I’ll Give You the Sun(89)
Author: Jandy Nelson

“Really?”

“Oh yes. I know so much about you, you have no idea. I’ve been trying to reconcile the two girls in my mind. The Jude your mother talked about and the CJ I was falling in love with.” The past tense hitches on my heart. “She always joked that I wasn’t to meet you until I’d been sober for three years and you were at least twenty-five because she was certain we’d fall head over heels in love and that would be that for both of us. She thought we were kindred spirits.” He takes my hand and kisses the back of it, then rests it back on my lap. “She was right, I think.”

“But what? Because the but here is killing me, Oscar.”

He looks away from me. “But it’s not our time. Not yet.”

“No,” I say. “It is our time. It’s absolutely most definitely our time. I know you know it is too. It’s Guillermo making you do this.”

“No. It’s your mother making me do this.”

“You’re not that much older than me.”

“I’m three years older than you, which is a lot now but won’t always be.” I think how much less the three years between him and me seem than the years between Zephyr and me seemed when I was fourteen. I feel like Oscar and I are the same age.

“But you’ll fall in love with someone else,” I say.

“It’s much more likely you will.”

“Not possible. You’re the guy in the portrait.”

“And you’re the girl in the prophecy.”

“My mother’s prophecy too, it seems,” I say, taking his arm, thinking how strange it is that I gave Oscar a note Guillermo meant for my mother, like the words had fallen through time from them to us. Like a blessing.

“You’re still in high school,” Oscar’s saying. “You’re not even sodding legal, which didn’t occur to me until Guillermo pointed it out a few hundred times last night. We can be great friends. We can bounce around on Hippity Hops and play chess and I don’t know what.” There’s hesitation, frustration in his voice, but then he smiles. “I’ll wait for you. I’ll live in a cave. Or become a monk for a few years, wear a robe, shave the head, the whole bit. I don’t know, I just really need to do the right thing here.”

This is not happening. If ever there was a moment to press PLAY, it’s this one. Words start tumbling out of me. “And the right thing is turning our backs on what might be the love story of our lives? The right thing is denying destiny, denying all the forces that have conspired to bring us together, forces that have been at work for years now? No way.” I feel the spirits of both Sweetwine women who came before me uprising inside me. Hear the sound of horses galloping through generations. I go on. “My mother, who was about to upend her life for love, and my grandmother, who calls God himself Clark Gable, do not want us to run away from this, they want us to run toward it.” My hands are getting involved in the soliloquy thanks to Guillermo’s tutelage. “I ended the boycott for you. I gave up practically the entire world for you. And for the record, a sixteen-year-old girl and a nineteen-year-old guy are probably at the exact same maturity level. Furthermore Oscar, no offense, but you’re frightfully immature.”

He laughs at that and before he knows what’s happening I push him down and climb over and straddle him, holding his hands over his head so he’s helpless.

“Jude.”

“You know my name,” I say, smiling.

“Jude is my favorite of all the saints,” he says. “Patron saint of lost causes. The saint to call on when all hope is gone. The one in charge of miracles.”

“You’re kidding,” I say, letting go of his hands.

“I kid you not.”

So much better than traitorous Judas. “My new role model, then.”

He inches up my tank top and there’s just enough light from the house so that he can see the cherubs. His fingers trace their shapes. He holds my gaze, watching what his touch is doing to me, watching how it’s making me free-fall. My breathing’s getting faster and his eyes have gotten wavy with desire. “I thought you had impulse-control issues,” I whisper.

“Totally in control here.”

“Is that so?” I slip my hands under his shirt, let them wander, feel him tremble. He closes his eyes.

“Oh man, I bloody tried.” He swings his hand around my back and in one swift move he’s leaning over me, and then he’s kissing me and the joy I feel and the desire I feel and the love I feel and feel and feel—

“I’m crazy about you,” he says breathlessly, the bedlam in his face at an all-time peak.

“Me too,” I answer.

“And I’m going to be crazy about you for a very long time.”

“Me too.”

“I’m going to tell you the things I’m afraid to tell anyone else.”

“Me too.”

He leans back, smiles, touches my nose. “I think that Oscar is the most brilliant bloke I’ve ever met, not to mention, way hot, and ladies and gentlemen, what a lean he has.”

“Me too.”

“Where the hell is Ralph?” Prophet squawks.

Right effing here.

• • •

Noah and I are outside Guillermo’s studio. He wanted to come with me, but now he’s fidgeting. “I feel like we’re betraying Dad.”

“We asked Dad.”

“I know. But I still feel like we’re supposed to challenge Garcia to a duel in Dad’s honor.”

“That would be funny.”

Noah grins and shoulder-bumps me. “Yeah, it would.”

I get it, though. My feelings about Guillermo kaleidoscope from hating him one minute for destroying our family, for breaking my father’s heart, for a future that’s never going to happen—and, what would’ve happened? Would he have lived with us? Would I have moved in with Dad?—to adoring him the next moment, like I have from the very first time I laid eyes on him as Drunken Igor and he said he wasn’t okay. I keep thinking how strange it is that I would’ve met Guillermo and Oscar if Mom had lived too. We were all heading for each other on a collision course, no matter what. Maybe some people are just meant to be in the same story.

Guillermo’s not answering the door, so Noah and I let ourselves in and make our way together down the hallway. Something’s different, I notice, but only realize when we get into the mailroom what it is. The floors have been mopped, and unbelievably, the mail’s been cleared out. The door to the cyclone room is open and inside is an office again. I go to the doorway. In the center of the room, the broken angel is upright, with a stunning crack zigzagging across her back beneath her wings. I remember Guillermo saying the cracks and breaks were the best and most interesting parts of the work in my portfolio. Perhaps it’s the same with people and their cracks and breaks.