“Okay,” I said as I hugged my knees to my chest. “Let the learning begin.”
“Lean back,” he said.
This I didn’t expect. Justin gently guided my shoulders back between his legs until my neck was resting against the cushioned seat of the couch. I could feel his legs lightly resting against my shoulders. My chest inhaled rapidly as he lifted my arms up and rested them on top of his knees like armrests. I instinctively closed my eyes.
“Remember when you asked me what makes us human?” he asked.
I nodded and tried not to gasp as he carefully, hesitantly, ran his fingers through my hair.
“It’s our senses. That’s another thing that sets us apart from computers. Smelling, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting. I don’t care what virtual world those computer programs can create. Are you telling me a computer can do this?” he asked, as he slipped his fingers softly through my hair. I gulped.
“No,” I managed to whisper.
“Okay,” Justin said, his voice smooth and velvety. “Don’t just look at the ocean, Maddie. Be there, walk along it, breathe it in, hear it. Use your senses.”
With his fingers slowly sifting through my hair, I went back to the ocean. I remember once when I was little, when my grandma was still alive, she took me to Newport and we stayed overnight at a hotel on the beach. I remember an early morning walk we took together on a cloudy, windy day and how happy and invigorated I felt being outside and holding her hand.
“I see it,” I said finally. Justin wove his fingers through my hair and lightly rubbed my scalp and the feeling made me want to moan.
“What time of day is it?”
“It’s morning,” I said. “The sun is still low in the sky. It’s just starting to rise over the cliffs and there’s a heavy marina fog.”
“Describe the fog.”
I grinned and my face relaxed as he traced his hands lightly across my cheekbones.
“So foggy you can feel the air, like you’re walking in a layer of clouds.”
I was quiet as I felt the ocean air resting heavy around me.
“Look out at the water,” he said.
“It’s wild. The waves are somersaulting over each other. They’re breaking eight waves back. Some are crashing down so hard they kick up spiraling funnels in the sky.”
I was there. I saw it all. I felt it all. Justin’s fingers flooded into my dream as if his hands were the wind tossing my hair.
“It’s humid but the wind’s cool. I have a jacket on and a stocking cap. My shoes are off and the wet, hard sand’s freezing cold on my feet. I can feel it squeeze between my toes with each step. Rock stacks are scattered down the beach. People are out walking but I can’t make them out in the fog. They look like floating shadows.”
My arms were so light they could have floated off of Justin’s legs. “I can feel the sun rays filtering through the fog. The air smells damp and salty.”
I breathed a full, deep breath that filled my body until every crevice of my lungs expanded. And then I let go. With a long exhale, my worries were pushed away. I was utterly calm.
I was so content sitting there, I hardly noticed Justin lift my arms off of his legs. He slid down on the floor next to me and I could smell salt in his hair and sun on his skin. I turned and his face was only inches from mine. The next thing I felt were both of his hands on my face, lightly drawing me closer, and then his eyes closed and his lips softly touched mine. I closed my eyes and my lips caught on fire the moment he kissed me. The skin on my face was burning from all the trails he left with his fingers. He opened his mouth and I opened mine and he tasted so sweet.
It was weird because it wasn’t weird. At all. It’s like we were designed to do this. Like we should have been doing this all along.
The kiss deepened and he pressed his lips harder against mine. I reached up and pulled my hands through his hair and his tongue was in my mouth and I could feel a moan come out of his throat.
I balled his T-shirt in my fist to pull him closer just as he did the same thing to me and I felt his mouth smile against mine.
All my doubts melted away. My head was spinning and my heart and my stomach and my soul. I knew he wasn’t doing this because I asked him to. I could finally feel how bad he wanted it. His hands weren’t just on me, they were exploring me, like he’d been waiting all his life to touch me. He kept kissing me and I sank against him and melted into his arms and he just held my face in his hands, lightly tracing my jaw and my cheeks and my neck. He touched me like he could break me. I wanted him to touch me forever. His hands took his time but his mouth was hard against mine. I couldn’t breathe.
He leaned his head back for a second and our mouths separated, but his hands still cradled my face like he couldn’t let go. His breaths came out short and uneven like mine. His eyes were wild and confused and overwhelmed. We both tried to catch our breath as we stared at each other.
I couldn’t help but smile.
“I like this part of the exercise,” I said. He slowly dropped his hands and ran his fingers through his hair, which I had messed with my knotting and pulling. He rubbed his hand against his flushed face. His lips were stained dark red and I stared, wanting to taste them again.
“That’s not normally how it works,” he insisted. I didn’t want him to think. I wouldn’t give him the time to second-guess what was happening.
Still high off of his kiss I leaned into him, craving more. “It should be,” I said, and pressed my lips to his again as if this was common behavior for us. He kissed me back and his long arms wove their way around me.
“You taste like chocolate,” I mumbled into his mouth.
“You taste amazing,” he said, and I caught his words on my tongue and grinned because it was one of the coolest things I had ever felt.
I knotted my hand in his thick hair and pulled his face so close against mine I practically suffocated us.
We lost track of time.
We moved from the floor back to the couch, only to end up back on the floor again. My face felt perpetually flushed from my heart racing the entire night.
We only stopped to catch our breath.
Justin’s mood changed that night. He was warmer to me than I ever knew he was capable of. He had always been so careful with me, so hesitant. Now his hands were constantly busy, either touching my hair, my face, my arms, my waist. It seemed so natural for him to be this intimate, I was amazed he had the discipline to fight it off. He was too good at being sensual to imagine him being unemotional with people.
“Feel that,” Justin said at one point, and pressed my hand over his heart. Through his warm shirt, it felt like a tiny drummer was hammering away inside his chest. At least I wasn’t the only one who had a minor heart attack every time we touched.
I grinned back at him. I had everything I wanted in my hand. If I had to choose my eternity, I’d choose this moment, right now, with him. Because there’s no place else I’d rather be.
Chapter Twenty-One
Hope and courage and risk dwell inside of us on an uncharted island and if we learn to look for it and tap into it, our possibilities are endless. That’s what I focused on during the drive to Eden. Hope that my future wouldn’t always be about running from my past. And most of all, hope that what happened between Justin and me was more than just giving in to the moment. More than a fleeting night. He didn’t bring it up during the drive and neither did I because sometimes you ruin the moment with words.
I was starting to think, maybe you need to feel your way more through life—just turn off the lights and follow your senses, even if you stumble once in a while. Maybe that’s what falling in love is like. Just feeling your way through the darkness until you find something solid to hold on to.
We exited the highway and turned onto a main street of town, with a bright yellow sign greeting us in blue letters: WELCOME TO EDGEWATER. It was an old-fashioned wood sign, not a digital screen like advertisements in the city. I waited to see gates and security
guards standing ready to check us in but as we drove into downtown we didn’t hit the security booths I imagined.
“Where are we?”
Justin looked over at me with surprise. “This is it. Eden, as you like to call it.” I stared out the window at the main street, packed with shops and people sitting outside and families strolling down the sidewalks.
The city didn’t look anything like I imagined. We drove down a cobblestone road and passed a grocery store, restaurants, and coffee shops. We passed a city park with a gazebo in the center and people picnicking on the grass. There was even an Edgewater Hotel. I blinked up at the painted sign suspended over a green awning. Who would come here to visit? Train tracks curved along the side of the street parallel to the road and a light rail buzzed by.
My eyes searched for the fences. “How do they keep track of who comes and goes?”
He wrinkled his eyebrows. “What?”
“They allow random visitors here?” I asked with astonishment. “Shouldn’t we have to register somewhere?”
“Good god, Maddie, what were you expecting? A mental institution?”
I stared, dumbly. “I don’t know. Something barricaded at least.”
“Your idea of Eden is something barricaded?” He gave me a quizzical stare and I shrugged my shoulders.
“I thought it was a place people were exiled to.”
He shook his head. “No, that’s what the government wants people to think. The rest of us are the ones who are barricaded.” Justin looked out the window at the street. “Everyone that’s here chooses to be here. As long as they keep quiet and don’t cause trouble the government ignores them. There are a lot of cities like this, all over the country, but you’d never know because they’re not on maps. Cities where trees grow. Where people walk outside, where fear doesn’t rule people’s lives. My parents don’t even have locks on their doors.”
I stared down at the shaggy grass that lined the sidewalk and asked Justin to pull over. He parked along the curb and before the car fully stopped I opened the door and jumped out. I had felt real grass once before, at a zoo in Portland. It was soft and mushy and terribly fragile. If you pushed into it too hard, it gave way to thick, chalky dirt. If you dug your fingernails into it, you could easily rip it out of the ground. It amazed me how people lived with such a delicate plant. The turf ground I grew up with could hold up under anything. It didn’t get trampled with use or dried out in the sun. It persevered under the human lifestyle, which so much of nature didn’t.
I kneeled down on the ground and ran my fingers through it, taking in its unusual shape. Some spots of the grass were fuller, some blades shorter, some greener. It had its own personality. It was softer than the turf grass and more giving under my fingers. Justin leaned against a tree and watched me and that’s when I looked up to study it. First, the smell of the tree was so much more intense. This one carried a musty, earthy smell. The branches and leaves swayed and sounded more like soft rain when they moved, more like a whisper than the clatter plastic leaves made. The plastic leaves cackled and chattered but these hushed and sighed. I stood up and rubbed a leaf between my fingers, feeling its smooth, velvety surface. Tiny veins ran through the leaves that looked as real and alive as the veins under my skin.
“Pretty amazing, isn’t it?”
I nodded, overwhelmed. I pressed my palm on the trunk as if I’d be able to feel a pulse underneath it.
“It puts things in perspective,” he said.
I looked over at Justin. “What do you mean?”
He studied the tree trunk. “This planet will outlive us all. People are just lucky enough to pass through. But we’re so self-absorbed—we don’t get it. People are deluded enough to think we can conquer the planet. Or that we’re powerful enough to destroy it.” Justin shook his head and stepped back. “But we’ll never have that kind of power. Humans are like every other species. We’ll come and go. We’re just passing through.”
I rubbed my fingers along the jagged bark.
“It’s hard to believe your parents can live here so freely. It’s like they break the law and their punishment is to go on vacation the rest of their lives.”
“Maddie, there’s something you need to know,” he said, his face serious. “Your dad thinks my parents are dead.”
My eyes narrowed skeptically. “What? Why would he think that?”
“Because he was part of the team that prosecuted their case four years ago. When my parents broke parole and were convicted, your dad requested the death sentence. His word carries a lot of weight.”
I stared at him. My own father would order for someone to be killed? I backed away and shook my head.
“I wasn’t going to tell you, but there’s no point in keeping anything from you. My parents have such a long criminal record fighting digital school they qualified as terrorists,” he said, laughing to himself. “And these days most terrorists are executed.”
“I can’t believe my dad would do that.”
“I don’t think you understand how powerful he is,” Justin said. “He designed the most influential program in our country. I mean, the president calls your dad to ask him for advice.”
“How did your parents escape?” I asked.
“They never told me the whole story. But they obviously knew someone inside that helped them break out. They were released the night before their execution but their deaths were recorded. Someone signed off as witnessing it. For all your dad knows, they were killed.”
I lowered my head. “And you can allow yourself to care about me? The daughter of the man who tried to kill your parents?”
His eyes were sincere. “I’ve never thought of you that way. And my parents worship you for what you did.”
“Because they didn’t know who I was,” I pointed out. “When they found out it was Kevin Freeman’s daughter, what did they think then?”
“You can use power for good or bad, for control or freedom. You grew up watching your dad abuse it one way and it made you take the opposite direction. That’s what we all think. Everything’s about balance. That’s what sustains life. Maybe your role is to keep your dad in check?”
I grinned at him. “You’re still just using me for my connections, aren’t you?” I joked. Justin frowned.
“Do you honestly think that?” he asked. I looked down at the ground and shook my head. I finally was allowing that doubt to shake off.
“Are you ready to keep going?” he asked. I nodded and followed him back to the car.
Justin described his parents’ beach house while we drove down the end of the main street of town and headed up a gradually ascending hill to a cluster of homes. He explained it’s more like a hotel, always open to people. It’s a block from the ocean, built up on a sandy ridge overlooking the sea. It’s in walking distance to downtown. His parents get everywhere on bikes and shoes. He told me Edgewater was picking up on tourism. A few DS colleges even offer field trips to the town to study ecology.
The wheels of the car came to a stop in front of a spacious two-story Victorian home. The house looked ancient, even though the yellow paint gave it a fresh, restored glow. A white porch wrapped around the first level of the house and hanging baskets overflowing with pink and orange flowers and ivy lined the rafters. I took a deep breath of relief. I could definitely handle this. Bikes cluttered the front lawn and a narrow trail of flat rocks carved a path to the house.
Justin grabbed my duffel bag out of the trunk just as the front door swung open, and a woman nearly sprinted down the porch steps.
“Justin!” she yelled. I could instantly tell it was his mom; she had the same smile and dimples. Her long dark hair had some streaks of gray in it. She wore red-rimmed glasses and she was small, a few inches shorter than me. She grabbed Justin around the chest and he had to duck down to hug her back. He towered over her.
She leaned away and stared up at her son. “Did you get your father’s birthday present?” she asked.
Justin nodded
. “It was uplifting.”
She waved her hand in the air. “I don’t even want to hear about it,” she told him. “It would be nice if he’d give you a present on your birthday that didn’t endanger your life.”
She turned to greet me.
“You must be Madeline,” she said. I nodded and she wrapped her arms around my shoulders and pulled me in for a tight hug. She let me go and studied my face. Her eyes widened with surprise.
“Well, aren’t you beautiful!” she said.
I felt my face flush with embarrassment. I looked down at my shoes and shook my head.
“Justin, you didn’t tell me what a doll she is.”
“Probably because I don’t use the word doll very often,” he said.
“Well,” she continued, and her bright eyes fell on mine. “You never know these days, with all the crap people eat and nobody gets enough sun or exercise anymore. People are getting uglier by the second. And not just physically, emotionally, mentally. People are turning into pasty computer zombies.”
I tried not to laugh. I could see where Justin got his cynicism from. I had a feeling my mom would love Elaine. Too bad that was a family gathering that would never happen.
“What did you imagine?” Justin asked her.
Elaine glanced back at me. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s just so good to finally meet you, Madeline. We’ve been looking for you for a long time.”
I nodded. “About three years,” I said.
She wrapped her fingers around my arm like we were old friends and guided me to the porch. Justin followed behind us. “You’re welcome to anything here, so please don’t ever feel like you need to ask.”
“Thanks,” I said sincerely. I glanced around at the porch, full of benches and blooming with flowers. “It’s gorgeous here.”
She inhaled deeply and nodded. “We love it.”
“Where’s Thomas?” I was surprised how casually Justin said his father’s name. I’d never used my dad’s first name. It sounded too impersonal.
“Who knows. He’s hiking somewhere on the coast. Rough life.”
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