Autoboyography
Page 43

Yeah, it’s just me here. Come over whenever.
His reply comes almost immediately.
Cool. See you in a few.
I run upstairs and change my shirt. I grab the kitchen garbage and clean up my soda cans and chip crumbs and throw the leftover pizza box away. I’m just coming in from the garage when the doorbell rings and I have to stop, take a few calming breaths before I cross the room, and open the door.
He’s standing there, wearing a black T-shirt, worn jeans with a rip in the knee, faded red Converse. Even lacking some of his normal polish he’s . . . breathtaking. His hair has fallen in his eyes, but it doesn’t mask the spark I see there.
I smile so wide my face hurts. “Hey.”
I step back so he can follow me in. Inside, he waits just long enough for me to move away from the door before he’s pressing me to the wall. His lips are as warm as his hand on my hip, where his thumb presses into the skin just above my jeans. That tiny touch is like a starter pistol in my blood, and I rock forward, so worked up by the thought of his hand and its general proximity to other parts that I can’t even remember why he’s not supposed to be here. I want him to tug the denim down. I want to take him to my room and see if he blushes everywhere.
A few more kisses and Sebastian sucks in a breath, moving to drag his teeth along my jaw. My head falls back with a mild thud, and only then do I see that I never got around to closing the door.
“Let me just . . . ,” I start, and Sebastian takes a step back. He looks around for the first time, in a mild panic as if only just realizing where he is.
Following the path of his attention, I tell him, “It’s just us.”
I can tell it shocks him how he just came in here and kissed me without any regard to what was going on deeper in the room. I won’t pretend it doesn’t surprise me, too. It’s the sort of impulsivity I’m known for, but he’s always seemed so much more measured. I like that I can break down his manufactured borders though. It makes me feel powerful, and hopeful.
Tugging him down onto the couch, I watch him fall back next to me. That’s right. I bet he was working his ass off all day building houses or digging ditches or something equally servicey. “How was your day?” I ask.
He loops his arm around my shoulder and pulls me closer. “It was fine.” I tilt my head back enough to see a splotchy blush bloom just beneath his skin. “I missed you.”
That sound you hear is my heart running full speed and jumping out of a plane. It’s flying. I don’t think I knew until he said that how much I needed to hear it. It lifts an eraser, rubs across the “Not . . . that.”
“I missed you, too, in case you couldn’t tell by the unending texts.”
A few moments of comfortable silence pass.
“Tann?”
I hum, looking over to see him squinting at the screen, confused. “What is this?”
“Oh. Pretty Little Liars. It’s the teen equivalent of a soap opera with dead-end plot twists and red herrings, but oh my God, I can’t look away. How many people have to die before you call the police?” I pick up a bag of chips and offer him one. “I’m shocked you haven’t seen it, Brother Brother, in all your spare time.”
He laughs. “What did you do today?”
My heart punches me from the inside. “Hung out with Autumn.”
“I like Autumn. She seems nice.”
My stomach clenches, and I wonder if I should tell him that she knows about me now, and then reject the idea immediately. She doesn’t know about this, right? It’d be cool for the three of us to hang out at some point, but I don’t think he’s anywhere near ready for that yet.
“Autumn is the best.”
The rest of what happened today trails like a stalking shadow: Manny, Julie, McKenna.
But Manny doesn’t know about us either. And if Julie and McKenna did overhear me at the store, all they would have heard is that Sebastian isn’t gay and won’t go to prom with me. He should be okay, right?
Sebastian’s phone goes off on the table, and he reaches for it. When he settles back, he pulls me closer. If I turned my head, I could kiss him again.
He types in his code and frowns down at the screen.
“Everything okay?” I ask.
“Yeah. I just . . . my mom.” He tosses his phone to the other side of the couch. I sit up, getting some distance for the first time since he walked in the house. His eyes are puffy and bloodshot. It doesn’t look like he’s been crying, but it does look like he’s been rubbing them an awful lot, something I’ve seen him do when he’s stressed.
“Oh, man. What now?” On top of school and tutoring and drafting his second book, he has his upcoming mission stuff to juggle.
“No, it’s fine.” He waves it off. “She wants to talk about what happened at the camp.”
This sets off some tiny alarm bell in my brain. “What happened at the camp?”
“We did an activity and it sort of got to me.”
I look over at him. “What kind of activity?”
I can see the flickering of the TV reflecting in his eyes, but I know he isn’t watching it; his head is somewhere back up on the mountain. “We do this thing called Walk to the Light. Have you heard of it?”
My expression must be largely bewildered, because he laughs and doesn’t wait for an answer. “They blindfold us as a group and have us line up, telling us to hold on to the shoulder of the person in front of us.”
Blindfolds in the woods? It sounds more horror movie than church activity.
“The group leader gives us instructions. ‘Go left,’ ‘go right,’ ‘slow down,’ and it’s fine because you can feel the person in front of you, feel the weight of a hand on your own shoulder.” He takes a breath, eyes flickering to the floor and back up to the screen. “Until you don’t. One minute you feel a hand on your shoulder, and then it’s gone. And it’s your turn to let go and follow directions.”
“That sounds terrifying,” I say.
Sebastian takes my hand, lining our fingers up. “It’s not too bad. Most of us have done the exercise before and know what to expect, but . . . it felt different this time.”
“Different like more confusing?” Because, honestly, that sounds awful.
“I don’t know how to describe it. The person who leads you off the trail takes you to a spot and tells you to sit and seek diligently for the Spirit, just like they always do. But it was different. I felt different.”
I sit up, fully turning to face him. “They leave you in the woods alone?”
“I know it sounds bad, but I’m sure if we could see we’d realize we’re not that far away from each other, and only barely off the trail. But we can’t look, so we sit quietly with our eyes closed, and wait, and pray.”
I look down to our hands and twist my fingers with his. “What do you pray for?”
“For whatever I need.” He looks down at our hands. I see a small quiver in his chin. “So I’m sitting there on the ground, and I can’t see, and after a while I hear something through the trees. Someone is saying my name—my dad. It’s quiet at first, but then gets louder as he gets closer. He’s calling my name and telling me to come home.”
A tear slips down his face. “I’ve done it before and it’s always a little scary. I mean, you can’t see, so of course it is, but this felt different—to me. Urgent in a way it’s never been before. So I stood up and followed his voice. My eyes were still closed, and I was tripping down this hill, hoping that I wasn’t about to fall off a rock or walk into a tree. But I kept going, knowing my dad wouldn’t let me get hurt but feeling like I had to hurry. When I finally got to him, he hugged me so hard and said ‘Welcome home,’ and that he loves me and he’s proud of the man I’m becoming. And all I could think was ‘Are you really? Would you still be if you knew about Tanner?’”