Where the Forest Meets the Stars(51)

He couldn’t maintain eye contact. And that revealed much more than he’d tried to hide by looking away. Aware that she was onto him, he turned to leave.
Without thinking, she grabbed his forearm. “Don’t,” she said.
He faced her, his features carefully sculpted. “Don’t what ?”
“Don’t close yourself off from me. We need to talk about what’s happening between us.”
His detached facade faded into outright fear.
At least he knew what she was talking about. “Can’t we be honest with each other?”
He stepped back, pulling his arm free of her hand. “I have been honest. I’m fucked up. You know I can’t do this.”
“You aren’t fucked up.”
“No?” He wrapped his arms around his chest. “I’ve never been with a woman. How fucked up is that?”
“Clever,” she said.
He unfolded his arms. “What is?”
“You remind me of Ursa—always fortifying the fortress walls, even against the people who fight on your side.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“You’re hoping I’ll be shocked and turned off by a twenty-five-year-old guy who’s never been with a woman. You said that to get rid of me—just like you use your illness to keep me at a distance.”
His jaw clenched, and he glanced at the stairs.
“Please don’t run out on me right now.”
“We have to find Ursa,” he said.
“Is that really all you have to say?”
“What do you want me to say?”
She looked down at Ursa’s drawing of the grave. In the dark rectangle that enclosed the dead woman, she saw the empty crematory box that had held her mother’s cindered remains. After she’d fulfilled her mother’s last wishes—poured her ashes into a cold roll of whitecaps on Lake Michigan—Jo couldn’t discard the box, dusted with the pale powder of her mother’s body. She still had it. Its emptiness was always there, hidden inside her, a void where her mother’s love had been and, more tangibly, where her female body parts had been.
He was looking at the grave with her.
“I’m as afraid as you are, you know,” she said.
He raised his eyes from the drawing to hers.
“Remember that feeling you described—the ‘horrific crush of humanity’ on your soul—maybe that’s another way of saying you’re afraid people will hurt you if you let them get close.”
He kept silent. But how would he know how to respond if he’d never experienced intimacy?
“When you said you’d never been with a woman, did that include kissing?” she asked.
“I didn’t know how to be with girls in high school. I had social anxiety.”
“Never kissed?”
“Never.”
Where they stood, high in the dark forest, felt like a fulcrum, a pinnacle of honesty they’d finally achieved. Ursa had steered them where she wanted them, but any second their unsteady emotions could tip them off that tiny point of balance. Ursa had to be found, certainly, but Jo knew she was safely hidden and not in any real danger. The only danger of the moment was that Jo—and Gabe—might let those seconds pass away without seeing them as Ursa did, as her own teeny tweak of fate in a vast and miraculous universe, as a wondrous gift she was offering to them.
Jo turned off her flashlight and set it on the desk next to her. She tugged his flashlight out of his hand and flicked it off. He startled, moving backward in the sudden darkness. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“Making it easier for you.”
“Making what easier?”
“Your first kiss.”


20

She had no trouble finding him in the darkness. His body was radiating heat—and maybe fear. He recoiled a little when she put her palms against his chest. She slid her hands up his neck. His skin was warm and humid, like the summer night around them. She ran her hands through his beard and touched her lips to his. Once he got the hang of it, she pressed closer. He’d showered before he went to bed, but the smell of his fit body, with tinges of forest and farm, overpowered the light fragrance of soap. “I love the way you smell.”
“You do?”
“I have a weirdly primitive sense of smell.” She slipped her hands under the bottom edge of his T-shirt and pushed it upward. She placed her face against his skin and breathed him in. “Mmm . . .”
“Jo . . .”
She tilted her face up to his. “What?”
He touched his mouth to hers. An exceptional kiss.
After they parted lips, she pressed her body against his. He wanted it, too, holding her tighter. They fit together with ease, as if their bodies had known this outcome and prepared for it since the day they first met out on the road. They melted into one another and into the night. She hadn’t believed darkness could ever feel that good again.
“Is this too much crush on your soul?” she asked.
“It’s the perfect amount of soul crushing,” he said.
But Ursa was there with them. Jo was haunted by the drawing of the grave. “I wish we could do this all night,” she said, “but we have to find Ursa.”
He pulled back but kept one hand on her waist. “I think I know where she is. It’s the only place left to look.”
“Then she better be there.”
He felt around for a flashlight. Jo found one first and turned it on. A man often looked different to her after the first release of sexual tension—as if he were somehow softer, especially in the eyes—and she wondered if Gabe saw her differently. He was staring intently.