He’s still smiling at me. My brain turns to fuzz. “Yes,” he says. “I play chess.” We stop at my locker and
he says, “In fact, I was thinking about starting an exclusive
chess club for offspring of pizza proprietors.”
I grin. “Oh my dogs, I believe I qualify.”
“We’ll have a lot of meetings,” he warns.
“I’ll be there—as often as I can.” I ignore the nervous
quake in my gut that taunts, Your parents will find out. His face is close to mine. “Tonight’s launch meeting is
from three to five thirty. I’ll have you back at the restaurant by then. Will that work okay?”
I nod. Whisper, “We’ll get this vision thing figured
out, Sawyer. I promise.”
The bell rings. Sawyer’s smile turns reluctant and he
caresses my neck, one slick motion that makes my hip
sockets burst into flames.
Trey promises to tell Mom that I joined a chess club (dotcom, he says wickedly, so I have to kick him), and that I’ll be home by five thirty. And that I would have called her myself but I still don’t have a cell phone. Not one she knows of, anyway.
I load up my backpack more slowly than usual, letting the halls clear around me. Sawyer saunters up to me and we walk down the hallway together. Ever so casually he takes my hand, entwining his fingers with mine. And then my eyes get all misty. Stupid, I know, but you know what? I remember thinking there would never be a time when I’d hold a boy’s hand in the hallway at school, much less the love of my life’s. It was all a little emotional there for a second, because here I am, and it feels even better than it looks. I squeeze his hand and he squeezes back and looks sidelong at me, and I am so in love.
He opens the car door for me, which feels so incredibly awkward that I hurriedly ask him not to do that again, unless I’m, like, carrying a six-foot sheet cake or something. And then we set out for somewhere, I’m not sure where. He takes my hand again and puts it on the stick shift with his. When he pushes in the clutch I change gears for him, and we’re flying out of town, away from Melrose Park, away from people who frown at us for stupid reasons. After a few minutes Sawyer pulls into a community college parking lot and parks by the gymnasium. Without a word we get out and he pulls me through the snow to the side of the building. There are a few cubbyholes in the walls and I can hear fans running. I catch a whiff of chlorine and feel a blast of humid air on my cheeks.
Sawyer and I duck inside one of the indents and suddenly it’s warm. “Pool fan,” he says, facing me. “My brothers told me about this trick.”
I stare at him. We are alone.
At last, at last.
I lunge for his coat, unbuttoning it, and I slide my
hands to his neck, pull his head toward mine, trying not to scrape him with my clunky cast. His hands suspend in the air for a second, and then he buries them in my hair and we’re kissing and panting and touching each other, starving and lusty and steamy hot, and soon he’s wrenching my coat off and pulling off his own, and he presses against me, his chest against my chest, our feet finding spaces every other, and his thighs squeezing mine. And suddenly I realize that what’s pressing against me is not all thigh, and I am secretly amazed and a little shocked by it being there, doing that. He moans and drags his lips to my neck, and my hands flounder at his hips and slide over them into his back pockets, like my fingers are someone else’s expert sexy fingers and I’m the lucky one who gets to feel through them, because dog knows I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m just going with it, intoxicated by his fervor and the overwhelming electric, psychedelic aching in my loins.
“Oh my God,” he whispers after a few minutes, breathing hard, and he lifts heavy hands one by one and slaps them against the wall behind me, pushing away, forcing space between us. He leans forward, arching his back, and rests his forehead on my shoulder, panting. “Shit. You are dangerous.”
I pet the back of his head, my lips tingling. “Are you okay?”
He lifts his head and looks at me, and it’s a look I don’t recognize. Desire and heat and I don’t know what else. “My God,” he says again, shaking his head a little. “What the heck was I thinking all those years.” He mops his face with a hand and looks at the coats on the cement pad at our feet. “I mean, it’s—” He looks around, distracted, like he forgot where we were. “It’s not just the this stuff, but the this is . . . probably . . .” He nods to himself. “Yeah. It’s going to kill me. For sure.”
I am intrigued by his random candidness, and I think how funny it is that I can make ball jokes until I’m blue in the face (dot-com) but I’m sooo inexperienced in the actual this of things, that I’m not quite sure what should or should not be happening on what I’m starting to think of as our first date. Which is also my first date ever. I’m pretty sure coats on the ground is far enough, though.
I reach up and kiss him again, lightly this time, and then turn my head and rest it on his shoulder, holding him. But those last words from him ring in my ears. Yeah. It’s going to kill me. For sure. And that reminds me of something else entirely unsexy, which makes my stomach clutch. I glance at my phone to check the time, and my brain totally changes gears. “Sit with me,” I say. I slide down the wall and sit, enveloped in the warmth from the swimming pool circulation fan. He hesitates and eases down to sit, too. And then, together, we sigh. The fun is over, and we turn our attention to the urgent matter of the vision that is taking over Sawyer’s life.