Under the Light - By Laura Whitcomb Page 0,13

to have the last word for a change, but she went silent.

“I want to leave,” I said.

He took my wrist, held it hard. And we were thankfully away from there. We stood in a gloomy hallway with barred cells along one wall. I could hear the sounds of prisoners, a cough, a low voice talking, perhaps reading aloud, someone snoring, someone else tapping softly, a nervous habit.

“Is this where you don’t want to be?” I asked.

He didn’t answer, just stared down the corridor.

“I don’t want to play anymore,” I told him. I gripped his shoulders and gave him a shake as I wished us back to the field, but my hand slipped off him at the last moment and I was in the field alone. I turned around and around—he didn’t come back with me.

Take me to the place I was standing right before this, I thought. And I was back in the prison. But he wasn’t.

“Take me to him,” I said out loud, and I was instantly in a hospital corridor. I peeked into the closest room. It was dark. All I could see was that a woman lay in the hospital bed with only her pale arm and hand visible, lit by the nurse call button on the side of the bed rail.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been able to find him that way. I don’t know why I could. But he was sitting on the floor against the side of the bed. He jumped up, furious.

“How did you get here?”

“I don’t know. I said I wanted to go to you.”

“I don’t want you here.” He stood between me and the woman patient.

“What’s so terrible about visiting someone in the hospital?” I asked. “That’s a nice thing to do.”

But his fury flared up and he grabbed my wrist. “Field!” As soon as we were there he let go of me. No, he didn’t just release my wrist—he threw it out of his hand.

“I’m sorry,” I stammered.

“You think I want you to follow me into a place like that?”

I could feel him about to disappear. “Wasn’t that the point of the game?” I asked. It was so frustrating to be in trouble when I hadn’t done anything wrong. I’d had enough of that for one lifetime.

“Stay away from me,” he said.

“No, you stay away from me,” I told him. “This is my field.”

“Bullshit.”

“I was here first!” I yelled at him. “You get out!”

“I don’t take orders from you!” he yelled back. “I can go anywhere I want.”

“Well, so can I!” I wanted to throw something at him. I hurled a fistful of nothing at his face.

He flinched as if I’d slapped his cheek and I was instantly sorry. He wouldn’t look me in the eye—he flew backwards away from me in a flash and was gone.

I hated that I had lashed out at him, and I missed him so hard, I wished I knew his name so I could scream it. I wanted to rewind our fight and take back my words.

I used to think I was always in trouble with my parents because their rules were so strict, but here was my first new relationship and I had killed it already. I sat down in the grass and cried.

“Okay,” I heard him say. “We’ll share it.” He stood over me with his hands on his hips. “You can have this side of the field and I’ll take the other.” With his foot he drew a line on the ground that made no impression in the grass. “Deal?”

I was glad to have him back, more than I was willing to admit to him, but I still felt unlovable. He lay down on the ground just on the other side of the invisible line, his arms folded across his chest.

“Shouldn’t sharing be like both of us enjoying the whole field?” I asked.

“It’s sharing like I break my cookie in half and give you one of the pieces.”

I lay down on my own side inches away from him. “No, my cookie and I give half to you.”

He moved closer to me, fitting his shoulder, arm, hip, and leg up against me in such a comfortable way, I worried again that his attraction to me might be brotherly. “Same difference,” he said.

The night was deep, the stars had risen, a faint glow defined every blade of grass. Wasn’t it strange that the stars sparkled in his eyes even though he would not cast an image in a mirror himself? When I looked up,