This Sky (17 page)

    “So just sex?”

     Gemma rests her head
back against the pillow. “Well, no. I guess that doesn’t make much sense. We’re going to be working together so we have to be friendly. We can still do surf lessons and hang out, but we won’t
date
per se.”

    “No holding hands or staring longingly into each other’s eyes?” I joke.

    But she doesn’t laugh. She nods, visibly relieved. “Right. No coordinated outfits. No ridiculous pet names.”

    “No secret hand signals.”

    “No presents or shared desserts.”

    “No sitting on the same side of the booth,” I say, smiling softly.

    “No flowers.”

    “No heart-shaped boxes of chocolate?”

    “Exactly,” Gemma replies, making a popping sound with her lips. “No check-in phone calls or guilt trips or family history lessons.”

    I swing my legs onto the bed and lean my back against the metal headboard. “No sunset beach walks where we talk for hours about the meaning of life?”

    She laughs a little and a stray brown lock falls in front of her eyes. I brush it behind her ear and she tilts her face until her cheek is resting in the palm of my hand. “Nope. I don’t want us to dredge up the past or worry about the future. No promises required and most importantly, no expectations between us.”

     My pause is less than a second. “I can do that.”

     She smiles and puts her mouth on my chest to seal our deal with a kiss. Her tongue feels like a bird flapping its wings against my skin. “Good. I was really hoping you would say that.”

Ending

I lied.

I wanted you from that moment.

I wanted you, wrapped in starlight and reflections,

To be tied up with strings.

And ropes.

And chains.

I wanted you hanging around my neck

Like a charm I could press to my heart and

Make three wishes on.

But I trapped the want

And the words inside my mouth.

I buried those secret things under my tongue,

Biting down until blood and bitterness

Filled my mouth

And poured down the back of my throat.

In the beginning,
you said,
there was only water.

But what about the end?

I closed my eyes and lay flat

With my back to the ocean

And my face to the sky.

I lifted my hands and caught ribbons of wind

Underneath my fingernails.

I rode the water for so long,

I forgot what my skin felt like when it was dry.

Landon

Who do you want to be now?

   
After I was forced into rehab, I saw a shrink exactly one time. It was at Claudia’s urging. She thought it would do me some good to “talk things out.”

    During the session, the line of questioning went pretty much how I expected it to go. Shit about my childhood. Shit about my mother. Shit about fighting. Shit about the painkillers.

    Nothing was shocking.

    Nothing was a revelation.

    In a soothing, monotonous voice, the therapist spoke about closure and moving forward. I nodded along like what she was saying was new or interesting to me. But I’d heard it all before and I really didn’t need a pep talk. I knew why I’d let things go so far because I’d already familiarized myself with the miserable scent of my own failings.

    And I was doing just fine. I wasn’t bumming pills. I wasn’t getting high. I didn’t even want to. Not really. I’d lost everything that mattered and I’d stayed clean and o
ut of trouble for months. To me, this was proof that I was okay. So, when the therapist asked me if I thought I was like my mother, I was able to give her an unequivocal “no.”

    At the end of the session, she said, “Now the question you need to ask yourself is,
Who do you want to be now
?”

   
Considering the fact that I’d lost the only thing that had ever made me feel whole, I didn’t know what to say. Truthfully, I was pissed.

    So I quietly thanked her for her time, paid for the session, and never went back.

   
Who do you want to be now?

   
For the past few days, that question has been rolling around my head.

    Claudia tells me I’m acting differently. She thinks my attitude change has to do with Gemma. I don’t know. Maybe my sister is right. Maybe the truth is that all I’ve ever wanted is to be good for somebody else.

Gemma

Do you remember when I said the past was out of bounds?

    Yeah, well, I’m starting to rethink that decision. There are things I want you to know before we continue; things that might give you a better picture of who I am.

    It probably won’t make a difference but I’m going to tell you about the time we went tubing on the American River. Andrew was five so I must have been eleven. Dad drove us for an hour and a half through nothingness. He didn’t give any hints, only told us to wear our bathing suits under our clothes. We counted state license plates and sto
pped to eat on the side of the road. Then Dad parked in a dusty lot where the highway forked, bought inner tubes from some guy selling them out of the flatbed of his pickup, and the four of us spent the afternoon floating down the river.

    Mom held our hands the whole time.
So I don’t lose you,
she said, tugging us through the water until our tubes collided and pushed away from each other like repelling magnets.

    Even now, if I close my eyes, I can hear the whirring sound the river made as it spilled past a grouping of rocks. I can feel the rhythmic sway of the current underneath me and the smooth plastic of the inner tube sticking to the backs of my thighs. I can picture my mother’s skin, soft and warm as a sun-ripened lemon peel.

    I guess in the grand scheme of things, it’s not really important, but I want to tell you about the cat we gave away after the pediatrician confirmed my long-suspected allergy. She’d been my father’s cat from before my parents met. Her name was Alice and she was black and white with a pink speckled nose. Her collar was a strap of red worn leather with tiny round silver balls fastened near the buckle. Alice liked to sleep on her back in patches of sunlight. We’d see her there, with her spine curved like a question mark, and her whiskers so long that they puddled around her upturned face.

       I find myself wanting to talk about Andrew and that feels like something huge. I want to remember his blond hair and his lively olive green eyes and that tiny mole on the left side of his neck. I want you to know that he liked to build with Legos and was prone to hay fever in early spring and that he had a very slight lisp. He loved classic comics. He was afraid of big dogs. He smelled of tree sap and soil and fresh, earthy boy things. He sucked on his thumb until he was four. Skittles were his favorite candy.

    And I want you to understand the truth of how I felt the first time I was on a real stage. I was eight and Mom talked me into a community youth theater.
You’ve always loved old movies and you can be such a drama queen,
she surmised.

    I was hesitant at first. And maybe a little intimidated. I was the youngest person by at least five years. We read for
Pygmalion
in a circle of chairs set up on a barren stage. I ended up getting the part of a young girl in the market.

    I don’t remember my cues or the outfit I wore or whether or not I was good. What I do remember is the smell of polished wood and the rush of standing underneath those hot lights, so fierce and bright that I almost couldn’t look at them head-on. I remember the heady excitement and the sound of my heart getting lost in the music of applause. I remember that it felt like coming home.

***

As strange as it is, I fall into an easy routine in San Diego. The days start to slide by too quickly to catch, passing through my fingers slick and easy as water.

    Julie says it’s because I’m relaxing now that the tabloid frenzy around Ren has died down. I no longer have to worry about catching a glimpse of my face on a magazine cover when I’m walking up to the checkout line at the grocery store. And the emails and phone calls from reporters have all but stopped. I can almost see my way over the top of this mountain.

    I work. I play. I spend time with Landon. And these are the hours I pace myself, taking deep breaths and intentionally slowing things down.

    I pay attention.

    I focus.

    I memorize.

    I hold each expression, each touch like an animal saving up food for an impending freeze.

    At night, we lay in his bed, nose-to-nose, our toes brushing and our hands tucked between our bodies, and we trade stories until our throats are raw and scratchy and our eyelids are drooping shut.

    This is how I learn Landon Young. Inch by inch. Moment by moment.

    Once, remembering what Claudia told me about their childhood, I asked him about his parents. It was so dark he couldn’t see my face, which was probably why I asked the question in the first place. I knew it went against the rules.
No dredging up the past.

    “No dad,” he answered, shrugging his shoulders against me like it didn’t matter to him “And you
don’t want to know about my mother.”

    Of course, I had to press the issue. “Why not?”

    He was quiet. I felt the rise and fall of his chest against me. I felt his heart ticking softly under his skin. When he finally whispered into my hair, I had to close my eyes and reassemble the words to make sure I’d heard them right. “She was a drug dealer.”

    “Oh,” I said, freezing up and feeling stupid for my reaction.
A drug dealer?
And here I’d been thinking my parents were bad because they’d abandoned me and gone thousands of miles away.

    “That’s why I didn’t want to tell you,” he said. “You’re too good to understand.
My childhood—shit— it wasn’t all roses.”

     “Neither was mine,” I replied
, thinking of Andrew.

    “My mother had boyfriends and a few of them liked throwing me around almost as much as they liked binge drinking and shooting up.”

     I stiffen
ed even more. Breathing in deep through my nose, I whispered, “And your mother didn’t stop them?”

    
“That’s what parents do in your world. In mine, they get high and forget you and your sister’s birthday. They disappear for days at a time. They spend the grocery money on drugs.”

    
My stomach dropped ten stories. “Landon, I—”

     “I don’t want to talk about this,” he said softly, pressing his mouth to my temple. “Can we just forget it?”

     “I-I…” I stuttered. How could I forget something like that?

     Landon’s arms tightened around me. “Please.”

     “But—”

      Before I could get another word out, he cut me off with a searing kiss
signaling the end of the conversation.

    I don’t forget what he told me. I can’t. B
ut after that, I don’t break the rules again. We gracefully avoid all the touchy subjects—Ren and our families, and the future. Instead, we roll out snippets of our lives in flickering bursts like a movie montage set to upbeat pop music.

    
I tell him about the acting coach who, for a class exercise, made us get on the floor, roll our knees to our chests and imagine that we had returned to the womb. Landon talks about the water. He draws waves on my bare skin with the tips of his fingers. I make him laugh with my SpongeBob SquarePants impersonation and the story about my awful first kiss. It was behind a bowling alley if that tells you anything.

   
And with nothing but words and golden skin between us, melting into him is such a simple thing to do. It’s so natural and true, I don’t realize it’s happening until my feverish heart is flush against his and our hungry breaths are synchronized. And when his eyes catch the light like spider silk and his hard body presses me deep into the earth, it’s so easy to forget that what we have is only temporary.