Out (10 page)

“No comment.”
Warren sips from a glass of brandy. “I will have to make an appearance, though.
You young people scatter before you’re summoned.”

The thought of
taking Carmen to my room makes me sweat all over. I don’t know what I’m going
to do…I guess I’ll have to show her the telescope. What else is there? I do
know one thing: there will be no physical contact. I will absolutely stay away
from her, and if I do that, I probably have half a chance of not losing my
mind.

I go up first,
and Carmen hangs back to put Jana in between us. I see the hallway, the carpet,
my door, as if I’m seeing them for the first time, how she must see it.

Jana stops in
front of my door. “This is Chris’s lair,” she says. Thank God I cleaned it up.
It’s never really messy anyway, but I dusted and picked up random books and
stuff the other day, so it looks especially put together. “The telescope is out
on the balcony. C’mon in!” She grabs Carmen’s arm and drags her into my room.

Through the
French doors, my scope is positioned to track the best of the night sky:
shooting stars, planets, constellations. I guess Gemini is up there, but I
don’t want to look for it. “Nice view,” Carmen says, wrapping her arms around
herself as if she’s cold.

Jana opens the
doors, letting a draft of cold air into the room. “Fresh air. Nothing better.”
She glances at Carmen, then says, “Geez, Chris, what kind of host are you? The
girl’s freezing.”

“Oh, do you
want a blanket or something?” I grab the old blue one off the edge of my bed
and awkwardly hand it to her. I will not get near enough to drop a blanket
around her shoulders. I will not.

“Thanks.” She
shrugs into it as a gust of air blows burnt-leaf smells into the room. “Nice. I
love how quiet it is.” She turns to me, her face a silhouette in ivory that
makes me want to write poetry or something equally dorky.

Jana inches
toward the hallway. “I’ll leave you guys alone,” she says, going for the door.

“No!” We both
yell.

Jana just
laughs at us. “That whole pretending you don’t feel the way you do thing? Yeah,
that’s not
gonna
work. You might as well skip to the
chase and figure out what you’re going to do. See you soon.” She closes the
door, still chuckling softly.

Could she be
more obvious? We’re alone, and it’s horrible. There’s a distance between us,
but it pulses with something, and all I want to do is grab her and kiss her. I
should just run out the door and get the hell out of here, but I don’t.

I brought her
up here to show her stars, so I suppose I’d better do that. “My telescope’s not
the best,” I say, adjusting the eyepiece. “But you can see a good amount of
stuff.”
 
I swivel the scope and check for
something bright and beautiful.

“Orion,” she
says, reading the name on the side. “The hunter. What are you hunting for?” Her
eyes. God, her eyes. Even in the low light I see them bright as embers. I
should run back downstairs right now.

“Just a brand
name,” I mumble, moving away from her. “Just
scoot
down there and look through the eyepiece. You should be able to see something.”
 

She kneels on
the thick green rug I keep near the scope and presses her eye to the focuser. “It’s
all blurry,” she says, squinting her closed eye tighter. “Can you show me?”

“Uh.” Wow. What
a suave bastard I am. “If you just lean in a little bit more, tilt your chin
down an inch or so…” She’s trying, but she’s doing it all wrong. I step in,
just to help adjust her chin. But then I’m kneeling on the green rug next to
her, touching her face, and she’s not looking at the stars anymore.

She brushes my
hair from my eyes. “I still can’t see anything,” she whispers. “Maybe I’m not
close enough.”

“But—”

“
Shh
.” Her finger touches my lips, and it burns where she
touches me. My heart pounds, a crazy drum, as she pulls so close I can feel her
breath touching my cheek.

“We can’t do
this.”

In the shadow
of the balcony, her face is half lit, like a waning moon, and I blink to see if
she’ll disappear. But she doesn’t. “I know,” she whispers.

“I should go.”
But I don’t go. She pulls me close, and her lips are on mine, sweet, warm, full
of life and passion, cherry sweet mixed with the scent of jasmine and autumn
leaves in her thick, dark hair.

Waves wash over
me, stars burst behind my eyes. I take her in my arms, and we ease down onto
the green rug, kissing, caressing, breathing each other in like oxygen.

“Stop,” she
whispers desperately. “What was I thinking? We can’t do this here. If they
catch us—”

“They won’t.” I
can’t stop. I nibble her ear, her delicious vanilla-cookie skin, and all the
hunger I’ve stored up in my life gallops through my gut and into my head, and I
don’t think I can stop. I don’t want to stop.

“Someone’s at
the bedroom door!” she says, terrified. “Someone knocked!”

Her words wake
me up like a bucket of ice water. Unfortunately, my lower half doesn’t get the
memo. My pants won’t be able to lie about what’s been going on. “What do I do
about—” I point to the obvious bulge.

“Uh…” she
blinks rapidly, then looks away, embarrassed. “Kneel down by the telescope.”
The knocking becomes more insistent. I kneel down, even though it’s kind of
awkward.

“Give me the
blanket!” I hiss. She plucks it from her shoulders and drapes it over my lap as
the bedroom door opens. She jumps back as if I’m on fire.

 
“Chris!” It’s Jana, thank God. She might
tease me, but she won’t rat me out. She makes her way to the deck. “Ah, I see
you’re giving our guest the grand tour of fantastically boring Ohio.” She leans
over my balcony and breathes deeply. “Just smell the conformity!”

Carmen shivers
in her light shirt, and I consider giving back the blanket, but I don’t want to
reveal my…occurrence. “Just looking for constellations and stuff,” I say,
pretending to focus on the night sky. “Did you need something?”

“Forgot to tell
you something.” She turns and studies Carmen, then glances at my lap. “He took
your blanket? No manners.” She darts into my room, digs through a drawer, and
retrieves a soft blue sweatshirt, which she tosses to Carmen. It’s too big on
her, but it looks so cute I want to grab her again and just…well… I can’t think
about it.

“Thanks,”
Carmen says, smiling at me. “I think it’s charming here.”

“That’s because
you don’t live here.” Jana taps the end of the telescope. “If I thought Chris
could find me a better planet to head for, I’d go in a heartbeat. Or maybe
Canada. Can you see Canada on this thing, Chris?” She leans over and presses
her eye to the focus.

“Canada?”
Carmen asks. “Why would you want to go there?”

“No reason,”
Jana answers quickly. “I like moose. Moose jerky, specifically. And bacon.” She
straightens herself up and grins.
 

“What did you
forget?” I ask, my voice cracking like it did in seventh grade.

“Oh, yeah.” She
puts an arm around Carmen. “I think you two should go for a walk or something.
You can show her the sights of the country at night. You can go out my window
and then the grownups won’t see you.” She waves behind her as she leaves, and
closes the door gently. “I’ll lock this, too. Just knock if you want to escape.”

“Interesting
girl,” Carmen says, stepping closer to me. “Is she…?”

“Is she what?”

She kneels next
to me again and whispers, “Perpendicular.”

“Jana? No.” I’m
not ready to admit that yet.

“
Here.
” Carmen grabs the end of the blue blanket and drapes
it around her shoulder, snuggling into my lap so we’re a double-stacked mass of
stargazers huddled under the fuzz. “That’s better. Now I can look at the stars
and really enjoy myself.” But she doesn’t look at the stars. She turns and
presses her chest to mine, and I can feel the hardness of her nipples through
the thin fabric, the beating of her heart. I feel that if I can’t be part of
her, I’ll die.

 
“Can we go for a walk? Like Jana said?” she
says softly. “I know we shouldn’t…”

 
“Come on.” I take her hand and we stand up
stiffly. When we go inside, the light seems glaringly bright.

In the hallway,
the voices of the adults drift up, a tapestry of baritone and alto posing and
negotiating, hopefully not about me. I knock on Jana’s door and she opens it,
almost as if she’d been expecting us. “Yes?”

 
“Can we come in?” I glance nervously
downstairs. “I’m afraid we’ll get summoned if we hang out in the hallway.” Jana
opens the door wider, and motions for us to come in.

“What can I do
for you?” She flops on the bed expectantly.

“We have a
problem.” Carmen crosses to the far side of the room, her arms folded against
her chest again, as if she’s trying to protect herself.
 

“Do you?” Jana
smiles. “What kind of problem?”
 
She
leans back into her pillows.
 

“We…Carmen and
I…we need to get away and talk for awhile. In private.” I can’t look at either
of them, so instead, I concentrate on the window.

 
Jana sighs. “All I know is you went for a walk
to check out the stars. Carmen is a huge fan of astronomy, am I right?”

“Huge fan,”
Carmen murmurs.

I focus on
Jana, who smiles mischievously. “Go on, kids. Have a great talk.”

I lead the way
to the big tree, take Carmen’s hand, and start on the road to oblivion.

We run across the dark yard,
making for the tree line. The lights of my house glow behind us, and I push the
thought of Dad and McFarland and the
Perp
League out
of my mind.

Past old trees
with rough bark, through piles of pine needles and accumulated dead leaves,
tripping on tree roots and breathing in the night air we run wildly, then slow,
then finally lean against the spreading base of an old oak. Our breath makes
steamy clouds in the moonlight.

I sit against
the tree and pull her to me; she snuggles into my lap and leans her head on my
chest. This is how it’s supposed to be. My life feels adjusted for the first
time in, well, forever. Carmen caresses my hand with her thumb. “See? It’s
right. Isn’t it?”

“Mm.” I bury my
face in her hair and breathe in her scent mixed with the frigid night air. “I
know. But we can’t…I mean, there’s no way to…be like this.”

“I know.”
Carmen turns to face me. “What are we going to do?”

I pull her
tighter, trying to memorize the shape of her body, the curve of her face. I
know I won’t be able to do this again. This will have to the last time. The
only time. “We just have to forget about it.”

“But I don’t
want to forget about it.” She grabs my chin with her small, cold hand. “I’ve
never felt…I never meant for this to happen. But now that is has, I don’t want
to pretend.”

“We can’t just
do whatever we want. There are consequences.”

“There are
consequences to living a life that someone else wants you to live, too,” Carmen
murmurs, sinking her head back into my chest again. “We have right now. That’s
all.”

That’s all we
have. Her face, half-shadowed, tilts toward me. How can someone so beautiful be
so brave, so willing to give up everything to follow her heart? She could live
her whole life, never tell anyone, be rich, be famous, be whatever she wants,
except what she really is, I guess. But she would risk all that safety, for me.
For us. So much joy in my heart, so much feeling that it might spill out onto
the forest floor right here—and I wouldn’t care. We have right now.

I have to kiss
her again. I
slip
sideways a bit so she sinks down,
and I turn her so my lips meet hers—delicious, soft, silk wrapped in cherry
blossoms, warm, welcoming, like I want to swallow her and keep her inside me
forever.

 
Our lips break apart as we hear leaves
crunching.
 
“Chris,” she whispers,
terrified. “Somebody’s coming!”

I scan the
darkness for a silhouette or a light. Shuffling of leaves, heavy footsteps. We
stay still and try to become part of the big, sturdy tree.

“Chris?” It’s
Jana. “I know you guys are out here. Where are you?”

Should I tell
her? She’ll find me anyway. “Here,” I say. Her footsteps come toward us, and I
instinctively shrug away from Carmen’s body.

“Good.” Jana
digs hands into her coat pockets. “It is freezing out here. Dad is looking for
you. I told him I’d come get you, that you two were checking out
constellations.”

“Did he think
that was weird?” I stand up and offer Carmen a hand. She brushes dirt and
leaves from her jeans.

“I don’t know
if he thinks it’s weird, but he definitely wants you back.” She glances toward
the house. “They’re still talking politics in the parlor, but I think they want
to talk to you about him. McFarland.”

The name is a
lead ball in my stomach. Now, especially now, there’s no way I can go with him.

Carmen grabs my
hand. “Maybe we can go out. Go somewhere, the three of us.”

“That’s not
going to stop anything,” Jana says as she pulls a cigarette out of her jacket
pocket and lights it. “If they don’t talk about it now, they’ll just talk about
it later. Or worse, just send you packing one day.”

“I’m almost
eighteen. Then they can kick me out, but they can’t tell me what to do.”

“Almost
eighteen and seriously Perpendicular.” Jana takes a long drag and exhales. “Which
means you’re not human. So you give up any rights you thought you had.”

Carmen shakes
her head. “That’s so wrong. It makes me so mad.”

 
 
Jana
continues. “It is wrong. As a matter of fact, I just gave Chris an interesting
piece of literature. Huh, Chris?”