“Make love to me,” she said again, wrapping her arms around his shoulders, going up on tiptoe to realign their bodies. “Make me forget just for a little while.”
A frenzied muscled ticked in his jaw, his lips flattening into a thin line. “Brooklyn, you have no idea how much I wanna do exactly that. But I don’t have a condom.”
She shook her head. All this talk was allowing some of that terrible pain to creep back in, some of that spirit-crushing despair to seep into the mortar she’d used to quickly build up a wall around her grief. “Forget about it,” she told him, shoving his jeans and boxers down his thighs until his erection sprang free. “I don’t care…”
* * *
Steady watched Abby scoop some of the goop she’d made from that hemp-plant-that-wasn’t-really-a-hemp-plant off a palm leaf. She mimicked sticking it to her eyes while Yonus translated for the people of the village. “And then, you press this to your face like this and go to sleep for the night. It will make the infection…” She wrinkled her button nose, glancing at Yonus. “Does that translate? The word infection?”
“I’m calling it the eyesight stealer.” Yonus shrugged.
Abby nodded. “I like that even better,” she said, before continuing to demonstrate. “So it will keep the eyesight stealer from…well”—she shrugged her shoulders—“stealing your eyesight.”
Steady glanced at the dark faces around him once Yonus had fallen silent in his translation. He didn’t need to speak the language to know the Orang Asli were eager to give Abby’s remedy a try. One man stuck his finger into the goo and lifted it to his nose, inhaling deeply. His expression was intrigued as he offered his finger to the rest of the villagers.
Steady had to roll in his lips to keep from chuckling as a dozen dark heads leaned in to give the paste the ol’ sniff test. But when he looked over at Abby standing in the middle of them, her skin dewed with sweat and her pale green eyes bright with enthusiasm, all his laughter died. Because in that instant everything, everything, suddenly became clear. Cut-glass clear. Mountain rain clear. As if he’d been clocked in the skull with a two-by-four of crystal-clear truth.
He loved her.
“Abby…” Her name was on his lips before he could call it back. He didn’t know why. All he knew was that he needed to say it.
“I know.” She laughed when one of the women of the tribe timidly touched a lock of her hair. “We need to be on our way. I know.”
Sí. They probably did. For many reasons, not the least of which was that he was itching to find a pay phone or a landline or even an electrical outlet with which to juice up his iPhone. He needed to call back to HQ to see if they had a status update on Ozzie. His best friend’s situation had been a constant presence in the back of his mind. But…that wasn’t what he meant. He meant… “Abby…”
And there it was again. Her name. Slipping from between his lips of its own accord. And each time he said it, it rang inside him like a promise…like a prayer. Which made sense since the good Madre Maria knew he was tempted to fall at her feet as a penitent, pledging to worship her forever.
“Okay, Carl—” Her words cut off the instant she looked into his face. No surprise, really. Considering some of what he was feeling had to be plastered there. I mean, he was thunderstruck. Awestruck. Dumbstruck. Every kind of struck you can imagine.
He waited breathlessly for her response to the love in his eyes, to the adoration scrawled across his face as if he’d written it there with a big black Sharpie. But then he realized his expression couldn’t be all that obvious when she said, “Oh, what the hedge cutter’s ass? Are you sick or something? Was it the rambutans?”
Hedge cutter’s ass? Oh, Abby. Sweet, wonderful, hilarious Abby…
And just like that, the laughter was back. This time, he didn’t try to contain it. This time he let loose with it. Let it echo up into the roiling, cloud-filled sky. Let it fill his chest, and warm his heart.
He loved her!
If it wouldn’t have scared the ever-loving crap out of the villagers, he would have shouted it to the world. Roared it through the jungle like a lion. And fuck the fact that he was a maldito bori and she was the president’s daughter. Fuck the right side of the tracks versus the wrong side of the tracks. Fuck everything that had ever kept them apart in the past or threatened to keep them apart in the future. Because he loved her. And, by Dios, if it took him moving heaven and earth to have her, that’s exactly what he’d do!
As if the universe knew and understood the weight of the pledge he’d made, the boiling clouds chose that second to rip open. Rain surged from the sky in a deafening roar, drenching him in an instant. He continued to laugh, lifting his arms wide as he let the downpour wash away the last remaining vestiges of the hurt he’d felt when Abby rejected him eight years ago. Let it wash away any lingering doubt that she would reject him again.