Abduction (60 page)

When he saw them the driver gave a hesitant wave, and as they drew nearer Devan saw that he was staring at her mistrustfully and, as they reached the truck, the boy—he couldn't be much older than Devan—gave Vaughn a quizzical look.

"Jeremy." Vaughn's voice was soft and sad.

It surprised Devan when Vaughn hugged the guy, and the lump in her belly got heavier as she thought to herself that Vaughn was clinging to the kid like he'd just pulled him from a burning building.

"Devan, this is Jeremy," Vaughn managed when he finally let go of the kid.

"Hi," she said with the warmest smile she could conjure.

"Hi."

Jeremy was plainly confused and dismayed by her presence there in the woods with Vaughn, but Vaughn didn't seem in any hurry to explain the mystery. They threw the packs into the back, and Vaughn opened the back door for Devan. With that same 545

heavy, withering feeling she climbed in and buckled her seat belt. The slam of the door as Vaughn pushed it shut jarred her raw nerves.

Gazing out the window she saw but couldn't hear Vaughn talking to the driver.

Then the kid flung open the driver's door and climbed in, and Vaughn walked around the other side. A flood of happy warmth rose and soothed Devan as the back door opened and Vaughn slid in beside her instead of getting in the front seat. He gave her his placid smile, fastened his seat belt, and took her hand.

They rolled and bumped over the trail, Vaughn holding her hand, Devan remembering the terrifying night ride into the woods with Conrad. She almost smiled to think that she was sad to be leaving those woods now. It didn't seem possible that it was all part of one journey.

When they reached a paved road Devan asked how long it would be to Seattle, and Jeremy said about four hours. Four hours. Vaughn looked at her and she realized she was squeezing his hand. She dropped her eyes and pulled her hand away. It didn't matter that she wanted to stay with him. Even if he felt the way she did, their lives couldn't fit together. She wouldn't trap him with his guilt, so she couldn't tell him what she really felt. What she really wanted.

When he touched her chin and coaxed her to look at him she tried to calm herself so he wouldn't see her torment in her eyes. His sweet smile was almost painful to look at, now. He stroked her hair and pulled her to him, and she let her head rest on his chest, listening to the beating of his heart as Jeremy put miles of their time together behind them.

She knew better, but she couldn't help fantasizing. They'd drive straight to Vaughn's. He'd bring her into his home. They'd talk. Make love. At the very least, stay friends.

But as they closed in on Seattle, Vaughn said softly, "Capitol Hill, right?" and she said "yes" as evenly as she could, then guided Jeremy to her neighborhood, her street, her building. Her heart felt too big in her chest as it thumped heavily, and she felt a little faint as she clicked the seatbelt release and opened her door. The ground seesawed under her feet and she closed the door. For a moment she thought Vaughn wasn't even going to get out of the car to say goodbye, and she felt the tears welling up, threatening to roll down her face, but then she heard his door open, and then he was touching a strand of her hair.

"Do you have a key?" he asked in a voice barely more than a whisper.

"There's one hidden. If it's missing, the landlord can let me in."

She couldn't look at him. He'd see too much.

"We'll wait to see you get in all right."

"Okay."

He pulled her into his arms, his warm embrace, and kissed the crown of her head. She wanted him to never let go, to go on holding her forever, his smell, his heat, his breath, the beating of his heart with her forever. But he was letting her go, and the sadness was welling up too high, too fast. He opened his arms and she was about to dash off before he could look and see, but he touched her, lifted her face to him. The sight of his face, contorted with sadness that maybe matched her own, his eyes going red and wet and starting to brim over undid her resolve, and the tears started flowing.

"Goodbye, Dev," he whispered hoarsely.

Her stomach dropped and her flesh went cold.

"Goodbye, Vaughn."

She forced the words out, crushed and broken. Then she turned and strode, shaking, the world hazed by her tears, toward the stairs that led up to her door. Now that her back was turned, now that Vaughn couldn't see her face contorted by sobs, she went slowly up the stairs, hoping with each step she'd hear him running up behind her, hear him say her name, feel him touch her shoulder. But she knew as she reached the top he was still back at the car. She pawed desperately around the corner beyond the railing enclosing her landing, snatched the key from the window sill, and without looking back to the truck, went in and shut the door.

FOURTEEN: Out of the woods, yet

This boy was sort of like a flower. Devan liked looking at him. His shapes and colors, his delicate smoothness. Liked his smell.

Boy. Four years older than she was. Twenty three. But a boy to her. Not a man.

Not like Conrad. Not like Vaughn.

Kyle looked up from his copy of Anna Karenina and his moss-green eyes locked on her and, just as she blushed at being caught staring, his rosy lips went wide and parted in that big affable smile of his.

Sometimes, when he looked at her that way, and she sensed he felt the urge to reach out and touch her cheek or her hand, or lean into her warmth, bring his mouth to hers, a now familiar heat rose in her, and she thought she’d let him. His presence, his smell, the way he looked at her exacerbated that awareness—utterly dormant before Conrad had taken her, with her every waking and sleeping moment since she’d been back—that she was a sexual creature, flesh and heat and need.

But he was like a flower. An alien thing, pleasant to sense, to brighten the room, to admire, but cool, smooth, delicate. He had nothing to sustain her, to satiate her.

Besides, the thought of being held, being kissed, touched, entered by this boy-man, the need to set free all the overwhelming impulses to take and give pleasure and love seemed suddenly tiny beside the incredible pain of missing Vaughn.

She’d decided all this before. Each time they’d worked together on their paper for their class on love and death in literature. But this was the first time, when he’d stuffed 549

his books and papers into his backpack and she’d opened the door and said goodbye, that he let his bag drop to the floor, touched her hand, then bent and kissed her.

Nothing in her imaginings came close to the hurt she felt when the warm soft press of his lips struck her with the shattering finality of having lost Vaughn. She stepped back, out of his hopeful embrace, away from his kiss.

Devan opened her mouth to say something, but he beat her to it.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “I guess I, uh, let my imagination get away from me. I’ll see you tomorrow. In class.”

He snatched his backpack off the floor and was out the door almost before she could say “goodbye.”

Hours later Devan lay in bed, as she did almost every night, touching herself—

fingering tresses of hair, running the tip of her thumb under her upper lip, tracing the line of her jaw, the contours of her throat, the swell of her breasts, the responsive nubs of her nipples, the softness of her belly—remembering Vaughn’s touch, his eager and reticent explorations of her. When she spread her legs and curved her hand over her sex she imagined her hand was his hand, his mouth. She made herself come as if she were under his body, her fingers were him inside her.

But when she was done, her taut and willful pretense fell apart. She didn’t usually cry, anymore. But this night she sobbed into her pillow as long and as hard as she had the day he’d brought her home and left her.

The next morning she sent the package that had been sitting on her desk for more than five weeks. Before sealing the wrapper, she slipped in the final draft of a letter she'd written and re-written a dozen times:

Vaughn,

I don't know if I'm doing the right thing, writing you. I've argued with myself every
day, for weeks, since the last time I saw you, whether it's the right thing. I guess I can't
know, since I can't be sure of how you feel or what you're thinking. The one thing I do
know is that if I don't write, if I don't try one more time, I'll always wonder if it might have
made a difference.

I miss you. I miss walking into a room to find you working out a melody on your
guitar, or leaning back in your armchair, your feet on the hearth, your temple propped
on your fist, your eyes fixed on the page of a book. I miss your face, your sharp eyes,
your soothing smile. And your hands. I didn't ever tell you, but I love your hands. I miss
hearing you talk. In those few quiet days we had together, I got so used to your way of
talking—so soft and steady. Your voice, your way of saying things had this way of
making me safe.

And I miss you touching me. Holding my hand, holding me against you. Your
kisses—the little ones on my cheeks and forehead and shoulders, and the others that
made me feel so wanted.

And I miss being your lover, if that's what I was. I miss feeling you and touching
you until I was so caught up with you that everything but what I was feeling—your
breath on my skin, your mouth, your body against mine, inside me—disappeared. I want
to feel that again—all your tenderness, your heat. And really—and I know it's only a
reckless fantasy, but—if I'm brave and I force myself to be honest, I want to wake up
with you, day after day, find you sleeping beside me, or looking over at me as I first
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open my eyes. And, not always, but now and then, I'd like to go back to the place I
found myself, over and over, at the cabin. I want you to take me there.

If you miss me, too, even if you don't see a future for us beyond friendship, I wish
you'd call or write or come to me. I hope you're not staying away because you think I
don't want to see you, or because you still feel guilty. I can't tell you how sad it makes
me to think we're kept apart by that.

But please, only come if it's what you want—if you've been wishing all these
weeks you could see me, talk to me, hold me. If you really want to put me and
everything that happened behind you, that's what you should do. The only reason I
haven't written before now is because I've been afraid you might come out of guilt, and
I'd rather let you go than have you come back to me out of some feeling of obligation or
pity. The last thing I want—such a lame cliché, but really—the last thing I want is for this
letter, or anything I do to hurt you, to make you feel regret or guilt. If that's what this
letter from me makes you feel, throw it away. Forget I sent it.

I won't say too much more here.

I've done something else I've been arguing with myself about. The five pound
doorstop. Not writing it, but sending it to you.

I started writing it, and went back to it, day after day, because I was missing you,
and writing down everything that happened seemed like the best way of keeping you
close. I hated the thought that time would dim and distort my memories of you, of us
together.

But when I finished I thought that maybe letting you read it would be the best way
of letting you see how I felt about things. How I feel about you now. And, in case you
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don't want to forget it all, but you can't find a way back to me, then we'll both have this,
and in a small way, we'll sort of be together.

Your friend,

Devan

After the kiss, Kyle didn't study with Devan any more. But another boy had materialized in her life, almost as if the first had been an elven changeling. Only Jeremy—the new boy—was in her course on modernist poetry, not her Love and Death in Literature class. And this new one was not like an alien or botanical life form. This one, with kind, dark eyes behind heavy glasses, attracted her, somehow. He'd spotted her on the bus, on her way home from the university one afternoon, recognized her as his classmate, and they'd discovered their apartments were less than two blocks apart.

When she first knew him she was convinced he was gay, but every once in a while she got the idea he had a thing for her. Strange, feeling desired. New. Just since she'd been back. Before all that, before Conrad had taken her away and changed her, it never happened.

He'd asked her once if she was seeing anyone, and she'd told him she was working on getting over somebody. Jeremy had gone quiet, and he'd sunk down a little, as if he were disappointed. Deterred.

Her affectionate desire for Jeremy was a dim shadow of what she felt for Vaughn—even of what she had felt for Conrad—but however faint, the fizzy warmth was there when they smiled their greeting at the start of class, or when he appeared at her door for a study session which half the time served as an excuse to order Thai 553

take-out and get a movie at the corner market. One night as he left they hugged goodbye, but instead of the usual quick, friendly embrace, this night he held her so close and for so long, she flushed with the sudden certainty that he would kiss her.

But he didn't. He let go of her and smiled, dodging her eyes, and slipped out the door. Devan went to work on a paper due to following day, but she had to fight to keep her mind from constantly working to disentangle the intertwined threads of relief and disappointment.

Study date after study date—first for their class together, and later focused on the GRE and prepping their applications to grad school—the expected attempt at a kiss never came. As winter quarter waned, then ended, and they got to know each other better, Devan saw how different Jeremy was from Kyle. When she stood back and looked past the fact of her attraction, she clued in to the reality that Jeremy was almost as much an innocent child as she herself had been before Conrad had taken her.