Axis of Aaron (12 page)

Ebon was up on his knees, molding one of the keep walls. He sat back down then looked up and said, “So when you work at the flower shop … that’s just like tossing a bunch of roses together, right?”
 

“What do you mean?”
 

“Well, you’re just reselling stuff. I was wondering why you’d like it if it’s just, like, being a clerk. Especially if you don’t have to be there. Wouldn’t you rather stay home and make art or something?”
 

Aimee blinked. “Arranging flowers
is
an art.”
 

“Like how stacking books in a pile is an art.” Ebon half laughed, then looked up and saw that Aimee was serious.
 

“No, really. Do you know what ikebana is?”

“Icky what?”

“Ikebana. The Japanese art of flower arrangement. I don’t like it, really, too many straight lines and rules for me. You’d probably like it fine. But they get the idea right, and they understand what I guess you don’t. It’s more than just shoving flowers in a container, you know. It’s a way to get closer to nature by doing art, so long as you’re paying attention. It’s just like any art though. You get some basic materials, which happen to be branches, leaves, grasses, and blooms. And then the artist — ” she put her tented fingers against her chest, “ — has to find the right color combinations and stuff. You know: the most organic shapes, the most graceful lines. And most importantly, the meaning in it all.”

“Oh,” said Ebon.
 

“A lot of people don’t know that.”

Ebon sure hadn’t. Nor did he care. But she’d been moving her hands in the sand as she’d been speaking, making subtle corrections to the castle without conscious thought, shifting elements by millimeters until they were nearer to perfect. As she’d been working the castle, his hands had been behind hers — refining edges, adding just the right shell accents, following her lead with improvement.

“Now,” he said, “I think it’s done.”
 

Aimee looked down. She seemed surprised. “Oh.” Her fingers trailed the wall, along the parapets, down into the large sandy courtyard. Watching her, it looked like she was seeing something new, something she’d never seen before. But Aimee’s hands had shaped most of it while her mind had been elsewhere. Ebon’s eye had made it better.
 

“Do you agree it’s done?”
 

She nodded slowly.
 

“Better than before?”
 

Another nod. Then she looked up. “How did you do that?”
 

“Do what?”
 

“It’s so much better even though so little was changed. I want to grab Dad’s camera and take a picture.”
 

“You did most of it.”
 

“Right, but … ” she trailed off, clearly mystified by her own process.
 

Ebon smiled, their ages seeming to have equalized in a moment. She’d been the professor throughout the build, but now they were two kids in the sand, equal as peers.
 

“The best way to get cool things to happen
is
to be quiet,” he said. “I don’t need to talk a lot. I just needed to get
you
talking, and the rest came out without even trying.”
 

“Oh,” she said.
 

He looked up at the porch, at Mr. Frey. Aimee’s father been watching them, but when Ebon glanced over, he returned his attention to the paper. Ebon found him both impressive and a little frightening. He wasn’t going to find the strength to suggest they go to Aaron’s Party under Mr. Frey’s heavy gaze right now, but it would happen in time. What Grams had anticipated had somehow actually happened: he’d made a friend. They could build while they waited to see what came next. Fix what was broken and make it better, improving what was already good.
 

Aimee stood and looked down at the sandcastle.
 

“Now that we’re done, I kind of want to destroy it,” she said. “Like, kick the crap out of it.”
 

Ebon stood.
 

“Okay.”
 

So they did.

CHAPTER SIX

Apples and Lemons

EBON AWOKE TO FIND HIS FACE stuffed full of downy pillow, almost as if he were being suffocated. For a moment he was totally lost, seeming to remember something about disorientation, sand, or both. But he must have decided against going to Aaron after all, because here he was, back in his own place in the city, surrounded by lush bedding. He could feel Holly shift beside him, a wall of pure white comforter between them. Down lower, he could feel the radiant heat of her skin near his. Holly always slept naked. It would have been a constant tease if she were remotely chaste, but Holly was hardly chaste, always interested in interlocking body parts.

The comforter shifted, and her arm slapped across his chest. Holly grunted, the porcelain-white arm sliding with the sleepy movements of her body beside him.
 

Except that Holly didn’t have porcelain-white skin.
 

And she was dead.
 

Ebon sat up, forcing himself to stay centered. A deep part of him argued that he’d recently been through a lot, and that he’d had other strange periods of disorientation, like whatever he dimly recalled in the sand. The dream he’d just had had felt real, just like the dream of Aaron that had come before it: of staying with grown-up Aimee at her father’s place on the island. He even remembered sleeping in her old bunk beds, seeing the bunk above his where someone had carved initials as if in that old weathered bench on Redding Dock.
 

Careful,
something told him.
 

“Get me coffee,” said a voice.
 

Ebon looked over to see a huge mess of red hair. It was bright orange, voluminous enough to recall the guts of a disemboweled Muppet. Then the hair’s owner rolled to the side and showed him a beautiful face he was sure he’d seen before, even though she’d never turned to give him a look at her smooth, pink-blushed features the other day, when he chased her through Aaron.
 

The strange woman smiled up at Ebon. “Morning, sunshine.”
 

“Uh … ”
 

“You’re going to make me coffee, aren’t you?”
 

Ebon wanted to close his eyes and sigh, but didn’t dare. He should have been scared shitless, but wasn’t. Everything was too normal, as abnormal as it was. It was hard to be the only one running around the room screaming, while the unalarmed sat by and watched.
 

“I … ”
 

“And maybe you’re going to make me eggs.” She pressed her lips together, spreading them into a wide, satisfied, drowsy red bow. Those lips looked soft, and Ebon fought an odd desire to lean forward and kiss them. Despite their lack of gloss, they looked bright enough to have been recently lipsticked: red against white skin, like the soft pink creeping across her cheeks. “Mmm. Yes. I think you might just do that.”
 

Ebon spoke without thinking, somehow knowing it was exactly what she expected because it was the sort of thing he
always
said. Because
she
always said things like
she’d
just said. It was a game between them, even though he’d never met her.
 

Or,
he thought, trying to decide why she seemed so familiar,
have I?
 

“I’m not your slave.”
 

She wrapped her arms around his waist, the comforter like a cloud between them. Ebon’s eyes drew in the room, straying upward. The wall to the right of the bed was glass from floor to ceiling. The room was sparse, specked with a few pieces of furniture that were far too modern and expensive-looking to be his. The view through the window wall was phenomenal. They were somewhere high up, on Aaron after all, and the bay stretched below like blue gems, the trees fully in bloom with Aaron’s autumn colors. Given the hour and the lack of direct sun, Ebon decided they must be facing west, same as Aimee’s cottage. He could even see the same off-shore rig he’d seen from Aimee’s window, only from a higher vantage.
 

Aimee.
 

“Oh yes, you are,” said the red-haired woman, hugging him tight. She gave him another squeeze, her moan full of early morning sleepiness, then let him go. As she rolled back, the comforter fell away, and he saw that she was as nude as Holly would have been. She had huge, soft-looking breasts topped with small nipples as pink as her lips. She made no effort to cover up, as if Ebon had every right in the world to look — which he now did without shame, stiffening despite the mystery. “You’ll do whatever I need. Because I’ve got what
you
need.” Ebon felt a hand on his bare leg and jumped. He’d have to look, but he was pretty sure he was equally naked.

“Did I scratch you?” She pulled her hand out from under the covers and looked at five red-painted nails.
 

“No, it’s … ”
 

“You were just really eager to get out there and make the coffee.”
 

“I … ”
 

The woman’s hand had gone back under the comforter and was again on Ebon’s leg. It moved higher, her finger pads brushing an already hard member. Her fingers curled, and he felt himself encircled, more horny than alarmed.
 

“What?” she said, watching his face.
 

“Nothing.”
 

“You don’t want to?”
 

Ebon swallowed. “Maybe we could just talk.” As he looked at the woman’s large soft breasts, they were the five hardest words he’d ever had to say.
 

The hand left Ebon, and the woman shrugged, now sitting up herself. She fluffed a pillow and shoved it behind her back and they became a Normal Rockwell illustration: two people sitting up in bed, possibly preparing to read educational periodicals while smoking pipes. Except that the woman was topless, and as she sat up, Ebon’s refusal grew painful as he saw that despite her chest’s size, nothing sagged.
 

“Oh. All right,” she said, her voice playful. She had the air of someone doing something absurd and knowing it, playing along to appease the insane. “Let’s
talk.”
 

He looked over, and the woman smiled, her expression pleasant. She was the most unique female canvas Ebon had ever seen. Her hair was so orange that it almost looked fake; her skin was pale, blushing into peach with no freckles; the accents on her body and face were so pink they seemed fragile. He wanted to push onward, see what colors lay below.
 

“What should we
talk
about, Ebon?”
 

He flinched at his name, but of course she had to know it. They’d spent the night in bed together, naked. In Ebon’s world, that kind of thing didn’t happen casually. Names were exchanged before any and all sexual incursions. Again he looked down, wondering with new vividness whether they’d actually had sex. If he was going to do something so odd and disorienting, he should at least be able to remember it for later mental replay.
 

The woman was smiling broadly, a knowing look on her face.
 

“What?”
 

“Just indulging you. As always.”
 

“‘As always’?”
 

Again, Ebon wondered why he wasn’t sprinting away in terror. The woman’s pleasant mood (not her ample chest, though that was helping) was keeping him rooted. Her bearing was so ordinary, so unfazed, so day-to-day. It rang something in his chest, strumming the sense of magnetic familiarity he’d felt since first seeing her on Main Street. He
knew
this woman. Deeply.
Intimately
. The fact that he’d woken up naked beside her felt much more like a culmination — maybe even a reunion — than something brand new. His shock here and now came from a sense of missing time, he realized, not from the situation itself.
 

And here she was, plugging hours gone missing with this implication of familiarity between them. Ebon
always
did this, whatever “this” was. Ebon
always
wanted to talk, and the woman
always
indulged him. They
always
made the same banter about coffee and eggs, and they probably usually ended up spending that breakfast time in bed, renewing bodily acquaintances.
 

He was sure of all of it, yet could remember none of it.
 

She was still waiting, wide pink lips in a pleased bow, chest bare. Ebon had an incredibly strong desire to ask for her name, but that probably wouldn’t go over well.
 

“What
do I always do?”
 

“This.”
 

“What’s ‘this’?”
 

“This,”
she said, now leaning over and running a pale hand through his chest hair, “is a fun time.”
 

“Oh.”
 

“Don’t ask me what it’s all about. It’s too big of a cliché. Besides, I’m supposed to ask things like that, because I’m the girl.”