How do I want him to tell me he loves me? I already know the answer to that. I want him to need me so much that it terrifies him. The way that it already terrifies me.
16
Love, I’m learning, is not a sudden revelation. I love Edison, but I look back and can’t be certain when it started. I love him when he sleeps with a hand on my hip, and when I hear the text chime on my phone and I know it’s him. I love him when he’s near me, but especially when I don’t know where he is or what he’s thinking.
The air-conditioning in the church is on full blast, but Pastor McDaniel looks especially wilted today at the pulpit. The sermon is about putting value on worldly things. Build your castle on a rock, he says. On salvation. The grandest palace built on dunes of sand will wash away.
Edison reaches over and puts a hand on my knee. We arrived late and slipped into a pew in the last row. We’re beyond the range of the AC and I fan myself with a pamphlet with all the upcoming get-togethers through the rest of the year. A youth Bible campout withoutdoor movies next week. A devotional family-style dinner in September. Christmas pageants all through December.
We’ll skip the New Year’s Eve service. That will be our last night together and I want us to be alone.
Edison’s hand slides up my thigh, one finger moving under the hem of my blue dress. Tiny white ships ripple in the fabric at the movement.
I look at him. His eyes are straight ahead, and he cants his head thoughtfully, as though considering the sermon.
His hand moves, even as the rest of him is still. He’s in his white dress shirt, the buttons gleaming and pristine. His hair is combed neatly, and that one rebellious curl has escaped again. The one that hints at something wild lurking within.
Curiosity turns to desire as I watch him, and I know that he feels my eyes. There’s just the faintest hint of a wicked smile on his lips. I can see his teeth. To everyone else, we’re just another couple sitting alone in the back row, where the AC doesn’t cool us. I don’t move. Don’t make a sound as his hand moves up and up.
Heat rushes to my face when he touches me. One finger slips inside me and then another. I grasp the edge of the pew. The sermon drones on, the dull beat of some distant song as the world spins on.
Edison betrays nothing, mischievous thing that he is. When I grab the fabric of his dress pants, his smile twitches and that’s all he gives me.
My back arches. I hold my breath because I’m sure that if I let it out, I’ll scream. He’s managed to surprise me. He’s decided that he can’t resist me. That he wants to see what I’ll do, just how far he can take me. I live in his head—not Jade, but me. The real me. He sees somewhere in my words and in my face that I’m more than this sweet church girl who sings “Ave Maria” and strums her guitar.
How much does he see? When did I let it slip?
I shudder, claw at his wrist with both hands. I go to pieces, flushed and spent all without making a sound. He draws his hand away, leaving me to melt.
McDaniel asks us to stand and turn to page forty-five in our book of psalms. There’s an electric energy here and he feels God in this room today and he wants us all to sing.
My legs are rubbery, and Edison grabs my arm and hauls me to my feet, breathing out a laugh at the way I stumble and fall against him. His. I’m his, and he knows it.
He lets out a little cough and brings his fist to his mouth. His tongue moves across his fingertips, tasting me.
I hold the hymnal between us and we both sing, and he knows that he’s won. He knows how much I want to grab him and take him out of here, the things I’ll do to him later when we’re alone. But all I can do now is stand in this overheated church, reeling, wanting, stunned by how much I love him. He scares the living hell out of me.
—
THE LAUNDRY ROOM ISthe closest thing to a basement you can find out here in the desert. It’s where every past tenant has apparently stored their useless crap. But growing up with nothing, my sisters and I have learned to be alchemists of broken things. With an old dust-coated phone book from 2007, Moody was able to prop up the archaic dryer so that it runs without rattling across the cement floor. Iris worked the rust out of the silver bicycle with baking soda and lemon juice, and now it gleams like new.
Here I stand now, staring at a small piece of plywood and a discolored cardboard box of nails. They caught my attention a while ago, while I was sitting on the washing machine, waiting for my clothes to beready for the dryer. It’s time to put them to use. Edison would use something like this to lay the foundation for a porch, or a new hardwood floor. I have something else in mind.
It isn’t Iris who pushed me into coaxing a confession of love out of Edison. Rather, it’s the thought that time is slipping by. Outside, the sun is going down, and the brush along the desert plain is on fire with pink and gold. The mood-ring sky is pale blue until the clean line where it becomes suddenly dark, deep and deadly like the Mariana Trench on a satellite picture.
If I want to love Edison, I must do it—as all other things regarding him—ruthlessly. I kneel on the concrete and set the board before me. When I grab the hammer from where it’s been abandoned against the wall, it’s heavy with grit, the grime coming off on my palm. I hammer four nails into the board. Rusted, bent, long as a human finger. When I’m through, I put everything back where I found it, taking only the board with me.
I feel the first drop of rain as I’m laying the board in the trunk. It lands on my nose and rolls down my cheek before it’s gone. I hold my palm up, astonished that the weather would turn at such a perfect and romantic time. When I pull out of the parking lot, it’s started to pour.
I drive too fast. I know that. But I’ve yet to see a single state trooper out on this stretch of road. Rainwood itself is asleep most days, a town in which nothing ever happens. That is, except for the man who went missing back in June. Edison didn’t know him, never heard the name. But still, he’s been in knots about it. I’ve tried to tell him that it probably isn’t what he’s thinking. The man just wanted to escape his debts, or get away from his wife. He’s probably at a casino in Vegas right now living the high life with a beautiful woman on each arm.
I couldn’t have imagined I’d find a man as sensitive as Edison. He worries about Sadie walking home and me driving at night. I text him when I get where I’m going and I promise him we’ll be okay, and he eases in my arms and gives me that smile that warms the darkness in me.
I roll to a stop at the ten-mile marker. I put the car in park. There’s no one here but me, especially now that it’s after dark and everyone is home from work. No Good Samaritans will come and ask me if I need some help. A jump, a spare, a tow.
I get the board out of the trunk, pushing away the hair fallen into my face by the rain. I lay it in the street a few yards ahead of my car, jagged nails sticking up, and then I get back behind the wheel.
“Ave Maria” is playing on my phone, plugged into the car so that it throbs through the speakers. I start to sing quietly along. My sisters being torn from me. The sadness in Elaine’s eyes when she tried so hard to love me but I refused to let her be my mother, refused to be what she needed when there was no way to fill the void in my own life left by Moody and Iris. The stories I wrote in my journal—my secret journal, the one I never showed my sisters—about a mother who could sing like me, a father who hoisted me up on his shoulders and loved me. All the moments I hurt, or wished for something that would never come. “Ave Maria” makes these things flow through me like nothing else, and I need to be crying when he comes to me.
