Unbroken Connection (13 page)

Leesie ignores her. But she doesn’t say, “No,” immediately to me either. Positive sign. She’s weakening.

Dayla grabs Roxi and splits with my cash.

A few minutes after they leave, a chick I haven’t seen yet comes from the back and picks her way through the crowd to the front door. This girl is dressed to conquer—skinny, skinny jeans, spike heeled boots up to her knee, expensive bag to match the boots, leather jacket, blonded hair tumbling down her back. In your face cleavage—plastic here? None of these other chicks shows anything like that. “I’m out of here,” she calls out behind her.

Leesie’s two remaining roommates, Cadence and Lily, explode after the door slams. Lily scowls. “That’s Tawni.”

Cadence, who moves like a dancer, turns to me. “Sorry Tawni’s so rude. She can’t stand not having all the attention.”

Lily exaggerates a shudder and sticks out her tongue. “Her and that creepy Kanyon. He’s like 25.”

Cadence says, “Yeah. They met at a modeling shoot.”

I turn back to Leesie. “That’s the girl you share a room with?”

Leesie nods. “I’m trying hard to get along with her.”

Lily says, “I can’t see why. You know she eats everyone’s food all the time. But we’ve got a plan for her.”

“Shut up, Lily.” Cadence puts an arm around her and squeezes, but it’s not a tender move. “Come help me find bowls.”

Dayla and Roxi come back with more guys and blue and white bags labeled “BYU Creamery,” stuffed with ice cream, bakery brownies, and a jumbo bag of M&Ms. Cadence and Lily get the girls next door to donate plastic bowls and round up spoons in all shapes and sizes from the other apartments in the hall.

One of the guys with Dayla and Roxi is Noah. He’s not nearly as lame as Leesie said. She gets off my lap to introduce us. I stand, too. My hands ball up into fists, but I keep them by my side.

“Nice to meet you.” He shakes my hand. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

I squeeze his hand, give it some power. “Did it involve bunnies?”

Leesie steps on my toes—hard.

Noah glances at her and then back at me. “Thailand—right?”

I nod, and Noah gets maneuvered away by Dayla.

Roxi hands me a chipped ceramic bowl mounded high with chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, a brownie jammed in the side, and M&Ms sprinkled all over it.

I take it. “What about Leesie?”

She shrugs and pulls a cute face. “Share.”

I sit back down on the couch—pull Leesie onto my lap again. And we eat. She feeds me. What a mess. Ice cream dripping down my chin onto Claude’s black T-shirt. I bought jeans at the airport in Hong Kong. They love American jeans in Asia. But all the T-shirts were too small. Asian sizes. I must reek. Leesie doesn’t seem to mind.

Everyone is eating now. The place gets quiet enough for them to hear Leesie ask, “What are you doing here?” as she shoves another brownie/M&M/ice cream spoonful into my mouth.

Great, now it’s dead silent. All eyes glued to me.

I chew and swallow, wipe a drip off my chin. “Kind of a long story.”

Freak, the crowd even stops eating.

Leesie lets the loaded spoon she was going to shove in my mouth hang in the air. “I guess you better tell it.” She shrugs and eats the spoonful herself.

“One of my divers had an equipment failure—”

Leesie interrupts with a full mouth. “Michael’s a scuba instructor.” She swallows.

“Right, I went after her—the diver in trouble.”

“Her?” Leesie glares.

“Karen—she’s my—your—mom’s age. You’d like her. She wants me to teach her daughters to scuba dive.”

“Are they six?”

“Oh, no.” I look around at all the guys and wink. Gets a good laugh.

Leesie pulls a pout. “I don’t think I like your job.”

“Stop interrupting, Leesie,” Noah says. “What happened to her?”

“She was sinking fast. I caught up. Stopped her descent, but we went pretty deep—needed to make a deco—decompression—stop halfway up to let the nitrogen built up in her blood dissipate. She got spooked—getting low on air—and blew the stop, came up too fast. I had to go after her.”

Leesie sets the bowl of ice cream down. “That’s not good, right?”

“Nope. She was bent.” I get strange looks. “She had decompression sickness—the bends.” Understanding spreads across a few faces. “Um, big nitrogen bubbles stuck in her blood vessels—blocking capillaries—killing off tissue. Divers can die from it.”

“Ahhhh,” filters out of the group.

“I put her on oxygen right away—that’s the best treatment—and we got her down to Phuket to the hospital. She spent time in the decompression chamber to get all those nitrogen bubbles dissolved back into her blood and off-gassed properly.” I think I lost them again. “She’s still sick, but she’ll be okay.”

Lily looks up from her ice cream. “You saved her life?” This girl would outfit me in tights and a cape if she got the chance.

I take the bowl of ice cream from Leesie. “I guess so.” I take a big bite of mushy M&M dyed ice cream. Leesie already finished off the brownie. “Just doing my job.”

The whole apartment full of Mormon kids starts to clap. If they were puppies, they’d be running around chasing their tails. I’m not sure what it is about them. Are they naïve? Eager? Or just freaking happy?

I roll my eyes.

Leesie isn’t satisfied. “But why are you here?”

I take her hand. “Don’t worry, okay?”

“What?”

“I got a tiny bit bent. I went in the chamber—so overkill. I’m fine. Kind of tired, but that’s all.”

She peers into my eyes and pushes my hair back off my forehead. “So you’re okay?”

“Don’t I look okay?”

Lily looks up from her ice cream. “Tell him he looks fabulous.”

The place breaks up. Lily turns scarlet.

Leesie leans in and whispers, “Your color is off. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“There’s still more ice cream.” Roxi waves a scoop in the air. The buzz builds into a roar again.

My head feels like it’s going to explode. “Can we go outside? I need some air.”

“And quiet. I’m sorry. This is craziness.”

We slip outside and sit on cement steps behind her building that lead up to a road. She wants to kiss me, and I’d rather do that than talk, too. Tonight her lips seem softer than anything I’ve ever touched. I bury my face in her neck, taste the smoothness of her skin, let her hair shelter me. I don’t ever want to move, but I’m just wearing that t-shirt, and I’m starting to shiver.

Leesie bends over and finds my ear. Her velvet tongue tickles it a moment before she whispers, “So you’re bent. What does that mean?”

I sit up and put my arms around her, pull her warm body against my chest. “The idiot doctor won’t let me dive for six weeks. My boss is taking it all seriously, so I’m here.”

“Six weeks of my air?” Her face breaks out in more than a smile.

I groan.

She kisses my cheek. “You promised to listen.”

“Okay, babe.” I let go of her and lean back on my elbows on the upper step. “Lay it on me.”

She scrunches up her face. “Not here.” She looks around at the quiet night. It seems calm enough to me. But not to Leesie. “Not like this. I’ll call the missionaries.”

“Missionaries? I didn’t promise that.”

“You’re not getting out of it.”

“Let’s make a deal then. I’ll try your air, but you’ve got to try mine.”

“Your air?”

I nod. “Self-contained underwater breathing apparatus.”

She doesn’t agree. I kiss her again before she can think too much about it and get freaked. She doesn’t like the water. At least being under it.

She goes with the kiss a minute then pulls away. “We better get back to the party.”

We slip back in. The kids are all smashed against the walls and about ten in the middle—guys and girls—are in a tangle. Feet on feet, elbows to elbows, knees to knees, heads to heads. A few guys even stand around the group to brace them up.

“Pretty wild stuff going on here.”

“Oh, yeah. Swedish Twister. The wildest.” Some chick shrieks as the whole group collapses. Leesie rolls her eyes at me. “I told you we have hormones.”

The girls keep squealing and the guys, “oof,” and make a big deal out of getting untangled.

Leesie wrinkles up her nose. “I don’t play that. Not appropriate.”

I watch the guys’ hands as they get up off the floor. “Good.”

The party ends abruptly at midnight. Curfew for all. At least in the dorms. Visiting hours are over.

Leesie leaves me a minute. She comes back wearing her fringed up suede leather jacket and carrying my old sweatshirt. She tosses the sweatshirt at me, spreads her arms out, and spins around. “Not so worse for wear?”

I pull on my hoodie—the same one she wore when all her clothes got soaked that night she went in the pool after me. I can’t believe we’re back here. Exactly here. Where we were, but not.

Better. This time it will be better.

She entwines her fingers in mine. Her hand is on top. I rub the four faint white scars on the back of it. My fingernails made them that same night. I was so messed up. And she sat there listening and stroking my hand. Told me about visions. Let me touch her hair. Who was I to her? A stranger. The new kid. Somehow she cared.

And she still cares.

She smiles and leads me back outside. She wants to walk.

“You won’t get locked out or anything?”

She dangles a key at me and shoves it in her pocket.

We wind up a wide sidewalk next to a wide street. Almost deserted. We get to the top and there’s a big complex of red brick buildings.

“That’s the MTC—Missionary Training Center where all the guys who get called on missions go to learn how to teach the gospel and speak the languages of the placesthey’re going to serve.”

“You delivering me as a sacrifice?”

“No.” She points me in the other direction. “I wanted to show you that.”

Across the street is a massive, low, white building. Round with a gold spire coming out of the middle of it. Statue on top. The whole thing is lit, glowing like a beacon guiding lost aliens to the mother ship. “What’s that?”

“Another temple.”

“This one’s a lot bigger than the Spokane temple.” I remember the power of that other building.

“Yeah.” Leesie pulls me across the street. “People say it’s ugly, but I’m starting to love it. I come up here a lot. Helps me think.”

We walk up behind the temple. The sidewalk slopes up so you can look down on the grounds and out at the city lights pricking the night with myriads of pinpoints.

I draw Leesie close, breathe in the sharp scent of her leather jacket blended with the sweetness of her hair. I touch the fringe on the front of her jacket, twist a lock of her hair around my finger. “Are you glad I came?”

“Delirious.”

I hold her until she starts to shiver. Even with my sweatshirt, I’m cold, too. No wonder. There are massive jagged mountains right beside us. They’ve been there, on the edge of this long valley since I landed at the Salt Lake airport. But here, we could hike right into them. We’re high in the Rockies without even trying. The night is cooling off. I kiss Leesie’s cold lips—just once in this solemn place—and keep her tucked under my arm until we get back to her dorm.

I show her where I parked the red Rav4 I rented.

“No Jeep?” She looks in the window.

I unlock the door. “This is the best they had.”

“Where are you staying?” She turns around and puts a protective hand on my chest.

“I passed a bunch of hotels.” I put my hand on hers, lean over to kiss her good night.

She puts her fingers on my lips. “I could call Noah—you could stay there.”

“Do they have a couch as hard as yours?” I kiss her fingertips.

She nods and drops her hand. “You’re right.” She reaches up to kiss me. “You wouldn’t get any rest.”

A pulse of desire shoots through me. I’ve been trying to control it all night. I pull her in tight, press her back against the car. My mouth comes down on hers too hard. I smash her bottom lip. Freak, I hurt her again. I back off her. “I’m sorry, babe.”

She sucks on her lip and shakes her head. “It’s okay.”

“I’m a mess. I’m falling asleep standing here.”

“You want me to come with you?” She opens the car door for me.

I must be dreaming. “To the hotel?” I shoot shock in her direction.

She punches my arm. “To show you the way.”

I pull her close again and chew on her ear. “Now you’re an expert?”

She shivers, and it’s not from the night air. “To make sure you get there safely.”

I kiss her long and slow—soft, careful of her bruised lip, but I hold her mouth until she’s breathless. “I know all about safety.”

“Stop it.” She tries to push me away.

I’m not going anywhere. “Take a deep breath.”