20 Nothing Lasts
20
Nothing Lasts
After a dinner in near-silence, Trey asked me to take a walk with him. Night had fallen and it was humid, and the fresh scent of plants surrounded me.
For a while, neither of us spoke. I was being rebellious. I needed that sometimes, to act like a child and have my little tantrums. I was looking for the least excuse to argue. I was frustrated. I hadn’t realized I felt that way, and it was driving me mad.
There was no logic to my impulses. Or maybe there was: I’d had my life all planned out, and he had turned it upside down. He was forcing me to move through unknown territories without a map. And now I wanted to know more, explore, try things.
And I wanted to know what he was thinking.
The house was closer to the beach than I’d imagined. I was surprised to see it appear before us, the sea calm, the waves soft and murmuring, the stars high in the sky, the rhythms of the night hypnotic.
Trey stopped and stood with his hands in the pockets of his jeans and drew a nervous breath. He spoke softly. “My mother was Mi’kmaq, and my grandparents are, and their parents, and generations before.”
Something absurd entered my mind—but I wondered if it could be true.
“Trey, were you embarrassed about that? Is that why you never wanted to talk to me about your mother?”
He smiled and shook his head. “No. I’m proud of who I am. I never talked about her because there are things about me that you might not like. And if you don’t like them, you’ll pull away…”
I closed his lips with my hand, unable to believe he would really think something like that of me. Unable to imagine what I’d done or said to make him think I might behave that way.
“Me? You thought I’d judge you because of your family?” I brought my hand over to his cheek and stroked it. “Who you are and where you’re from don’t matter to me, Trey. All that matters is what you make of your life.”
He kissed me.
“You’re killing me,” he said. “I feel like I’m losing it. Like I’m going completely crazy.”
“In a good way?”
“See?” He laughed. “That’s exactly what I mean. You’re priceless. Incredible.”
I blushed. I wasn’t. Not even a little. Was he blind? Stupid? Who knew. At any rate, there was no way I was driving him as crazy as he was driving me!
He took my hand and dragged me to the shore, to a boulder that jutted out into the water. I could hardly see him, just his outline against the glow of a slender crescent moon. He sat down and motioned for me to sit on his lap. When I did, and when he wrapped his arms around me, I thought to myself that there could be no better place in the world.
He kissed my temple, and his face remained close to mine as he started talking.
“My parents met in the spring of 1990, at a folk music festival in Vancouver. They fell in love, and two weeks later, they were living together. My mother got pregnant, they got married, and I was born. Things went well between them at first. My father got a job in a major architecture studio and quickly made a name for himself. With fame came money and hangers-on and a lifestyle and social position that he liked a little too much. There was just one problem. Suddenly he was ashamed of my mother. She wasn’t classy enough to hobnob with the stuck-up women his friends were married to. They talked bad about her behind her back, and my father knew it. He wanted her to pretend to be someone else.”
“Poor thing. She must have felt terrible,” I whispered.
“She didn’t. She was strong, and she never renounced who she was.”
“So what happened?”
“They argued constantly. I remember them fighting at all hours, but I was too little to realize why. One day I came back from school and Mom was gone. I didn’t understand how she could abandon me, and I kept asking about her. I wanted to go find her. I needed to see her again. That was when my father started to talk about those people … Of course he was talking about my people. He was nasty about it, and he never let me forget that a part of me was like them . He kept repeating that my mother had chosen them over me.”
I turned to look at him and saw the pain in his face with every word.
“How cruel of him.”
“He never let up, and I started thinking like him. But that turned me into someone insecure, ashamed of my mother, and I hid that part of my life. She stopped existing for me. She was like a ghost.”
“She never tried to see you again or make contact with you?”
“Yeah, she did, many times. I didn’t know that then. My father had taken out a restraining order against her, saying she’d threatened to kidnap me. It was a lie, obviously. She went to my school, showed up at my house, and eventually she got arrested. She spent time in jail because of it.”
A dark cloud of curses was forming on the tip of my tongue. What kind of man could do that to his own son?
“The years passed,” Trey continued, “and I still hadn’t seen her. But then I turned fourteen. There was a woman watching me in the park where I was hanging out with my friends. I started noticing her. I remember she was wearing beaded earrings. Then one day she came over and called me by my name. I recognized her then…”
“And what did you do?”
“I took off running. I saw her twice again, the next day and the day after that. She was waiting for me outside. So I hid.” He sighed and passed his hand across his forehead. “I mean, I hated her because of what my dad had ingrained in me. A few years later, Dad and I moved to Montreal, and I met your brother and sister. And you. It was a new start, and it forced me to forget everything that came before. When people asked about my mother, I always said she’d died when I was little.”
I didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t want to judge him. So I limited myself to remarking, “It must have been very hard for you, living like that.”
“It’s easy. You just turn into an asshole and you stop thinking about anything but yourself.” His voice was as fragile as rice paper.
“Don’t say that.”
“No? Think about it. A week ago you thought I was a piece of trash.”
I felt bad and turned away.
“I’m sorry, Harper. I didn’t mean…”
I couldn’t see his expression, and I was glad, because that meant he couldn’t see what I was feeling then, either. A tear streamed down my cheek.
“I know. It’s fine. It’s true,” I said. “But I don’t see you that way anymore.”
He hugged me tight and rocked me softly back and forth beneath that black velvet sky and the stars that shone like pearls. I don’t know how much time passed before he spoke again. “So at the end of my second year of college, in the summer, I went home for a few days. I remember I was just about to go to San Francisco with some friends. My dad and I got into an argument; I don’t remember why. It got heated and he ended up blurting out the truth. How he’d lied to me about my mother and how she’d never left. He had forced her to go. He’d threatened her, blackmailed her, lied to her… He did everything he could to get her away from me. After that, I couldn’t stop thinking of her. I did some investigating and found out she lived here with my grandfather and Elaine. But a year passed until I gathered the courage to call. We only talked for a few minutes. I didn’t know what to tell her.”
My heart ached for him as he stroked my back distractedly. I wanted to say something, to console him somehow as he tried to pull himself together. But I didn’t know how.
“She wanted us to see each other. She told me she had a heart problem and she couldn’t travel anymore. I think she invited me to visit lots of times, but I always made some excuse. Time passed, and I kept telling myself that next time, I’d do it. But the feelings my father had provoked with his lies still ran deep, and something in me refused. She died four months later. The same night you and I…”
He let me go, stood up, and walked a few feet away. I let him. But the thread that united us kept getting tenser, and finally I couldn’t resist the pull. I came up behind him and hugged him. My hands joined at his chest, and he covered them with his own.
“I still haven’t forgiven myself,” he said.
“Trey…”
“I don’t think I ever will.”
“Don’t torture yourself, please.”
“It’s just…life changes from one moment to the next, and we know that, but somehow it’s so hard to figure out what that means. I was an idiot, you know? All I thought about was myself. But then I lost my mother, and what I felt… I just don’t know if I can describe it. I came to Lennox for the first time for her funeral, and I discovered this place. I sat right here on this rock and stared at this same shore. And I realized what an asshole I’d been. And I understood what it meant when we say nothing lasts, Harper. Everything can change at the drop of a hat, everything can end in the blink of an eye, and you have to take advantage of every moment.”
Happiness and sorrow are so close that sometimes you can feel both of them at once. And I did then. I was happy because I was with him, and I felt special when he shared his secrets with me. But I also felt sad because I saw him wounded, struggling with his demons, and there was nothing I could do.
He reached up and touched my face.
“I feel like a bad person for the way I acted with my mother, and I understand if you—”
“You’re insane if you think I’d leave you for what you just told me.”
“I run away, Harper. It’s a bad habit. I wouldn’t blame you for wondering if I’ll do it again.”
“How many ways do I have to tell you this? I’m not going anywhere, and I feel certain that you aren’t, either. You could have vanished at any moment, but here you are.”
“I’m still here.”
“You’re still here.”
“You too.”
“Yeah.”
“And us both being here, that means something,” he said pensively. “Do you think you’re ready?” His voice, his attitude changed. The bad boy who melted my heart was back.
“I might be.” I pulled him tight to me and asked, “What exactly is that something you’re talking about, though?”
I could see the stars in his eyes. The stars, and not much else.
“I’m talking dates, I’m talking physical contact… In fact, if I remember correctly, you already signed on for that.”
I grinned, feeling flushed. With my hands on his chest, I could feel his heartbeat, quick and strong beneath his ribs.
“Does what we’ve been doing these past two days count as a date?” I asked.
He nodded slowly.
“Because if that’s the case, I guess we should move on to the physical contact. That’s the next logical step in the relationship, no?”
“It certainly is,” he whispered.
“Good. Because there are some things you apparently don’t remember and I’d like to remind you of them.”
“Are you sure about this?”
“I’ve been sure since I was twelve years old. Every time I’ve ever been with anyone, I’ve thought of you. So yes, I’m sure.”
He dove in, his lips covered mine, his tongue intertwined with mine. He nibbled, groaned, grabbed my ass, and pulled me tight to him. I was touching him all over, unable, unwilling to suppress my desires. I wanted him to understand how much he mattered to me, how much I needed him.
Our bodies were so close, they could have been one as I felt under his T-shirt and touched his skin. He did the same, touching the lace of my bra. Our bodies were on fire. I was aching, each of his caresses a sweet torture. We were getting impatient, ready to see those corners of each other that were still hidden, when a gust of wind struck and we realized the weather was about to change.
“We should get back,” he said.
“Sure.”
But instead of that, he kissed me again. Again. Again. Only after that did he take my hand and guide me back. I could hardly see, but he seemed to know every inch of that terrain, and I followed him, unafraid of where I might step.
Soon we were in the clearing where the house and garden lay. The lights were off, and the only sign of life was the barking of the dogs. He grabbed our luggage from the car and started walking around the house.
“Aren’t we going to sleep inside?” I asked.
“I don’t know if you realize this, but there’s only one bedroom, where Grandpa and Elaine sleep. And the sofa isn’t exactly big.”
“We’re not going to sleep outside, are we? Because if that’s the case, I’ll pass. There must be spiders and ticks and all kinds of creepy-crawlies out here.”
Trey laughed. “We’re not sleeping outside. We’re sleeping over there.”
I squinted my eyes and saw a white outline against the underbrush, and as we approached, I could see a small white camper van. I stopped, flabbergasted.
“We’re sleeping in a camper?”
“It’s not just any camper.”
“Uh, it is, though.”
“Don’t worry, it’s quite comfortable—real bed and everything.” He mounted the few steps, opened the door, and put our things inside. “Come in. It’s quite spacious, you’ll see.”
“I need to go to the bathroom first.”
Trey sighed, but patiently, and walked me over to a little wooden shack under the trees. He pushed the door open and turned on the light inside.
“This one’s for us. It’s got electricity and running water, as you can see.”
“Hot water?” I asked, with strained hope. I was desperate for a shower.
“Yeah. The water heater’s in the back. I’ll turn it on.”
“Thank God,” I murmured. It’s not that I was a fancy-pants, but my contact with nature hadn’t gone much further than the parks in the various cities I’d lived in. “Why’s your grandfather have a bathroom out in the woods?”
“Grandpa built the house when he remarried, but it’s not big enough for more than two, so when Mom moved back here, he bought the camper for her. And now it’s mine when I come here to visit.”
This would be fun, exciting, I told myself. I was going to spend the night in a camper with Trey in the woods on an island. I had an idea for a book now. A suspense story, full of love and sex.
I kept thinking silly things like that while I showered, and even when I climbed into the clean sheets Elaine had laid out for us, I couldn’t stop. She’d left a note wishing us a good night. What a lovely woman.
I looked up at the roof of the camper, lit up by the lantern Trey had taken from a trunk that he used as a table. Outside, an owl was hooting and the wind was rustling the trees. I thought I could hear plunking sounds—scattered at first, then rhythmic. I listened closer. It was starting to rain.
The door opened and Trey came inside wearing nothing but a towel around his waist. In the soft light, I could see water droplets shining all over his body, dripping down his arms, his chest, and his belly, falling and soaking into the white cotton of the sheets.
“It’s raining,” he said.
“I realized that,” I responded, not taking my eyes off of his body.
I was almost ashamed of the scenarios that played out in my head. When I looked into his eyes, I realized he must have known what I was thinking. He was serious, very serious. I felt exposed as he kneeled on the bed, his eyes telling me of his intentions, of promises of future kisses and caresses, of knowing, smelling, tasting each other in a perfect embrace.
Sparks of tenderness flew.
Madness overtook us.
My body yearned for his.
And his shouted out for me.
I got on my knees in front of him, grabbed the edge of my T-shirt, and pulled it over my head. He observed every inch of my nakedness as though peering into my soul.
“I can’t believe I ever forgot this.”
My nerves were raw, waiting for him to touch me, to see his hands on my body. I wanted to feel him. I wanted to know him again.
I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled him closer to me. My hands on his firm back, his tight waist, his abs contracting as I tore off his towel. It was all so different from that first night. He was so different. I was.
His lips touched mine, and we fell down on the bed, panting. I moaned as he touched me. He tickled my belly button and reached into my underwear, and I arched my back. I could feel him smiling as his lips traced a line from my neck to my stomach to my thighs. He kissed them, giving me goose bumps.
I felt it all: every soft touch, every stroke, so sweet it was painful. I melted in his mouth like molasses. He took me to the limit, tormenting me. I wanted to cry, to beg him to free me so I could touch the sky. Over and over, he took me to the edge and then drew back.
Then he climbed back up me, leaving a trail of kisses that led to my lips. I could feel his torso heavy against my breasts. I trembled in anticipation, wriggled my hips, tempting him, and he groaned into the hollow of my neck. Then he slipped inside, slow, but deep.
And just as the storm broke out above us, a storm of kisses, caresses, and moans broke out in the camper: whispers, breathing, groans, hips grinding, bodies touching, rocking, swaying, faster and faster, harder and harder, letting go.
Outside, the rain kept falling.