Chapter 42 #2
“I’ll give you some space,” I mutter. I duck past him, escape the room. Did I feel it—that gravitational tug? Did he seem as radiant, as luminous? I won’t let myself think about it.
“I’ll check back in a couple hours,” I tell Lillian. “I have to . . . um.” I don’t know what I have to do.
“I’m heading out in a few,” she says, “but I’ll let them know. They’re all good here. Isn’t that guy great? He’s like the last doctor in the country who still does house calls. I’ve worked with him before. Heart of gold.”
I grit my teeth. “Yeah. Okay. Thanks, Lill.”
“Love ya, T.”
“Love you!” I grab my stuff from the dining table, where I left it.
I am out the door, in the gravel driveway, the trees by the road budding in an expectant reddish haze, the forsythia hedge next door a flourish of sunny yellow. His car is next to mine. I open my passenger door to throw my bag in.
“Tempest.” He’s behind me.
I turn around.
He looks flushed, uncertain, his gaze guarded. My heart throws itself into a full-out run, runs with all its might.
He says, “I’ll go right back in.”
“It’s good to see you.” We’re adults after all. I can say that.
“It’s good to see you, too.” His hands are by his sides. “It feels like a long time— ” He seems to cut himself off; there’s a flicker of bright suffering in his eyes.
The connection we had should be gone. We were drawn to one another helplessly, against ourselves, because of the things we never wanted to be, things that aren’t true about us anymore.
“How are you?” he asks quietly.
“Fine,” I say, too fast. “Good. What about— ”
“Yeah,” he says. “But.”
We look at each other.
“The daffodils came up,” he says. “They’re beautiful.”
“Ours, too.” I think of us kneeling side by side in his yard in what feels like a different lifetime, at the beginning of everything, before everything, when I loved him instinctively, like breathing, and when I couldn’t have him at all, and when we planted bulbs together anyway, just out of some reflex toward the future.
To put a little bit more color into the world.
Joel closes his eyes for a moment, takes a breath.
He opens his eyes again. “That night at the synagogue,” he says, “when you were singing, and I heard you before I saw you—I would know your voice anywhere. I knew then, but I’ve known since the first time you sang: I want to hear it every day, I never want to stop listening to you. ”
I feel myself smiling. “I would sing for you every day.”
We move at the same time. His hands are in my hair, my hands are on his chest, that addictively welcoming give over the solid block of his strength.
Our mouths collide. The soft sound he makes—raw need—brims at the waterline of my hearing, and I’m already inundated.
I am drinking the sun from his lips, his mouth.
I’m stunned by my own restraint, after not being able to kiss or touch him for all these stupid, earnest, muddled months.
We break apart, panting. He’s holding on to my waist now, and he doesn’t let go. He closes his eyes, bends down so his forehead rests on the top of my head. “Tempest,” he says.
“Joel,” I say, more a whimper.
We’re silent. He pulls me against him, presses me as close as he can. I breathe in hard, trying to swallow his scent, trying to preserve it in the jar of my chest. My legs, then my feet flow downward into the gravel. I am planted here, taking root.
“You have to go,” I suggest eventually, whenever that is, being responsible out of respect for the family inside.
“Mm,” he agrees. His fingers tighten on me.
Somehow, we separate. He adjusts his glasses quickly, pushes his hair back into a less aroused attitude. He’s dazed, relief just under it. I can’t look away from the story of his face.
“We decided— ” I try.
“Hey,” he says softly. “I have a better idea. Why don’t we just start again.”
“Again?” Yes, I think.
“Maybe we could get coffee. Do you like coffee?”
“I like coffee,” I say.
He smiles. “Want to get some with me?”
I’m already nodding.
“Great. I’ll call you right after this.”
“It’s too late for coffee.” I’m smiling, too.
“Dinner then.”
“Big commitment.”
“I don’t know. I feel like we’re going to get along. Maybe start a band one day.” He’s walking back to the house.
“Ella would like that.”
Joel is at the chipping blue door. He turns. “I didn’t get to say it before,” he says. “I keep thinking about how I didn’t say it.”
“Say what?” But I know.
“I love you, too.”
He looks at me for only a blink—matter-of-fact and open as the sky—and then he goes inside.
I stand for a while in the driveway, my mind an avalanche, my heart a thundering waterfall.
And under that, something in me leans forward, lusts, turned up just a notch too high, stretching fingers into the dragon’s throat of the unknown, trying to touch a hidden flame.
Just a brush of the fingertips, just for a second.
My arms lift from my sides, only slightly, as though inching toward flight.
I was exaggerating when I said I am normal.
Even just now, when Tamar clung to my hands in the tub, I was tempted. I wanted to look into her eyes and tell her, “You feel better, you don’t feel all this pain.” Because I know, I have known for a while, that it would help.
It’s not a shock, really, that she wanted to hear me sing.
My father was a rock star, and I guess I can’t say I’m nothing like him. Curse or no curse, I am still the daughter of a demigod.
All around me, things that lay still as death all winter are waking up, putting out feelers, squirming into the light.
Spring peepers sing their mating song from a trickle of water in a roadside ditch.
And isn’t that always the world? Life and sex and hope fighting their way up from desolation, from the darkest, most ridiculous places, finding a way.
I yank open the door, get into my car, start the engine. The granola bar wrappers in the cup holder lift like faint metallic wings. The sky is the deep blue of pure joy above the tiny white house, just beginning its diffusion into a darker and more final color.
I am still smiling.
I could be in a band.
Maybe I’ll be in a band.