Frank smiles back as if he can see her, looking right into the fish-eye lens.
She opens the door beaming.
“Had to pick up some cough drops for my dad, so I was in the area . . .” He glances at the bike helmet she forgot she was wearing. “Were you headed out?”
“I was on my way to Aubrey’s—”
“That’s right! Totally forgot—”
“I don’t have to leave for, like, forty minutes. Want to come in?” She opens the door wider.
“I don’t want to make you late.”
“It’s fine.”
He glances down at the CVS bag in his hand. “Sure,” he says.
This is the first time he’s been inside her house. She leads him to the couch, noticing only after he’s walked across the carpet that there is dirt on his boots. She’ll have to clean it up before her mom comes home, but Maya doesn’t fault him for this—she should have told him about the no-shoes-in-the-house rule. He wears the same white T-shirt and dark jeans he wore earlier today, and when he sits beside her, she smells sun and earth and the kind of sweat that comes from hard work. He must have been working on his cabin.
He drapes an arm over the back of the couch so that he almost, but not quite, has his arm around her, and she wants to lean back into it, but the thought of Ruby stops her.
“So,” he says casually, “what’s up?” Whatever low mood he slipped into earlier has vanished. He smiles.
“Not much . . .” Maya says, but she doesn’t look at him.
His eyebrows tent at her tone.
She weighs asking him about the mix CD. Decides against it.
“Hey,” he says softly. “You all right?”
She should just tell him how she feels. The blood rushes to her face.
He takes her hands, turns her gently toward him. Looks into her eyes. “Talk to me,” he says.
“I really like hanging out with you, Frank. I like . . . you. Like maybe more than a friend.”
“God, it’s good to hear you say that.”
“Really?”
He looks like he might laugh, but his eyes are warm. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know.”
“Know what?”
“I mean . . . I spend all this time with you because there’s no one else I’d rather be with.”
Her eyes go wide, and her heart. She melts. She could do a cartwheel. “I feel the same way.”
He smiles, but the smile is sad, and Maya prepares to plummet back to earth. “I just wish you weren’t leaving,” he says. “I have to keep reminding myself, telling myself I shouldn’t get too close to you, that I’ll only get hurt. But then, every time we’re together, I just—”
She kisses him.
He’s surprised at first, lips parted mid-speech, but then he kisses her back. A long, deep kiss that answers, once and for all, how he feels about her. She doesn’t want to get hurt either, but why should either of them have to? She’d gladly bus back here every weekend. She wraps her arms around his neck.
Then she remembers Aubrey.
Maya pulls away but stays close, their foreheads touching. “Wish I didn’t have to go,” she says.
He pouts. “Maybe you could see Aubrey another night?”
She shakes her head.
“Why not?”
“She’s my best friend. I’ve been kind of ignoring her lately.”
“I bet she’d understand.”
Maya’s flattered by his persistence, then by the glimmer of resentment she sees. “I’m really sorry,” she says. “I can’t.”
“I understand. Guess you should probably get going, then.”
She glances at the clock; she still has ten minutes.
“There’s actually something I want to tell you,” he says.
She can’t tell from his tone if the news is good or bad, but there’s a weight to the words that evokes the same blend of glee and fear she’d felt on the boat.
“I finished my cabin,” he says.
She blinks at him. “That’s awesome.”
“Nothing in it yet, of course, and like I said, nothing fancy, but I worked on it a little each day and now it’s done.”
“Wow, already?”
A smile spreads across his face. He nods.
“I’d love to see it.”
“Would you?” He looks at her thoughtfully.
“Of course! I didn’t realize you were so close to being done.” Maya wonders when he’d had the time, between caring for his father and spending time with her.
“I’d like that,” he says. “You’d be the first to see it.”
“I’d be honored.”
“How’s tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow’s great.”
“You’ll probably want to wear sneakers. Only way to get there is down this abandoned road I found at the edge of my dad’s property when I was little.”
“Wow, sounds cool.”
“Yeah, well . . . wasn’t so cool at the time.” He sighs like a much older person.
Maya wants to know more but asks only with her eyes, and Frank looks at her as if trying to decide if he should tell her. Then he does. While he talks, he plays absently with something in his hand. The key to his cabin—Maya recognizes the serrated edges. The key seems to bring him comfort. She’s struck by his vulnerability as he opens up to her about something that happened when he was ten.
He says he was in the woods behind his parents’ house. He’d go back there whenever they were fighting, and they fought a lot in those days. Those woods went on for miles. One day he wandered onto an abandoned road. It was getting late, but he was curious and decided to follow it. The road was overgrown, disappearing for yards at a time beneath dead leaves and ferns and moss. Eventually it disappeared so completely that Frank couldn’t follow it a step farther—yet when he turned around, it wasn’t behind him either. He was lost. He was only ten, it was getting dark, and all around him, an endless sea of trees, like that dream where you’re underwater and can’t tell which way is up.
He doesn’t know how much time passed before he shouted and cried himself out. He only knows that it was dark, and he was clinging to patches of moonlight between branches when he finally fell quiet enough to hear the stream. The soothing, lifesaving gurgle of it—what a miracle it seemed when the sound led him not only to the stream but back to the road, which he followed expectantly.
He saw an old bridge and a clearing on the other side of the bridge and decided to cross over, thinking he might find something there. A cabin. Help. He entered the clearing but found only the barest remains of a home: a low concrete foundation being reclaimed by forest. Frank sat down on it, pulled his knees to his chest. He prayed that his parents would find him. But they didn’t. He waited all night, shivering with cold and with fear.
Then, sometime near dawn, he closed his eyes and imagined that there really were walls around him, and a ceiling above. A cozy fire. Something hot on the stove. He imagined it until he smelled the cooked meat and burning wood. He must have fallen asleep then, because he dreamed that the place was real, and for the first time in months, he felt safe. Safer than he’d ever felt at home. And in the morning, he wasn’t afraid anymore. He’d survived a night alone in the forest and dreamed up a home for himself. The home he promised himself he would build someday, there in the clearing on the other side of the bridge.