“I wish... I wish I hadn’t been such a coward. I could have told you.”
“I wish I hadn’t been such a snob. I don’t know if you telling me would have made a difference. You were my brother’s stoner friend. And I liked you. I did. I liked that you were so protective of Dillon. I liked hanging out with you. I didn’t like you like you. Except for the night you kissed me. Then I liked you.”
“We were drunk. Doesn’t count.”
“No, I guess not. But I’m very sober tonight. And tonight counts.”
“You don’t like me. I’m just the rebound guy.”
“I like you. You’re very sexy when you’re not stoned.”
“I haven’t gotten stoned since my freshman year in college.”
“You said you went to a trade school.”
“Because I flunked out of college.”
“Because of the pot?”
“Because of the pot and the drinking and the not giving enough of a shit to go to class. When I flunked out, Dad kicked me out. Mom un-kicked me out. Sort of. She said I could stay in the storage room over the garage for six months but after that it was either go back to school or move out for real.”
“So you got a job?”
“I had to clean up the room in the garage first. Dad kept all his tools out there.” He stopped and smiled. “This will sound dumb.”
“Sound dumb. I want to hear you sound dumb.”
“I found a knife, a really pretty one, and Dad had some birch wood he’d never gotten around to using for something. And I was bored. I started whittling it. It made me feel better, better than I’d felt in a long time. Clear up here.” He tapped his forehead. “I did that for a couple weeks. Played with Dad’s tools, whittled, carved a little. In shop class in high school, I’d made a chair. I taught myself how to make one again, a rocking chair this time, and gave it to Mom as a thank-you for un-kicking me out. She thought it was so pretty she cried. Dad had been promising her a porch rocker for years like the one her grandmother had. Right after that, Dad had a heart attack and had to cut way back on work. I stepped up because I knew I could do it then. Making one stupid chair changed me. Yeah, that did sound dumb.”
“No, it sounds kind of...spiritual, maybe?” She hoped that didn’t sound as cheesy to him as it sounded to her.
“It’s wild, you know. Trees are alive and they die when you cut them down, but if you treat the wood the right way, carve it, stain it, polish it, make something beautifu
l out of it, or something useful—”
“Like a rocking chair for your mom?”
“Right. If you make something out of that wood, if you use it well, it’ll last for centuries. It’ll last longer than the tree might have lived. How’s that for an afterlife?”
“Sounds like a good afterlife to me. So making a chair changed you. I like that.”
“You make your mother cry by giving her something you made with your own hands and it gets to you, you know? That’s when I decided to get my act together. I quit drugs, all of them. I’m clean now. Have been for years.”
Joey felt an unexpected knot in her throat. She hadn’t meant to see Chris’s heart like that. She hadn’t meant to go digging. She certainly hadn’t expected to hit gold like she had.
“Anybody ever tell you that you clean up really nice?”
“Dillon did. But he doesn’t count.”
“Why not?”
“Because right now, only you count.”
He kissed her again, gently, but she didn’t want that. No gentle kisses for her. She needed rough and hard. She needed bruising kisses that would remind her tomorrow that she was single and could do stuff like have wild meaningless one-night stands with old high school friends. Of course, if Chris kept making her feel this good, this sexy, she might accidentally find a little meaning in it and that would be terrible, wouldn’t it? She didn’t want to have to get over two guys in one month. That was a lot of rebounding.
Joey touched his face tenderly. He pulled back and looked her in the eyes.
“What is it?” he asked, his voice soft and low. His eyelashes were long and they made him look younger in the low lamplight. They made him look almost innocent.