Forever Innocent (14 page)

I managed to answer when he asked questions, but my mind wasn’t on the conversation anymore. I wanted to give him a shirt, so that I would stop looking at his chest. I’d been up against it twice already, and when he kissed me earlier, it had taken everything I had to get away.

But dang it, he made me mad. I was still so disgusted that our private story was out.

Gavin seemed to realize I’d quit paying attention and just watched me with those cool blue eyes.

I closed my own to cut off the visuals feeding my distraction, letting my head fall against the wall. Calling him had been a good thing. I felt in control again, less afraid of what had happened in the bathroom. Maybe now that the moment had passed I would be all right. I could send Gavin home, and we’d see each other in class on Monday, and fall into something easier than we’d endured so far. If I kept it light, then my secrets could stay tucked away. No more drama. No disaster or rejection or guilt.

His breath on my neck made me snap my eyes open.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

“No! I’m fine. This is fine. It’s good. Thank you.” God, I was gushing.

He picked up my hand and bent each finger, one at a time. My heart sped up crazy fast. He first starting doing this when we were young and just experimenting with kissing and touching. He saw it in some movie and realized when he did it that it had an effect on me that worked even better than on the woman on the screen.

Later, when we were lovers, he’d do it when we were out in public, just to tease me, knowing it made me think of all the things it led to. Feeling it now, each finger getting its own moment of attention, everything flooded back. The innocence we knew as children and friends. The playful way we copied the grown-ups around us, acting like other couples, sometimes as a joke, and other times in perfect seriousness.

And of course, later, when we knew the baby was coming, and that we would marry, and life might be accelerated, but was still the path we planned to go down eventually.

I struggled to find a way to avoid that dangerous direction. “You did this at Finn’s sonogram,” I said. “You know, the big one when we found out if he was a boy or a girl.” And if he was normal, I thought.

The sonogram had been fine, showing a healthy boy right on target for the dates they’d established before. We had no idea then that Finn would be born early and with a heart condition.

“That was a good day,” Gavin said. He brought my hand to his lips and kissed each finger.

Heat flooded through me again, and I knew I was falling. “He was so beautiful.”

“He was.”

“Sometimes he doesn’t seem real.”

Gavin gripped my hand and held it to his cheek. “I feel that way a lot.”

He did?

“You think about him? You had his picture.” My chest still warmed over, seeing it, even though I hadn’t been ready when Gavin pulled it out in the stairwell.

“Pretty much every day.” He let go of my hand and stretched out on the floor, hands beneath his head.

I was both relieved and disappointed that he moved away. “But you — you can manage it. You don’t get upset?”

He frowned. “Not much upsets me anymore.”

“How does that work?” I felt like I was getting worse, not better, although until Gavin had come back, I had been in a manageable place.

“I burned it out of me with beer and work and everyday life.”

“I can’t do that. I can’t watch TV for the baby commercials. And some stores are insufferable. There’s this sign on campus —”

“I know the one.”

“Tripped me up.”

Gavin stared up at the ceiling. “Could you be pregnant? We can help.” He looked over at me and his abs crunched together in a way I only knew from Hollister ads. “I know what it’s for, but I want to paint the whole kiosk black.”

“We never considered anything but keeping the baby, did we?”

“Nope. Hell, half the town was excited for us.”

It was true. So many of our classmates married right out of high school anyway. Jumping the gun hadn’t caused much of anyone so much as a blink.

“Remember how Old Man Wilkins brought over that ancient stool?” Gavin asked.

“It was so sweet. It had belonged to his little boy. I still have it.”

Gavin sat up. “Really?”

“Sure. It’s on the other end of the sofa.”

Gavin stood fluidly, each muscle taut, and I tried not to think about him as anything but, well, like Austin, or lumberjack boy, or my coworkers — guys I’d come across and felt no temptation with whatsoever.

Who was I kidding?

He picked up the little green stool. “Do you have anything else from our old place?” he asked.

I pushed myself up, not nearly as gracefully as he had. “Just small things. The bedside table. The little hula-girl lamp.”

“Hula girl!”

I had to smile. “Yes, the gift from the art teacher. She was always a little strange.”

“You just say that because she loved my bad paintings of waterfalls better than your bad paintings of waterfalls. Can I see her?”

“Sure.” I led him down the hallway to the bedroom, not realizing what a terrible idea it might be until I flipped on the light and saw the unmade bed, sheets strewn in every direction.

Gavin passed me and beelined for the lamp. “Turn off the overhead!”

I waited until he had his hand under the girl’s skirt, then killed the main light. Gavin switched on hula girl and as she warmed up, her hips swayed gently back and forth.

He looked over at me, his face bathed in the greenish light. “I missed her!”

I could barely swallow then. Seeing him there, leaning over the lamp, we could be in any time, any place.

Gavin must have noticed I had changed. He walked back to me and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear, another familiar gesture that completed the sense that we had arrived in some other moment in our history. “This is good, really good. Don’t you think?”

I nodded, not trusting my voice. This was going to happen. It had already begun.

Chapter 21: Gavin

Something had shifted in Corabelle. But it had been pushing and pulling all night, so I didn’t trust it. She’d been in my arms by the door, and again on the sofa, and I’d screwed it up every single time. I turned away and sat on her bed, looking for something else from our past to comment on, something easy.

Hula girl swayed on her stand, keeping the light moving like a wave. Corabelle’s room was simple, sparsely decorated, and all the pictures on the wall were of her family.

Then I saw it.

The frame held four images, two tall and two wide. The first picture was the sonogram, Finn’s shape clear in white on black. The next was the first shot, one I had taken, right after he was born, red faced and covered in a white paste. The last two were after they hooked him to the ventilator, the blue tape covering his mouth.

So much for keeping it easy.

She saw me looking and sat on the bed next to me. I wondered why she hung them up if she didn’t want anyone to know, and then I realized it was because no one came here. No one was in her room but her. She kept herself separate. Jenny said she only saw Corabelle at work.

How alone we’d both been. I’d busied myself with work, and playing pool with Mario, and paying girls to keep me company. But we stayed away from attachments, from closeness. We were the same.

“I just had the one from the funeral,” I said. “I didn’t take anything with me when I left.”

“I know. I thought you’d be back soon because you hadn’t packed so much as a toothbrush.” Her arm brushed against mine, but she didn’t move away.

“I really thought I’d come back. It’s just the farther I went, the harder it got to turn around.”

The moment had arrived to tell her what I’d done, and why I’d stayed away. Just get it over with and see if she hated me or not, if she could forgive me. Maybe she would just say, get a reversal. Or maybe she’d take it so personally that the rift would tear us apart a second time.

But she laid her head on my shoulder and I couldn’t breathe. Her fingers closed around my arm, and my blood rushed so hard, it was everything I could do not to pull her down on that bed, to love her mercilessly and without hesitation. Maybe we needed something stronger before we went down those dark paths. Maybe we could build again.

“Remember in the sunroom?” I couldn’t say anything else, not trusting my voice to hold together.

“Which time? We were busy in there.”

“The first time.”

“Ah. Yes.”

“Your parents thought it would be okay to leave us to go to that fire station fund-raiser,” I said.

“We were only fifteen.”

“Going on twenty.”

Corabelle squeezed my arm. “They had no idea.”

“What movie had done it this time?”

“
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
.”

“Yes, Kate Hudson. Hot.”

Corabelle smacked my thigh.

“You did the same thing that night,” I said, laughing.

“What was the scene that got us?”

“In the bathroom, when they finally decide they actually like each other. He takes off her shirt.” I remembered that so clearly. As soon as I saw it, I wanted to do it with Corabelle. When the movie ended, we went into the sunroom, our together space since her parents were weird about me going in her bedroom now. We turned out the lights and talked for a while, then I stood up and dragged her with me.

“Raise your arms,” I told her.

Corabelle had giggled. “What for?”

“Just do it.”

The seriousness of my tone sobered her up. “Like in the movie?”

“Like that.”

She looked up at me, dark haired where the actress was blond, but just as intense, just as sure, and lifted her arms in the air. I held on to the bottom of her shirt, barely able to breathe, and lifted it over her head.

We were young, and we fumbled, but Corabelle was already on the shot, so we had nothing to worry about except the how and the where. And once we began, there was no stopping us.

“You ever listen to that song anymore?” I asked her.

“I put the CD away with Finn’s things after you left.”

“You have it here?”

She hesitated. “Yes, but I can’t open that box.”

“Let me.”

“It’s under the bed. You’ll know it.” Her voice was unsteady.

I pulled away and knelt low, fumbling in the low light. But she was right. I remembered the box, given to us by the hospital just for the baby’s things. A blanket. A little outfit. A candle. A handprint kit. We’d gone through it in the two days between his death and the funeral. The box had been put together by some volunteer group for families like us.

I didn’t pull the box out, just lifted the lid a few inches. The CD was on top, and I was grateful, because just seeing the blanket was more than enough for me. “You got anything to play this on?”

“My laptop has a CD drive. Are you — are you sure we should?”

“I’d like to.”

Corabelle moved to a backpack in the corner and tugged out her computer. She passed it to me, so I opened it up, waited for the chime, and opened the CD tray.

The first song of the soundtrack wasn’t right, so I skipped down to “Feels Like Home.” Hearing that crystal voice sent me back in time so fast that I half expected to look up and see that we were in the sunroom and Corabelle was holding her arms in the air. I realized she was wearing the same white tank from that scene, and I had to wonder about fate, timing, and what exactly the world had in mind when it signed us both up for the same class at the university we had once planned to go to before everything else happened, before life got so dark that it split us apart.

Before
I
split us apart.

The enormity of my regret crashed over me. I wanted to shut off the song, stop it all. I reached for the keyboard but Corabelle knew what I was doing and grabbed my wrist. “Let’s just get through it. I know it’s hard, but let’s just tough it out.”

The chorus tore through my heart. I was home. We were home. All we had to do was decide that this was where we belonged. She had to forgive me for leaving. Then she had to know what I had done, and forgive me all over again.

I pushed the laptop out of the way and moved closer to her. The mattress dipped and knocked us together. She fell on me, and I held on. The moment to tell her had come a second time, and I had to be man enough to say the words.

Chapter 22: Corabelle

I had to tell him what I’d done. The only way to move on with my life was through his forgiveness. I could start with what happened earlier that day with Austin, then back to New Mexico State and my arrest, and then the worst of all.

He was looking at me with those blue eyes, like I was the only thing in the world, just the way he had always done. I had forgotten what that could feel like. How important it was to be loved like that. How it could heal.

“Corabelle —”

“Gavin —”

We both stopped at the same time and just when I thought we’d both laugh, instead, we both almost sobbed, coming together in a crash, his arms tight around me and mine gripping him like a lifeline.

It was too much, my need of him overwhelming, how hard I ached. He shuddered against me, and I could feel the emotion passing between us. For the first time in four long years, I thought —
I can be that girl I once was. I can have hope. I can find happiness.

Gavin was home to me. Just like that night so many years ago, I looked up at him with a mixture of anxiety and certainty, and just like then, just like in the movie, I raised my hands over my head to let him start the journey all over again.

He never took his eyes off mine, but his fingers grasped the bottom of the white tank — God, the same type of shirt as that scene, I realized — and tugged it up and off.

“Corabelle,” he whispered, looking at me as if he’d never seen me before.

“I’m here.”

He pulled me in, letting our skin have its own reunion. His chest was hard and almost hot to the touch. His heart hammered against mine. I wanted him to kiss me again, needed it more than I’d ever needed anything in my whole life. He took his time, running his fingers up the back of my neck and into my hair.