Say the Word

by Julie Johnson

  Seeing that look on Jamie’s face again was worth any amount of time spent with Loretta’s twins.

  “You okay?” I yelled at Jamie.

  He nodded without looking at me, his grin never faltering. “Faster!” he yelled back over the strains of Don’t Stop Believin’ that were pounding from the truck’s speakers.

  I passed along his orders to Bash, and watched as the speedometer needle topped seventy.

  “Faster!” Jamie yelled again.

  Eighty.

  I heard Sebastian whoop in exhilaration as we went even faster, pushing the truck to dangerous speeds. He hadn’t been kidding — we were definitely flying, now. The wind roared in my ears and my hair streamed back in a blonde ribbon as we whipped down the roadway. I felt my stomach flip and held on tighter to the straps.

  “I thought you promised me some speed!” Jamie yelled at the sky, his words immediately swallowed up by the wind as we hurled along.

  “I don’t think this rust bucket will go much faster,” I screamed into the air tunnel whooshing between us. “Bash borrowed it from his gardener!” I tried to laugh, but the sound was swept away as soon as it left my mouth.

  Jamie’s grin widened but he didn’t respond. His eyes drifted closed and he lifted his arms straight up above his head in a gesture I could only describe as one of pure, unabashed victory. My breath caught as I looked at him.

  There, in that pink-smeared, dusty, wind-swept moment, he wasn’t a cancer patient or a sob story whispered about at the town-wide pancake breakfast on Sunday mornings. He was just seventeen again — alive and invincible, untouched by illness or worries about whether he’d live long enough to attend his prom.

  There, in that perfect, solitary sliver of time, with his hands fisted in the sky in defiance at the cruel twists fate so often seemed to take, Jamie was flying. Life held a million limitless possibilities.

  And he was free.

  I only met my grandmother a few times as a young girl before she died. My mother’s mother was the only grandparent left by the time Jamie and I arrived in this world, and she had one foot out death’s door even as we took our first steps of childhood. My memories of her are both scarce in number and dimmed by time’s passing, but I do remember one thing she told me with intense clarity.

  “There’ll be moments in life, sweet pea, that stand out in your memories like a photograph. Scenes captured perfectly in your mind, frozen in time with each detail as colorful as it was that first time you saw it. ‘Flashbulb memories,’ some people call them,” she’d told me, her eyes crinkling up and nearly disappearing in a face etched with too many laugh lines to count. “Most people don’t recognize those moments as they happen. They look back fifty years later, and realize that those were the most important parts of their entire life. But at the time, they’re so busy looking ahead to what’s coming down the line or worrying about their future, they don’t enjoy their present. Don’t be like them, sweet pea. Don’t get so caught up in chasing your dreams that you forget to live them.”

  This moment with Sebastian and Jamie was one of those moments. A flashbulb memory in the making. I knew I’d remember every detail of it for the rest of my life.

  I hoped they would, too.

  So, with Jamie’s image burned into the backs of my eyelids, I stopped worrying about his prognosis, my family’s finances, and my unlikely college prospects. I pushed the future away and embraced this moment of jubilant recklessness. Closing my eyes, I crossed my fingers and wished with everything I had in me that thirty years from now, we’d all be sitting around laughing about what dumb kids we’d been on that bright spring day when the world was as new as our dreams for a different kind of future.

  One with a happy ending.

  ***

  “Do you think he liked it?” Bash asked me, linking our fingers together as we walked through the dense foliage. We’d dropped Jamie back at the hospital about an hour earlier, before returning the gardener’s truck to Sebastian’s garage. I’d worried that Bash might want to go inside his house — I was definitely not looking forward to another encounter with his mother — but he’d surprised me by grabbing my hand and leading me toward the wooded path that led to the old oak.

  “He loved it,” I assured him. “Jamie doesn’t do false enthusiasm. If he doesn’t like something, he’s not exactly shy about letting the world know it. Seriously, you should’ve seen him when the new trilogy of Star Wars movies came out — he was quite vocal. I think he even wrote a letter to George Lucas, petitioning him to recall The Phantom Menace from circulation worldwide.”

  Sebastian chuckled lightly. “Well, I’m glad he had fun today. It was good to see him laugh like that.”

  “He used to be like that all the time,” I said, my own smile slipping as I thought of the animated boy Jamie had been before his diagnosis. “Not that he doesn’t still joke around — he’s just a little different. More contemplative. Maybe a little more serious.”

  “He’s brave,” Sebastian noted quietly. “I don’t know if I could wake up every morning and face the reality he faces. All the chemo, the surgeries…”

  “Jamie believes that everything happens for a reason,” I told him.

  “And you don’t?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, shrugging. “What do you think?”

  “You can’t laugh,” he ordered, looking at me sternly. “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  “Well,” he began, reaching up to rub the back of his neck in what I’d come to recognize as one of his few nervous tells. “It might sound cheesy, but I think some people are destined.” He looked anxious as the words left his mouth, as though I might laugh at him after all. In truth, laughter was the farthest thing from my mind.

  “Destined?” I whispered.

  “Destined to cross paths. Fated to enter each other’s lives, and change them in some fundamental way. Call them soulmates or star-crossed or whatever you want — the point is, I think some people are just…” he trailed off, taking a breath as our eyes locked. “…meant to be.”

  “Meant to be,” I echoed, my breaths shallow as I stared at him. “So you think there’s only one ‘right’ person for everyone?”

  “Essentially,” Bash said, nodding.

  “But what if you never find that person? Or what if you meet them, and it doesn’t work out? Or what if they’re married to someone else with seven kids? Are you supposed to just… live the rest of your life without the other half of your heart?”

  “Truthfully?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “I don’t think many people even find their soulmates. Most of them meet a nice boy or girl who fits a specific set of criteria — good job, good looks, good family — and they decide, ‘Hey, this must be it. This must be true love.’” Sebastian looked at me, his eyes intense. “So they give up their search for the elusive ‘one’ and they settle for what they consider to be the next best thing. And maybe they even convince themselves that they’re happy for a time — that they’re living in perfect sync with the person who was designed for them — but that feeling rarely seems to last.”

  “So, you’re saying that if you were separated from your soulmate — from the person you supposedly knew was the one for you — you’d never move on? Never get married, or have kids with someone else? You’d choose to be miserable and alone forever?” I asked, incredulity lacing my tone.

  “I’m saying that soulmates are a reward, not a certainty. I think you have to earn them. And I believe, if you’re one of the bastards lucky enough to stumble across yours, that you have to fight for them with everything you have,” Bash told me. “There’s this phrase that kind of sums up how I feel about life in general, but also how I feel about love — aut viam inveniam aut faciam. ”

  “I shall either find a way, or make one,” I translated, my three years of high school Latin finally paying off in a real life scenario. “Ha! Take that, everyone who ever told me to take Spanish because it was more practic
al.”

  Bash smiled at me indulgently. “Legend goes that when Hannibal the Conqueror’s generals told him it would be impossible to cross over the Alps during the Second Punic War, that was his reply.”

  “And did he do it?”

  “He did.” Sebastian nodded, his expression earnest. “Despite insurmountable odds, despite huge losses, he found a way. That’s how I want to live. It’s how I want to love.”

  “Epically?” I asked, equal parts teasing and serious. “Or tragically?”

  “Maybe both,” he said, laughing lightly. “Aren’t the truly epic love stories also the most tragic?”

  “That’s kind of…devastatingly sad but beautiful all at the same time.”

  “Well, if it helps, I also think that if two people are meant to be together, nothing can ever truly separate them. Time, distance, other people — it doesn’t matter. They’ll circle back around to each other eventually.”

  “You’re a closet romantic,” I whispered, more than thrilled at the discovery. “I bet you like Jane Austen novels and Nicholas Sparks movies,” I teased lightly, squeezing his hand in mine.

  “Oh, shut up,” Sebastian growled, pulling me in for a hug as we came through the final stretch of woods and entered the clearing. “And don’t diss Jane.”

  I burst into laughter and he begrudgingly joined in after a few seconds and a coercive elbow to the stomach.

  My giggles abruptly dried up as I took in the clearing before me. This was clearly not Sebastian’s first trip to the glade today. Beneath the massive oak, a fluffy white blanket had been spread across the ground. Pillows were tossed artfully on top, and a picnic basket sat unobtrusively on a small mossy boulder nearby. Tall, unlit pillar candles in glass jars were scattered around the perimeter, and a string of white paper lanterns had been hung from the lowest tree branch overhead.

  It was beautiful — like I’d stumbled into a scene from a fairytale.

  “What is all this?” I whispered, turning to face Sebastian.

  “It’s our two month anniversary,” he told me matter-of-factly. “I wanted to do something special.”

  “We have an anniversary?” I asked, unable to contain the teasing smile that was overtaking my face. “I wasn’t even sure we were dating.”

  Sebastian glared at me playfully, then clutched one hand to his heart and fell to his knees as though my words had mortally wounded him. I giggled and grabbed his free hand, pulling him to his feet and leading him forward into the clearing.

  “We met two months ago, today,” he explained. “And I don’t care how you label yourself — friend, girlfriend, strange blonde girl who follows me around…”

  He laughed when I smacked him on the arm.

  “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’m crazy about you,” he told me simply, tucking a wayward strand of hair behind my ear.

  “Yeah?” I asked, eyebrows raised.

  “Yeah,” he echoed, leaning in to kiss me lightly.

  What began as an innocent kiss quickly morphed into something more. We’d been taking things slowly — getting to know one another before rushing into the physical aspects of our relationship. And I wasn’t sure how Bash felt, but the crawling pace had been killing me. The careful, chaste kisses and soft, stolen touches might have been enough at the beginning, but for weeks now a storm of sexual tension had been brewing in the air between us, apparent in each charged interaction and heated glance we exchanged.

  If you walk outside before a heavy rainfall or at the start of a particularly strong lightning storm, there’s a feeling in the air — a crackling intensity, like standing by a live wire letting off sparks. There’s a smell — the sharp, pungent scent of ozone, as a current fills the air. The atmosphere is electrified, humming with energy and, at any moment, ready to unleash a monstrous storm on the earth below. Being near Sebastian felt that way — and I was standing in the center of a treeless field holding a metal rod up to the sky with both hands.

  It was only a matter of time before lightning struck me.

  The more time we spent together, the longer the charge had to build; and as that sensation got stronger, I was near ready to explode in sheer anticipation every time we were alone together.

  So once our lips brushed…once his hands began to slide around my waist to the small of my back…once my arms twined up around his neck…

  The storm finally broke. And there was no turning back.

  Restraint wholly abandoned, we lost ourselves in the moment. Drugging kisses stole our breath and hurried touches made the rest of the world disappear. We tumbled down onto the blanket, the light filtering through the new spring leaves overheard casting our tangled limbs in a calico pattern of light and shadow. Sebastian braced himself over me with one hand, the other running through the long strands of my hair that fanned across the blanket. I craned my neck to meet his lips with my own.

  I didn’t allow myself to feel inexperienced or unsure — we were long past that now. Instead, for the first time in my life, I felt wanton. Passionate.

  I wasn’t a young girl in his arms — I was a woman, standing on the precipice of adulthood.

  Emboldened, I tugged on Sebastian’s lower lip with my teeth and his answering growl was more than enough to urge me on. I giggled breathlessly when he rolled and took me with him, so I landed sprawled across his chest with my legs straddling his waist. My hair fell down around us in a honey-colored curtain, and Bash’s eyes roamed my face hungrily even as his fingers played with the hanging locks.

  “This wasn’t my intention, you know,” he whispered. “I didn’t set this up to get you in bed with me.”

  “I know,” I said, brushing a kiss across his lips.

  “And I don’t want you to think that I don’t respect you, becau—”

  I silenced him with my lips, deepening our kiss and tracing my palms over the planes of his chest. His hands gripped my waist, pulling me tighter against him as his fingertips skimmed along the exposed skin between my jeans and the drapey white peasant top I was wearing. My hands trembled as I fumbled with the top button on his shirt, but it was with excitement rather than fear.

  There was no one in the world I felt safer with.

  We shed our clothes along with our inhibitions as we laughed and loved beneath the oak tree, a spot I knew from this moment on would be branded forever in my memories as ours. Hands and lips explored unfamiliar places. Passion mounted until I felt combustible, as though the superheated air we’d made with our bodies might reach a flashpoint and simply ignite, turning oxygen to flame. Maybe we’d burn up with the heat of it, so lost in each other we’d let the fire eat us alive rather than stop. And maybe someday, a man out walking in the woods might stumble across two charred skeletons, locked together in an eternal lovers’ embrace beneath a tall oak tree, and our story would fade into folklore — the urban legend of a couple with a passion so intense it burned them alive.

  As we moved together, the initial pain eventually gave way to pleasure and, finally, to an aching sense of completeness as our limbs turned languid and eventually stilled altogether. The crisp spring air cooled our heated skin as we lay chest to chest, our breaths mingling and labored, and disappeared for a time into one another. Sebastian pressed a kiss into my hair and nipped my earlobe gently.

  “You didn’t even let me light the candles,” he grumbled, tilting my face so our gazes caught.

  “Sorry,” I said, grinning unapologetically. “I was just so turned on by the fact that you like Jane Austen, I couldn’t control myself.”

  Sebastian glared at me. “If you reveal my secrets to anyone, I’ll be forced to seek retribution,” he threatened in a low voice, his fingers tickling my sides lightly.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” I told him, rolling my eyes. “Your secret is safe with me.”

  “Good,” he said grinning. “Because it would really suck to have to kill the girl I’m falling for.”

  I stared at him wide-eyed, wondering if this was just another pa
rt of his teasing, but found nothing but sincerity in the depths of his hazel gaze. “You’re falling for me?” I breathed.

  “Of course I am,” he told me, sighing. “And of course, you’d doubt it.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked, growing defensive.

  “Lux, It was obvious from the first moment I met you that you don’t see yourself very clearly. You have no idea how beautiful you are. And, yeah, at first maybe it was that undeniable, exterior beauty that drew me to you. But once I got to know you — once I realized that your beauty wasn’t just surface level, that it extended down to your soul — it was only a matter of time before I fell for you.”

  I opened my mouth to respond — with what, I wasn’t sure, because I didn’t feel entirely confident in my abilities to formulate words at the moment — but Sebastian continued speaking.

  “You’re entirely selfless. You work yourself to the bone to pay off your brother’s medical expenses, and you do it with a smile on your face because you love him. You go without basic necessities and have no regrets about it, if it means Jamie has better care. You give love deeply and freely without expecting a damn thing in return,” he told me, his hand cupping my jaw and one thumb stroking my cheek. “You are remarkable. A gift. Completely unlike everyone I grew up surrounded by.” He shook his head in disbelief. “My parents and their high society friends…they’re poison. But you’re my antidote.”

  I stared into his eyes, feeling my own fill slowly with tears.

  “You idiot!” I blubbered, my voice trembling with emotion. I knew I probably sounded like a crazy person, but I didn’t care. At the moment, I was full to the brim with love and fear, and the only outlet for my emotions was spilling over from beneath my lashes and tracking down my cheeks.

  Sebastian’s brows rose in question even as his thumbs worked to wipe the tears from my damp face. “Well, I have to admit, that wasn’t the exact reaction I was expecting…”