“Are all guys as oblivious as you?”
“For the sake of humanity, I hope not.” He opened his arms. “I’m ready for you now.”
“You can’t handle me.”
He scrunched his nose. “Are we still talking about jumping, or has this conversation gone PG-13?”
I didn’t really know what I meant by that. It just sounded like something someone would say in a movie, and I thought Snake would like it. Truthfully, though, there was one thing I had to know if I was about to plunge to my death with this oddly tolerable jerk.
“I’ll jump, but answer me this.”
“What?” he sighed.
“Do you . . .” I was about to cross the great unspoken line. I was about to use the L word. I braced myself, though I knew Snake was blissfully ill-equipped to combat it. “Do you think that you love Carla?”
He stood up straight and looked at the wall. I’m guessing he concentrated, though I couldn’t see his eyes very well beneath his hair. My brain was dancing a victory routine because, for once, I had shocked him.
“Why do you ask if I think that I love her?”
“Because love is a futile disposition fueled by hormones and stupidity, which I think we both know you’re exceptionally well-versed in. So how hormonal and stupid are you when it comes to Carla?”
He smiled, not his usual close-mouthed, lazy grin. A real smile. A bright smile.
“Let me put it this way,” he said. “I’m not standing in front of Carla’s window at midnight holding a bag of Twizzlers and wearing a tuxedo amid a killer lightning storm to ask her to risk breaking my back and/or killing me just to spend the latter part of an evening with her.” He bent into ready position again. “That sounds pretty hormonal and stupid, if you ask me.”
The dude had a point. I was the one he bothered round the clock. I was the one he practically stalked whenever he thought he could get away with it. I was the one on the receiving end of his embarrassing romantic gestures that he would certainly regret one day. But I still knew that Carla had something I didn’t. That he would always see her differently.
The bathroom door opened.
Footsteps.
“My mom’s coming!” I yelled down.
He bounced on the balls of his feet. “Now or never.”
To this day, I swear, if I had to stand trial for jumping out of a window to my death just to escape to another possible death, I would plead temporary insanity. And yet, I found myself with a leg on the ledge, both hands on the brick.
My trembling feet despised me, almost as much as the rational part of my brain. But there was another part of my brain that told me to go for it. I didn’t know what part that was, but it was louder than anything else.
Momentary confession: I was an idiot drunk on the allure of a futile disposition (see: love). And all of its uselessness and futility and pain awaited me on the ground with skinny arms wide open. I knew I could have hurt myself, or him, or both. We could have shattered to a million pieces on the asphalt. We could have been irreparably damaged. And that was the scary part. Not the idea of falling, but the fear of getting hurt.
So I jumped. I jumped because the fear of getting hurt wasn’t unbearable. The only unbearable fear was living my entire life with only one leg out the window.
Next thing I knew, I had two hands on the cool grain of the driveway with Snake pinned beneath me. I could smell him. Strawberry. Cologne. A hint of Carla’s expensive perfume. I could hear him. He was making a moaning sound, but it was more of a showy moan than a necessary one.
I opened my eyes gradually. Hazy darkness and lavender dotted his pasty skin. I glanced down at his face. He was staring at me like his life depended on the memory of what my eyes looked like under a purple sky. I could tell by his broken breaths that he was in some pain, but it was sufferable. He could handle hurt.
Falling hadn’t killed us. Not yet, anyway.
“Are you okay?” I whispered.
“Pretty comfortable, actually.”
“Your hand’s on my ass.”
“Oh, sorry.” He slid his hand to my hip. “Better?”
I pushed up on my palms, standing with a leg on either side of him. I swung my right leg around and reached a hand down to help him up. “No,” I said. “That’s better.”
He accepted my help and pushed up onto his feet. “Ouch,” he breathed, rubbing his hand across his lower back. He turned to me, stepping one foot length too close. I didn’t mind. “You’re lighter than I thought. I could have caught you if I had known.”
“No, you couldn’t have.”
“I’m stronger than you think.”
“It’s not about underestimating your strength. It’s about overestimating my weakness.”
I think we both knew we weren’t talking about my Olympic dive from the window at that point.
We hopped in the Prius and were at his house in ten minutes. The house was dark except for the twinkle-lit sidewalk, buzzing like fireflies in the shadows. He led me past his screened deck, where there was a master grill like the ones in those fancy commercials. As we went through the backyard, I was staring at the sky, dazing off as the gray gave way to black.
“Reggie?”
Snake was staring at me again, but it was more of an earth-to-crazy stare this time. I looked around and noticed that we were on a hill a good few yards behind the house, not a huge one, but high enough to provide a great view of the neighborhood and the pond. He untied the camera from his back.
“Are you going to lay the blanket down?” he asked.
I forgot I had been carrying a hand-stitched quilt his grandmother had made for one of his moms when she was a baby. The pattern was Jacob’s ladder in patriotic colors, and I knew that because Karen had instilled in me every possible design of quilt that any human could ever not need to know. I spread the blanket across the dewy grass and sat down. Snake sat beside me, his arm pressed to mine.
The lightning had already begun on the car ride over. There were little flashes here and there, but nothing significant for his documentary. He clicked the camera on just as brighter sparks electrified the horizon.
“Why do you need lightning shots, anyway?” I asked as a bolt struck above his house. The sky was honey in an instant, and bruised purple in the aftermath.
“Because it’s ironic,” he said from behind the lens. He had one eye squinted into the viewfinder as the sky erupted. “A lightning storm in Flashburn. Who could pass up the opportunity to capture not only our uselessness, but the predictability of our existence?”
“We are exactly what we say we are. No surprises.”
“None except one.” He pulled away from the camera and looked at me, a flash of pink blinding half of my vision of him. “You’re the only person who’s ever surprised me.”