“Kiss me again,” said Christian, pulling her close to him.
When he let her go, he looked at her face, which she knew was more freckled from the sun than when he’d first met her, and said, “I know you think I’m a bit of a dumb kid. Seventeen. Wisconsin. All that.”
“I’ve never been to Wisconsin,” she said smiling.
“It’s not Austria.”
“Let’s not talk about Austria,” she replied.
“All I mean,” said Christian, reaching for her hand, “is that despite my age, and where I’m from, and this dopey wide-eyed look that I really can’t get rid of. It’s genetic,” he said, smiling and pointing to his big blue eyes. “Despite all that, I really like you. I’ve kissed other girls . . .” he said. “But it always felt a little out of expectation. That I should like a certain girl, because she was pretty, or interesting, or liked me. But this—you—it’s very different.”
“Because you’re imprisoned,” said Emi laughing. “Less choice.”
“I’ll have you know that I am a highly desired member of the German school’s class of 1944,” Christian said, laughing at himself. He plucked the pebbles in the dirt and threw them into the darkness, holding on to Emi with his other hand.
“I don’t doubt it,” said Emi, lying back on her hands.
“Don’t lie down,” said Christian, reaching for her. “Let’s weave deeper through the trees.”
“Weave?” she said standing. “And then do what?”
“I don’t know,” said Christian. “Eat oranges.”
“Eat oranges,” she repeated slowly, and she let herself be pulled gently inside the rows of trees. They walked back a few feet, as quietly as two excited people could do, and he kissed her as soon as they were partially hidden among the branches.
With that kiss, she knew his attempts at restraint were gone and so were hers. He put his hands under her shirt, feeling the muscles, the bones in her back, slowly and respectfully, but she was already pulling at his shirttail, trying to untuck it.
Suddenly, knowing what they were about to do, she was thinking about the last person to kiss her, to touch her in that way. Her body went cold from the memory. It wasn’t Leo. That boy, he had been the opposite of Leo. She stopped kissing Christian as she tried to push the image of what had happened in Vienna back into the depths of her mind. If she died in Japan, or en route to Japan, at least the last person she’d kissed would be someone she cared for.
Christian laid his shirt on the ground and Emi on top of it, asking too many times if she was comfortable.
She wasn’t comfortable, but she was comfortable with him.
“Even though nothing is perfect,” she said as he kissed her neck, “everything is.”
“Because here it’s just us,” he said, his clothes off, resting on her, still breathless. “You can take some of the humanity away from people, but not all of it,” he said, holding her tightly.
Emi knew that her time with Christian was finite. But that limitation helped her get over her fear of imagining a future with him. Her future had already been promised to Leo Hartmann, and she and Christian, they could only exist in Crystal City.
*
Emi’s life was different after that night. She was locked in an internment camp but everything else seemed to have been unlocked again. Her heart, her physical being, was thriving.
She had slept with Christian, on the ground in the orchard of an internment camp. How crazy, she said to herself the morning after it had happened. How wild and crazy and wonderful.
And how fleeting, she thought as she walked to meet him in the orchard two weeks later. Just like everything in her life had been lately.
Emi kissed Christian after they had their clothes back on and rested against one of the trees, trying to position herself around the roots. “We’re leaving tomorrow,” she said, not looking at him. “My mother and I. We’re boarding the train to New York in the morning.” She’d wanted to say it days ago, but the words refused to travel from her mind to her lips. Now she was out of time. In less than twenty-four hours, she would be gone.
Christian didn’t move, didn’t bend his head to look at her, and she thought he’d misheard her, but when she peered up at him, she knew he hadn’t.
He sank down next to her. “How can you find out one day and leave the next? They can’t make you just disappear like that. You need more time.”
“I didn’t just find out today,” she admitted. “I found out a month ago. But I thought if I told you it would upset you. You knew I’d be leaving sometime, just as you will leave, but you didn’t need to know when.”
“I didn’t need to know, but maybe it would have been better,” he said, moving his hand away from her body.
“Perhaps,” she said, sure that it wouldn’t have been. “But then we would have spent the last few weeks focusing on me leaving instead of on us being right here. Present. Together.”
She could tell that Christian was trying to agree with her, trying to remain stoic, but it wasn’t his nature. He, she had learned early on, wore his heart on his sleeve.
“I should be your shoulder to cry on,” he said, pretending to dust off his old blue T-shirt. “But we both know that I’m too crazy about you to be that person.”
“Crazy good?” she said laughing.
“Crazy great,” he said smiling back. “But heartbroken, too.” Christian threw his body back in the dirt and let out a helpless cry, looking straight up at the never-ending Texas sky.
“I suppose it doesn’t matter if we get caught anymore,” said Emi after putting her hand over his mouth. “But don’t be broken. You only feel that way because you had nothing to do here but fall in love.”
“That’s not true,” he protested, wrapping his arms around her so tight that she had to wiggle out of his grip so she could breathe. “Not every young person in camp is falling in love out of boredom. This was different.”
Yes, she admitted to herself, it was different. It was, like he had said, something.
“It was—you are—very important to me,” she said, tracing around his sad blue eyes with her fingers. “And we will write. As much as our hands will let us. Maybe the letters will even be delivered. I know I’m going back to our family house in Tokyo. It’s in a neighborhood called Azabu. It’s a really nice place to live, full of houses with quite a bit of space, and shops selling housewares and things, a few noodle restaurants for when the men come home from work and little schools down one-way streets. Best of all, there isn’t any barbed wire. I’ll give you my address and you will give me your address in Germany. In Pforzheim. Do you know it?”