I follow an uncharacteristically grim Oscar out onto the front stoop.
I want to put my arms around him but don’t dare. This is a good-bye visit. It’s engraved all over his face. He sits down on the step and puts his hand on the space beside him so I’ll join him. I don’t want to join him, don’t want to hear what he’s going to say. “Let’s sit on the bluff,” I say, also not wanting Dad and Noah spying on us.
He follows me around to the back of the house. We sit, but so our legs don’t touch.
The sea is calm, the breakers shuffling into shore without conviction.
“So,” he says, smiling a cautious smile, which doesn’t suit him. “I don’t know if it’s okay to talk about this, so stop me if it’s not.” I nod slowly, unsure of what’s coming. “I knew your mother well. I felt like she and Guillermo . . .” He trails off, regards me.
“It’s all right, Oscar,” I say. “I want to know.”
“Your mum was around when I was at my worst, jonesing all the time, bouncing off the walls, afraid to leave the studio because I’d use if I did, afraid of the grief that was leveling me without the booze and drugs to mask it. The studio was different then. G. had tons of students. She used to paint there and I’d model for her just so she’d talk with me.” So Noah was right. Mom was a secret painter.
“Was she Guillermo’s student?”
He exhales slowly. “No, she was never his student.”
“They met when she interviewed him?” I ask. He nods and then is quiet. “Go on.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, please.”
He smiles a truly madhouse smile. “I loved her. It was she more than G. who got me into photography. The strange thing is we used to sit and talk in that church where you and I first met. That’s why I go there so much, it reminds me of her.” This makes the hair on my arms rise up. “We’d sit in the pew and she’d go on and on about her twins.” He laughs. “I mean on and on and on. Especially about you.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes. I know so much about you, you have no idea. I’ve been trying to reconcile the two girls in my mind. The Jude your mother talked about and the CJ I was falling in love with.” The past tense hitches on my heart. “She always joked that I wasn’t to meet you until I’d been sober for three years and you were at least twenty-five because she was certain we’d fall head over heels in love and that would be that for both of us. She thought we were kindred spirits.” He takes my hand and kisses the back of it, then rests it back on my lap. “She was right, I think.”
“But what? Because the but here is killing me, Oscar.”
He looks away from me. “But it’s not our time. Not yet.”
“No,” I say. “It is our time. It’s absolutely most definitely our time. I know you know it is too. It’s Guillermo making you do this.”
“No. It’s your mother making me do this.”
“You’re not that much older than me.”
“I’m three years older than you, which is a lot now but won’t always be.” I think how much less the three years between him and me seem than the years between Zephyr and me seemed when I was fourteen. I feel like Oscar and I are the same age.
“But you’ll fall in love with someone else,” I say.
“It’s much more likely you will.”
“Not possible. You’re the guy in the portrait.”
“And you’re the girl in the prophecy.”
“My mother’s prophecy too, it seems,” I say, taking his arm, thinking how strange it is that I gave Oscar a note Guillermo meant for my mother, like the words had fallen through time from them to us. Like a blessing.
“You’re still in high school,” Oscar’s saying. “You’re not even sodding legal, which didn’t occur to me until Guillermo pointed it out a few hundred times last night. We can be great friends. We can bounce around on Hippity Hops and play chess and I don’t know what.” There’s hesitation, frustration in his voice, but then he smiles. “I’ll wait for you. I’ll live in a cave. Or become a monk for a few years, wear a robe, shave the head, the whole bit. I don’t know, I just really need to do the right thing here.”
This is not happening. If ever there was a moment to press PLAY, it’s this one. Words start tumbling out of me. “And the right thing is turning our backs on what might be the love story of our lives? The right thing is denying destiny, denying all the forces that have conspired to bring us together, forces that have been at work for years now? No way.” I feel the spirits of both Sweetwine women who came before me uprising inside me. Hear the sound of horses galloping through generations. I go on. “My mother, who was about to upend her life for love, and my grandmother, who calls God himself Clark Gable, do not want us to run away from this, they want us to run toward it.” My hands are getting involved in the soliloquy thanks to Guillermo’s tutelage. “I ended the boycott for you. I gave up practically the entire world for you. And for the record, a sixteen-year-old girl and a nineteen-year-old guy are probably at the exact same maturity level. Furthermore Oscar, no offense, but you’re frightfully immature.”
He laughs at that and before he knows what’s happening I push him down and climb over and straddle him, holding his hands over his head so he’s helpless.
“Jude.”
“You know my name,” I say, smiling.
“Jude is my favorite of all the saints,” he says. “Patron saint of lost causes. The saint to call on when all hope is gone. The one in charge of miracles.”
“You’re kidding,” I say, letting go of his hands.
“I kid you not.”
So much better than traitorous Judas. “My new role model, then.”
He inches up my tank top and there’s just enough light from the house so that he can see the cherubs. His fingers trace their shapes. He holds my gaze, watching what his touch is doing to me, watching how it’s making me free-fall. My breathing’s getting faster and his eyes have gotten wavy with desire. “I thought you had impulse-control issues,” I whisper.
“Totally in control here.”
“Is that so?” I slip my hands under his shirt, let them wander, feel him tremble. He closes his eyes.
“Oh man, I bloody tried.” He swings his hand around my back and in one swift move he’s leaning over me, and then he’s kissing me and the joy I feel and the desire I feel and the love I feel and feel and feel—
“I’m crazy about you,” he says breathlessly, the bedlam in his face at an all-time peak.
“Me too,” I answer.
“And I’m going to be crazy about you for a very long time.”
“Me too.”
“I’m going to tell you the things I’m afraid to tell anyone else.”
“Me too.”
He leans back, smiles, touches my nose. “I think that Oscar is the most brilliant bloke I’ve ever met, not to mention, way hot, and ladies and gentlemen, what a lean he has.”
“Me too.”
“Where the hell is Ralph?” Prophet squawks.
Right effing here.