26
Edison understands my absence completely. When I call him, he doesn’t try to coax my feelings out or offer platitudes. “What can I do for you?” he asks. I tell him that I just want to forget for a few minutes. Not Dara, but everything. He knows a place, he says.
Loss, Edison understands. The soul-deep pain that stuns you to your core and makes the whole world feel like poison. He will always mourn Sheila, not because he lost a wife, but because he’s lost a lifetime of tomorrows that will never come to pass.
When he picks me up, he doesn’t ask if I want to talk about it. He doesn’t say that we need to go to church on Sunday to remind ourselves that God has a plan for all of us. He doesn’t say this because he isn’t like them—the purest of our congregation, the steadfast believers. Edison dresses in a suit on Sundays and he sings the hymns, andhe fixes the sound equipment when the microphone isn’t working or the squealing interference splits everyone’s eardrums.
But beneath all that, he’s beautifully flawed. He knows the power of his vices. He’s been to the bottom of his bottles. He understands that goodness is more of an image and less of a human characteristic.
We don’t talk about Dara or Tim or the body that was found. But Edison weaves his fingers through mine as he drives, and I feel the worry in his muscles. Rainwood was peaceful only a few weeks ago, and some dark cloud has shadowed the blue desert sky. He’s scared that it will take me, and he has no idea that I’m the one who’s brought it.
I’m unsettled by how guilty this makes me feel. I’m ashamed at myself for keeping so many secrets from my sisters—my fantasies about having a life with Edison and my anger that Moody killed a man who should be at home with his family, because his only crime was helping me with a tire that wasn’t flat. But none of this compares to the hatred I feel for myself because I couldn’t save Dara. I scoured the blood and I told her what to do. But I should have held her when she broke down and cried. I should have been more patient.
Stop it, Sissy.Dara made her choice. She’s gone, and I have my sisters to protect. Family always comes first. If I get soft and make a mistake, they’re the ones who will suffer.
Edison and I are halfway up the hiking trail when the rain clouds start to form.
“It’s supposed to be clear today,” Edison grouses, waving his phone with the weather app pulled up.
“We can wait it out.” I take his hand, reeling him toward an alcove in the mountainside. It’s just wide enough to shield us before the sky erupts and a deluge pours down. The ground turns to mud thatsplashes up on my new hiking sneakers. I don’t know why, but it makes me laugh.
Edison sticks his arm out so the water will pool in his palm, and I watch the way the water drips down him in frantic rivers. I want to touch him the way the rain does, disappearing in his sleeves, finding every crease in his hands.
I grasp his shirt, pull him to me. He spins me so that my back is against the mountainside, grabs me under one knee so that my leg is hooked around his waist. His mouth is open, breaths shallow. When we draw back from our kiss, I see a sleepy haze in his eyes that I’ve come to know as intimately as the flutters in my own chest.
I grin and hang my arms over his shoulders; he presses his forehead to mine. His hand, slick with rain, traces the side of my face, the hollow of my throat. All it takes is the barest touch for him to transform me into this desperate thing. I want him right here, in the rain, in the vastness of this desert I’ve come to love almost as much as I love him. The sunset is shining through the downpour, making the world a strange color like we’re trapped in the flash of a camera, illuminating all these things I want to take with me but know I can’t.
There’s beauty in our numbered days. This can’t last, so I’ll give him all that’s in me.
His hand reaches under my shirt, fingers spread across my belly. He starts to move it toward my breasts the way he always does, but I hold it there. “Leave it,” I say. “I like the way it feels there.” In answer, he presses into my skin, and it sends wild roiling waves through me.
He nudges my forehead with his. “Hey.” He wants to know if I’m really here with him, rather than lost in my thoughts about Dara. Thoughts about my heart that shouldn’t be broken, because when I came here, I knew that I was leaving with exactly what I had when Iarrived: two sisters, a pile of fake IDs, and no evidence of the mess I made while I was here.
We’re so close I can taste his skin on the air between us. I grab his wrist and bring his hand to my throat. Something charges in him when he presses forward to kiss me.
“I just want you,” I whisper, and kiss behind his ear, making him groan.Make me forget. Please make me forget.
I gasp when I feel him push into me. My back is pressed against the rock; my leg hooks around his hip. His fingers clench against my throat with so much force I can scarcely breathe, but then he looks at me and his eyes are soft.
“Is this okay?” he asks. I nod, coil my arms around his shoulders to bring him closer to me.
Beyond our little alcove, the rain floods the world. All I can hear is the rasp of his breathing and the water washing everything away.
“Jade,” he says. I’ve come to like my fake name, now that he’s brought so much life to it. I slide my hands under his shirt and I feel his breath hitch when my fingers dig into his skin. He’s rough and careful all at once, a hand pushing into my stomach, as though he knows what I’m hiding there just under his palm, as though he’s protecting us because we belong to him.
“Come with me.” It’s a command, his voice a growl. I feel the wickedness of the smile he coaxes out of me, and then my head lolls back. He can read my body by now, and he covers my mouth when I scream, catching the sound the way that I caught his that first time.
I feel him shudder against me, over and again. He buries his head in the curve of my throat, gasping.
“You drive me insane,” he murmurs. All wildness and force moments earlier, and now helpless in my arms. I was his then, and he’s mine now. All mine. I kiss him and I inhale the smell of the rain,heady with a strange perfume that only the desert can make. It’s the madness of this moment that makes me brave—him inside me, the air around me. We are two figures lost in time, and very soon the rain will end, and our time together to follow.
“Edison?”
“Mm?” He raises his head now, and his thumb sweeps across my cheek. I shudder.
I search him. In this moment, I need to know if there’s some part of him—however small—who could love the real me. Not Jade.
I press our foreheads together and his eyes close when I kiss him. My mouth lingers beside his and I breathe him. This man who, to the world, is just another churchgoer. A stranger in a diner. A car passing by on a stretch of open road.
