The Edge of Never (40 page)

“Well, not that I’m complaining,” I say, trying to pay attention to the road and not get us killed, “but now I have a…bit of a problem.”

Camryn’s gaze falls on my lap and then she looks up at me again, cocking her head to one side with a look of mischief and seduction. Then she moves across the seat toward me and grabs a handful between my legs. Now my heart is
banging
against my ribcage. I’m white-knuckling the steering wheel with both hands. She kisses my neck and then my jawline and moves her lips to the shell of my ear. Goosebumps rape me.

She starts to unzip my shorts.

“You’ve helped me with my ‘problems’,” she whispers into my ear and then bites my neck again. “It’s only fair that I return the favor.”

She looks up at me.

I just nod stupidly because I can’t think with the head on my shoulders long enough to form a sentence right now.

I press my back further against the seat as she takes the length of me into her hand and lowers her head between my stomach and the steering wheel. My body lurches a little when I feel her tongue snake out to lick it.
Oh my fucking God…Oh my fucking God…I don’t know how I’m going to drive….

When she slides me into the back of her throat I shudder, my head falls back some, still trying to keep my eyes on the road, and my mouth falls open. I’m only white-knuckling the wheel now with my left hand; as she sucks me harder and faster, my right hand has slid away from the wheel and is gripping the back of her head, her blonde hair wedged within my clinging fingers.

Forty miles per hour has become fifty.

By sixty, my legs are shaking and I can’t see straight. I grip the wheel with both hands again, trying to maintain some kind of control over
something
, especially the damn car, and I let out a gasp and moan as I come.

~~~

I managed not to kill us on the highway after Camryn’s toe-curling head-job. We’re in Galveston by morning and she’s still passed out across the seat with her legs hanging partially on the floorboard. I don’t bother to wake her yet. I drive slowly past my mom’s house first, noting that her car isn’t in the driveway so that means she’s working at the bank today. To kill time, I drive the long way to my apartment, passing down 53
^rd
. Camryn didn’t get much sleep last night, but I guess the car moving slower than usual is enough to wake her anyway. She starts stirring before I pull into my complex at Park at Cedar Lawn.

She raises her beautiful blonde head from the seat and when I see her face, a ripple of laughter bursts lightly through my lips.

She cocks her already crazy-just-woke-up head to one side and grumbles, “What’s so funny?”

“Oh, babe, I tried to keep you from falling asleep like that.”

She leans up, pressing her face into the rearview mirror and rolls her eyes once she sees the three long striped indentions stretching across one cheek all the way to her ear. She probes the indentions in the mirror.

“Wow, that kind of hurts,” she says.

“You’re still beautiful even with stripes.” I laugh and she can’t help but smile.

“Well, we’re here.” I finally say and pull into a parking space and shut off the engine, dropping my hands beside me.

The car is uncomfortably quiet. Even though neither one of us has ever actually said that our trip will end in Texas, or that things between us are going to change, it’s like both of us can feel it.

The only difference is…I’m the only one who knows why.

Camryn sits perfectly quiet and still on her side, her hands folded loosely within her lap.

“Let’s go inside,” I say to stir the silence.

She forces a smile over at me and then opens her door.

“Wow, this place looks more like a campus dorm than an apartment complex.” She shoulders her bag and purse, looking out at the historical building and giant oak trees sprawled across the landscaping.

“It was a U.S. Marine Hospital in the 1930’s,” I say, lifting my bags from the trunk.

Camryn grabs Aidan’s guitar from the backseat.

We make our way down one curvy chalk-white sidewalk and come to my one-bedroom on the bottom floor. I fumble my key in the door and open it into the large living room area. The smell of un-lived-in space hits me as soon as we step inside; nothing funky, just vacant.

I drop my bags on the floor.

Camryn stands there at first, checking out the place.

“Set your stuff wherever you want, babe.”

I move over to the couch and pluck my jeans from it hanging sloppily over the back and then grab a pair of boxers and a t-shirt from the chair and matching ottoman.

“This is a really nice apartment,” she says, gazing around.

Finally she sets her stuff on the floor and props Aidan’s guitar against the back of the couch.

“Not much the bachelor pad,” I say heading into the dining room, “but I like it here and I wanted to be closer to the beach.”

“No roommates?” she asks following in behind me.

I shake my head and step into the kitchen and pop the fridge open; the various bottles and jars in the side-door jangle against one another. “Not anymore. My friend Heath lived with me for about three months when I first moved in, but he ended up moving to Dallas with his fiancé.”

Shutting the fridge door, I pull out a two liter bottle of Ginger Ale. “Want a drink?” I hold it up to show her. “See? I have non-soda or beer in my fridge and you see that I wasn’t even here to plant it in advance.”

She smiles sweetly and says, “Thanks, but I’m not thirsty right now—what’d you buy it for: hangover, stomach bug?”

I smirk at her and take a swig from the bottle itself. She doesn’t cringe like I halfway expected her to.

“Yeah, you got me,” I admit, twisting the cap back on.

“If you want to get a shower,” I say as I leave the kitchen and point down the hall, “bathroom’s just right there; I’m going to give my mom a call so she doesn’t worry and pick up some around here before I get one myself. My plant is probably dead.”

Camryn looks slightly surprised. “You have a plant?”

I smile. “Yeah, her name’s Georgia.”

Her brow rises a little higher.

I laugh lightly and kiss her softly on the lips.

While Camryn is in the shower I work my way through every visible inch of my apartment in search of anything incriminating: disgusting, crusty socks (found one at the foot of my bed), unopened condom wrappers (have a box full on my nightstand—I stuff them in the very bottom of the trash),
opened
condom wrappers (two in the wastebasket in my room), more dirty clothes and one porn magazine (Shit! That’s on the back of the toilet—undoubtedly she’s already seen it).

Then I wash the few dirty dishes that I left in the sink before I left out and sit down in the living room to give my mom a call.

CAMRYN

34

WHEN I SEE THE porn mag on the back of the toilet as casually placed as one on motorcycles might be, I can’t help but laugh to myself. I wonder briefly if there are any guys in the world that
don’t
look at pornography and then realize what a stupid question that is. I can’t say anything; I’ve looked at my fair share of porn on the internet.

I take a long, hot shower and dry off with the beach towel Andrew gave me and then get dressed.

I don’t like it here. In his apartment. In Texas.

Any other time and in some other circumstance, it would be different, but what I said to him the other night when we pulled over on the side of the road still holds true. This place, everything about it feels like
the end
. The magic of our time together on the road has all but literally evaporated with last week’s rain. Not our feelings for each other…no, those are so strong that thinking about the end at all is metaphorically bringing me to my knees. How we feel about each other is…well, it’s all that we have left. The open road is gone. The spontaneous stops and sometimes not knowing where we are but not giving a damn, is gone. The motels and the little things like beef jerky and Baby Oil and bubble bath, they’re all gone. The soundtrack of our time together, our short life together, has faded away as the last song on the album ends. All I can hear anymore is the smooth vibration of silence coming from the speakers. I feel like all I want to do is reach out and start it over again, but my hand won’t move to press the button.

And I can’t understand why.

I wipe the tear from my face and push my emotions down into my lungs and hold them there, taking a deep breath before I open the bathroom door.

I hear Andrew talking on the phone when I move through the dining room:

“Don’t fuck with me right now, Aidan. I don’t need this shit. Yeah, so what? Who are you to tell me what to do with my life?
What
? Give me a fucking break, bro; funerals aren’t mandatory. I personally would rather never go to another one again unless it’s my own. I don’t know why people have funerals anyway; just going to see someone you care about lying completely fucking lifeless in a goddamn box. I’d rather the last time I see someone it be of them alive. Don’t give me that line of shit, Aidan! You know it’s bullshit!”

I don’t want to keep standing around the corner like I’m eavesdropping, but it doesn’t exactly feel appropriate to walk in there on him yet, either.

I do it anyway. He’s getting way too irate and I just want to calm him down. The second he sees me, he drops the angry tone with Aidan and raises his back from the couch.

“Look, I gotta go,” he says. “Yes, I’ve already called Mom. Yes. Yeah, alright, I hear yah. Later.”

He shuts the phone off and drops it on the oak coffee table next to his propped bare foot.

I sit down next to him on the split cushion.

“Sorry about that,” he says, patting my thigh and then rubbing his palm across it.

“I’ll never hear the end of it from him.”

I move over and sit on his lap and he pulls me against his chest as if I’m what he needs to calm down. I drape my arms around his neck, interlocking my fingers around his shoulder. Leaning in, I kiss the side of his mouth.

“Camryn.” He gazes into my eyes. “Look, I don’t want this to be the end, either,” he says, as though he had been reading my mind while in the bathroom moments ago.

Suddenly, he lifts me up and makes me sit upright on his lap facing him with my legs on either side, my knees bent into the couch. He takes each of my hands into his and looks right at me with gravity and intensity in his eyes.

“What if we…” he looks away, contemplating his words deeply, though I wish I knew if it was because he wanted to say them right, or maybe not at all.

“What if we
what
?” I try to prompt him. I don’t want him to back out, no matter what it is; I want him to say it. I feel some revived sense of hope again and I can’t bear to let it slip away. “Andrew?”

His intense green eyes lock on mine as my voice snaps him back into the moment.

“What if we go away together?” he says and my heart starts pounding faster. “I don’t want to be here. And I’m not saying that because of my father or my brother—none of that has anything to do with how I feel. Right now. Here with you. How I’ve felt all this time, since the day I saw you sitting alone on that bus in Kansas.” He squeezes my hands tighter. “I know you lost your partner in crime, but…I want
you
to be
mine
. Maybe
we
should travel the world together, Camryn…I know I can’t replace your ex—”

Tears stream from my eyes.

He takes it the wrong way. His hands slip from mine and suddenly he can’t look at me anymore. I reach out and cup his face in my palms, forcing his tortured gaze.

“Andrew..,” I shake my head, tears rolling down my cheeks, “…it was always you,” I whisper harshly. “Even with Ian, I felt something was missing. I told you, that night in the field; I told you that…,” My voice trails. I smile and say, “You
are
my partner in crime. I’ve known that for a long time.”

I kiss his lips.

“I can’t think of anything in this world I’d rather do than to see it with you. We belong on the road. Together. It’s where I
want
to be.”

His eyes are watering, but he lets his bright smile push the tears away before they fall. And then he crushes his mouth against mine, both of us cupping each other’s faces in our hands. His kiss steals my breath away, but I just kiss him deeper, drinking down as much of his own breath as I can. And without breaking the kiss his hands fall away from my face and he wraps them tight around my body, lifting me with him into a stand.

“You have to meet my mom today,” he says, scanning my face, peering deeply into my eyes.

I sniffle back the rest of my tears and nod. “I would love to meet your mom.”

“Great,” he says, guiding me to slip away from his waist and stand on my own. “I’ll get a shower and we’ll go do some stuff around town for a while and head over to see her after she’s off work.”

“OK,” I say, never letting the smile fade from my face.

I couldn’t let it fade even if I tried.

He looks at me for a long moment like he doesn’t want to pry himself away long enough even to shower, his smiling eyes as radiant as I saw them that night after our performance at Old Point. His face reads all sorts of things that one who is overwhelmingly happy might want to say, but he says nothing.

He doesn’t need to.

Andrew finally leaves the room to shower and I go to check my phone messages. Mom finally called. She left a voice mail telling me all about her cruise of the Bahamas that ended up lasting eight days. It really sounds like she’s into this guy, Roger. I might actually have to swing by home long enough to check him out and do my own douchebag inspection of his personality just in case my mom has been blinded by something he has that overshadows the warning signs: more money than my dad, a body sexier than Andrew’s—well, that’s not likely—or a really big…not sure exactly how I would find something like that out unless I asked Mom directly. That’s not gonna happen.