Never Been Kissed (9 page)

“She was sleeping.”

“You know, I don’t ask—”

“It’s better that you don’t.”

Sean looked at him, really looked at him, so Brody looked back. The wisecracking shit disturber was gone, and in his place was the man Brody didn’t understand. Or like. The one who wanted something … different from him. Who seemed to think Brody owed him something.

Brody shifted in his skin. This is why he didn’t come home. This bullshit, right here. Demand disguised by coffee
and rooftops. The black bag of family. He was who he was in a vacuum. In the context of Sean and Ed, his family, he didn’t know who he was supposed to be.

“Are you in trouble?”

“No more than usual.” That wasn’t exactly true. The Montgomerys were going to be looking for their daughter and should they find her, Brody would take the brunt of that particular anger.

“You know,” Sean said, his voice low, his eyes on his hands, the half-empty coffee cup he held. “You can tell me, if you are. You can tell me—”

“I can’t actually. It’s not my story to tell.”

“It’s the girl’s?”

Brody took a sip of his coffee and Sean sighed.

“Will I be in trouble?” Sean asked.

“When have I ever let you take the fall for me?”

“Never,” Sean said, staring down at the town he was so much a part of. “But I can hope.”

Brody never knew what to say when Sean said that shit.

“How long are you staying?” Sean blinked up at Brody. The sun was at Brody’s back, and he shifted slightly to the left so Sean could look at him and not be blinded.

“I don’t know. A few days.”

“And the girl?”

“Probably a few more.”

“Who is she?”

God, what a loaded question, and of all his options he picked the simplest. “A friend.”

Sean couldn’t hide his surprise. Because Brody didn’t have friends. Not ones he brought to Bishop.

“Kind of,” Brody amended, taking another sip of coffee. “That’s good,” he said, about the coffee because he didn’t want to talk about who Ashley was to him.

“Cora. She’s ruining this whole town for anything average.”

“You guys still fighting?”

“The second she stops looking down her nose at me and treats me like a businessperson, the same as her—”

“So the answer is yes?”

“Hell yes the answer is yes!” Sean said.

Brody swore under his breath. This sustained animosity between his brother and Cora was getting old.

Brody looked down at the open square of his coffee cup, the brown liquid that stained the white plastic. His brother, for all that they never spent time together, knew exactly how Brody liked his coffee. The milk/sugar ratio.

It was as if Sean was constantly calculating the worth of those little things and hoping they would add up to something—a relationship, a brotherhood, family of some kind.

I’ve given you all I can,
he thought.
I don’t know what else you want.

“Give me a name, at least,” Sean asked.

“Ash.” That had been her name when she was young.

“All right. Ash. Would you like me to get some food from Cora’s?”

“I’d hate to put you in the line of fire.”

“My money is as good as everyone else’s and I want to.”

“That would be fine. Thank you.”

For a few moments they sat there, drinking their coffee, looking down on the town. And for those few moments, Brody was happy. Or maybe content. He wasn’t itching his way out of his skin, and that sometimes was happy enough.

“I better get back,” Brody said, stood, and Sean turned on him with intent, his entire body braced for something. A jump. A punch. Brody wanted to tell him to stop, to leave what had been a relatively nice moment on the roof between two sort-of brothers alone.

But that wasn’t Sean’s style.

“We should talk about Dad.”

“What do we need to talk about?” he asked, planting his feet firmly on the roof.

“He’s dying, Brody.”

When his patrol was hit by that IED, the blast had lifted him up in the air and for a split second in shock, before the pain of shrapnel and the skin-burning heat and the debilitating sucker punch to all his internal organs from the pressure, he’d just been weightless. Flying.

Talking about Ed dying gave him that same split-second
holy shit
feeling in his guts. “Bullshit,” he said, ignoring the very concept. The bottoms of his feet were burning on the tar paper, but he barely felt it.

“Go see him if you don’t believe me.”

Brody shook his head. “I won’t be in town long enough.”

There was pity in Sean’s eyes when he looked at him, and that was the last thing Brody needed.

“Do you need more money for him?”

“It’s not money that’s the problem. But—”

“Then there’s nothing you need me for,” he said, and meant it. “Thanks for the coffee. And the apartment.”

“Brody—”

Brody didn’t say anything, he just turned and half walked, half slid down to the landing. Leaving his brother and his worry alone.

A day later, two days, a few hours, she wasn’t sure, but Ashley woke up to sunlight and thought of Maka.

It had been a year, but the way the sunlight fell like syrup across Ashley’s hand reminded her of the girl. She turned her hand, making a cup of her palm, and the sunlight syrup filled it. She spread her fingers and it slipped away.

Ashley had arrived in Dadaab foolishly convinced all the reading she’d done would prepare her for the size and scope of the compound, the degree of poverty, the depth of the crisis.

She’d been wrong of course; it was obvious in the first ten minutes.

And while Ashley had been reeling from how wrong she’d been, Kate had gone to deal with a cholera outbreak in one of the five smaller camps that made up the whole of Dadaab. Before leaving she’d given Ashley very specific instructions about not letting anyone spend the night, unless they were sick, or related to someone at the clinic.

We’ll be overrun, Kate had said.

But then Maka showed up. A silent, utterly non-speaking seven-year-old girl, her name on a scrap of paper pinned to her shirt. Ashley, rattled, unsettled, and desperately unsure of her ability to help in a place like Dadaab, had been happy to have the company.

When night fell on that first day, and Kate had sent word that she was staying on the other end of the camp,
Ashley tried to shoo the girl away, but then Maka had opened her mouth, revealing the reason for her silence—a severed tongue.

Ashley had nearly fallen apart. If the possibility of getting on a plane that very moment had existed, she would have taken it. She would have bundled Maka up and run to the air-conditioned Western world.

But there was no waiting plane, so she made a spot for Maka on the floor beside her cot, the mosquito netting cast out around her like the edges of a puddle.

In the morning Ashley woke up and saw the girl watching the sunlight through the window of their cement building.

Maka tucked her toes out of the way as the sun approached, shifting closer and closer to the cot. Initially, Ashley had been confused.

But then Maka had glanced up, smiling, her teeth so white against her dark skin, the pink of her wounded mouth.

It had been a game. Dodge the sun.

Maka stuck around that day, was present for Kate’s return, helped stock some shelves with the supplies Ashley had brought with her. And then finally fell asleep beside Ashley’s cot again, despite Kate’s dire looks.

The next morning, Ashley woke up ready to play the game with Maka, but the girl was gone, as well as the meager supply of baby formula Ashley had brought with her.

So now, a year later, Ashley played her own games with sunlight and she could not say how long she’d been watching it stretch and reach, slowly gaining more ground, like famine or disease, spreading through the room, and then when it hit critical mass, it turned back, curled up on itself, and retreated.

Shadows claimed the area left behind.

It was all a very clever analogy for Africa, she thought. Though her brain was too mushy and she kept forgetting what she was trying to beat back, sunlight or shadow. Both?

Another knock split the silence of her African Studies dissertation.

Brody.

Her eyes fluttered shut, weighted by something so heavy, so thick and encompassing, she didn’t even want to think about it.

But unlike the sunlight, Brody was not retreating.

“Ashley?” Brody pushed open the bedroom door.

“Leave me alone,” she whispered, halfway asleep already.

“I have Kate’s number.”

Her eyes flew open and she turned her head so fast, her neck stung. Her brain pounded. He stood in the doorway, holding a cell phone. His expression blank.

“How?”

“I texted your brother.”

She swallowed and started to push herself up in bed. He stepped forward as if to help but she shot him a look that backed him off. “What time is it?”

“Four. In the afternoon.”

More than twelve hours of sleep. It had been years since she’d slept so long.

She held out her hand for the phone but he shook his head.

“What are you doing?” she cried.

“You can talk to her, but not yet.” He put the phone in his pocket and picked up a plate and a glass from the floor. “You need to eat first.”

“Are you bribing me?”

“Yep.”

He stepped into the room and it was smaller. So small.
The entire space felt like a dollhouse with him in it. And even though there was no danger of him touching her, she pulled her legs closer to her body, hoping she wouldn’t feel him like an electric current in the air.

He put the plate down on the bed. Toast. Buttered.

And in the glass he held out to her was orange juice.

Her mouth flooded with saliva and she took the glass with a shaking hand.

“Careful,” he murmured and she used both hands like a child. Out of his pocket he fished two pills. He handed her the red one.

“The antibiotic for your arm,” he said.

She swallowed it and washed it down with a gulp of orange juice. It lit her up, the orange juice, she felt her blood vessels expand with sugar and vitamin C.

“What’s the other one?” she asked.

“Painkiller.”

She held out her hand but he put it back in his pocket.

“You’re kidding me.”

“I want to check your arm and your head first. After that you can have it.”

“I’m not paying you to be my nurse.”

“You’re not paying me at all. Yet.”

“Can I pay you to leave me alone?”

Silent, he scooted around the foot of the bed; there was only about a yard between the bed and all the walls, not even room for a dresser.

He got to the edge of the bed closest to her arm and she knew he was going to touch her and that made her panic in a way, down deep.

“Did you grow up here?” she asked, distracting herself from him, from what he was going to do. It didn’t work. When he touched her, those broad calloused fingers against the skin of her arm, she gasped.

He stopped and looked at her, his gaze, his stillness asking if she was okay.

“It’s fine,” she lied. “Your hands are cold.”

“Sorry,” he murmured and began to peel away the bandage on her arm.

“You didn’t answer my question,” she said, because his dark hair was right at her shoulder, his breath gusted over her skin, across her chest where the tank top didn’t cover her. “Did you grow up here?”

“Age six on.”

“In this apartment?”

“Ed and Linda had a house a few blocks from here.”

“Where were you before age six?”

“New Orleans.”

Hilarious. She’d known nothing about him ten years ago, not even the slimmest details and she’d considered herself in love. What a fool she’d been.

He sucked in a breath when the bandage finally fell away.

“What?” She panicked at that breath, imagining infection and blood poisoning that had killed thousands of people in Dadaab. “Is it bad?”

“No.” His fingers brushed over the stitches and she felt that on the inside of her skin, like the stitches were vibrating at his touch. “It’s healing all right, but you’ll have a scar.”

Scars are okay,
she thought.
Scars are nothing.

“Can I look at your forehead?”

There was his face suddenly, right in front of her. Inches away. That hard mouth, those big dark eyes that when he wasn’t scowling at her could be so soulful. Maybe it was the eyelashes, which were ridiculously long. And thick.

The last time she’d been this close to him, she’d thought that it looked like he had eyeliner on, that’s how dense his lashes were.

And then she’d made a big fat fool of herself. The memory should be enough to inspire her to look away,
but she was in no danger of repeating her mistake, so she stared at him with impunity.

The laugh lines were new, or maybe they were
squinting menacingly
lines. Hard to say with him, but for right now, in this room, she’d go with laugh lines.

She wanted to believe, in the heart of her that had been hung in suspended animation all these years—because being a romantic in a place like Dadaab could kill you faster than infection—she wanted to believe that there was some place, some person that made Brody smile.

“You’re getting ripe, you know.”

“Ripe?” she whispered, still thinking about laugh lines and a long time ago and the kind of woman who could make Brody smile.

“You need a bath.”

She almost laughed. Right. No need to get carried away at the sight of some eyelashes. She put away foolish thoughts and memories and looked at the white wall across from her bed.

There was a circulatory system of cracks in the corner; small capillaries branching off from the main artery, reaching from wall to nearly the ceiling.

“Check the stitches,” she said, as he seemed to be waiting, his thumb against her skin, burning her.

Brody pulled the bandage off her forehead and after a moment nodded. “You can leave the bandage off this one,” he said.

“Yay me,” she said.

“Eat your toast and I’ll give you a pain pill.”

“Didn’t I just have one?”