Gemini (11 page)

The barista wanted to close, and they walked out to the street. The rain had turned to a mist so fine it was nearly imperceptible, a fresh nip on her cheeks, a gauze over the Christmas lights woven impossibly thick through every tree. The streets were noisy with partiers, despite its being a weeknight—the holiday more an excuse to break rules than a celebration of tradition or faith. Bo was telling Raney about a puppy he’d snuck into his dorm room to raise. He’d taken it for walks in the middle of the night so the RA wouldn’t find out, but the dog had disappeared one weekend after a house party—stolen, Bo was sure. He had posted signs everywhere, though he knew it was useless. They stopped walking and Raney watched his hands stroking the dog’s back, caught between real life and imagination. She remembered his hands holding a book in the woods, on the beach, in the bunker, and wondered if he knew he had mastered something rare and was meant to be a storyteller. Once, when they were kids, she had asked him to read aloud to her, more because she was frustrated at being ignored than because she had any actual interest in the book. It worked at first. He had made a different accent for each character and talked slow or fast as the action moved slow or fast, but after a while he was mumbling so that all she’d heard was the rise and fall and punch of his voice. He’d grown oblivious to her as his audience. She’d started to feel jealous of the book that so absorbed him, those petty, vicious English schoolboys and their smelly roasted pig. She had called him out on it and he’d said, she remembered, “Sure, Ms. Vincent van Gogh. Like you give a fart for anybody else when you’re painting.” After that they would choose the day’s spot, Bo with his book and Raney with her tackle box of paints, and be happy enough in silence.

Bo finished the story about his dog and looked around. “Where are we going?”

She pointed to the building behind him. “This is my apartment.” She didn’t ask him to come in, but he said, “Okay,” and then they were climbing the stairs and unlocking her door and then she was throwing clothes into the closet and dishes into the sink and kicking textbooks under the sofa.

“My roommate’s already gone home. She’s a worse slob than I am—could have at least thrown her pizza box away.”

“Who’s your roommate?”

“Brittany. She’s a photographer. I didn’t know her before I got to school, but she’s nice enough”—Raney opened the refrigerator—“and she usually keeps beer. Want one?”

“Sure.” He tried to twist the cap off, grimacing when the metal ridges scraped his chilled fingers. She brought him a bottle opener and sat next to him on the couch—a ragged paisley piece of junk they’d found at a garage sale and covered with an afghan. “Nice place,” he said.

Raney laughed. “No, it’s not. Are you gonna stay in the dorms or move someplace you can get another dog?”

“Hmm. I might not go back right after Christmas.”

“Why? Semester off?”

He took a sip of beer and looked around the room, either deaf to her question or deciding that it was not worth answering. He pointed with the bottle to the wall covered with Brittany’s photographs. “She’s pretty good.”

“Yeah. She likes buildings, highways, playgrounds—never people. Man-made things without the man that made them.” Bo got up and walked close to a grouping of bridges and highways. “How’d she get Highway 99 with nobody on it?”

“They’d closed it off for the St. Patrick’s Day race.”

“Why does she dislike people so much?”

“Oh, she doesn’t dislike people. Particularly if they’re male.”

Bo was leaning toward the photograph of the bridge, one hand tucked into his hip pocket. From the back his haircut looked ragged, like he’d let a drunk fraternity brother go at him with sewing scissors. “Where’s your stuff?” he asked.

“In the bedroom.”

“What, so you got banished from the main room?”

“We share the bedroom too. But she’s at her boyfriend’s most of the time.”

“Can I see?”

“The bedroom?”

“Your paintings.”

—

What was she expecting when she opened the door and turned on the light for him? Astonished praise? Stunned silence while he absorbed her genius? Only three people, Grandpa, Sandy, and now Bo, knew both her old work and her new and thus had some measure of how she had grown from a child to a woman through the arc of her art. Was she hoping Bo would see, absorb, and know her now as if he had never stayed away? Whatever she was expecting, she felt something cave in when it didn’t come. He scanned the paintings with his mouth pursed. Raney sat down on her bed, waiting, talking herself into not caring. After a long while Bo leaned against the wall, holding his eyes on her face like he was winding up to say something summative and profound. But when he finally spoke he said, as if they had just been talking about her grandfather, “I bet your granddad still goes into that bunker. Does he? Still waiting for the end of the world?”

“Grandpa? Of course. Gotta end someday.” She didn’t try to hide the sharp edge in her voice, but Bo seemed to interpret it as sarcasm and laughed softly.

“What does he do when the cans expire?”

“He gives ’em to the food bank a month before. Or we eat beans every night for a month. What made you remember his bunker?”

“I always wondered what he expected after an apocalypse. I mean, if everyone you know, your whole town, is decimated, why would you want to survive?”

“Well, those are words spoken by someone who never had to face death.” It was a blind lashing, and as soon as she saw his hurt expression, she wished she’d just swallowed her pride about the paintings. She felt confused about why she’d let him come up to her apartment now, smacked by the admission that she had let her hopes build up, as if running into Bo twice in one night was some predestined path carved by more than her own sweat, for once. “Grandpa was a POW in Korea and half the men in his unit starved so I guess he pretty much lived through the end of his world. Besides, I think he sees the end of the world as an opportunity. Like if we have to start all over maybe he’ll find some place he fits in.” Herself too, a dark voice inside her added. Suddenly she wished Bo would leave, cursing the sleet that drove her inside the gift store and reintroduced his gilded life to her own. She’d been happy enough before measuring her lot against his, hadn’t she? Thinking this school, this apartment, these paintings were a step to somewhere else. Her eyes stung with tears and she lay back on the bed so that Bo couldn’t keep staring into her face.

A moment later, though, the bed dipped when he sat next to her. He put his hand on hers, cautiously knit his fingers between her own. “You don’t have people in your paintings, but they don’t feel lonely.” His fingers curled around hers, no mistaking their intention to hold on. Raney held her eyes as wide open as she could to keep tears from spilling down her cheeks. “Your paintings feel like everything is connected—the trees, the light, even the missing people . . .” One fat tear escaped with that, slipping across her temple and, she hoped, disappearing into her hair. She felt the bed move as he brought his other hand to her face and stroked the path the tear had made.

“So you don’t hate them?” she said, embarrassed she had to ask and asking anyway.

“I don’t hate them, Raney. No one could hate them.”

Raney could not have said later whether he kissed her or she kissed him, but they kissed then, crossing the mountains between friendship and romance. He tasted different than she’d expected, which made her aware that she had been expecting this kiss. Anticipating and preparing for it. She tasted the coffee, a sweetness of brown sugar and earthy florals. For all his height, his frame fit well with her own, thighs and hips and shoulders, longer, wider, stronger; safely encompassing, though she would not have guessed how much she wanted that. She knew pride in her own body, too, which overtook her shyness—that magic time when smooth skin and clear eyes and supple joints rank with the grandest of natural wonders.

Bo took off his coat and sweater and stretched himself across her so the quick thud of his heart came through her own chest. He hesitated a moment then closed his eyes, slid one hand under her shirt and eased it up, up, working each side higher until it tangled in an awkward band above her bra and Raney had to quit pretending she had no part in this, sat up, and wriggled her arms free. Above her again he ran his hand over her belly and the swell of her breasts and she was surprised that his skin was as soft as her own, like he had never used his hands for anything but turning the pages of a book. She heard him sigh and when she opened her eyes he was looking at her right arm, tracing the bracelet of scar where a thin nylon rope and high wind and adolescent foolishness had nearly cost Raney a limb. He leaned down and pressed his lips into the raised pink flesh, then moved his face lower along the course of her ribs and let one hand trail downhill to her navel, gently pressed his palm against the shallow cove between her hips.

“Have you done this before?” he asked.

“
This
or
it
?”

He blushed and she could see how he hated what it gave away. “You know. It.”

Raney shook her head. “I hated every boy in Quentin and haven’t met any here I like much better.”

“Me neither.”

Despite the blush she was surprised. The smooth blond hair and seashell ear of the girl in the gift store flashed into her mind. “No girlfriends?”

“One. For a while—not long enough to, you know . . .”

“Have sex,” she finished.

Saying the word broke the tension. Bo laughed and moved off her, bunched the pillow under his arm, and looked at her with a new easiness. “I have an idea.”

“What? You ravish me and we both pretend we know what we’re doing?”

“Let’s go out for breakfast.”

Raney looked at the alarm clock. “It’s one in the morning. Doesn’t anybody care you aren’t showing up?”

“No. Mom stays with her boyfriend half the time. I’ll call her in the morning. I want to spend the day with you.”

She laughed and put her hand over his where it lay on the bare skin of her waist, so safely unself-conscious now she felt older, smarter, funnier. “What? In bed?”

“No. I mean, maybe. Someday.” His face got serious again, like he was weighing what to say next.

Raney reached over her head for her shirt and pulled it across her front. “You have a car?” Bo nodded. “Give me a tour. I’ve lived here six months and hardly left downtown.”

—

When she was a grown and married woman, a mother with her own child to guide, Raney knew that if she had any advice about love it would be to make all the delicious room possible for that time between wanting sex and having sex. The anticipation building like an electrical charge—so strong it binds and forgives all sorts of inadequacies. Inside that window the goal is still the winning of love rather than the maintenance, which takes a more enduring patience. In ways, she and Bo had been waiting since his last summer in Quentin. They talked another two or three hours in Raney’s apartment that night, mixing time and topic until a patchwork of missed history began to fill in the lost years. By 4:00 a.m. they were drunk with fatigue and with each other, and Raney made him get under the covers with her, both of them fully dressed. Before they fell asleep he scratched the back of his head and she ran her fingers through his hair. “I think I liked it better long.” Bo pulled his head away and reached up to stay her hand. Raney smiled, surprised at his unexpected vanity. “You’re cute either way.” But instead of relaxing, he moved her hand higher up the back of his scalp, carefully guiding her index finger over a curved ridge of skin.

“What happened?” Raney asked.

“I had to have an operation. In October.”

Raney was awake again. She sat up and turned his face away from her, brushing his hair back. Even in the dim light of the street lamp below her windows she could see the crescent of pink tissue arcing across his skull. “Jesus, Bo. Why didn’t you tell me that? What for?”

“You remember the day in Port Townsend? When I had the seizure? They found something in my brain. A tumor.” Raney couldn’t stifle a gasp and Bo touched her lips. “It’s okay—it wasn’t cancer or anything—I’d probably had it all my life. But it came back, so a few months ago they took it out again.”

“They cut into your brain?”

He sat up and crossed his legs so their knees were touching, leaned so close Raney inhaled his own exhaled breath. “Yes. They cut it out, and now it’s gone. Forever.”

Raney was quiet for a moment. “It seems like I would have known somehow. Known you were in trouble.”

“But I’m not. I’m fine now.”

“You are? You’re sure?” Bo nodded and Raney began to relax again. “What other secrets should I know about you, Mr. Bo?”

“I don’t go by Bo anymore. Not at school.”

“No? So what do they call you back at Duke University in North Carolina, U.S.A., planet Earth?”

“My middle name. Eric.”

“Yeah?” Raney tilted her head, like seeing him from another angle might change how she interpreted him. “Eric’s nice. But I’ll still call you Bo.”

—

When he woke up, Raney was sitting up in bed with a paintbrush in her hand, shaping the hint of gold cast across Bo’s face in the morning sunlight. She hadn’t put her shirt on, and blushed when she realized he was awake. “You’re painting a person,” he said. “See? Not lonely at all.” Then he reached for the brush before she could pull away and drew a gold band over the scar on her right arm. “An Egyptian bracelet. For my Cleopatra.”