Losing Francesca (22 page)

"So you won't let him just take you back? You'll at least stand your ground and stay with us for a while?"

I nod and let out a long breath. "Yes, I will. OK?" We're at his house now and I'm tired of fighting. "Does that make you feel better?"

He stops us halfway up the driveway and pulls me into his chest. "It does. Sorry for pushing you, I just needed to hear it, that's all. Thank you."

I lean up on my tiptoes and kiss him on the lips. He responds and rubs his hand up underneath my shirt. A wave of chills rockets through my body and I draw in a deep sigh against his mouth. "Let's go up to your room."

He laughs and looks sideways at me. "Nice try. We're not going up to my room."

"God, of all the man-whores in this world, why do I have to get the one who renounces his religion just as I'm about to convert? Why?"

"We had this conversation earlier, remember?"

"Yeah, but I figured you're corruptible. Right? You were all kinds of corrupted from what I hear. Now, just when I show up, you're on the straight and narrow? And you're not even remotely interested"—I slip my hands under his shirt now, teasing his back with the tips of my nails—"in deflowering me?"

He bursts out laughing. "Where do you get this stuff?"

"Books. It's all about deflowering and v-cards and cherries and—"

"OK, I've heard enough, I can't even listen to this stuff come out of your mouth! Your response has been recorded, Miss Sullivan, I'll weigh all my options and let you know."

"Let me know when?" I prod. "And how can I tip the scale in my favor?"

"OK," he says, looking down at me with a sly gleam in his eyes. "I'll tell you what. If you tell your dad you want to stay for a while, I'll deflower you—Oh, God, I can't believe I just said that word!"

I stifle down a giggle at his flushed face. "Hmmm… I think talking you into it makes it less fun. Sean's right, I should play hard to get."

"Now I've heard everything! You're talking about sex with me to your brother?"

"No, that's gross. But I told him I think I love you last night." This is a bomb that he was not expecting and it shows. He just stares at me with his mouth open. "Hello? Are you OK?"

"You told him that?"

I nod.

"What did he say?"

"Um…" Crap, we're right back to where we were. "He told me the same thing you're telling me. Stay with him, let myself be loved by them."

"And what did you say?"

"I went inside and that's exactly where I want to go right now. Inside. To your room!" I pull him and he reluctantly follows until we get to the porch and then he opens the door and waves me in. I make right for the stairs, but he grabs me by the waist and swings me around. I squeal as he sets me down in the living room.

"The computer is right there, Fee. And that's as far as you're going in here tonight."

I can barely contain my blush and my smile. "You would be so easy to corrupt."

"No, Fee. Not with you," he says as his expression turns serious. "I
am
going to be the one. I
am
going to be your first. But I'm not gonna rush it, or ask for it, or plan for it, or let you talk me into it. Because you are so much more than sex to me, Fiona. You are so much more. When it's time, we'll know. It will happen."

Chapter Thirty-Two - Brody

I take her by the hand and lead her over to the couch. Parker is the only one of us Mason kids who's into computers, so he has his own setup in his room, the rest of us just use the family laptop. We settle in and I pop open the computer, sign on, and hand it over to her. "Go ahead, knock yourself out."

She pulls out her phone and I grab the charger off the coffee table and plug it in for her, then pull up the pictures.

That picture of our feet in the creek seems like months ago. Fiona coming home seems like years ago. Fiona going missing feels like it never happened, that's how completely she has filled my life and wiped away all those bad years.

She logs in and starts messing around with the back-end of her blog and I play with her hair as she chats about posting, and comments, and followers, and all sorts of stuff that make about as much sense to me as that horse back at the farm.

But I don't care.

I listen to every word. I pay attention to every word. I watch her fingers type out her feelings about being at the creek that day and she even writes about me.

She calls me
a new boy
.

"Plug your phone in now, Brody. So I can put up the one with the horse."

I disconnect her phone and plug mine in and she finds the image and uploads that one too. I take a deep breath and lean back as I put my arm behind her on the couch.

After a few minutes she stops and looks up at me. "Ready?"

"For?"

"To see my blog? You said you wanted to, do you still?"

"Absolutely. I'm ready." You couldn't pay me a million dollars to miss this moment with her.

"OK." She's not looking at me, so it's not easy to tell, but I can see how her cheeks puff out a bit from the side and I know she is beaming with happiness.

The page begins to load and I watch as the images appear.

The header is a picture of just her feet on a beach, like she's lying down and looking down her legs, like her feet are looking out at the ocean because they're on vacation. Her little toenails are painted cherry red and the name of her blog is
My Well-Traveled Feet
.

"You are so fucking cute, Fiona."

She giggles and sinks into my chest. "Not cute enough, apparently," she says with a sideways glance.

I drag the hair away from her neck with the slightest of movements and feel her shiver, then lean down to kiss her in that little dent at the base of her skull. "When it's time for that, Fee, believe me, you will have my undivided attention. I will make love to you thoroughly, and I'll take that flower and your heart at the same time. And you will be the last girl I'll ever love like that.
Ever
."

I can feel her swallow hard and she leans her head into my shoulder. "I don't want him to come."

"Just tell him no."

But she sighs. "I don't know if I can, Brody. I have never said no to him before. He's just trying to protect me, it feels wrong to make him worry. I hate the fact that he has to worry about me constantly."

"But why are you in danger in the first place?" She stays silent. "The only possible reason for your life to be so secret is because of who he is and what he does. None of that has anything to do with you. Or Fiona Sullivan. If you were just Fiona Sullivan, you wouldn't
be
in danger."

"But what if I'm not Fiona Sullivan? What then? Will you stop wanting me?"

She looks up and I give her a squeeze. "You. Are. Her."

"But just pretend I'm not Fiona. Just pretend I'm really that other girl. What then?"

"What nothing. I don't care. I do not care one way or the other. I know you're her, but if somehow, some way, it turns out you're not, I don't care. I still want you."

We sit in the silence a little more and she refreshes her blog page. Already there are a dozen comments from people asking where she is and what she's been doing. She types in a few vague lines about being on vacation and I figure she's got it down to a science, because half of what she writes is the truth and half of it is made up.

She tells them about the creek. It's in America, she hints. It's in the woods, she hints. The boy is hot, she insists.

I smile at that.

And the horse was a gift. Again, not a lie. The big boot is the hot boy, the little boot is her.

I watch them all go back and forth for several minutes and it feels a little like peeking into a girls' locker room, or a sleepover party, or any of the dozens of places girls go to be with each other and do girl things. All this is happening on her blog, right in front of me, and she's not embarrassed. She talks about me, she describes how I look, the things I've said to her. She calls me a gentleman, a nice boy, and a good person.

I don't think anyone has ever called me any of those things, let alone all three in the same sentence. Certainly never written them about me while I was sitting less than three inches away.

She logs on to a Facebook page with the same name as her blog and chats with them on there as well. And after about a half hour of her typing and snickering to her online girlfriends, as I twirl my fingers in her hair and trace the little dent in the back of her neck, she finally flips the computer closed and sighs.

"Thank you so much. I really needed that. I didn't realize how important my blog friends were until just now. Even though I've never met any of them, and even though we live all over the world in very different places, I really enjoy their company."

"You don't have to stop if you don't want to. I'm not bored."

She turns her whole body and looks at me. "Can we go back to the beach for a while? I want a picture down there too."

"We can do whatever you want, Fiona. Leave your phone here to charge and we'll pick it up on the way home." She hands it back as I disconnect mine and exchange it for hers and then I pull her up and take her back outside. She swings my hand as we walk and talks about lightning bugs. We trek through the grass and the shrubs to get out to our beach and then take a seat on the sand down near the water. The tide is receding and the waves are calm.

"It's pretty here," she says suddenly. "I mean, the South Pacific is spectacular as far as natural beauty goes. It's got a lot going for it. And our island is so beautiful, I can barely comprehend it when I look out my bedroom window. But this place is pretty, too. We don't have trees like this in the tropics. They're spindly, not majestic and thick."

I look around and take notice of the old elms and oaks behind us. "I have very little experience with other places, so this is really all I know."

She lies down on her stomach, picks up a thin twig, and starts drawing in the wet sand as she gently kicks her feet back and forth in long arcs. I get a little lost in their hypnotic rhythm for a few moments. "I've been almost everywhere, I've seen almost everything, and I'm tired of it." She draws for a few more second and then scoots back and sits up. "My well-traveled feet need a rest, Brody."

I look over in the sand and catch her doodle before a thin layer of water reaches out and wipes it away.

The word in the sand simply says
home
.

I bet she's wondering where that is right about now.

"When I was little, after you disappeared, I used to come down here to think about what it meant that you were gone. I looked for you, Fee. I spent entire summers out in the woods alone, wandering around. Pretending this place was Italy and you were being held captive by kidnappers. I fantasized about rescuing you."

"Did you ever find me?" she asks as she grabs hold of my arm and leans against my shoulder.

"No. I would never let myself find you because I knew it would hurt so much more if I fantasized about you coming back and then had to accept reality, accept that you were still gone and you'd probably never be back. I can't even explain how I feel about you, or how I felt when I found out you wouldn't be on the bus for school." It's my turn to pick up a twig and trace lines in the sand.

"Let's take a picture," she says after several long minutes of silence.

I fish out my camera. "Point your toes at my boots."

"No, I mean, let's take a real picture. Of us. Can we do that?"

"It's up to you, Fee. You're the one in charge here."

She squints hard at me as she thinks about this. "Nothing has ever been up to me before, Brody. I'm not very good at making decisions. So can you just tell me it's OK?"

I huff out a little laugh. "I think I'd like nothing more in this world than to have a picture of us together."

She bounces to her feet. "OK, well, let's make it with the lake behind us. Maybe we can use the moon instead of a flash for light?"

The moon is almost full and pretty bright, maybe even bright enough to light up a photo, so I turn off the flash, stand up, and put my arm around her. I hold the camera out and snap the picture and then turn it around so we can see. We are smiling in the moonlight, which is just bright enough to make the captured moment seem dark and dramatic.

"Oh, I want one, hand it over so I can send my phone a copy right now! I'll look at it all night and get no sleep."

She's happy and laughing now, but the end of this day feels sad to me.

It feels desperate, like clinging.

Like we're clinging to all the good things that have happened in the past few days. It feels like her father is very close. It feels like she's about to be stolen away from me again. I look down and spy my drawing in the sand as she busies herself with the photo on my phone. It's a heart with a crack in it.

That's how I felt that first day of school as I waited for the bus that would
not
be the place where I declared my love for her with my Fruit Roll-Up. And that's how I've felt every day since then, until that day I picked her up on my dirt bike and finally, after twelve years of acting out, and sadness, and anger, and fear, and despair—I
finally
got my chance to rescue Fiona Sullivan out in the woods and set things right. For both of us.