Let's Get Lost

6

HUDSON LISTENED FOR noises beyond his own pounding heart. They were lying on the ground, his back pressed against the cool earth. Leila was tight against him, her skin warm and her breathing slow and deep and smelling of an alcoholic sweetness. Her head was resting on his shoulder, her hand still in his.

They’d taken cover where some fallen trees had landed on a little hill, creating a nook that, as it turned out, was just big enough to hide two people. They’d heard the guys get into the boat, the splash of the oars as they rowed away. Some moments later there’d been some unintelligible, muffled shouting. More than three voices, definitely. He and Leila had decided to stay hidden for a while, and that was fifteen minutes earlier. Now Hudson had been lying next to her for long enough to forget the danger and briefly hope that his life could continue simply the way it was. That tomorrow would be a day just like today, with the garage and Leila. Dinner with his dad in their backyard, nothing urgent to say to each other. He wished that could be every day.

Thinking about his dad stirred in Hudson a deep pang of shame and regret that he’d snuck out of the house, been deceptive. Then Leila squeezed his hand, and all his reservations disappeared.

Grass and leaves damp from the humidity clung to his arms. A barn owl screeched somewhere on the island. She looked up at him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to keep you out this late. I think I’m good to swim back across now. Let’s get you home.”

“No,” he said. “There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.” He put his arm on her back, his fingers coming to rest at the base of her neck, massaging gently.

She smiled and shuffled closer to him, leaning her head against his shoulder. “You’re not worried about the interview?”

“No. I’ll make it on time. Right now I just want to stay here with you.”

Leila curled up against him, her head on his chest, one leg over his lap. When he put his arm around her and they settled into each other, the comfort was so overwhelming that he thought he might fall asleep on the spot. He kept his eyes on the stars until they brought to mind the Northern Lights, at which point he looked down at Leila.

He’d never really done this before, just being close to someone. But this was something people never had to learn, never had to study for. Or, no, that wasn’t quite right. This was like fixing an engine. All you needed was to find the right parts and put them together, watch them click into place.

He ran his arm up and down her back, slipping his hand beneath her shirt, exploring her skin with his fingers. It was more as if her skin were leading his fingers around, as if he had no option but to trace the lines of her shoulder blades, to follow the lace of her bra down the strap toward the clasp. His hand lingered there for a second, then, beckoned by her skin, it moved to the open expanse of her lower back, the faint dimples there, the soft curve of her hip. He rested his hand right there, the tip of his fingers at the edge of her shorts.

How long this went on for, Hudson couldn’t tell. He pictured his cell phone in Leila’s car, imagined his father calling over and over. But having Leila there instantly quelled his anxieties. She’d run her fingers through the hair by his temples, massaging his scalp. Or she’d shift her leg, and he’d feel the warmth of each other’s skin go to new, fresh places. As long as she was there and not driving north and away from him, he was happy.

“Tell me a story,” she said, the words spoken right into his chest, so he could feel her lips pulling away from and sticking a little to his skin.

“What kind of story?”

“I don’t know. Anything. A bedtime story.”

He was about to say that he didn’t know any stories, but instead he said simply what he was feeling. “This is the greatest night of my life, I think.” He paused and let the Mississippi air fill in the background noise as he gathered his thoughts. “Up until now my greatest moment was last year, when this old car my dad and I were restoring finally started. Or the time when I was five, at the park. I don’t remember much from the memory except for the fact that I had fallen and was in pain. Then, out of nowhere, my dad came in and picked me up, almost as if I were weightless. I remember how happy and relieved I was.

“But this,” he said, emphasizing by pressing Leila closer to him, if such a thing was possible. He could feel her skin filling in the gaps between his ribs, the hollows his hip bones created. “This is the highest peak I’ve ever reached.”

He let some time pass, focusing on nothing but her in his arms. Then he leaned his neck toward her and kissed the top of her head. He kissed her softly, not because he wanted anything, but because he could no longer keep the kiss to himself. Without a word, she turned to him, and before he could think to do anything else, her lips were on his.

They kissed madly, like people who’d been waiting for it much longer than they had. Their bodies seemed to understand each other; their lips parted at the same time, their tongues moved in sync, their hands knew exactly when to grasp on to one another and when to explore elsewhere. Hudson wasn’t sure whether it felt better to touch her or be touched by her, and he didn’t care to decide.

He was vaguely aware of the night sky, the plentiful stars, the sound of the river and whatever life it contained. They rolled on the earth, and Hudson was aware of the ground only in that it was outside of them, that it was colder than the two of them, conscious of the occasional pebble or scratch of grass. Aside from those minute details, his world was entirely Leila.

* * *

When they finally stopped kissing, Leila curled herself against him, her head on his chest, one leg stretched across his lap. Hudson was certain that he was grinning like an idiot, but he didn’t care anymore.

“Can I ask you a question?” She spoke softly. Not a whisper, exactly, but the kind of tone Hudson had always imagined people used when there was someone in bed with them. Close, intimate, the words not having to work hard to reach the other person.

“Sure.”

She hesitated and brought up her hand to his jawbone, running her fingers from his chin to the spot behind his ear. “Why do you want to be a doctor?”

The question surprised him, not just because of the moment but because he couldn’t actually remember anyone ever asking him before. “Um, I don’t know,” he said. “I just do.” A mosquito buzzed past his ear, and he halfheartedly swatted at it. “I think I’ve been working for it long enough to forget the moment I made up my mind.”

“Well, if you remember, let me know,” she said, moving her hand to his chest and kissing his breastbone, then propping herself up on one elbow and studying his face. After a while she said, “You don’t regret coming here with me?”

“Not even a little,” he said. “I’m really glad I met you, and there is nowhere else I’d rather be.”

She smiled that smile of hers, the smile that he knew he’d be comparing other smiles to for the rest of his life. Then she kissed him, slow and deep, not as hungry as before but just as rich. “Good,” she said, and she repositioned herself, her face buried against his neck. Every now and then he’d feel the tickle of a hurried kiss on his skin, and he’d think of it as a kiss she couldn’t keep to herself.

“I’m glad I met you, too,” she said. “I sort of can’t believe I did, this early on my trip. I was expecting something great to happen. Just not this.”

“Something like what?”

Leila shifted against him, kissed the back of his hand. “It doesn’t matter right now. I’ve got this.”

One of Hudson’s hands rested on Leila’s waist; the other held her hand. He looked up at the stars in his Mississippi sky, thinking to himself that he never wanted to leave. A sigh escaped his lungs, a deep, gratifying sigh that might as well have been the first breath he ever took. Then, feeling the weight of Leila against him, unable to keep a smile from his lips, Hudson closed his eyes.

7

IT WASN’T THE light of the sun that woke him up, but the heat of the starting day and the sweat dripping down his lower back. Hudson opened his eyes in a panic, immediately noticing the absence of stars, the sky bruising with the oncoming sunrise that, under any other circumstances, might have been breathtakingly beautiful.

“Shit. Oh, shit. Shit, shit, shit.” He nudged Leila until she woke up with a sleepy smile. “We have to go. We have to go right now.” He lifted her gently by the shoulders until she rolled off him and watched him scurry around looking for the phone he realized he’d left in his car.

“What time is it?”

“Way too late. We have to go.”

Hudson started doing math in his head to figure out how fast he’d have to go to make it to the interview on time. Leila was just barely getting off the ground. He looked across to the mainland as if that might help reduce the distance. She stretched, yawning. It was a shame that he couldn’t take the time to appreciate her beauty in the morning light.

“Please, Leila, we have to hurry.”

This time, he jumped first into the water, going as fast as he could. When he reached the other side, he tried shaking himself dry as much as possible; then he helped Leila out of the river. Hudson hoped that his clothes would dry in time. He opened the car door for Leila, unable to break that habit even under the circumstances. He rushed around and got into the driver’s seat, reached for the glove compartment, and grabbed his cell phone. It was flooded with missed calls and voice mails from his dad. It was 7:15. The interview was in forty-five minutes and about sixty miles away. “Shit,” he said, shifting the car into reverse and getting them back on the road.

“Don’t worry, we’ll make it,” she said, placing a hand on his thigh.

He didn’t respond, but he brought one hand over to where hers was and gave it a squeeze before pulling it back to the steering wheel. He kept his eyes on the speedometer’s rising needle, on the odometer adding on the miles. The car was heavy with silence.

They arrived at the Jackson campus of Ole Miss. It wasn’t where Hudson would be attending, since it was just the medical center, but the dean had scheduled the interview there that day to keep Hudson from having to drive the two hundred miles to Oxford. There were a few buildings, and Hudson didn’t exactly know which one to park near. He turned into the nearest parking lot and hoped he’d guessed right.

The parking lot was full of cars, mostly older, used models and pickup trucks. A couple of women in nurses’ scrubs were sitting on a bench, drinking coffee and catching up on whatever nursing students catch up on.

Hudson pulled the car up to the curb in front of the nurses. He didn’t look at the time so that it couldn’t confirm his fears.

“Go,” Leila said. “I’ll park the car here and wait for you to finish. Good luck.”

Hudson climbed out of the car, breaking into a sprint toward the nearest building. He knew well before he reached the doors that it was a futile act. He was doing it because his dad was there, watching from someplace inside Hudson’s head. Hudson was dressed in clothes he’d not only slept in but had swum across a river in. Twice. His shirt was still a little damp, and his jeans were soaked. Even if this was miraculously the right building and he only had to find the dean’s office, he’d be late. A good first impression was not about to happen. His only hope was that the dean would see him anyway, and that Hudson could somehow express himself well enough to wow the dean and make him forget about his tardiness and his presentation. But the chances of that happening in his current condition were unlikely. He’d slept only a few hours, and he could still feel Leila’s touch on his skin.

He was just about to try the doors when he noticed a sign pointing to the Admissions Department in the neighboring building. He grumbled a few curse words and changed directions, rushing past the nursing students and hearing just a snippet of their conversation, “...it was absolutely awful. I even asked to speak to the manager, and I never do that...”

Only now, while running through the courtyard, did he realize that his muscles were sore from his night with Leila, wonderfully sore.

Finally, he turned a corner and reached the building entrance. He scanned the directory and rushed up the stairs to the second floor. Hudson felt himself relax a little when he saw the office empty save for a matronly woman sitting at a receptionist’s desk. She was large, her hair up in a bun, her eyes rising from her book to look at Hudson. Maybe it was because she looked like an embodied cliché of a teacher, but Hudson thought he recognized her for a second.

“Hi,” Hudson said, trying to offer a polite smile and not seem as if he’d just sprinted up the stairs. “My name’s Hudson, I have a meeting with Dean Gardner. An interview.” He cleared his throat a little and folded his hands in front of his stomach, as if that might hide his clothes.

The woman sighed and put her book down on the desk, turning to her computer screen. She played with the mouse a little bit and then hit the keyboard until the monitor came back to life.

“Hmm,” she said after a moment. “You’re late.”

Hudson nodded, making sure to look ashamed of himself. “I know. I’m terribly sorry. I’ll make sure to apologize to the dean. There’s no excuse for it.”

“Too late,” she said with a sigh. “Sorry, hon. The dean waited twenty minutes. Then he had to go to a meeting across campus.”

Hudson’s immediate reaction was to hang his head. He kept it there for a moment, trying to think, until the receptionist asked if he was okay.

“There must be something I can do,” he said. “When’s his next open slot? I’ll explain as much as I can in however much time he has.”

The woman shook her head, angling her eyebrows sadly. She turned to the computer and made a show of scrolling up and down the calendar in front of her. “You were his last meeting here. He’s across campus now, then at lunch with the school president, and then he’ll be driving back to Oxford straight from there. Nothing I can do.”

Despondent, Hudson turned away. He crossed the courtyard slowly, trying to think of how he could possibly explain himself to his dad. The two women were still chatting on the bench, steam rising from their coffee, thick like smoke from a train wreck. Leila had parked on the far side of the lot, her red car pointed away from the campus. She was sitting on the hood, her knees up and legs crossed in front of her, looking out at the road, which was as quiet as you’d expect on a Saturday morning. She looked tired but happy. There was some light bruising where her collarbone met her neck, a hickey Hudson hadn’t noticed because of the morning’s hectic mood.

Finally she noticed him and slid off the car. “What happened?”

“I didn’t make it in time.”

She threw her arms around his neck and pulled him in tight. “Shit, I’m so sorry.” It was weird how he could recognize the hug’s physical comforts yet not be comforted. “Maybe you can reschedule?”

He returned the hug briefly, then pulled away from her. “No, I can’t reschedule. I just no-showed the most important interview of my life.” He felt like hitting the car.

“Maybe if you—”

“Damnit, Leila, no.”

The harshness of his voice surprised them both. He turned so that he was facing the road, Leila’s pretty face and whatever expression it was contorted into—sadness, shock, disbelief—just out of sight, where it couldn’t weaken the anger he wanted to be feeling.

A loud cackle echoed through the parking lot. Hudson turned around and saw one of the women with her head flung back, laughing. The heavier of the two was talking excitedly, and the laughing one waved her hand, as if begging her to stop.

Hudson caught himself biting on the end of his thumb, a nervous habit he usually tried hard to avoid, since he hated the little bumps of chewed-off skin that were left behind. This time he let himself go on. After a while, Leila walked up to Hudson so that her legs straddled his and he had nowhere to look except at her. She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. All he could think about was the empty office where he should have been sitting, his back straight, keeping eye contact, projecting confidence and a genuine interest in his education—all those things that FAQs on the Internet had told him to do.

“Let’s go,” he said after a few moments. “I have to tell my dad.”

Leila’s eyes narrowed until he could only see green irises and black pupils that matched her hair. He dropped his gaze to the ground, focusing on the line where the paved lot met the grass, thinking about her story of the two different anthills. He walked around to the driver’s side, opening the door and getting in behind the wheel before Leila had moved.

He turned the engine on before Leila got in, which she was slow to do. When she did, the air took on, simultaneously, the feel of weight and fragility. They were quiet, the only sound being the car itself, the brakes chirping whenever Hudson slowed for a turn. There was a clear sense that, if either of them spoke, something would break. He adjusted the rearview mirror wide to the right so that he wouldn’t have to look in her direction. He drove brusquely, with quick accelerations, sudden braking, and jerky turns. Angry driving, his dad’s voice said in his head, is the most dangerous thing on the road.

When they got back to Hudson’s neighborhood, his dad’s black Camaro was still in the driveway, sparkling in the morning sun as if it had just been waxed. Hudson parked Leila’s car at the curb and let the engine idle for a moment. He gripped the steering wheel, trying to squeeze out the tension from his fingers. His left leg jittered nervously against the door, making something in the car rattle annoyingly.

Who the hell was this beautiful tornado of a girl who had come into Hudson’s life and uprooted everything he’d known?

“All I had to do was stay at home,” he said, looking out at his house. “Get some sleep, show up there on time. It was so easy. We could have stayed in. We could have...I don’t know. Why did we have to go to the island yesterday, of all days?”

He could sense her eyes on him. “Your dad’s a nice guy. He’ll understand.”

“It doesn’t matter if he understands,” Hudson said, his voice rising. “I may have just ruined my future. Don’t you get it? This was my one shot at a full scholarship. There’s no way they’ll give me one now.”

She reached out and put a hand over his, but he kept it tight on the steering wheel, his knuckles turning white. “I’m sorry this happened. But wasn’t it worth it? It was still the greatest night of your life, right?”

In a few minutes, his dad would walk out, on his way to work. Hudson’s stomach turned with guilt at the thought. His dad spent all his time in the garage, wanting only one thing for his son, and now Hudson had thrown it right back in his face, all for some girl. He couldn’t help but bow his head, as if his shame could just drop right out of him.

“I don’t know,” he said, turning toward her. “It’s hard to see it that way right now.”

Leila’s eyes glimmered in the rising sun. What right did she have to be so beautiful at a time like this?

Somewhere in the neighborhood, a car was coming down the road. Hudson could hear its engine, at least a V6, in good shape. Hudson wished they would have just stayed at home, fallen asleep on top of his comforter, woken up on time in merely sleep-wrinkled clothes, avoiding any room for doubt about whether or not it had been the greatest night of his life. But his night with Leila was tainted by this hungover morning.

“I didn’t keep you on the island,” Leila said, her voice calm, soft. “You did.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Hudson shot back. “The way you stayed parked outside my house last night? How was I not supposed to come running out? And we didn’t have to swim across the river—that was your idea. We could have taken the boat, brought our cell phones with us, set an alarm. We didn’t have to stay there all night. You knew I had the interview.”

“You knew better than I did, Hudson.” She brought her feet up to the dashboard, tucking her knees against her chest. “You want to pretend I was in control last night, go ahead. But we both know the truth.”

“Yeah, what’s that?”

“You chose to stay out there with me. We could have swum back. I even asked you if that was what you wanted.” He couldn’t take the sight of her eyes anymore and turned away, catching his own reflection in the window. “‘No place I’d rather be.’ That’s what you said.”

“I don’t remember saying that.” Hudson’s leg still jittered against the car door, the annoying rattle filling the pauses between words, not letting silence grab hold of the air in the car. “And if I did, it’s only because I wasn’t thinking clearly.” Leila’s breath caught, as if it had stumbled on something. He could see her chin quiver ever so slightly.

Outside, Mrs. Roberson was walking her twin Chihuahuas, Bowser and Nacho, their tiny legs scampering to keep pace with her. She waved at Hudson cheerily, dressed in a pink tracksuit, her hair up in a ponytail. He raised his hand in response, feeling the tension in his fingers subside.

“You knew exactly what you were doing, Hudson,” Leila said, her gaze following Bowser and Nacho’s path down the street. “I think you were looking for an excuse to miss the interview. I think this happened for a reason, and as soon as you’re done being scared of admitting what you really want, you’ll see that maybe this is for the best.”

Hudson snorted derisively. “What are you talking about? Without that scholarship, I can’t afford school. Without school, I have no fucking future,” he said. He shook his head, amazed that the girl who’d understood him so clearly just yesterday now didn’t seem to get him at all.

Leila took her feet off the dashboard, slipping them back into the flip-flops and sitting up straight against the car seat. “Stop lying to yourself. You don’t want to go to school, Hudson.”