Page 22 of Fade into You

“Yeah,” I say, taking the olive branch. “A whole second.”

“What made you think of this, anyway?” she asks, and offers me the pack. I shake my head. Nicotine kills. But if she’d offered me a puff of hers, I might have taken it, touching something that had touched her lips…. Fuck, I need to focus.

I look down, but that’s even worse because I notice that though she followed the clothing guidelines, she did wear a white shirt. The cold water has her showing through, and past the lines of her bra I can see the firm bumps of her nipples, and for a second that fire deep in me burns.

“My sister, she, uh, did this once.” I look out the window, the damp and heat in the car starting to fog it up. I start to draw a fancySin the window ’cause I can’t think of anything else to distract me from the very damp and somewhat revealed Bird.

“You have a sister?” she asks. I nod in return. “My condolences.”

“I take it you have one too?”

“You don’t know who my sister is?” she asks.

“No, should I?”

Bird shakes her head, a small smile brightening her eyes. In this light, her cheeks pinked from the excitement, the contours of her face illuminated by the overhead car light, she’sdownright kissable… and maybe I am just a letch.

“Is yours younger or older?” she asks, seeming genuinely interested in the one topic I really don’t want to be talking about right now.

“She’s older,” I answer anyway. “Do you mind if we don’t talk about sisters right now?” She takes another puff, cranking the window down to let the smoke out and ash.

“I’d love to not talk about sisters right now,” she says, then shifts toward me, her smile turning slightly wicked as she opens her mouth to say, “Wanna leave them here?”

“Dade would kiiiill me.”

“Kayla would banish me from existence,” she says, laughing a little.

“There you go with your big poet words.” I like her big poet words.

“Well, I know how much you enjoy my big poet words, so… sorry, I’ll try to keep them to a minimum,” she says, exhaling a cloud of smoke. She looks miffed. I don’t really understand why. Weren’t we on the verge of having fun a second ago?

“I was just teasing, Bird, you gotta get a thicker skin.” Somehow ticking her off has become less fun over the past week.

“Or you could be a bit kinder,” she says, squeezing the cherry off her cigarette. “Got an ashtray?”

“Betty the Buick doesn’t usually do smokes,” I say, and pull open the flip-out ashtray, which is kinda packed with old roaches. “But I think we can make an exception, Captain Planet.” I smile at her to let her know it’s a joke. It’s cute she cares, unlike most smokers, who toss their butts out like confetti.

She reaches into the glove box and starts sifting through my jewel cases, then finds the zippered CD case and flips through them. “Is this all you have?”

“No, but my CD collection would likely fill the car,” I say, a bit horrified that nothing from my heavy rotation is catching her eye.

“Must be nice,” she says, then digs into her purse and pulls out a somewhat beat-up jewel case with a seventies-looking woman’s face on it. “I have a few, oldies but goodies.”

If this is some seventies disco garbage, I swear to god I’m gonna find a way to drown her in the next fountain. The Bee Gees and their contemporaries are still a dark mark on music history.

“Let’s expand your palate,” she says, and reaches for my Discman.

“Um, I have amazing taste in music, didn’t you even see…”

I don’t have a chance to point out the Lauryn Hill, Wu-Tang Clan, and the more eclectic artists like Bikini Kill…. Instead she is actually removing my Jump, Little Children CD to put in her dubious disc.

“Look,” she says, peering out the window at the soaking-wet couple—dear god, where is security? “It’s safe to say we have another few minutes. Give me a chance to guest deejay.”

She snaps my Discman closed, then inserts the cassette-to-CD-player adapter.

Soft guitar starts off with simple, sweet chords and then the voice comes in, clarion and light like Joni Mitchell, the kind of song that would be perfect on a spring day, easing through a lightbreeze, back directly against grass. Or almost a waltz, the back-and-forth of a slow dance that’s romantic but not quite sexy, more classy than that. I hear hints of Joan Baez there as well, the woman definitely taking on attributes of the best of her contemporaries.

I can see the song speaks to her in some significant way.