Logan lugged in his green duffle bag and I hid it under my bed. I had to mash it down before it would fit. We sat down on top of the comforter and looked at each other. It was hot in the house, as usual, and sweat dotted his upper lip. It was all I could do not to kiss it away. I swayed on the bed. The room spun a bit.
“Where’s your mom at?”
“I don’t know. Work maybe. She told me when she’d be home, but I forgot.” I really did. I searched my head for the answer, but it had completely up and vanished. It took every last one of my powers of concentration just to listen to what he was saying.
“You think I could take a shower?”
“Yeah, but you have to be quick.”
“Don’t worry.”
Ten minutes later he came back with wet, ruffled hair and the smell of my chocolate ice cream soap on his skin. I got some blankets out of the linen closet and took a pillow off of my bed. We crawled through my closet over old shoes and under hangers jammed with clothes. Behind last year’s too-small church dress, there was a door the size of an opened newspaper with a fake bronze handle that opened onto the attic access. The room was a quarter the size of my bedroom and the ceiling slanted down low enough for Logan to bang his head against if he tried to stand up. On the far wall, a small window would of given a view of the lawn if it hadn’t been covered up and darkened by the holly bushes. Unpainted plywood covered most of the floor and only one of the walls was finished with sheetrock. Two-by-four studs and itchy pink insulation made up the rest. It smelled of stale ginger bread and old pine needles. Piled from floor to ceiling along the side closest to the living room were boxes of Christmas decorations and my old kiddie stuff, black plastic bags of worn-out clothes and junk my dad never took when he left. Dust covered everything and it felt twice as hot as the rest of the house, but Logan didn’t seem to mind any, or didn’t say so if he did.
I made a bed for him and we lit emergency candles and stuck them in beer bottles. He asked about a painting on the wall I did when I was about ten. It was a sloppy picture of me riding a brown horse in the princess outfit I wore for Halloween that year. Long pink scarves and an upside-down ice cream cone hat. He moved his blankets over beneath it, so he could look up at me while he went to sleep.
“Princess Lynn Marie,” he said and laughed. It was a nice laugh and not one that was making fun of me.
I went and got him a plastic water bottle in case he got thirsty in the night. Logan smiled when he saw it and pulled out a bottle of Boone’s Farm wine, saying he got it because I’d seemed to like it so much. This time I got us a couple cups to drink from. We drank while I told him about the games I used to play in the storage space when I was younger. Prisoner in Troll Castle. Or the cave of a monster snail who guarded over a treasure hoard. I used bottle caps as silver coins and my Cabbage Patch Kid, Penny, as the snail. Occasionally I traveled through space, stuck in suspended animation until I arrived on a blue planet populated only by singing whales. Other times terrorists with turbans kidnapped me but their leader, a sock monkey named Chief Biltmore, Esquire, was kind enough to provide cherry Kool-Aid and Ritz crackers. We sat quiet for a moment.
“Oh, yeah, I nearly forgot.” Logan reached inside the lower pocket of his cargo shorts and pulled out something crinkly. Going down on one knee, he bowed his head. “These, my princess, are for you.”
He held out a bouquet of paper flowers glued atop fuzzy green pipe cleaners, all folded dozens of times to look like tiny roses. They looked so real that for just the littlest moment, I was amazed they hadn’t wilted in his pocket.
“I made the white ones from the certificate I got when they gave me my mosquito wings a couple years ago. The pink one’s a parking ticket, and those blue ones are from the paper my dress uniform came wrapped in. They’re like …” He stopped to kiss the knuckles on my hand one by one, then on the crook of my elbow, and a last, longish smooch on the base of my neck.
“Like what?” I asked.
He shrugged. I watched his eyes and they watched me right back. They looked to be worried, waiting, and maybe the tiniest bit afraid. It was this last possibility that thrilled me through and through.
“They’re gorgeous,” I said, to make this strange expression on his face go away.
“I’m going to kiss you now,” he said in an odd, flat voice. The flickering candlelight made his eyes look sunken in, but not in a gruesome way, more like intense. He put his hands on my shoulders and we kissed. This time we opened our mouths and touched our tongues together. He didn’t slobber or try to ram his tongue down my throat, like Billy had the night in the barn. He touched my cheek and my hair. I put my hands on his hips. Almost from the moment he touched me, the shaking started again. I don’t know where it came from, but it took over my entire body and wouldn’t stop. My teeth chattered.
“Is something wrong?” he asked, tilting his head back.
“No, no,” I said, “it’s just … I’m not …”
“Don’t worry,” he said, and he kissed me again.
Embarrassment gave me a fever. My face probably glowed in the dark. I closed my eyes and let my hands rest on his hips and tried to forget my name.
I don’t know how long we’d been doing this when my mom came home. It didn’t seem all that long, but I’d lost track of time. I jerked up when I heard the front door slam and banged my head against a two-by-four on the ceiling.
“What is it?” he said. He must not of heard the door. I’d been listening with half an ear the entire time.
“It’s my mom. I’ve got to go back and get into bed or she’ll think something weird’s going on.”
I crawled into my bedroom. My hands still shook so bad it looked like I’d swallowed some convenience store speed. A long bit of cobweb stuck to my arm.