A young man put his forefingers in the girl's back pockets, and pulled her flush against him. She giggled and tossed the hair out of her eyes so she could look up at him.
"C'mon, Annie, stay out a little longer. You're nineteen; you're allowed."
"Mark," she sighed, half teasing, half exasperated, "you know my Mom won't like it if I come home too late."
Her eyes minutely narrowed. He didn't notice.
"Besides," she continued," I don't really feel well tonight. I think I ate something funny yesterday."
The boy gave a slight grumble, grinding it along the back of his throat, before giving her a final squeeze and a searching kiss. He pulled back, looking into her eyes. They had a certain sparkle in the starlight – it made him lonely.
"Well, feel better, babe," he said.
She smiled. "I'll try."
He half-smiled, and turned to go. Annie smiled and gave a little wave when he turned in the middle of his slightly arrogant gait to look back at her over his shoulder. He finally disappeared into another dark house across the compound. Annie exhaled, a short burst of captured air, and then turned to the little playground next to her house. She liked to be out here by herself at night. Things were different at night, especially when you were alone. The island spoke to her, in a way she knew no one would understand. She didn't mind being alone. Curling her toes in the grass and sitting down on one of the swings, she smiled to herself, her first real smile, and leaned back, letting her hair flow. An ant crawling through the compound would have only seen an indescribable shimmer, remarked it, and continued on his way. Someone else made a mental note, organizing it to be locked away in the icy depths for private use.
Annie began to swing, in a practiced, flowing motion, pumping her long legs fast, so that her hair flipped back and forth with the rhythm of her body. Exalted, she reached the top, staring out over the dark roofs. When she got up that high, with the roofs and the stars and the quiet jungle, she felt like she could fly right off the island, into nothingness and the glittering ocean.
From her dreamland, a rustle in the foliage behind her snapped her back to uneasy attention. Her bare feet skidded along the grass, revealing shining trails in two long streaks. Twisting, she stared furtively at the jungle, every muscle tensed. A slight flush spread along her throat, shadowy in the moonlight. The eyes narrowed. She drew one breath.
"I know you're there," she said, barely louder than a whisper. "You might as well come out now."
Nothing happened aside from a spider crawling up a tree trunk.
She set her jaw.
"We both know you're there, and it's no good pretending." Her voice retained the same volume, but this time a note of desperation clawed at the edges of her calm.
This request elicited a different response from the environment. Out of the leafy darkness, a young man drifted clumsily. He was of average high, with round glasses and slightly bulbous eyes that made him look wary and observant. He walked straight to her, not saying a word, with his full purpose in the rigidity of his back.
"Hello Annie."
"Hello Ben."
She gestured to the swing next to hers. He hesitated, then moved to sit.
"So do you want to tell me why you were lurking in the shadows and watching me?" Annie asked, a slight grin playing on her lips.
Ben kept his eyes forward.
"Let's just say it was a personal matter," he finally said.
Annie cleared her throat.
"Alright, call it what you want. The fact remains that you've been following me a lot recently. I've noticed you." She began swinging her body casually. "You watch me at lunch, you follow me down the hall, you sit outside my house sometimes at night. I have a right to know why, Ben."
He chuckled, deep in his lungs, almost to himself, and intertwined his hands deliberately. He gave another chuckle, and turned to look at Annie. His eyes always knocked the breath right out of her. They were almost frighteningly blue. There was a piercing quality, yet a profound sadness that should never occur but frequently does regardless in one so young. They stayed like that for a full minute, with the infinitesimally small rotation of the heavens being the only movement. Slowly, and without breaking the tenuous bond of their eye contact, Annie rose from her swing. Equally slowly, she held out her long hand to Ben, and he grasped it with his young, eager fingers. Noiselessly, they moved out into the jungle.
Ben and Annie continued to trek quietly through the jungle, hand in hand. When she slipped on the tangled vines, he grabbed her elbow gently, supporting her. After a half an hour of walking silently side by side, they reached their destination. Perched in a huge tamarind tree was the tree house. Built many years ago, it guarded children at play and gave them a place to while away the hours imagining epic battles and quiet scenes of domesticity. At this time of night, it was wholly deserted, yet there remained an air of invitation and warmth about it. Annie began the climb first, starting up the sturdy boards nailed into the trunk of the tree, and then grabbing the rope ladder that hung relatively close to the trunk halfway up. As children, they were told by their parents that they put a rope ladder there to protect them from wild animals that might happen to stray into their sanctuary; more often than not, the children would use it to draw up into their fortress when they wanted to be truly left alone. With a little more effort than the lithe Annie, Ben also began to climb. He staggered to the top, where she waited for him. Smiling, she held out her hand.
In the tree house, Annie walked across the floor and opened the skylight. She stood under it, staring up at the sky. Ben came to stand close beside her; he, too, glanced at the sky.
"It's so beautiful," Annie whispered, breaking the long, unsure silence.
Ben reached out carefully, and lifted up the edge of her shirt, caressing the skin spread smoothly across her hip bone. She turned, pressing her hip into his warm palm, and looked into his unsettlingly blue eyes with her trusting cinnamon ones. Stroking her cheek with his other hand, he kissed her. He kissed her like a man truly free for the first time – long, lovingly, openly. Everything fell away in a blur as Annie wrapped her arms around Ben's neck, sinking deeper into his touch. He began lifting up her shirt, but she was too engrossed in his mouth to notice for a minute. When the clumsy movements finally caught her attention, she grinned and pulled her shirt off herself. Turning her attention back to Ben, Annie started unbuttoning his shirt, going slowly and stretching out her neck so she kissed him lightly, teasingly. Her hands found his chest, and stroked the heaving ribcage. In one swift motion, Ben lifted her up, placing her hips on his. She instinctively wrapped her legs around him as he carried her over to a large beanbag chair leftover from their parents' hippie days. A few more self-conscious motions, accompanied by nervous smiles, removed the last of their clothing, scattered now like butterfly wings on the ground.
Annie settled deeper next to Ben, pressing her cheek into his chest. Her hand curled protectively in toward her body. From this angle, she couldn't see his face, but she could tell Ben was satisfied. His calm breathing lulled her into a quiet stupor. Everything had clicked in her brain and made her relaxed. Ben lay quiet, but the stillness of his eyes, could she have seen it, would have betrayed him. Clearing his throat, he asked the question he'd wanted to know the answer to for six long weeks.
"So, all of this –" he began, stumbling over his own words, "what about Mark?"
"What about him?" she asked casually.
Suddenly, with a gentle fierceness, Ben flipped Annie over, lying on top of her, so she couldn't escape his eyes.
"You know what I mean."
Annie's eyes sparkled, this time with tears.
"I wanted you to notice me." Her voice broke unsteadily. "I wanted you to notice me so badly. I thought if I got involved with a guy you really didn't like, at the very least you'd notice me." She tried to hide her face, ashamed of her actions.
Ben sat up suddenly, facing away from her, from her tears. Annie cried softly.
"When have I ever not noticed you?" he asked quietly.
Sitting up, she wrapped her arms around him and pressed her moist lips to his spine, resting the curve of her face along the curve of his back.
"I'm sorry, Ben." It was the most sincere, penitent statement he would ever hear. "It's just because –"
She hesitated. He turned to face her. The connection of their eyes bolstered her strength so she could give up her soul.
"—because I love you."
Turning away from her again, the expression in Ben's eyes softened, and an unnoticed tear slipped down his cheek and dripped off his chin. Then, his eyes hardened. The pit of his stomach turned to icy coldness, but his resolve remained.
"I've always loved you – ever since before that day when the Hostiles came. It seems so long ago, now." She continued on like one bewildered. "I don't even know what it was, but ever since the first day I met you, I have been inexorably bound to you, body and soul. I'm tired of playing games, Ben. I just want you."
He sat very still, shallowly breathing. Closing his eyes, he chewed his lower lip. Annie looked up at him, her expression shattered.
"Ben –"
Nothing.
"Ben –" Now with more urgency.
Still, he did nothing.
"Don't you love me?"
Ben looked away.
Annie's chin trembled, and she drew in a shaky breath.
"Right. Of course. Silly of me to presume you were. . ."
She bit off the last word, getting up forcefully, pushing him away with the effort. Striding over to where her clothes lay strewn on the floor, she began to dress. She pulled on piece after piece of clothing, facing away from him. Finally composed, Annie headed toward the ladder, heat physically emanating from her body. At the entrance, she paused, hating herself, and turned back to face Ben where he still sat, naked, on the beanbag.
"I thought you were different, Ben."
She couldn't see in the half-moonlight the fathomless sorrow in Ben's eyes.
For what felt like hours after she had left, Ben still sat, naked, in the gray rays of first light. He could still smell her. Annie always smelled like hope – fresh and light. He drank it in, not knowing when he would smell it next. In a second he was up, and running to the balcony of the tree house. Gripping the banister with his clawed fingers, he began to retch uncontrollably over the side. His insides heaved, rebelling against his resolve, trying to purge the poison locked away in his being. Finally beginning to dry heave, Ben rolled onto the deck, limp and defeated, and began to cry. There was no one to hear his cries of mourning in the early dawn.
Hours of aching, lonely sickness passed at last, and Ben, dry of tears, firm of mind, and devoid of the heart which had followed her, pulled on his own clothes. Before he too turned to climb back down the ladder, he went back to the beanbag chair. Inhaling deeply, it smelled like her and him and them together. He would never, for the rest of his life, forget that smell.
Slowly, ploddingly, he headed back toward the barracks. Every so often, he turned back to look in the direction of the tree house. Breaking through some fronds, he came upon the compound. Someone ran past. Then another streaked by in the bland Dharma jumpsuit.
"What the hell –" he muttered to himself, and, stirring himself out of his trance, he looked around him for the first time since she left. People were running all around the compound, and worried voices reached his ears, frantic and thin. One of the people running past stopped when she saw him. It was his teacher. She panted, out of breath, and pointed.
"Ben, there's been an accident –" she managed before he took off running at a dead sprint.
Jumping over fences and around dazed people, he fled toward the commotion and the crowd. Then, he heard it. One single word wailed above the racket of the group.
"Annie!"
Ben froze. Coming through the crowd, lying with her limbs at odds angles, was his beautiful Annie. Her light brown hair was matted with blood, and a bone stuck antagonistically out of her leg. The breath rocketed out of his lungs and he grabbed at the person next to him for support.
"Is she dead?" someone asked.
"What happened?"
"Where did you find her?"
"She's unconscious, and she's beaten up pretty badly," replied an unidentified nurse gripping a corner of her stretcher. "She went climbing last night, we guess, and fell off a cliff. One of the workers found her this morning. We think she's bleeding internally. We have to get her into surgery."
"But there's no one here to help," someone else whispered.
Ben couldn't stand being so far away from her. He began to push through the crowd in desperation. Throat dry, he called her named, scratchy and quiet; he never wanted to stop saying her name. They got to the doors to the nursing building, and someone pushed on his chest.
"Get back, Ben, we have to take her now."
"No! I have to talk to her! Now!"
"Please, Ben, we need to help her now."
He turned to the nurse, his hands squeezed so tightly into fists that blood dripped onto the concrete floor.
"Please," he hissed. "I just want to talk to her for one second."
"She's unconscious; I don't know that she'll even hear you."
"I don't care!" he screamed.
The nurse glowered at him.
"Fine. You have one minute."
Weak with relief, he turned to her angelic, broken body. He stroked her blood-encrusted cheek gently, and bent over her body.
"I love you too," he whispered into her ear.
Kissing her beneath her earlobe, right at her hairline, so no one would see, Ben finally relinquished her. The nurses carried her into surgery while he melted into the shadows, desperate to know instantly whatever happened to her.
Four hours passed, and he still sat, indistinguishable from the wall, next to the double doors where she had disappeared. The midday sun beat down on the compound, but he was sheltered – not that it mattered. He cringed when he thought about what had happened. Some people had stayed by the doors a while back, talking about the accident. It was that Mark. Ben had to use all of his remaining strength to not strangle Mark on the spot.
"So did you hear what happened?" asked the friend.
"Yeah, I heard she went climbing last night. You know how she likes to climb those cliffs that border our compound," answered Mark in a dead voice.
"She's normally such a good climber," returned his fellow.
"I guess she just wasn't focused, and it was probably dark," he mused. "But why did she go climbing in the dark; I don't understand."
Mercifully, they left after a short vigil.
Ben waited patiently.
After an excruciatingly long time, a blood-stained nurse hurried out of the banging double doors and headed out across the compound. The minutes ticked by as Ben watched the door he had gone into for him to come back out. It was Annie's house. The nurse returned, this time with an older woman on his arm, Annie's mother. She was weeping.