Personal Effects (17 page)

“Any problem getting the rest of the money?” she asks.

“No. Anders said if I come by the site on Tuesday afternoon, he’ll give me the rest early.” Her eyebrows climb. Guilt flutters up again. “I told him I had to make the payment on Wednesday.”

She doesn’t judge me
too
hard for the lie.

Instead, she carefully selects her fortune cookie from the three left, breaks it into a gazillion pieces, and reads her fortune. She smiles at the little slip of paper, tilts her head, smiles bigger, and then folds it in half and pushes it into her pocket. Oh, great — one more thing for me to obsess over.

“So, you’re really going to blow off your finals?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “I am.”

“What about seeing if you can take them early?”

“And say what? ‘Principal Pendergrast, can I pretty please take my Thursday finals on Wednesday, so that I can skip town immediately after, with the money I’m supposed to pay you, and break that agreement I signed, promising —’?”

“OK,” she says. “I get it.”

“I can’t risk it. I’m not even going to bother showing for the history final on Wednesday. Can’t risk that they’ll haul me into Guidance or insist I go to the Spanish or algebra reviews that afternoon.” She nods, knowing I’m right. “Mr. Lee’s been all over me. If he decides we need a chat, I could be stuck in Guidance for hours. I need a good head start on Dad. At least four or five hours, even better if he doesn’t know I’m gone until I’m out of Pennsylvania. If I leave early on Wednesday, as soon as Dad leaves for the day, I’ll have a shot. If I don’t, if I get stuck at school until sometime in the afternoon . . .”

She looks at the stack of stuff in front of her, plays with the edge of the folder.

“Shaun.” She looks up. “Only way to make sure I get out with the money is to leave early Wednesday.” I need her full attention on planning, not on trying to find another way. “Please?”

“OK,” she says, finally convinced.

While the laptop’s booting up, she leans across me to look at my map. She presses close, her tits soft and squishy against my arm. All the blood rushes to my face and neck, and then plunges away, leaving me dizzy. I swallow hard. Her breath hits my neck, and my stomach jumps. Everything pretty much jumps. Including me, back into the corner of the couch.

“Shauna, I think you could just focus on when I get there. I’ll handle the drive. It’s hard with you looking over my shoulder.” Nice. Moron.

“Oh, OK.” She moves behind the computer again. But she’s still close enough to smell, and her leg touches mine every time one of us moves. I can’t concentrate. I also can’t ask her to move over any more without explaining.

“Mind if I turn this off?” she asks, reaching across the table for the remote.

Her knee digs into the outside of my thigh, pushing my legs together. The added pressure feels good. And bad. The warning buzz that things are getting out of control rushes past the good. Her hair touches my shoulder, making the hair on my arms stands on end. And not just my hair. My brain fights for control.

The alarms sound a higher warning, but I can’t move. And then she’s gone, curling into the opposite corner of the couch, facing me, pulling the computer onto her lap.

I concentrate on shutting down the sirens, breathe out, testing if I can move. After a few careful breaths and a stealthy tug at my jeans, I chance a look her way. She has no clue what she does to me.

We work on our parts of the planning and only talk to ask or answer a question. She works on stuff about Madison. I focus on nailing down the route and double-checking the costs: gas getting there and back, some kind of place to stay, food. Math calms everything the rest of the way down.

We’ve already printed out everything we could find on Celia. Not much. I had Shauna trace Celia herself, to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Loads of Celia Carsons in the world, but no other hits for a Celia Carson in Madison, Wisconsin, anywhere else online. So, it’s her home, work, and the few places I could pull out of the letters. That’s where I’ll look.

Shauna nudges my leg with her foot, then leaves it there on my thigh. “Matt?”

“Yeah?” Her toes wiggle. I stare at them.

“How many nights?”

“I don’t know yet. I . . .” I can’t remember the question. Her shirt is pulled tight and low by the computer on her lap. I can see the outline of her bra through the shirt. Just above the screen, I can see the shadowy space between her tits. They felt so good squashed into my arm. I make myself look at her face, but she isn’t paying attention, so I let myself look down again. So good. Love that shadow.

“So . . .” She sits back suddenly, shadow gone. “Still thinking you’ll get there on Wednesday night?”

“Yeah.”

She’s looking at the screen. She hasn’t caught me staring. I focus back on the map and the gas costs. But I keep getting really stupid-wrong answers and losing my place, making me start over again and again.

Crackling plastic. Without even looking I know what she’s doing — I’ve heard the sound a gazillion times. But still, I look. Absorbed in the research, she unwraps the candy, stopping every so often to scroll down the screen with her pinky finger, while the other fingers continue to peel the plastic away from the sticky candy.

She slides the purple rectangle into her mouth, curls her tongue around it, sucks it hard before pushing it around her mouth. The whole world has gone supernova. My wrists sweat. Heat climbs from my toes to paint every part of me red with humiliation, extra swipes at my neck and ears. Twitching pressure builds.

I hunch over the map in front of me for cover, but it’s no use. I can hear her sucking anyway, and it’s almost worse not watching, because my brain makes all these pictures to go with the sounds.

I can’t
not
watch her.

Her tongue sweeps the candy around her mouth. She examines the end of her finger, nibbles away some candy at the tip. Then she licks the side of another finger, her tongue tinged purple just a bit on the edges, but darker in the middle, like tie-dye. She shifts the candy again, rolling her tongue along the side of her cheek.

I need to look away. Now. But all the blood that usually makes my brain work is AWOL. And the voice that usually talks me down is panting.

She looks up. “Want one?” She reaches for the candy on the table, tugging her shirt tight and down again. Fuck. Less shadow, more skin where her tits squish together. She leans back, less skin, more shadow. Fucking hell.

“No, thanks.” Didn’t even sound like my voice, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

I push my legs together and try reasoning.

But it’s not like she’s helping.

She pushes her candy against the roof of her mouth. Her cheeks cave in a little. My pulse pounds all the way through me.

“You sure?”

Shit. She has no clue. Except . . . she’s not looking away. She’s staring right at me. Playing with that candy. But she can’t
know . . .
she’d be totally grossed out.

I pull the road atlas onto my lap. Study the roads. This is about to get monumentally embarrassing. Every time she sucks on that candy hard enough to make a noise, the sound vibrates down my spine and pushes me closer to the edge.

All the voices in my head tell me to run, except for the one telling me she’d taste like grape and that her mouth would be wet and warm.

I try conjugating Spanish verbs, the few I can remember. Sing the alphabet song in my head.

The couch creaks and dips and then she’s moving closer. I beg for anything to get me out of this without her knowing.

I try to think about disgusting things — open sores, roadkill, what my puke would look like if I threw up right now. If she figures it out . . . if she sees . . . God, I’d never be able to look at her again if she knew how often . . .

“OK, I think I’ve found somewhere to stay.” She moves even closer, putting the computer right in front of me and leaning over my arm. “They have a youth hostel. The one in Madison . . .”

I try to pretend everything’s OK, but when I look at her, I can see down her shirt all the way to her bra. Light blue and shiny. Alarms bounce off my skull.

I bolt.

Leaning against the back of the closed bathroom door, I try everything. But none of the usual things are working. Cold water: handfuls in my face, and then over my wrists. Holding my breath. Usually making my lungs fight for air will work, but even when I’m seeing spots and ready to pass out, no dice. I dig my thumbnail into the skin between my thumb and finger for as long as I can stand it. Still at attention.

Then Shauna’s phone in the next room plays the theme song for the Wicked Witch of the West: Stacy’s calling. And just the thought of Stacy, calling now, how she’d look if she came home and found me here — if she knew right now I was in her bathroom with a raging hard-on for her sister — does it.

Still uncomfortable, but good enough for now, I walk back into the living room. Shauna’s still on the phone.

“Sure. No problem.” She rolls her eyes and uses her free hand to make a talking head. “Stacy, it’s fine. They love cookies and ice cream for breakfast. Take your time.”

The table’s been cleared. My map and her computer are there, but everything else is gone. Like it was never here.

“Stacy, I’m kidding.” Didn’t sound like Shauna was kidding. “Really. We’ll be fine.”

Shauna put the TV on again, but on mute. I flip channels without sound, looking for something decidedly not sexy. C-SPAN. Sharks. Professional bowling. I finally settle on competitive fishing, without sound. Perfect.

“OK, good night.” Shauna snaps her phone shut. “Man, she is such a pain.”

I’ve heard Shauna brawl with Stacy before. This one sounded like nothing. And Shauna doesn’t really look all that pissed.

“Checking in?” I ask, testing her mood, and how much she got of what just happened.

“More like checking up. She thinks she knows everything about everything.” Shauna rolls her eyes. She’s fine. “You OK?” She gathers up her hair, then seems to remember she doesn’t have a hair band and just lets it all fall again.

No. “Uh, yeah.”

“You sure?” Shauna plays with her phone, snapping it open and shut, not looking at me.

“Yeah, just, uh, maybe that third beer was too much, or uh . . .” Maybe she’ll think I got the runs, or puked or something; anything’s less embarrassing than the truth.

“Want a ginger ale?” She won’t look at me. Shit. Maybe she did get it?

“Yeah, that’d be great.”

Normalness, even faking it, is good. I move her computer in front of me and look at what she’s found.

“Here you go.” She plunks a glass down to my right and then curls herself back into the far corner of the couch.

“Oh, sorry, I was just looking at what you found,” I say, moving away from the computer, and from her.

“No, feel free. Go ahead.” She sips her soda. Watches. But doesn’t make eye contact. Feels like I’m in some dream, like this is a dream version of Shauna, a dream where I don’t know the rules and things can change on a dime.

I look at the pages on the hostel. It’s perfect. Cheap. Looks better than the other places we found that didn’t require a credit card. Shauna’s cousin is hooking me up with a community college ID anyway, so an ID to register is no big deal. But no credit card required, and probably lots of kids stay there. “This looks great. Thanks for finding it.”

She buffs her nails on her shirt and then blows on them. “Yes. My Google-fu is strong.”

I click over to one of the other pages, showing a map of Madison. Then another, a link to somewhere at the university: the library where Celia works. Shauna’s been busy.

I couldn’t have found half this stuff without her — I’d probably still be sitting on my ass, trying to figure out where to start looking. I owe her big-time, even before the car. And the car is what is really making this possible. Whatever the hell is going on, she’s still got my back. Like she always does. Saving my ass.

“Shaun.” I look at her and again forget what I was gonna say. Because she’s watching me over the rim of her glass. I have no idea what the hell she’s thinking, but the look scares the shit out of me. Too intense. And all of it coming at me. Like heat.

She takes a sip. Then another. Her cheeks flush darker and she looks up, staring straight at me. Grins. And I feel myself smiling back — I can’t help it.

She bites the edge of her lip. I can’t figure out what the hell it all means. Nothing makes sense, least of all that look. But it feels important, like by smiling wider I’m agreeing to something. But I have no idea what.

She’s all mischief again. I can’t help but keep smiling — it’s been a long time since I’ve seen her like this. Maybe never like this, exactly. But . . .

I’ve
never
seen her like this, not with
me
.

It’s like getting sucker punched. Everything goes loose and lost, and for a second I can’t breathe.

The shirt. The makeup. The beer. The perfume. Not for Michael. Or anyone else.

Holy fuck.

She stares at me. Her eyes narrow to dark slits. She puts the glass on the table and begins to move closer.

I stare at the map.

The couch creaks, cushions shift.

Pulse pounds in my ears and dick.

Fuck, she’s right there. Still smells good, too good, ’cause now I can smell the grape, too. And I can’t think. I can’t breathe. I’m dizzy and so fucking hard.

I turn my head. Her mouth is right there. All I’d have to do is lean.

Her fingers squeeze my arm.

I can’t move.

What if I’m wrong? What if this isn’t really happening? What if . . .

“Matt . . .”

“Yeah,” I whisper.

“It’d be fun. You. Me. Road trip?”

“Huh?”

“I’ll come with you,” she says, her breath warm on my cheek. “I don’t have any finals after Tuesday, just take-homes. I’ll get them done early and then I can come with you.”

Her fingers squeeze my arm. My dick throbs.

“We’d be away from here . . . together . . .”

Fuck.

“Shaun . . .” As soon as I say her name, she knows. Her face changes, confused, pale. And she leans a little away.