This Sky

by Autumn Doughton

  “Eww, that’s disgusting,” I breathe.

  Claudia makes a bored face. “Chica, I was just getting started.”

  Swallowing, I say, “Ren isn’t even worth the effort or the money I’d spend on gas. He and I are over.”

  She lifts an eyebrow. “Is that so?”

  I nod sharply. “It shouldn’t matter to me what he does or who he does it with.”

  “It shouldn’t, but does it?”

  Looking over the never-ending pile of napkins beside me, I think about her question. Am I bothered by the fact that Ren is probably screwing around with every girl in Hollywood now? Do I wish that he was calling me and trying to win me back? Do I miss him even a little bit?

  “No, not really,” I answer truthfully.

  Huh. When did that happen?

  “Get the fuck out,” she says, her hands wrist-deep in a bucket of forks.

  One corner of my mouth lifts. “You get the fuck out.”

  Claudia chuckles and shakes her head, throwing the white-blond strands from her dark chocolate eyes. They are so similar to her brother’s—such a strange mixture of warm and fierce. With that stray thought, I look away, the back of my neck heating.

  “Now that I know and love you, I’m completely over my crush on that slimy mo-fo.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  She flicks her hand. “Yeah. Anyway, I think I’m moving on from actors.”

  “I’m sure Smith will be happy to hear that.” I still don’t understand how that relationship works, but I’ve mostly kept my curiosity to myself. The one time I did ask, Claudia told me that they have very liberal boundaries. Whatever that means.

  “I was on campus the other morning and the men’s soccer team passed by and it occurred to me that I should be paying a lot more attention to sports,” she says with a sly wink.

  “Oh really?”

  She eyes me. In a softer tone, she asks, “How about you? Have you given much thought to soccer players? Or… ah, I don’t know… surfers?”

  Realization dawns. I almost choke on my laughter. “Oh my God! Was this whole conversation an elaborate set-up to ask me about your brother?”

  Her dark brown eyes widen innocently—a dead giveaway. “Who me?”

  I laugh some more. “Yes, you!”

  “I was trying to be diplomatic.” Claudia grins and adds, “For once.”

  I scrunch my nose. “Diplomatic doesn’t really suit you.”

  “You’re probably right,” she sighs, giving me a tell-me-about-it eye roll. Then she turns to face me fully and braces her hands on her hips. “But the not knowing is killing me, Gemma. Landon won’t talk. You won’t talk. A person can only be expected to take so much uncertainty.”

  Confused as to what I’m feeling—excitement, trepidation, nausea—I shake my head. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea for us to have this conversation. You’re his sister,” I say the last word as though she’s forgotten.

  She exhales slowly, flicks a lock of hair away, and pouts prettily. “Fine. If you insist on hurting me in this manner, I suppose I’ll have to learn to move on.”

  “I guess you will.”

  “I guess,” she repeats, looking dejected.

  We both grow quiet. Claudia continues to work on her sullen expression, throwing in a begrudging sigh every now and then. I try to stay focused on the task in front of me. Fork. Knife. Napkin. Roll and repeat.

  Finally, when the quiet gets too intense, I cave. “Okay. Hypothetically, if we were going to talk about Landon, what would you want to talk about?”

  This perks Claudia up like I knew it would. “Yes!” she howls in victory. “You like him. You like like him, don’t you?”

  “No,” I say quickly. “It’s not what you’re thinking.”

  “It is!”

  I drop the napkin in my hand and rub at my eyes. My skin is so hot it feels like I’ve got a fever coming on. Landon left the restaurant a half an hour ago, but still, I feel sure that he can hear this whole embarrassing conversation through the walls of time and space. I cringe and make a lower your voice motion. “Maybe it is? I don’t know. I’m so out of practice with the whole flirting thing that I’m not sure I’m reading the signals right.”

  “Why do you say that?” she asks, seeming baffled. “He took you surfing, didn’t he?”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “He borrowed my wetsuit for you.”

  “Oh, right.”

  Claudia grins and points her finger at me. “He took you surfing. What other confirmation do you need?”

  “Well,” I say, taking a deep breath, collecting my thoughts. “It seemed like things were progressing, and then today, things were weird again.”

  She rolls her hands in the air and bobs her head. “Please explain.”

  “Well, he—” ignored me “—barely said anything when I came in to the restaurant.”

  “He was working,” Claudia replies in an assuring tone. “And Landon’s not good with other people around. Gossip and that kind of stuff makes him anxious.”

  Well, I can understand that. “Maybe—I, uh, don’t really know what I was expecting and I don’t want to compare my life to a Katy Perry song, but ever since Landon bought my gas, he’s hot then he’s cold. He’s yes then he’s no.”

  Claudia laughs. “He’s in then he’s out, he’s up then he’s down?”

  “He’s wrong when it’s right.”

  “Gemma, you’ve got to understand that my brother is careful.” She looks around like she’s making sure no one in the restaurant is listening in. “He knows that you’re just getting out of a relationship. He knows it ended badly.”

  “So he’s going to stay away from me?”

  “Not necessarily. But, he’s probably not going to chase you unless you let him know that it’s what you really want. And, let me tell you, sometimes, you have to make that shit crystal clear.”

  “Thanks for the advice.”

  “That’s what I’m here for.” She says, slipping another silverware roll to the pile. “Anything else you want to know?”

  I chew on the inside of my cheek. “I guess I’ve also been wondering about what Smith said last week?”

  “You mean about Landon being damaged goods?”

  I nod cautiously.

  “I knew that came off wrong. Landon isn’t damaged,” she says. I can tell that she’s carefully editing herself, but I don’t know what to make of it. Here, a girl who proudly declares that she doesn’t filter her thoughts is filtering her thoughts. Why is that? “The past couple of years haven’t been easy and—” She stops herself and shakes her head. “Look, I don’t know how to explain everything to you so you’re going to have to trust me on this. Just don’t believe anything you hear about him.”

  Don’t believe anything I hear about him?

  Claudia must understand the unsettled look on my face because she quickly follows that statement up with more. “He’s had some setbacks.”

  “Setbacks?” This is sounding more and more forbidding.

  She winces slightly like she understands she’s not exactly helping. “I’m getting this all wrong! Landon and I… we had a rough childhood. He paid for it more than I did.” For a moment, it’s as though she’s staring through me. Then she shakes her head and her eyes dilate and refocus on my face. She smiles guardedly.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Sometimes I don’t either. Maybe with you he has another chance.” Her smile becomes more determined. “The thing you have to keep in your head is that this isn’t a romance movie or a Nicholas Sparks novel. You don’t have to play the part of the sad princess who needs to be rescued after an evil witch locked you in a tower. In this life you save yourself, Gemma. And if, along the way, you see something you want? Then fucking take it.”

  ***

  I squint into the storeroom and let my eyes adjust to the dim light. The room is wider than it is long, broken into maze-like sections by sturdy metal shelves that re
ach all the way to the ceiling.

  When I get to a crate of liquor bottles, I pause and run my fingers across the labels. Checking the list that Claudia gave me, I start to pull bottles from the shelf. “You and you,” I mutter absently to the bottles as I scoop them up.

  “Do you always talk to inanimate things?”

  The disembodied voice makes my heart skip and the fine hairs on my arm stand straight up like I’ve been electrocuted.

  “Or do you only talk to alcohol?”

  I catch my breath and cautiously peek around the shelving to find the source.

  Landon is sitting in the farthest corner of the storeroom. His dark head is tilted to the side and his knees are pulled up to his chest. A small beam of light from the hallway streaks across his face, tracing his pronounced cheekbones.

  I need a moment to steady myself before wringing out, “God, you freaked me out. I-I didn’t know you were back here.”

  Landon smiles sheepishly and that small movement sends another tremor through me. He pulls two white earbuds from his ears. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “No.” I swallow hard, concentrating on breathing normally. “It’s not that. I just thought you left work over an hour ago.”

  He moves his shoulders up and down. “Still here.”

  “I see that now.”

  “It’s the quietest place I can come to get shit done for class. If I go home, Wyatt will be all over me, begging me to take him for a walk or throw a Frisbee with him. And I’ve discovered that the chairs at the campus library are worse than the floor.”

  This is when I notice a small spiral notebook in his lap. I walk closer until I’m hovering over him. “You’re writing back here?”

  His eyebrows twitch. “Surprised?”

  “It’s not that,” I say even though it is that. It’s exactly that. “I just figured—” I shift the liquor bottles that I’m carrying to the floor and slide down the wall until I’m sitting next to him. “Isn’t it a little dark in the storeroom to get anything done?”

  “I manage.” He picks up his phone and shows me how he uses it as a light.

  “So what’re you working on?” I ask, pointing to the notebook, enjoying the warmth of his body sinking in around me.

  “It’s a journal for a creative writing class.”

  “Creative writing?” I ask, incredulous.

  One corner of his mouth turns up. “It’s an elective. And it’s a stupid assignment. I keep having to come up with these entries—poems and short stories and stuff.”

  “Uh-huh. So what’s your major?” Gah, such a dumb question.

  Landon arches an eyebrow. “Undecided.”

  “Hmmm…” My mind is spinning with Julie and Claudia’s advice. Move your ass. Squish your boobs. Do whatever it takes to seal the deal. Fucking take it.

  A tingle slides up my body when Landon shifts and his thigh brushes up against mine. Exactly eighteen seconds of silence tick by. I know this because my bursting heart is keeping the time like a stopwatch.

  I figure it’s rude to ask him about the journal he’s working on but I can ask about music. “So what are you listening to?”

  Without speaking, he hands me one of the buds. I move my hair and gently put it in my ear. My eyes widen when I immediately recognize Typhoon. That’s the name of the band whose shirt I was wearing the day I drove from L.A. to San Diego. The day Landon bought my gas.

  A new song begins, and in the dark, we listen, letting lyrics about love and suffering and hope fall over us.

  When the song ends, Landon immediately puts on something else by another band. The rhythm is hooky. Lots of upbeat percussion.

  I say, “It’s got an electro-pop feel. I like it.”

  “They’re Australian,” he tells me as the beat skips and the song moves into the bridge.

  “They remind me of Phantogram.”

  Landon’s eyes widen. “Yeah, me too.” He glances down and scrolls through his phone. “Have you heard these guys? Smallpools? They’re out of L.A.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Here,” he says, shifting even closer.

  For the next few minutes, Landon plays me snips of different songs. I sit back with my eyes closed and my head against the storeroom wall, just listening.

  “I like how this one is all over the place. They incorporate funk, pop, and even some reggae,” he says, starting a new track by a band I’ve never heard of. “Their sound reminds me of this band called Glass Animals.”

  “Oh, I love Glass Animals,” I tell him over the music that has started to play.

  “Yeah right.”

  His tone makes me open my eyes. “I do.”

  Landon frowns and pauses the track. “Not really?”

  “What do you mean not really?” Now I’m feeling a little annoyed. My face is going hot. I shake my head and the earbud falls out of my ear. “When I discovered them, I think I listened to the album at least a dozen times.”

  Landon touches his chest. “Me too.”

  I blow out a breath and laugh. “Did you think you were part of a secret fan club?”

  He laughs—fast and short. “No. It was stupid. They’re just really obscure.” His fingers disappear into his hair and our eyes meet in the dark.

  Landon doesn’t say anything else, but he hands me the notebook from his lap. Surprised, I look down at the page he’s turned to and I see the handwritten words there. Pulling it closer to my face so I can see in the dim light, I start to read.

  It’s a short story about a band whose lead singer gets bitten by a zombie the night before their big breakthrough performance. It’s absurd and gross and funny and surprisingly poignant. I start to laugh when the drummer tries to sew the singer’s eye back on his face.

  “This is good,” I say, meaning it.

  Landon sits in the shadowy corner and just watches me while I read on. And it’s like we’re sharing something. Something more than the music and these words.

  “It’s just for a class,” he says. But, when I look up, I can tell that it’s not just for a class. He wants to know what I think.

  When I finish, I look right into Landon’s face. He’s turned toward me and his expression is almost strained with anticipation. His hands are on his legs, his fingers digging into his jeans a little. Those eyes—those achingly dark eyes are searing me with their fierceness.

  “In the darkness, our zombie hearts want to beat,” I say, reciting the final words from his story. “This is really good.”

  Through the charged stillness, I can still make out the muffled sounds of pots and pans clanking in the kitchen down the hall. I can hear the wispy static of our breathing, the hum of the air passing through our lungs, and the deep thump of Landon’s heart pumping in his broad chest. The moment feels fragile, like a piece of thin paper held over steam.

  Damaged goods, I remind myself.

  Slowly, deliberately, he lifts his arm and rubs his fingertips across his mouth. Then he reaches his hand out to my face like he did on Sunday morning.

  The rush I feel when his fingers connect with my skin is so powerful that it scares me, but still, I don’t pull back. I gasp and tilt my head toward his hand, pressing my cheek into the rousing warmth of his open palm. His thumb sweeps over my lips and his pinkie drifts below my jaw to graze the overly-sensitive skin of my neck.

  Landon is watching his own hand stroke my face with a surprised intensity like he can’t believe he’s actually touching me. I stare at the swell of his mouth and wonder what it would be like to kiss him in the cool darkness, to feel his lips and taste the inside of his mouth. In the darkness, our zombie hearts want to beat.

  He leans in until I can feel his breath feather-soft on my skin. My pulse grows frantic and I feel my eyes fall shut and my head loll back and then I’m opening to him like a flower following the sun. Landon makes a low sound that is half-curse, half-plea, and his free hand falls to my leg, curling over my kneecap, burning me through the fabric of my pan
ts, pulling me closer.

  “Gemma,” he starts, his tone wary like he’s not sure he should even be saying my name at all. I open my eyes and see that his rich chocolate irises are punctuated with question marks.

  “Did you find—” The door creaks loudly and a burst of bright light floods the storeroom, spilling over us like a bucket of icy water. Landon and I jerk back, but it’s too late. We’ve already been spotted. “Oh—shit!”

  “Sorry!” I leap to my feet, rubbing frantically at my clothes as if to erase the memory of his nearness. Mad, unfettered thoughts are spiraling through my head.

  “I-uh, I didn’t mean to interrupt.” Claudia is standing in the doorway. Her features are a fracas of guilt and excitement. “I thought Gemma might have had a problem finding the things I sent her back here for and I just wanted to check.”

  “We’re fine,” Landon says, sounding far more put together than I’m feeling. He raises his arm and touches the inside of my wrist. “Gemma?”

  Afraid to meet his eyes, I yank my hand away and rush over to the bottles I abandoned a few minutes ago. My skin is so hot I worry that it will melt right off my body and then there will be nothing left to hold my bones together.

  “Gemma?” Landon says my name again but I don’t look at him.

  “Sorry.” My voice comes out shriller than I intend. I swing sideways and push past Claudia as fast as my legs can carry me. “I just got distracted.”

  Landon

  My fingers ache from transcribing the short story I wrote earlier to my laptop. I save the document then I crack my knuckles and push away from my desk. The rolling chair slows down to a full stop by my bed. Wyatt is sitting back on his haunches staring at me with sad eyes. He’s been giving me this exact same look since I got home from Aunt Zola’s. That was hours ago.

  I consider him for another second. “A walk?”

  I haven’t even finished the question before he’s bouncing around on his feet, turning himself in circles.

  “Okay, okay.” I grab his leash and my keys and I’m out the door.

  The sounds of voices and faint music are coming from Julie’s apartment. My heart picks up, but I don’t stop. I don’t blink. I keep my eyes ahead, my legs moving fast until I’m down the stairs, around the block, and heading up Parker Street. From there I take a right and move toward Broward. Thoughts are pooling in the back of my head, dribbling from the corners of my eyes like invisible tears.