by Sarah Porter
Though only for a moment. Josh broke free first, stomped over to the hat, and stared into it critically.
“Oh, for God’s sake. Can’t you give us some privacy?” He snatched the hat by its brim and flipped it over, smacking it down on the mattress. I could feel the eye going out, fizzling to nothing like a flame. “Oh, Kezzer, I’m so sorry that happened! I don’t ever want you to be scared. You, um, you probably should be careful not to leave your hat turned up that way. All right? The thing is—I know that’s your special hat and everything—but you were wearing it that night. It might decide to cause trouble.”
“Josh,” I said. I only realized how hard I was breathing by the distortion it forced into his name. “Josh, where are we?”
He hesitated. “We’re home, Kezzer. You know that.” He reached for me, but I held myself back. So rigid that he gave up, for the moment.
“Home,” I said. “It seems different.”
“That’s because we weren’t really home before, and now we are. We finally, finally are. We’ve both been so lost, for years now, Kezzer, don’t you see? But now for the first time in our lives we have a real home, and it’s all ours, and no one can ever make us leave, or force us apart.” He was getting louder. “Please, please just let us be happy!”
“You did this,” I said. How, though? “Did you do this?”
Another pause. He seemed flustered. “Kind of? All I want is for you to appreciate it. Kezzer, Mitch and Emma were scared of you! They just tried hard not to show it. The way people do with dogs, like fear would make you attack, or something. And they couldn’t stand how much we love each other, because neither of them has ever felt anything even close to what we have! They were dying, really dying, for you to leave. I heard them talking about how I would get over it before too long! Like I ever, ever would!”
He’d started crying. I couldn’t stand it. I went to him and wrapped him in my arms. “Baby,” I said, “it’s fine. It’s going to be fine. I’m just—processing.”
Josh snuffled. “So you’ll come eat dinner? I’ve been cooking all day!”
“Let’s go eat. I’ll open the champagne. We’ll celebrate”—I couldn’t say you coming home, somehow—“that we’re back together. Okay? And then I need to get my revenge, for how you slaughtered me at Parcheesi.”
Josh laughed at that, hard and sputtering. I stroked his hair.
He slid his hands under my vest and up my bare back. I don’t do bras. Very softly, because I didn’t want to upset him again, I pulled away. “So, what did you make for us?”
A flicker of worried sadness passed over his face, then shifted into a grin. “I told you it was a surprise, Kezzer! A fabulous surprise. I made us absolutely everything you can imagine.”
tiny, sparkly hands
The smell hit me when I walked back to the kitchen. Warm and rich and salty. And there on the table were two plates heaped with mashed potatoes and gravy and what I thought must be lamb shanks. I’d been expecting, oh, tofu fritters or something.
“But you’re vegan!”
Josh considered that. “Not tonight. This is the most special occasion possible. As special as if we’d found a rocket ship and we were cruising through space. There are a million stars, and they’re all reaching out, just for us! Tiny, sparkly hands.” I kissed his cheek and headed for the freezer, got out the champagne. “You don’t mind, do you? I thought lamb was your favorite!”
“It is. I’m just surprised. You usually get pissy if I smack a mosquito.”
Josh grinned. “You were supposed to be surprised. As I informed you earlier.”
The champagne popped and fizzed, I poured it, Josh put on music. We toasted each other. And as it turned out, dinner was incredible. Impossibly savory and full of subtle herbal flavors I couldn’t identify. The carrots were the most carroty I’d ever tasted—exuberantly so. Every bite made me sad that I’d never get to taste that exact same bite again. This was food that left a trail of longing behind it.
“Where did you learn to cook like this?”
“Kezzer, hello? I can read? There are cookbooks? So what do you know, I looked up some recipes. It’s good, right?”
Cookbooks. Not the internet. I wondered if we could still access the web.
“It’s the best food I’ve ever eaten,” I told him truthfully. “I bet the restaurants millionaires go to aren’t this good.” There was a tiny edge in my voice; it was too good, too delicious. I would have had to be an idiot not to notice that.
Josh beamed. “I baked us a cake too! With plums!”
Something flashed into my mind: an image, a nagging dream with insomniac eyes. It was me, or another me: a Ksenia flat on a twilit sidewalk, convulsing in some kind of violent fit. Lexi kneeled beside me, crying my name again and again, her brown arms cradling my head so I wouldn’t bash it on the pavement. In that azure light Lexi was able to hold on to herself, to preserve her darkness. But my blond hair and pale skin were painted blue by the glow until I was almost erased. I was only there through the medium of my spasms, my drumming heels.
And then I stilled, and Lexi started screaming. Begging for help. There seemed to be a lot of people crowded around us, actually. More than I’d seen all day.
“Kezzer?” Josh said. He was studying my face with a look of slight anxiety. “What are you thinking?”
“Oh,” I said. Snapping back to the kitchen, to my fork in midair with its nugget of lamb. “Just that when I was out today, there weren’t a whole lot of people.”
I half expected him to argue. To say that everyone must be on vacation or something. So his reaction startled me. He tipped his head and looked mournful.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “We couldn’t really get people. You know, right off the bat. But it’s something where—I mean, I know there’s room for improvement.”
“Improvement?” I said.
Josh refilled our glasses. Carefully, not looking at me. “Are you done with your lamb, Kezzer? Because personally I am desperate for cake.”
My plate was clean, in fact. I was stuffed, but I knew if there was more I would have gone on eating. And at the mention of cake, my mouth flooded with spit and sweet, sharp anticipation. I got up to clear the table. “Sure, baby.”
I saw it again. My body on the sidewalk, my face nearly dissolved in blue. A big man I didn’t know, hands thrusting at my chest, and Lexi weeping violently. “Do you think she poisoned herself?” someone asked.
Josh was up beside me, dessert plates clattering as he plopped them down. He fetched the cake from the oven, where it had been keeping warm. A plum upside-down cake, dripping with terra-cotta syrup, dense with fruit as slick and bright as rubies. And the smell: it was unspeakable. A distillation of butter and caramel and flowers that throbbed like hearts.
Josh levered two fat slices onto the plates and spun around, a brash, abrupt grin flaring on his face. “Kezzer? You know, if you want more people here, there’s something we can do about that.”
“What do you mean?” I said. I must have blipped out somehow, because I didn’t remember coming back to the table, didn’t remember my slice set in front of me. I’m not usually that into food, but now my fork trembled in my hand. Josh watched while I took my first bite, and I had to close my eyes just to cope with it: the effervescent tang, the tidal sweetness.
“We could have a baby! Hell, Kezz, let’s have two. Or three! Raise them so that they never even have to think about—the kinds of crap that happened to us. Keep them safe, and warm, and so super loved!”
No one to say to them, You’ll always be my little duckling. And then never call again. Josh might have his issues, but I knew absolutely that he would never treat a child the way my dad, or actually-not-dad, had treated me. I could almost see the appeal of the idea, except for everything.
“Now you’re just being crazy,” I said. “You’re sixteen? Did that slip your mind somehow?”
“I really don’t see why that matters,” Josh insisted. “It’s not like we’l
l ever have to worry about money.”
That was a new thought. There’d been too much to absorb. “We won’t?”
“Nope. We’ll have everything we need. Kezzer, to tell you the truth? I knew you wouldn’t need money to buy our champagne today either. I just gave it to you to, like, help you adjust.”
Ah. “There was no one there. I left the money under the register. I didn’t want you to think I’d been stealing.”
Big smile. “See? Other people get these whacked-out ideas that you’re so edgy and intimidating and everything. But I know how thoughtful you actually are.”
I’d finished my cake. When did that happen? I braced myself against the urge to go get more, and then more. I wasn’t my mom, Josh had said, and that cake wasn’t a bottle of painkillers swiped from a clinic. So not acting like her, that was the important thing.
“It does seem like Mitch and Emma might have made a mistake, being scared of me,” I said. “The one they really should’ve been scared of is you.”
I didn’t mean it as a compliment, but Josh took it as one. He started bouncing in his chair from pure glee. “Oh, absolutely! That is so utterly right. Oh my God, I can’t believe sometimes how well you understand me! Even though I should know by now. Yeah, you come across as all remote and threatening, but when—when someone really gets inside you, you’re not. And I seem like some adorable puppy that anybody would want to bring home.”
And she was still there, that girl in the blue, that Ksenia who wasn’t anything anymore. I knew they hadn’t managed to restart her heart. The tips of her spiny hair leaked blue poison, her skin was barely a blue ruffling in bluer air. Hope and rage were the same in her, as indistinct as the atmosphere. Her corpse weighed almost nothing. It floated on my thoughts like a slab of ice.
“You’re the only one who really gets me, Kezzer,” Josh said. His hands were drifting down my neck. It hit me that I would have a decision to make. Not five years from now, but immediately. “I’ve been hopelessly in love with you since I was ten years old. When you walked in here fuming, acting like you couldn’t see any of us. Remember? And you were all I could see; you seemed like a completely new kind of human being to me. A new invention. Like, just by existing, you were gonna obliterate everything that came before you.”
“I remember.” I’d been blind with fury; I’d come so close to having a real home, a real family, and then it had been stolen from me. Yeah, I’d actually been dumb enough to believe Owen’s parents might become mine too. Mitch and Emma happened to be next in line. I couldn’t feel anything for them, though objectively I knew they were good people: generous, tolerant, and determined. I knew they tried hard to feel something for me, even if they couldn’t really manage it.
But Josh never thought he was doing me a favor, by loving me.
He reached to undo the top button on my vest. I stiffened, and he paused, his brown eyes searching. “You do love me back, right, Kezz? You love me for real?”
“I do,” I said. “I love you incredibly much. It’s just hard for me to show it the way you do.” And that was all true. But the question of whether I was in love with Josh—that seemed more complicated. And I knew it shouldn’t seem like that. It should have been the simplest question in the world. “You’re the only person I’ve ever loved who hasn’t betrayed me.”
“And I never will, Kezzer. I promise.” He got out of his chair and tugged me from mine. “You get that everything is different now, don’t you? I think—probably it was just too hard for you, when we thought we were going to have to be apart for so long? Like, it was too dangerous for us to love each other even more, then. But now you can let go, and it’ll be totally safe.”
Would I even know, if I was in love? I couldn’t detect my own heart, sometimes. It could have been doing almost anything, and I wasn’t sure I’d notice. Besides, this was what Josh needed from me.
I said, “You know what Owen did to me.” I hadn’t even meant to. It came out.
Josh wrapped himself around me, kissed my neck. “Oh I know, Kezzer. It’s horrible that happened to you. But seriously, seriously, this isn’t the same thing at all. Like, you didn’t love Owen, and I utterly and forever love you! You really, truly can’t take advantage of me, because I’m already yours, and I have been all along. Okay? That’s what I keep trying to explain. Why won’t you believe me?”
That wasn’t actually what I’d meant. Maybe I’d thought that was the problem before, but it wasn’t.
“I haven’t, though. With anyone. Not since then.” Though that wasn’t really it either.
Josh tipped back, wide-eyed. “Really? But you make out with people!”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s all I do. I make out to kill time, until you’re done screwing.” Did I sound jealous, or bitter? Maybe I did. Probably.
“Why didn’t you tell me that before?” Josh demanded. I stared back, couldn’t answer. “I only really want you. I was killing time screwing random people, until we could be together.” He was studying my face, the glitter on his eyelids winking with light. “Kezzer? Are you scared? Of being with me, I mean.”
“Yes,” I said. It was true, in more ways than I could identify.
“Then what can I do?”
Maybe the wrongness had been in Josh too. But I only really noticed now that he seemed right again. Because that was Josh like he’s supposed to be, sweet and openhearted. He was genuinely worried about how I felt. He was trying to help me.
“Sing to me?” I said. What really scared me was hearing my own voice. How it broke, just from saying that.
So Josh switched off the music and sang me love songs in his beautiful tenor, all dusk and velvet, with shivers on the high notes and tiny earthquakes on the low ones. And while he sang he pulled me to the living room and got me in a tangle on the sofa. Between verses he would pause, to dust the smallest possible kisses on my face and throat. I closed my eyes, bit my lip. We both knew I wouldn’t try to stop him, wouldn’t tell him no. I was done with that. I was in some unfathomable space, where there was nothing to do but go on. Where every step I took burst out into countless unknown directions, skewering the darkness like rays.
This was what Josh called home.
Every brush of his fingers felt amazing—too amazing for comfort, actually. I felt like a lab rat, wired into a machine that jolted me with unrelenting pleasure. I was on the edge of plummeting, falling completely out of control.
He slid down my body to tug my skinny jeans off my ankles. And that was when I realized I couldn’t breathe. Every inch of me was shaking like a sail in a storm, and a choked, whining noise came out of my chest. I threw myself on the floor, stark naked, and rolled into a ball, rocking and fighting for air. My head knocked against the edge of the coffee table, over and over, and I couldn’t seem to stop it. My lungs burned.
And Josh was all over me, stroking my hair and arms, and I knew he was going to hate me for rejecting him again. For going back on our unspoken deal. I tried to say that I didn’t mean it. That I wanted to be his. I just couldn’t get enough wind to do it.
“Kezzer!” Josh said, “Kezzer! You have to breathe. It’s okay, it’s okay, just calm down. Breathe for me. You can do it! Nice and slow, okay? Okay?”
I managed to suck in one long stretch of air, just enough to speak; my voice came out in a whistling shriek. I kept picturing Lexi’s beautiful face, streaked by tears as she kneeled over my body. Just the idea that she would sob like that because of me—it rolled through me like a planet slammed out of orbit. “Josh, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I can’t. I want to, but I really—I can’t! I try and I try and I try and I can’t do anything I’m supposed to!”
“Shh, Kezzer. Shh. It’s okay. It’s not your fault. I guess I should have known you weren’t ready.”
Every breath seemed to get snarled inside me, to fight and jump on its way back out. “I’m sorry. I know you’re going to hate me. I can’t.”
“I will never do anything but love you, Kezzer. No m
atter what.” Josh was mostly naked too; only his underwear was still between us. He coiled around me and there was a shifting moiré of sweat and sensation where our skins overlapped. He let out a kind of half laugh, close to crying. “It does make me want to kill Owen even more than I used to, though!”
Right. “I guess that’s why. It was like a flashback.”
“Shh. I know. I want to help fix what Owen did to you, Kezzer, not make it worse! Like once you see what it’s like to be with someone who really loves you … It’s okay. We’ll wait till you’re ready.”
I turned and buried my face against his chest. Squeezed tight. “I thought I was. I’m sorry.”
“Come on the sofa, okay? I’ll just hold you, Kezz. I promise.”
I was getting better. Still shaking, my breath still catching with every gasp, but better. I climbed back onto the sofa and we stretched out in each other’s arms, and Josh stroked my face, and everything seemed almost okay. Tears were slowly seeping from Josh’s closed eyes and slipping down my throat. Even now that there was no one trying to rip us apart, we still clung to each other, for warmth and hope and some slight sense of reality. I kept my eyelids shut tight. I didn’t want to see anything, or know anything.
At some point I gaped around, and found myself staring straight into the single eye of the imp-thing, the shattered, shrunken Joshling. It was perched on the coffee table less than two feet away from my face. Watching us, and leering.
And all I could do was close my eyes again while it leaned close and its gritty finger wandered around my cheek.
it was what we had to give
It was late, as late as the end of the world, when Josh squirmed out of my arms and flopped across my back instead, then started kneading my shoulders.
“Are you okay now, Kezzer? You know, I think this is what we have to do; like, just hold each other a lot, and let you get used to being touched really gradually. It was stupid of me to think you could get there all at once.”
