I’ll Give You the Sun(67)
Author: Jandy Nelson

“Quite an existential dilemma that parrot has put us all in,” Mom says, smiling at him.

He returns her smile, then meets my eyes. “Ready?” he says, like we have some plan.

I notice he doesn’t have his meteorite bag and see out the window it’s probably going to pour any minute, but we need to get out of here. Immediately. “We’re going to search for meteorites,” I say, like that’s what most people do on winter mornings. I never really told either of them too much about last summer, which is reflected in both of their flummoxed faces. But who freaking cares?

Not us.

In a flash, we’re through the door, across the street and into the woods, running for no reason and laughing for no reason and totally out of breath and out of our minds when Brian catches me by my shirt, whips me around, and with one strong hand flat against my chest, he pushes me against a tree and kisses me so hard I go blind.

• • •

The blindness lasts just a second, then the colors start flooding into me: not through my eyes but right through my skin, replacing blood and bone, muscle and sinew, until I am redorangebluegreenpurpleyellowredorangebluegreenpurpleyellow.

Brian pulls away and looks at me. “Fuck,” he says. “I’ve wanted to do that for so long.” His breath’s on my face. “So long. You’re just . . .” He doesn’t finish, instead he brushes my cheek with the back of his hand. The gesture is startling, atom-splitting, because it’s so unexpected, so tender. As is the look in his eyes. It makes my chest ache with joy, horses-plunging-into-rivers joy.

“God,” I whisper. “It’s happening.”

“Yeah, it is.”

I think the heart of every living thing on earth is beating in my body.

I run my hands through his hair, finally, finally, then bring his head to mine and kiss him so hard our teeth collide, planets collide, kissing him now for each and every time we didn’t all summer long. I know absolutely everything about how to kiss him too, how to make his whole body tremble just from biting his lip, how to make him moan right inside my mouth by whispering his name, how to make his head fall back, his spine arch, how to make him groan through his teeth. It’s like I’ve taken every class there is on the subject. And even as I’m kissing him and kissing him and kissing him, I wish I were kissing him, wanting more, more, more, more, like I can’t get enough, never will be able to get enough.

“We’re them,” I think/say, stopping for a moment to catch my breath, my life, our mouths inches apart, our foreheads pressed together now.

“Who?” His voice is a rasp. It creates an immediate riot in my blood, so I can’t tell him about the guys in the alcove at the party. Instead, I place my hands under his shirt, because I can now, I can do everything I’ve thought and thought and thought about. I touch the river of his stomach, his chest and shoulders. He whispers the word yeah under his breath, which makes me shudder, which makes him shudder, and then his hands travel under my shirt and the demanding hungry feel of them on my skin burns me to the ground.

Love, I think and think and think and think and don’t say. Don’t say it.

Don’t say it. Don’t tell him you love him.

But I do. I love him more than anything.

I close my eyes and drown in color, open them and drown in light because billions and billions of buckets of light are being emptied on our heads from above.

This is it. This is freaking everything. This is the painting painting itself.

And that’s what I’m thinking when the asteroid comes crashing into us.

“No one can know,” he says. “Ever.”

I step back, look at him. In an instant, he’s turned into a siren. The whole forest goes mum. It doesn’t want anything to do with what he just said either.

He says more calmly, “It’d be the end. Of everything. My athletic scholarship at Forrester. I’m the assistant captain of the varsity team as a sophomore and—”

I want him to be quiet. I want him back with me. I want his face to look the way it did a minute ago when I touched his stomach, his chest, when he brushed my cheek with his hand. I lift up his shirt, slip it over his talking head, then take off my own, and step into him so we’re all lined up, legs to legs, groin to groin, bare chest to bare chest. His breath hitches. We fit perfectly. I kiss him slowly and deeply until the only word he can manage is my name.

He says it again.

And again.

Until we’re two lit candles melting into one.

“No one’s gonna find out. Don’t worry,” I whisper, not caring if everyone in the whole world knows, not caring about anything except more now him and me under the open sky as thunder cracks and the rain comes down.

• • •

I’m propped on my bed drawing Brian, who’s a few feet away at my desk watching a meteor shower on some astronomy site he’s addicted to. In the drawing, the stars and planets are storming out of the computer screen and into the room. This is the first time we’ve seen each other since the woods except for the kabillion times I’ve seen him in my mind over the last few days, which included Christmas. What happened between us has colonized every last brain cell. I can barely tie my shoelaces. I forgot how to chew this morning.

I thought maybe he’d hide from me for the rest of our lives, but a few minutes after I heard his mom’s car pull into the garage today, signaling their return from some Buddhist center up north, he was at my window. I’ve listened to an endless state of the intergalactic union and now we’re fighting about whose Christmas was worse. He’s acting like what happened between us didn’t happen, so I am too. Well, trying to. My heart’s bigger than a blue whale’s, which needs its own parking spot. Not to mention my eight feet of concrete, which has kept me perpetually in the shower. I am so clean. If there’s a drought, blame me.

In fact, I just happen to be thinking about the shower, him and me in it, thinking about hot water sliding down our naked bodies, thinking about pressing him against the wall, about gliding my hands all over him, thinking about the sounds he’d make, how he’d throw his head back and say yeah like he did in the woods, thinking all this, as I tell him in an even, controlled voice how Jude and I spent Christmas in Dad’s hotel room eating takeout Chinese food and breathing gray air. It’s amazing how many things you can do at once. It’s amazing how what goes on in the head stays in the head.

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Do Not Disturb)