by Sara Alva
“Yeah? What?”
In the sand, he traced a small circle, then drew a stick directly beside it. He added a few more sticks and circles, including some with curvy tails.
Musical notes.
“Music? You miss music?”
He touched his throat.
I started to chuckle, squeezing him into a side-hug. “Don’t worry. Just because a person can talk doesn’t mean they can sing. I sure as hell can’t.”
He scowled and looked at me defiantly. Yes you can.
“No, I swear to God I can’t. What, you want me to prove it?”
Yes.
I shook my head. “No, seriously, I can’t.”
Seb’s fingers danced up and down my back, like he was playing the piano on my spine. He looked at me eagerly through his lashes. Please?
My cheeks grew warm. “I…I haven’t sung since I was in the sixth grade choir…and I sucked then, too. I don’t even know any songs.”
More fluttering lashes. Pretty please?
“Oh, God.” I dropped my head into my hand. “You’re gonna regret this.”
I really couldn’t think of any songs. The radio was my only source for music, and I hadn’t had access to one of those in ages. Searching for inspiration in the horizon, I eventually caught sight of a plane twinkling in the distance as it left the LAX airport.
“At least now you’ll know this isn’t one of the things you should miss.” I lowered my voice to a half-whisper so the people around me couldn’t hear. “Twinkle, twinkle, little star…how I wonder what you are. Up above the…uh, world so high, like a diamond in the sky. Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.”
To further my embarrassment, Seb clapped when I was done.
“Shut up. I suck.”
He shook his head. I liked it.
“Whatever.”
No, really. He laced our fingers together and smiled gently. With his other hand, he touched my throat. Sing another?
“I don’t know any others.”
Come on.
Damn those dark lashes of his. He seemed to know just how to use them to make me putty in his hands.
“Fine. I do know one more. But this one requires audience participation.” I took his hand and drew out his pointer finger, placing it in the sand.
“A…B…C…D…E…F…G…”
I sang slowly so I could make Seb trace the letters as I went. He gave me a really sour look but let me keep going, all the way to the end.
“Now that’s a useful song, right?”
With a roll of his eyes, he freed his hand so he could dab the pastry crumbs off our plate. Then he pulled the backpack under his head like a pillow and lay down, his lids drifting closed.
The couple stood a few seconds later and the girl shook out their towel. Sand wound up spraying directly toward us and I glared at her, using my body to protect Seb’s face. She sputtered out an apology, but I ignored her so I could focus on Seb—it looked like he’d fallen asleep. I just hoped her yacking wouldn’t disturb him.
Positioning my back to keep any more flying sand from bothering him, I gazed at his still form. Affection and worry fought for control of my thoughts, and since he wasn’t awake to comfort me, worry seemed to be winning out.
Maybe I could keep being myself around him, but the stakes really were higher than they’d been before. If I screwed this up, I’d lose everything.
He opened his eyes. Bright, alert eyes.
“Okay, enough with the fake sleeping!” I smacked his leg. “Seriously. There’s a lot more you can do with life than just pretend to sleep through it.”
Such as? He raised a brow expectantly.
“Such as…”
If I knew the answer to that one, I wouldn’t have had this cold fear lurking beneath the surface of my happiness.
“Just gimme a sec. I’ll think of something.”
Chapter 23: No Llores
I couldn’t come up with anything for the long-term, but I did decide we had to do some shopping.
The glaring fluorescent bulbs at the 99-cent store didn’t cast the best light on Seb’s skin. They made him look yellow, even though I was sure he was starting to pick up a tan again. Wandering down the aisles, he ran his hand over the merchandise and stopped every once in a while to hold up something he wanted to buy.
“Sorry, but I don’t think pink marshmallows have any nutritional value.” I took the bag from him and stuck it back on the shelf. “We need to get stuff we can eat for a meal…like granola, or something.”
He sighed but nodded, adding a box of Nutrigrain bars to our basket.
“I mean, we can still hit up a McDonald’s every now and then, but we kinda blew through a chunk of our cash today. The dollar menu is great and all but when you put in the drink and the fries and the tax, it starts to add up.”
Money just kept on going out, but obviously none was coming in. And here I was about to spend more of it. But we had to eat, and this seemed like the cheapest option. Of course, there was one more way to go about it…
I glanced at the store employee manning the front door, then did a 360 to catch all the security cameras dangling from the ceiling.
Seb shook his head. Don’t.
The odds didn’t seem to be in my favor. “Yeah. I guess you’re right. I mean, I was pretty decent at getting away with stuff back home…but those were little Mom and Pop shops. This place looks more—”
He stepped on my foot.
“Ow! Watch it, that hurt!”
Arms folded across his chest, he jerked his head left—to where a security guard was eyeing us from a few feet away.
“Oh, shit,” I muttered. Teenagers with a backpack were probably always under suspicion. “I didn’t see him. Hope he didn’t hear us talking…not that we did anything wrong.”
Seb tossed some pretzels at me.
“Sure. Yeah.” I stuck them on top of our pile, even though I wasn’t sure it was such a good idea to get something so salty—we’d just end up buying more drinks. “But, um, about that…security guard”—I dragged him further down the aisle—“how’d you notice him? How do you always notice things? Like when Ms. Loretta would be coming to yell lights out…or that time when Brandon showed up…”
He made his hand into the shape of a pistol and tucked it into his pants.
“Shit. And Angel’s gun. You saw it first, huh. How do you do that?”
He shrugged.
“Do you think if I shut up more, I could be like you?”
The fake gun came back out of his waistband, and he used his barrel-finger to trace my jaw. You’re fine the way you are.
I almost choked on the back of my tongue. Face-touching in public was…literally more in-your-face than the handholding we’d been playing around with. But really, I didn’t feel as nervous or as uncomfortable as I would have thought.
Instead, I wanted to knock him back against the shelf full of snack cakes and kiss him until neither of us could breathe. Then I’d rip off his clothes and have my way with him on a bed of Twinkie boxes.
“M-maybe we should get a couple bottles of water on our way out.”
Stocked with about eight dollars worth of food—and that important sun block—we rounded the corner to head back to the register. Seb gazed wistfully at some modeling clay and a fancy notebook as we passed through the school supply aisle, his fingers stopping on the items and forcing his feet to a standstill.
I shook my head.
“I have a notebook in my backpack you can have if you really want it. And there’s always the wet sand to play with.”
I was sure he was giving me a dirty look, but I didn’t see it because something else caught my eye.
“Now here’s something we can get for you.” I grabbed a child’s trace-the-alphabet booklet and stuck it in his face.
He pushed it away, glaring. Why would I want that?
“So you can learn how to write better.”
And why should I? He huffed,
a bit of hair blowing off his forehead.
“So you can…write me love letters.” I gave him a cocky grin.
His lips tightened in a frown.
And then pop! my daydream of doing him against a fallen shelf burst back into my mind and completely overpowered me. Thankfully, I managed to show some restraint in the actual force of my advance as I leaned in and kissed him.
Kissed him right there in the middle of a West Los Angeles 99-cents store, with bright lights and cheesy elevator music and tons of shoppers. My hand latched onto his t-shirt and I dug in, drawing breath through my nose so I could keep our connection going for as long as possible.
I couldn’t help it…not that I really wanted to. Because it’d finally struck me that each expression of his—including the frowns—just proved he was real.
The kiss dissolved into a final brush of our lips and I stayed close, basking in the warm glow of his eyes. I’d surprised him, I could tell, but he was happy.
He untangled his arm from where it’d slid around my waist and tapped his wrist.
“Huh?”
He tapped again. The time.
“Oh shit! We’d better move it. Shit, I hope that dance place is still open.”
~*~
Of course, it wasn’t.
“Fuck.” I banged on the locked door. “Fuck. We shoulda come back here and waited a lot earlier. It’s my fault. I’m sorry.”
Seb rubbed my back soothingly. It’s okay.
“I guess we’ll have to go to plan B.” Defeated, I led us over to the strip mall where we’d been the night before. “This fucking sucks.”
Shaking his head and smiling, Seb took the bag from my back. We’ll make do.
The blankets came out again, though neither of us was tired. I wanted to talk more, but Seb wasn’t really paying attention to me. And if I couldn’t see his eyes, I didn’t think I’d be able to “hear” much from him.
He dug around in the backpack, laying my belongings out in neat piles in front of us.
T-shirts. Boxers. A few pairs of socks. The photos from my house. A notebook, a crumpled piece of paper, a stick of dried-up gum. Two pens, a pencil, and a smushed package of tamales.
“Oh, shit. I forgot about those. Think they’re still good?”
Only one way to find out. He ripped back the foil and took a bite, then nodded. They seem all right.
I snagged a piece for myself. What was the worst that could happen? I’d already thrown them up once before and survived.
Good thing they were only cheese.
While we ate, Seb picked up the notebook and pencil. He opened to a blank page and began to doodle. At first, I couldn’t make out anything in the mess of shapes and random lines—it just reminded me of the way he used to run his fingers around in the dirt. But eventually I saw something round emerge within the twisted scribbles: the Ferris wheel. As layers of details and shading were added, the scene expanded to include an abstract sketch of the whole pier.
“I didn’t know you could draw.”
He gave me an amused look. There’s a lot of things you don’t know about me.
“Well that I did know.” I laughed. “How ’bout telling me some more stuff?”
Shrugging, he returned to his drawing.
But I wasn’t going to let him get off so easily this time. With nothing else to do but sit holed up behind a bush all night, I was ready to get some answers.
“Listen, Seb, you’re gonna have to explain some stuff.”
He ignored me.
“Like…why have you been hiding all this time? I mean, why didn’t you ever let anyone know that you were…in there?”
The pencil stopped moving across the paper. Brows raised slyly, he pointed at me. Why do you hide who you are?
“What? I don’t hide.”
He tipped his head. Yes, you do.
“No I don’t.”
Uh huh. His eyes narrowed skeptically. So you’re saying you share everything you are with everyone?
I scowled. “Fine. So maybe I keep some stuff to myself. But we’re talking about you here, not me. If you won’t tell me why you decided to hide…then can you tell me why you decided to open up to me? I mean, why after all these years did you choose me to be yourself with?”
Again, he pointed at me and turned the question around. Why did you decide to be yourself with me?
My cheeks grew warm. How was I the one being interrogated here? “Um…because it felt…safe, I guess.”
He nodded.
“So then…I make you feel safe?”
He took up the doodling again, his lips tugging into a grin.
Some moisture traveled to my eyes, making his drawing all blurry, but I covered it with laughter. “I make you feel safe. I think I really like that.”
I leaned against the concrete wall, pulling Seb between my legs so he could rest on me. He flipped to a fresh page and kept drawing.
I watched each stroke, completely entranced by this new glimpse into his mind. Slanted, almond eyes appeared. Then he added sharp cheekbones and an angular jaw in an oval face, surrounded by long, dark hair.
“Who’s that?”
He ran a finger over the drawing, smiling fondly.
“Your mom?”
His hair bounced as he nodded.
I tightened my arms around his chest and hugged him close. “You know, Laloni said something once…about uh, special needs kids. Do you think you not being able to talk is why she…abandoned you?”
He whirled around to face me, eyes boiling with fury. She didn’t abandon me!
“Okay, okay.” I scraped my back on the wall as I edged away. “Sorry. I just thought…” His eyes blazed even fiercer. “Never mind. So she didn’t abandon you. What happened, then? How’d you end up in foster care? They took you from her?”
He turned away again and added a few more strands of hair to her picture, swirling them around her neck and shoulders. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down restlessly, and even though he didn’t look at me, I could see the grief in his slumped shoulders.
She died.
“Shit. I’m sorry, Seb.” I kissed his cheek. “I’m so sorry.”
He started to draw spirals, the pencil spinning out in wider and wider circles and overlapping his mother’s face.
“Were you really young when it happened?”
Yes.
“And then you went straight into foster care? Didn’t have anyone else to take you in?”
He didn’t answer.
“Seb? Did you go straight into foster care after she died?”
Still no response, but the spirals on his page grew darker as he crossed the same spaces over and over again.
“Were things always…okay for you after she died? I mean, like they were at Ms. Loretta’s?”
A larger spiral took over all the smaller ones. His pencil moved faster and faster until the picture resembled a black hole.
I didn’t know why I was pressing him when he was so clearly upset, but I didn’t stop. Something had crawled into my stomach—besides the two-day-old tamales—and it lay there heavily, making me sick. “Seb”—my voice sunk to a whisper—“did anyone ever…hurt you?”
No answer. Then, with a splat, a pool of liquid appeared in the black hole. It seeped into the paper and smeared the lead into an even darker circle.
“Seb?”
Splat. Another tear fell. And then another.
I crawled around him and gently took the notebook and pencil from his hands. I’d already known, somehow, even before I’d asked. And I hadn’t really wanted the answer.
As I gathered him into my arms, I tried not to think about all the horrible things that might happen to a little boy when no one could hear him scream.
“Shh, shh.” I rocked him. “No llores, mi amor. No llores.”
I wasn’t sure why I slipped into Spanish. It was just that the last time anyone had held me like this, I’d been really young, and those were the words I’d heard…from Mimi, or
from my mother.
“You’re safe now, remember? You’re safe. I won’t let anyone hurt you ever again.”
He clutched my arms, his fingers digging into the flesh. Strange, squeaking breaths came from his throat as he cried.
Stranger still because I’d never heard him make a sound at all.
“Seb, please don’t cry.” My voice was strangled now, too. Maybe I wanted my ignorance back. What had happened to him? Who had done it?
I might never know. But I had my suspicions. I’d had them since the night before, I realized. Seb was experienced. And in a boy who’d spent his teenage years pretending to be special, that experience sent up red flags.
I tipped his head back to wipe his face clean. His eyes were red and just slightly puffy, the expression in their depths as naked and as vulnerable as I’d ever seen.
At least now I had an idea of why he’d put up this wall between himself and the rest of the world.
I couldn’t take away his pain, but maybe I could replace it with another emotion. Maybe not tonight or tomorrow, but maybe, if we spent our lives together…maybe the happiness could outweigh the bad.
“I love you, Sebastian.”
His lips found mine, melting into a soft kiss.
The rest of our lives. Making that kind of commitment to Seb was terrifying. I just wished I had some idea what that life together would look like…but I wasn’t going to let uncertainty hold me back anymore.
The tears stopped. His chest fluttered against me, still heaving from the earlier sobs. I cupped his face and kissed him again, slowly and with just the tip of my tongue reaching in to meet his.
It was different from the other kisses we’d shared…and miles away from the wild lust of last night. I still felt the stirring in my pants from being this close to him, but I had no intention of acting on it.
Because tonight meant more than that. These kisses were a promise.
We loved each other, and I would keep him safe.
~*~
For all the warmth I’d felt the night before, I was surprised to wake up cold and hungry.
Seb lay curled against my shoulder. A little bit of tear-crust clung to his lashes, but beyond that, there wasn’t any sign of how emotional he’d been the night before.
