Tilt - Alan Cumyn [39]
He didn’t know what the hell was going on.
“Hey!” someone called out miles behind him. So far back he could easily not have heard her.
Breathe, stride-stride-stride, breathe . . .
“Hey!” she called from farther back.
He didn’t have to stop. He could just have slowed and even then she would never catch him.
She was in her killer dress but she looked like a soggy shadow except for her white boots.
She probably wasn’t much of a runner. But she’d come after him.
“Where are you going?” she said.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he shot back.
Her shoulders were bare and wet. She had to be bloody freezing.
Her chest was heaving. She had a glorious chest. He wasn’t sure she was going to be able to say anything.
He thought maybe she was going to try to lie about what he’d seen.
But instead she said, “I’m sorry.”
She was standing in her killer black dress with her black hair plastered to her white, white face a few paces off, like she was about to draw her pistol and shoot him dead. He was already shot through.
16
He had known that going to the dance would be a whole bigger deal than it should have been.
“Sorry about what?”
She was crying in the rain. When he was the one who should be upset. Was this the way all girls operated?
“I broke it off with Leona weeks ago and then she came tonight anyway and I couldn’t keep her away.” She wiped her face. “My parents don’t know anything. Please don’t tell them. I thought . . . I thought asking you was the right thing.”
“For what?”
“My mother has gone through second chemo. She only has about two months to live. That’s what all the doctors say. She lives for these dances. She just shines. But she’ll be days and days in bed afterwards. And I know she wanted me to invite one boy I liked. Just one.”
“But you like girls?”
She was shivering and crying and not answering.
He’d seen the two of them dancing together. He’d seen the white-dress girl — Leona — with her arm around Janine.
“I like boys, too,” Janine said. “Maybe. I like you.” She shivered deeply.
Clearly, despite everything, it was his duty to hold her, warm her. “I called you,” she said. “I wanted to go with you.”
It was his duty but he couldn’t move. It felt like . . . rigor mortis was setting in. If she wanted him to hold her, to warm her . . .
Even as the argument presented itself in his mind, she somehow curled into his arms. How did that happen? She felt . . . quite warm and soft in all the right places. She clutched him and even though they weren’t moving it was almost as if the two of them were slow dancing after all. Her words were terribly sad and the sound of them — the feel of her — had a different effect.
“So . . . you do like me?” he said. The words fell out. Stupidly, pathetically.
“Of course.”
There was no reason to stay clenched wherever they were — in the middle of the street, practically. He, too, was starting to shake with the night’s cold.
How confused was this? But the feel of her now . . . her hands on the small of his back, pulling him firmly against her middle.
“I saw you looking at me in class,” she whispered. “Guys think we don’t notice or something.”
This close there was no focus. This close they could say anything.
It was odd. Any moment a truck was going to split the darkness with its headlights and crush their bones.
YOUNG COUPLE KILLED IN MIDDLE OF THE ROAD!
His mother would evaporate with shock and grief.
But now they were slow-motion dancing.
None of this made any sense.
And neither did the kiss. It only took each of them to move slightly. At first she turned her cheek a bit toward his, and he edged away because he didn’t know if she wanted to kiss him. She pressed closer. Then he couldn’t turn any farther. Once on a science class nature trip in elementary school he’d seen a brown owl — at a nature center, in a big pen — turn his head farther, farther, until he’d almost corkscrewed it completely around. But at 270 degrees or so — was that possible? — the owl swiveled his head the other way.
So Stan turned back to her and at first their lips