I exhaled at the realization that, indeed, for the next three months there was no more cancer. We could end our senior year like normal teenagers. Or, at the very least, like normal teenagers with a shitload of baggage.
CHAPTER 41
“DO WE HAVE TO do this?” I asked, bundled in twelve layers of clothes and still freezing my ass off at Baynes Beach.
“Bucket list, remember?” Becca still held that Fuck-It List over my head, as if the fact that I started it with her made me obligated to finish it, too.
“I believe we decided it was a Fuck-It List, and that is what I’d like to declare right now. Fuck it. It’s too cold out, Becca!” Becca used her cancer card to convince me, Caleb, and Leo to fulfill number 13: Sleep on a beach and watch the sunrise.
“I’m calling a technicality. It doesn’t actually say we have to stay all night. Let’s just watch the sun set and then get up really early for the sunrise.” Leo was my glowing voice of reason.
“Yes! Excellent idea.” I clapped.
“You guys can leave after sunset. We’re staying.” Becca linked her arm through Caleb’s massive one. He was scoutly prepared with a tent, heater, and probably a bearskin rug he skinned himself.
The four of us sat on a blanket in the cold sand. Caleb passed out hot chocolate made from cacao beans he grew in his greenhouse. Probably. As miserable as the late March temperature was, nothing could really make the moment bad. Here we were, together, happy, alive. So little else mattered.
Still, the instant Caleb marked the sunset with his Swiss Army watch, Leo and I were out of there. “Call me if you stop feeling your toes,” I yelled from my car. Leo and I sat inside as the engine attempted to warm up.
“Just drive. We’ll be back at my house in five minutes. We can warm up there.”
In the time Leo and I had been back on speaking terms, closer than when it was merely physical, we hadn’t yet had sex. At first, we held out so as not to make things too intense too quickly. But as the weeks passed—the long, yearning, painful weeks—I didn’t think I could hold out much longer. It surprised me, that while getting emotionally close to someone I could feel even more attracted to him than when I barely knew anything about him. I knew that sounded stupid, but I had never experienced anything different. The physical and the emotional never went together. Maybe because I had never had the emotional before.
We got back to Leo’s house in record time and shot straight up to his bedroom. We kicked off our shoes and dove under the covers together, still wearing all eight million layers of clothing. As we huddled up, our shivers stopped and we somehow fell asleep. When I awoke an hour later, I was thick with sweat.
“Gross.” I sat up and began to peel off my coat, then my hoodie. Underneath were three more shirts and long underwear. When all that was left was my t-shirt, I nudged Leo awake. His forehead and hairline were coated in sweat. “You need to get out of your clothes,” I told him.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said sleepily. I helped him unzip his coat and pulled layer after layer over his head. When it was time to stop, when he, too, was left with only a black t-shirt, I pulled that off, too. In return, he yanked my shirt over my head. “Just to be fair,” he explained.
“Well, if you’re going to be that way,” I said, and unhooked my bra.
There we were on his bed, wearing jeans and nothing else. I sat on my knees facing him, while his legs dangled over the edge of the bed. I traced my fingers up the definition of his stomach, his chest. He wrapped his hands around my waist and let them rise up over my breasts. This was as naked as we’d been in months. We both knew that if any clothing came off, we couldn’t stop ourselves from everything coming off. We were right. The instant I felt his bare flesh against mine, I couldn’t get close enough to him.
We took our time, knowing we had time. Every hair on my body stood on end, every sense heightened. He tasted so good, felt even better. I didn’t remember taking off my jeans, and maybe I didn’t. Maybe it was all him. We waited until we couldn’t stand it anymore, until it felt like we’d explode from not letting ourselves go. And then we did. The feeling lasted forever, as though I couldn’t let it stop. When I finally relaxed, every limb entwined with Leo, I said something so completely involuntary that I gasped after I said it.
“I love you.”
“You what?” Leo propped himself up on an elbow.
“Uhhh…” I sounded like a dolt, and I knew I had to own it. “I said I love you,” I repeated more clearly, more certain.
“One more time,” Leo prodded.
“Those are about to be the last words you ever hear, Leo Dietz,” I growled in his ear.
“That’d be fine with me.” He kissed my forehead. I waited for his return sentiment, but it didn’t come.
“And?” I prodded.
“And what?” He played dumb. Or was dumb.
“Aren’t you going to say it back?”
“You heard those words from me and had months to deal with them. I’m going to let your words age a little. Like a fine wine.”
“Or cheese,” I noted.
“I like cheese,” Leo added. “A lot.”
“That makes two of us,” I concurred.
So, I had to wait. I had gotten pretty good at waiting. But this time, it wasn’t test results. Love was so abstract: It wasn’t war, it wasn’t cancer, it wasn’t death. But I’m pretty sure that’s what I felt. And I was going to let myself, no matter how hard my evil side fought against it.
CHAPTER 42
SPRING
I WAITED FOR LEO in the book closet. There was less than one month left of school. Less than one month until the anniversary of my dad’s death. Less than one month until Becca’s next cancer check.
The door clicked open, and there stood Leo. His hair was growing out, which I liked a little better than the buzz. I think we all wanted to have some hair on our heads for a while. He had on a black t-shirt, jeans, and black Chucks, which made us annoyingly cutesy and matching. I recognized the outline of his brother’s dog tags underneath his shirt. The second he walked in and the door closed, we clung to each other. We kissed for a couple minutes until I stopped him. “Time to get down to business.”
Reluctantly, we sat down at the old desks and worked. He had a huge creative writing story to revise, and I was putting the finishing touches on my new horror movie, Graphite. It was the story of a girl who gets hit in the forehead with a pencil after her classmates attempt to throw it at the muddled classroom celling. Then she goes on a killing spree, taking out all of the guys who crossed her with violent pencil deaths. Naturally, Becca would star, fulfilling number nineteen on the Fuck-It List. Not that we had looked at the list since freezing our asses off on the beach. We may have accomplished most of the weird, ridiculous, perverted goals Becca set for herself, but the list felt too connected to cancer to continue. I held onto it, storing it underneath my bedside stack of library books. Just in case. Becca never asked where it was.
On a clear May afternoon, Becca, Caleb, Leo, and I hung out in Becca’s backyard. It was the spring of the seventeen-year cicadas. They had been around when I was a baby, so this was technically the first time I had really seen them. I found them fascinating. In appearance, they would have made perfect horror-movie specimens: about three inches long, with translucent, green wings and glowing red eyes. Their feet were covered with sticky pads, and if one landed on you it might stay and just hang out, not flit away like scaredy bugs. It was incredible to think they lay dormant underground for seventeen years. Then they climbed their way out, leaving behind a trail of cocoony things on the trees and a layer of bugs on the ground so thick you had to shuffle your way through them so you wouldn’t crush their newly freed bodies. And the noise they made was deafening. Like a UFO landed somewhere nearby and hovered as it picked up people for experiments.
