Trade Me (Cyclone #1)(59)

I don’t have answers to any of his problems. I don’t even have solutions to mine. But this one thing? This, I can handle. “Come on,” I say. “Let’s get some mangoes.”

We pull off the freeway a few miles later and follow the computer’s directions to a little grocery store. Fifteen minutes later, we’re sitting in a rest stop, cutting our mangoes to bits.

“Here,” I tell him. “Trade me. Pretend you’re me. Let me tell you what it was like when I had that mango.”

He shuts his eyes obligingly.

“I didn’t have a lot of money,” I tell him. “And that meant one thing and one thing only—fried rice.”

He smiles despite himself. “Kind of a stereotype, don’t you think?”

“Whose stereotype? Rice is peasant food for more than half the world. It’s easy. It’s cheap. You can dress it up with a lot of other things. A little bit of onion, a bag of frozen carrots and peas. A carton of eggs. With enough rice, that can last you basically forever. It does for some people.”

“It actually sounds good.”

“If you have a decent underlying spice cabinet, you can break up the monotony a little. Fried rice with soy sauce one day. Spicy rice the next. And then curry rice. You can fool your tongue indefinitely. You can’t fool your body. You start craving.”

He’s sitting on the picnic table, his eyes shut.

“For me, the thing I start craving first is greens. Lettuce. Pea shoots. Anything that isn’t coming out of a bag of frozen veggies. And fruit. If you have an extra dollar or two, you buy apples and eat them in quarters, dividing them throughout the day.”

I slide next to him on the table. The sun is warm around us.

“But you get sick of apples, too, pretty soon. And so that’s where I want you to imagine yourself: sick to death of fried rice. No respite. No letting up. And then suddenly, one day, someone hands you a debit card and says, ‘Hey. Here’s fifteen thousand dollars.’ No, I’m not going to buy a stupid purse. I’m going to buy this.”

I hold up a piece of mango to his lips. He opens his mouth and the fruit slides in. His lips close on my fingers like a kiss, and I can’t bring myself to draw away. He’s warmer than the sun, and I feel myself getting pulled in, closer and closer.

“Oh, God.” He doesn’t open his eyes. “That’s so good.”

I feed him another slice, golden and dripping juice.

“That’s what it felt like,” I tell him. “Like there’s a deep-seated need, something in my bones, something missing. And then you take a bite and there’s an explosion of flavor, something bigger than just the taste buds screaming, yes, yes, this is what I need.”

I hand him another piece of mango. He bites it in half, chews, and then takes the other half.

“That’s what it felt like,” I say. “It felt like I’d been starving myself. Like I…”

He opens his eyes and looks at me.

“Like there was something I needed,” I say softly. “Something I’ve needed deep down. Something I’ve been denying myself because I can’t let myself want it.” My voice trails off.

I’m not describing the taste of mango anymore. My whole body yearns for his. For this thing I’ve been denying myself. For physical affection. For our bodies joined. For his arms around me all night.

It’s going to hurt when he walks away.

But you know what?

It’ll hurt more if he walks away and we leave things like this, desperate and wanting, incomplete.

My voice drops. “It’s like there’s someone I’ve been denying myself. All this time.”

“Yes.” His voice is hoarse in response. “That. Always that.” And he slides his arm around me, pulls me close, and kisses me. He tastes sweet like mango. Like he’s bigger than my taste buds, like he’s precisely the luxury I have been craving. I let my eyes shut and tilt my head back, falling into his embrace.

And I know, despite all the constellations placed in the sky as warning, why all those Greek maidens gave it up in the end. It’s because all the pain is worth it for this one moment.

His tongue is sure against mine, touching me with insistent strokes. His hand clamps around me, holding me in place. And he holds me like I matter, like I’m the entire world.

“I can’t touch you,” I say. “My hands are sticky.”

“That,” he says, “is what washing machines are for.” He reaches out and takes hold of my fingers and then, very deliberately, he wipes them on his shirt. The sun is hot against my shoulders; Blake is sweet to the taste and tempting to the touch.

I’m not sure how long we stay there, kissing in the sun and the wind, stopping only long enough to feed each other bites of fruit. Long enough for me to touch him all over, to feel his body hard and lean through his shirt. Long enough for me to lose all sense of safety.

The air smells of new beginnings—crisp and clear, untouched by any worries. He touches me like the middle of the story, strong and sure. But despite the mango on his tongue, he tastes almost bittersweet, because the end is coming. It’s coming, but it’s not here. Not yet.

“Let’s get home,” I tell him. “Let’s go home and find a bed.”

I won’t be home until tomorrow morning, I text Maria as we turn up the freeway heading back to campus.