Chapter Sixteen
Allie
Curtis looked surprised to see me, maybe because he was still half-asleep.
“I hope I didn’t wake you up,” I said as I edged close to him. “I think your brother’s stories might’ve gotten to me. I kept laying there jumping at every noise in the distance, wondering if it could be a bear or a murderer.”
“There’s no bears out here,” said Curtis. “Crocodiles are the most dangerous thing we have out here, and they’re mostly all down by the water.”
“I don’t know what it is.” I drew my knees close and ran a hand over my forehead, which felt achy and feverish. “I just didn’t feel like taking any chances. Maybe it was the loneliness of being out here under all those stars. I fall asleep most nights with the TV on, listening to infomercials. I don’t even really like TV, but it gives me something to listen to, which puts me to sleep.”
Without another word, I laid down and burrowed in next to him, nestling into his broad chest. He flinched in surprise, and I half-wondered if I ought to have warned him first. “Is this okay?” I asked. “You mind if I just lay here for a bit?”
“Go right ahead,” said Curtis, though the bewilderment was still plain in his voice.
I laid there for a few minutes with my head on his chest, feeling its rise and fall, listening to his heart racing. There was no way that was his normal heart rate. Perhaps he wasn’t used to having girls in his tent. Perhaps he was genuinely excited to see me, or perhaps he was just alarmed.
“Allie,” he said quietly, just when the silence was threatening to go on forever. “Allie, we’ve got to talk about something.”
I sat up slowly and turned to look at him. I could see his face in the light of the flashlight, sweaty and nervous but gently beaming. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Was it something I said earlier?”
He dismissed the notion with a wave of his hand. “No, it’s nothing like that. I was just thinking. It’s been great with you these last few weeks, the sort of thing that doesn't ever seem to happen in my life.”
I nodded, not understanding.
“I just think it’s maybe time we discussed where we stand,” he said. “What we are. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I know what I feel about you; I just don’t know what you feel about me, or if you even feel anything. I keep thinkin’ about that old song, ‘Lookin’ for Love in All the Wrong Places,’ and I want to make sure I don’t make that mistake.”
“Do you mean—” I began, then broke off. “Do you mean, do I like you?”
“Yes, I suppose that’s what I mean.”
I thought about it for a long moment. “I suppose I do. I guess I’d never really stopped to ask myself what this was feeling was. I just knew I liked being around you, liked the way I felt when you smiled at me, like my whole body was melting like butter. If I could, I’d bottle that feeling up and find a way to feel it every day for the rest of my life. But since I can’t bottle it up, I guess I’ll—I’ll just have to do the next best thing, which is to get you to smile at me as much as I can, for as long as I can.”
It was one of the longest uninterrupted speeches I had ever given him, and at first, I wasn’t sure how he was going to take it. For about half the time I was talking, I hadn’t even been looking at him, I was so focused on what I was trying to say and on saying it right.
But when I glanced up at him again, nervously, after a long interval in which neither of us spoke, the look on his face erased all doubt from my heart. It wasn’t a smile, exactly, but if he had been smiling, I don’t think he could have looked happier. His eyes were misting over as he said to me, softly and quietly, “Thank you. That was all I needed to know.”
I’m still not entirely sure how it happened, or which of us approached the other first. I remember trying to bridge the silence by asking him a question. (“Hey, Curtis?” I said. “Would you do me a favor? Would you play me that song when we get home, the one about looking for love in all the wrong places?”). And then one of us was kissing the other, or we were both kissing each other, it was hard to tell, and his beard brushed up against my face, and my arms were wrapping themselves around him with a hunger that was as much animal as it was human.
If I had been thinking clearly, I suppose I would have been surprised at how quickly kissing progressed into lovemaking. It was like we were tinder waiting for a match. All those primitive impulses that I had been so carefully suppressing during the last couple weeks, every look, every word, every gesture. All the times we’d been out in public, and I just wanted to nibble his fingers and bury my face in his broad chest, but I didn’t.
I don’t think it became real to me, what we were doing, until he broke away and asked, “Did you bring protection?”
As it happened, I had brought protection. Not because I had expected anything to happen between us, but because it’s always best to be prepared. “I did,” I said, reaching into the pockets of my cargo pants.
“We’ll have to be quiet,” said Curtis. His hands were sweaty and shaking. It looked like he hadn’t done this in a long time, like maybe he had forgotten what it was like. “I don’t want to wake Zach up.”
“I’ll try not to make any loud noises,” I whispered. “Are we really doing this?”
“If you want it,” said Curtis. His eyes searched mine. “Do you?”
I nodded, apprehensive but eager. “I can’t think of anything I want more right now, not even your mother’s blue lemonade.”
With a radiant look in his eyes, he grabbed my shirt from the bottom and lifted it over my head. I wasn’t wearing a bra underneath it, and there was something odd yet bracing about sitting there in front of him with my breasts out, in my natural state. Slowly at first, as if not sure I would let him, he reached his hand out and ran his thumb along the curve of my right breast down to my nipple. I thought he would stop there, but he kept going, all the way down the side of my body to my waist.
“Somehow you’re even more beautiful like this,” he said quietly. “I didn’t think it was possible.”
“Don’t tell anyone my secret.”
He leaned forward and kissed me once, on the mouth. “Not a soul.” He kissed me again, then leaned back as if wanting to take me all in at once. “I wonder what the rest of you looks like.”
“I guess we’ll have to find out,” I said as I ran my fingers through his hair. He smiled and ran his hand along the line of my belt. At first, I wondered why he seemed hesitant, but then I realized he was savoring the moment, not wanting it to end too quickly.
“I wish I could freeze time right here,” he said. “Just the two of us.”
It seemed an odd thing to say right as we were about to have sex. “Don’t you want to find out what happens?” I asked.
He frowned, as if not liking the question. “Have you ever had a moment of being so happy you were afraid to get up, or move, or walk around, because you knew the minute you did the spell would break and the world would go back to being its horrible old self?”
“I remember reading a story once,” I said, “about a man who was cursed to die at the moment when he was most happy. To prevent it from happening, he told his wife they must never have sex again. But then one night when they were out in the wilderness alone, they were overcome by animal passion. There was no fighting an urge that powerful; all they could do was give in to it. Right as they climaxed, he had a moment of pure happiness, and he died with a smile on his face. His wife grieved his loss, but she was happy in the knowledge that he had died happy.”
There was a quiet pause. Curtis gave me a deadly serious look, but the effect was undercut by the twinkle in his eye. “Are you trying to kill me?” he asked.
I laughed, and then he laughed, and we spent the next hour experiencing the bliss that man and his wife must have felt.
It was only much later, after it was all over, as I curled up beside him and listened to the steady rhythm of his snoring, that I thought about the wife he had lost. Christine, he had said her name was. I wondered if they had been happy together, if there had been nights like this. And I wondered, with a pang of guilt in my heart that I couldn’t entirely quench, whether I was somehow being unfaithful to her memory. Whether she still existed in some form and was looking down on us now, shaking her head in disapproval at her former husband and the woman who had just stolen him away.