Читать книгу Don't Let Me Go - J.H. Trumble - Страница 7

Chapter 2

Two months earlier

Graduation party and Key West

“Open it! Open it!” Mea cried, bouncing impatiently in her chair.

Adam grinned. “I’m opening it.” He painstakingly worked the envelope flap loose just to tease his little sister. Adam’s parents had waited until the party guests had gotten out of the pool, dried off, and gone home to give him their graduation gift.

Clearly, the wait had been almost too much for his little sister. “It’s an airplane ticket,” she blurted out before he could finish the job.

“Mea!” Mrs. Jensen said, putting her hand over the six-year-old’s mouth.

Adam stuck his tongue out at her and removed not one, but two tickets from the envelope. He looked at them, said, “Wow,” cleared his throat, then held them up for me to see.

“What?” I said, surprised, because one of the tickets was issued to Nathan Schaper.

“Family trip,” Ben said before we could get the wrong idea, which was approximately two seconds too late.

Mrs. Jensen slinked her arm around her husband’s waist. “We’ve already cleared it with your mom, Nate. We have a lot to celebrate and, well, we’re really hoping you want to go.”

A week in Key West with Adam? Was she kidding? Even with his family, it was still a week in Key West with Adam. Just a week and a half ago I’d been girding myself for a second trial, a repeat of the painful and humiliating experience that had been the first trial in March. Facing the second assailant in the courtroom, reliving that horrible night five months ago, laying out the most intimate details of my relationship with Adam, and feeling like I was the one on trial. And then, at the eleventh hour, a plea deal.

Just like that, it was over.

I hadn’t felt this free, been this happy since last New Year’s Eve, until Mea innocently blabbed half an hour later, “Adam’s going to be a star.”

I was helping her get her toys out of the pool while Adam helped his mom and Ben carry the food back inside.

“Adam’s already a star,” I said, hooking a yellow raft with a net and dragging it toward the edge.

“No, he’s going to be a for-real star. In a play and everything. In New York. He even said I could visit him. And he’s going to take me to the zoo in Central Park. And let me feed the pigeons and ...”

New York? New York?

Over the next week, I kept waiting for Adam to hit me with New York, my excitement over the trip to Key West marred by a new impending sense of doom. But he said nothing. And by Friday afternoon I was beginning to think that Mea had gotten it all wrong.

Adam was rummaging through my suitcase when I got out of the shower.

“Why do you have so many books packed?” he asked, flipping through the pages of a novel I’d picked up at a used bookstore after work a few days earlier. “When do you think you’re going to have time to do all this reading?”

“I always read at night before I go to bed.”

“Not this trip. You’re sharing a room with me.”

“What?” I froze in the middle of towel-drying my hair and stared at him, shocked.

He laughed and tossed two books over his shoulder. “Mom and Ben finally gave up trying to figure out room arrangements. They could only get two rooms at such a late date, so they were going to have me sleep with them and Mea. And then that seemed ridiculous when there was an empty double bed in the room right next door. So ...”

A slow smile spread across my face. “So I’m stuck with you for a whole week? In Key West? Me and you? Together? Like alone? All night?”

He laughed and held up a pair of pajama pants. “You won’t be needing these either.” He tossed them over his shoulder too. I threw a box from my nightstand into my bag and he read the label. “Trojan natural lamb. For a more sensual feeling.” He held it up to me, smiling. “A twelve pack? Are you kidding me? I hope there’s a First Aid kit in here somewhere too.”

Key West—the southernmost point in the United States, a mere six square miles, the last in a string of keys off the tip of Florida, and a place where, as one Web site claimed, closets have no doors. But thankfully, the rooms did, with locks. Ben handed over the key with a slightly amused grin.

“I expect you two to behave.”

Fortunately, our room wasn’t next to theirs after all.

The week was pure magic. We filled our days with long walks on the beach and lazy swims in the ocean. We explored the island on bicycle, taking in the nineteenth-century architecture, dodging the free-roaming chickens, and chatting up barefoot hippies with tiny dogs nestled in their bicycle baskets. We wandered through Ernest Hemingway’s house and speculated about Tennessee Williams’s life as we stood, hand-in-hand, outside the bungalow he’d lived in decades ago. And when we got hungry, we ate Cuban sandwiches or conch fritters at a sidewalk table or sitting on the curb and watched other lovers in fearless public displays of affection.

Our nights we filled with passion and long soft gazes and sweet words. We weren’t behaving ourselves, and we didn’t for one moment feel guilty about that.

On Thursday evening, I paid a street performer twenty-five dollars to borrow his guitar for five minutes. It was the first time I’d played Adam his song, the song I’d written for him as a Christmas present, the song I’d not had the heart to play for him before then. And it seemed right that I’d waited. I played it for him sitting cross-legged under a street lamp in Mallory Square with the crowds and tightrope walkers and jugglers as a backdrop. He cried.

Too soon it was the last day, the sun on the beach just as intense as it had been on the first, but the water cooled our feet as we walked through the surf. Adam took my hand.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

He smiled and strengthened his grip.

“When were you going to tell me about New York?”

The look on his face confirmed what I’d been dreading. The smile disappeared. He stopped and stared off at the ocean for a long time, then turned to look at me. “How do you know about New York?”

“I know.”

“I’ve been waiting until we got back to talk to you about it.”

“When do you leave?”

“I haven’t even agreed to take the job yet.”

I looked away, down the beach. Two guys who looked like body builders were making out on a striped blanket under a palm tree about ten yards away. A lone woman tossed a Frisbee into the ocean and stood with her hands on her hips while a black-and-white dog bounded through the surf to catch it.

“Come on,” he said, pulling me after him into the deeper water.

We rose and fell with the swell of the ocean, and finally he told me about New York.

“It sounds like a great opportunity,” I said.

“Mom’s not too happy with the idea. She wants me to go to Austin.”

“You have to do what’s right for you.”

He stared back toward the beach. “Just say the word, Nate, and I won’t go.”

I couldn’t do that. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t. “I don’t want you to stay,” I said.

His face told me he hadn’t expected that. A wave tossed me into him and then pulled him away.

“I don’t believe you.”

“You know what I mean. This is your time. If you don’t do this, then I’ll always feel like I robbed you of your dreams. I can’t live with that.”

“I’ll be a hero for you, Nate. Let me be that. I can chase my dreams here.”

I shook my head. “No, you can’t. Please, go to New York. Be fabulous.”

“I don’t want to leave you.”

I drew in a slow, deep breath to steady myself. He’d saved me when I couldn’t save myself. And it was my time to return the favor.

“I don’t know who I am without you anymore.” True. And then the untruth that I knew would release him. “I need to find out. For me, for you, for us.”

What could he say? We were somber as we headed back up the beach some time later. He dropped my hand and slung his arm around my neck and pulled me snugly to him and sniffed.