swayed and went down again, trying to catch myself on a pile of sand instead of bricks. I landed on my ass with a puff and missed her next several sentences through ears ringing with pain, gritting my teeth.
“Anyway, you did it,” I said when I could talk again.
“We did. I asked for everything at the end. Everything inside of you. And you gave it. And when we fell...”
She started to sob, one hand over her face, the other waving at me. Inanely, I handed her the water bottle. She dropped it and lurched forward. My arms came up reflexively, catching her tense body as she collapsed onto me. My God, she was so fragile, she was so light; as small as she looked, I had no idea she weighed so little, as if the desert had dried her out like a leaf.
Her hands formed fists in my t-shirt, as if she were literally fighting tears. Against my chest, her heart was going so fast I thought it might burst out of her. How soft her hair was. The fur of some predator. Like petting a cat, aware that it’s a carnivore, that its ancestors leapt and slashed, that it only seemed tame. I thought, clearly: You did this to me. And you have been doing this to me all my life. You expect a dog to love you back. All the different definitions of love and I never realized that you engineered mine.
But I couldn’t push her away.
After sobbing for what seemed like forever, she simply went limp; I sat there with her silky head tucked under my chin, rocking slightly, smelling blood and sand and the faintest edges of ozone, as if she were carrying a thunderstorm within her, and a whiff of frankincense as it warmed against my hip.
There were awful conversations ahead, I thought. About how to get out of here without dying—how would we find the Rover? how would we find our way back?—and then assuming we could leave, we still had to get home, release my family from witness protection, fix things with the reward and the missing persons report, fix things with the airport security guards, fix things with Rutger, fix my house. Grown-up things: credit ratings, jobs, reputations.
But for now, there was silence, the slight coolness at the bottom of the blast crater, the warm bricks. And there was knowledge. I knew that she too had never trusted, that she too feared that if she dared love anything, it would be taken from her. I knew her great fear was not so different from mine: that we were always too late, too slow, too cautious, that our hearts did not even belong to us. At last we were neither particle nor wave moving in an unknown trajectory. We had come to rest.
I felt her hands move tentatively up my arms and onto my shoulders, as if there were still a chance I might push her away. She reached up and cupped the back of my neck.
“Wait a minute,” I said, but it was spoken into her open mouth, sending a shock all the way down to my toes—no one had told me a girl’s mouth was so soft and warm, no one had told me you could kiss someone and taste their blood, no one told me the edges of her predator’s teeth were like a razor. I told myself: Remember this. It won’t happen again. Her hand in my hair, her heart wild and loud, the satiny skin under my nose, the softness and sharpness of it.
This couldn’t be love. Anyone else would kiss you with such yearning tenderness as proof of love, but not her. Always she had only loved the lie and, loving it, loved only herself.
We finally peeled apart, gasping, and she wriggled free from my hands and stood up. “Think you can walk?”
“If I can’t, can you carry me?”
“We could have a conversation about dragging.”
She didn’t look like she could drag a helium balloon, but I gamely got up again and teetered for an uncomfortably long time. The first few steps shot iron bolts of pain up both legs, but nothing gave way.
The crater’s edge was more sand than brick, and more glassy, burnt stuff than either; Johnny scrambled up first and waited while I dragged myself up the few pieces that looked as if they could hold my weight, slicing through my shirt and leaving thin obsidian grooves in my stomach, like claw marks.