Days are pouring through a sieve. There are a few mornings spent between the jagged black edges of rocks on the Pacific coast, cold salt water and the sweet, pungent smell of cedar wood mixing in her hair. She stands wrapped in a blanket, on the edge of the water in the morning, watching the sunrise while he makes coffee.
She lays in the scented groves, under the damp bark, letting tiny drops of rain drip on her mouth from the leaves. He covers her in ferns and refuses to touch her, afraid of what might occur now that they both know the gentle truth.
Her smile is sweet and benevolent these days.
During the day, they lie on the sand, watching the grey waves and picking driftwood.
" You can always tell who the Californians are"¨ she says, the corners of her mouth turned up, eyelids half closed.
"That so? How?"
She sits up on one elbow.
"They always run into the water, surfboards under one arm, hollering and whooping about the waves, look at the size of that mother! Half a second later, they´re running out, teeth chattering, blue toenails, cursing."
He laughs.
"If you don´t die of hypothermia there´s white sharks."
"Win win."
She drapes a strand of seaweed over his arm, pensive, and his smile slowly becomes solemn. His eyes memorize her, burn her into his memory as the grey wind whips her hair around her face. Her arms curl around her knees, and her mouth is very grave. They know everything is rather different now.
They´ve packed up and moved. The car moves through the sweltering August heat like a mirage, and they both feel the change in the air, the smell of an ending approaching. Through the long drive through Cather´s Nebraska, she even found herself absentmindedly thinking about school supplies and such, ticking off a list in her head that would doubtless show up on paper. He can sense this in her, he´s always been able to read her when she tries to hide something. Cornfields sweep past, mind numbing in their similarity, blazing under the hot sky; they stop once, because she wants to walk through one.
"I´ve never done it before," she says rather defensively. He´s still grinning.
"You´re going to get lost. They´re going to find your corpse years later, probably not too far away from other corpses of tourist who lived on the east coast."
"Well, at least yours will be next to it."
"Dream on."
"Jess….." she pleads, voice sweet now.
"Didn´t you ever watch Children of the Corn?"
"They don´t exist now. Crop dusting killed them."
"No way in hell," he replies, crossing his arms.
Minutes later, he´s trudging through the rows.
"It´s like a maze or some kind of scary dream," he hears her voice, seeing flashes of brown hair and bare arms through the green stalks. An odd sensation pursues him that she is only a ghost, rustling through the humming field next to him.
"Rory?" he suddenly says, breathless.
He can hear words. Flashes here, there, silence. Laughter. The acid blue sky presses down on his shoulders, the sun burning. The silence seems to buzz, heavy, eerie, beautiful.
"Rory?"
His feet have picked up now, going faster down the row. He is in a forest, surrounded by pale green, row after row. Leaves slash at his arms, tracing fine, invisible lines. The earth crumbles soft under his feet, dark and hot. His mouth is dry, no words will come out.
She appears in front of him in the blink of an eye, suddenly and surprisingly there, out of nowhere. She is calm and quiet. His heart is beating hard, in the sound of the humid silence.
"I thought I lost you for a bit there," he finally says, through dry lips.
She nods as though she understands, and grabs his hand, pulling him through the rows back towards the small glow of light where they had entered.
"So see, that´s why the Cubs suck," she says, very seriously, snapping her gum twice, swinging her legs, sitting on the hood.
"Because an old greek man put a curse on them?" he grins, shaking his head.
"Yep. Years later, we now have the Billy Goat Tavern, founded by this great man, where people can come devour overpriced heart-attack inducing burgers and talk about how much the Cubs suck."
"Ok, what else?"
"Hmmm…..oh, Jerry Springer!"
"But of course."
"And original Chicago hot dogs. Better than New York," she says maliciously, smiling.
"Now why would you say that? You know it´s just going to start a fight and make me yell at you."
"Hold on to that feeling until we get to Jerry Springer."
He finishes putting in gas, screwing the cap back on.
"Anything else?"
"Gino´s East. I want to eat the hamburger pizza and write my name all over the walls."
He smiles.
"Can I put + Jess next to it and draw a heart around it?" he says, half jokingly, but he´s afraid he might really mean it.
When she looks at him, he´s surprised by the shyness in her smile as she nods, and he feels as though he has seen through something he was not supposed to for a second, and it made his heart jump a rhythm, causing some dull sort of ache.
"Chicago it is," he says suddenly, to get past the moment. "But so help me God, if you insist on singing the whole soundtrack all the way there I´ll go to Minnesota to see the Butter Festival instead."
"C´mon babe, we´re going to paint the town, and all that jazz…….."
"I´m warning you."
She throws her arms up, flipping her hair and hopping down from the hood.
"Oh, she´s gonna shimmy till the gutters break, and all that jazz," she sings, spinning under the gas station lights, one dramatic hand over the proverbial heart.
And she does not stop until they are two miles into the highway.
They stay at an old hotel there where everything smells of clean detergent and the towels are rough and embroidered with someone else´s monogram; the shower stops working after he takes one, leaving Rory with a sink and a few washcloths as her only option. He opens the windows, so the sound of the night wind rustling the trees can come in. There are no sounds from the cobblestone street outside, and the thin lace curtains slowly and sensuously swell and retreat in the breeze.
He helps her wash her hair, careful to keep the suds out of her eyes. She smells damp and fresh from her washdown, clad in clean cotton underwear and a slightly large cotton nightgown whose straps kept falling down her shoulders. Jess remembers thinking she looks rather like a small child, nightgown barely to the knees, cut like a childish smock, frustrating straps falling, wet hair plastered to her head. He leans over her, turning her head under the faucet, studying the slight ridge of the spine as she stands there, bent over. Gently, he towels her hair, making light jokes about drowning cats and bedtime prayers, feeling his heart pulsing, his whole body warm, alive, waiting.
Every once in a while, she comes close without noticing, her skin brushing almost unnoticeably against his, as they do a sort of delicate dance around each other. She is surprised at how those hands who can break things in two can be so delicate. Rory knows her body is humming too, singing, sending out warm waves, invisibly beckoning.
They lay down next to each other, the dark of the room illuminated only by one golden orange streetlight, barely casting shadows of the trembling leaves on their wall. Outside, a wind from Lake Michigan whispers secrets from the north.
They each know that should they even touch a second, the least significant touch, that it would be impossible to stop. So they lay there, keyed and nerves taut, bodies buzzing silently like the flickering streetlight, unable to sleep, thinking only about things that made it even more unbearable. The tiny space between them on the white sheets expands like an ocean, then shrinks to a millimetre, like a hallucination. He is close enough to feel the golden down on her arms raising, close enough to hear each shallow breath, too afraid to move.
He squeezes his eyes shut.
"I can´t sleep."
Her voice makes him jump, sending a shock through his nerves before his body quiets down again. He takes a deep breath, trying to calm down.
"Me either."
The sound of sheets rustling. Another hissing whisper, each word heavy.
"I´m cold."
"Should I shut the window?"
"Please?" she says, and he sees the dark outline of her arm as she props herself up on her elbow.
Then he sits up. She blinks her eyes, and he is right over her, his dark form inches away, and her whole body stops working and the ground drops away, the ceiling explodes in stars as the poor girl freezes. In an instant he is by the window, and as the blood rushes back into her veins, she realizes he has just simply vaulted over her to get to the other side. She can hear the queer sound of her breath, strangled, rattling in and out of her body almost silently.
She watches the muscles of his back tighten, the edge of skin that rises from the soft cotton at his waist as he reaches up to pull the window down. She concentrates on the strange warmth curling inside her, eyes tight shut.
She hears him crawl in on his side.
Her hand moves of its own accord into no man´s land, the few inches of white sheet. Years later, she would remember how it had moved without her consent, as though her body had refused to be denied any longer. It rests between them, powerless to do more.
He hears it move, watches it incredulously, centimetres away from his. Everything suddenly flees, leaving only a calm quiet in his head. Everything is slow, as though underwater. He hears his heart, feels the cotton on his skin, smells her hair. His fingers close around her wrist slowly, daintily, circling it. He feels the little round bird-bone, the blood rushing through her veins, her pulse.
The crime.
She jumped as though electrocuted. Her body purrs, velvety.
Very slowly and painfully her hand moves to his chest, landing on his heart, feeling its wrecked pulse tearing through to her palm. Her lips curve shyly in the darkness.
"Are you scared?" he whispers, no need for explanations. Under his shut eyelids, new universes and northern lights bloom soft in the darkness.
"No," she replies, voice small and still.
He hear her body rustling, and he instinctively turns towards her, eyes still shut.
"Open your eyes," she says softly, each word like a petal.
He does, and sees her dark, gleaming ones, wide and floating in her face, glittering.
Her hand has forgotten herself on his chest, seeming attached there by that current. It drops softly to the sheet and slides back to her side.
He studies her features.
"Why not?" she says, feeling the blood rushing to her cheeks. She cannot believe she is asking for this.
"I don´t want to hurt you," he answers, his voice strangled. She can see the rise and fall of his chest. The kitten inside her purrs harder, and she feels it move between her hipbones, little ripples of warmth spreading. "I´ve never done anything like this. You know, thinking about the other person…….." he continues. "It´s hard. I don´t want you to be sad later."
She trembles.
"Can I touch you?"
She freezes at his soft words. This is different, different then the mere physical attraction that has moved them to act before, clawing at each other, frenzied. This is terribly different and she can feel everything reverberate inside her like an echo.
She is too scared to hear the sound of her own voice. She nods.
And so he does. She watches his hands in wonder, how they move like instruments, with such exact precision. How his head falls forward, gentle, lips parted, how she arches and coils and curls in response, how stars bloom and explode silently under her closed eyelids, colors and circles, ragged breath. She hides her face in her palms, and bites down hard on her knuckles.
It´s over.
Rapidly, he turns away from her,
They lie sleepless all night, not saying a word.
