The Big Kahuna (Fox and O'Hare #6)(46)

“Nora, wait.”

The sound of his voice made me turn, and I slid down the boulder, scraping my arm in all its length and landing on my knees in the dirt. He called my name again as he climbed down toward me. Holding my arm to the moonlight, he looked at the scrape. “We should go back,” he said.

“We’re more than halfway through.”

He ran his fingers along the scrape, but they came out dry.

“See,” I said, trying not to wince. I had come to do this hike and now I wanted to finish it. “Let’s just go.” Twenty minutes later, we came to the final bend in the loop. A desiccated tree with bone-colored branches sat in a cluster of chuparosa bushes. Instantly I was flooded with memories. “My dad used to bring my sister and me here when we were kids. We’d race to see who could make it to the highest branch.” The tree was just as tall as it had been when I was a child, but the desert had stripped its boughs of their moisture and color. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen it at night, though. The branches look so gnarly. Terrifying, really.”

“What do you have to be so scared of?”

“Ghosts,” I said. “They won’t leave me alone.”

When I looked up, I found him watching me. He put his hand on my cheek, and after a moment his lips touched mine. How easy it was to lean into him. How good it felt to be wanted. He wrapped his arms around me and drew me so close that we almost lost our balance.





Jeremy




When we got back to the car, I held her arm to the moonlight, and saw that the skin was scraped all the way from her elbow to her wrist. I pulled out my first-aid kit from the trunk and sat on the bumper while I rummaged inside it for disinfectant wipes. The air had cooled; across the road a jackrabbit hopped out of the bushes. I cleaned the scrape quickly, so it wouldn’t sting too much, then spread antibiotic ointment on it before covering it with a bandage. “Do you always drive around with a medical kit, rescuing women?” she asked me teasingly.

“I had it here for my last camping trip,” I said. “Does it hurt still?”

She shook her head, and her earrings got tangled in her hair again, their silver catching the light. But I could do now what I had been too scared to do at seventeen—I brushed her hair away from her face and untangled the earrings one by one. She was watching me. Her eyes were so dark, her gaze so penetrating, that I felt as if all my secrets were bare to her. Because I had missed my mark in the past and because I wasn’t sure I would get another chance, I drew her to me, kissed her again, whispered in her ear. She hesitated, then gave a nod.

I drove out of the park with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on her knee. Moonlight across the windshield. Patsy Cline on the radio. By the time I got to the convenience store, the clerk was getting ready to lock up. “Come on, man,” I said. “It’ll just take a minute.” The clerk shook his head. He was a little man with yellow glasses and thin lips that wanted to yield nothing. I held the sliding door open with my hand and he narrowed his eyes at me. “Sir, step back,” he said. “We’re closing.” The security guard came over—a big guy with tattoos on his neck and scars on his arms. He took one look at me and told the clerk to let me in.

But when I got back to the car with the condoms, she wasn’t there. The air was knocked out of me. I really thought she was gone, until I stepped back up to the curb and saw her all the way on the other side of the parking lot. I walked over and stood next to her. “Look,” she said, and pointed across the highway at the open desert. A bighorn sheep. I had never seen one this close to town, this far from a herd. I took her hand in mine and waited. The bighorn was grazing in a patch of dry grass, and after a moment it stopped and stared at us. A ram with dark fur and a beautiful set of long, curly horns. Ears that twitched when a car drove past on the highway. Then it turned around and went away at a trot, its hindquarters white and soft like the inside of a cut pear.

The cabin was blistering hot when we came back. Nora turned the swamp cooler back on, opened a window, and went to the kitchen for water. Leaning against the counter, I listened to the hum of the fridge, the ticking of the clock, the clinking of the ice in her glass of water. Wait, I told myself. Give her time. After the air had cooled, after she’d taken off her shoes, after she’d poured another glass of water, I put out my hand and she took it.

And then we were standing by her bed. It wasn’t my scars she touched first when I took off my shirt, or the tattoo I’d gotten just before I’d shipped out. It was my eyelids, my brows, my cheekbones, as though she were only seeing the old me. Her fingers were so light. When she slipped off her shirt, I noticed a beauty mark on the swell of her left breast, just above the scalloped line of her bra. It was one of those halter tops and I fumbled like a teenager trying to find the clasp. “It’s here,” she said and unhooked it from the front.

Whatever awkwardness I felt dissipated when she put her arms around me. My hands found the curves of her breasts, her hips, her thighs. What were ten years? Nothing. A heartbeat. The blink of an eye. We were still at the concert hall, the sunlight was still pouring in through the branches of the magnolia tree, she was still stirring the ice in her soda with a red straw, she was still smiling at me. She hadn’t yet been called away to see the show, hadn’t yet walked across the stage at graduation and continued walking—out of town, out of my life. That I lay in bed with her now seemed to me a small miracle. I kissed the base of her throat and slid down, taking her nipples one after the other into my mouth. On her navel was a piercing but no ring, and I kissed the tiny little dot, sliding slowly down. When I tasted her she coiled her fingers into my hair with an urgency that thrilled me. With my eyes closed, I could indulge in the fantasy that all this had happened before and that it would happen again and again. How easy it was to let myself believe this when she guided me into her.