“It wasn’t just my dad,” I say. “People didn’t know how to handle it. My friends got weird—even the ones who really did care. I’m sure it was my fault too, but I was so angry. I couldn’t trust anyone.” I look up at him. “And sometimes I think I still don’t know how.”
“That makes sense.”
“What I’m trying to say is that I spent the last four months learning to be alone, avoiding the world, hating pretty much anyone who so much as blinked at me,” I say. “But when I’m with you, I don’t want to be that person anymore.”
“Thank you,” he says quietly.
The anchor of pain that I’ve been dragging around Manhattan with me snaps free, sinking into the past, where I hope it will rest undisturbed. He knows. He knows and he’s still here. I want to laugh and cry. But I want something else even more. I edge closer to him on the bed. He doesn’t move. I’m looking at his lips, tracing their shape with my eyes.
I close my eyelids and quickly lean forward. I feel the cool whisper of his breath on my face, but then I’m no longer leaning. I’m falling. I make a full face-plant against my bed, and the familiar scent of our fabric softener hits my nose. Spluttering through cotton, I roll over. Stephen is bending over me, his eyes wide. I stare at him. My stomach wants to climb out my throat. He obviously jumped out of the way when I tried to kiss him.
My cheeks are on fire, but humiliation makes my blood cold.
I’m such a moron. This is too soon.
I’m blinking as fast as I can so I won’t cry, but tears are biting at the corners of my eyes. I want to cry because it feels so good to finally have talked to someone kind about Laurie. I want to cry because the boy I like didn’t want to kiss me. I want to cry because I’m in a new city and I’m lonely.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
I can’t shake my head or nod. I’m afraid to move at all. Paralysis is the only thing between me and a total meltdown.
“I’m so sorry, Elizabeth, but I have to go.” He’s still hovering above me, his hands pressing into the bed on each side of me. “It wasn’t your fault.”
He fixes me with a gaze that makes my breath stop. Without closing his eyes, he leans down. Then his lips are brushing against mine, feather soft.
His kiss lingers, electric on my mouth, but he’s walking out of my room.
I’m still lying there when I hear the apartment door open and close as he leaves. I’m still lying there when I realize I have no idea what he meant.
Chapter 7
I AM FINDING IT HARDER and harder to concentrate on myself when I am around her. If I am too caught up in her—in caring about her, in wondering about her—I forget about my body. I disappear in my thoughts of her.
This is not a problem I’ve had before. To escape my own story long enough to be a part of someone else’s—this has never been a temptation. With my parents, there was always the knowledge of what was going on. Every interaction they had with me was tethered to the fact of what I was. All of our conversations were, in some way, about me. But with Elizabeth, I lose that tether. My thoughts are free to think only of her. But if my thoughts go too far, then my body, left to its own devices, loses its ability to touch, to hold, to stay.
I have to learn to be conscious of her and conscious of myself at the same time.
I am so new at this thing, which I deeply suspect is what other people call love.
* * *
I return to her apartment an hour later, after I’ve managed to rehearse my focus, practice my concentration.
Mercifully, she lets me back in. Mercifully, her brother and mother are still gone.
She has been taking out her anger and confusion on the boxes. There’s a sheen of sweat on her skin, and her room is an astonishment of piles and scatter.
“What was that?” she says.
“I want us to go fast,” I tell her. “But I need us to go slow.”
She scrutinizes me. “Why?”
If I cannot tell her the truth, I can tell her a truth.
“Because I’ve never done this before.”
“Never.”
“No. Never.”
“No evil exes?”
“No exes mark my spot. Evil or otherwise.”
“Why?”
I shake my head. “It just hasn’t happened.”
I can’t tell her she’s the first person I’ve ever had feelings for—she’s not. But at the same time, I can’t tell her she’s the first person I’ve ever had feelings for who actually knows I exist. Because she is. And that would no doubt scare her.
“You can’t just leave,” she tells me. “If a moment goes wrong or if something isn’t right—you can’t just say you’re sorry and walk out the door. The next time you do that, the door’s going to be locked and bolted behind you. Do you understand? I like you, okay? But I also need to like the way you make me feel. And just now? I didn’t like that at all.”
I tell her I know.
“Okay, then.” She looks around the room. “So who’s my box bitch?”
I smile. “I’m your box bitch.”
“I’m afraid I didn’t hear you.”
“I’M YOUR BOX BITCH!”
Now she smiles. “Much better. Let’s get to work.”
* * *
I focus. As I rip off the packing tape, I focus. As I fold the empty boxes into their flattest state, I focus. When she’s showing me books, asking me if I like certain authors—I focus. And then when those books sentry around us in stacks, and she beckons me to hear her favorite Margaret Atwood poems, I focus. It’s called “Variations on the Word Sleep” and at the very end the poet says she would like to be “the air that inhabits you for a moment”—hearing this, my own breathing intensifies, like breathing itself is a sense.
Time doesn’t stop, but we stop. We cannot ask time to stop, but we can stop ourselves.
She turns to me, and I focus. On her breathing. Her eyes. Her lips. She leans into me, and I focus. Her heat. Her skin. Her hands.
We touch, and I focus. We kiss, and I focus.
We are the time. We are the breathing.
We are the air.
* * *
What follows is an almost perfect week.
The weather turns nasty outside, storm after storm after storm, which proves to be a perfect excuse to stay indoors. With her brother off at summer school and her mother starting work, we have the days to ourselves. Our apartments and the hallway between them become the only territory we need, the Profoundly Sovereign Nation of Us, and we alternate between the newness of her place and the long history of mine.