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Chapter 4
Claire
With the motorcycle rumbling beneath me and my fingers laid in the grooves between Ajax’s hard abs, I’m completely distracted from the fear I have of flying off the back. The wind streams over my face and performs a wild dance in my hair while the sun warms my skin and the heat of his body melts me. It coalesces into a sensation of freedom. Free from my past, free from the future, free from Satan’s Animals and the lie that brought me to Ajax in the first place.
I plant my chin on his shoulder and for a moment pretend that I’m actually allowed to fall in love with him.
We cross Stonebrook and enter the dense forest to the north by way of the winding road that carves a serpentine path through the trees. Sunlight glints through the leaves like its winking, like it knows, you’re not here for Ajax, you’re here for Big Dog.
But then I wrap myself tighter around Ajax and push the thought out of mind. Maybe if I cling tighter, I can somehow change reality. By sheer force of will, make this moment drown all the preceding ones until there’s nothing left but possibility instead of inevitable tragedy.
We pull over to the side of the road. “Where are we?” I ask, but I already know. We’re in a dream.
“Follow me,” he says. “I want to show you something.”
We step into the woods and find ourselves on a narrow footpath that leads us into its depths. After a while I turn back just to see if the road is still visible, but it’s disappeared. It’s like we’ve stepped through a portal into a msytical forest, where anything is possible. A poor girl who never had much ambition, much hope for bliss, can suddenly find it waiting for her, in the guarded heart of a biker playboy.
He takes my hand as we ascend a hill, I think probably to make sure I don’t slip and fall, but I consider it a gesture of affection, that he’s experiencing the same fantasy here as I am.
When we crest the hill, a valley comes into view. Beyond the steep dropoff, the forest sprawls out to the horizon, a million trees forming a thick canopy of green. Bisecting the vista is a river and in the distance I can see a waterfall. Ajax turns to me, beaming. “Listen.” Beneath the chorus of songbirds, I can hear the falls, water crashing ceaselessly onto rocks. It sounds powerful, and I have the fanciful thought that it could wash away my sin.
After an hour driving out here, the sun dips low on the horizon, shading the western sky in hues of pink and red and orange. The colors mix in the river, shimmering like an iridescent ribbon.
Ajax sits us down on a boulder, still holding my hand. “When I was a child, one of the older foster kids, one who escaped, came back once he got his license and took a handful of us up here. He said, ‘People always disappoint. But look at this. Nature is constant. When you get away, you come back here and remind yourself the world is mostly this. Nature. And nature never disappoints.’ I used to come here all the time. For some reason, I haven’t been in years.”
I rub my thumb across the back of his hand. “Thank you for showing me.”
He smiles, but there’s pain in it. “No shitty brothers out here,” he says.
“Nor any negligent families.”
The way he stares back at me suddenly feels different. Like the veneer of his charm has been rubbed off. It’s raw. Dangerous. “Claire, say it’s not just me.”
He doesn’t have to explain. “It’s not just you.”
“It’s a little frightening, isn’t it?”
I nod.
“To feel this so powerfully so soon after meeting a person.”
“Sometimes a kiss is all you need to know.”
“Come here.”
I pull myself up against him and we kiss again, this time slower, as if the world around us is fragile and anything more vigorous would break it. I moan softly into his mouth, and it feels like I’m sending my heart out with my breath. My hands rest against his hard chest while his hands caress my face, play with strands of my hair between his forefinger and thumb. The sun departs, and where it burned, the sky is now bruised, like the tender organ in my chest. It begs me to tell him, to end the lie so that we might move beyond it, but I fear his reaction. It’s so much easier to let him go one nibbling my lips, to make from the entwining of our tongues an excuse for my silence.
My body yearns for his, but to progress this would feel profane, a slight to the purity of nature while my deception continues.
Instead, he holds me a while and we watch the sky turn black, then the stars emerge from the dark blanket of the universe. There are so many to see out here, it’s breathtaking. We talk about childhood memories, which turns into childhood dreams, which turns into actual dreams. Our conversation meanders through the night, alighting only briefly on a dozen subjects before taking flight again, desperate to cover more ground, to explore as much territory of each other’s soul as possible.
Dawn catches us off-guard. All of the sudden, the forest fills with blue light. “I suppose I ought to bring you home.”
“I don’t suppose we could live out here.”
“We wouldn’t want to impose.”
“Fair.”
