Skygods (Hydraulic #2) (41 page)

“I’ll be by for Samuel’s papers tonight,” I said flatly. “And talk to Lexi at Berkshire House, explain the offer you made to Buitre. She might be willing to champion Lyle’s book if he’s serious about making those revisions.
Only
if the revisions are made.”

Her eyes widened. “I can’t crawl back to Berkshire House for help. It would be degrading.”

Not even to help Togsy. Interesting.
And with those few words, Caroline Ortega told me enough.

“Good-bye, Caroline. I hope you find your happiness.”

When I was eleven, I bought a diary. It had a pink plastic cover and a little silver padlock and key, threaded on a ribbon. My father gave me ten dollars for my birthday and there wasn’t much for shopping in Lyons. But I carried the ten-dollar bill in my purse on the off-chance I’d find something to blow it on. That chance came when my mother filled a prescription at the pharmacy. I spotted the diary on a magazine rack next to gift wrap and party balloons, and knew it was meant for me.

“But you never write,” Mom said when I held up the diary.

“I want this.” I was firm.

The thing was, Samuel Cabral wrote in a diary.

He kept it hidden in a box stuffed with baseball cards. But Danita had sibling radar, an instinct that started beeping when there were embarrassing things to be discovered in her brother’s room.

“My brother is such a dork!” she shrieked when she triumphantly pulled the stolen diary from her backpack. It was a plain blue journal with a Red Sox sticker on the front and a rubber band around the middle. At the time, I was so caught up in the thrill of reading the clandestine thoughts of my long-time crush, wanted into his world so much, I didn’t consider I was doing something wrong. I was barely eleven, and eleven-year-olds are notoriously self-centered.

Much to Danita’s dismay, there were no juicy revelations in the book’s pages, mainly recaps of baseball practice and the funny things Angel said in geography class. There were also brief, horny snippets about Jennifer—AKA, Cherry ChapStick Girl—which made Danita giggle and me fake vomit.

Before she could return the diary, Samuel busted us.

“I can’t believe you read it, Kaye!” he shouted, red streaking up his neck and coloring his cheeks and ears. “I would never, ever read your diary!”

“I don’t have one,” I mumbled, “but if I did, I’d let you read it.”

I think he understood my offer wasn’t meant to be petulant. I simply wanted to undo the damage I’d done by offering a piece of myself in return—a child’s flawed “I’m sorry for kicking you, would you like to kick me back?” sense of justice. His shoulders slumped, the fight leaving him. “Just don’t tell anyone, okay?”

I didn’t. But I did buy a diary. I even wrote in it every night for two months, filling it with little details which, in the back of my mind, I thought Samuel might like to read. Whenever Danita came to visit, I left the pink diary in plain view, the key secure in the padlock. She never took it. I played in the Cabrals’ basement and blatantly laid the book on top of my pom-pom hat. When I returned, it was always untouched. After a while, it became clear that Samuel meant it when he said he would never read my diary.

But still, I’d wanted him to. Badly.

I gave up on the thing halfway through December. It remained hidden in the bottom of my underwear drawer until I left for college. Now, seventeen years later, I wished I’d filled it to the brim.

That night, I heard the rapid clacking of fingers flying over a keyboard before I even unlocked the apartment. The box of Samuel’s papers was heavy and awkward in my arms. I hoisted it onto my hip and pushed through the door, ready to chew him a bit for not hearing my huffing knocks. He didn’t even turn his head when I loudly dropped the box next to the coffee table.

“Samuel, what are you doing?”

“I’ve got to write it all down,” he muttered. “All of it…”

Fear shot through my heart. “Write what?”

“The words. The memories. I have to get them on paper before I lose them, because I can feel them slipping away again, every day, further and further, slipping away again and I can’t let them leave.”

His glasses were pushed up into his hair, which made me realize he was typing blind. Muscles beneath his T-shirt bunched and clenched with frenzied energy, his body not fast enough to release what was in his head. Peering over his shoulder, I squinted at the glowing laptop screen:

Catch them in your hands, those bitter drops of rain or blood like death seeping through brittle bones split over age or paving stones. Or maybe she’s stone through and through, always was and always will be, like the stone angel woman towering over us, la llorona with her drowned babes and sad sad lips gaped in a horror scream, a space of black

if only she’d crack that cement seal.

I lift my love, so light so warm, by her waist. I lift you high high high so you can see her dead eyes and hope for some life, but she’s dead, you see, staring down at me from her place above, or below, but always staring in her tomb and crying from cold eyes

But oh my, there you are all grown up in brown earth and roots, thriving, hot and wriggling in the sun, and I want to kiss you.

I want to fuck you.

I want to be buried with you in warm flesh so pink and alive when she watches me…

I swept an unruly lock from his forehead.

“It’s okay, Samuel,” I said, trembling. “You need to sleep, and then we’ll go see a doctor in the morning.”

“No. I need to write it all down before she’s gone.”

She?
I cast a wary glance at the urn above the fireplace. “Before who’s gone? The Weeping Lady?”

Sad eyes met mine. “Aspen. I can’t lose her again, Kaye.” He returned to his keyboard.

Oh no. Please, no. Was he writing his thoughts before he lost them, or was he confusing fantasy with reality? That wasn’t supposed to happen with hypomania, was it? I had absolutely no idea what to do. But I had to do
something
, had to ground him.

“She’s right here.
I’m
right here.” I knelt beside him and pried his fingers away from the keys then forced them onto my face. “Can’t you see her in me? Tell me you can.”

Fevered blue eyes locked on mine. His fingers dug into my cheeks, the back of my skull, as he searched for his Aspen. Finally, he nodded. “I see you.”

Ground him.
I watched his face, mesmerized by the raw craving I saw there. He probably saw the same thing in me. I was terrified and I wanted to feel him, to hold him close and tie him to me in the only way I had left.

I pushed his laptop aside and placed my hands on his chest.

That was all the invitation he required. His lips took mine with a frantic passion. He clung to me, fingers pushing under my shirt, only breaking his kiss to drag it over my head. I heard the metallic clatter of his glasses as they skittered across floor. We tumbled down and my tailbone screamed in protest at the sudden jarring, but I swallowed the pain beneath his heated skin and wrapped my legs around him.

“I love you,” he rasped as he dragged his fingers through my hair. “I’m not ready to let you go. I love you. Let me love you. You are so warm.”

A gut feeling told me those words were not meant for me. They were for an idea of me and, strangely, I felt guilty for deceiving him, for making him believe he was with a different person…but not enough to stop.

We shed our clothing and pressed our bodies together, driving out the air until there were only rib cages, sharp pelvises, and soft flesh. Still, like his elusive memories, he was slipping away. I fought to find that symbiotic circuit crossing between us so I could overpower his manic mind, to draw out the madness like a fever and replace it with cool sanity. I pushed his back to the ground and straddled his lap, but I couldn’t ground him. Keeping Samuel with me was like forcing sunlight to stay on my skin. It could burn and burn and burn until my arm was a charred, aching mess. Even so, its brilliance would vanish when the sun sank.

We made love on the floor. My hands clutched his beautifully shaped shoulders, feeling the lithe, potent muscles shift. I begged him to stay with me. “Please come back, Samuel.” His eyes were hooded with pleasure. He flipped me to the ground, his torso weighed me down and his legs twined with mine, pinning me, heavy as a humid night. A clammy palm cupped my face. “I love you…I love you…I love you.”

I hugged him to me. Every muscle in his thighs, back, and arms clenched, and he shuddered, groaning into my neck a single word.

“Aspen.”

The dream returned. I was cast as the brunette, trapped beneath Samuel’s steel arms as he gazed at the broken girl in the doorway. I shoved at his chest, trying to get his attention. I shouted. I must have said or done something in my sleep, because I awoke to Samuel whispering in my ear, trying to calm me with gentle words.

“I’m going to take you to Boston, to Fenway Park. Would you like that? Please don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. I haven’t forgotten the promise I made to you that morning by St. Vrain Creek. Do you remember?”

“I remember,” I choked out, even though I didn’t remember.

“It was a sunny day and you skipped your government class to hike with me. Your shoulders were sunburned. I kissed them like this—” he smoothed dry lips over my skin “—and you told me it made them feel better. After lunch we waded in the creek. We dug rocks from the bed and laid them out in the sun. When they were dry, we drew faces on them with markers and then threw them back in the water for other people to find.”

I buried my face in my pillow as he spoke, stifling my breaking heart. I’d begun to hate
Hydraulic Level Five
and my youthful doppelganger.

Chapter 13

Stupid Hurts

An idiotic decision that results in injury
to the diver or another person.

S—T
HEY
F
OUND
Y
OUR
L
APTOP
and returned it to me. I hope you don’t mind, I read what you wrote those days in New York. I’m no expert, but it doesn’t really gel with the rest of our story. So I’ll write it for you, even though I’m crap at it. I can’t exactly screw it up because I’m Aspen…right? I think I am, but sometimes I’m afraid I’m not. I love you anyway. ~Kaye

Hydraulic Level Five [working title]
Draft 5.34
© Samuel Caulfield Cabral & Aspen Kaye Trilby
34. Using Up Stamps

Aspen squints at her young husband in his smelly undershirt and jeans, hunched over his guitar, and wonders whether he’d look hot with Cobain hair. No, definitely not. She smooths smoke-heavy locks from his forehead. It’s been months since he’s had it cut, and the shagginess ventures beyond Sexytown and into Grungeville. He turns his face into her palm and gently nips the base of her thumb.

“I’m heading back to campus,” she says. “Can you buy stamps and mail my internship applications before two?”

Caulfield nods, red-rimmed, glassy eyes not leaving the guitar strings as he plunks out “Pale Blue Eyes” for the fiftieth time—a far cry from the grinning, golden boy baseball star of their high school days. “Linger on…” And on, and on, and on.

She tugs his T-shirt sleeve. “Why don’t you toss that in the hamper and I’ll do laundry tonight.”

He pauses in his playing to jerk the ratty thing over his head, then chucks it in the vicinity of the hamper. She catches a whiff of sex and stale beer and oddly, it’s a turn on.

“You don’t always have to take care of me,” he says.

She shrugs. “I’m used to taking care of stuff. Besides, you take care of me, too.”

“Not very well.” He closes his eyes and his Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows.

They had a late night covering an area band. She doesn’t know how he could stumble home with her half-drunk tush, have mind-blowing sex, and still be coherent enough to turn around a review for the paper by deadline. It’s typical for him to write his reviews the same night, when his mind is still fresh with details. Somehow, he always pulls it off.