Delirium - Lauren Oliver [104]
He leads me over to the bed, and again a wave of shyness overtakes me. I’m not sure what he expects, and when he sits down I hang back, feeling self-conscious.
“It’s okay, Lena,” he says. As always, hearing him say my name relaxes me. He scoots backward on the bed and lies down on his back and I do the same, so we’re lying side by side. The bed is narrow. There’s just enough room for the two of us.
“See?” Alex says, tilting his chin upward.
Above our heads, the stars flare and glitter and flash: thousands and thousands of them, so many thousands they look like snowflakes whirling away into the inky dark. I can’t help it; I gasp. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many stars in my life. The sky looks so close—strung so taut above our heads, beyond the roofless trailer—it feels as though we’re falling into it, as though we could jump off the bed and the sky would catch us, hold us, bounce us like a trampoline.
“What do you think?” Alex asks.
“I love it.” The word pops out, and instantly the weight on my chest dissipates. “I love it,” I say again, testing it. An easy word to say, once you say it. Short. To the point. Rolls off the tongue. It’s amazing I’ve never said it before.
I can tell Alex is pleased. The smile in his voice grows bigger. “The no-plumbing thing is kind of a bummer,” he says. “But you have to admit the view is killer.”
“I wish we could stay here,” I blurt out, and then quickly stutter, “I mean, not really. Not for good, but . . . You know what I mean.”
Alex moves his arm under my neck, so I inch over and lay my head in the spot where his shoulder meets his chest, where it fits perfectly. “I’m glad you got to see it,” he says.
For a while we just lie there in silence. His chest rises and falls with his breathing, and after a while the motion starts to lull me to sleep. My limbs feel impossibly heavy, and the stars seem to be rearranging themselves into words. I want to keep looking, to read out their meaning, but my lids are heavy too: impossible, impossible to keep my eyes open.
“Alex?”
“Yeah?”
“Tell me that poem again.” My voice doesn’t sound like my own; my words seem to come from a distance.
“Which one?” Alex whispers.
“The one you know by heart.” Drifting; I’m drifting.
“I know a lot of them by heart.”
“Any one, then.”
He takes a deep breath and begins: “‘I carry your heart with me. I carry it in my heart. I am never without it. . . .’”
He speaks on, words washing over me, the way that sunlight skips over the surface of water and filters into the depths below, lighting up the darkness. I keep my eyes closed. Amazingly, I can still see the stars: whole galaxies blooming from nothing—pink and purple suns, vast silver oceans, a thousand white moons.
It seems like I’ve only been asleep five minutes when Alex is gently shaking me awake. The sky is still inky black, the moon high and bright, but I can tell by the way the candles are pooling around us that I must have been out for at least an hour or so.
“Time to go,” he says, brushing the hair off my forehead.
“What time is it?” My voice is thick with sleep.
“A little before three.” Alex sits up and scoots off the bed, then reaches out a hand and pulls me to my feet. “We’ve got to cross before Sleeping Beauty wakes up.”
“Sleeping Beauty?” I shake my head confusedly.
Alex laughs softly. “After poetry,” he says, leaning down to kiss me, “we move on to fairy tales.”
Then it’s back through the woods; down the broken path that leads past the bombed-out houses; through the woods again. The whole time I feel as though I haven’t quite woken up. I’m not even scared or nervous when we climb the fence. Getting over the barbed wire is infinitely easier the second time around, and I feel as though the shadows have texture, and shield us like a cloak. The guard at hut number twenty-one is still in the exact same position—head tilted back, feet on his desk, mouth open—and soon we’re weaving our way around the cove. Then we’re slipping silently through the streets toward Deering Highlands, and it’s then I have the strangest