[The Forever 01.0] Forever Innocent

by Deanna Roy

  Her hand beat against me again, and I felt like I was that jerk boy I had been so angry about when I came in. I let her go and she spun away, putting distance between us.

  “You can’t do this,” she choked out. “I called you here, but not for this.”

  I ran my hands through my hair, trying to cool down. “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “I just —” She covered her face with her hands. “I don’t know.”

  The sofa cushions crushed beneath my weight as I sank down, trying to put my need on lockdown. Corabelle stood several feet away, back by the wall, but looking at her didn’t help matters. Her hair was all scattered in a crazy knot. The tank clung to all her curves, her nipples still tantalizing beneath the thin fabric. The silky shorts v’d between her legs and I just wanted to race over there and part them, feel her, watch all the expressions come over her face as I pleasured her. I’d forgotten her feet, those little toes, decorated with pink nails.

  I had to stop this.

  “Tell me what you want me to do, and I’ll do it.” Except leave, I added silently. Please don’t ask me to leave.

  She sat on the floor, tucking her knees to her chin. “Just be here. Just keep it easy.”

  I leaned back on the sofa. “I can do that.”

  I caught her glancing at my crotch, and I willed it to behave. “Should we talk about astronomy?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “I think Professor Blowhard has a pipe up his ass about having to teach nonmajors.”

  Corabelle almost smiled, I could see it.

  “I’m sure it’s more fun to teach students who aren’t just there to goof around on the roof,” she said. A piece of black hair had fallen from the tangle and she twirled it with her finger.

  “I hope the next lab feels a little less like something you do at a kids’ camp.”

  Corabelle shook her head. “Yeah, I’m thinking I may be a bit of an overachiever for this class.”

  “I bet you’ve got some perfect GPA.”

  She shrugged. “I’ve done all right. I need the grades to get into grad school.”

  I hated to think I’d lose her as soon as I found her. “Where are you thinking of going? Here?”

  “Wherever I get accepted. I have a list.”

  “None of them UCSD?”

  She turned her head. “You seem hopeful I’ll stay.”

  “I’m hopeful you’ll want to.”

  She looked at the floor. “I don’t know what I want anymore.”

  The urge to crawl over to her was strong, but I forced myself to stay on the sofa. “I wonder if Crazy Charles has made good on his valedictory speech.”

  Corabelle smacked her hands against the carpet. “OH! That jerk! I forgot about him!”

  “I never thought you’d forget the guy who stole the top spot from you.” Corabelle had ended up salutatorian when a perfect tie on their grades meant the committee looked to their noncredit courses for a decision.

  “Last I heard, he was at MIT,” Corabelle said. “So he did well.”

  She seemed to be relaxing again.

  “Remember when we were kids, and practiced teaching school?” I asked.

  “I know where this is going.” She kicked her legs out, and the sight of her thighs made my blood jump, but I stuffed it down.

  I propped my feet on a scarred-up coffee table, hoping the position would hide anything that sprang up unexpectedly. “Charlie was always the student in the most trouble in our pretend classroom.”

  “Didn’t we stick him in the corner? What did we use for him?”

  “Your clown doll,” I said.

  “Yes! That was it. I seemed to enjoy giving him F’s on all his essays.”

  “You were a heartless one.”

  Her smile was genuine and made her look so much like the old Corabelle. Our history seemed to fall away and we were almost like we’d been at the beginning of that terrible year, before anything went wrong. I wanted her so desperately, to talk to her while I held her close, to bring her around. I knew her. I knew everything about her. I could make her better, erase that sadness in her eyes, that panic that came over her so often.

  Cool your jets, I told myself. One step at a time.

  Chapter 20: Corabelle

  I wasn’t going to be able to resist him. I could already see it.

  He sat on my sofa, his feet up on my coffee table, and everything about my difficult world suddenly seemed so simple. I could see he was on edge. He always had these explosive moments. But he cared, a lot, and I had always forgiven him because I knew where they came from, his father, that jerk who never thought Gavin did anything right.

  But would he forgive me? I couldn’t bear it if that anger was directed at me.

  He talked about our old pretend school in my parents’ sunroom, looking out over the yard and the fence that had a Gavin-sized gap going to the alley. Eventually my father had put in a gate to make it easier for him to come over. He had no idea that he would later be enabling our torrid nights, Gavin coming in my window as freely as the hot winds blew through New Mexico.

  My belly burned and the heat rushed between my legs. I tried to remember the last time we’d been together, all the way together, my last time. Maybe a week before the baby was born. Only in the last day or two when something seemed off, cramps in my back and random contractions, did we stop.

  I managed to answer when he asked questions, but my mind wasn’t on the conversation anymore. I wanted to give him a shirt, so that I would stop looking at his chest. I’d been up against it twice already, and when he kissed me earlier, it had taken everything I had to get away.

  But dang it, he made me mad. I was still so disgusted that our private story was out.

  Gavin seemed to realize I’d quit paying attention and just watched me with those cool blue eyes.

  I closed my own to cut off the visuals feeding my distraction, letting my head fall against the wall. Calling him had been a good thing. I felt in control again, less afraid of what had happened in the bathroom. Maybe now that the moment had passed I would be all right. I could send Gavin home, and we’d see each other in class on Monday, and fall into something easier than we’d endured so far. If I kept it light, then my secrets could stay tucked away. No more drama. No disaster or rejection or guilt.

  His breath on my neck made me snap my eyes open.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  “No! I’m fine. This is fine. It’s good. Thank you.” God, I was gushing.

  He picked up my hand and bent each finger, one at a time. My heart sped up crazy fast. He first starting doing this when we were young and just experimenting with kissing and touching. He saw it in some movie and realized when he did it that it had an effect on me that worked even better than on the woman on the screen.

  Later, when we were lovers, he’d do it when we were out in public, just to tease me, knowing it made me think of all the things it led to. Feeling it now, each finger getting its own moment of attention, everything flooded back. The innocence we knew as children and friends. The playful way we copied the grown-ups around us, acting like other couples, sometimes as a joke, and other times in perfect seriousness.

  And of course, later, when we knew the baby was coming, and that we would marry, and life might be accelerated, but was still the path we planned to go down eventually.

  I struggled to find a way to avoid that dangerous direction. “You did this at Finn’s sonogram,” I said. “You know, the big one when we found out if he was a boy or a girl.” And if he was normal, I thought.

  The sonogram had been fine, showing a healthy boy right on target for the dates they’d established before. We had no idea then that Finn would be born early and with a heart condition.

  “That was a good day,” Gavin said. He brought my hand to his lips and kissed each finger.

  Heat flooded through me again, and I knew I was falling. “He was so beautiful.”

  “He was.”

  “Someti
mes he doesn’t seem real.”

  Gavin gripped my hand and held it to his cheek. “I feel that way a lot.”

  He did?

  “You think about him? You had his picture.” My chest still warmed over, even though I hadn’t been ready when Gavin pulled it out in the stairwell.

  “Pretty much every day.” He let go of my fingers and stretched out on the floor, hands beneath his head.

  I was both relieved and disappointed that he moved away. “But you — you can manage it. You don’t get upset?”

  He frowned. “Not much upsets me anymore.”

  “How does that work?” I felt like I was getting worse, not better, although until Gavin had come back, I had been in a manageable place.

  “I burned it out of me with beer and work and everyday life.”

  “I can’t do that. I can’t watch TV for the baby commercials. And some stores are insufferable. There’s this sign on campus —”

  “I know the one.”

  “Tripped me up.”

  Gavin stared up at the ceiling. “Could you be pregnant? We can help.” He looked over at me and his abs crunched together in a way I only knew from Hollister ads. “I know what it’s for, but I want to paint the whole kiosk black.”

  “We never considered anything but keeping the baby, did we?”

  “Nope. Hell, half the town was excited for us.”

  It was true. So many of our classmates married right out of high school anyway. Jumping the gun hadn’t caused much of anyone so much as a blink.

  “Remember how Old Man Wilkins brought over that ancient stool?” Gavin asked.

  “It was so sweet. It had belonged to his little boy. I still have it.”

  Gavin sat up. “Really?”

  “Sure. It’s on the other end of the sofa.”

  Gavin stood fluidly, each muscle taut, and I tried not to think about him as anything but, well, like Austin, or lumberjack boy, or my coworkers — guys I’d come across and felt no temptation with whatsoever.

  Who was I kidding?

  He picked up the little green stool. “Do you have anything else from our old place?” he asked.

  I pushed myself up, not nearly as gracefully as he had. “Just small things. The bedside table. The little hula-girl lamp.”

  “Hula girl!”

  I had to smile. “Yes, the gift from the art teacher. She was always a little strange.”

  “You just say that because she loved my bad paintings of waterfalls better than your bad paintings of waterfalls. Can I see her?”

  “Sure.” I led him down the hallway to the bedroom, not realizing what a terrible idea it might be until I flipped on the light and saw the unmade bed, sheets strewn in every direction.

  Gavin passed me and beelined for the lamp. “Turn off the overhead!”

  I waited until he had his hand under the girl’s skirt, then killed the main light. Gavin switched on hula girl and as she warmed up, her hips swayed gently back and forth.

  He looked over at me, his face bathed in the greenish light. “I missed her!”

  I could barely swallow then. Seeing him there, leaning over the lamp, we could be in any time, any place.

  Gavin must have noticed I had changed. He walked back to me and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear, another familiar gesture that completed the sense that we had arrived in some other moment in our history. “This is good, really good. Don’t you think?”

  I nodded, not trusting my voice. This was going to happen. It had already begun.

  Chapter 21: Gavin

  Something had shifted in Corabelle. But it had been pushing and pulling all night, so I didn’t trust it. She’d been in my arms by the door, and again on the sofa, and I’d screwed it up every single time. I turned away and sat on her bed, looking for something else from our past to comment on, something easy.

  Hula girl swayed on her stand, keeping the light moving like a wave. Corabelle’s room was simple, sparsely decorated, and all the pictures on the wall were of her family.

  Then I saw it.

  The frame held four images, two tall and two wide. The first picture was the sonogram, Finn’s shape clear in white on black. The next was the first shot, one I had taken, right after he was born, red faced and covered in a white paste. The last two were after they hooked him to the ventilator, the blue tape covering his mouth.

  So much for keeping it easy.

  She saw me looking and sat on the bed next to me. I wondered why she hung them up if she didn’t want anyone to know, and then I realized it was because no one came here. No one was in her room but her. She kept herself separate. Jenny said she only saw Corabelle at work.

  How alone we’d both been. I’d busied myself with work, and playing pool with Mario, and paying girls to keep me company. But we stayed away from attachments, from closeness. We were the same.

  “I just had the one from the funeral,” I said. “I didn’t take anything with me when I left.”

  “I know. I thought you’d be back soon because you hadn’t packed so much as a toothbrush.” Her arm brushed against mine, but she didn’t move away.

  “I really thought I’d come back. It’s just the farther I went, the harder it got to turn around.”

  The moment had arrived to tell her what I’d done, and why I’d stayed away. Just get it over with and see if she hated me or not, if she could forgive me. Maybe she would just say, get a reversal. Or maybe she’d take it so personally that the rift would tear us apart a second time.

  But she laid her head on my shoulder and I couldn’t breathe. Her fingers closed around my arm, and my blood rushed so hard, it was everything I could do not to pull her down on that bed, to love her mercilessly and without hesitation. Maybe we needed something stronger before we went down those dark paths. Maybe we could build again.

  “Remember in the sunroom?” I couldn’t say anything else, not trusting my voice to hold together.

  “Which time? We were busy in there.”

  “The first time.”

  “Ah. Yes.”

  “Your parents thought it would be okay to leave us to go to that fire station fund-raiser,” I said.

  “We were only fifteen.”

  “Going on twenty.”

  Corabelle squeezed my arm. “They had no idea.”

  “What movie had done it this time?”

  “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.”

  “Yes, Kate Hudson. Hot.”

  Corabelle smacked my thigh.

  “You did the same thing that night,” I said, laughing.

  “What was the scene that got us?”

  “In the bathroom, when they finally decide they actually like each other. He takes off her shirt.” I remembered that so clearly. As soon as I saw it, I wanted to do it with Corabelle. When the movie ended, we went into the sunroom, our together space since her parents were weird about me going in her bedroom now. We turned out the lights and talked for a while, then I stood up and dragged her with me.

  “Raise your arms,” I told her.

  Corabelle had giggled. “What for?”

  “Just do it.”

  The seriousness of my tone sobered her up. “Like in the movie?”

  “Like that.”

  She looked up at me, dark haired where the actress was blond, but just as intense, just as sure, and lifted her arms in the air. I held on to the bottom of her shirt, barely able to breathe, and lifted it over her head.

  We were young, and we fumbled, but Corabelle was already on the shot, so we had nothing to worry about except the how and the where. And once we began, there was no stopping us.

  “You ever listen to that song anymore?” I asked her.

  “I put the CD away with Finn’s things after you left.”

  “You have it here?”

  She hesitated. “Yes, but I can’t open that box.”

  “Let me.”

  “It’s under the bed. You’ll know it.” Her voice was unsteady.

  I pulled away a
nd knelt low, fumbling in the low light. But she was right. I remembered the box, given to us by the hospital just for the baby’s things. A blanket. A little outfit. A candle. A handprint kit. We’d gone through it in the two days between his death and the funeral. The box had been put together by some volunteer group for families like us.

  I didn’t pull the box out, just lifted the lid a few inches. The CD was on top, and I was grateful, because just seeing the blanket was more than enough for me. “You got anything to play this on?”

  “My laptop has a CD drive. Are you — are you sure we should?”

  “I’d like to.”

  Corabelle moved to a backpack in the corner and tugged out her computer. She passed it to me, so I opened it up, waited for the chime, and opened the CD tray.

  The first song of the soundtrack wasn’t right, so I skipped down to “Feels Like Home.” Hearing that crystal voice sent me back in time so fast that I half expected to look up and see that we were in the sunroom and Corabelle was holding her arms in the air. I realized she was wearing the same white tank from that scene, and I had to wonder about fate, timing, and what exactly the world had in mind when it signed us both up for the same class at the university we had once planned to go to before everything else happened, before life got so dark that it split us apart.

  Before I split us apart.

  The enormity of my regret crashed over me. I wanted to shut off the song, stop it all. I reached for the keyboard but Corabelle knew what I was doing and grabbed my wrist. “Let’s just get through it. I know it’s hard, but let’s just tough it out.”

  The chorus tore through my heart. I was home. We were home. All we had to do was decide that this was where we belonged. She had to forgive me for leaving. Then she had to know what I had done, and forgive me all over again.