Plus One (30 page)

We.

I dragged my eyes from Poppu to look at Ciel: my grown brother, the father of a child, the boy being bloodied by Dice on the gravel path at Wooded Island, the tech genius the Noma sought, the boyfriend Gigi wanted, the teen who looked over his shoulder and shouted that he loved me. They were all Ciel, and I had to make sense of them somehow.

He said, “I asked William to grab a book … from your apartment … when he picked up Poppu.”

Our apartment, once—Poppu’s and yours and mine.

“Would you like to read it to him?”

I nodded. I very much wanted to. I wanted to read one last time to my grandfather—to do something, anything, to comfort him when he was beyond help.

Ciel went to the shelves above the desk and pulled out a thick book. When he put it in my hands, dog-eared and dingy, it was like a last vestige of my old life, the life I had lost. I wondered what would happen to the apartment—what had happened already. The police had taken it over, I was sure, and when I went to jail, everything would be confiscated by the state. I would never go back. This book was all that was left of my home.

I lay down next to Poppu, facing him, with my back to Ciel, and I opened to the first page. Ciel sat in the chair and listened.

I began, the words like dear friends:

“Sing in me, Muse,

and through me tell the story

of that man skilled in all ways of contending,

the wanderer, harried for years on end,

after he plundered the stronghold

on the proud height of Troy.”

Sunday
3:30 a.m.

I stumbled to my cabin the way a dry, curled winter leaf blows down a street—carried without a will, tumbling, cracking, and splitting as I grazed objects in my path. I landed on the bed, facedown, and I wanted to cry but I was empty. I was suspended for this one moment between a world with Poppu and one without; stuck between seventeen years of his love and presence in the past, heavy and real, and his never-ending absence in the future, oddly light and ephemeral in its unfamiliarity. Tomorrow the scales would tip, and I would fall into the world that was empty of him. Right now, for an hour, a night, I was on the precipice. My life both included Poppu and it didn’t.

I thought sleep might come, but soon I opened my eyes and stared at the blanket without seeing it, because what I saw in my mind was D’Arcy, next door, probably asleep at this hour, his face relaxed, his eyelashes black on his cheeks, the way they were when he held vigil during my fever. I pushed myself up, opened the door, checked both directions to make sure the hall was empty, and padded in my fishnet-stocking feet to his room.

The door was unlocked. The hinge cracked quietly as I opened it. D’Arcy startled, his body swishing against the sheets, and took a surprised breath—a light sleeper. He lifted his head and stared. There was a night-light in his room, plugged in near the floor. But with the amber lights along the ceiling of the hall behind me, I could only have been a shadow. A lanky, broken shadow. I held my breath for the beat it took him to process what he saw. He pushed himself up on an elbow.

“He’s gone,” he said softly, his voice thick from sleep.

I let out my breath, shakier than I expected.

“Je peux entrer?”
I whispered, all at once feeling exposed and frail and hanging.
Can I come in?

“Viens.”
His arm threw back the sheet and blanket and reached out to me.
Come here.

I took three steps and climbed into the bed with him, his warm arm reaching around me, scooping me into his space. He had nothing on but boxers. He pulled the covers over us, and a waft of heavy, close, sleepy skin scent filled my lungs. I breathed it deep. He nested himself around me, his stomach to my back, his arm around my waist with the hand tucking all the way under me, our knees bent. I entwined our feet, locking us together.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered.

His breath on my neck, humid and surprisingly sweet, the softness and firmness of his skin, the hair on his arms, the firing synapses in his brain—everything was the opposite of Poppu’s corpse, every cell of D’Arcy was dynamic and alive. The tears finally came.

He wrapped around me tighter as I cried. Now and then he kissed my shoulder, my ear, to let me know he was there. I felt him aware of me, and of every rise and fall and turn in my emotions; so present, so solid. Eventually I stopped crying. Eventually my body became heavy and I dozed. In my sleep I felt him kiss my hair and begin to pull away. I held his arm. I growled in protest. I scrunched back an inch so we were touching again. He pulled me close, a puff of a laugh leaving his nose and tickling my neck.

“Do you know how much I love you?” he whispered.

My heart tumbled, caught off guard for a sluggish, sleepy beat.

He curled his knees up tighter. “It’s as big as the Milky Way.”

He rubbed his nose against my ear. “It’s as wild as the murmuration.”

There was a pause. “It’s as stuck as the
Morazan.

“
That’s
why I’m here,” he said, answering my question from the hallway. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t attach a single coherent word to the lake of feelings his declaration had filled me with. He said, “Do you remember when you were feverish on the sofa in your apartment?”

I looked back at him, craning to see his face in the shadows, catching only the outline of his high cheekbone and his beautiful nose in my peripheral vision. I nodded.

He went on. “You admitted you were throwing your life away so that Poppu could hold Fleur just once, and it was like the floor of your apartment opened under me. You had the balls to condense the whole screwed-up world into this one pure thing, this crazy act of love. Everything I was working for collapsed through that hole with me, and I went into a free fall. And then you kissed me on the prairie and I wanted it all—I selfishly wanted what Poppu had.”

I realized suddenly that for the first time—and probably the last—I was alone with the person I desired beyond reason, and that we were safe for a single moment, in a quiet room. Sunrise would likely take him out of my life forever. I whispered, hoarse, into the air above us, “I want to have sex with you.”

He laughed out loud, a belly laugh. And then he buried his face in the pillow to cover the sound. When he lifted his head, he whispered near my ear, “Please never stop saying exactly what you think.”

“Does that mean you want to, too?”

He took a deep breath of my neck and exhaled in something like frustration. “Will you think I’m a jerk if I admit I’ve been comforting you
and
lusting after you for the past half hour?”

I turned to face him and he tipped back a bit to accommodate me. I hooked my arm around his neck and pulled his mouth on mine. I curled my leg over his hip so that we could press our bodies all the way together. We kissed until my lips felt swollen and raw and his stubble angered the skin of my chin and I’d do anything for more. I pushed him over to be on top.

I sat up and grabbed the sides of my shirt with my arms crossed, pulled it over my head, and dropped it on the floor. I unhooked my bra, slid it off my shoulders, and tossed it on top of the shirt. He breathed in with a sort of surprise, sat up with me on his lap, put his arms around me, and buried his face in my neck, timid and tender, all at once.

“Hold on,” I whispered. I climbed off him to stand on the floor.

“Nooo,” he groaned jokingly, stretching for me as if I were leaving.

I wriggled out of my skirt and stockings, pulling my panties off with them into one big wad that I ditched on the rug. I saw him lift his hips and squirm out of his boxers. I felt the chill of standing nude and vulnerable, and my whole body turned to gooseflesh. He pulled the covers open, inviting me. I clambered in, our cool skin everywhere.

“Do you know how to do this?” I whispered.

He laughed a hot cloud of air. “I have a good handle on the scientific theory,” he said. “But I don’t have much … lab experience.”

“Impossible. I would have eaten you alive if I had been a Ray in any of your classes.”

“I would have fed myself to you.” He added more seriously, “But you weren’t there.”

“There must have been someone.”

“I went on a few dates, but mostly I hung out with groups of people. I was busy, and I didn’t mind being alone.” He lifted his head from the pillow to bite my lower lip, and something in my pelvis pulsed, warm and demanding. “No one was as smart, and insightful, and in tune with me, and just—raw—as the girl who drew on the desks. It was a high standard you set. I didn’t have any second dates.”

In a moment he said, “How about you? Where did you learn to kiss like that?”

My eyes were accustomed to the dim light, in a grainy, monotone way. He was looking at me like he was glad to see me, even while I was in his arms. I said, “Mostly I try not to hurt you.”

He laughed, not knowing it wasn’t a joke.

But I wanted to answer his question. He wasn’t my first kiss.

“Once, the summer before I turned twelve, I was playing curfew violation with my brother and his friends—”

“Curfew violation?” he interrupted.

“It’s a running game. A chasing game. Outside.”

“In the dark?”

“With flashlights.” I nodded. “And nearly silent, of course. But even Smudges need to play.”

“Go on.”

“I was a pretty rabid competitor.”

“You? Rabid?” He traced his finger around my jaw.

“I was ‘it’—I was Hour Guard—and I thought I was holding my own with the older boys. I cornered one of them in the gangway of our apartment. His nickname was Ace. He was in the grade above Ciel. He shoved me up against the brick wall and started kissing me.”

He got up on his elbow to watch me and listen.

“It was confusing, but also sort of exhilarating. It lasted a long time—minutes. I copied whatever he did. I thought kissing me must have meant he liked me.

“I remember feeling embarrassed because he had jammed me against the wall holding my armpits, and he started massaging my breasts with his thumbs. I was just developing—they weren’t breasts, really, they were nubs, and too sore. I didn’t know how to ask him to stop.

“For a long time, whenever he came over to visit Ciel, I tried to find ways to be alone with him, hoping he’d kiss me again. It wasn’t until I was fifteen myself—the same age he was when he did it—that I understood what happened.”

I had never uttered that story aloud.

D’Arcy was quiet, thinking. Finally, he put his hand on my cheek and angled his face to kiss me sweetly, gently. It was the opposite of what Ace had done.

I pushed him onto his back and straddled him, saying, “So I guess we’re both rookies.”

He nodded, but there was a hint of worry in his voice. “Reassure me this is what you want.”

I leaned down to whisper against his lips, “This is what I’ve wanted since the prairie.”

“The same night that…” He couldn’t finish the sentence.

“The same night that Poppu died.”

“There are—I saw condoms in the bedside table,” he said almost shyly.

I reached for the drawer, leaning my chest on his, feeling his lips on my shoulder in a stolen kiss. I sat up again, tore the foil wrapper open, and we worked together, our hands bumping—mine trembling with the frankness of the task. When we’d finally got it, there was a loud thump that made the room quiver, followed by a low voice.

D’Arcy pulled the blanket around my legs and said quietly, “Was that against the hull or in the hallway?”

“Couldn’t tell,” I whispered.

We waited, staring at each other silently, for another sound. There was nothing. With the passage of time and D’Arcy under me nude, his chest rising and falling with anticipation, whatever it was became unimportant.

A tiny smile spread on his lips, and I felt my own face open with warmth. I leaned down to kiss him, softly at first, affectionately, deliberately trying to make the pressing of my mouth convey “I love you” without using any words. The air around us became our breath. He playfully flipped me onto my back, with his body three-quarters on top.

I encouraged him all the way on me. I tried to guide him.

“Wait. I—” he said, suddenly flustered, “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You won’t.”

“I
will
,” he objected.

“I need it to be you.”

“Tell me if we should stop,” he begged.

I knew I wouldn’t, because I was experiencing what Grady Hastings had called a thundering cry of urgency—and mine had to do with being as close to this person as humanly possible before the morning tore us apart.

He was so careful, so concentrated, so D’Arcy that tears came to my eyes and dribbled down my temples into my hair.

He faltered, alarmed.

“I’m fine!” I said.

He watched me, to see for himself whether it was true. And I needed him to understand that unlike every other source of pain in my life, this was temporary, necessary, and very much wanted. I pulled his neck down and reached my face up to kiss him—to hide the tears, spilling uncontrollably now, and to stop him from fretting.

Sunday
5:00 a.m.

While I was in the bathroom I heard the sound of a fist banging on D’Arcy’s cabin door and the noise of someone barging into the room.

“What the
hell
,” D’Arcy said at the intrusion.

“Where is Sol?” Ciel’s voice boomed, accusing.

There was a robe on the hook of the bathroom door, and I threw it on as quickly as I could, tying the belt in a knot.

“She’s not in her room,” Ciel barked. “Is she here?
Shit, she is
.” I heard smothered rage in his voice. He had seen something. My clothes on the floor? I burst out of the bathroom, my hackles raised, ready for a fight. The lamp was on.