The Impossible Knife of Memory(58)

“What about school?”

“He homeschooled me. Unschooled me. It was kind of awesome for a while: him driving, me reading out loud, the two of us talking about everything, fractions and evolution, Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet and which Hemingway book is the best. Every once in a while, he’d get a bug up his butt that we needed to settle down in a little town somewhere, but a few weeks or months later, he’d get a different bug and, boom, we took off again.”

Finn crawled around the mirror and sat next me. “How’d you wind up here?”

I took a deep breath. “He got arrested in Arkansas last year. Public drunkenness.”

Finn leaned against me, warm and solid.

“He was only in the jail overnight, but he came out completely set on moving back here. Said I needed to go to a regular school to get ready for college.”

“Makes sense.”

“I thought the move would be good for him, that he’d hook up with old friends and get a decent job. Instead it’s like a bomb has started ticking in his head.”

“What about Trish?” he asked quietly.

“She’ll make it blow up early.”

My stomach hurt from going too far, telling too many secrets. I should have kept the past locked away so it couldn’t screw up the way I was trying to get by one day at a time. That was Dad’s problem, right? His worst yesterdays played on a constant loop in his head and he couldn’t (or he wouldn’t) stop paying attention to them. At least on the road, there had been times when we’d outrun the memories. Now they had us surrounded and were closing in.

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” I leaned forward and blew out the candle. “Can we go to bed?”

We walked up the stairs, Finn a step in front of me, reaching back to hold my hand. He turned on the desk lamp in his room. The walls were covered with posters of indie bands I never heard of, Russian travel posters, and mostly naked women posed on gleaming motorcycles. A floor-to-ceiling bookcase overflowed with paperbacks, and gaming controllers crowded around the computer monitor and keyboard on his desk. It smelled like body spray and Fritos.

“I wasn’t sure,” he said. “If, you know, you were going to come up here. But I cleaned, just in case.”

“Just in case?”

“Yeah.” He closed the door and hit the space bar on his computer. The screen lit up with an image of a fire burning in a fireplace and jazz poured out of the speakers. He shut off the desk lamp, wrapped his arms around me, and kissed me. He tasted of maple syrup and butter and pancakes and bacon.

Now. I will stay in right now, this minute. Build a fortress with Finn and keep yesterday locked out.

And . . . somehow we found ourselves on his bed. And our clothes started falling off because everything felt good, felt right. The world on the other side of his door didn’t exist. His mouth, his hands, the muscles of his shoulders, the curve of his back; that was all that mattered. Tomorrow . . .

Shit.

I sat up.

“What?” He sat up, too, breathing hard. “Did I do something wrong?”

“I thought of a bad word.”

“A dirty word? I know all of them. Do you have a favorite?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow isn’t a dirty word.” He brushed his hair out of his eyes. “Is it?”

“I said it was bad, not dirty.” I shivered and pulled the covers up to my chin. “Tomorrow as in reality, as in we can’t go as far as we want. Reality sucks.”

“Don’t think about tomorrow.” He ran his fingers down my arm, making me shiver again. “It’s not sexy.”

“You know what’s not sexy?” I pushed his hand away. “Babies. Babies are not sexy.”

“But I bought condoms,” he said. “I even practiced putting one on!”

The lost-puppy look on his face made me smile. “I’m proud of you, Boner Man, but that’s not enough. I have the worst luck in the whole world. If anyone on the planet was going to get pregnant tonight, it would be me. The last thing I need to think about is a baby.”

He groaned and rolled on to his back. “Stop saying that word!”

“Baby, baby, baby.” I picked my shirt off the floor and put it on. “I can’t. I just can’t.”

“Why are you getting dressed?”

“You have to take me home.”

He dug around in the covers for his shirt and pulled it on. “Do you want to go home?”

“No. But if I stay, you’ll be too tempting and we’ll be stupid and my life will be over.”

“I’m not going to ruin your life and we’re not going to be stupid.” He opened his closet door and reached for something on the top shelf. “You mind a sleeping bag?”

“Why?”

He tossed a tightly rolled sleeping bag at me. “Postmodern bundling,” he said. “You stay in yours, I stay in mine.”

“Sleeping bags can be unzipped,” I said.

“I don’t break promises,” he pulled down a second bag, “and I’m pretty sure you don’t, either.”

It took a little while to rearrange the pillows and figure out how to keep the sleeping bags from sliding off the bed, but finally we crawled in and set our phones to wake us up just before dawn. We fell asleep instantly, without even kissing each other good night, like we’d been enchanted.