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Rarely acknowledged but brighter.
Each time they go unspoken,
And blinding the few times they reach our lips.
“Storage opened when I was jostling us around,” Kai says, nodding down the road.
He starts walking before I spot it. Itlookslike the pink cover of the notebook, but I hope I’m wrong because he already has it in his hand when my slow mind catches up to what’s happening. It’s already fallen open to the page it always falls to—the one I’ve read the most over the years, the declarations.
He carries it to the edge of the empty road, staring down. His entire body has become even more tense than before. I keep expecting him to tear the notebook clean down the middle, his hands trembling.
When he returns to me, his eyes are blazing like green wildfire. “What the hell is this? When did you write this?”
I almost snatch the notebook away, but what would the point be? It’s out there now, and I’m almost relieved he knows. I don’t have to protect this secret anymore. Maybe that’s why the fox came, to give me a chance to be honest. Or perhaps that’s just plain nuts.
“Years ago,” I whisper, “before you left for Europe when I was a kid.”
He shakes his head slowly, staring down at the lines. “You had a crush on me.”
He sayscrushas if it’s a small thing. It seems so tiny with the blue sky open behind him, with the deep yellow of the prairie all around us. A crush, but it was my whole world once.
“Is this why you’ve… is this why we’ve…” He trails off, dropping the notebook, his jaw tight like he’s on the edge of an explosion. “Is this all about your goddamn childish crush?”
“No, I want you for you,” I tell him.
“But youdidhave a crush.”
“Yes,” I say, unable to hold eye contact with him. “When I was a kid, I—”
“I don’t want to hear about when you were akid,” he growls. “I don’t give a damn how you felt then.”
“You asked—”
“Because I have to know if we’re in this for the real thing or if this is some silly childish thing for you. Some… Fuck, I can’t speak. This is too strange.”
He marches over to the bike, picking up a few items here and there, residue from the storage compartment. I pick up some plastic water bottles and follow him. We say nothing, like a married couple during a brief armistice.
“When did this crush start?” he asks after a pause.
“If I answer, will you snap at me again?”
He smiles tightly and answers with a side-to-side of his eyes.
“I’m not sure exactly how long.”
“Since the stories?” he asks.
“Around that time, yeah, but it’s not like I knew what it meant back then. It was just a silly childhood thing. Then, when I got older, I crushed on you, but I knew nothing could ever happen.”
“But you wanted it to.”
“I still want it to,” I whisper.
His chest seems to swell in the leather jacket, his shoulders getting broader. “You have to be sure this isn’t some childhood crush. It isn’tjustthat. I don’t care how you felt when you were a girl. You’re a woman now, and you have to decide. You have to be dead certain.”
Suddenly, he rushes over to me. His hands are on my hips. He squeezes with far more passion than he has yet. I feel so sensitive to everything he does as if I can judge something like that, the layers and levels of his desire, but I can. It blazes through me as fiercely as his eyes burn, holding me in place. It’s like I’m the only thing in the universe for him.
“Is your little crush going to wear off?”
