Becoming Calder (A Sign of Love Novel)(37)

He was goodness—raw, unguarded goodness. It glowed in him. It was impossible not to want to drown in that type of beauty . . . to feel like I could happily wrap around his bones and suffocate in his skin.
It alarmed me, and comforted me.
As we lay by our spring day after day, Calder not only told me the things he remembered from each year of his schooling, but he told me the things he'd learned from the others living in our community who had previously lived in the big society. He had learned about gambling from a man who had come to be a part of our family five years previous. He'd told Calder, as he worked alongside him, that he'd had a real problem with going to big casinos, places where adult games were played for money. If you won, you went home with more money, and if you lost, you went home with nothing. He'd lost far more than he'd won and in the end, he lost everything: his wife, his children, his job, and his friends. No one wanted him. That's when Hector had come along. And Hector had wanted him.
There were many of those stories, and I listened intently to them all.
Physically, Calder kept his distance from me, flinching when I got too near, watching me like a hawk. I wasn't so na?ve I didn't understand he was having a difficult time with our closeness, and I had been telling the truth when I'd said I was going to pour all my focus into learning, but it still stung. And the unfairness of it made me angry.
Yes, my childish crush had disappeared, but I knew him now. I knew his kindness, and his protective nature. I knew his patient spirit and his sharp wit. Simply put, I was in love with him. As if my love for Calder could ever be simple.
Meeting him at our spring for an hour and a half every afternoon, as my friend and my tutor, wasn't everything. But it would have to be enough.
We didn't meet again in the evening. Clive Richter was home at night and he always seemed to be watching for me. It was safer to keep our lessons to the daytime hours. I wouldn't jeopardize those.
We talked about the names for groups of animals one day. "Gorillas come in a band, grasshoppers come in a cloud, pigs come in a team," he said as I wrote down the list. He named a few more and then couldn't remember any more. I sighed.
"Sorry," he said, laughing slightly. "I told you, I could only give you what I remember."
"The problem is," I said, tapping my pencil on my chin, "if you were prompted, or given a choice of a few, you could probably remember a lot more than you think. It's somewhere in there." I tapped my pencil on his head.
"Ouch."
I rolled my eyes. "But me, all I have is what you give me. There's literally no more."
"Well then, good thing I'm smarter than the everyday person." He winked. "I figure, even having a quarter of what I ever learned, you're better off than the average numbskull."
"Haha. Well, how comforting that I'm an above average numbskull."
Calder grinned. "Penguins come in a colony."
I scrawled it down.
He looked thoughtful like he did when he was trying to recall something specific he'd learned on a certain topic. "Penguins spend seventy-five percent of their lives in water. I wonder if they'll survive the flood. How could they not?"
We both quietly mulled that over.
"We had cockroaches in our cabin last year. My mom said in the big community, the joke is that cockroaches can survive anything."
"Even the end of the world?" I asked quietly.
Calder glanced at me and shrugged. "Maybe." He was silent for a minute. "But that's probably a good thing. Who wants cockroaches in Elysium anyway?" He grinned. "Let 'em stay."
I let out a small laugh, picturing the great flood finally receding, and the cockroaches climbing out of their holes in the earth.
Calder turned toward me and propped his head up on his hand. "Anyway, back to penguins, there's a certain kind who proposes to his mate by giving her some thing or another."
I looked over at him with interest. "Really? What does he give her?"
"I don't remember. Maybe a feather, or a stick or something."
"You don't remember? Why not? That's so romantic. You remember precisely what percentage of time a penguin spends of its life in the water," I threw up my hands in impatience, "and how cockroaches will survive us all, but you don't remember what gift a male penguin gives his mate to propose to her? That's ridiculous." I shook my head in exasperation.
Calder laughed. "Why should I care? I'm not a penguin. It's not exactly information that was going to come in handy when I pick my own mate."
My face fell. I couldn't help it. I looked away from him, out at the spring water, glistening in the sunshine.