They shut off the stove, not caring that the dulce de leche would turn to crystals, that it would take them an hour to wash out the saucepan.
This time, instead of climbing on top of him, she pulled him onto her. She wanted him covering her, soaking her like the light from his moons. She wanted her skin taking in as much of his scent as it could hold. And when he touched her, she wondered if this was how he touched himself, if this was how he’d figured out what felt good.
In the years since she’d walked in on him changing, there had been so many times she had turned off her bedroom lamp and slid her hand under the quilt, trying to imagine she was touching him, that the place she had set her hand was not on her body but on his. But even if they were the same inside their jeans, he was so different from her that she could not imagine his body as her own. Even his underwear, the plain gray cotton, was so different than the yellow and blue and pale green ones Miel bought in packs of three colors.
No matter what their bodies had in common, she and Sam were not the same. So the feeling of touching him had always slipped from her fingers even while her fingers were still against her. The closest she’d ever gotten was imagining her hand belonged not to her, but him.
Now, his fingers traced her, and the shudder up through her body made the small of her back curve away from the sheet. Her hair spread out, trailing off the edge of the bed, her neck so exposed to him he set his mouth against it, and stayed.
With his weight on her, she was water and he was a moon, his gravity pulling her closer. He was a world unmapped, a planet of valleys and vapor seas no one but he had a right to name. If he let her, she would learn the bays and oceans of him. She would know him as well as he knew the maria in the moon atlases.
She grabbed his belt and the waist of his jeans and pulled them away from his body enough to get her hand in. First her fingers were grasping at his boxers, feeling him through the thin cotton. Then her hand crawled up to the elastic band and found its way in, and she took hold of him, hard, like there was a single shape of him to be grabbed. She put her hand on him as though he had a body that would let him be called he and him without anyone ever daring to question it.
He didn’t pack, didn’t stuff a pair of socks into his underwear. Didn’t fill a condom with dry grain or hair gel or any of the other ridiculous ideas they’d considered before he figured out that working on the Bonners’ farm could get him out of PE, out of changing in a locker room. And that was something she loved about him, the fearlessness, how he simply wore jeans loose enough that no one would ask questions.
For one pinching moment, Miel wondered if that was what had made the Bonner girls suspect, if they’d looked at him close enough, seen how the shape of him did or didn’t push up against the crotch of his pants.
But she wasn’t letting them in, not this time. She was shutting every window in this house and scaring them off with the light from Sam’s moons. It was just him, and her, his fingers flicking against her like the hot light of falling stars, her touching him in the best way she knew to remind him there was no distance, no contradiction between the body he had and a boy called Samir.
lake of joy
The first thing Aracely must have wondered, seeing Miel in the doorway, was why her hair was wet from the shower. Why she smelled not like her own soap, but like the kind Sam used. Why she was wearing not her own clothes, but one of Sam’s flannel shirts over a pair of his cuffed-up jeans, the hems damp because even if they were his, they were on her body.
But before Aracely could ask about any of that, Miel spoke.
“I want a pumpkin,” she said.
Aracely set down the glass jar she was refilling with dried rosebuds. “What?” she asked.
“I want us to carve pumpkins,” Miel said. “You and me.”
They would go to a farm other than the Bonners’—any farm but the Bonners’—and they would walk through the rows of curling vines. They would pass Rouge Vif d’Etampes, and yellow-and-green-striped carnival pumpkins, and the round, orange kind called a jack-o’-lantern because it was a favorite to hollow out and fill with candles.
Aracely would bring knives for both of them, and they would cut shallow ones to leave on their doorsteps, maybe an Autumn Crown pumpkin or the pale blue-green kind named Shamrock.
And they would bring home others wide and round enough to carve. They would sit at the kitchen table, newspaper spread over the wood, and they would hollow them out. They would set the seeds in the oven, drying out the pepitas and then sprinkling them with salt and chili powder.