When Rose Wakes (14 page)

She glanced around for Kylie and saw her talking to Dom near the table being used as a bar. But as she started toward them, she felt a gentle touch upon her shoulder and turned to find herself face-to-face with Jared.

“I hear I missed all the excitement,” he said.

Rose smiled, but only halfheartedly. “Yeah. So much fun.”

Jared’s eyes narrowed with concern. “Are you okay?”

“I’ve been better. It’s pretty awkward. I’m feeling like I shouldn’t be here.”

Jared pushed his hands into the pockets of his jeans. With his hair a mess and in a navy blue shirt open at the collar revealing a beaded leather choker, he looked entirely different from the guy she’d met at school. But the eyes were the same, full of unspoken feeling. And in casual clothes, out of uniform, he looked older than his years. She had to fight the temptation to touch him.

“We could go outside and talk,” he said. “On the steps. Or maybe there’s a deck or patio in the back.”

Rose glanced at Kylie, who was deeply engaged in animated conversation with Dom, just as emphatic and enthusiastic about whatever topic she was discussing as she always seemed to be. She seemed to sense Rose watching her and looked up, gave a goofy little smile and a wave, and then went back to focusing on Dom.

Go outside and talk,
Rose thought. She had her punch and rum soaked shirt in her hand, wore only a bra beneath her borrowed jacket, was at a party she had not been invited to where people were drinking boatloads of alcohol, and this guy who made her knees weak wanted to spend some time in intimate conversation away from the crowd.

Aunt Suzette and Aunt Fay would have taken turns having heart attacks.

“Okay,” Rose said. “Let’s go.”

There were too many people crowded on the back deck, so Rose and Jared wandered into the small fenced yard in back of the house and, to their delight, discovered a bench beneath an old oak. Abandoned beer bottles indicated that it had not been vacant for long, so they had gotten lucky.

The noise of the party spilled out of the house, but somehow the space around them seemed intimate regardless of the loud laughter from the deck. Fallen leaves danced along the grass with each breath of the night breeze, making a crinkling sound that Rose loved. The October moon shone brightly down upon them, the sky
clear save for the occasional wisp of cloud. Though they were in the city, somewhere nearby someone had a wood-burning stove and the smell alone warmed Rose.

They talked about school, mostly. Jared talked about his favorite teachers, about football, about some of the kids he had been in class with since elementary school. But after a while he seemed to become reticent and several brief silences arrived to interrupt the conversation.

“So, Kylie says you’re sweet,” Rose said.

Jared arched an eyebrow. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“And what do you think?” he asked.

Rose smiled. “So far, so good. I want to know more about you, though.”

He shrugged. “Like what?”

“Your family. Your life. Your girlfriends.”

Jared glanced away, almost shyly, and Rose liked that very much.

“My parents are pretty cool, I guess. As for my life… it’s kind of what-you-see-is-what-you-get. When I’m not in school or at football practice, I play guitar or watch TV. I like to read—”

“Old books,” Rose said.

Jared chuckled softly. “Kylie told you that?”

Rose nodded. “Maybe you can recommend something. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

“Jack London. Jane Austen. Dickens. I love all of that stuff. I’m reading T. S. Eliot right now—
The Waste Land.
I understand hardly any of it, but it’s still cool just trying to soak it in, make some sense of it.”

His passion for the subject lit up his eyes, but when he saw her watching him, he seemed to grow embarrassed.

“Sorry. It’s kind of lame, I know. Totally uncool.”

Rose smiled. “No. I like that you’re so into it. Besides, I don’t know the first thing about what’s cool.”

His hand touched hers, and their fingers twined together. She wasn’t sure who had initiated it, but she liked the contact very much.

“Tell me more,” she said.

This time Jared didn’t look away. He looked into her eyes.

“I read about all of these amazing places, and I want to see them all. To travel. Sometimes I wish I could go back in time, not just across the ocean,” he said. Then he grinned. “But across the ocean will do.”

Rose thought about the ocean. “Do you like to swim?”

“Yeah. I love the beach.”

That’s one thing,
Rose thought. The more she learned about Jared, the closer she felt to him. She didn’t know much about herself, but her aunts had told her that she loved the sea, so she and Jared had one thing in common, at least. For the rest… she would have to learn more about herself to know how compatible they really were.

But it certainly felt good being with him.

“You didn’t say anything about girlfriends,” she reminded him, teasing a little.

“I don’t have one, if that’s what you mean,” Jared replied.

Rose smiled, and for a time they enjoyed the relative quiet of the night together, the muffled roar of the party forgotten.

“It’s beautiful out here,” Rose said, after a time.

“Yeah. It is. I love this time of year. Pumpkins and Halloween and all of that,” Jared said, but he glanced away from her.

“What is it?”

“What’s what?” he asked.

“Something’s bothering you.”

Jared smiled, almost sadly. “Not really. I’m just feeling badly, I guess.”

Rose pushed her hair away from her face, keenly aware suddenly of how close they were sitting to each other, their knees touching, his hand on his thigh only inches from hers.

“Why?”

He shrugged. “I sound like a jerk, talking about myself like this. You… I mean, I want to know more about you. I’m curious about you.”

“Me, too,” Rose said with a sheepish look. “Truth is, there isn’t much to tell. I’ve been on this… what’s the phrase? Crash course. I’ve been on a crash course in how to be an American teenager. I know all of this stuff, but I’m not sure how I know it or what the frame of reference is. What little I do remember, things I understand, feels
more like data from a computer file than actual experience. It’s experience I can’t recall.”

Jared leaned toward her. “Wow. Nothing?”

“Next to nothing,” she said. “I have dreams that seem like they’re trying to remind me of things I’ve forgotten. And obviously not much shocks me, so a lot of stuff that feels familiar must just be locked in the attic of my brain or something. But in other ways it’s all new to me. Other than reading books and watching TV and movies and shopping in Boston with my aunts, everything I’m doing really is like the first time for me.”

Jared shifted a little on the bench, his leg pressing more fully against hers. For a moment he just looked at her, an odd smile on his face. Rose wondered if he could see her cheeks reddening in the moonlight or hear the pounding of her heart even with all the noise from the house.

“So as far as you know, this is the first party you’ve ever been to,” he said.

Rose nodded. “Yes.” The word came out as barely more than a whisper.

The stray lock of her hair had fallen across her face again. Jared reached out to push it aside, his hand lingering, and Rose held her breath.

“And if I kissed you, as far as you know…” he said, letting the words linger in the space between them.

Her heart beat against the cage of her chest like a frightened bird. For what seemed an eternity, their gazes were locked together and she felt mesmerized, unable to
look away. Then Jared dipped his head slightly, the preamble to a kiss, and her paralysis was broken. She glanced away.

“It would be my first,” she admitted. “But I can’t. I… God, I know how this sounds, but I promised.”

A rush of embarrassment went through her. She felt foolish and ridiculous and wanted to find Kylie and go home. But the thought of leaving Jared behind, of surrendering the delicious intimacy they had created around themselves like some sort of magic bubble, filled her with sadness.

He touched two fingers to her chin, tilted her face up toward his, and then those deep, brown eyes had caught her again. Jared bent toward her and she did not pull away. His lips brushed hers and she closed her eyes and gave in to him, all of her self-control pouring out of her with that single kiss. It lingered and her first kiss became her second, and then she understood that this was no singular thing, nothing that could be tallied like points in some game. He pushed his hands through her hair and brushed her cheek with the pad of his thumb before slipping his arms around her and holding her close. She wondered if he could feel her heart pounding even through Kylie’s jacket and imagined she could feel his, wished that she could be sure, shocking herself with the desire to remove the jacket and anything else that kept their heartbeats from meeting.

When he kissed her neck, Rose let out a soft moan.
That sound, and the feeling that came with it, woke her up. Her eyes snapped open and she pulled back from him, wetting her lips with her tongue, glancing around at anything and everything but Jared. She reached up and touched her hair, then the collar of the jacket, frantic with fear of the things she had been feeling.

“Rose?”

“I’m sorry. I promised,” she said, picking up her stained shirt and pushing herself up from the bench. “I need to go home.”

“Hey,” Jared said, standing up and catching her hand so gently. “I shouldn’t have… I didn’t mean to upset you. I just thought…”

Rose took a deep, shuddering breath. She rolled her eyes at the melodrama of it all and tried to steady herself, turning to him.

“It’s okay,” she said, smiling and shrugging at the same time. “I mean, really okay. I’m glad, I’m just not… it’s quick for me. I’m like a brand-new person, y’know? I just have to kind of sort out all the stuff running around my head, okay?”

“Yeah. Of course,” Jared said.

Heart still racing, Rose stepped into his arms and kissed him quickly on the cheek, then extricated herself.

“I’ve got to find Kylie and get going. I’ll see you in school.”

“Get home safe,” he said.

Rose turned and went up the steps to the deck,
glancing back only once, fighting the urge to stay with him. The memory of his kiss stayed with her, lingering, and she thought it would still be with her all through the night and into the next day.

Forging a path through the crowd on the deck, she made her way into the kitchen. Several of the older girls were there, but she was relieved to see that Courtney was nowhere in sight. Rose hoped Kylie would still be in the living room talking to Dom or someone else from school. She needed to get out of there and clear her head.

As she squeezed between two athletic-looking guys, she caught sight of something moving out of the corner of her eye and glanced over to see a cockroach scuttling across the tile backsplash above the stove. Recoiling in revulsion, she jerked against one of the guys, who caught her as though afraid she would fall.

“Hey, you okay?” he asked.

Rose couldn’t even look at him. She shivered, looking all around the kitchen for signs of other cockroaches, one of her nightmares returning to her in vivid detail, the woman sculpted from the skittering creatures whispering about her death.

But as she fled the kitchen in search of Kylie, the words that echoed in her mind came from a different dream.

All is lost,
she thought, with Jared’s kiss still on her lips.

Rose saw the first crow as they turned onto Mount Auburn Street. It perched on the support bar of a sagging awning, and it watched her as she passed by.
It’s in your head,
she told herself.
Stop it. Just stop.
But the silence of the crow slivered under her skin and several times she glanced back to find the crow with its head cocked, still looking in her direction. The fourth time, it had vanished without so much as a flutter of wings. She knew she ought to have felt better, but somehow the bird’s absence weighed on her even more heavily than its unnerving attention.

“You okay?” Kylie asked, hugging herself against the chilly autumn night.

“Hmm?” Rose glanced at her. “Sorry, yes. I’m fine.”

Kylie grinned, eyes growing large. “Good, ’cause you
should
be great! I mean, you like the guy, right?”

Rose nodded quickly, scanning the area anxiously as they hurried into Harvard Square, crossing Mount Auburn and turning left, toward the T station.

“You know I do,” she said.

Kylie’s enthusiasm faltered. “So why aren’t you happy? I mean, obviously the feeling’s mutual, if his tongue down your throat is any indication.”

Rose shot her a sharp look. “It wasn’t like that. It was nice. Really, really nice.”

“Tongues can be nice,” Kylie said, her grin turning devilish, that mischievous sparkle returning to her eyes.

A loud caw made Rose jump. She turned to see a crow sitting on the taut telephone wire that stretched across the street behind them. At first she thought it might be the same one, following her, but then it cawed again and a second crow answered from its perch on a window ledge.