Wild Awake (17 page)

“What does your aunt do?”

Skunk puts a carton of eggs on the counter and turns back to the fridge to rummage around in the vegetable drawer.

“She’s a nurse,” he says over his shoulder.

“What about your uncle?”

“Auto parts manager.”

“When do they get home from work?”

“Six.”

“I should probably go before then. I really do need to practice.”

Skunk snorts. I plant my hands on my hips. “What are you laughing at?”

“You sound just like my aunt.”

“Why? Does she play piano?”

“No, she’s on a diet.
I’m going to lose sixteen pounds. No, twenty pounds
.”

“You’re such a jerk! I only have to do eight hours if I leave right now. I can do them before bed.”

“Is piano your job or something? Are you going to get fired if you miss a day?”

“It’s called discipline, fool. I’ll have you know I’ve been playing piano since I was a kid, and I take it very seriously.”

“What about your band?” says Skunk. “I bet you don’t play synth for eight hours a day.”

“That’s different.”

“Why?”

“Nobody
needs
me to be in a band.”

“And they need you to play piano?”

I scowl at Skunk, piqued. “This had better be the best freaking omelet I’ve ever had.”

He drops his hands on my shoulders and steers me to a chair at the kitchen table. “Consider this an intervention.”

He pours me a big mug of coffee to drink, then goes back to the fridge and takes out arugula, goat cheese, wild mushrooms, and fresh herbs. While he’s cooking, a fat orange cat comes out of the living room and slinks around my legs, meowing plaintively.

“That’s Gingerly,” says Skunk. “Don’t feed her, she’s a mooch.”

Skunk reaches into a cupboard, takes out sea salt, and shakes some into the omelet. I’m so hungry I squirm in my chair. “Is that food almost ready?”

“Good things take time.”

“The smell’s driving me crazy.”

“You’re already crazy.”

“Oh no, I’m not. Not yet. Okay, now I am.”

And for the last three minutes before the omelet’s ready I’m fluttering around the kitchen in my socks, light as a moth and practically translucent with hunger, saying, “When-when-when-when-when?” and spinning around with the affronted cat in my arms. Skunk lifts the cast-iron pan off the stove with an oven mitt, and when he puts it down on a hot pad on the kitchen table, I rush up with the cat in my arms and almost kiss him I’m so hungry, but stop just short and stand there, panting slightly, my head dizzy from spinning, our faces just inches apart.

I’m conscious of Skunk’s height, of his bigness. He’s like a brontosaurus or a bison or a bulldozer, some strong, solid word. He still smells like something that’s been out grazing in the sun, even though it’s been raining since last night. There’s a fleck of rosemary stuck to his forehead. A smudge of bicycle grease on his wrist. I feel a flutter of fear, then a wingbeat of certainty.

“I want to kiss you,” I say, “but I seem to be holding this cat.”

Skunk lifts his hand and touches it to the side of my face. His fingers are warm from carrying the hot skillet to the table. He regards me very seriously, and for a moment I wonder if he’s about to tell me we should Focus on Bicycle Repair. Instead he just looks at me for a very long time.

“You’re beautiful,” says Skunk, “and completely batshit.”

Then, cat be damned, I do kiss him. I’m either swooning or having a hypoglycemic meltdown, take your pick, because I’m starving and in love with Skunk and because nobody’s ever said anything like that to me before. Halfway through the kiss, the cat twists out of my arms, drops to its feet on the floor, and streaks away. I step in and close the space between our bodies and we kiss, Skunk and I, like all the bicycles in the world are gliding down a long, steep, swooping, tree-mad hill.

Somehow we eat our afternoon breakfast and get the dishes done and put away. We wipe down the counters, push in our chairs, and turn off the lights. Every time a car passes, we shoot each other panicked looks and bolt toward the stairs. Suddenly, it’s a game: How long can I stay until we get caught? How much of this can we get away with?

We scamper downstairs and kiss until our lips are swollen and our cheeks are pink and Skunk’s shape, his vast lovely architecture, has become as familiar to me as the rooms of my own house. We drag the black-and-green quilt off Skunk’s bed, lay it on the floor, and roll in it like snow, hands tangled up in one another’s hair.
Bicycle Boy, my brontosaurus of love, my love-bison
. I cling to his sweater like a cat, pawing at his heart with my little hooked claws, mewling, memorizing his scent. Every so often my mind flits back to my house, the piano, the thirsty azaleas and the mailbox stuffed with flyers. I finally open my fist and let go of these worries, and like a bunch of helium balloons they float up and up and up until they’re tiny specks in the corner of the big blue sky.

At six o’clock, we hear Skunk’s aunt coming home from work. We freeze on the rug, listening to her footsteps on the kitchen floor. A few minutes later, Skunk’s uncle gets home too. They talk—a low rumbly voice and a sharp medium-high one—and there’s the beep of a microwave and the sudden bright loudness of a TV commercial. I snuggle into Skunk.

“I should go home now, right? Right?”

Before I can say anything else, the door at the top of the stairs squeaks open, letting in a bar of yellow light.

“Philippe?” calls Skunk’s aunt.
“T’es en bas?”

Our bodies go rigid like lizards playing dead. I’m sure she sees us, but Skunk motions for me to stay where I am. He jumps up and rummages noisily through his dresser.

“Ouai, tante Martine. J’viens. Un moment, j’suis en train de me changer.”

“D’accord.”

She shuts the door. My body goes limp, but Skunk is quaking with silent laughter.

“I told her I was changing. I have to go upstairs for a while,” he whispers. “Don’t worry.”

He climbs the stairs. Before he opens the door, he looks over his shoulder to cast me a mischievous grin.

“Hey, Aunt Martine. What’s for dinner?” he says more loudly than he needs to. I have to bury my head under the quilt before I laugh so hard I give our secret away.

When Skunk comes back down, he lights big beeswax candles and tunes one of the radios to this station that plays detective shows from the 1940s. We lie on the floor and listen, the quilt wrapped around us. I lift his hand and very gently bite the tender perfect acorn of his finger. He murmurs and pulls me in close, and we spoon while the radio detective comforts a hysterical woman whose husband has just been found poisoned in bed.

“It was the butler,” I whisper.

“No way,” murmurs Skunk. “It was definitely the wife.”

“No way.”

“She’s having an affair with the butler.”

“You’re smoking crack.”

“Just wait.”

I sigh and nest my body more snugly into Skunk’s. The show goes on. It turns out it was the hysterical wife. Skunk was right.

We listen to another one starring the same detective, and this time Skunk predicts the killer again. “You’ve listened to way too many of these,” I say.

“You always think it’s the obvious suspect. It’s never the obvious suspect.”

“Thanks, Inspector Gadget.”

“It’s always the last person you’d ever guess.”

“I still don’t get why the groundskeeper killed Dr. Knight.”

“He’d falsified his brother’s will so Harry wouldn’t inherit Birch Pond anymore. The only way to get it back was to kill Dr. Knight.”

“You
have
listened to way too many of these.”

“Let’s listen to one more.”

I prop my head up on my elbows and look down at him. “Aren’t you getting tired? Don’t you ever sleep?”

“We’ll sleep,” whispers Skunk. “But let’s listen to another one first.”

I start to protest. Skunk reaches up and touches my hair, and before I know it I’m kissing him again. Soon neither of us is paying enough attention to the show to figure out who killed who.

All night we drift in and out of sleep, waking up just long enough to kiss and tangle and fall asleep again with our limbs in a knot. It feels like we’re living in a dream, like there’s no way what we’re doing is possible. But it is. And we are. And I don’t ever want it to end. I think back to Lukas and the disaster with the wine, and it seems hilarious now, like I’ve traded in a jar full of pennies for a bar of gold. It’s amazing how quickly the things you thought would make you happy seem small once you stumble on something true.

Beautiful
, I think to myself as I float back into sleep, my whole body thrumming with a tender, exhausted state of exhilaration. Beside me, Skunk’s body is warm under his T-shirt. The last thing I see before falling asleep is the Kali painting on Skunk’s wall. Her blue-gold body is draped in equal parts flowers and severed heads—as if beauty and horror were interchangeable and what matters most is trusting in the dance. I gaze at her until I can almost hear the clink of bells, the thud of drums. My eyes droop shut, and then I’m gone.

Sometime around noon on Saturday we both take showers in the tiny downstairs bathroom. Skunk gives me a soft old T-shirt to wear and a pair of his aunt’s sweatpants he finds in the dryer. They’re big in the butt and they make me look like an orangutan, but at least they’re clean. Oh, Skunk! Oh, Bicycle Boy! This afternoon’s omelet features Asiago and leeks. When did Lukas ever feed me? When did Lukas peel off my borrowed socks and do a weird and vaguely pleasant shiatsu thing to my feet?

That evening when Skunk comes downstairs from checking in with his aunt and uncle, he does a silent victory dance in the middle of the floor.

What’s going on?
I say with my eyes.

He just smiles and keeps dancing.

No, tell me!

I pound the bed with my fist in mock frustration. High heels click on the floor above our heads. Do Skunk’s aunt and uncle have company over? Are we about to get busted? Is Skunk getting some kind of sick pleasure out of almost getting caught?

I’m about to bolt for the alley when Skunk slides onto the bed beside me and whispers in my ear, “They’re going to an engagement party in Surrey. They won’t be home until eleven.”

When Skunk’s aunt and uncle leave for the party, we go upstairs and play house. We snuggle up on the couch and watch movies on the big-screen TV. We play with the cat. I climb onto Skunk’s aunt’s elliptical machine and swing my legs so hard I almost break it. When I discover the waterbed in Skunk’s aunt and uncle’s room when I’m walking through after using their bathroom, I shriek so loud, Skunk comes running in to save me.

We stare at it, then at each other, both of us waiting for the other person to say what they’re thinking first.

“We shouldn’t,” says Skunk.

So we do.

When the rain stops, just past ten, we’re lying on the floor of Skunk’s bedroom flushed and breathless, our teacups abandoned nearby. We both hear it at the same time: the sudden silence, where the patter of rain had sounded in the courtyard ever since we come in from our ride. I burrow my hand in the soft black tangle of his hair. “Time to go home.”

I feel a pinprick of uncertainty when I say it. Maybe it
was
crazy to stay here. Maybe Skunk thinks I’m a big easy sloot, and all those sweet things we did were just games to him.
If you’d only been responsible like I
told
you to be, you wouldn’t have to worry about those questions
, says the version of myself that went home and practiced piano on Thursday night. For one perilous moment, my heart hangs in the air like a flipped coin. I know by the time I get home, that coin’s going to have landed either on drunken elation or crippling regret, and I don’t want to wait that long to find out which one it’s going to be. I decide to do a test.

“There’s something I want to do before I go,” I say. “I need to whisper it, though.”

Skunk tilts his head, and I murmur it in his ear. When I pull away, he grins.

“Do you . . . want to?” I say.

He nods and starts to unbutton his jeans. We undress quickly, dropping shirts and underwear, and I glimpse Skunk’s body, pale and lustrous as a pearl, his tattoos dark on his arms. When we’re both naked, I reach for Skunk’s hand.

The glass door slides open easily. The wet concrete in the courtyard is cold and rough under our feet. I glance at the sky and let out a happy whoop.

We gambol, star-clad, while the last few raindrops splash around us and the pear tree shakes its wet, white blossoms on our heads.

When I get home, I plug
my dead cell phone into its charger and discover a million messages from Lukas, asking where I am and when we’re leaving for Battle of the Bands, which is on Saturday night at nine, which is—oh God—an hour and a half ago.

Shitshitshitshitshit
.

I mash Lukas’s name in the call log and practically pee my pants while I’m waiting for him to pick up, because the full awful truth of how badly I’ve just screwed up is dawning on me in all its horror. If we miss Battle of the Bands because of me being a huge irresponsible sloot with Bicycle Boy, I’ll never be able to look Lukas in the face again.

Pick up, pick up, pick up
, I plead to the cell phone gods, and when Lukas finally picks up, he shrieks, “WHERE ARE YOU?” and I shriek, “AT HOME COME PICK ME UP!” and a minute later Petra’s car screeches into the driveway. I scurry out with my synth under my arm and cords dangling everywhere and cram myself into the backseat without even bothering to put my gear in the back of the station wagon.

“I’m so sorry.
So
sorry,” I babble while Petra bombs through a yellow light and heads for the bridge. Lukas’s dad cringes in the passenger seat. He’s a safety freak, and Petra’s driving is cause for alarm on the best of days.

Lukas looks at me with his eyes bugged out and says, “I called you fifty-one times! My call log says fifty-one times!”

“We were worried about you, Kiri,” says Petra, cutting off a bus that was going too slowly for her taste and merging into the left lane. “I was about to have Lukas break into your house in case you had slipped in the shower and hit your head.”