Mirage(4)

Dom presses his lips against mine, reminding me of our first kiss and how it was not soft, but urgent and fiery. It was me who initiated it, but he denies that. He takes my hand and leads me up two small metal steps to the front door of the motor home. I don’t know why my heart is racing at simply trespassing in an abandoned hangar, but I love it when my body hums with signals?—?excitement, danger, alarm. It’s when these red flares shoot up inside me that I feel most alive.

“Who would dump an expensive RV like this and just vanish?” I ask, noting an extension cord snaking across the floor of the hangar. “You wired the power?” I ask, and Dom nods. He prepped our hideaway. Dom directs me inside with his hand on the small of my back. “I can’t see a thing,” I complain, reaching out in front of me into the blackness. My skin registers a drop in temperature, like the random, mystifying spots in lakes that are fifteen degrees colder. Goose bumps rise on my outstretched arms, and a wave of trepidation sweeps its rough hand down my spine.

A light switches on, and the RV is bathed in a yellow glow. I screech at my own reflection in the mirror in front of me and then bust out laughing.

Dom pokes my back. “Silly.”

“Hey, I didn’t expect to see someone standing there, even if that someone is me! Wow. This place is boss.”

It’s a miniature house on wheels, with a kitchen, a sofa, and an oak dining table with padded booth benches. I step farther inside. The dank smell of the hangar has disappeared. In its place rise the diminishing sharp odors of bleach and the chemical smell of new carpet. Dom watches as I open cabinets, check the fridge, flip switches. “This is camping in style,” I say, clicking my fingernail against a row of dusty glasses that are hanging upside down in an overhead cabinet. They jangle against one another. “When we’re older, let’s rent one of these and drive all over hell and back.”

“How ’bout I ride my bike, you follow me like my road crew and cook me dinner, and?—”

“Screw that,” I say with a raised eyebrow. “You be my road crew.”

While the place has obviously been scrubbed clean of both use and the personality of the owners, my poking around reveals traces of a previous life. A case of some kind of nutrition drink sits unopened under the kitchen table. A maroon Bible stands lonely in a little magazine nook built into the end of the couch. I run my finger over the smooth gold crown of the pages, coating my finger with a film of dust, which I wipe on my shorts. The bathroom still has toilet paper on the roll and a stack of white towels?—?thin, like tea towels or hospital towels?—?folded in the cabinet under the sink. I slide them aside, knocking them into something, which falls sideways with a rattling sound.

It’s a prescription bottle, totally full of morphine. That’s some heavy-duty pain stuff. I wonder why it’s full. Why was it left here? The urge to swipe the pills comes over me like a drive-by devil before I put them back and head down the narrow hallway and slide the door into its pocket. A queen bed fills the middle of the room and is surrounded by honey-colored cabinets. Blankets, sheets, and pillows are stacked on the mattress. I glance over my shoulder at Dom.

There’s want in his eyes.

It’s a certain look I’ve come to recognize: chin lowered a bit, eyes focused and penetrating. I love that look. But instead of coming toward me like I expect, he leans a shoulder against the wall and stares at me with his arms crossed.

Dom holds his ground when I think he’ll advance. Surprises when I think he has no more mysteries. Six months ago, when I pegged him for another hotshot adrenaline junkie, he showed me poetry and tender pencil drawings of hawks, my profile, and his dead mother’s strong hands making tortillas.

People don’t always like Dom on first impression. For instance, my best friend, Joe. Well, Joe doesn’t like him after many impressions. I don’t know why. But to me, Dom is like the art he loves so much: complicated and nuanced. The more I look, the more beautiful he is. My heart inflates each day, expanding and rising up, up, and he holds the rope that tethers me when I feel like I’ll float away. In turn, I do the same for him. We urge each other into wild explorations, then belay each other to reality.

Needing to kiss his lips right this second, I take the length of the hallway in two strides and grab his chin. Our lips melt together?—?powerful, moist fire. His mouth, his jaw, his tongue . . . he is everything hard and soft at once. I reach under his T-shirt and run my hand down his stomach toward the snap of his jeans. He stops my advances with a gentle hand on my collarbone.

He turns me around so I’m facing the full-length hall mirror and stands behind me. “Look at yourself,” he whispers into my curls. His hand caresses my jaw with the sensitivity of a sculptor, and his thumb runs over my lips. “You’re beautiful.”

I’m not sure why I feel a foreign shyness when Dom says this. When he looks at me adoringly, I feel like a lone sunflower in a field, and he’s the sun I arch toward. I feel truly seen. I’m not going to be falsely modest and say I don’t know I’m attractive. Guys look. Hell, even girls look. But I think it’s more because I’m interesting, with one foot in each parent’s race.

Before she lost her sight, my grandmother said I was the combination of the smooth, dark rum of her beloved Caribbean and the imperious determination of a bank of white clouds marching over the land.

Gran has poetry in her.