Wild Awake

breakfast and get the dishes done and put away. We wipe down the counters, push in our chairs, and turn off the lights. Every time a car passes, we shoot each other panicked looks and bolt toward the stairs. Suddenly, it’s a game: How long can I stay until we get caught? How much of this can we get away with?
    We scamper downstairs and kiss until our lips are swollen and our cheeks are pink and Skunk’s shape, his vast lovely architecture, has become as familiar to me as the rooms of my own house. We drag the black-and-green quilt off Skunk’s bed, lay it on the floor, and roll in it like snow, hands tangled up in one another’s hair. Bicycle Boy, my brontosaurus of love, my love-bison . I cling to his sweater like a cat, pawing at his heart with my little hooked claws, mewling, memorizing his scent. Every so often my mind flits back to my house, the piano, the thirsty azaleas and the mailbox stuffed with flyers. I finally open my fist and let go of these worries, and like a bunch of helium balloons they float up and up and up until they’re tiny specks in the corner of the big blue sky.
    At six o’clock, we hear Skunk’s aunt coming home from work. We freeze on the rug, listening to her footsteps on the kitchen floor. A few minutes later, Skunk’s uncle gets home too. They talk—a low rumbly voice and a sharp medium-high one—and there’s the beep of a microwave and the sudden bright loudness of a TV commercial. I snuggle into Skunk.
    “I should go home now, right? Right?”
    Before I can say anything else, the door at the top of the stairs squeaks open, letting in a bar of yellow light.
    “Philippe?” calls Skunk’s aunt. “T’es en bas?”
    Our bodies go rigid like lizards playing dead. I’m sure she sees us, but Skunk motions for me to stay where I am. He jumps up and rummages noisily through his dresser.
    “Ouai, tante Martine. J’viens. Un moment, j’suis en train de me changer.”
    “D’accord.”
    She shuts the door. My body goes limp, but Skunk is quaking with silent laughter.
    “I told her I was changing. I have to go upstairs for a while,” he whispers. “Don’t worry.”
    He climbs the stairs. Before he opens the door, he looks over his shoulder to cast me a mischievous grin.
    “Hey, Aunt Martine. What’s for dinner?” he says more loudly than he needs to. I have to bury my head under the quilt before I laugh so hard I give our secret away.
    When Skunk comes back down, he lights big beeswax candles and tunes one of the radios to this station that plays detective shows from the 1940s. We lie on the floor and listen, the quilt wrapped around us. I lift his hand and very gently bite the tender perfect acorn of his finger. He murmurs and pulls me in close, and we spoon while the radio detective comforts a hysterical woman whose husband has just been found poisoned in bed.
    “It was the butler,” I whisper.
    “No way,” murmurs Skunk. “It was definitely the wife.”
    “No way.”
    “She’s having an affair with the butler.”
    “You’re smoking crack.”
    “Just wait.”
    I sigh and nest my body more snugly into Skunk’s. The show goes on. It turns out it was the hysterical wife. Skunk was right.
    We listen to another one starring the same detective, and this time Skunk predicts the killer again. “You’ve listened to way too many of these,” I say.
    “You always think it’s the obvious suspect. It’s never the obvious suspect.”
    “Thanks, Inspector Gadget.”
    “It’s always the last person you’d ever guess.”
    “I still don’t get why the groundskeeper killed Dr. Knight.”
    “He’d falsified his brother’s will so Harry wouldn’t inherit Birch Pond anymore. The only way to get it back was to kill Dr. Knight.”
    “You have listened to way too many of these.”
    “Let’s listen to one more.”
    I prop my head up on my elbows and look down at him. “Aren’t you getting tired? Don’t you ever sleep?”
    “We’ll sleep,” whispers Skunk. “But let’s listen to another one first.”
    I start to protest. Skunk reaches up and touches my hair, and before I know it I’m kissing him again. Soon neither of us is paying enough attention to the show to figure out who killed who.
    All night we drift in and out of sleep, waking up just long enough to kiss and tangle and fall asleep again with our limbs in a knot. It feels like we’re living in a dream, like there’s no way what we’re doing is possible. But it is. And we are. And I don’t ever