I don’t ask him why he hasn’t called. I don’t ask him where he’s been. When I found him in my kitchen, leaning against the counter like he belonged there, I pretended it was perfectly natural, not even a surprise. “Am I interrupting something?” he asked, like it wasn’t odd that he suddenly decided to show up.
“Depends on what you call interrupting.” My insides were filled with diamonds, suddenly illuminated by the sun.
“Do you want to go out?”
“Sure.” I ran upstairs and scrubbed off my clown face, knowing all the while I should have said no, or at least allowed myself to be convinced, because what girl agrees to go on a date spur of the moment like that? It sets a bad precedent, makes the guy think he can see you whenever he wants, treat you however he wants. But I didn’t have it in me to refuse. As I pulled on my boots, I wondered if I’d come to regret being so easy.
I’m not regretting it now, though. Who makes up those rules about dating, anyway? And why can’t I be exempt?
He puts his hand on my leg. Casually. Like we’ve been dating for a long time. If we were, I wonder if his hand on my leg would always produce the reaction I’m having now, which is a confused sort of divine giddiness. I decide it would. I can’t imagine ever not feeling like this when I’m with him.
I’m losing it.
“It’s not that great, you know,” he says.
“Huh?” I turn back to him, my happiness pitching into inexplicable panic.
“Europe,” he says.
“Oh,” I breathe. “Europe.”
“Two summers ago when I lived in Rome, I went all around—France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain—and when I got back here, I realized this place is just as beautiful.”
“Castlebury?” I gasp.
“It’s as beautiful as Switzerland,” he says.
Sebastian Kydd actually likes Castlebury? “But I always imagined you”—I falter—“living in New York. Or London. Or someplace exciting.”
He frowns. “You don’t know me that well.” And just as I’m about to expire from fear that I’ve insulted him, he adds, “But you will.
“In fact,” he continues, “since I figured we ought to get to know each other better, I’m taking you to see an art exhibit.”
“Ah,” I say, nodding. I don’t know a damn thing about art either. Why didn’t I take art history when I had the chance?
I’m a goner.
Sebastian will figure it out and dump me before we’ve even had a proper first date.
“Max Ernst,” he says. “He’s my favorite artist. Who’s yours?”
“Peter Max?” It’s the only name I can think of at the moment.
“You are funny,” he says, and laughs.
He takes me to the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford. I’ve been there a million times on field trips, holding the sticky hand of another little classmate so no one got lost. I hated the way we were marched around, scolded by a teacher’s aide who was always somebody’s mother. Where was Sebastian back then? I wonder as he takes my hand.
I look down at our intertwined fingers and see something that shocks me.
Sebastian Kydd bites his nails?
“Come on,” he says, pulling me along beside him. We stop in front of a painting of a boy and a girl on a marble bench on a fantasy lake in the mountains. Sebastian stands behind me, resting his head on top of mine and wrapping his arms around my shoulders.”Sometimes I wish I could go into that painting. Close my eyes and wake up there. I’d stay there forever.”
But what about me? screams a voice in my head. I suddenly don’t like being left out of his fantasy. “Wouldn’t you get bored?”
“Not if you were there with me.”
I just about fall over. Guys aren’t supposed to say these things. Or rather, they’re supposed to but never do. I mean, who actually says things like that?
A guy who is crazily, madly in love with you. A guy who sees how incredible and amazing you are, even though you’re not the cheerleader or even close to the prettiest girl in the school. A guy who thinks you’re beautiful, just the way you are.
“My parents are in Boston,” he says. “Want to go to my house?”
“Sure.” I figure I’d go just about anywhere with him.
I have this theory that you can tell everything about a person by their room, but in Sebastian’s case, it isn’t true. His room is more like a guestroom in an antique boardinghouse than an actual boy’s lair. There’s a black and red handmade quilt, and an old wooden captain’s wheel hangs on the wall. No posters, photographs, albums, baseballs—not even a dirty sock. I stare out the window at the view of a fading brown field and past that, the stark yellow brick of a convalescent home. I close my eyes and try to pretend I’m with Sebastian in the Max Ernst painting under an azure blue sky.
Now that I’m actually in his room—with him, for real—I’m a little uneasy.
Sebastian takes my hand and leads me to the bed. He puts his hands on either side of my face and kisses me.
I can barely breathe. Me—and Sebastian Kydd. It’s really happening.
After a while, he raises his head and looks at me. He’s so close I can see the tiny flecks of dark green around his irises. He’s so close I could count them if I tried.
“Hey,” he says. “You never asked why I didn’t call.”
“Was I supposed to?”
“Most girls would have.”
“Maybe I’m not most girls.”This sounds kind of arrogant but I’m certainly not going to tell him how I spent the last two weeks in an emotional panic, jumping every time the phone rang, giving him sidelong glances in class, promising myself I would never, ever do any bad thing ever again if he would only talk to me the way he had that night at the barn…and then hating myself for being so stupid and girlish about the whole thing.
“Did you think about me?” he asks slyly.
Oh boy. A trick question. If I say no, he’ll be insulted. If I say yes, I’ll sound pathetic.
“Maybe a little.”
“I thought about you.”
“Then why didn’t you call?” I ask playfully.
“I was afraid.”
“Of me?” I laugh, but he seems oddly sincere.
“I was worried that I could fall in love with you. And I don’t want to be in love with anyone right now.”
“Oh.” My heart drops to my stomach.
“Well?” he asks, running his finger along my jaw.
Aha. I smile. It’s only another one of his trick questions.
“Maybe you just haven’t met the right girl,” I murmur.
He brings his lips close to my ear. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
My parents met in a library.
After college, my mother was a librarian. My father came in to borrow some books,