Mops took a deep breath at the same time I let mine out. Inhale—regret. Exhale—relief. I wondered how many times she’d dreamt it, woken up in a panic, wet with sweat. Something like that gnaws at a person, devouring from the inside out. It was a memory that clung to each day, unwilling to let go.
“The cops came shortly after that and took me in. They ticketed me, and my driver’s license was suspended for a while. We had to pay for the damage to the house. But I didn’t care about any of that. I knew I deserved worse. That baby had been in the kitchen with its mother, getting a bottle. If it hadn’t been, I would have killed someone else’s child.”
Mops started helping me sort through my box. Somewhere in the middle of her story, I’d forgotten what I was supposed to be doing.
“I hated myself,” she said. “I hated that I could have been the reason someone lost their baby, just like I lost mine. I quit drinking cold turkey. Not that it was easy. I went to meetings. I almost caved several times. Pops kept right on drinking, no matter how much I tried to help him. It wasn’t easy having it in the house. And your mom never forgave me. Sometimes I think she got pregnant just to punish me.
“But you were the best gift ever,” she added, reaching over and cupping my face. “After you came, I had a better reason to stay sober.”
Another reason I was going to feel guilty if I could manage to make it out of here. If I left, what would happen to Mom and Mops? I was the only family they had.
“Why are you telling me this now?” I asked.
“You should know.” Her face darkened. “And your mom needs to remember. She hasn’t ever forgiven me for being a drunk. She doesn’t need to make the same mistake I did.”
“She’s not a drunk,” I said, “not yet.” She hadn’t really started drinking until Pops died. She couldn’t become an alcoholic in seven months, could she? “It won’t get that bad.” But I’d learned that saying the words didn’t make them true.
“Let’s hope not.”
We closed the shop early, and I was home by four-thirty. It was too hot to run, but I needed to fly. The air was heavy and oppressive, and storm clouds built on the horizon. Maybe they’d be empty when they reached me. Maybe I’d be.
Solitude—what a perfect name. Our house was miles from town, which was miles from anywhere. Circles upon circles of nothing, with my room in the center. I’d never spent this much time alone before. It had always been
we
, not
me
. I was starting to get on my nerves. I needed out.
The air was thick and strained to hold up the clouds. I walked down the hill and past the small pond. Two weathered chairs guarded the marshy bank, their paint warped and peeling. A lazy drizzle scattered the pond’s stillness. I followed a small path into the woods. It was quiet. Even the birds and bugs waited to see what was going to happen.
I walked.
The drizzle turned to rain.
I kept walking.
Thunder began somewhere on the horizon and rumbled its way closer. I continued putting one foot in front of the other. It poured, soaking me, but I didn’t mind. It separated me from the rest of the world, a curtain of water that tucked me away. So I wasn’t at all prepared when she ran into view.
Jenna. She colored my thoughts, turning gray into Technicolor. Which was a bad thing. Just one of many. I couldn’t stop thinking about her, maybe because I shouldn’t have wanted her. Couldn’t have her. She was gorgeous—a risk I shouldn’t take. But I knew it was more than that.
She
was more than that. Like the way she held her head or the expression on her face when she thought I wasn’t looking. She was even more intriguing than she was beautiful.
Jenna wore gray cotton shorts and a gray tank top with maroon lettering. SHS Warriors. She was drenched, and I envied the rain. But despite the lightning, and the mud that was splattered on her shins, she was grinning. Watching her, I fell in love with storms.
She was pure movement. Powerful. Graceful. Moments after she appeared, she vanished into the trees, only to reappear much closer to me.
She didn’t see me until she was almost on top of me. Her smile disappeared as she jumped, startled, and darted away from me. I scared her. Not surprising. I sort of had that effect on people. Then she smiled at me, and my heart felt too big for my chest.
“Ian! You scared the hell out of me!”
Of course she thought I was Ian. Again. I was willing to bet he had no intention of telling her about me. I couldn’t blame him. I’d made a mess out of everything. And he didn’t even remember what happened to the last girlfriend of his I kissed. So the fact that I wanted to touch this beautiful girl standing in front of me threatened to ruin me. I’d always been a little self-destructive.
Jenna’s brow furrowed, and I knew she was wondering why I hadn’t said anything. Why
hadn’t
I said anything?
“Or not,” she said. “You’re Luke, aren’t you?”
“Guilty.” In all ways possible.
“Sorry.”
And then we stood there, staring at one another while the rain fell through the trees. Lightning struck somewhere nearby, the resulting boom shaking the earth.
“You’d better get home,” I told her. Better for everyone. Safer.
Her eyes narrowed. She didn’t like me telling her what to do. “You’d better get home too,” she said. She looked behind her. “Look, I live right over there. You should come in and wait out the storm. You’re a good three miles from your house.”
I should have said no, but I didn’t want to. And I usually did what I wanted, even though it almost always got me in trouble. Ian was going to be pissed. Jenna just might cause way more damage than any storm.
Jenna jogged ahead, and it wasn’t as easy to keep up with her as I thought it would be. I stared at the space in between her shoulders blades, pointedly keeping myself from staring at her butt. Or her legs. Both were pretty nice.
Her gray shirt melded into the sheet of rain. We sprinted behind a row of houses. With no trees to slow its fall, the rain pounded down on us, making sure I was thoroughly drenched. More lightning, louder thunder.
I followed Jenna into her garage and through the back door, both of us dripping water all over the tile. She handed me a towel, but I was too wet for it to do much good.
“I’ll be right back,” she told me, and she disappeared.
I felt really stupid just standing there. I tried to squeeze some of the wet out of my clothes, but that just made an even larger puddle on the floor. I was trying to clean it up when Jenna came back.
“Here.” She handed me a stack of clothes. “It’s the best I could do.” She pointed to the laundry room. “Change in there and toss your clothes in the dryer.”
“Already trying to get me out of my clothes.”
She laughed, and I felt the world stop. Her laugh was deep and loud and so full of possibility that it made me sad. Sad because I wanted to know her better. Sad because I couldn’t.
“Just do what I said,” she ordered.
I did as I was told, like a good boy. If she only knew. I winced at that. I would rather she didn’t. I had lost count of the lives I’d managed to destroy. That right there should’ve made me leave this girl alone. It didn’t.
I threw my clothes in the dryer, shoes too, which banged loudly once I turned the thing on. I put on the clothes she’d given me.
“You’re joking, right?” I shouted through the closed door, and over the thump of the dryer, I heard her giggle.
“Best I could do, remember?”
She’d brought me some of
her
clothes. The sweatpants were about four inches too short, and the T-shirt was really tight across my chest and arms. It was going to be all stretched out when I was through with it. I looked ridiculous. Not really the way I’d played it all out in my head. It was going to be hard to come off cool when I was dressed this way.
“This is pretty cruel,” I said as I came into the kitchen. Her face turned red as she tried not to laugh. “I mean, first you arrange for this storm so you can get me naked. Then you force me to wear girls’ clothes.”
“I didn’t force you to do anything.”
“So you wouldn’t mind if I just went
au naturel
while I waited for my clothes to dry?” I asked.
She eyed me, daring me. “Be my guest.”
She had no idea who she was talking to. I started to take off the shirt.
“No!” she hollered. She sounded a little afraid.
I laughed. “You’re right. The full effect can be a bit overwhelming.”
She filled a kettle and set it on the stove. “We don’t have any men around here,” she explained, “so it was that or one of my mom’s dresses.”
“Then this is perfect.” I sat down in one of the large chairs over by the window. It was a really comfortable room, and Jenna looked at home here, almost as much as she had in the woods. Almost. Stacked books sat on the small table between the two chairs, all of them worn and weathered, their covers creased and torn, their pages ruffled. An old lamp warmed the room as the rain continued to splash against the windows.
Jenna stood in the kitchen, barefoot and wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt that matched mine. A winged shoe was stamped at her hip and across the front of the shirt. Her hair hung in a braid down her back and left a wet spot between her shoulder blades, and I discovered that I had never wanted to kiss someone as much as I wanted to kiss her.
“You run cross-country?” I asked, trying to get the image of her lips out of my head.
“Yep. I’m one of two girls on the team.” She twisted her mouth down, but her voice gave her away—she was proud of that. She took two mugs out of the cabinet, and I tried not to look at the flat planes of her stomach as her T-shirt rode up. The kettle began to scream, and I looked away.
I picked up the book on the top of the stack and flipped through it. India.
“I like to read about different places,” she explained, pouring the boiling water over the tea bags. “Sugar?”
“Sure.”
She finished with the tea and handed me the steaming mug before folding herself into the other chair.
“So. Twins. That’s really cool.”
“It used to be,” I admitted. Now it was just awkward.
“Which one of you is the oldest?”
“I am, by seven minutes.” The room wrapped itself around Jenna. “You have any brothers or sisters?”
“Nope. Only child,” she said. “Just me, my mom, and Mops.”
“Who’s Mops?”
“My grandmother. She owns the secondhand store where I work.” She paused, her mouth forming a perfect “o.” Then she smiled. “That was you in there that day.”
I had to look away; her eyes were making me nervous. They kept me from thinking straight. “Sorry about that. I wasn’t supposed to go to town.”
“Why not?”
Shit. “Let’s just say I got into a little trouble back home. It’s a long story.” She had no idea how long. And she wasn’t going to know, not if I could help it.
At first it was weird, looking at Ian who wasn’t Ian. But after a while, I saw Luke. Even though he looked exactly like Ian, Luke was different. Darker. Funnier. His eyes had questions behind them rather than laughter, his jaw harsher than his brother’s.
I hardly noticed the storm. Hardly noticed the banging coming from the dryer or the fact that my tea had gotten cold. I really didn’t notice anything but Luke.
“God, can your mother even tell you two apart?” I joked. I’d been staring at Luke for the past half-hour and I was just noticing the subtle differences.
It was obviously the wrong question to ask. Luke’s eyes got very dark and there was something dangerous in his face. For a moment, I was afraid of him. For a moment, I realized I’d invited a complete stranger into the house. And that my mom wouldn’t be home for hours.
But then he grinned, and my fears melted away in the warmth of that smile. “We used to play tricks on her all the time when we were little. But tell me about Solitude,” Luke said. He looked genuinely interested—poor thing. It wouldn’t take long.
“Solitude sucks.”
He smiled. “Surely there are some good things about it.”
Not really. “Everybody is in everybody else’s business and I just want to go somewhere where no one knows me or my mom or my grandmother, where I can start fresh and do all sorts of unpredictable things I can’t do here.”
“Like what?” he asked. I could have drowned in the blue of his eyes.
“I don’t know. Anything. Everything. Just last week my best friend Becca was drinking coffee at a sidewalk café in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower and in the Louvre looking at paintings she didn’t appreciate.” I hated how bitter I sounded, but I’d been working and taking care of my mom and being responsible. “Hell, I’d settle for running naked through a subway station or something.”
“
That
I would like to see,” he said.
“There are some good things about Solitude.” I tried not to sound so cranky. “I love the store and the old train yard. I run in the woods all the time without ever seeing anyone.”
Luke smiled at me.
“Well, rarely seeing anyone,” I amended. “And the lake. Solitude Point is pretty cool.”
“Solitude Point—sounds lonely.”
“Yeah, everything around here is pretty lonely, but it’s a nice place to go if you want quiet. There’s this bluff, the Point, which juts out over the water. We used to jump off, before they outlawed it.”
“I’d love to see it,” he said, and his voice sent ripples through my stomach.
“We’ll go sometime, take a picnic or something,” I promised. I shouldn’t have. I should have been thinking about Ian. Not that he was my boyfriend. But it felt a little like cheating. But for once, I was doing something that wasn’t completely responsible. And that felt a little like freedom.
“I should probably get going,” Luke said.
I turned around and looked out the window. It was still pouring. “I’ll give you a ride.”
“No, really, that’s okay. I can walk. I’d rather walk.”
“Not in this. That’s stupid.”
He looked out the window, then back at me. “Okay. I do need to get back before my mom gets home. She doesn’t like me being out.”
I couldn’t imagine what he’d done that was so bad. I didn’t really want to.