CHAPTER SEVENTEEN #2
“Thing is, I am going to go.” Penn’s voice was so quiet. “I have to, one way or another. Even if it’s not tonight, it’s tomorrow. Or next week.” His hand reached out, palm splayed, pink and veined, another trick of time. Proof of life for fools. “I’m going to go.”
You’re going to miss him.
I know, I know, I know.
“But not yet,” I said. “Not right now. I’m not ready. But I will be, I swear.” I raked fallen hair from my face. It felt dry and brittle—I felt dry and brittle, hollowed out. “First I have to make good on my promise to try to get you home.”
Penn sighed. “I understand that. I don’t like it, but I understand.” His blue eyes bored into my green ones. “And until I can remember otherwise, it’s the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me.”
“Penn,” I whispered. I was laid out bare and spent already.
But our time was fading quicker and quicker, and there were things that couldn’t be left unsaid.
“The other night you asked me what I wanted. I told you I wanted more say in how my relationships play out.” Another step.
“When it is that people come and go. When I do. When it’s time to move on and say goodbye. ”
Amusement tugged the edge of his lip. “Are you saying you’re not done with me yet?”
The lightning bolt of it struck me twice in the same battered place. “Our time isn’t up. Let me be part of our goodbye. Please?” I found a weary smile. “I haven’t seen that woodpecker yet, and you promised.”
His eyes squeezed shut, and a heavy sigh rose from the base of his chest. “You have to promise me something.” At my single nod, he went on. “The second anything changes between you and that watch, you take it off.”
“Deal.” I raised my chin. “Just don’t walk away again. Please.”
“I won’t,” he said. “I swear. On whatever life I had.”
It was the kind of oath you sealed with a crushing hug. For one lost moment, we forgot the restrictions between our bodies and lunged anyway, only to halt millimeters away from each other. I looked down at his hands caging my shoulders. Any closer, any deeper, and he’d slip right through me.
“Why did you, though?” My voice was so faint, I barely recognized it.
Penn lowered his arms, but his eyes peered into mine as if all the rest of his memories were right there, waiting. Or was he simply trying to memorize me? Enough to take a little bit of me away with him when the watch stopped ticking?
“Why did I what?” he asked, his gaze still fixed.
“Why did you leave?” I repeated. “If it wasn’t because of Del, what was it?”
Only then did he duck his head. “I don’t know if I should say.”
“Penn. Real ta—”
“Yeah, I get it. But this feels too real.” He broke away and sat near the foot of my bed. A boy who would never be twenty. A boy who would one day go home, but not to the one he’d left in Oregon.
“You get to say anything you want here.”
“Even that I wish I’d met you before?”
My breath shredded on the exhale, ripped at the seams.
“Every day, every second I’m with you. I wish I’d been able to pick you up in some old truck. And grab your hand tight. Throw my arm around you at a county fair. Share that funnel cake and everything. Just everything.”
Exposed. It was the good and terrifying kind that found me just as I was: sleep-deprived and worn out.
My brittle nails and stringy hair and crumpled pj’s set and the old, ratty robe I brought everywhere.
Then there was a part of me that didn’t care about any of that—giddy, insides popping hot and wonderful and spilling out all over.
How would I put myself back together after this?
One, two, set. I drew in air and remembered who I was and what I’d come from. That I could do anything—no, I could. Even this.
Del’s words rushed in like a torrent. It’s not your time. . . . To have him?
To be with him like he wanted, and I wanted, in every way that existed?
“I wish I would’ve known you too,” I admitted, and his face went so, so soft. “I wish we could’ve had all those things. But you don’t know me at all if you think I’d share my funnel cake.”
His throaty laugh was the best part of too many lonely days. “That’s why, if you were wondering,” he said, sobering. “That’s why I regret that I never had a chance with you, specifically.” In a microsecond, he was closer.
“Because I’m greedy?”
“Because you’re the kind of funny that’s my favorite. And you take in bitchy cats, and buy abandoned watches, and help people like me because you want everyone to have a good home.”
Oh.
“You’re the best listener I’ve ever known,” I said.
“Even when I fight to keep things inside, you make me feel safe enough to share. And you make me want to be curious too, and learn more things, and debate stuff while we’re sitting on the couch with my head on your shoulder.
I would’ve liked that.” My hand reached out. “I would’ve liked all of it.”
He leaned in. “I wish you could’ve met the real Penn.”
“I wish I could’ve kissed him.”
This was the kind of thing—the kind of wish—that needed one of Tía Vivian’s dream boxes. I didn’t understand before, but I did now. I wanted a place to hold it and keep it safe besides my own heart.
He swallowed. His mouth parted. “Can I try something?”
“Anything.”
When Penn told me to lie back, I knew—but not everything (and soon, I’d learn, not even a micro-fraction).
I couldn’t have planned for the fall of my head against the pillow.
For my eyes, unwavering as he knuckled his hand across my cheek, my neck, a lost strand of hair.
His touch was a fuzzed and humming warmth, not enough by Oregon miles.
But deeper than anything I’d ever felt before.
He broke the universe and all its rules when he kissed me anyway. The touch of butterfly wings and eyelashes fluttered over my mouth, radiating through all the skin I had. I was already committing to memory how my lips were too chapped and how he moved in and almost through the center of me.
After, he pulled away, but just a little. “You’re beautiful.”
“You are,” I said.
His finger dipped underneath my eye, heavy with shadows. “So tired.”
“I haven’t been sleeping well.” I nodded into the empty space beside me that only he could fill. “Stay? Until you can’t?”
He reclined, arms linked above his head, one leg crossed over the other. “I’ll be right here. Just rest, Sylvie.”
I fought a dozen yawns and every impatient midnight tug. Until I couldn’t.