Jessup? I . . .”
“Yeah?”
She straightens up now, rocks back, kneeling over him, looking down into his eyes. He smiles at her and she smiles back, but then whatever she was going to say disappears.
“What?” he says.
“Nothing.” She reaches down and holds the condom steady while she gets off him. It’s awkward again, the two of them squashed into one seat. He peels the condom off, knots it, tosses it on the floor. He’ll stop somewhere and chuck it in the trash on the way home. The wrapper, too. Has the image of Jewel finding the wrapper—or worse, the condom—and asking him what it is. Doesn’t want to have that conversation.
She’s curled up in his lap now, her arm around his neck. He can’t believe how comfortable he is. He could sleep like this, but she seems wide awake.
“What were you going to say?” Jessup asks.
“Was that your dad? Sitting with your mom and your sister?”
Jessup can’t stop himself from stiffening. She feels it.
“Was that what you were going to say?”
“Sorry,” she says.
“No. It’s okay. It’s just . . .”
It’s not something they’ve talked about. If anything, they’ve gone out of their way not to talk about it. They’d known each other before working at the movie theater together—film study at Coach Diggins’s house, and even though the Diggins family moved to Cortaca only last year, Cortaca High School is less than 1,500 students, the size where nobody is really unfamiliar—but they’d never exchanged more than a few words until, suddenly, magically, they were dating.
“You don’t have to,” she says. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
“No,” Jessup says. “It’s complicated.”
The crack of Corson’s boot against Jessup’s taillight, the thump of his body against the truck, the way his neck was turned, the dent in his head, Jessup on his knees in the snow puking up beer, the weight of Corson’s body as he laid it in the car, metal and glass as the car hit the trees, and more, the grainy footage from the camera in the alley, David John sitting down next to Ricky and waiting for the cops, letters from Ricky—I don’t regret it none. You got to stand up for yourself. Like we always say: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Those fourteen words a rallying cry for white pride, Ricky writing home that what he did he did in self-defense, but he’d do it again so “you and Jewel can be safe in this world, stopping them from taking away what little we have left.” Jessup’s mom’s eyes red-rimmed from crying, touching her wedding ring like a talisman, David John taking Jessup’s hand at Kirby’s, bowing heads, asking dear Jesus for a blessing, and then standing outside the restaurant, taking Jessup’s hand again, shaking it like a man, “Proud of you,” David John said. “Go have some fun.”
“Jessup?”
“Sorry,” he says. “Stepdad. He’s not my dad. But he’s a good guy.”
“Isn’t he . . . ?”
Even though she’s right there, naked, the two of them in a small space, the heater blowing over both of them, he can feel that she’s pulled away. He wants her to come back.
“Like I said, it’s complicated.”
“Tell me about it?”
So he does.