I kiss Joe back.
My arms are around him. My body is pressed against his. Every place he’s touching lights up.
He holds me tighter. I let my hand move to the back of his shoulder. Kissing him here on the street feels less like a way of merging identities than of losing identity; and for the moment, that is more than okay.
“You’re shaking,” he whispers.
“I’m shivering,” I tell him. “I’m soaking wet.”
He lets one hand drop to mine. Holds it.
He’s so close. His shirt is drenched. Beneath the fabric, I can trace the cut-marble curves of his chest, of his shoulders.
I guess I don’t need to tell him that I’m surprised he’s here. And that happiness is pulsing through me with every beat of my heart.
I say, “If you’d stayed away, I wouldn’t have thought you were a bad person.”
“That’s not why I came after you.”
He’s left the way open. And I’m going there. I have nothing to lose now. “So why did you?”
“A lot of reasons.”
His mouth is so close. His body is right here. I want to kiss him again. But I search his face. “Like?”
“Like I didn’t want you to think I thought badly about you. You’ve got more courage than probably anyone I know . . . except maybe me.”
There’s a trace of a smile in his eyes, but if he’s trying to loosen this conversation with a drop of levity, I won’t let him—not yet. “I wasn’t brave. If I wanted to live, I had no choice.”
He squeezes my right hand and it’s like he’s palpitating my heart. Like resuscitation.
“Partly, I mean, in telling me,” he says. “I took a life for what I think was the right reason. But you didn’t take a life. You took something that would have gone to waste. You did it for the right reasons.”
I grip his hand as tightly as I can. “And I didn’t tell you. And I slept with you.”
His smile cracks open. “Yes, you did.”
“So it must seem horrible and really weird to you, because you have no idea what I actually look like?”
“You don’t actually look like anything other than this.”
“I wasn’t pretty,” I tell him. “I wasn’t pretty at all.”
He frowns. “There’s nothing I can say to that that’s sensible. Anyway, I told you: I don’t think pretty is the right word. And I remember saying I could tell you and Sylvia apart.” He shakes his head. “The only sensible thing is to take you completely as you are. I can’t divide you into parts. I have met some very pretty girls. Some have even been interested in me. I didn’t feel anything about them like I feel about you.”
He smiles again—at my expression, I guess. Sunlight on sea. It warms me right through.
“So you are not completely freaked out?” Because I have to be sure.
“I don’t think so.”
“A lot of people would be completely freaked out.”
“Maybe.”
“A lot of people would think it’s completely immoral and it’s playing God, and—”
“I don’t care what they’d think. A lot of people would think that about me.”
For a few moments, we just stand there together, by Poe, under a sagging awning. Just two enamored kids taking shelter from the rain. Which shows what other people know. I think: Perhaps he’ll change his mind, but for now, absolutely, I will take this.
Telling Joe the truth was, I think, the second biggest risk of my life.
I think: I’m the kind of person who will take significant risks.
We find soft leather armchairs in a café close by. The misted-up windows and stacks of paperbacks and board games on the shelves make it even cozier.
When we’ve got our drinks, the first thing I ask is if he isn’t meant to be at a meeting.
“I should be at a meeting,” he says, nodding. “I should also be in jail, or at home with Dad.”
I say quietly, “You should be at home with your dad and mum. I should never have got sick. But here we are.” I push the mint leaves in my mug around with my spoon and take a sip. It’s the first time I’ve had mint tea made with fresh leaves, and it’s a minor revelation. “The first time I met you, I thought you knew. I thought, he must be videoing everything and in five minutes I’ll be all over the news.”
“If you thought that, why didn’t you walk away?”
“After I told you about the surgery, why didn’t you go back to your office instead of coming after me? You could have taken your editor the story of the year. You still could.”
His expression darkens. “Why would you even think I might do that? I wanted to help you, remember.”
And I do want him to help me. But Joe’s taken in a lot. I can wait another day for the favor I want to ask him. Right now I want to enjoy just being here, with him.
He frowns at my neck. “You weren’t wearing that before. It’s kind of unusual.”
My hand darts up to my necklace. “My doctor gave it to me.”
“Your doctor? It’s a strange-looking stone.”
“Actually, it’s a bit of Moon rock.”
“Are you serious?” His face softening, he reaches out to touch the acrylic sphere. “It came from the Moon,” he repeats, his voice so low I can barely hear him. “When Neil Armstrong talked about what it was like to look back at Earth from the Moon, he said, ‘I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.’”
“Your mother told you that?”
“I read it . . . in a book she gave me.”
“To the stars.” I touch his tattoo. “This is to do with her?”
“We come from the stars,” he says. The expression in his eyes like none I’ve seen before, except for on that bench after O’Neill’s. “When our sun ceases to exist, our atoms will be blasted into space. So maybe mine and hers will be together again someday.”
“To the stars,” I whisper.
He nods.
“What was it?” I ask him. “A hobby? Or was she a cosmologist?”
“Kind of in between. She volunteered at the California Academy of Sciences.”
“I’d like to go there,” I tell him.
He looks down, takes my hand, gently twists my fingers in his. “I’d like to take you. One day.”
I stay sitting there, with Joe, not talking, waiting for him.
“So, I’m wondering something,” he says.
I nod.
“Was there supposed to be a moral to the story about the hamster and the chips?”
I smile. I can’t help it. I shake my head. “I was just trying to think of something true to tell you about me.”
“Did you eat all the chips?”
“A lot of them. And I don’t even really like crisps.”
“So why did you eat them?”
“I guess . . . Elliot used to win things a lot. Academic things at school, anyway. This was my moment of triumph. So what if it was because of a sparkly hamster cape?”
He smiles. Then he glances away. I follow his gaze to a clock on the wall, by the board games.
“I don’t want to go,” he says. “But I should get back to the office. Someone’s helping me with a story. A real one, about a center for immigrant kids.”
I nod. “The beautiful woman from the lift?”
His smile returns. “If that would make you jealous, then yes . . . Actually, it’s the editor. You’d better have my cell.”
I find my phone, activate it, and enter the number he tells me. I’m halfway up out of the chair when he reaches for my hand. I sink back down.
His expression is intense, and I’m suddenly scared that, though he just gave me his number, he’s realized he’s actually not okay with who I am—or with me asking about his mother.
His face so close, he says, “Other side effects of hanging out with you: insomnia, due to recurrent recollections of a night in a motel in Lexington . . . the sensation of having been pulled up from under ice.”
My heart melts, burns, implodes, does all kinds of medically impossible things.
“I guess we must be on the same drug,” I whisper.
A smile—the deepest so far—warms the blue of his eyes. “Just so you know, I’d like to take as much as I can for as long as I can.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Me, too.”