“You’ll get one next year, too,” he says, taps me on the nose, and smiles. “And the year after that. And the year after that one, too. Forever. Because you belong to me now. No onewill evermistreat you again, you hear? That’s a thing of the past.”
“Can you stay with me tonight?”
“Of course,” he says, kissing my nose. “Of course.”
But then his glance wanders up the stairs and I know he is imagining my room. He swallows.
I take his hand and make small circles over the outside of his middle knuckle. “We don’t have to go to my room.”
Knox looks at me. His lips spread. “How do you know…”
I caress the close-cropped hair by his right ear. The minimal stubble prickles. “You carved your name into the wall by the bed.K-n-O-x. Crooked and bent but legible.”
He smiles faintly. “I was six, I think.”
“Does the reason you don’t want to step foot in there anymore have to do with your mom?”
He swallows again. His eyes drift toward the ceiling, as if he could look directly into the room, as if he could jump into a time long since past when his heart was so much lighter.
“She used to read a goodnight story to me every night in that room once the sun had disappeared behind the Aspen Highlands.She always said: ‘Tomorrow morning, once the sun has returned to greet the new day, I’ll be there to kiss you awake and to remind you how much you are loved.’”
“She’s never stopped,” I whisper. “She still does, every time the sun rises. Just remember that with a smile on your face. She’s there, Knox, and she doesn’t want to see you fall.”
Knox nods. The little golden lights on their strings dapple his face, the corner of his mouth, above his eye, next to his ear. He looks sad but not hopeless anymore. It’s a melancholic sadness, and that’s better, I think. I don’t think he’ll ever completely lose that expression, but he doesn’t have to. Because then Knox wouldn’t be Knox. It’s a piece of him—that love for his mother who is no longer here—and denying that would be insincere. Knox isn’t insincere. He’s real, and he is sad. Just like me. He and I, we’re broken, but we’re slowly putting ourselves back together again. We will function again, but the cracks will remain visible. That’s a good thing. It reminds us that we’re strong every time we forget it.
We go upstairs to his room. Everything in this resort is upscale, from the lamps to the designer furniture to the silverware—but Knox’s bedspread is dark blue, with spaceships and planets on it. It’s got to go back to when he was a kid.
He sits down and seems completely overwhelmed. “To be honest, I have no idea what I’m supposed to do.” He crosses his feet and begins to rub his toes, right, left, right, left. “There has never been a woman who I was serious with in my room.”
At the wordserious,everything in me starts to tingle. I sit down next to him cross-legged and bob my knees.
“You don’t always need to know what to do. Sometimes it’s nice just to experience new things. Don’t you think?”
Knox pulls a leg up onto the bed. I admire the spaceship beneath his knee because I, too, want to touch him, and then I just do. I start with his knuckles, raw from the cold, move up his arm, the fine little hairs under my fingertips. At my touch, they stand up, and for two,three, four seconds Knox stops breathing.
“Paisley.” His voice is soft, gravelly, mixed with an undertone of something I have never heard from him before. My fingers stop at the cuff of his rolled-up shirt, wander to his elbows because I am certain that no woman has ever touched them in the same way before. He gives me the feeling of being the first and, God, how I need that. If I start thinking now about how normal it is for him to have women in his room, to be touched by them, to bewantedby them, I’ll get sick. So I don’t. I touch his elbow and think it’s the most beautiful elbow I’ve ever seen.
“Paisley, look at me.”
I look at him. His room is dark, but even here there’s a string of lights at the window dappling his face in gold. He kisses me between my eyebrows, right there where I feel the little wrinkle every time my thoughts begin to control me. My stomach contracts.
“This here is new,” he says. His expression is so real. It goes so deep. “This didn’t exist before. Okay?”
I nod. My hand is trembling. My mouth still tastes like beer from the party, and I’m worried Knox wants to kiss me but will be disgusted. But maybe he tastes like beer, too, and beer plus beer will be okay.
“Don’t think so much,” he whispers. “Just feel.”
His lips press themselves to mine, and I think anyway. I think:And how I can feel everything, Knox,and how.
“I love this,” he says hoarsely, a breath between two kisses. “The way it feels kissing you.”
I don’t know how much time goes by, but we kiss for a long time and in every way possible. Quick kisses hounded by hot desire. Warm, slow kisses, and with every touch a small meaning, heated, wild, urgent. He can feel that I wantmore, needmore, and I can feel that it’s the same for him. If I had a camera that was made to capture the special moments of my life then, right now, I would hear it snappingclick, click, click.
Our lips move in a familiar rhythm as if they had known eachother a whole lifetime already, in perfect symbiosis, as if they had only waited for the right moment to find each other.
With every breath I smell vetiver, smell Knox, and it’s crazy how much his smell and his kisses drive me nuts, along with the feeling of being wanted by him. My hands wander up his taut arms, across his wide shoulders, up his neck, across the shaved hair at the back of his head and up through the somewhat longer hair on top. I dig my fingers in, pull, somewhat too strongly, but Knox seems to like it, because he starts to moan again with that strange sound that just makes me lose my mind.
His fingers encircle the hem of my woolen sweater, stroking the individual stitches, and I know he’s doing it to stop himself from sliding his hand down and exploring my skin. But I want to, so I remove my fingers from his hair, pull the sweater over my head, feel my hair grow staticky, but it doesn’t matter, nothing matters because here we are, Knox and I, and that’s all that does.
