Page 6 of Roadrunner

“It’s complicated. They’re gone for the next six months, so it won’t be so bad for a while. And after that I’ll be a thousand miles away at school. We won’t see much of each other for the next four years either way.”

“Six months? Where’d they go?”

When I was seven or eight, I’d started marking my parents’ trips on a world map with push pins, certain that eventually I’d be old enough to go too. By eighth grade I had thirty countries marked and hadn’t left the United States once. By high school, I’d stopped expecting an invitation.

“Melbourne, I think. Somewhere in Australia.”

“That’d be a cool place to see. My family is from Sicily. Do they travel for work?”

“No. They just travel.”

“You ever go with them?”

I nudged a pebble off the edge with my shoe and watched it disappear without a sound. “They’ve been to more countries than I can count. I’ve never left this one.”

Something in his face softened. He put a hand on my shoulder. “Sorry I asked.”

“It’s fine.”

I’d known him for four hours, and he’d already been kinder to me than my father had in years. I let my shoulder rest against his arm. Kindness should not have been that easy to spot.

It was.

His hand slid to the middle of my back. I didn’t move. Losing the view, or the warmth of it, wasn’t something I wanted to do.

“I don’t really know what the deal is,” I said, finding another pebble with my toe. “My parents just aren’t around much. I was mostly raised by an au pair. She’s great.”

“Is she still with you?”

“Martina? She’s at their house right now. She’s been around as long as I can remember. She took me to my first day of kindergarten. She was at my graduation. Everything in between, too.”

He went quiet for a second, like he wished he hadn’t asked. “Oh.”

His hand moved lower, past the waist of my jeans, resting under the denim, against my skin.

Neither of us said anything about it.

I wondered if he meant to kiss me. If he did, his face wasn’t giving it away. It didn’t matter much. Just standing there with him was doing something to me that I wasn’t in a hurry to name.

We stood quietly at the edge of the rock. He waited for me to say something. I waited for him to close the distance.

Neither of us did.

The sun slipped behind the farthest ridge. The sky went from blue to something darker, and then darker again. Orange and pink catching along the mountaintops the way a fire catches the underside of smoke. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d watched a sunset.

By the time the color drained out of it, leaving nothing but indigo, the temperature had dropped hard enough that I shivered. The mountain air was a good forty degrees cooler than the desert floor.

I turned to him. “Should we—”

Before I finished the sentence, he tipped my chin up with two fingers. His other hand, still resting against my skin at the waist of my jeans, moved lower, coming to rest against the curve of me.

There was nothing unclear about what he wanted.

He kissed me.

It wasn’t hesitant. His mouth found mine like he’d been waiting all day to do it, and I kissed him back the same way, my fingers finding the muscle of his back and holding on.

He pulled me in against his chest until the mountain, the sky, and the cold fell away, kissing me all the while.