“’Cause I’m asking you to.” He bends over and grabs a handful of shiny white pebbles from the path leading up to the porch, begins to throw them onto the lawn one by one. They skip across the slick green grass as I shake my head.
“Sawyer,” I tell him. “No.”
“Why not?”
I don’t really have a good answer for that one—not one I can tell him, at least—so I get off the swing and perch on the top step. He slides down so he’s sitting below me, his chin about level with my knee. “That one is new,” I say. There’s a deep blue star on his bicep that wasn’t there before; it stands out against his skin like a brand.
“Got it in Tucson.”
I feel my eyebrows go up, that expression Shelby calls the Big Furrow, when she and I are speaking. “What were you doing in Tucson?”
Sawyer looks up at me, smiles a little. “I worked on a farm.”
“Seriously?”
“Soybeans,” he tells me, nodding once. “And in a pottery place.”
I laugh, I can’t help it. “You are out of control.”
“What’s out of control about that?” he asks, all innocence. “I ran the kiln.”
“I see.” Of course he did. Probably Sawyer could have any job, do anything, drive a forklift or a race car or turn water into wine. “Where else did you go?”
“Oh, man.” Sawyer considers. “Well. New Orleans, right when I left here. LA.”
Los Angeles is dirty and full of neon. You can’t drink water from the tap in Los Angeles. I know this: not because I’ve ever been there, but because like so many other things I read it in a book.
“Kansas, for a while.”
“Kansas.”
“Uh-huh. I’d never been. It’s flat there.”
“So they tell me.”
“Missouri. Flat there, too.”
I close my eyes and wonder how I am doing this, how we’re talking just like we used to. On the breeze I smell the ocean, close and endless; my pulse ticks like a bomb inside my throat. I hum at him a little, unwilling to commit either way.
“New Mexico,” he says, like a litany. After a moment his hand brushes my heel. “Austin.”
I try not to notice—I believe in accidents—but then his palm slides up the back of my leg, across the muscles that have settled there since he’s been gone. “Hey there,” I tell him, and I have to clear my throat to do it.
“Reena,” he says, and the sound of him saying my name is a murmur down my backbone that spreads like a flattened palm. He presses his index finger to the crease behind my knee. “I’m not doing anything.”
“You really are, though.” God, it would be so easy. How is it possible that it would still be so easy? I take a big breath and slide over on the step, away from him.
Sawyer lets go right away, reaches down for more pebbles to throw and, finding none, sets about pulling blades of grass from the cracks in the walkway. “Can I ask you something?” he says after a moment, not looking at me. His hands are very tan. “If I’d asked you to come with me, you think you would have?”
“What, when you left here?” I look at him curiously. “I was already pregnant.”
Sawyer laughs a little. “No kidding, princess. That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking if you would have come.”
For a minute I don’t say anything and the silence is phosphorescent; it feels like the whole world is asleep. A small green lizard scampers by. I think of the maps folded up in my bedroom, the travel guides and atlases I’m never going to use. I think of my girl, who I love more than any breathing creature in this universe, and tilt my head back at the moon in a silent howl.
“No,” I tell him finally. “Probably not.”
Sawyer nods like I’ve given him something, confirmed what he suspected from the start. “Yeah,” he says. “That’s what I thought.”
In the morning I wake up and find a pomegranate on my doorstep: red and perfect, round as the world itself.