CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Alex
Now
Della kept Arthur on a Thursday evening.
She’d called that afternoon with a tone that didn’t invite discussion.
“Bring him at five,” she said. “Pick him up tomorrow morning.”
“Della, it’s a school night—”
“He’ll be in bed by nine,” she said. “I’ll have him at the bus stop by seven-thirty.” A brief pause. “Go be young.”
She hung up.
Riley picked me up at seven.
No particular destination discussed. He drove and I sat in the passenger seat and watched the desert go by in the dark and didn’t ask where we were going.
He took me to Mount Lemmon.
Not the restaurant. Not the trail. He drove up the mountain road in the dark, the headlights cutting through the pines that appeared as the elevation climbed, and he parked at an overlook I didn’t recognize and turned off the engine.
Below us the valley spread out in every direction. The city lights of Tucson scattered across the dark floor of the basin. The mountains on the far side were black shapes against a sky that was doing something extraordinary with stars.
We sat for a while without talking.
“I used to come up here,” he said. “After you left.”
I looked at him.
“Not often,” he said. “A few times.” He looked at the valley. “I’d sit up here and try to figure out what I did wrong.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said.
“I know that now,” he said. “Took a while.”
I looked at the lights below. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“I know,” he said.
We sat.
“Do you remember the first time you brought me up here?” I asked.
He gazed out at Tucson. It was spread out like a much larger city. “Day one.”
“You kissed me at the top of that rock,” I said.
“You were waiting for it,” he said.
“I was trying to be subtle,” I said.
“You weren’t,” he said.
I laughed. It came out the way laughter did with him now. Easy. From somewhere real.
He turned and looked at me when I laughed and his face did the thing it did in private. Open and unguarded and completely his.
“There it is,” he said.
“What?”
“That laugh,” he said. “That exact laugh.”
I shook my head. “Stop.”
“I’ve been waiting to hear it again for years,” he said. “I’m not going to stop.”
I looked at him.
He was looking at me the way he had on that rock formation years ago. Like he’d made a decision and was entirely at peace with it.
“Riley,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Kiss me,” I said.
He did.
It wasn’t like the kiss at the hotel. That one had been tentative. Finding its footing. This one knew exactly where it was going. It had years of direction built into it.
When it ended I leaned my forehead against his.
“I wasted so much time,” I said quietly.
“Stop counting it,” he said.
“I can’t help it.”
“Then count forward,” he said. “Count what’s left.”
I pulled back and looked at him.
“A lot left,” he said simply.
I looked at him in the dark of the truck with the valley spread out below us and the stars doing their impossible thing overhead.
“A lot left,” I agreed.
He reached over and tucked the hair back from my face. His thumb stayed against my cheek.
Same as it ever was.
I closed my eyes and let it be everything it was.
We stayed like that a long while, the truck ticking quietly as the engine cooled, the valley below spread out in its scattered constellation of streetlights standing in for the real stars overhead.
Somewhere far off a coyote called and another answered it, and neither of us moved to acknowledge it, because it belonged to the desert and we belonged, for the moment, to each other, and the two things had never once required comment.
When I opened them he was still there.
He always was.