I’ll Give You the Sun(81)
Author: Jandy Nelson

He modeled for Noah.

Oscar’s the guy in the portrait.

He’s him.

And this is exactly like I always imagined it.

I lean back out again into the night. “I gave up practically the whole world for you,” I tell him, walking through the front door of my own love story. “The sun, stars, ocean, trees, everything, I gave it all up for you.”

Bafflement crosses his face, quickly followed by delight. Quickly followed by both of my hands reaching for him, pulling him to me, because he’s him, and all the years of not noticing and not doing and not living are breaking through the dam of the moment until I’m kissing him hungrily, wanting my hands on his body, and I’m reaching for him, and he me, and his fingers are knotting in my hair and before I know it I’m all the way out the window and toppling him to the ground.

“Man overboard,” he murmurs, wrapping me up in his arms and we’re laughing and then the laughing dies out because who knew kissing could be like this, could so alter the landscape within, tipping over oceans, sending rivers up mountains, unpouring the rain.

He rolls us over so his body is pressing into mine, the weight of him, the weight of that other day, and Zephyr begins elbowing his way between us. My muscles tense. I open my eyes, afraid of the unseeing stranger I’ll find this time, but I don’t find a stranger. It’s Oscar, present, so present, with love in his face. That’s how come I trust him. You can see love. It looks like this face. To me, it has always looked like this crazy mismatched face.

He touches my cheek with his thumb, says, “It’s okay.” Like he somehow knows what happened.

“You sure?”

Around us the trees rustle softly.

“One hundred percent sure.” He gently tugs at the seashell. “Promise.”

The night’s warm, shy, barely touching our skin. It envelops us, entwines us. He kisses me slowly, tenderly, so that my heart creaks open, so that all those moments on the beach from that horrid, horrid day wash away, so that, just like that, the boycott comes to an end.

• • •

It’s extremely difficult to concentrate on Oscar in my bedroom because: Oscar is in my bedroom! Oscar, who’s the guy in the portrait!

He’s flipped out that the dresses on the walls and the one on my body were made by me and has now picked up a framed photograph of me surfing. He’s excavating me, just without hammer and chisel. “Pornography for an English bloke,” he says, waving the picture at me.

“Haven’t surfed in years,” I tell him.

“Shame.” He taps the Physician’s Desk Reference. “Now this I expected.” He picks up another photo. A jump off Devil’s. He studies it. “So you used to be a daredevil?”

“Guess so. I didn’t think about it. I just loved doing that kind of stuff then.” He looks up like he’s expecting me to say more. “When my mom died . . . I don’t know, I got scared. Of pretty much everything.”

He nods like he gets it, says, “It’s like a hand at your throat all the time, isn’t it? Nothing’s inevitable anymore. Not the next heartbeat, not anything.” More than gets it. He sits down on my sewing chair, regards the photo again. “Though I went the other way. Started using all that fear as a punching bag. Nearly got myself killed on a daily basis.” He frowns, puts down the picture. “That’s partly what the row with G. was about. He thinks I take ridiculous risks on the bike or in the past with drugs but won’t—” He stops when he sees my face. “What is it?”

“Oscar, I overheard some of that fight this morning. As soon as I realized you guys were arguing, I left, but—” I stifle the confession because I’m thinking his organs may have caught fire.

Not sure what’s happening, except that he’s on his feet and bounding toward me at a breakneck un-Oscar-like pace. “Then you know,” he says. “You must, CJ.”

“Know what?”

He takes me by the arms. “That I’m fucking terrified of you. That I can’t seem to keep you out like I can everyone else. That I think you could devastate me.”

Our breathing’s loud, fast, in synch. “I didn’t know,” I whisper, barely getting the words out before his mouth lands hard and urgent on mine. I feel the unrestrained emotion in his lips, feel it unburying, unleashing something in me, something daring and fearless and winged.

Ka-effing-pow.

“I’m so dead,” he says into my hair, “so dead,” into my neck, then pulls back, his eyes shining. “You’re going to obliterate me, aren’t you? I know it.” He laughs in an even more tumbling, cascading way than usual and there’s something new in his face, an openness, a freedom maybe. “You already have. Look at me. Who is this guy? I assure you no one’s ever met this tempest before. I haven’t met him before. And none of what I just told you was really even part of the fight with G., for Christ’s sake! I just had to tell you. You have to know I’ve never”—he waves his hand in the air—“flipped the lid before. Not even close. Not a lid flipper.” He’s saying he’s never been in love? I remember Guillermo telling him how he hurts before he can be hurt, how he lets no one in. But he can’t keep me out?

“Oscar,” I say.

He puts his palms on my cheeks. “Nothing happened with Brooke after you left. Nothing. After I told you that stuff about my mother and me, I totally freaked out and was this total wanker. A coward—you probably heard that fine praise this morning on G.’s lips. I think I tried to ruin this before . . .” I follow his gaze to the window, to the black world outside this room. “I kept thinking now that you had a glimpse of the underbelly, of who I really was, you’d—”

“No,” I say, understanding. “It was the opposite. It made me feel closer to you. But I get it, I think the same way, like if people really knew me, they could never—”

“I could,” he says.

It kicks the breath out of me, kicks bright light into me.

At the same time, we reach for each other and then we’re in each other’s arms, joined together, pressed together, but this time not kissing, not moving, just holding each other so tightly. Moments pass, lots and lots of them, with us holding on, it feels like for dear life, or maybe holding on to dear life. So dear.

“Now that you have the seashell,” he says, “I’m thinking this is about as much distance I can safely be away from you at all times.”