The Infinite Moment of Us (14 page)

said. “That’s what I hear you saying.”

“Exactly. And you?”

“Are you kidding? Mayonnaise all the way. I
live
for mayonnaise. Bread is just a vehicle.”

“So you don’t have a strong opinion, either.”

“The hell I don’t.”

Her laughter came more easily.

They chatted for a few more minutes about other

this-or-thats: dogs versus cats (Charlie liked both, Wren

preferred cats), mornings versus nights (Charlie was a

night person, Wren liked getting up early), and snooze

versus no snooze (they both chose no snooze, agreeing that

they got more real sleep that way).

“I should let you go,” Charlie said reluctantly. “You prob-

ably need to go to bed, huh? Given that you’re a mustard-

eating morning person?”

“I guess,” Wren said.

“All right. But I miss you.”

“Me, too,” Wren said. And all at once the thought of
not

missing him—and not knowing him, since she had to know

him in order to miss him—seemed impossible.

They breathed together for several long moments.

“I wish I could kiss you good night,” Charlie said.

“I wish that, too.”

“Imagine I am,” he said.

Her breath hitched. “Okay.”

“I’m sending you kisses, baby.”

Her skin tingled. He cal ed her baby, and he sent her

kisses, and everything hard turned good.

Everything good was new.

c h a p t e r t e n

June flew by, and Charlie fell deeper and deeper in

love. He walked hand in hand with Wren along trails by the

river in the Chattahoochee Nature Center. Sometimes they

returned to the railroad bridge, but they explored new

trails, too. Or they sat on the floor of Chris and Pamela’s

house and leaned against each other as they watched movies

on Wren’s iPad. Once, Charlie had dinner with Wren and

Wren’s parents, who were nice, if overbearing. Wren’s dad

told Wren to lower her voice when she was talking—not

the volume of her voice, but the pitch—because appar-

ently Wren’s dad thought women shouldn’t be shrill.

Wren wasn’t shrill. Wren was perfect. Charlie put his

hand on her thigh under the table. Wren slipped her hand

under the table, too, and squeezed his fingers.

Sometimes Wren packed a lunch and brought it to

Chris’s shop so that she and Charlie could eat and talk and

laugh before Charlie returned to work. Sometimes she

baked cookies, and she always left him with a Ziploc bag of

extras for later. Always he walked her to her car. Always he

kissed her before she left, slipping his hand to the small of

her back and pulling her closer.

When Charlie couldn’t be with her, he ached from

missing her. When he was with her, he felt as if all was well

with the world. He smiled without meaning to. Stroked

her hair. Talked with her about friends and movies and

books, and talked about how lucky they felt to have found

each other.

He told her, when she asked, that, yes, he’d felt some-

thing pass between them on the last day of school. She’d

brought it up shyly, as if worried he might think she was

being silly, but he never thought the things she had to say

were silly.

“It was before first period,” he said. “We were outside

the main building. You had on a blue shirt, and you looked

beautiful, as always.”

She blushed and nuzzled his shoulder. He kissed the top

of her head, which was warm from the sun.

“You were with Tessa,” he continued. “I was with

Ammon. He was telling me about a new computer game

he’d bought, but I wasn’t paying attention. A breeze made

your skirt fly up—did you know that?”

“Are you saying I flashed you?” She hid by pressing her

cheek against his collarbone. “Great.”

“It
was
great. Yes. And then I waved at you, because you were staring at me.”

“Oh my gosh.”

“But you didn’t wave back. You were kind of in a fog or

something. Finally you snapped out of it, and you
did
wave, and everything got—I don’t know—sharper. Because—”

A lump rose in his throat. Because she’d seen him, he’d

almost said. Really seen him.

Wren pulled back and searched his face. “Charlie?”

“Sorry. Don’t know what happened there.”

“It’s okay,” she said.

He gave himself a shake. “So, yeah, you came out of your

fog and waved at me, and everything else fell away.”

She took his hand and squeezed it. “I think our souls

touched,” she said.

He squeezed back. “I felt it.”

He loved talking to Wren. He also loved touching her.

The back of her neck. The skin of her wrist, so pale that he

could trace the blue veins beneath. Her lower lip. Once,

he ran his finger over the swell of her lower lip, and she

surprised him by parting her lips and capturing his finger

between her top and bottom teeth. She sucked on him,

circling the tip of his finger with her tongue, and he got

hard. She had no idea. At least, he thought she had no idea,

although when she let his finger go, she smiled impishly.

At moments like those, she could have asked him to do

anything—scale a mountain, push down trees, bring her a

single wild strawberry from a secret patch—and he would

have done it.

But what they were doing, and what was happening

between them, was all new for Wren, and Charlie needed

to remember that. Well, it was new for Charlie, too,

though. If not physically, then emotionally. One day, when

Charlie was worn out after hours of work, Wren told him

to stretch out on their blanket. She lay behind him, hiked

up his T-shirt, and scratched his back, using her fingernails

to draw loops and spirals on his skin. It brought tears to his eyes. He didn’t know why.

Then he realized it was because she was taking care of

him, because she
wanted
to take care of him. It was a gesture more tender than sexual, and yet it felt more intimate

than sex ever had.

More intimate than sex with Starrla, he meant. Starrla

was the only girl he’d slept with.

He wanted to have sex with Wren. God, he wanted to,

and he hoped she eventually would, too.

As for Starrla, she had a new boyfriend herself, but her

having a boyfriend in no way made it okay for Charlie to

have a girlfriend. Starrla had strong opinions about Wren,

and she shared them frequently and creatively.

One afternoon, after a picnic with Wren in what they

now called “their ditch,” Charlie’s beat-up flip phone

chirped as he and Wren were walking back to their cars.

Sometimes when Wren and Charlie got together—which

was most days—Wren asked Charlie to pick her up in his

Volvo. More often, she chose to drive herself. It made more

sense, she said. Charlie put in so many hours at Chris’s

shop, and she had her volunteer work at Grady. Also, even

though Wren’s parents continued to lay a guilt trip on her

about having bought her a car she never asked for, Wren

seemed to think it helped her case, a little, to drive it as

often as she could before fall.

Charlie’s phone chirped. When he didn’t answer it,

Wren cocked her head.

“Your ghetto phone is calling you,” she said. She called

it that because it was old. No apps, no voice activation, no

Internet access.

It chirped again.

“Aren’t you going to answer?”

“If it’s important, they’ll leave a message,” he said, slip-

ping his arm around her waist. He slipped his other hand

into his pocket and switched off his phone’s ringer. “Right

now I’m with you.”

She liked that answer, he could tell, because when they

reached her Prius, she leaned back against the front door

and put both arms around him, pulling him in for a long,

slow kiss. He felt the length of her against him as she rose

onto her tiptoes.

He couldn’t believe she’d never had a boyfriend, but

damn, he was glad she hadn’t.
He
was her boyfriend now.

“My Charlie,” she whispered once when they lay, entwined,

on the blanket in their ditch. He hadn’t replied, because

he sensed he wasn’t supposed to have heard. He just held

her tighter.

In the parking lot, still leaning against her Prius, Wren

pulled out of their kiss. “Wait,” she said. “What if it was

Dev? If it was Dev calling you . . .”

If it was Dev calling, or Chris or Pamela calling about

Dev, then Charlie would go to him. Wren knew this

because more than once he’d had to push back their date

or even cancel on her—which killed him—due to a minor

Dev emergency. A urinary tract infection. A pressure sore

on Dev’s leg that Pamela feared might be a blood clot.

Joint problems that Dev couldn’t feel but that couldn’t be

ignored.

It wasn’t always Dev or Chris or Pamela, though.

“I’ll check,” Charlie said. He pulled out his phone,

flipped it open, and flipped it shut again. He shoved it back into his pocket.

Wren lifted her eyebrows.

“Ammon,” Charlie said. “I’ll call him later.”

“Okay,” Wren said. “Tell him hi from me.”

“He still can’t believe we’re going out,” Charlie said.

“Wait, let me rephrase. He can’t believe a girl like you

would be willing to go out with a guy like me.”

“Well, he’s nuts,” Wren said.

“I can’t believe it, either.”

Wren groaned. She didn’t like it when Charlie made

comments like that. “Well, I can’t believe you’d be willing

to go out with me,” she said, “except yes I can, because here

we are. I think we’re both lucky to have found each other.

I think we’re equally lucky. All right?”

“You’re right. I agree.”

“Thank you. That’s better.” She reached up and tugged

on the hairs at the nape of his neck. Charlie loved how

she did that, twining her fingers and locking on. “I guess I

should go home, but I don’t want to.”

The tiniest furrow formed in her brow, and Charlie sus-

pected she was thinking about her parents. They’d accepted

her choice to put off college, but in a pursed-lipped, dis-

approving way that forbade Wren from feeling good about

it, or so it seemed.

“I suppose we don’t need to buy anything for your dorm

room after al ,” her mother might say while Charlie was

standing by. “I was so looking forward to helping you dec-

orate it. Well, next year.”

Or, from her father: “You realize this means an addi-

tional year before you can practice medicine.” And then,

like from his wife, a sigh.

Charlie wanted to like Wren’s parents, but he wanted to

jump in and protect her from them, too.

Last week, Wren had hooked her computer up to the

TV and used the TV as a monitor so that she could show

Charlie and her parents a slide show she’d put together. It

was about Project Unity. It was a peace offering, to try and

help her parents understand.

“Why Guatemala?” they said. “Why now?”

Wren didn’t bring up that neighbor she’d told Char-

lie about, Sarah something. Instead, she knelt on the rug

by her computer and clicked through pictures of young

adults wearing T-shirts, shorts, and ball caps posing with

brown-eyed, brown-skinned people from Guatemala. Blue

skies, lush green forests, explosions of colorful flowers.

Lots of white teeth. Lots of smiles.

“I’ll probably travel between three or four towns,” Wren

told them. “I’ll spend the mornings working at summer

camps—”

“Summer camps?” her dad said.

“Not summer camps. Um, summer schools. Summer

language schools. And in the afternoons, all the volunteers

do other service projects, like help repair houses and stuff.”

“So you’ll be doing construction,” her dad said.

“John,” Wren’s mom said.

“Dad, listen,” Wren said earnestly. “I want to be part of

something bigger. I just . . . I want . . . it doesn’t
have
to be Guatemala, but—”

“If it doesn’t have to be Guatemala, then why not

Atlanta?” her dad interrupted.

“John!” Wren’s mom said, but then she turned to Wren

and added, “Yes, Wren. Why?”

Wren grew flustered. “Because I know Spanish. Because

the people are supposedly really nice, and they need our

help, and it’s warm, and the food’s good—”

“The
food’s
good?” her dad said.

“Dad,” Wren said, her breath hitching. “Please.”

Charlie wanted to go to her and put his arm around her.

The only reason he didn’t was because he sensed that Wren

needed to plow through this on her own.

“I want to make a difference in the world, and change

people’s lives, and . . . yeah,” she said.

“Becoming a doctor will change people’s lives,” her dad

said. “Your volunteer work at Grady changes lives. If you

can’t explain why this grand plan of yours has to happen in

a foreign country, then I don’t see how you have much of

a leg to stand on.”

She doesn’t have a leg to stand on because you keep

knocking her down, Charlie thought. She wants to go to a

foreign country because maybe, if she’s a thousand miles

away, you won’t be able to.