My Dark Vanessa(52)

Later we go for a drive in his station wagon and cruise the highways that wind through the down east woods. His window is open; he lets his arm hang out. It’s warm for April, seventy degrees, buds on the trees, weeds starting to grow along the roadside.

“I’ll come see you during the summer just like this,” he says. “I’ll pick you up and we’ll go for drives.”

“Like Lolita and Humbert,” I say without thinking, and then wince as I wait for his annoyance at the comparison, but he only smiles.

“I suppose that’s fair.” He looks over at me, slides his hand up my thigh. “You like the idea of that, don’t you? Maybe one day I’ll just keep driving rather than bring you home. I’ll steal you away.”

The closer we get to the coast, the busier the roads become. Strane doesn’t seem afraid, though, so I’m not, either. We’re outlaws on the lam, a couple of brazen criminals driving all the way to the easternmost tip of the state, a fishing village of people who don’t bat an eye when we stop for sodas at the market and stroll down the pier discreetly hand in hand.

“Sixteen years old,” he marvels. “Practically a woman now.”

We set the self-timer on the Polaroid and balance it on the hood of the car. The photo comes out a little overexposed—Strane with his arm around me, the ocean a backdrop. It’s the only photo that exists of the two of us. I want to ask if I can have it but figure he’ll say no, so when he stops for gas I take it out of the glove compartment and slip it into my purse. I leave him the one of me on my bed. That’s the one he really cares about anyway.

On the way home, he says he wants to kiss me a little while longer, so he pulls off the highway onto a dirt logging road. The station wagon rocks over the gravel, mud splatters on the windshield. We drive a few miles through dense woods until the trees thin and then disappear altogether, revealing a rolling blueberry barren, a carpet of green dotted with white boulders. He parks, cuts the engine, and undoes his seat belt, reaches over and undoes mine.

“Get over here,” he says.

As I climb over the console to straddle him, my back presses against the steering wheel and hits the horn, sending a spray of crows into the sky at the far edge of the barren. He cups my butt, the skirt of my dress hiked up around my waist, and a buzzing hums through the air. Out the car window, I see an apiary swarming with bees a couple hundred feet away. We’re miles from anyone and anywhere, free to do whatever we want, our isolation as safe as it is dangerous. I don’t know how to feel one without the other anymore.

He pushes my underwear aside. Two fingers in me. I’m still all sticky from the sex in my bedroom, the insides of my thighs starting to rash. My forehead presses into the crook of his neck, hot breath against his collarbone as he tries to make me come. He says he can feel it when I do. Some women lie about it, he says, but what my body does can’t be faked. He says I get there fast. He can’t believe how fast. It makes him want to make me get there over and over, to see how many times in a row I can handle, but I don’t like that. It makes sex feel like some sort of game that only he’s allowed to play.

As soon as it happens, I tell him to stop. I only have to say it once and he takes his hands off me like I’m something on fire. I move away from him, back over the console to the passenger seat, legs slick and chest heaving. He lifts his hand, the one that was working at me, and holds it to his face, breathes me in. I wonder how many times he’s made me come. Congratulations, I want to say, you did it yet again. Tipping my head back, I watch the bees swarm and the tops of the far-off conifers sway.

“I don’t know how I’m going to handle being away from you this summer,” I say. I don’t even know if I mean it. During breaks I’ve been fine without him. He’s the one who says he can’t go a week without talking to me or seeing me. It’s just the sort of thing that slips out after sex, when I’m soft-belly vulnerable. But Strane takes it seriously. He’s sensitive to any indication that I’m too attached, that he’s affecting me in a way that might have long-term consequences.

“You’ll be seeing plenty of me,” he says. “You’ll be sick of me by July.”

When we’re back on the road, he says it again. “You’ll get sick of me.” Then he adds, “You’ll be the one to break my heart, you know. You’re holding me in your little hands.”

Break his heart? I try to imagine myself having that power, holding his heart, mine to abuse, but even when I picture it pulsing and pumping in my hands, it’s still the boss of me, leading me around, jerking me this way and that with me clinging and unable to let go.

“Maybe you’ll break me,” I say.

“Impossible.”

“Why impossible?”

“Because that isn’t how these stories end,” he says.

“Why does it have to end at all?”

He looks from the road to me, back to the road, his eyebrows cocked in alarm. “Vanessa, when we say goodbye, it won’t be painful for you. You’ll be ready to be rid of me. The rest of your life will stretch out ahead of you. It’ll be exciting for you to move on.”

I say nothing and stare out the windshield. I know that if I try to talk or move, I’ll start to cry.

“I see so much in store for you,” he says. “You’re going to do incredible things. You’ll write books, traipse around the world.”