“The thing?” I say, and he affirms, “The thing,” and I laugh because he’s right.
“I’m lying,” I say, and then I hook my foot around his scrawny hips and pull myself upright so that we’re face to face. My hands are on his chest and I can feel his heart, thudding thudding thudding. “I’m lying,” I say again, “you’re right. My favorite day, my favorite favorite day ever, is this one.”
And I kiss him.
It’s soft and hesitant and yielding.
He doesn’t move and I still don’t quite breathe.
And then—
And then—
He leans, I push. He is rainwater and smoke and wishes. He is honey and wind and bitter as truth and sharp with hurting and endlessly, unbearably sweet. He is air, finally, endlessly. Ease—that’s what it is, that’s what we are, we snap into place, or we glide, or we fall. His fingers are careful, light, resting on my back and my waist, barely touching. My hands are over his lungs and his heart, pressing. He is Micah and I am Janie, and this is how we should have done it years and years ago.
We kiss like that for a long time. Centuries, maybe. Eons.
But then there’s a whistle. Not a nice one. It’s sharp and rising and it pierces the music and slices into my eardrums, and I let go of Micah and look up, and it’s Ander and Piper, and he’s grinning the ugliest grin in the world, and she just looks like she wants to get out of here.
Again.
And suddenly I’m cold. I am carved out of ice.
“Jeez, Janie,” Ander says. He leans his elbows on the back of the lawn chair with his cup crooked in his hand, dribbling onto us. “Micah Carter? Seriously, who won’t you fuck?”
But I’m looking at Piper. Staring her down, even if she won’t look at me.
The fury is sudden and harsh and rising. It’s impulse. I look straight at Piper and I spit out, “Wait. Stay.”
Ander grins, and kisses me.
I am too surprised to stop him.
I am too slow to say no.
And Piper.
Piper finally looks at me, and she doesn’t stop him.
He pulls me out of the chair with his stupid, stupid wrestler body as he keeps kissing me, and the blanket falls off and the cold hits me everywhere and all at once, and his stubble stabs my face and his breath is stale booze, and I wish he were grosser so that I could puke in his mouth.
And he obliges. He reaches for the bottom of my shirt and I’m not frozen, I’m drowning in liquid nitrogen, I’m frostbitten, I’m cryogenic.
But I still feel it when something shifts behind me, and all of a sudden, I don’t care about Piper or Ander. But by the time I push Ander away, by the time I can breathe enough to get away from them, Micah is disappearing into the dark.
“Micah,” I try, but my voice is stuck somewhere deep inside me, rotting away with all of the stomach butterflies that had reanimated for a few seconds when Micah and I touched. But they’re good and safely dead again, and clogging my throat.
“Don’t worry about him,” Ander says. “Come on, Janie. Let’s stop fucking around.” And his hand is on my wrist, and I whirl around and shout it at him.
“No!”
And I punch him across the face, just in case the message wasn’t clear.
Piper’s watching me, horrified, mouth open and useless and stupid.
“Fuck you,” I say, and I mean it, I really do, I don’t hate anyone like I hate her right then.
And then I’m pushing past them, running. The blanket falls off and the air is so cold it hurts, everywhere. “Micah,” I scream, and I’m crying. “Micah, wait.”
He’s halfway down the driveway already, though, and he hesitates for maybe a second before he turns around again, but the second is enough. The moment. The moment has to be enough.
“Micah,” I say, and I run into him, crash, collide. His breath whooshes out of him and mine disappears. Or it was never there in the first place. “Micah, don’t leave, just listen, listen to me—”
“I’m tired,” he says, very, very quietly, and I hiccup into silence. He’s looking at the ground, playing with his car keys in sloppy fingers.
“Micah, stop, you can’t drive like this, just stop—”
“I’m not driving. I’m finding Dewey. He’s driving.”
The anger that rises in me isn’t rational, I know, but I can’t help spitting out, “Of course he is. And where is he? God, Micah, you keep going to him because he’s in love with you, but don’t you see? It doesn’t matter. He isn’t here. Here is us, Micah. You and me. Me and—”
He turns away. “I’m tired,” he says again, far, far away. “Janie, I’m just really fucking sick of this, okay?”
“Of what?”
And that’s when he looks up. Snaps up. His eyes meet mine and I realize that this isn’t what I want, I don’t want to look at him, not at all, not like this. He is so far gone that I don’t know—I don’t know if he will come back.
“I am sick,” he says slowly, deliberately, spitting the words out syllable by syllable. “I am sick of being screwed over by you. Every single time. I’m tired of you and all of your shit.”