I'll Be Here

cancer patients?”
                “You’re scared,” he repeats without answering my question.
                “Maybe,” I admit turning away from him without saying anything else. 
    All at once I feel exposed on the open street and I don’t want to be where I am.  I start to walk too fast. 
                “Whoa!”  He moves his feet faster to keep up.
    I turn to him, my hair whipped in front of my face.  It sticks to my moist mouth and I push it away with my fingers.  “Honestly, I don’t even know where to begin with my mom.  It seems too hard.  Or maybe too late.”
                Alex steps closer. 
    He reaches forward and tucks my hair back behind my ear and his fingers linger on the side of my face.  I want them to pull me in.  I want them on every part of my body.  I think that he’s going to kiss me on my lips and I close my eyes and breathe in.  Alex wraps his free arm around my shoulders and places a soft kiss on the top of my head. 
    When he speaks into my hair, it is barely a whisper.  “Willow, it’s never too late.  And there’s always a way to begin again.”
                Holy hell. 
    How is it that every single thing that he does is so sexy?  I am so far gone that I’m surprised that I can even stand on my own.  I take a big, steeling breath and swallow. 
    We don’t say much the rest of the way to the theater and then we’re in the movie and we really can’t talk, but it’s crazy how singularly he occupies my mind.  Just sitting there beside me I can sense every little movement that he makes.  I’m aware of Alex’s arm draped over the armrest between us, and the way his fingers crawl the distance to a bag of popcorn propped on his lap.  I suck in an embarrassing gulp of air when his lips part to meet the straw of his drink.  The creaky sound the theater chair makes and the rhythm of Alex’s breathing in the darkened space are amplified in my mind and I shift nervously.  
    A half hour into the movie Alex’s calf brushes up against mine.  It stays parked there, still as a cat that has found a sunny spot to take a nap. 
                If someone were to ask me what the movie was about, I don’t think I’d be able to come up with a coherent response.  All I know is that there’s a girl.  And a guy.  And something happens with someone’s uncle and there’s a scene on a boat and I laugh because everyone else laughs but I’m not following it.  Instead I’m thinking about Alex Faber’s leg touching mine, and Alex Faber’s eyes and then his lips and the way he smells like soap and something else so incredibly masculine that it causes my stomach to clench. 
                After the movie lets out, he buys me an ice cream cone from the metal cart in front of the theater.  The vendor is wearing a silly hat embellished with pastel polka dots and a smiling black and white cow.  He hands me a scoop of mint chocolate chip on a sugar cone.  Alex gets strawberry for himself.  I don’t comment on the rainbow sprinkles.
                We scoot along the railing of the pier.  My eyes sting.  They narrow against the salty wind pushing in from the water.  After the rain and the falling black night I expect it to be cooler than it is, but the air that moves against my skin is moist and warm and for the first time in what feels like awhile, I am not cold. 
                Here the sidewalk ends in a half-moon slab of concrete.  Curving metal rails make a perimeter—a guard against small children falling into the water.  Alex presses his forearms against the iron—his body wrapping itself around the smooth hardness of the metal.  I stand straight, licking the last of the green ice cream from the top of the cone before consuming the thing entirely.
                Abruptly, Alex puts an arm around my waist and pulls me close, and when he kisses me hard I have a newfound respect for strawberry ice cream.

 
     
     
               
    In spite of ourselves we’ll end up a’sittin’ on a rainbow
    Against all odds, honey, we’re the big door prize
    We’re gonna spite our noses right off of our faces
    There won’t be nothin’ but big ole hearts dancin’ in our eyes.
     
    ~John Prine
    “In Spite of Ourselves”

 
     
    CHAPTER SIXTEEN
     
    The rain starts early in the morning while it’s still almost yesterday.  I wake up in the dark as the