Bear and I wanted to help. I pointed out that it was close to my birthday, so I’d be happy to take that as my present.
I had to see Blake. The days when she didn’t answer my texts drove me crazy. I worried about her at school, about Kordell, about her plastic-wrapped brain.
And I needed to see her for me. So I could be real again.
But my father was back in strict mode when he was home. He said no. He’d already gotten me a nice gift for my birthday and I needed to focus on school.
“I need to see my friends,” I told him, too loudly.
“You need to take your SAT and be filling out college applications,” he said.
“I can do both. It’s only for a weekend.”
“Applications and SAT first, and show me your grades, then we’ll talk about it.”
“That’s too long! I want to help Cyd move. Please.”
He shook his head. “I’ve let you go too often already. You’re being moody and obstinate. I thought we agreed that this year you’re going to do your work. You might think it’s funny to sabotage your future, but I don’t and you won’t either someday. My letting you run around undisciplined is helping no one, regardless of what either of us might want. It’s my job to make sure you turn out successful and a contributing member of society, not some spoiled girl who’s going to be a drain on everyone around her.”
I remembered Isaac’s total expression of disbelief as he asked if our father said things like this to me more than once. I wanted to call Isaac and hold the phone up so he could hear what I was hearing. I wanted to say: When he decides to pay attention, I hear this every week, Isaac. Variations of how awful I am and why can’t I be a success like you.
But I couldn’t do it. Later, in my room, I called Mom and got her voice mail and hung up.
While my father was at work that Friday, after school, I packed a bag, left a handwritten note on the counter, and drove down to the Cities anyway.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Blake said to come to her house. The move wasn’t until the morning, Cyd would be busy packing and I didn’t need to be in a place where I could run into Sierra. I figured I could stay until I wore out my welcome at Blake’s and then get a hotel or sleep in the car. I didn’t know if I could even get a hotel room by myself at sixteen-almost-seventeen.
In the daylight, I could see that Blake’s house was a cute one-and-a-half story. It hadn’t snowed yet this year, so the small but well-kept lawn was visible, along with a tiny, dormant vegetable garden. I rang the bell and her dad answered the door.
“Lauren,” he said cheerfully. “Go on upstairs, but watch your head.”
He pointed to an open door with stairs leading up. At the top of the steps, I got what he meant: the half story had a low ceiling, six feet high in the middle with sloping dormers. If I moved out of the middle of the room, I’d smack my head on the slanted parts of the ceiling.
There were clothes hanging near the top of the stairs in open closets, mostly black, and further into the room a dresser, a nook with a beanbag chair on the floor, and the bed at the far end. Blake was propped up in the bed with a book in her lap.
She looked roughly washed and tumbled dry, but she smiled when she saw me. She got up and walked around the bed, standing at the foot, in the middle of the room, seeming small. Under her black hoodie, she wore loose gray sleep pants and it was strange, almost sad, to see her not in all black.
I put my arms around her. She rested her head on my shoulder and held onto me.
All the way down, driving, I’d been thinking of things to say. Mostly arguments for us to date, for why it could work even long distance. Now I couldn’t remember any of it. Didn’t need to.
Standing with her was everything. Inhaling maple-earth, honeysuckle and green darkness, feeling like sunlight in deep water.
A few infinities later, she pulled away and grinned up at me. I wanted to kiss her, but I didn’t know if that was okay, so I took the beach stone out of my pocket. She closed her fingers around it. Inside her fist, it fit perfectly. Opening her hand, she peered at its layers of gray and white granite.
“I love this,” she said. “Thanks for bringing it for me.”
I nodded, grinning back at her, trying not to grin so much, failing. She went to the bedside table and got a flat, gray stone with a dip in the middle. It fit comfortably in my fingers and I could rub my thumb along the dip.
Blake sat down against the headboard and patted the spot next to her. The bed was made, so it wasn’t a provocative gesture. (Yeah, a little disappointed.) I sat down.
“Where are you staying?” she asked.
I shrugged.
“I’ll ask my dad. I think you can stay here tonight. How long are you here for?”
“However long,” I said. “My father didn’t say I could come, so I guess I’ll go back in time for school Monday and see how mad he is. I mean, what’s he going to do? Ground me? There isn’t anything I want to do up there anyway.”
“I wish you didn’t have to go back there,” Blake said. “You sound so sad when you do.”
“I…do?”
“You sound flat,” she said. “But I think that’s how you do sad.”
Sudden tears burned in my eyes. I looked away, blinking hard, trying to find something in her room to comment on, except that I couldn’t get my eyes to focus around the water in them.
“Yeah,” I said roughly. “It is.”
I wanted to say more. To tell her how much it hurt all the time there, trying to be someone else and always failing. How bad it was to be so far away from her. How I’d messed up trying to have a relationship with Sierra and I got if she didn’t want to date me because I sucked at being a girlfriend. How fucked up everything was.
I got up, to move and not cry, but I forgot about the ceiling and smacked my head. I swore and sat down hard on the side of the bed. It made me laugh even as the pain blossomed through my forehead.
She pulled on my sleeve, tugging me toward her. I went slowly and she directed me until I was lying down, my head in her lap, facing up at her.
She said, “If you run away every time you feel things…you don’t have to. I like you this way.”
“How can you?” I asked. “I’m a mess.”
She bent down and kissed me. My chatty brain remarked that this was probably the first time she’d kissed me with her mouth closed. Purely lips on lips, ultra-soft. She kissed my cheeks and my eyelids and a random part of my forehead and my mouth again. For a long time we were just tongues playing, lips translating a thousand small feelings back and forth, the shared space of our mouths its own universe.
She pulled away and smiled down at me. I traced the side of her face and her lips.
“I could kiss you forever,” I said.
“An infinite amount of kissing?” she asked. “In infinite time?”
“Not even. Completely outside of time and space. Eternal, I think. Like a kiss that happens once but is, in some sense, happening all the time.”
Her head jerked up, eyes wide, mouth opening in a flattened O. “That’s so perfect.”
“Don’t be too impressed,” I told her. “I stole that from something the Rabbi said. Well the idea of it anyway. It was about mythology, that myths didn’t happen once, they’re happening all the time.”
“Eternal mythic kissing,” she said and laughed and kissed me again.
In our next pause, I said, “I’m sorry I don’t live here. That I’m not around for you. Is it still bad with Sierra and all that?”
�
��Medium bad. It was a big deal when school started. Scandal of the month and all. Stupid gossip and Kordell got shoved around. Some guys figured I’d been covering for him and he had to be gay. Assholes going after him and not me. I got in a fight. Now they’re afraid of me. Dad had to go in a few times.”
She shook her head, mouth tight.
“Bad fight?” I asked. “Did you get hurt?”
“Wounded pride mainly. If you have a rep for being crazy and you start yelling, people back away pretty fast.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Silly goose,” she said. “They’re the assholes. Kordell’s got a girl he’s into anyway, so when she gives in to his inevitable charm, that’ll help things. About time he got a steady girlfriend.”
“I thought…” I said. “You seem to like each other a lot.”
“I adore that boy. But we don’t click like that.”
“That made no sense.” I became super aware that I was lying with my head in her lap and she was talking about someone else she had sex with.
She sighed. “It’s like I care about him and I like having sex with him but there’s another part that’s supposed to connect and it doesn’t. Plus I’m not the most reliable. I mean, you should probably know, sometimes I’m totally into having sex and other times I don’t even like being touched.”
“Well you should know I’m very used to not touching. I grew up in a highly not touching family. Also there’s a pretty good chance that I suck at relationships.”
“You honestly think that?”
I didn’t answer at first because that was too close to making me cry again. I nodded and swallowed a few times while she waited.
Finally I managed in a mostly steady voice to say, “Sierra said I was cold and distant and you say I’m flat.”
“Don’t combine those. Flat is what you do, it’s not what you are.”
“Oh.” Before I could stop myself, I asked, “Did you hook up with me at Bear’s parents’ house because you were…?”
The sentence hung unfinished. I stared up at the sloping part of the ceiling. Was there any word I could use to end that sentence that didn’t make me a huge jerk?
“Hypersexual?” she offered. “You’re asking if Sierra was right?”
“Sierra’s never right,” I said.
She half-smiled but her eyes were wet. I was definitely the biggest asshole in the world for making her cry. She turned her head so I couldn’t see her face.
“Kind of, yeah,” she said.
“Blake?”
She looked down at me, tears on her cheeks. I reached up and brushed one away with my thumb.
“What did it mean?” I asked.
“That sometimes I really want sex. And if it’s like that I’m probably hypomanic.”
“No, not that. I looked up the bipolar stuff on the Internet. I even remember that ‘hypo-’ means ‘under.’”
That got a faint smile.
“What did it mean with us? It’s okay if it was a random thing,” I told her, but I was lying.
“You know, you took your bathing suit off first,” she said and paused. Her fingers played with the collar of my shirt. “All night I wanted to be around you. Not only that night. You’d been asking me about feelings and I wanted to reach inside you, put my hands through your skin, help you feel things. And then I just wanted you. And we were naked. Before that I thought we’d hang out more, talk. But once we were naked I didn’t want to not be naked with you. Does that make sense?”
I nodded. “I was so confused. I couldn’t figure out what you were doing.”
She laughed. “Neither could I. And then you kissed me.”
“You looked at me,” I said. “You looked at me like you wanted to put your hands through me.”
“But you kissed me,” she repeated.
“I’m thinking about kissing you again,” I told her.
“Me too. Great minds.”
I gathered the front of her sweatshirt in my fingers and pulled her toward me, but she stopped me by pressing her palm over my heart.
“It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have wanted you otherwise,” she said. “You get that, right?”
“I get that now.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. Hypomanic is like the volume is turned way up but the song doesn’t change.”
“So you don’t suddenly give up math for sky diving, you just want more math? Heavy metal math?” She nodded and I asked, “Does the song ever change?”
“Not with the meds.”
I wanted to ask a bunch of questions but even more I didn’t want to ask. Didn’t want to make it into a big thing.
Her dad called up the stairs, “Blake, is Lauren staying for dinner?”
“Yeah,” she yelled back down, and to me said, “Let me go ask him about you staying the night. He’ll want you to sleep on a three-thousand-year-old air mattress in his workshop, but if you can brave that, it’s totally okay.”
While she went downstairs to ask, I got out my phone. My father probably hadn’t come home yet and seen the note saying that I needed to go to the Cities and help my friends and I’d be back for school. He hadn’t texted or called. Or if he had seen the note, he was in that silently pissed state.
Maybe I shouldn’t go back. Except I’d left so much of my stuff there. Things I wanted, like my sketchbooks. I had to go back at least to get that, but when I did, he’d probably make sure I couldn’t leave again. Or he’d try. I didn’t think he could literally lock me in the house. He’d have to let me out for school.
If I left again and came down here—where would I stay? Would I be able to graduate? How badly would I screw up my life?
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Dinner with Blake and her dad was fun and painful (and not merely because of the bad puns). Her dad persisted at being as great as he was the night he carried her in from the car. Watching him talk to her, watching him listen to her, made me ache like I was one big bruise all down my ribs.
Blake’s dad started the dinner conversation by asking, “Guess why wind power is so popular these days?”
Blake shook her head at him like she knew what was coming.
“It’s got so many fans,” he told her and they both laughed.
He asked me, “What do you get if you step on a live wire with two bare feet?”
“Electrocuted?” I offered.
“A pair of shocks,” he said.
“I should have warned you,” Blake told me.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Nothing could have prepared me for this.”
My father and I used to have dinner together once every week or two. I talked about my week at school, he talked about whatever case he was working on. I could only tell him certain aspects of my week: the things I’d done right, good grades I got, compliments from my teachers. I could mention one element that I struggled with and ask for his advice. I couldn’t say that I was bored or trapped or felt like I was drowning.
When Blake’s dad asked how school was, he listened intently to her answer.
She said, “I’m not following the math lectures very well. I try but it’s not coming together right. I can’t see it all.”
“Did you get the professor’s notes?” he asked.
“Yep.”
“You want me to go over them with you?”
“Can we do it Sunday evening?” she asked, adding, “and you have to do the impersonation.”
He laughed and in a grumbling, badly German-accented voice, that I assumed was her math teacher, said, “Vat iz de trouble mit divizing by zero?”
“Infinity,” Blake said and grinned at him.
I was glad after dinner to sit and watch a movie with Blake until it was time to get ready for bed. I needed space to uncompress my head. I got into a T-shirt and sweatpants, and tried to see if I could make the air mattress situation any more comfortable.
When Blake came in to say good night, I put my arms around her and buried my face in her hair. After a
moment she pulled away.
“I can’t stay,” she said. “I wanted to say good night.”
“Okay,” I replied, confused because I hadn’t asked her to stay. I didn’t know what the house rules were. Her dad seemed cool and all, but I could get that he didn’t want us sharing a bed.
“I mean, I have to sleep,” she insisted.
“Okay?”
“No, I mean, I really want to kiss you again, but…”
My hands were on her hips, her hands on my shoulders, the air shimmering hot between us. If she felt anything like the pull I was feeling, the wrenching desire, she was having trouble letting go of me. That was almost better than getting to kiss her again.
I pushed her lightly. She took two steps back and stared at me, wide-eyed.
“I’ll be here,” I said. “Go to bed. It’s bedtime, right?”
She grinned lopsidedly. “Yeah. Thanks.”
She was out the door so fast I wondered if that meant I’d done something wrong. Crap. We already knew I sucked at relationships. I wanted to go after her, but I’d make all the stairs creak and wake up her dad and make everything worse. I settled onto the makeshift air mattress bed, which was like lying on an extra-thick rug.
I got up again.
I walked barefoot around the room, trying to be silent. There were shelves of drawers labeled with electrical-sounding names. And there was a shelf with photos in frames. I saw one of Blake as a little kid, beaming and mischievous. I picked it up and stared at it for a long time.
Finally I made myself get back into the shallow bed. I contemplated the ceiling and wondered what part of her room I was looking up into. One of the closets?
This was so different from being around Sierra, who after that first spring break week never only made out with me. Kissing was always a prelude to sex. That afternoon, being in Blake’s bed, it was nice to kiss each other without feeling like it had to go anywhere. Way nicer that it was Blake I was kissing.
The problem with Sierra wasn’t that we had lots of sex. I still liked sex a lot. It was that we didn’t do much else. Having sex or writing scenes about sex or flirting was more than half the relationship. And the other half was going out to eat, walking around shopping, talking about the story, but never talking to each other.