Promise Me This(18)

After a good laugh, we got on the road again. I tried to jump in the driver’s seat but she wasn’t having it.

“Tell me one amazing memory,” Jessie said after a few minutes of silence. “You know, from your childhood.”

She was intent on going back there again. I shut my eyes momentarily and took a deep breath. Did I even have any amazing memories? Of course I did, I just needed to dig deep.

“There was a pond near our house where my brother and I always hung out,” I said. “A tire hung from this huge tree and the two of us would swing high over the water and jump in. We did it over and over again all damn day.”

“That sounds amazingly cool, Square,” she said. “And completely country. I mean, I didn’t have some random body of water by me in the city. I had to use the public pool.”

“Well, at least it was sanitized,” I said, shrugging. “We’d find all kinds of crap floating around in that lake, especially after a good rain.”

“I’d still take the fresh smell of a lake after a hard rain over hard-core chlorine that always made my eyes burn.”

“Point taken,” I said, jiggling my knee again. I just needed to keep moving. It was how I organized my thoughts, my brain. Of course, my little tick was also magnified by how amped up I felt, being around Jessie like this, in close quarters. I could smell her and it wasn’t some kind of sugary perfume.

She had this exotic scent—like when my mother picked a bouquet of wildflowers from the garden. A concoction of eucalyptus, baby powder, and honey all melded together. It was intoxicating and made me want to move closer to that soft patch of skin in the hollow of her throat, in order to take a deeper lungful.

The night she stumbled in the bathroom was the closest I’d ever gotten to her and it was the first time I’d gotten a good whiff, that’s how subtle the scent was. But now it was all I could think about.

“Why do you think that day by the lake was one of your favorites?” she asked.

Again, that deep ache in my chest. “Oh you know, because it was the freedom of being a kid. Not a care in the world.”

I remembered how some nights in my room, when I could hear my parents arguing a floor below, I’d take out my sketch pad and get lost in the feeling of my fingers dragging across the page—I’d draw buildings, bridges, and other structures that interested me. I also had many pages of darkness—caves, pits, eclipses—so I’d be sure to sketch the pond and the sun, added light and balance to the black.

When she didn’t respond I continued, recalling how easy it was to walk out the front door into the sunshine and forget all of it, every single part, for the next few hours.

“When I was a kid, I didn’t care that my knees were scratched or my shins had an entire landscape of bruises across them. Or that I was completely filthy and my hair was matted to my head with sweat. I wasn’t even sure where in the hell my shoes were half the time,” I said, laughing and shaking my head. “All I knew was that sometimes I felt light as a balloon drifting off in the warm summer breeze and I wanted those days—those good days—to last as long as humanly possible.”

“Wow, Nate,” she said, the words floating from her mouth on a gust of air, her eyes round and wide. “Now you’ve made me feel nostalgic.”

“I want a redo of one of those carefree days. There weren’t many of them.” I gave her a quick sidelong glance, surprising even myself that I had admitted all of that. But it dislodged the rigidity in my chest, just a little. ”Before everything in the entire fucking universe went to shit and began to matter.”

“That’s about right,” she said, softly, her gaze focused on the road but really a whole world away.

“What makes you nostalgic?” I asked.

The bittersweet look in her eyes deepened and I figured she was thinking about her dad. She twisted her bottom lip with her fingers and glanced at me, almost hesitant. “There was this one time it was just my dad and me. He had taken me to the beach to shoot pictures of the waves.”

“Where was your mom?”

“At work. My parents always had odd jobs and work hours. My dad would go off on photography assignments because he worked freelance and then he’d come back with all kinds of stories.”

“That’s really cool.”

She nodded. “But this was just a quiet afternoon we shared and the water was so gray. There was no wind kicking off the lake and it was so peaceful.”

“Huh,” I said. “So you do have a water tale after all, Blue. This wasn’t some public pool with chlorine.”