“You’re beautiful, Charlotte. With your soft hair and your port and your scars, you’re everything I would want in a girl. Don’t you believe differently.” He turns his head again, so I can see his brown velvet eyes staring straight at me.
I believe.
He kisses up a little higher, to the top of my thigh. “I love your laugh. Your willingness to put up with the Jackson boys’ shit constantly. Your endless optimism. No one has your spirit.”
He rises and pushes me backward on the bed so that I’m caged on either side by his muscular arms. Why, Nate, you haven’t been skipping arm day, have you? I think ridiculously because I’m nervous and excited and I’m trying not to squeal.
He is going to kiss me. His face comes closer, and I lick my lips in anticipation. This is it. This is what I’ve been waiting for my whole short life. This is why I have to keep living so that I can remember this event over and over and over. Slowly his lips brush mine. I want to keep my eyes open, but they are dragged down as if there is a string attached to my lips.
“I just want to take things slow. Make them right for you. Do you trust me?”
I nod.
“We can’t go back. What we have between us,” he waves his finger back and forth, from his chest to mine, “will never be the same. We will have to fight to keep Nick with us. We will have to fight to keep together. No matter what. Will you do that?”
“I will,” I vow. I loved him so much for remembering Nick—that we are all one unit—and for wanting me to fight for him and for us.
He bends forward then and presses his mouth against mine again. His arms are shaking with the effort of something, some unknown force either holding him back or pushing him forward. He’s straining with the power of it, but his lips against mine are featherweight, light and without pressure. It’s a hello kiss. It’s a we’re going to get to know each other one new second at a time kiss. It’s endlessly sweet and wonderful, but it’s not enough.
So I grab hold of his wrists and it’s easy to tumble him down, but he turns at the last minute so he’s lying on his side, still kissing me, still telling me that kissing me is all he wants for now. He threads his left hand through my right, but his other hand is no longer occupied with holding him up, and so it drifts downward until it finds the curve of my waist. There it stops and finds purchase, gripping me tight. He won’t let me get closer, but as our lips move against each other I feel his fingers bite into my skin and that movement tells me that he’s so close to the very edge of something that he doesn’t even notice that his touch might be a little too tight. I revel in that—that I’m making Nathan Jackson feel out of control.
But his iron will is still in charge, and so we are just kissing, loving each other with the soft movement of our lips.
13
Charlotte
When Nick and I were ten and Nate was twelve, we went to the Shedd Aquarium for a school field trip. I had a crush on a boy named Lancelot. Everyone did, but I think it was because his name looked like it belonged on a Valentine’s Day card. In the basement of the big aquarium there was a dark room devoted just to showing off jellyfish. Attached along one carpeted wall was a grouping of fake squishy jellyfish made of some kind of weird translucent polymer. You could stick your finger against the pliable rubber and bisect the jellyfish in half and when you released it, the half-moon body would spring right back. Lancelot was standing next to me, and I was transfixed as he stuck his finger inside the jellyfish repeatedly.
He whispered to me that this was what sticking his finger up a girl felt like. If Nate hadn’t been there hovering behind me, maybe all I would have done was blush or maybe I would have hit him. But before I had a chance to react, Nate had pulled Lancelot around and stuck a fist in Valentine’s Day’s face. Lancelot tried to punch back, and the entire class was sent back to the bus for causing a ruckus.
Later that night Nate relayed the whole story to our families, much to my embarrassment. Dad ruffled Nate’s hair, and Noah patted him on the back. But the rumor got out that Nate and Nick would beat up any guy who even looked cross-eyed at me. It was Lancelot’s revenge, and an effective one because until right now, I hadn’t ever been kissed. Not once. Not even a not-so-accidental brush of my lips against a Y-chromosome during a birthday party game, mostly because every co-ed party, birthday or not, has also included at least one—if not both—of the Jackson boys.