Page 107 of Leaving the Station

“I just wanted to kiss you here,” she says. “Where it all started.”

“Well, technically it started in the dining car of an entirely different train.”

“Dang,” she says, making a big show of looking angry at herself. “Should we go back there and make out?”

I roll my eyes and wrap her into me and kiss the top of her head. “Absolutely not.”

When we’re in her room, she sits me down on the bed and then pushes me into the pillow, flattening her body against mine.

“When are we going to get to do this again?” I ask her after a few minutes.

“Soon,” she says with so much certainty. “My parents decided they wanted to spend Thanksgiving with my cousins in Tacoma, so they’re meeting me here. I’ll head back to Ritzville with them after that and stay for a few weeks but then... who knows?”

“Yeah,” I say, but I’m worried now.

What if she doesn’t leave? What if she decides to return to the Church after all?

She must see the panic on my face because she says, “Zoe, I want you to be part of my life.”

I wipe my eyes and nod, leaning into her chest. “Are youscared?” I ask quietly. “That you might not get your eternal family if you leave?”

Oakley pushes me off her and stares at me intensely. “I don’t want you to worry about that.”

“That train has left the station,” I tell her, and she smirks. But then her face gets serious.

“I want you, Zoe,” she says. “Maybe not everything has to be eternal. And right now, I want you so badly. It might not be forever, but nothing has to be.”

I nod, and Oakley kisses me harder than she has before, biting my lip and leaving me bruised and wanting more.

“This isn’t the last time we’re going to get to do that.” She grins as she starts throwing her clothes into her suitcase.

“Why are you being so chill about this?” I ask her, worried. “You were so set on going back to the church.”

She barely looks up at me as she says, “Because I prayed on it yesterday.”

I stare at her. “You did?”

“It’s what my parents would always tell me to do when I had to make a tough decision as a kid, and it’s what I wanted to do yesterday, after our fight.”

“So what happened?”

She takes a breath, and I know she’s about to tell me a story. I sit back on the bed, ready to listen.

“Mormons believe that we live a premortal life,” she says, and I appreciate that she didn’t add,Didyou know?She’s learning. “It was a life where we all lived with our Heavenly Father, andit’s part of His big plan of happiness for us. Then we get a physical body so that we can have experiences that God wants us to have, that we couldn’t have any other way. We’re supposed to learn what’s right. We’re supposed to sin—do things we know are wrong—so that we can repent and understand the proper path and then rejoin Him.”

She stops packing and sits next to me, putting her hand on my thigh in a way that now feels familiar and comforting.

“When I prayed yesterday, I waited to hear a voice, a confirmation, anything.” She squeezes my leg. “And I did. I don’t know if it was my own thoughts or if it was the Spirit or the conductor or someone else entirely. But I heard a voice, clear as day, that said that caring for someone is not a sin. The voice said that what wedid wasn’t wrong at all. Because a sin is doing something you know is wrong, but Zoe, Iknowthis is right. Every part of my body knows it.”

It’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me. That being with me is right, that what we’re doing is holy.

“I agree,” I tell her, putting my hand on top of hers, then leaning in and kissing her cheek, and her forehead and her other cheek and her nose and her lips.

She laughs at each kiss, then pulls me back down onto the bed. “We have to get off the train soon,” she says.

“Or we could just refuse to leave.” I hold her against me. “They’ll have to drag us out.”

“I like that idea,” she says.