He shook his head. “I think that’s what did it. When I read that. ‘The last person on Earth’—because I felt the same way.”
My hands were mauling that old OSU shirt. It was very maulable. That’s a good word, maulable. It applies to so many things.
“You’re not coming back,” I said, because he couldn’t say it.
His fingers combed through my hair. I shivered. Don’t do that, you bastard. Don’t touch me like you’ll never touch me again. Don’t look at me like you’ll never see me again. I shut my eyes. Our lips touched.
The last person on Earth. With my eyes closed, I could see her walking down a wooded path in Vermont, a place she has never been and will never go, and the leaves that embrace the trail sing arias of bright red and gold. And there is a big dog named Pericles running ahead of her in that self-important way of dogs, and she has everything she ever wanted, this girl—no, this woman—nothing left behind, nothing left undone. She traveled the world and wrote books and took lovers and broke hearts. She didn’t allow life just to happen to her. She punched and pummeled and beat the living shit out of it. She mauled it.
His breath hot in my ear. I’m clawing at his chest, digging my nails into his skin, the hungry lioness with her catch. Resistance is futile, Walker. I’ll never take that path in the golden woods or own a dog named Pericles or travel the world. There’ll be no recognition of a life well-lived, no street named after me, no difference in the world because I once occupied it. My life is a catalog of the undone and the never-will-be-done. The Others stole all of my unmade memories, but I won’t let them steal this one.
My hands roamed his body, an undiscovered country, which henceforth I shall call Evanland. Hills and valleys, desert plains and forest glens, the landscape pockmarked with the scars of battle, crisscrossed by fault lines and unexpected vistas. And I am Cassie the Conquistador: The more territory I conquer, the more I want.
His chest heaved: a subterranean quake that rose to the surface like a tsunamic wave. His eyes were wide and wet and filled with something that closely resembled fear.
“Cassie . . .”
“Shut up.” My mouth surveying the valley beneath his rolling chest.
His fingers entangled now in my hair. “We shouldn’t.”
I almost laughed. Well, the shouldn’t list is awfully long, Evan. I scored my teeth across his stomach. The land beneath my tongue quivered, shock and aftershock.
Shouldn’t. No, we probably shouldn’t. Some cravings can never be satisfied. Some discoveries demean the quest.
“Not the time . . . ,” he gasped.
I rested my cheek on his tummy and tugged the hair from my eyes. “When is the time, Evan?”
His hands captured my roving ones and held them still.
“You said you loved me,” I whispered. Damn you, Evan Walker, why did you ever say such a ridiculous, crazy, imbecilic thing?
No one tells you how close rage is to lust. I mean, the space between molecules is thicker. “You’re a liar,” I told him. “You’re the worst kind of liar, the kind who lies to themselves. You’re not in love with me. You’re in love with an idea.”
His eyes cut away. That’s how I knew I nailed him. “What idea?” he asked.
“Liar, you know what idea.” I got up. I pulled off my shirt. I stared him down, daring him to look at me. Look at me, Evan. Look at me. Not the last person on Earth, the stand-in for all the people you shot on the highway. I’m not the mayfly; I’m Cassie, an ordinary girl from an ordinary place who was dumb enough or unlucky enough to live long enough for you to find. I am not your charge, your mission, or your cross.
I am not humanity.
He turned his face toward the wall, hands beside his head as if in surrender. Well. I’d gone this far. I tugged the jeans over my hips and kicked them away. I couldn’t remember a time when I was this angry—or this sad—or this . . . I wanted to punch him, caress him, kick him, hold him. I wanted him to die. I wanted me to die. I wasn’t self-conscious, not at all, and it wasn’t because he’d seen me naked before—he had.
That time I didn’t have a choice. Then I’d been unconscious, close to death. Now I was awake and very much alive.
I wished there were a hundred lamps to light me up. I wanted a spotlight and a magnifying glass so he could examine every imperfectly perfect human inch of me.
“It’s not about the time, Evan,” I reminded him, “but what we do with it.”
23
RINGER
AT THIRTY-FIVE THOUSAND FEET, it’s hard to tell which seems smaller: the Earth below or the person above it, looking down.