This Is the Wonder

by Tracey Ward

  “Yeah.”

  I want to growl, but I bite down and I don’t. She hears me but she’s not listening. My words make sense to her but they don’t stick. They’ll get garbled in her mind the next time she talks to Ben and she won’t remember how she feels right now. She’ll only understand him and the way he makes her feel. I can’t do anything about it any more than she could tell me to stop feeling the way I do about Jax.

  One is lust and one is love, but they’re close cousins. So close it’s often hard to tell one from the other.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “So it seriously never showed up?” Jax asks for the third time.

  “No. I’m fucking with you,” I deadpan.

  He pauses. “Wait, are you?”

  “No!” I laugh. “I’m not. It never showed up.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

  “And say what? Where the hell is my Christmas present?”

  “Yes!”

  “No.”

  “I can’t believe it didn’t get to you,” he growls. “I mailed it right before I left. I made a point of doing it before I was gone so you wouldn’t have to wait to see it. I hope it’s not lost forever.”

  “It’s probably just stuck in the mail somewhere,” I soothe him, not sure I believe it. It’s been months. If it was going to get here, it would have by now. “It’s crossing an ocean and several countries. It’s not too hard to believe it could have been hung up somewhere. “What was it? Maybe it didn’t pass customs.”

  “I’m not telling you. It might still make it and I don’t want to ruin the surprise. But no. It shouldn’t have gotten locked up in customs.”

  “I’ll watch for it. It’ll turn up.”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me until now.”

  “Well, believe it, buddy.”

  “So how’s your last semester going?” he asks, changing the subject and making me cringe. He laughs at my expression as it shows up on his computer screen on the other side of the earth. “That good, huh?”

  “It’s fine. I’m doing great in my classes. I always do.”

  “I challenge you to sound less enthused about it.”

  I roll my eyes, looking away.

  “I saw that,” he sings.

  “I let you,” I sing back. I look at him and grin. “How much longer?”

  He laughs. “You ask me that every day.”

  “I like hearing it every day. How much longer?”

  “One month. Ish.”

  “Ish. Ugh, I could kill that word.”

  “Not a word, babe.”

  “Still. I hate it. Just say a month. Or less. Say less!”

  “I wish I could,” he says gently.

  I look at him, with his tan skin and his beautiful face. His blue eyes that strike me every time I see them. Every time they hold me steady. “Lean in close,” I plead. “I want to see your eyes.”

  He does it for me, putting his face so close to the camera that it fills the screen of my laptop and he’s all I can see. Just the curve of his nose and the endless deep blue sea.

  I smile looking at him, drinking him in. “I love your eyes,” I whisper.

  I’m skirting the line. I’m saying the words but I’m not. I’m telling him but I’m staying silent.

  His cheeks lift with a smile I can’t see, his eyes narrowing with the emotion and brimming with another. “I love your voice.”

  “Because it does something dark to you?” I ask, quoting him.

  “Sometimes.”

  “When?”

  “When I’m holding you. Kissing you.” He hesitates, then says huskily, “When I’m missing you.”

  “Are you missing me right now?”

  “It seems like that’s all I do lately.”

  I pinch my lips together, debating. Wondering. “Do you want to miss me a little bit less?”

  He sits back slightly, his face receding from the frame and his upper body entering the picture. He’s in a T-shirt, the beige one that goes under his uniform. I know he’s still in the pants of his uniform, probably still wearing his boots. I’ve seen him in pictures dressed like that or walking across the screen. I even caught sight of it once back in Germany the night after Paris when I crashed in his dorm after we drove all night to get him to work on time. He left me there to sleep and wait until he got off work so he could drive me home, and I lay in his bed half asleep watching him get dressed. Watching as he put on his uniform and he transformed into someone else. Someone I didn’t know yet. He was just Jax then—a guy I had a crush on, one I could walk away from at any point and remember him fondly. I wasn’t his yet and he wasn’t mine.

  But that morning I saw the part of him that can never be anyone’s because it isn’t even his. It belongs to something bigger, a higher purpose. One he’s offered himself up to. Putting on that uniform made him the soldier that’s breathtaking and heart-stopping to look at but will disappear when the calling comes. That morning was my warning and I should have taken it for what it was when I saw it, but I didn’t know yet. I was too busy looking with lust, and by the time I wholly understood it, I was already in love.

  “What do you mean?” he asks now, looking confused but interested. Very, very interested.

  Jax and I haven’t had any kind of anything since the night I left Germany. Six months. Really think that through. Long time.

  “Do you remember how I told you I read dirty books in the middle of the night to help me sleep?”

  “Yes,” he says instantly.

  I smile.

  “You’re going to read me a dirty book?” he asks.

  “No.” I reach for my reader, sitting back on my bed and letting him see the thin boy shorts I’m wearing that leave my legs exposed, pale and smooth from a long winter in hiding. They’re like a secret no one knows. No one but him. “I’m going to let you watch me read a dirty book.”

  He swallows hard. “Fuck.”

  “Are you ready?”

  “Are you serious?”

  I turn on my reader, flipping back until I find the last filthy page I’d read. “He ran his hands up her thighs, spreading them wide and nuzzling the harsh scratch of his five o’clock shadow over her creamy, sensitive skin until she gasped and twitched beneath his fingers.”

  “You’re serious.”

  I grin as I sit up and slowly push my shorts down my legs. I pull them off with a flourish and toss them across the room, sitting back against my headboard with the computer and Jax at my feet looking up the long stretch of my naked skin to my underwear. “I’m very serious. Do you want me to stop?”

  “Never.”

  I turn back to the book, picking up a little farther down the road. “She writhed and moaned…” I run my fingertips up over my leg, “…her body arching up off the bed as his relentless fingers drove her to the highest of heights…” I touch the edge of my underwear where it meets my hip, “…and she screamed a strangled cry in the back of her throat...” I tug gently on the cotton, slipping it low. “Then she moaned his name as though it were a prayer…” my fingers delve inside, just along the waistband, “…her body openly weeping for him.”

  Jax’s breathing is coming through the speakers of my laptop. It’s shallow and strained and when I look up from the book to meet his eyes they’re electric. Violently blue and brilliant, trained on me with a raw hunger and adoration that leaves me lost. I don’t know the woman he’s looking at, but I want to. I want to be her. I want to live in her skin as he stares at it, memorizing it and remembering it, heating it and igniting it with nothing but the air from his lungs pushing and pulling in and out over the span of space between us that dwindles to nothing against the will of his want.

  “This is the best book I’ve ever read,” he tells me.

  His voice is gravel.

  “Oh, baby,” I lament, flipping the page and grinning wickedly, “you haven’t seen anything yet.”

  What he sees is me at my most vulnerable. Me the way no one has
ever seen me before. It’s different than sex. It feels like I’m giving up a hidden part of myself that I’ve never considered offering up before, but with Jax it feels safe. It feels right. It’s something I want to give, and when I fall apart—shuddering and frantic—it’s his name on my lips. His eyes on my body and his voice in my ears urging me on, thanking me and pleading with me. Begging me for nothing and promising me everything.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  One of my last classes that I have to take is an English Lit class. You’d think that with my core work done I’d be finished with this sort of thing, but apparently not. Apparently I need to master the art of reading and writing, as though I haven’t already done that in my twenty-two years.

  The class is almost over and my final assignment is simple: read and interpret a poem. Any poem. It sounds so easy and it should be, but here’s the problem—I can’t pick a poem. It’s so fucking frustrating and indicative of my indecision in the rest of my life that I almost choke on the anger it causes me. It’s so simple. Everyone makes choosing sound like it’s so simple, but if it is, then why am I constantly in a wild state of panic over the littlest and biggest decisions in my life?

  What is wrong with me?

  If the assignment was narrowed down to picking a poem by a specific author or within a certain period of history, even a set standard of meter, I would be okay. I could work with that. But the fact that I’m supposed to pick just one of the millions of poems that exist in the known world gives me a sickness in my stomach that I can’t understand and I can’t get away from. I need structure. I need parameters—otherwise I’m lost. I’m overwhelmed. What if I choose the wrong one? What if I pick one, do the work, and it turns out I don’t understand it at all? What then? I failed.

  I have one chance and a million choices and I’m so goddamn gut-sick that I’m going to fail.

  I vent about it online, cursing my teacher for being a vague rat bastard, and Jax and Mel immediately try to make me feel better.

  Mel: Use a passage from a porno and tell him it sounded like poetry to you.

  Jax: Does Chuck Norris write poetry? Use something of his.

  Wren: You’re using different words but I feel like you’re both saying the exact same thing.

  Ben: I’ll write something for you. It’ll be long. It’ll be hard (to understand). You’ll want to give it multiple go overs.

  Wren: I thought I unfriended you, Ben.

  Ben: You did. I saw the thread through Mel’s profile.

  Sanchez: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/ee-cummings{i-carry-your-heart-with-me}

  Sanchez: ur welcome.

  Wren: Oh my God.

  Mel: Damn.

  Wren: Sanchez, that’s beautiful! How did you find that?

  Sanchez: i luv me some cummings.

  Ben: giggity.

  Sanchez: it’s one of my favorites.

  Jax: You read poetry?

  Sanchez: what? a brother can’t be deep?

  Wren: You’re not a brother.

  Sanchez: that hurts, baby bird.

  Wren: Sorry. And thank you! It’s perfect.

  Sanchez: thought you might be feelin it. especially now.

  Wren: <3

  Sanchez: that for me or ya boy?

  Wren: Both. All of you. Everyone.

  Wren: Except for Ben. Fuck you, Ben.

  Ben:

  ***

  I graduate from Idaho State University on a warm afternoon in June wearing my Bengal black and orange and smiling proudly. I made it. I did it. A goal I set out to complete when I was eighteen years old is coming to a close and I’m equal parts relieved and terrified.

  I graduate with honors because I gave it my everything from start to finish. No matter how afraid I was or unsure what would come when it was over, I was committed to this with the passion I put into anything I promise myself to.

  The day goes by in a blur. It starts and finishes before I can catch up, and I imagine it’s what a wedding feels like. You’re guided down the aisle, take your time in the spotlight, pose for pictures in your gown, eat food you won’t taste or remember, receive gifts you don’t have time to open or thank anyone for, and then you’re exhausted and wondering how an entire day blew past you without you realizing it.

  When we get home that night after my parents take me to dinner to celebrate, I crash immediately. I glance at messages online from friends and family telling me congratulations and making jokes about my expensive brain and putting it to work when all I want to do is shut it down and sleep.

  Then I see the message from Jax. It’s a picture of a tree in a green field with a star-strewn sky behind it and a message written across it about knowledge that I barely read. What I focus on is the sky. The black night, the brilliant blue stars, and the feeling it gives me as I stare at it. It reminds me of the feeling I get when I think about the future, that cold, empty feeling space holds, but then there’s the tree. It’s tall and old, gnarled and twisted, and it’s reaching. It’s reaching the way the words do and what it wants, what it’s unafraid of, is the sky. The stars. The hope and possibility of a world wide open for the taking.

  It reminds me of Sanchez’s poem and suddenly the sky doesn’t seem so daunting anymore. Every line of that poem weaves around the tree rooted inside me and feeds it in a way that water to the earth from the sky can’t even fathom. I absorb it. I devour it and I hold it inside me tightly to keep it close, always near and always true. It’s my heart song. It’s my love.

  It’s Jax.

  And he’s coming home.

  Not today or tomorrow, but he is coming home. He’s leaving Afghanistan, heading for Germany to check in, then he’s going on vacation to Jersey. He’s coming stateside and I’m losing my shit.

  “You’re sure?” I ask, demanding that he validate his story every single day. “You’re coming to the U.S.? Soon?”

  He laughs faintly and turns his computer so I can see his space. It’s being packed up. All of his pictures are down, his desk is cleared off, his big green military duffle is bursting in the corner next to a pile of folded clothes. “I swear it. It’s happening. I can’t tell you when—”

  “I know, I know,” I agree, smiling at him. I can’t seem to stop. “I remember the drill. You’ll just vanish some day and reappear out of nowhere in another country. You’re like a magician.”

  “I thought I was a thespian.”

  “You wear many hats. So then we don’t know when you’ll make it to the States, do we?”

  “Nope, sorry,” he admits.

  “But you’re going to Jersey first?”

  “Yeah. I’ll fly out there from Germany, spend a week with my family, then I’ll come to Boise and spend a few days with you before I have to go back. I’m sorry it’s not longer.”

  “I’ll take what I can get.”

  “That’s a raw deal for you.”

  “No, it’s just how it is. It’s fine.”

  He turns the computer back to focus on his face and I can see the remorse. I’ve seen it a lot lately, more and more as the deployment drags on. It worried me at first. I was scared he regretted getting involved with me because this was too hard, but he admitted last week that it’s guilt. He feels bad doing this to me and I’ve been trying to dial back the desperation for him to get out of there. I don’t want to add more weight to his shoulders. His burden is heavy enough as it is.

  “Hey, babe?” I say, sitting in close to the screen.

  He looks up, his face still drawn.

  I smile brightly, willing the emotion into my eyes so he sees it. “Thank you.”

  He chuckles in a short bark, his hand rubbing his eyes roughly. “For which part? The distance? The loneliness? The shit hours? The fact that I forgot Valentine’s Day?”

  “I don’t care about Valentine’s Day.”

  “That I missed your graduation?” he continues.

  I need to stop this rant.

  “No. None of that. Thank you for trying for me. For us
. For never giving up. We barely knew each other when we decided to give this a shot and it could have gone really wrong, but I think we did good. We made it. Six months of separation and I know you so much more now than I did before and I…” I speak carefully here, dancing around those words again. “I can’t imagine caring more about anyone than I care about you. You’re my best friend. If it weren’t for this deployment I don’t know if we’d have that. The distance made us get to know each other better because talking is all we have. And it was a make-or-break situation. It would have been easy to quit, but we both fought to stay. We stuck together. We had to work for us and it wasn’t easy, but if you asked me to do it again, I would. No hesitation, no question.”

  “I’ll have to,” he says deeply, his eyes downcast. “This was the first deployment. There’ll be others, and I’ll have to ask you to wait for me over and over and—”

  “And I’ll do it. Every time. You won’t have to ask because I’m telling you right now that I’ll wait for you every single time, Jax.” I take a breath, willing him to look at me, to show me he’s okay. That he understands. “I’d rather be waiting for you than be with anyone else.”

  He nods his head and when he lifts his eyes I can see them shining in the low light of his room. Then he grins and it’s crooked and sweet and it’s him. It’s happy.

  My heart clenches in my chest as I smile back, and I commit this moment to memory. I take a mental picture of his face framed in my computer with that look in his eyes and the smile on his lips and I make it my life’s goal to always draw this out of him.

  To spend the rest of my life making this man smile.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  My world goes dark a week later.

  He’s on the move.

  I take it with more grace than I did before. I face it with more strength. Or maybe I go numb a little bit because sometimes you have to. You can’t feel everything all the time and I have so many things up in the air right now, I can’t stand to think about them all at once.