Winter Loon(48)

“Hey, you,” I said.

Her head tilted up at an angle, and she smiled her barely smile.

I went to her, took her hands, and pressed them behind my back. I slipped my hands under her sweater and traced one by one the prayer bead bones on her back. She stepped away from me, crossed her arms at her waist to lift her sweater over her head. I stopped her, gently pulling her sweater back down. “Hold on,” I said.

“You okay?”

It wasn’t that I was stalling. It was more that I wanted to freeze that moment. If I could slow everything down, it wouldn’t end, at least not so soon. And part of me felt like it couldn’t possibly last, especially since it was so good. Nothing ever did.

I took a step toward the window, then turned back to her. “Want to sit on the roof for a minute?”

She touched the scar and shook her head. She took my jacket off and let it fall to the floor. Then my flannel shirt, then my T-shirt. “It’s okay,” she said. I was powerless.

Nothing went slowly after her lips touched mine—not kicking off my shoes, fumbling with buttons and flies. I melted when she peeled off her sweater, baring herself to me. I knew her body. I’d known it forever. We fell onto her soft bed in only our underwear. She threw a sheer scarf over the lamp so that every time we moved and shifted, purple and red and green danced around us like northern lights.

“You smell so good,” I said, exhaling to make room for more of her while my hands swept the suede of her skin.

Her hand slowly moved down my stomach.

“You’re sure?”

“Sure.”

She took the band from her hair and lay back so it fell like feathers against her pillowcase. “God, you’re beautiful,” I said and she was. We rolled around on each other awhile more, touching curves, tensing muscles, tasting skin on fire, until there was nothing left to do. I went as slowly as I could and so did she, never taking our eyes off each other.

“Am I hurting you? I can stop.”

“Nothing hurts,” she said. “Nothing hurts.”

I held on until I could do nothing but give in.

We lay together afterward, quiet, drifting in and out of shallow sleep. I felt a clutch of relief and guilt, knowing I’d taken something and had likely given little. Jolene’s head was on my chest, her hand on my stomach. Her blanket was over us, and I was grateful for it, suddenly modest and self-conscious.

“Was that okay?” I asked, afraid of the answer.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Did you, you know?”

She shook her head against my chest. “Don’t worry about that right now.”

My heart was pounding so hard I thought Jolene’s head was moving to the rhythm. I wanted to tell her I loved her, that I wanted to be with her forever, that I would do anything for her, anything to make her happy. I wrestled with the words, phrasing and rephrasing, imagining her response.

“Wes, I want you to do something.”

“Anything.” I would have killed for her in that moment.

“Well, actually, two things.” She tucked the bedsheet under her arms and sat up.

I leaned on my elbow. “Okay. Shoot.”

“First. Will you go to the Sadie Hawkins dance with me? And before you even say it, I know I said I didn’t give a shit about these things, but I actually really do. I want to go. It’s my senior year, I’ve never gone to a high school dance. And—” She shrugged and let her eyes scan the mess we made of her bed.

“You don’t have to convince me. I want to go with you, too. But the dress-up part, too?” It was a part of the fall tradition to wear corny costumes, like something out of Hee Haw. “I don’t want to wear overalls.”

“No dress up,” she said, crossing her heart.

Her hair was tousled around her ears and her face was flushed. I pictured her in one of those Hee Haw Honey bandana tops and wondered if I could wear overalls after all. “Alright. So that’s settled. What else?”

“I want you to go to Brookings. I want you to go find Topeka. I’m sure I can get Troy to let you borrow the Bronco. He trusts you. Just go down there, find out what he knows, come back here. The dance is a week from Friday. You don’t hear from him by then, go the next day.”

“What does it matter to you? He may not even be there. He may not know anything.” I dropped my elbow and lay flat on my back, staring at the ceiling.

“You’re always waiting for something to happen to you. You need to go make this happen so you know once and for all what the deal is. Otherwise, you’re stuck. I don’t want you to be stuck. And I won’t be stuck with you.”

“What if it’s bad? What if something bad happened?” I didn’t ask the other questions nagging at me. What if I go and find him? What if he’s there and I never come back here? What if finding him means losing you?

“You can’t live in the dark, Wes.”

I thought of my mother, how she drew darkness to her, wrapped herself in it, right up to when she used her own body to punch a dark hole out of paper-white ice. I didn’t want to be in that shadow, in that confusion of dim light anymore. “I know you’re right.”

She touched my face and lay back down so that we were side by side. She sniffed, and at first I thought she was crying. “What’s that smell?”