ever seen it at night, though. The branches look so gnarly. Terrifying, really.”
“What do you have to be so scared of?”
“Ghosts,” I said. “They won’t leave me alone.”
When I looked up, I found him watching me. He put his hand on my cheek, and after a moment his lips touched mine. How easy it was to lean into him. How good it felt to be wanted. He wrapped his arms around me and drew me so close that we almost lost our balance.
Jeremy
When we got back to the car, I held her arm to the moonlight, and saw that the skin was scraped all the way from her elbow to her wrist. I pulled out my first-aid kit from the trunk and sat on the bumper while I rummaged inside it for disinfectant wipes. The air had cooled; across the road a jackrabbit hopped out of the bushes. I cleaned the scrape quickly, so it wouldn’t sting too much, then spread antibiotic ointment on it before covering it with a bandage. “Do you always drive around with a medical kit, rescuing women?” she asked me teasingly.
“I had it here for my last camping trip,” I said. “Does it hurt still?”
She shook her head, and her earrings got tangled in her hair again, their silver catching the light. But I could do now what I had been too scared to do at seventeen—I brushed her hair away from her face and untangled the earrings one by one. She was watching me. Her eyes were so dark, her gaze so penetrating, that I felt as if all my secrets were bare to her. Because I had missed my mark in the past and because I wasn’t sure I would get another chance, I drew her to me, kissed her again, whispered in her ear. She hesitated, then gave a nod.
I drove out of the park with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on her knee. Moonlight across the windshield. Patsy Cline on the radio. By the time I got to the convenience store, the clerk was getting ready to lock up. “Come on, man,” I said. “It’ll just take a minute.” The clerk shook his head. He was a little man with yellow glasses and thin lips that wanted to yield nothing. I held the sliding door open with my hand and he narrowed his eyes at me. “Sir, step back,” he said. “We’re closing.” The security guard came over—a big guy with tattoos on his neck and scars on his arms. He took one look at me and told the clerk to let me in.
But when I got back to the car with the condoms, she wasn’t there. The air was knocked out of me. I really thought she was gone, until I stepped back up to the curb and saw her all the way on the other side of the parking lot. I walked over and stood next to her. “Look,” she said, and pointed across the highway at the open desert. A bighorn sheep. I had never seen one this close to town, this far from a herd. I took her hand in mine and waited. The bighorn was grazing in a patch of dry grass, and after a moment it stopped and stared at us. A ram with dark fur and a beautiful set of long, curly horns. Ears that twitched when a car drove past on the highway. Then it turned around and went away at a trot, its hindquarters white and soft like the inside of a cut pear.
The cabin was blistering hot when we came back. Nora turned the swamp cooler back on, opened a window, and went to the kitchen for water. Leaning against the counter, I listened to the hum of the fridge, the ticking of the clock, the clinking of the ice in her glass of water. Wait, I told myself. Give her time. After the air had cooled, after she’d taken off her shoes, after she’d poured another glass of water, I put out my hand and she took it.
And then we were standing by her bed. It wasn’t my scars she touched first when I took off my shirt, or the tattoo I’d gotten just before I’d shipped out. It was my eyelids, my brows, my