the police right away.”
Jo returned the drawing to the table. “You know, I’m tired of your sudden virtue. I think you’ve forgotten you were the one who decided we should keep her until we found out more about her.”
“You’re doing it again,” he said.
“What am I doing?”
“You attack me to avoid the problem with Ursa.”
“Who avoids the problem of Ursa more than you? You dumped us like we were stray cats you didn’t want to deal with anymore—only I know you’d have treated cats better.”
He came close, right up in her face. “That was a shitty thing to say!”
“It was a shitty thing to do.”
“I had to do something. We’re already in big trouble. Don’t you get that, Jo? We could be arrested for kidnapping and put in jail.”
She kept her eyes on his. “That’s not why you dumped us.”
He couldn’t maintain eye contact. And that revealed much more than he’d tried to hide by looking away. Aware that she was onto him, he turned to leave.
Without thinking, she grabbed his forearm. “Don’t,” she said.
He faced her, his features carefully sculpted. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t close yourself off from me. We need to talk about what’s happening between us.”
His detached facade faded into outright fear.
At least he knew what she was talking about. “Can’t we be honest with each other?”
He stepped back, pulling his arm free of her hand. “I have been honest. I’m fucked up. You know I can’t do this.”
“You aren’t fucked up.”
“No?” He wrapped his arms around his chest. “I’ve never been with a woman. How fucked up is that?”
“Clever,” she said.
He unfolded his arms. “What is?”
“You remind me of Ursa—always fortifying the fortress walls, even against the people who fight on your side.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“You’re hoping I’ll be shocked and turned off by a twenty-five-year-old guy who’s never been with a woman. You said that to get rid of me—just like you use your illness to keep me at a distance.”
His jaw clenched, and he glanced at the stairs.
“Please don’t run out on me right now.”
“We have to find Ursa,” he said.
“Is that really all you have to say?”
“What do you want me to say?”
She looked down at Ursa’s drawing of the grave. In the dark rectangle that enclosed the dead woman, she saw the empty crematory box that had held her mother’s cindered remains. After she’d fulfilled her mother’s last wishes—poured her ashes into a cold roll of whitecaps on Lake Michigan—Jo couldn’t discard the box, dusted with the pale powder of her mother’s body. She still had it. Its emptiness was always there, hidden inside her, a void where her mother’s love had been and, more tangibly, where her female body parts had been.
He was looking at the grave with her.
“I’m as afraid as you are, you know,” she said.
He raised his eyes from the drawing to hers.
“Remember that feeling you described—the ‘horrific crush of humanity’ on your soul—maybe that’s another way of saying you’re afraid people will hurt you if you let them get close.”
He kept silent. But how would he know how to respond if he’d never experienced intimacy?
“When you said you’d never been with a woman, did that include kissing?” she asked.
“I didn’t know how to be with girls in high school. I had social anxiety.”
“Never kissed?”
“Never.”
Where they stood, high in the dark forest, felt like a fulcrum, a pinnacle of honesty they’d finally achieved. Ursa had steered them where she wanted them, but any second their unsteady emotions could tip them off that tiny point of balance. Ursa had to be found, certainly, but Jo knew she was safely hidden and not in any real danger. The only danger of the moment was that Jo—and Gabe—might let those seconds pass away without seeing them as Ursa did, as her own teeny tweak of fate in a vast and miraculous universe, as a wondrous gift she was offering to them.
Jo turned off her flashlight and set it on the desk next to her. She tugged his flashlight out of his hand and flicked it off. He startled, moving backward in the sudden darkness. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“Making it easier for you.”
“Making what easier?”
“Your first kiss.”
20
She had no trouble finding him in the darkness. His body was radiating heat—and maybe fear. He recoiled a little when she put her palms against his chest. She slid her hands up his neck. His skin was warm and humid, like the summer night around them. She ran her hands through