“Least you can do is come in here and talk with me some,” he said, giving me his best sweetie-pie look as I set up the screechy old box fan for him. I’d borrowed it out of my mom’s room after she left to see about whatever was going on at work, but I didn’t tell him that. He thought she was lying out in a lawn chair in the side yard. Again, I’m not sure why I kept lying. I was still waiting for something to happen. Just something. I thought I’d know it when it came. Something that’d make all this feel permanent and real after it ended and he had to leave. Right then it still felt like a daydream, some story I’d cooked up to amuse me and Dani one bored Tuesday afternoon in August.
“Alright,” I said, and crawled over beside him.
“Do you like me?” he said. “I mean, do you really like me?”
“I do,” I said. “That’s why I’m keeping you prisoner in my closet. The evil princess keeping the brave knight in her tower.”
“This is serious, right?” he said. “I mean what we got here. Us.” He didn’t act as confident as he did the day I met him. Today it seemed more like he was my age, maybe even younger, like he needed me to tell him everything was going to be okay. But I liked knowing he’d been thinking about this.
“Yeah, it feels bigger than anything I’ve ever—” I wasn’t sure how to say it. I wasn’t sure what it was. “More than anyone else I’ve ever met.” I tilted my head away and stared at the wall. “What about you?”
“Seems like I left the base a million years ago. Here, I made you something.” In his palm was a little orange animal made of paper. “It’s a fox, on account of your being so foxy.”
I took it. The closer I looked at it, the more intricate it seemed to get. The little beasty even seemed to be smiling. It occurred to me then that under different circumstances Logan and my mom would probably get on famously, them having a shared interest in making normal objects very small.
He sat up suddenly, his face serious. “What time is it?”
“It’s almost three, I think.”
As of eight this morning, he was officially AWOL. They’d probably put him behind bars if he went back. If they discovered I’d helped him, I wondered, would they put me in an Army jail or send me to juvie over in Bulloch County? Thinking this and holding his hand gave me a shiver of happiness.
He put his arms around my waist then and kissed me. I lost my balance and we fell back onto the blankets, a muddle of sweat-sticky arms and legs. His hands crept up under my shirt. This time I didn’t need to tell him where I wanted them to go because they wanted to go there too. I wasn’t wearing a bra because it was so hot and, to be honest, my breasts weren’t really big enough for anyone to notice if I went without. We rolled over again and I could feel his excitement pressing through his boxer shorts. He took off my shirt and kissed my breasts. An electric tingle wriggled in from the tips of my nipples, through my belly, and down between my legs. When he tried to take off my shorts, I made him stop.
“Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“Wait till later, when my mom goes to sleep,” I said. I wanted to draw this out. I wanted his needing me to last.
“You’re getting me all riled up,” he said. “Being stuck in this little closet is hard enough without—”
“You’re a soldier during wartime. The town has been invaded by your enemies. I have to hide you until it’s safe. You ever see that old movie, Summer of My German Soldier?
“What movie?”
“It’s old. From the seventies, I think. See, during World War Two this American farm girl finds a German soldier wandering around lost after he’s escaped from soldier prison and she hides him. He’s not really a bad guy. He got drafted and had to fight or they’d kill him or something, but he actually hates Hitler. While he’s hiding, they fall in love.”
“Yeah,” Logan said, “I can dig that. How’s it end? Does he get away?”
“Sure,” I lied.