by Amber Smith
CHRIS
THE RAIN SOUNDED LIKE WHITE noise. But underneath the hum I could hear the echo of individual drops seeping through the weak spots in the roof above us. Underneath that, I could hear the sound of my own pulse drumming in my ears, and Maia breathing softly as we lay side by side.
It was almost enough to drown out all the things Neil had said to me.
Just when I’d worked up the nerve to ask her one more time about all the stuff with Neil, the unspoken history, she said, “If you were home right now—in New York, I mean—what would you be doing?”
I rested my head against the smooth bare skin under her collarbone, between her shoulder and her chest—it was the perfect shape. “Probably playing video games. Or reading,” I told her, but then rethought my answer. “Or something else that is actually exciting.”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
I loved that she really didn’t believe there was anything wrong with that. I loved that I didn’t have to pretend to be anything I wasn’t with her. Not anymore.
“What would you be doing if you weren’t with me right now?” I asked her, letting my fingers brush against the subtle curve of her waist.
“I honestly don’t know,” she said, her hand trailing up my arm, fingers as soft as a feather.
“I could imagine you in the barn working on your photography right now,” I told her. The thought of it made me smile, but I could feel her body tensing all around me. “You didn’t like me being out there today, did you?” It had been bothering me, and I wanted her to know I got it—I would respect her privacy if that’s what she needed.
“It wasn’t that.” She paused, her hand stilled against my skin. “It was just—”
“It’s okay. You don’t have to explain.” I lifted my head to look at her face. “I meant what I said, though—you really are talented.”
She shrugged.
“And brave,” I added.
“I’m what?” she shouted, laughing through the words. “I’m not brave at all.”
“Are you kidding? Yes you are.” I propped myself up next to her. This was not a point I could make lying down, not when it was one of the things that I admired most about her, one of the things that made her stick in my mind from the very beginning. “When I think of you going out and taking all those pictures—up in that tree at the party and when I saw you out in the road—you’re fearless. I mean, I almost ran you over and you weren’t even scared, Maia!”
She was laughing like I’d told her a joke.
“I’m scared of tons!” she exclaimed.
“Yeah, like what?” I teased, and even though this time I was joking, she suddenly got quiet again.
“You,” she answered.
Her smiled faded, and I felt mine melting away too.
“M-me?” I stuttered.
“Not you, you.” She sat up before continuing. “But . . . this.”
She grabbed my hand—this.
I was scared of this too, but I said, “Don’t be.”
“I’m trying.”
She kissed me, leaning into me until she was pressing me down onto my back. I moved my hands to her waist at first, because that’s where she was always putting them. As I pulled her closer, I could feel the muscles in her back as she moved against me. My fingers traveled up under the band of her bra, where the clasps are, and my hand rested between her shoulder blades.
She held still for a moment, and lifted herself up, looking down at me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her.
“Nothing, but—” She gazed at the lamp on the table next to the bed. “Can I turn this off?”
I nodded.
She reached across me and pulled on the string that hung from the lamp. The room went dark. Too dark to see at first, but as she sank back on top of me, my eyes adjusted to the moonlight shining through the stained glass door, the lines of pale lavender seeping in through the spaces in the blinds.
I felt her bending her arm to reach behind her back, her hand brushing against mine, her fingers feeling for the clasp.
She let out a short laugh, and said quietly, “Can you . . . ?”
We looked at each other as my fingers worked the little metal hooks. They released one by one, and as the two halves of the band fell to her sides, the straps sliding off her shoulders, she closed her eyes.
Even though she wasn’t watching, I kept my eyes on her face as I pulled the straps down her arms. “You know we don’t have to do anything else,” I whispered.
“I know,” she said. “I want to, though, if you do.”
She let her weight come down onto me again. I wished I could feel her skin against mine, her breasts against my chest. I pulled my undershirt off over my head. I still had my binder on, and my underwear, but my midsection was bare—the cool air was a relief against my skin as it rushed between us.
She rolled off me then, covering herself with her hands until my hands took their place. I’d never touched her like this, not without a barrier of clothes between our skin. It felt like everything switched to slow motion, and I wanted to savor every moment—but then my stupid thoughts turned once again to Neil, remembering the way he had gotten so rough with Maia the night of that party, and then my thoughts inevitably turned to that day in the woods, to the memory of what it felt like to be touched out of violence, out of hate.
I made my touch as light and gentle and smooth as possible.
She was breathing, deep and slow.
It brought me back from those dark spaces in the corners of my mind.
“Chris?” she said softly, running her hands along my back.
“Yeah?”
“Will you take this off?”
“No,” I answered immediately. “I—I’m sorry, I just can’t.”
“Okay,” she said right away. “It’s okay.”
Her thigh slipped between my legs—I felt a tiny fire igniting inside me, in a way I never had before, not even when I was all alone in my bedroom. I didn’t need to tell myself to pretend to be anything. I was just me, feeling her hand reaching down, against the thin fabric of my underwear.
The truth was, this scared me, but scared me in the most amazing way—that thrilling way you get scared when you know you’re actually safe, like when you’re on a roller coaster.
“Tell me to stop if it’s not okay,” she said. “Okay, Chris?”
“Okay,” I told her, and I hoped she knew I meant okay, I’d tell her to stop, and okay, it was okay.
I let her touch me until I could take no more.
We were both breathing heavily now.
She took my hand in hers, moved it down her stomach—she had to have known I was too shy to do it myself, even though I wanted to—and she guided my hand until my fingertips tucked under the thin elastic band of her panties, inching into uncharted territory. As my fingers slid down and against her, she tilted her hips toward me.
I listened to her breath and her tiny moans. I listened to the way her body moved against mine. I didn’t know what I was doing, not really, but it didn’t matter. After, as we lay there side by side, I wanted to say something, to tell her how much this meant to me—that it meant love—but not even that word could do justice to the way I felt.
“Come here,” she said, pulling me toward her, so that I had my head resting once again in that soft spot near her shoulder. “I just want to feel you close to me.”
That’s what she’d said the night we first kissed. I wondered if she remembered that.
I would’ve asked her, but I didn’t want to crush the quiet as our breathing slowed to normal again. She was the one to speak first.
“I know you don’t want to talk about it, and you don’t have to, but . . .” She paused midsentence.
“Talk about what?” I asked.
“About what you told me the other day—what happened to you back home.” Her voice sounded strained, and when I looked at her, I could see that her eyes were filling with tears. “Sorry. I just hate the th
ought of something like that happening to you.”
“I’m fine, though,” I told her again, but she shook her head and blinked hard, like she was willing the tears to go back from where they’d come, and they did.
“I just want you to know, it wasn’t your fault,” she said, her voice solid and firm. “I know you know this, but you didn’t deserve that, okay? Nobody deserves that. Ever.”
I did know that, of course, but no one had actually ever said it to me before, not in that way. “Okay,” I whispered.
I set my head back down in its spot, and there was this calmness that settled in all around us. I lay there, listening to the air filling her lungs and then emptying, over and over, until I knew she had fallen asleep. As slowly and quietly as possible, I slipped out of her arms. Making sure she’d stayed asleep, I sat on the edge of the bed and quickly wrestled out of my binder. I covered myself with my arms, then bunched up the sheets around the front of me, and lowered myself to the bed on my stomach.
My back was facing her when I felt her hand, smooth and cool, against my skin.
“Chris?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” I swallowed hard—I was trusting her with everything. “Just don’t—”
“I won’t,” she said. “I promise.”
I nodded, and then both of her hands pressed against my back. Then her lips kissed, openmouthed, over my shoulders and between my shoulder blades, where I had let my hand rest on her earlier, then down the length of my spine, to the small of my back. It felt incredible, even more incredible than her hand kneading between my thighs, because this was something I could’ve never even imagined myself allowing to happen.
After she’d run her hands over my entire back, she pressed her body up against me. I felt her stomach and her breasts and her hips, and her face against my skin.
“Chris?” she whispered, her breath against the back of my neck, right behind my ear.
“Yeah?” I whispered back.
She inhaled deeply like she was breathing me in, and then she said the words that I never thought anyone would say to me: “I love you.”
I didn’t hesitate, because the words had been on the tip of my tongue for weeks already. “I love you too.”
The whole night, I never let go of the sheet I had clutched to me, but even so, I’d never felt more alive, more free, more understood, in my entire life.
PART THREE
august
MAIA
WE WERE STANDING OUTSIDE THE decrepit old movie theater, waiting for Hayden and Gabby. Chris was holding my hand a little too tightly. Or maybe it was me. There was something in the air between us, like an itch just out of reach.
Hayden and Gabby had gotten relentless in their efforts to meet him. I chose the movies. It’s a controlled environment: two hours of not being able to talk. Because talking meant the risk of someone saying something about Mallory or me or the stupid lie I had let take on a life of its own this summer.
“Are you all right?” Chris asked me. “You seem a little tense.”
“No, I’m fine,” I said, forcing a smile. But he was getting to know my different smiles, and he squinted hard at me like I was glass he could see right through.
“You’re nervous about me meeting your friends, aren’t you?” he asked, but before I could respond, he added, “It’s okay, so am I.”
“I’m sorry,” I told him, and I was. “I should be trying to make you less nervous, not the other way around.”
“You want them to like me—I get it.”
“No, I already know they’ll like you.” Which was the whole problem, but I couldn’t say that, so instead I leaned in and kissed him on the lips quickly. I was determined to make this evening go smoothly, and as we looked into each other’s eyes, I was convinced for a moment that it would.
“Hey, I was waiting to tell you this until I knew for sure,” he began, and took a deep breath before continuing. “But I’m trying to get my parents to let me stay.”
“Stay?” I felt this massive thump in my chest. “Stay here?”
“Yeah, stay here in Carson and live with my aunt and go to school with you this year.”
All the blood in my body ran cold.
“Think about it; it’s the perfect solution,” he continued. “My parents are too scared to let me start school back home. This way, there’s not all the baggage from everything that happened. But more importantly”—he held on to both of my hands now—“we get to be together.”
I once saw this video of a snowboarder who got trapped inside an avalanche. The snow began cracking all around him like glass, and then the mountainside just collapsed, swallowing him up in its hundred-mile-an-hour current. It’s not always the massive explosions or earthquakes that cause avalanches; they can be triggered by something small, like the movements of animals, or new rain or snow.
I could feel the ground cracking all around me.
It was one thing for Chris to be here and not know anyone else or talk to anyone else and simply exist with me in this dreamworld we had created—I was worried enough about being able to successfully shepherd two hours of silence in a darkened theater with my friends—but if he was really going to stay, he’d find out within one day every last thing I was keeping from him.
“I mean, you want me to, right?” he asked after I still hadn’t responded.
“Yeah, of—of course,” I stuttered. “Yes, you just—I—I’m surprised. I didn’t know you were even thinking about that.”
His smile returned as he brought my hand up to his mouth and kissed it.
“You think your parents will really let you?” Even I could hear my voice shaking as I spoke the words. But before he could answer me, a pair of footsteps approached on the sidewalk, accompanied by Gabby’s booming voice:
“Hello, lovebirds!”
I turned to look, and so did Chris. He was already waving at my friends, and I felt myself getting swept away in the undertow, being carried farther and farther from them.
Gabby stood in front of Chris and said, “At last, we get to meet the person responsible for stealing our girl away from us all summer.”
Chris looked to me—I was supposed to make the official introductions, but I couldn’t. I was being buried.
“Gabby, right?” Chris said, pointing at her, and then pivoting toward Hayden. “And Hayden?”
“Nice to finally meet you, Chris.” Hayden glanced over at me, and I managed to give her a smile. “So,” she said. “What do we wanna do?”
“Movies?” I uttered, pointing above us to the giant marquee theater sign half lit up in neon.
“Oh yeah,” Gabby chimed in. “Hayden and I decided that sounded really boring, so—”
“You can’t just decide that,” I argued. “We made a plan.”
Hayden raised her voice above ours. “Then let’s vote. Those in favor of the movies . . .” We each looked at one another, and I was the only one raising my hand, until I locked eyes with Chris, and then he put his hand up too. “All in favor of doing something, you know, fun, where we actually get to hang out?”
Hayden’s and Gabby’s hands shot up, and as I crossed my arms to signal our stalemate, Chris slowly raised his, extending just one finger at first, shrugging, as he spread all five in a full hand raise. “Sorry,” he said, his face cringing.
But before I could respond, they all started laughing.
I took a deep breath—I would have to deal with one disaster at a time. In comparison to the time bomb Chris had just dropped into my lap, I guessed I could handle one unscripted evening. I exhaled, looked at Chris, and said in my best make-believe-yet-actually-very-real defeated voice, “Traitor.”
To which he wrapped his arm around my shoulder and leaned in to kiss my forehead, prompting Hayden and Gabby to respond in a chorus of “Awww!”
“Let’s get something to eat,” Hayden said, and they walked away from the theater. We were headed toward DairyLand, but to ge
t there we had to pass some abandoned storefronts, and then Miss Teresa’s Antiques, which was basically a giant indoor yard sale. I was traversing the same stale geography I’d been surrounded by for my entire life, except this time it was buzzing with the unknown, here with Chris by my side, and my friends just ahead.
“Oh wow, look at this!” Chris stopped walking, and was peering into the overcrowded storefront window. It was an old telescope mounted on a wooden tripod, the original box sitting on the floor next to it.
Hayden and Gabby backtracked to join us, and Gabby said, “Let’s go in.”
A buzzer chimed as we walked through the door into a world of forgotten items. The sharp scent of mothballs and mildew and old books immediately brought back a hundred different memories of all the times I used to come here with Mallory in search of the perfect photo prop or vintage combat boots or antique costume jewelry. My head began to ache, that old familiar dizziness settling in the pit of my stomach.
Chris went straight to the telescope, and while he was inspecting it from all angles, he murmured to himself, “Wow” and “sweet.” Hayden whispered in my ear, “Adorable.” Gabby gave a not-so-subtle thumbs-up. I batted at them with my hand and silently mouthed at them to Stop. They dispersed to go rummage through the clothing.
I wandered to the jewelry display by myself. I was looking through the glass case at the antique engagement rings and expensive one-of-a-kind brooches and pins when the shopkeeper approached—Miss Teresa herself. “Would you like to see anything?” she asked.
“No, I’m just—” I started, but then a necklace caught my eye. A locket engraved with a crescent moon encircling a star with a missing stone in its center. “Actually, can I see that?”
She pulled it out and laid it on top of a swatch of velvety fabric. As I ran my fingers along the tarnished gold chain and the grooves of the locket, I could feel my mouth curving into a smile.
“That would look so pretty on you,” Chris said as he came up behind me, placing his hand on my back.
I turned over the tiny paper price tag that was tied around the chain by a loop of string—sixty dollars. “I can’t spend that much on a necklace.”
