Made You Up (19 page)

“He told me to give it to you,” Miles said after a solid minute of staring out the windshield.

I was about to make a joke about how good that was, because someone needed to teach him some manners, but then I saw the look on his face.

“Let’s go,” I said softly. “We shouldn’t be too far from home, right?” Miles nodded and threw the truck in drive.

T
wenty minutes later I had to start talking to keep Miles awake. My lengthy lecture on the Napoleonic Wars (one of Charlie’s favorite subjects) was cut short by the familiar streets of town and what I could only describe as a message from God.

The Meijer sign.

“Stop for a minute,” I said, turning around to look at the store.

“What?”

“We need to go to Meijer.”

“Why?”

“Trust me, we need to go to Meijer. Pull in and park.”

He swung into the parking lot and drove as close as he could get to the doors. I almost had to drag him out of the cab and into the store.

“I work here all the time,” he whined, yawning. “Why did we have to stop?”

“You’re a baby when you’re tired, you know that?”

I pulled him toward the deli counter. His coworkers gave us odd looks as we passed by. Miles waved them off. The main aisle was empty.

Miles nearly crashed into the lobster tank when I stopped in front of it. He blinked once, stared down at it, then looked at me.

“It’s a lobster tank,” he said.

I took a deep breath. Now or never.

“It’s
the
lobster tank,” I said. “Your mom told me you remembered.”

Miles looked back at the tank, the water reflected in his glasses. At first I thought I’d been wrong, that the odds had been too high, that maybe my mother had been right this whole time and I had made the whole thing up. But then he said, “Do you do this all the time?”

“No,” I replied. “Just today.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “You smell like lemons.”

I rose up on my toes.

He turned, his hands finding my waist, his lips finding mine like he’d been preparing himself for this moment.

Saying I wasn’t ready for it was an understatement.

I wasn’t ready for the emotion, and I wasn’t ready for the
way his long, chilly fingers worked their way under my jacket and sweatshirt and shirt and pressed into my hips, raising goose bumps on my skin. Everything around us drifted away. Miles groaned. The vibration rippled through my lips.

The heat. How did I not notice the heat? There was a furnace between the layers of clothing that separated us.

I pushed away. He breathed heavily, watching me with alert, hungry eyes.

“Miles.”

“Sorry.” His huskier-than-usual voice didn’t sound sorry.

“No—I—do you want to come back to my house?”

He hesitated for a moment; in his eyes, I saw him working out the meaning of my words. It took him so much longer to figure it out than a math problem or a word puzzle. Those he got immediately. This took all his brain power.

I had to believe he’d been born with this confusion, this inability to understand people, because the alternative was that he’d been conditioned to think no one would ever suggest something like this to him, and he simply couldn’t process it when someone did. And that was too sad to believe.

“You . . . you mean . . . ?” His eyebrows creased.

“Yes.”

His breath hitched. “Are you sure?”

I let my fingers wander to the waistband of his jeans. “Yes.”

W
e didn’t talk on the way to my house. Miles’s knuckles were white against the steering wheel, and he kept glancing over at me every few seconds. I knew this because I kept glancing over at him, too. Something wiggling and strange tunneled through my stomach, half excitement, half terror. When he pulled up the driveway and reached over to unbuckle his seatbelt, I held him back.

“Wait. Let me go in first. Drive down the street some, then walk back. You know which window is my room?”

“No.”

I showed him. “Come to the window. I’ll let you in.”

I marched up to the front door, perimeter checking the yard as I went, trying to be as casual as possible when I stepped into the house and flipped the bolt behind me. I kicked my shoes off in the hallway and tiptoed past the family room.

“Alex?”

My mother.

“Hey, Mom.”

“I’m glad you’re home.” She stood from the couch and held out her hand. “I didn’t realize you’d be out so late— you need to take this.”

She gave me a pill. I swallowed it dry. “We stopped for dinner.”

“Did you have fun?”

“Um, yeah, I guess.” I wanted to be in my bedroom. Wanted to be shut in, safe, away from prying eyes. With Miles.

“How was Miles?”

“Good? I don’t know what you mean.”

“He was visiting his mother in a mental hospital. You’d think he’d have some sort of issues. Heaven knows the boy already seems a little . . . emotionally stunted. I’m half convinced he’s autistic.”

“So what if he is?”

She blinked at me. “What?”

“So what if Miles is autistic? And he’s not ‘emotionally stunted’—he has emotions like the rest of us. He just has trouble figuring out what they are, sometimes.”

“Alex, he seems very smart, but I don’t think he’s the best influence.”

I scoffed. If only she knew. “Then why’d you get so excited about the idea of me going with him? Because you wanted me to see where I’d be living after high school?”

“No, of course not! I didn’t mean it like that.”

I shrugged my jacket off and hung it on the coatrack. “I’m going to bed. Please don’t bother me.”

I left her standing in the dark entryway and slipped back to my room, closing and locking the door behind me. I didn’t bother with a perimeter check. I didn’t care. Joseph Stalin himself could’ve been standing in the corner and I wouldn’t have cared. I lifted the window and popped out the screen.

“Be quiet,” I said.

Miles had no trouble with that. He slinked into the room, blending into the darkness. I found him by touch and brought him close, helping him slide out of his jacket. The smell of pastries and mint soap filled my room. With him here, I knew everything really was okay. I wrapped my arms around him and pressed my face into his shirt. We tottered back, through the narrow shaft of yellow light from the
streetlamp outside, and fell onto the bed.

The artifacts on the shelves rattled and my pictures fluttered. I sat up and pressed a finger to my lips. He nodded. The streetlight hit his eyes and turned them into blue stained glass.

He had to be real. Out of everything, he had to be real. I slipped his glasses off and set them on the nightstand. It struck me how open his face was, all clear blue eyes and sandy hair and golden freckles. My heart stuttered, but he hadn’t done anything. I wondered for a second if maybe I was the one who’d been conditioned to think this couldn’t happen. He laid there staring up at me, and while I was sure he couldn’t see much, it still felt like he was analyzing the tiniest details.

My fingers fanned out over his abdomen. His muscles clenched and he released a breathless laugh. Ticklish. I smiled, but he’d closed his eyes. I eased the shirt up over his chest and he sat up to let me pull it off.

The feel of his skin under my fingers sent little jolts of fire up my arms, and when he carefully peeled my shirt off, I thought I would combust. I hated things like swimming and changing in locker rooms because I hated being so bare in front of other people. I was too exposed. It made me think of torture. But this wasn’t torture at all.

Miles paused, wrapped around me, his neck craned over
my shoulder. I felt a small tug on my bra and I realized he was examining the clasp. I stifled my laugh in his shoulder. He’d gotten it unhooked and was re-hooking it. He unhooked and re-hooked it a few more times.

“Stop stalling,” I whispered.

He unhooked it one last time and let me pull it off.

The rest of our clothes joined the shirts on the floor. I shivered and pressed myself closer to him, letting the heat build between our stomachs again, hiding my face in the crook of his neck. I rolled us to the side and he curled around me. I pulled the blanket up over us to create a little cocoon.

I loved being this close to him. I loved being able to touch so much of him. I loved how tightly he held me, the soft in-out of his breathing, and how I didn’t feel the need to look over my shoulder when he was here. I loved being able to pretend that I was a normal teenager, sneaking around, and everything and everyone was

Just

All

Right.

Miles’s fingers pressed into the small of my back. “Basorexia,” he mumbled.

“Gesundheit.”

He laughed. “It’s an overwhelming desire to kiss.”

“I thought you weren’t good at figuring out what you felt.”

“I’m probably using the word in the wrong context. But I’m pretty sure that’s what this is.”

I pressed a kiss to his shoulder. One of his thumbs brushed across my spine and. . . .

It was too much.

Too much, too fast.

“Don’t hate me,” I said. “But I don’t think I want to do this. Not . . . not right now. Not here. I’m sorry; I didn’t think I would change my mind.”

He let out a whispery, relieved laugh. “That’s actually good. I think I’m going to have a heart attack just from this. Anything more might kill me.”

I wedged a hand between us. His heart beat fast and hard against my palm. I whipped it back. “Jesus, you’re right, I think you might actually have a heart attack!”

I was mostly joking, but he pulled back, bashful. His breathing came a little harder. “It would help. If we could . . . reposition . . .”

We shifted away from each other. His breathing returned to normal. We faced each other in the dark, the covers pulled up over us. His hand found mine.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m not used to people touching me.”

“Neither am I.”

There was silence for a few long minutes, until I had an idea.

“Pick someone,” I said.

“What?”

I smiled. “Pick someone.”

He hesitated, then smiled back. “Okay. Go.”

“Are you dead?”

“No.”

“Are you a man?”

“No.”

“Do you live in a foreign country?”

“No.”

Female, alive, from the US. Maybe he
hadn’t
gone for obscure.

“Do you have anything to do with East Shoal?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Shot in the dark. “Are you in the club?”

He paused. “Yes.”

“You’re Jetta.”

He shook his head.

I frowned. “Theo?”

“No.”

“Well if you’re not either of them, you’d have to be me.”

He blinked.

“It’s me?” I said.

“I couldn’t think of anyone else,” he said.

He inched closer and opened his arms; I crawled in and rested my head on his shoulder. He whispered something in German. I closed my eyes and placed my hand over his heart again.

M
iles fell out of bed at one-thirty in the morning, panic flooding his face.

“I have to go.” He stumbled his way into his clothes. I sat up, shook off drowsiness, and pulled the comforter up to cover my chest.

“What’s wrong?” I whispered back.

“Shoes . . . where are my shoes?”

“Next to the window.”

He grabbed them and shoved them on his feet. “My dad knows I never work past midnight.”

“What does he do if you’re not there when you’re supposed to be?”

Miles stopped and looked at me. Then he found his jacket on the floor and slung it over his shoulders.

“Come here.” I opened my arms. He perched on the edge of the bed, body rigid. I turned his face toward me and kissed him. “Can you be here Monday morning?”

“Sure.”

I kissed him again and handed him his glasses. “Here.”