Where the Stars Still Shine (15 page)

“I’m not.”

Connor shrugs. The light changes and he makes a left.

“We can—”

“Yeah, I know. We can hang out.” He sounds tired and slightly sarcastic. I guess I can’t blame him for that. “Be
friends
.”

“I’m sorry.”

He parks in front of the bookstore. Just up the street I can see the lighted marquee of the movie house hanging out over the sidewalk. “Do you still want to go to the movie?” he asks.

“Not really, no.”

“Me neither,” he says. “Do you want me to take you home?”

I shake my head. “I don’t really want to have to explain this to Kat yet.”

Connor nods. “She already started planning a double date to homecoming, so—yeah, that’s not going to be fun.”

I open the passenger side door. “I’m really sorry.”

“We’re cool.” He offers me a smile that has sadness at the corners and his fist for a bump. I touch my fist against his, then get out of the car. “See you later, Callie.”

He drives away and I consider going into the bookstore and curling up on that comfy couch until my imaginary date is over. But as I reach for the door handle, the hipster girl with the black glasses turns the closed sign toward me and points at her watch.

Ten minutes later, I’m at the sponge docks.

On my way to Alex’s boat, I pass a small restaurant with a handful of tables arranged on the sidewalk. At one of the tables, a blond girl with freckled cheeks picks at the label of her beer bottle as she flashes a bright smile at the guy across from her. At Alex.

I lower my head so my hair will cover my face, but the damn braids hold most of it back. I walk fast,
hoping they won’t notice me, but the flat soles of my sandals slap on the pavement as I pass.

“Callie.” I hear Alex call after me. “Hey, Callie. Wait.”

So. Stupid. So. Stupid. So. Stupid. My footfalls call me out. So stupid. So stupid for going out with Connor. So stupid for coming here for Alex. For thinking I could fit in here. For thinking I could be someone else. I could go faster without these shoes, but I don’t want to waste time stopping to take them off. Even though I have nowhere to go, I want to flee my embarrassment as quickly as possible.

He catches up with me on Athens Street, his hand wrapping around my upper arm. “Wait.”

“Let go of me.” I look down at his fingers. “Now.”

He releases my arm, shoving his hands deep in the pockets of his jeans, and his voice drops low. Soft. Melting. “Please.”

So stupid.

“I have this terrible habit of picking the wrong guys. Ones who don’t give a shit about me.” My shoulders sag as I lean against the brick of the building behind me. “I broke my date for you.”

“I gave you the combination to my boat.”

“Yeah, but then you just left and I thought you didn’t want—”

“I gave
you
the combination to my
boat
,” he repeats, and the weight of the words hit me.

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Oh.”

“You really shouldn’t give the combination to your boat to strange girls.”

The corner of his mouth tilts up and I get this intense longing to kiss him right there on that little crease. He reaches out and touches my neck, his fingertips curling around the back and his thumb resting against my wild pulse. He takes a step closer. “Did I give it to the wrong girl?”

I lick my lower lip and shake my head. “No.”

His other hand comes up on the other side of my neck and his mouth brushes feather-soft against mine. Fleeting and—oh, how I want more, more, more. “Let’s go to the boat.”

“What about your friend?”

“That’s all she is, Callie. We were just having a beer while she was waiting for her boyfriend to meet her for dinner.” His fingers slide down my arm until they reach my hand and he pulls me gently toward the dock. His palm is rough against mine, but I don’t mind. “C’mon. You still want Chinese?”

“Sure,” I say, leaving out the part where I already ate dinner.

On the boat, Alex rummages through a pile of takeaway menus until he finds the grease-stained yellow flyer from the Great Wall restaurant. He hands it to me. “What’ll you have?”

I sit down, handing him the menu without looking at it. “Maybe just an egg roll?”

“That it?” He digs his cell phone from the pocket of his jeans. “You sure?”

“This time.”

Alex grins as he makes the call, ordering an egg roll for me and moo shu chicken—my favorite—for himself. Mom and I never order anything but kung pao chicken because that’s what she likes.

“So where’d you go just now?” Alex cracks open the cap on a bottle of beer and offers it to me. I shake my head as I tuck my knees up against my chest. He drops down beside me and props his bare feet on a milk crate.

I rest my cheek on my knee. “Thinking about kung pao chicken.”

“You like it?”

I’ve never told Mom how much I hate it. “Not even a little.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he says, catching one of my curls between his fingers. “For next time.”

I want to reach out and touch him, too, but I don’t. I’m not sure why. “Will there be a next time?”

He looks away and takes a sip of beer, and I wonder if he’s swallowing the words he was going to say. But then he looks back at me with those green-side-of-hazel eyes and says them. “As many as you want.”

I can feel the heat blossom in my cheeks and he laughs in a not-mean way. I look past him, out the doorway to the deck where the dark garlands of sponges hang. “So I think you said something about watching a movie?”

“That was before you turned me down,” he says. “I mean, I have a couple of things we can watch, but they’re kind of old.”

“That’s okay. What do you have?”

He opens a sliding hatch behind our heads and takes out a short stack of DVD cases. I shuffle through them. “
Princess Bride
,
High Fidelity
,
Road House
,
Coyote Ugly
, and—” I side-eye him. “
Kinky Kittens 6
?”

“We can skip that one.” Alex snatches the case and sends it spiraling out through the cabin doorway. It lands with a thump on the deck. “Not much plot.”

“Well, yeah. After
Kinky Kittens
one through five, what more is left to be said, really?”

He laughs. “Exactly.”

I fan the remaining DVDs like a hand of cards. “Which is your favorite?”

Alex pulls
High Fidelity
. “Have you seen it?”

“No.”

“You have to.” He pulls a small combination TV/ DVD player out from a storage compartment beneath his bed and plugs it into the orange extension cord that runs out to an outlet on the dock. As the disk is synching up, he props a couple of bed pillows against the bulkhead and settles against them. He pokes my thigh with his toe. “Come here.”

I shift backward between his legs until my back is against the wall of his chest. The brush of his stubbled cheek against my temple makes me shiver and he wraps his arms around me. His hand slides beneath the collar of my shirt, his fingers resting on my collarbone. It strikes me as both an unusual and perfect place for a hand to be.

“All good?” he asks.

I feel as if I’m inhabiting some other girl’s body, as if something this excellent could not actually be happening to me and that at any moment the universe is going to clue me in to the joke. “All good.”

He reaches overhead and switches off the light.

We stay in this position until the delivery driver from the Great Wall arrives. Alex unwraps himself from me and pauses the DVD before going out on deck to pay for the order. He returns with a stack of takeaway containers. “There are a couple of TV trays in the storage
locker opposite the head.” He tilts his chin in the direction of the locker.

I unfold the trays in the middle of the cabin and he spreads out the food. I take my wax paper bag of egg roll and sit down again, as Alex opens the foam carton of moo shu chicken and the greasy fried scent takes me back to the hallway of our last apartment and those little Dora the Explorer shoes outside our neighbors’ door. We’d still be living there if Mom hadn’t gotten the stupid itch to leave. She wouldn’t have been arrested. I wouldn’t be here and she wouldn’t have stolen my computer.

“Can I have some of that?” Even though I can’t think of anyplace I’d rather be than right here with Alex Kosta, I’m angry. Eating some of his moo shu chicken feels as if it’s a perfect
Fuck you, Mom
.

“Sure.” His eyebrows pull together as he looks at me. My eyes hurt and I feel as if I’m going to cry. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I just—I need to use the bathroom.”

I sit on the closed toilet lid and try to shove my mom out of my head, but it’s hard when it feels as if she’s out there somewhere watching me, judging me. And my head is a jumbled mess because I want to be with her again. I do. But living with Greg is better than I thought it would be. I have a real bed—even if it’s in a trailer—and
home-cooked meals, and little boys who touch me with sticky fingers and call me Peach. I enjoy having a job, even though I’m still not sure if I enjoy the job I have. All of it makes me feel as if I’m being disloyal to Mom. As if I don’t care. And that’s not true at all.

“Hey, Callie.” Alex’s voice is on the other side of the thin wooden door. “I forgot to tell you that to flush you need to pump the red handle first.”

“Okay, thanks.” I blow out a breath and look at myself in the dirty mirror on the wall. The eyeliner Kat applied is smudgy, so I run my knuckle beneath my lower lashes to clean it up a little before opening the door.

I can see the concern in his eyes, but I ignore it as I spoon some of his moo shu chicken onto a pancake and pretend I’m totally fine. “So why does Kat hate you?”

“She, um—she had a crush on me for a long time,” he says. “Even back when we were kids. I knew about it, but she’s too young for me.”

“I’m the same age as Kat.”

“That’s different,” he says, but doesn’t elaborate on what the difference is. “A couple of years ago, she asked me to take her to homecoming and I turned her down. I told her I’ve always considered her like my little sister.”

I wince.

“Yeah.” He scrunches up one side of his face. “Didn’t go so well.”

“I can see that,” I say. “She wouldn’t talk to me after she saw me share my lunch with you the other day. I don’t really get that. I mean, if she’s happy with Nick, why does she care what you do?”

Alex shrugs. “She doesn’t want me anymore, but she’s still mad that I didn’t want her. Best I can tell, it’s a girl thing.”

“I have a feeling I’m not very good at being a girl.”

He leans over and his scruffy face tickles my neck, making me squirm. His voice is low as he says, “You—are exceptionally good at being a girl.”

We share all the food. Alex eats half of my egg roll, and I find room for a moo shu pancake filled with chicken and plum sauce, rolled into a little Chinese burrito. And after the empties are stowed in the trash, I settle against him again to finish watching the movie. Except I have a hard time paying attention when his thumb is wandering across my collarbone and his lips keep touching my hair. At least I think they do. It feels that way. When I lift my face to look at him, he kisses me and the movie fades to background noise.

Alex works open the buttons on my shirt, kissing me between each one. When it’s on the floor, he slides my tank top over my head. He tugs off his own T-shirt and sends it to the growing pile of clothes, then pushes me backward until I’m lying on the berth. My jeans and
underwear come off together and I lift my hips so he can slide them down. He kneels down on the cabin floor and strokes his thumbs along my thighs, easing them apart. His lips brush against the inside of my knee.

“What—” The words clog my throat and my heart ricochets around my chest like a drugstore Super Ball. “What are you doing?”

“I’m not going to hurt you, Callie.” His jaw grazes my skin and the stubble from four days of not shaving raises goose bumps across my entire body. His grin says he’s pleased with himself, but the muscles in my thighs are stone as I await the words that Frank always said. That it will feel good. That I’ll like it. Except Alex says his own words. “If you tell me to stop, I will stop.”

He touches me with his fingers. So gentle. As if I’m something so fine. I’m scared and shaking so hard and he keeps asking me if I want him to stop, but I don’t want him to stop. Then he touches me with his mouth and I melt.

When his body finally moves up over mine, my cheeks are damp with tears because I never believed it
could
feel good or that I
would
like it. Right now, in this moment, the absence of shame is shaped like Alex Kosta and I don’t want to let go of this feeling. Of him. Ever.

“All good?” he asks quietly, later, when he’s cleaned up and we’re half-dressed. The TV has reverted to the movie menu, prompting us to watch the movie again.

I nod against his chest, and this time when I feel his lips against my hair, I know for sure. “All good.”

I dream about Alex.

He comes into my room and I’m wearing a Hello Kitty nightgown. I’m seventeen—not a little girl—so it barely covers me, the bottom ruffle falling just below my hips. He lifts the hem, but I’m not afraid because it’s Alex, who whispers that he’s not going to hurt me. Except when he touches me he turns into Frank, who laughs his phlegmy smoker’s laugh and tells me he always knew I liked it. That no one will ever want me because I’ll always be his special girl
.

I break free from the circle of Frank’s arms and stumble out of bed. I snatch up my shirt from the floor and pull it on, holding it closed with my fist, covering myself as I look for my jeans. “Where are my pants?”

“Callie.” Someone is saying my name. It’s not Frank’s voice, but I ignore it anyway. I have to get out of here. Away from him.

“I need to find my pants.” The words are soaked with tears and desperation.

“Callie.” Reality snaps into focus as Alex grabs my shoulders. “What the hell is going on?”

I blink once. Twice. My heart rate is crazy fast and
I touch his face to make sure he’s real. “It was only a nightmare.”

“Only?” He brushes his fingers along my cheek and they come away wet. “You were
crying
in your sleep.”