River's End

"Hey—I saw them again. The other night. Those lights. They're crazy. This's the second time."

"So what? You've been out of your head for the last four nights."

His laughter, she thought, was worth it every time—that slow cool trickle that felt like the ocean sluicing over your toes. It was worth it even when there was no humor in the situation, when she'd been trying to make a serious point. She knew that this could only end with her heart broken into pieces and scattered out at her feet, but if he laughed when he left, or even after he had gone with the next girl and the wind carried the sound to her, it would have been worth it.

"That's true," he said, so soft and warm that it might have been no more than the July air, or a moth's wings beating like a blush across her face. "Five," he said, "If you're counting now."

"I'm leaving," she said abruptly, although it was her house, and they'd been together less than ten minutes. She knew, in theory, that when she couldn't even tell anymore, when she didn't know the difference between him sober and him wasted unless by her sense of smell, then that was when it was time to go. Her mother and father had taught her that, at least, if nothing else. The wicker chair creaked as she abandoned it, and she started to walk away across the porch and back into the kitchen. She heard an echo of that squeak.

"No, hey, wait," he said. Three fingers touched the back of her arm—touched, did not grab, and not even all four, and it was enough to stop her dead in her tracks.

"Don't," he finished, lips a hummingbird's wingspan from her ear. She could feel his body running along the length of her own, or perhaps more precisely his aura. The only thing actually touching her was his fingers.

"What?" she snapped. She turned to face him and found herself looking at his chest, where the sun had buttered his skin golden. Where the sun had cooked him brown like a waffle. A malted waffle, she thought a little bitterly, because this close she could smell it on him. And as if it were some sick cologne to her, she was drawn in. She closed what little gap there was, and she put her cheek to that exposed patch of skin and wondered what else was in his blood that she could not sense.

He was engaged. To someone that was not her. He was, strictly speaking, a cad.

He put one hand on her shoulder. The other hand hovered where it had been touching her arm, somewhere around her waist. Like a blackfly drawn to blood it settled, finally, on the small of her back. Her own hands hung lump at her sides. Although she wanted to curl one on his chest, next to her face, she resisted.

"Tell me about the lights," she said.

He laughed again, that lazy sound that made her see afternoons on a tire swing and green shadows through high foliage and pink-bellied fish, half-mirage along a sandy creek bottom.

"There were two," he said. "Almost like… green. Maybe blue like Sirius sometimes. One of 'em was just moving along, real slow, but it couldn'a been a satellite; it went all over. Up and down, just real slow—like a sailboat, drifting along up there. Then the other one, it was faster. It was zigzagging around and I kept losing sight of it. It stayed close to the slow one, though. They stuck together."

"It's impossible to tell with sta—with space objects," I said. "They could've been a thousand miles apart and just looked like they were right next to each other, just because of the angle you saw them from."

"Nuh-uh," he disagreed definitively. "They were together.

"How do you know?"

"I know." She could hear his smile. The hand on her back moved up, and trailed along the ends of her hair.

"What night was it?" she asked, fighting two battles—one mental, and one to feel like she was in control of her knees. It was, she tried to assure herself, the setting. It was the yellow-pink of the setting sun and the still afternoon-hot air. It was the anticipation of the cool breeze blowing up from the shore. It wasn't that he could just do this to her.

"I don't know… Tuesday? We were out on the beach," he said vaguely, as if that explained it. And who knew? It might.

"Did anyone else see them?" she asked.

"Well, I didn't tell anyone else," he said, and again she could hear the languid smile in his voice, and this time the amusement, too. "I wanted you to be the first."

She was losing both battles, as one hand tangled in her hair and the second replaced it on her back.

"I'm going to check the… the… I don't know. I'm going to call the weather… the weather station." She should be stronger than this. She was nearly a grown woman, after all. She'd had plenty of boys. He was just a boy, she told herself. Engaged or not, he was just a boy.

"Knew you'd say that," he drawled. He traced something over her back with a single finger. "Someday you'll see them," he said, so quiet, so sure. "And you'll wonder how you ever wondered."

"Someday," she countered, finally summoning the strength to break the spell. She pushed away from him and went to stand at the railing. She looked over it, at the green grass below her, and the foliage wall beyond which lay the strangely silent street. A cricket thrummed. "You'll come looking and I'll be gone."

She felt his aura first again, and then his face was in her hair. She'd seen him do it to his bride-to-be a thousand times. She wondered if she knew he did it to other women. She wondered if she, also, did not care enough to stop him.

"When you're gone," he said, "I'll think of you." He said it like it meant something. Other men she had known might have said they would follow, that they would break their bodies into pieces trying to get her back. But what was terrible about him was the honesty with which he said it. Like it truly meant something. And worse than that, even, was that it did. "Someday I'll look into the sunset and think of you, just like this, because I know you'd like it."

"I'm going to call the weather station." She said it warningly, like, touch me and I'll scream. Like, I'll tell your fiancée.

What was the point?

"You'll call tomorrow," he said—not quite a command, more like a prophecy—as his hands slipped lower than before, and she had to try not to gasp.

"Tomorrow," she agreed, and he laughed like a sand-bottomed stream.

She had never been a very strong swimmer.

tbc

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