I’m just staring at her. “You used to like me?”
“Yeah,” she says, simply. “But I was with Tony and I also liked him. A lot. Still do. We’d have had the most incredibly pretty black Finnish Korean babies in the world.”
“Why’d you break up with him then?”
She finally looks away. “He wanted us to get married this summer.”
“What?”
“I thought about it, too. As a way to get out of the Africa trip. But then I realized that was the only reason I was considering it. You can’t marry someone just to get away from your parents.”
“People do.”
“Not me, it turns out. It also made me realize I couldn’t see myself marrying Tony at all. Not yet, anyway. At least not until I’d gone out and had a life of my own, where I could make my own decisions, maybe find out what I want.”
“And you want to find out if you want me?”
She looks back at me. “We could have died together. But we didn’t. And all I could think while we were waiting for the ambulance was how glad I was it was you with me there. Because if it was you, I didn’t have to be afraid.”
“I felt the same way.”
“I know. I’ve always known.” She unbuckles her seatbelt. “I don’t know if it’s the right thing for us to kiss but I don’t want to leave not having found out. I’m not trying to play with your feelings and I’m so scared you might get hurt but being too afraid isn’t–”
And I’m already kissing her.
She’s…
Well, I don’t know, you’ve kissed people, haven’t you? So you know what the physical part is, and though we do just fine at that and the closeness and the smell of her and the taste of her mouth is so freaking amazing and though I can feel every part of where she’s touching me with her non-injured hand on the back of my neck and her cast digging into my chest and, yeah, I have such a hard-on I have to readjust myself before we kiss again because it’s so uncomfortable against my jeans but–
But it’s really inside your head where it all happens, doesn’t it?
Because I’m just thinking, I’m kissing her I’m kissing her I’m kissing her I’m kissing Henna We’re kissing It’s Henna and we’re kissing.
And maybe that’s stupid, but maybe it’s not, maybe that’s just what people do. I’m kissing her.
That’s what I’m thinking.
There’s a knock on the window so loud and surprising, we jump apart.
A car is stopped a little behind us, its headlights off. I have no reason to think so, but I have the immediate thought that it’s the same car that stopped behind us before. And the same car that drove by slowly a minute ago. It turns on red and blue lights to flash at us once or twice before going dark again.
It’s a police car.
“Shit,” I hear Henna say.
“We haven’t done anything wrong,” I say.
The knock comes again and we both jump again, too. I don’t think either of us are especially afraid of policemen, but two people have been killed and a zombie deer jumped over my head, so I think it’s fair to say we’re a little on edge.
I roll down my window. The cop is standing so close to the car, I can’t even see his face at first. I do see the big truncheon-like flashlight that he knocked on the window with. It’s about two inches from my head.