I followed the red taillights. I didn’t know where I was going, or what direction I was going in, or even where, exactly, I was right now. I was, as he’d so rightly pointed out, in a Wendy’s parking lot in the middle of nowhere, and I was going there—nowhere.
I could feel him watching me as I walked away. Maybe a few words passed between him and the old man. I plopped down in the snow at the edge of the parking lot, about fifty feet away from the truck, pulled my knees up to my chest, and stared out over the highway. How many times had I tried walking away from Miles? Once at the bonfire—he’d stopped me—again when Erwin had died—and he’d stopped me again. This time he knew I had nowhere to go.
Shoes crunched a path behind me, and the sleeve of Miles’s jacket tapped me on the shoulder.
“Here,” he said.
I pushed the jacket away. “Don’t want it.” I wiped my eyes again, tried to stop my shivers. All those layers of sheepskin, it was probably like a toaster oven inside.
“I’m sorry I called you crazy.”
“Why? It’s true.” I pulled my knees tighter. “I’m probably going to end up inside the hospital with your mom.”
“No you’re not.” He sounded exasperated. “Your parents—”
“Have already considered it.”
That stopped him.
“So you can take your stupid jacket ’cause you’ll probably freeze without it. What’s your body fat percentage? Negative point-zero-zero—oomph.”
He’d knelt down and flung the coat over my shoulders. Not looking at me, he pulled the coat tighter and said, “You’re so damn stubborn.” Though he tried to hide it, he shivered. “Come on, let’s go.” He offered a hand and I took it, using the other to keep the jacket on.
Strangely, he didn’t let go of my hand when we got back to the truck. As an experiment, I squeezed a little. He squeezed back.
The old man peeked around the hood and smiled when he saw me wearing Miles’s jacket.
“Well, it looks like your battery might need a little juice,” said the man. “I’ve got jumper cables, should only take a second.”
He popped the hood of his car and pulled a pair of jumper cables out of his trunk, and after a bit of instruction on his part, he and Miles set to work. I almost fell asleep standing up, and Miles had to prod me out of my stupor when it was time to go.
“Thanks again,” he said to the old man. Miles’s voice was weak, brittle.
“Really, it was no trouble.” The man smiled and waved, stowing his jumper cables again. “You kids enjoy the rest of your night!” He got into his car and drove away.
Miles stared after him, a small crease between his eyebrows.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, one hand on the passenger side door handle. Miles shook his head.
“It’s nothing, I just . . .” He made an exasperated noise, his shoulders drooping a little. “He made me think of Opa.” He walked around to the driver’s side and got in.
“Oh, wait.” I shrugged the jacket off, climbed into the truck, and handed it across the seat to him. “Seriously, your lips are turning blue. I’ll be fine, really,” I added when he started to protest. He feigned reluctance well as he slipped the jacket back on.
“He told me to give it to you,” Miles said after a solid minute of staring out the windshield.
I was about to make a joke about how good that was, because someone needed to teach him some manners, but then I saw the look on his face.
“Let’s go,” I said softly. “We shouldn’t be too far from home, right?” Miles nodded and threw the truck in drive.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
Chapter Thirty-three
Twenty minutes later I had to start talking to keep Miles awake. My lengthy lecture on the Napoleonic Wars (one of Charlie’s favorite subjects) was cut short by the familiar streets of town and what I could only describe as a message from God.
The Meijer sign.
“Stop for a minute,” I said, turning around to look at the store.
“What?”
“We need to go to Meijer.”
“Why?”
“Trust me, we need to go to Meijer. Pull in and park.”
He swung into the parking lot and drove as close as he could get to the doors. I almost had to drag him out of the cab and into the store.
“I work here all the time,” he whined, yawning. “Why did we have to stop?”
“You’re a baby when you’re tired, you know that?”
I pulled him toward the deli counter. His coworkers gave us odd looks as we passed by. Miles waved them off. The main aisle was empty.
Miles nearly crashed into the lobster tank when I stopped in front of it. He blinked once, stared down at it, then looked at me.
“It’s a lobster tank,” he said.
I took a deep breath. Now or never.
“It’s the lobster tank,” I said. “Your mom told me you remembered.”
Miles looked back at the tank, the water reflected in his glasses. At first I thought I’d been wrong, that the odds had been too high, that maybe my mother had been right this whole time and I had made the whole thing up. But then he said, “Do you do this all the time?”
“No,” I replied. “Just today.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “You smell like lemons.”
I rose up on my toes.
He turned, his hands finding my waist, his lips finding mine like he’d been preparing himself for this moment.
Saying I wasn’t ready for it was an understatement.
I wasn’t ready for the emotion, and I wasn’t ready for the way his long, chilly fingers worked their way under my jacket and sweatshirt and shirt and pressed into my hips, raising goose bumps on my skin. Everything around us drifted away. Miles groaned. The vibration rippled through my lips.
The heat. How did I not notice the heat? There was a furnace between the layers of clothing that separated us.
I pushed away. He breathed heavily, watching me with alert, hungry eyes.
“Miles.”
“Sorry.” His huskier-than-usual voice didn’t sound sorry.
“No—I—do you want to come back to my house?”
He hesitated for a moment; in his eyes, I saw him working out the meaning of my words. It took him so much longer to figure it out than a math problem or a word puzzle. Those he got immediately. This took all his brain power.
I had to believe he’d been born with this confusion, this inability to understand people, because the alternative was that he’d been conditioned to think no one would ever suggest something like this to him, and he simply couldn’t process it when someone did. And that was too sad to believe.
“You . . . you mean . . . ?” His eyebrows creased.
“Yes.”
His breath hitched. “Are you sure?”
I let my fingers wander to the waistband of his jeans. “Yes.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
Chapter Thirty-four
We didn’t talk on the way to my house. Miles’s knuckles were white against the steering wheel, and he kept glancing over at me every few seconds. I knew this because I kept glancing over at him, too. Something wiggling and strange tunneled through my stomach, half excitement, half terror. When he pulled up the driveway and reached over to unbuckle his seatbelt, I held him back.
“Wait. Let me go in first. Drive down the street some, then walk back. You know which window is my room?”
“No.”
I showed him. “Come to the window. I’ll let you in.”
I marched up to the front door, perimeter checking the yard as I went, trying to be as casual as possible when I stepped into the house and flipped the bolt behind me. I kicked my shoes off in the hallway a
nd tiptoed past the family room.
“Alex?”
My mother.
“Hey, Mom.”
“I’m glad you’re home.” She stood from the couch and held out her hand. “I didn’t realize you’d be out so late—you need to take this.”
She gave me a pill. I swallowed it dry. “We stopped for dinner.”
“Did you have fun?”
“Um, yeah, I guess.” I wanted to be in my bedroom. Wanted to be shut in, safe, away from prying eyes. With Miles.
“How was Miles?”
“Good? I don’t know what you mean.”
“He was visiting his mother in a mental hospital. You’d think he’d have some sort of issues. Heaven knows the boy already seems a little . . . emotionally stunted. I’m half convinced he’s autistic.”
“So what if he is?”
She blinked at me. “What?”
“So what if Miles is autistic? And he’s not ‘emotionally stunted’—he has emotions like the rest of us. He just has trouble figuring out what they are, sometimes.”
“Alex, he seems very smart, but I don’t think he’s the best influence.”
I scoffed. If only she knew. “Then why’d you get so excited about the idea of me going with him? Because you wanted me to see where I’d be living after high school?”
“No, of course not! I didn’t mean it like that.”
I shrugged my jacket off and hung it on the coatrack. “I’m going to bed. Please don’t bother me.”
I left her standing in the dark entryway and slipped back to my room, closing and locking the door behind me. I didn’t bother with a perimeter check. I didn’t care. Joseph Stalin himself could’ve been standing in the corner and I wouldn’t have cared. I lifted the window and popped out the screen.
“Be quiet,” I said.
Miles had no trouble with that. He slinked into the room, blending into the darkness. I found him by touch and brought him close, helping him slide out of his jacket. The smell of pastries and mint soap filled my room. With him here, I knew everything really was okay. I wrapped my arms around him and pressed my face into his shirt. We tottered back, through the narrow shaft of yellow light from the streetlamp outside, and fell onto the bed.
The artifacts on the shelves rattled and my pictures fluttered. I sat up and pressed a finger to my lips. He nodded. The streetlight hit his eyes and turned them into blue stained glass.
He had to be real. Out of everything, he had to be real. I slipped his glasses off and set them on the nightstand. It struck me how open his face was, all clear blue eyes and sandy hair and golden freckles. My heart stuttered, but he hadn’t done anything. I wondered for a second if maybe I was the one who’d been conditioned to think this couldn’t happen. He laid there staring up at me, and while I was sure he couldn’t see much, it still felt like he was analyzing the tiniest details.
My fingers fanned out over his abdomen. His muscles clenched and he released a breathless laugh. Ticklish. I smiled, but he’d closed his eyes. I eased the shirt up over his chest and he sat up to let me pull it off.
The feel of his skin under my fingers sent little jolts of fire up my arms, and when he carefully peeled my shirt off, I thought I would combust. I hated things like swimming and changing in locker rooms because I hated being so bare in front of other people. I was too exposed. It made me think of torture. But this wasn’t torture at all.
Miles paused, wrapped around me, his neck craned over my shoulder. I felt a small tug on my bra and I realized he was examining the clasp. I stifled my laugh in his shoulder. He’d gotten it unhooked and was re-hooking it. He unhooked and re-hooked it a few more times.
“Stop stalling,” I whispered.
He unhooked it one last time and let me pull it off.
The rest of our clothes joined the shirts on the floor. I shivered and pressed myself closer to him, letting the heat build between our stomachs again, hiding my face in the crook of his neck. I rolled us to the side and he curled around me. I pulled the blanket up over us to create a little cocoon.
I loved being this close to him. I loved being able to touch so much of him. I loved how tightly he held me, the soft in-out of his breathing, and how I didn’t feel the need to look over my shoulder when he was here. I loved being able to pretend that I was a normal teenager, sneaking around, and everything and everyone was
Just
All
Right.
Miles’s fingers pressed into the small of my back. “Basorexia,” he mumbled.
“Gesundheit.”
He laughed. “It’s an overwhelming desire to kiss.”
“I thought you weren’t good at figuring out what you felt.”
“I’m probably using the word in the wrong context. But I’m pretty sure that’s what this is.”
I pressed a kiss to his shoulder. One of his thumbs brushed across my spine and. . . .
It was too much.
Too much, too fast.
“Don’t hate me,” I said. “But I don’t think I want to do this. Not . . . not right now. Not here. I’m sorry; I didn’t think I would change my mind.”
He let out a whispery, relieved laugh. “That’s actually good. I think I’m going to have a heart attack just from this. Anything more might kill me.”
I wedged a hand between us. His heart beat fast and hard against my palm. I whipped it back. “Jesus, you’re right, I think you might actually have a heart attack!”
I was mostly joking, but he pulled back, bashful. His breathing came a little harder. “It would help. If we could . . . reposition . . .”
We shifted away from each other. His breathing returned to normal. We faced each other in the dark, the covers pulled up over us. His hand found mine.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m not used to people touching me.”
“Neither am I.”
There was silence for a few long minutes, until I had an idea.
“Pick someone,” I said.
“What?”
I smiled. “Pick someone.”
He hesitated, then smiled back. “Okay. Go.”
“Are you dead?”
“No.”
“Are you a man?”
“No.”
“Do you live in a foreign country?”
“No.”
Female, alive, from the US. Maybe he hadn’t gone for obscure.
“Do you have anything to do with East Shoal?” I asked.
“Yes.”
Shot in the dark. “Are you in the club?”
He paused. “Yes.”
“You’re Jetta.”
He shook his head.
I frowned. “Theo?”
“No.”
“Well if you’re not either of them, you’d have to be me.”
He blinked.
“It’s me?” I said.
“I couldn’t think of anyone else,” he said.
He inched closer and opened his arms; I crawled in and rested my head on his shoulder. He whispered something in German. I closed my eyes and placed my hand over his heart again.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
Part Three: Rubber Bands
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
Chapter Thirty-five
Miles fell out of bed at one-thirty in the morning, panic flooding his face.
“I have to go.” He stumbled his way into his clothes. I sat up, shook off drowsiness, and pulled the comforter up to cover my chest.
“What’s wrong?” I whispered back.
“Shoes . . . where are my shoes?”
“Next to the window.”
He grabbed them and shoved them on his feet. “My dad knows I never work past midnight.”
“What does he do if you’re not there
when you’re supposed to be?”
Miles stopped and looked at me. Then he found his jacket on the floor and slung it over his shoulders.
“Come here.” I opened my arms. He perched on the edge of the bed, body rigid. I turned his face toward me and kissed him. “Can you be here Monday morning?”
“Sure.”
I kissed him again and handed him his glasses. “Here.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
Chapter Thirty-six
I couldn’t stop smiling at Finnegan’s the next day. The customers definitely left me bigger tips, but that could’ve been because I wasn’t staring at them like they were bugged.
Tucker noticed.
“Why’re you so happy?” he grumbled, shoving bills into the register. The register shook when he slammed the drawer closed.
“Am I not allowed to be happy?” I asked. Still, I wiped my smile away. Guilt knotted my stomach. I wanted to tell him what I’d learned from June, but this was the most he’d spoken to me in days. I grabbed Finnegan’s 8 Ball. Did I do something wrong?
My sources say no.
Tucker glanced sideways at me. “You’re acting like you won the lottery. Just tell me it doesn’t have anything to do with Richter.”
“Fine. I won’t.” I’d apologized a million and one times. I’d taken shifts for him at work, done my own discussion papers during English class, and hadn’t asked him for a damn thing. I didn’t care if he was mad at me. He had no right to comment on what I did with Miles.
He turned to face me. “You’re kidding. You’re still hanging out with him, after he did that to me? After everything he’s done?”
“It’s none of your business what I do with him, Tucker.” I lowered my voice so the couple sitting at the closest table wouldn’t overhear.
Tucker hesitated. “What you do? What are you doing with him?”
My entire face must’ve been as red as my hair. “I said it’s none of your business, didn’t I?”
Tucker’s voice dropped until he was whispering. “You are shitting me. You slept with him?”