Touch(20)

He turned and looked out over the water. The night was still, and the ocean calm. “Yeah. We grew up about a mile up that hill back there. When I was a kid, we were here just about every day. I don’t get down here as much as I used to now. But as much as I can.” Looking back at her, he asked, “You surf?”



“No way. I barely swim. I mean, I can. A little. Enough. But we never came to the coast much. My dad worked a lot.” She laughed. “I was an expensive kid, I guess.”



That felt like an opening, and Luca wanted to ask. He argued with himself briefly and then decided, fuck it. She was direct. He preferred directness. So he asked. “Why?”



Sucking cutely on her straw, she stared at him for what felt like a full minute. Then she set her drink on one knee and her wiener on the other. “Okay. Straight up. I was in ‘intensive’ therapy”—he heard the quotation marks—“for like fifteen years. Twice during that time I was in the actual loony bin. Once because my mom got in my way when I had a rage on, and I stabbed her with her big sewing scissors. Three times. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t even know I was doing it, not really. I was away more than a year that time.”



She picked up her wiener, took a bite, chewed it. Luca processed the new information and tried to decide whether her story was over, but then she set her food down and looked him straight in the eye. “I don’t know why we’re sitting here. I don’t know if this is supposed to mean something. I’m not good at knowing things people don’t say. But whatever. I know Dimi told you where we came from. My circuits are all twisted up. I didn’t learn a lot of things normal kids learn—not till much later. I learned other things. Not good things. The way normal people behave, it’s like a foreign language to me. I have to work hard at things normal people don’t even have to think about. And I work hard at it all the time. I have, like, this set of mental flashcards that I flip through to try to understand. But I get tired, and sometimes I slip. I get wicked pissed sometimes. I tear everything down. And sometimes I hurt people. Usually, it’s people I care about, because they’re the ones who put themselves in my way.”



She took her last bite of wiener. Luca’s was still in his hands, half uneaten. “In short, I suck. I’m nuts, I’m violent, and you should probably be running back to the safety of the boardwalk now.”



She was right. That was exactly what he should be doing—well, at least he should finish his meal and take her back home to live her little, askew life. But that was not what he wanted to do. He kept thinking about her start, that image he had, maybe from some episode of 60 Minutes or something he’d seen back in the day, of a grey baby crying alone in a grey crib, rocking herself, trying to give herself comfort that wasn’t available from any other source.



Superimposed over that image was his view of this small, fierce young woman with the electric-blue eyes, laying herself out to him. A girl strong enough to learn to love despite a brain that didn’t understand it, who worked hard to interact with people, even though it wore her out, and got up and did it all over again every morning. A girl strong enough to tell him her story, flat out. He looked at her and saw real courage in that tiny frame.



His childhood had been about as different as it could have been—a lively, loving, warm, colorful home full of children. An idyllic life near the ocean. A world bathed in sunlight and privilege. Maybe it was that, the contrast, that made his chest ache like this.



As a rule, Luca was just not that deep a guy. So what was going on with him was more than a little disorienting.



He could think of no words adequate to be uttered, and he wasn’t one who filled silence with garbage. So he just watched her watch him.



Damn, she had beautiful eyes. Even in the dark, they caught the moonlight and seashine and seemed to glow. They were the kind of eyes a guy could get lost in. Luca was overtaken by a powerful urge to pull her to him and kiss her thoroughly, but he warred with that urge until he mastered it. He didn’t want to scare her.



But fuck, he wanted to kiss her.



Those gorgeous eyes suddenly dropped, and she focused on wadding up the paper from her meal. “Look. You know that thing they do in movies, where people look into each other’s eyes, and, like, violins start playing, and they don’t need to talk because they’re saying everything they need to say just by looking at each other?”



He blinked and nodded, derailed, but interested.



“Well, like I said, I don’t have that. I don’t hear violins. I just get static. I need people to say what they mean, what they’re thinking. Because as hard as I try to read people, I’m only hitting the mark about half the time. I need people to say what they want. I need you to say what you—”