Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series (16 page)

For a long time, they watched the rough gray clouds race across the damp-looking sky. He felt her heart beating at the back of his neck. She worked her arm around his head and gave him lazy waves of gooseflesh pulling gently at the hair over his ear.

“This is a bad idea,” he said, turning to kiss her chest.

“True.”

He closed his eyes, could see the blood red and white negative of clouds against the backs of his eyelids. “I don’t want you to come to Wales with me.”

“I don’t remember asking, Hefin.” Her voice was soft.

“You haven’t, I know. What I mean is, I followed someone, after an intense affair, and there’s something inside of me that still isn’t made right again. I would never want that for you.”

She turned to her side, bumping his head from her shoulder, and propped herself on her elbow, looked right at him. “I’m not afraid, you know. Of how I’m going to feel after you go. I think I’m kind of starting to figure out that no matter what you lose, you still have yourself. There you are. Everything in pieces all around you. I can’t stand the grief of losing something and the fear of losing something else at the same time. I can’t. And since I already am living with the grief, I guess I choose not to bother with the fear.”

“You’re going to lose me.” He pulled her closer, and they were chest to chest in the grass.

“You’re going to lose
me
. You’ll have to dream about these breasts for the rest of your life.” She arched into him, just a little.

“I will, too.”

“Yeah, you will. And I’m going to be here, and fix my family and get a kick-ass job and really
live
, and of course, send you occasional, breezy emails.”

“Will you attach cheeky photographs?”

She laughed. “Did you seriously just say
cheeky
?” Her color was up. Her eyes completely clear.

A woman who had nothing but herself left, and fearless besides. Who wasn’t looking to him for anything.

“Why did you notice me?” He was a glutton. Greedy and bottomless.

She reached up and traced his eyebrow, and his eyes got heavy. He closed them, letting her touch reach him all over. “You were the best thing I’d seen in forever. And your voice. How serious your face was when you carved.”

“You were so determined. I wanted to see you every day, and yet, I wanted never to see you again because that would mean you’d won.”

“No more yellow slips.” She traced over his top lip and it made his body tense, in a hot and slow sort of way, all over.

“Right. No more yellow slips.”

Her kiss was so soft, her lips just sliding over his. He felt her tongue touch his front teeth, and he met it, grabbing her nape to press her closer. Her breath was the only warm thing about her body, lying in the grass.

Her hair was cold, her neck cool, the skin of their stomachs touched where their shirts had ridden up and they shared no warmth at that connection. Each time she breathed, though, as their mouths met and slid away, angled and touched, he felt the heat from inside her.

He hooked his leg over her hip and she bucked up, just a little and there was something a little like a moan on her next huff of breath.

He realized that it wasn’t that the clouds moved over them, it was that they were moving under the clouds. Spinning. Another turn closer to good-bye.

He kissed her again.

“It’s cold,” she said.

He rubbed his face into the soft shirt against her soft side, inhaling her skin so new from her shower, how the crushed grass was already mixed up into the soap.

“And wet,” she complained. He thought she might not be wearing a bra, but there was some kind of extra, tighter garment under the big tee she was wearing. He skimmed over its seams, trying to figure it out.

“Also,
oof
, dude, Hefin, hold up.” He looked down at her where she was under him in the grass.

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

“I think mud is starting to seep into the crack of my ass.”

He pulled her up with him. “Sorry,” he said. He even tried to feel sorry.

She looked at him very seriously, except for the color of her eyes, which was the same as when she laughed.

“I’m going to ask you something.” She pressed her forehead to his shoulder.

He put his hand on her wet hair and wished for absolutely everything in the entire world to be different. “Yes.”

She laughed. He didn’t feel like laughing. He felt like he was coming right out of his skin and the only activity that would soothe him was climbing to the top of the tallest building possible, perhaps one of those that made cloud breaks in Dubai. Of course, once he did, he would face himself in the direction of Ohio just to see if he could spot her house.

He realized there was no stopping this. If he hadn’t wanted to tell her yes, he should never have approached her in the library. He should have pretended it was someone else who he had heard crying, who he saw scraping the hair away from her tearful face, then walked away and gone on an important carving errand.

He had wanted more than to stop her tears, but what he wanted, he couldn’t fathom. Watching her, looking at her hadn’t been enough, but kneeling next to her, being in that moment had been too much. He couldn’t understand what made her so willing to
live inside her grief. How could she not understand that the grief took and took from her, stole the luminescence from her gray eyes and made them watery and bloodshot. She claimed, now, that she could stand among the pieces of her life and face anything.

But he couldn’t believe that she truly accepted that. The good-byes. The small squares of sky above her head like the underside of a cage, ready to trap her.

He had been trapped, he knew. He knew what it was to look at a landlocked lake and wish it were the sea. To climb forty stories and hardly get a view for his efforts. He had sat inside his box and looked at his past hanging on small nails all around the room like it was an archival display.

Some twisted-up part of him, living deep on the inside, wanted to force her to admit what she didn’t have here. To name every last twig of her grief as if she had been cruelly tasked to put the tree back together. Minimal employment. Death. Crushing family obligation with little reward. A little rented house crowded around with little rented houses.

Except he somehow knew that once he had visited this torment, where he reduced her entire life to a handful of broken twigs, she would weave them into a circle with the ambition to make something of it.

He had nothing to give her. Less than nothing. A plane ride. The foldout sofa in his parents’ living room. Long hours in a tiny sublet in a country where she knew no one while he worked even longer hours, nothing for her to do but sightsee and wait.

His life would become a slowly emerging target of her resentment, until she didn’t recognize herself.

So he would tell her yes. He would tell her yes for whatever she asked for as long as there were flowers and birds and farmhouses to carve into oak and fit into marble cladding.

Then he would get on a plane and fly home and find a doctor to replace his heart with a plastic pump, like the one he heard some American politician had, that moved his blood around but didn’t beat, so the man was alive but didn’t have a pulse.

That. He would do that.

“You don’t know what you’re saying ‘yes’ to.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he told her.

“What if I was going to ask you to eat worms?”

“Yes. I might ask for a tea alongside, though.”

“What if I was going to ask you to go to Mass with me, and that you had to wear a tie? Bear in mind that the parish priest has been running over a good half hour ever since he was brought back to life on the table after his heart attack.”

“Yes. I would also tell you that I tie the most beautiful half-Windsor you’ve ever seen and that you should be prepared to wait a good time after. My unconfessed sins have quite piled up.”

She brought her head back and showed him her hand, which was streaked with mud. Her forehead crinkled and she reached up and drew a line of mud from his forehead to the tip of his nose. Then folded her hands into her lap. “What if I was going to ask you to mud wrestle?”

“That’s simple. Yes. In fact, a thousand times yes. You know men have been known to pay good money for that sort of thing.”

“You’re very easy this morning.”

His heart skipped a beat, threatening to stop and rescue him from this entire situation. He held his breath to encourage it, but it started up again with a sick and lurching plod through his chest. “None of this is easy.”

She looked down at her dirty hands. “No. It’s not.” She looked back up at him.

“But it doesn’t have to be the end of the entire fucking world, either.”

He looked back up at her small little square of sky. “Yes, then. I’ll take you inside and make love to you. I’ll willingly make everything much more difficult, as it seems we have no choice.”

“That’s what you think I was going to ask?”

“You said you weren’t going to be afraid, and having you is the most terrifying thing I can think of.”

“Except for the whole part before the scary part where it’s really, really awesome.”

He laughed. She made it seem easy to, even during the scary parts.

She stood up and held out her hand and he took it and she pulled him along until they creaked into her back door.

Her kitchen seemed dark and quiet after the birds and sunshine of the garden.

She kept hold of his hand, and pulled him through the old-fashioned galley kitchen and dark living room.

Kept pulling until she pushed through a doorway in the hall, then let go. Faced
him.

Her bedroom was small and close with knotty wood paneling that he was certain had not actually been milled from a knotty pine tree. Her nightstand was a chair, and it was stacked with books. Her bedclothes were still rumpled, a bright quilt and pink sheets, what she’d been wrapped in this morning.

“Where are you?”

He looked away from her bed. “In your bedroom.” It wasn’t an answer.

“No you’re not. You’re not here with me. You’re in that place where you squint at me like you can somehow get me into better focus. I’m right here. I’m not there.”

“Where’s there?”

“Standing on the ground, watching your plane fly away. I’m not there. We’re not there yet. You’re not there yet. Stop making us be there. You know what was dumb?”

“I can’t possibly name one particular thing.” But he left the bite out of his voice.

“It was dumb to waste time on all that talk about good-bye. About all the languages we’d need. All that stuff, a waste of time. Every time you let me walk past you in the library was a waste of time. Every time I didn’t make up an excuse to talk to you or join one of the project tours and make cow eyes at you was a waste of time.”

“Cow eyes?” He didn’t resist putting a finger on her forehead, bunched in irritated wrinkles.

“Moon eyes. Come-fuck-me eyes. Whatever. Waste of time. Why did you decide to stop wasting time?”

“You were crying.”

“What did you imagine you were going to do about it?”

He thought about that moment when he stood behind her in the library, the feeling he’d had that everything he did from that moment was an impulse he would pay for, as if approaching a pretty woman was charging against the entire credit of his life. “I didn’t know.” He hadn’t known.

“What if I had told you to go away?”

“You nearly did.”

“What if you had listened? Walked away? Walked right back to your wood carving?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do know. Your walking away is about everything, everything that wouldn’t
have happened, so far. Like holding me in the park on the first warm day of the year, or getting naked in the back of a limousine. Why is experiencing what you would have otherwise missed out on so terrifying, Hefin? Why is living so scary?”

His head was actually spinning, he was looking down from a hundred stories and waiting for his brain to make sense of safety. “I’m here.”

He would be here. He would try to be here.

If only because every other place didn’t hold her.

She was only
here
.

He didn’t understand how she accomplished that.

When he told her he was returning to Wales, she made him ask her on a
date
. As if they were young and were nothing more than a girl and a boy who had been making cow eyes at each other across the room.

She had lifted her shirt and risked his instant death by flying baseball.

And yes. The bit in the limousine. That, as well.

“You’re brooding,” she said, and pulled that big, loose shirt right up over her head. The hair that was dry floated after it in electrified orange webs. Underneath was some kind of vest, with tiny straps. Pink.

“I don’t think that means I’m not here. I think it’s simply proof of life.”

“You know what would have been great?” She wiggled her jeans right off her hips without unfastening them. Her panties weren’t panties at all, actually, but plaid men’s shorts with Christmas trees and snowmen printed over. His lust was confused, but game.

“What’s that, then?”

“If we could have done it inside my dome.”

He laughed. “Inside your twig circle, you mean.”

“Yeah.” She stood in front of him, toe to toe. “When it’s a dome, we’ll have to do it, right inside. I’ll work in a little doorway, so it’s like a hut.”

He closed his eyes because he knew that she would take advantage and kiss him. Reliably, he felt her mouth move over the corner of his, rubbing her nose in his whiskers. She kissed his top lip, and he had never been more glad of its strangeness. He let her kiss him.

Her hand was at his jaw, her thumb pressed down on his chin, and he opened his mouth, just a little for her, and their tongues met, just the very tips, before she slid right
into a kiss, warm and wet, and so slow there was a moment it seemed they only breathed together, lips fit under and over the other’s.

He slid his mouth over to her jaw, found a clump of freckles so closely gathered at the hinge, they looked like a spill of stain on raw wood.