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The first is music.
The second is where my lips are drawn right this instant, like a magnet.
Chapter 7
Wynona
“Emerson,” I murmur into his lips, “I’m scared.”
“I am too.” He kisses me again.
And I don’t know why on earth that makes it better, but it does.
His arms wrap around me. His hands grip me. As if he meant what he said and is already afraid of losing me. As if, like me, he’s thinking now that anything this intense, this painfully real, can’t be safe, can’t last.
If it’s too good to be true, then...
But he smells like that same Old Spice I hate on anyone else but him. And his lips are moving with mine with a rightness that makes me think, makes me remember...
Why everything fell apart when he left.
Maybe life is this big miracle, maybe we only need to remember that we are all star stuff, that there are so many things we still don’t know, so many discoveries to make and wild, impossible things to achieve and see, but all I know is that I could never really believe in any of that, never really feel like that—like this—except with him. Life never felt like a miracle to me or anything but disappointing—except with him.
“Do you remember?” he murmurs in my ear.
My eyes flutter open and stare into his.
Those light blues hold that same unforgettable look. The one I always thought he saved for me, the one I later disbelieved in, was sure I’d made up.
A happiness greater than any he seemed capable of.
“I remember,” he says.
And as his arms wrap around me and my body trembles with the rightness of it, I remember.
Oh, I remember.
Him, serenading me, a whole wheelbarrow of roses for Valentine’s Day, outside my dorm window, grinning at the gaping girls and chuckling guys and hooting friends who wandered past.
Us, our first date in that little art café, and how he didn’t invite me home, didn’t even try. How he just drew me an ugly picture of an ostrich with the stub of a pencil on a lopsided napkin as we sat in some antique peg-legged, high-backed, scratchy-ass armchairs and talked and talked and talked while I waited for us to run out of things to say, only we never did.
That time we got too drunk on that expensive-but-terrible rum and some expired Fruitopia in my first shitty apartment, the one with the leaky ceiling and the neighbor with the fat greyhound that barked all day and night, and dog barking be damned, rain inside from the outside be damned, Emerson massaged my ass for a good two hours, stopping only to top up his rum-Fruitopia cup, entranced, murmuring, “Goddamn, Wynona. Goddamn, that ass,” while I laughed whenever I wasn’t moaning.
The time we showed up to that Hawaiian frat party head-to-toe done up as members of Kiss and convinced a few guys to let us do ’em up. How we rerouted the party to Josie’s old place and filled the kiddie pool with so many drunk people it broke. How, after Emerson had promised to pay Josie, the two of us strolled down the street and he booked us a room in the nicest hotel just because. And we ordered meatballs from room service.
How I could tell Emerson’s public smile from his real one—it was all in the lopsidedness of it for the real one, the one he saved almost exclusively for me.
But then was then, and now is now. The culmination of everything that happened in between.
“I can’t do this anymore,” he said that sunny afternoon over five years ago.
“This has to stop,” he said.
I pull away.
One breath apart, one movement apart.
No.
I’m the one who can’t do this. Not now.
I force myself out of the cabana, out onto the beach. I don’t run, even though I want to.
But I don’t pause, either. I walk, as slow and steady as the hand of a clock, as if my leaving is inevitable. As if I don’t hear him behind me, back in the cabana, calling, “Wynona.” As if every part of me didn’t want me back in there with him, continuing what we started. As if we could really make it as though the past, the bad part of it, had never happened.
As my bare toes dig into the smooth half-wet sand on the shore and I wonder when exactly it was that I’d kicked off my sandals, I smile.
Maybe it’s dangerous, being alone at night outside like this, but it’s always been my favorite time.
Daytime is laden with expectations, watching eyes. Smile at the nice old lady. Don’t hum to yourself or laugh at a joke in your head or do anything that could look too weird to anybody nearby. Don’t stop too long to look at a rock, or the sky, or a tree, or anything like that, lest you look like a crazy fool.
