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I bite back my acrid response. Where he came from, thriftiness and self-sufficiency were probably second only to godliness. He pulls me closer with a hand on my elbow, then points to a cap near the front of the engine. “That’s the oil dipstick. We’ll check to see if it’s dry, but the engine’s too hot now.” Gently slamming the hood, he hurries back to his seat and pulls out his backpack, which I didn’t notice him stow away. “Luckily, I made sandwiches. Let’s have lunch.”
Everything’s getting away from me, my grasp on my plans for the day slipping, and I just want it all to stop. When I try to get back into the car, he shakes his head. “Not in there. Have you seen how I eat?” Before I can respond, he swings his leg over the metal safety railing along the side of the road and disappears into the shoulder-high grass.
“Jonah?” The ground drops steeply from the shoulder, and far below I can hear the bubbling of a small brook. “Where the fuck are you?” I jump when his head pops up over the edge. He’s balanced partway up the vertical slope, gripping the rail to keep from sliding down.
“I found a good place to eat.”
“No, thank you.”
He pats the warm metal solemnly. “Just sit here and put your legs over.” As if I’m a teenage girl who doesn’t know how to surmount a knee-high fence. When I reach the other side, he lets go and slithers down the hill in a puff of dust, disappearing from sight.
“Are you taking me down here to murder me and hide my body?” My voice sounds very loud in the hushed peace of the woods.
“Absolutely.” I can hear him unwrapping the food without me, chewing away.
Rocks tumble in every direction when I set one foot on the slope, and he’s there in a second, offering his hand for me to grab. “For God’s sake, I’m not incompetent.” I push him out of the way and awkwardly jump down onto a pebbled beach that runs along the bank of the brook, split by a massive, decaying log with dead plants tangled through its root structure. Jonah pats the log, his mouth stuffed with sandwich.
Resigning myself to getting wood dust on my ass, I sit and accept the sandwich he proudly offers. It looks like something from the front of a cookbook—thick bread, hearty bacon and vegetables, some kind of condiment I think he invented himself. The contrast of the artisanal food presented on a carelessly crumpled Ziploc bag stuffed in a backpack seems so quintessentially Jonah.
I don’t talk as we eat, and he seems content to leave me in peace. Neither of us apparently like bread crusts, so he collects them and tosses them into the bushes for the animals. I’m about to get up when a particularly loudchirrupsounds nearby and he goes alert, cocking his head to listen. When it comes again, he tiptoes along the edge of the water, searching among the rocks and little pools.
He pounces in a blur and stands up with something curled gently in the cage of his muddy fingers. “Come check this out.” His eyes are shining as he grins at me.
That’s when it hits me, hard and breathless. In some ways he’s just like Colson, always stopping to enjoy the view, always noticing the small, beautiful miracles in the world while I stand back and watch, lost and unsure, until they come to hate me. I have a fucking type. The type that breaks my heart.
“Gray.” He hasn’t called me that since we signed the contract, and it hits much too close to the center of my aching chest. “Come hold out your hands.”
I shake my head. Words force their way out before I can consider that they won’t make any sense to him. “Jonah, don’t bother trying to change me. I’m never going to be like you.”
He stands very still, studying me for a long time. “Just come here.”
There’s nothing left to do but obey, to pick my way over the stones and around the slippery patches of mud until I’m standing there, looking down at him.
“Put your palms out.”
“I swear to God, if you give me something disgusting…” But I press my hands together into a cup and hold it out to him.
He hums soothingly, his fingers trailing along my palm as he tenderly deposits a tiny green frog in my hand. It’s pristine and intricate, the sun shining off its wet skin, its throat expanding and retracting. I brace for it to jump away, but it just sits there, feather-light and damp in my palm.
“Look at that. A new friend.” I don’t know if Jonah’s talking to me or the frog. My hands waver a little and he cups his palm up gently under mine, his thumb stroking the bones of my wrist. “Isn’t he handsome?” His hair brushes my forehead. “When I was a kid, I would go down to the river in the summer and catch a whole Tupperware full of crickets. Then I’d find a frog, and I’d just sit with him all afternoon, feeding him crickets and talking to him. I had a book about frogs, so I would take it with me and show him the pictures, frogs from the Amazon and the Nile, and if he seemed to like one I’d read to him about it, since he didn’t mind that I was slow.”
I don’t think I’m ever going to kiss someone again.
But if I had, maybe it would have been right here, right now, just like this.
