She folds her arms close to her chest and I swear goose bumps rise on her skin. “Are you waiting for an engraved invitation?”
I scan the area and except for the old man I spotted Stella with earlier, there’s no one around. No one. Never realized how desolate a cemetery is. “What if they catch us?”
“Who’s ‘they?’”
Good question. “The cemetery owners.”
Stella becomes thoughtful, her face pensive. “You know, I never thought about the fact that someone owns this place. It seemed to belong to the dead people.” She pulls out of serious mode. “Okay, so the mysterious ‘they’ show and we’re skinny-dipping in the koi pond. Let’s devise a plan for what we do.”
My eyes snap straight to hers. Good God, Stella naked. I bet that would be a sight for a weary soul, but I’m not going there. Stella plays with the hem of her tank and does this shimmy shake with her hips that becomes my sole focus.
I hear her giggle and it’s a beautiful sound. She’s messing with me and I’m falling for it. Maybe we could skinny-dip. Not all the way. Not here. Maybe someplace else. Someplace more secluded.
“Thinking about it, aren’t you?” she says.
She caught me. “No skinny-dipping.”
Stella pouts her bottom lip and I pop my neck to the side. Dang it, she’s sexy.
“Do you live your entire life so seriously?” she taunts.
“No.”
“Then frolic with me and the fi sme aunts.shes.”
“No.”
“Cuddle with the koi?”
“Same answer.”
“Gallop with the gigantic goldfish?”
“How many more of those you got?”
She squishes her lips together. “I’m done.”
“Good. The answer’s still no.”
Stella’s mouth forms this glorious smile as she steps out and sits on the brick edge of the pool. “Touch your face.”
Uh... “What?”
“Do it.”
Once again, I do as I’m told with this girl and the shock registers. I am smiling. A real smile. Not forced. Not fake. And beyond the smile on the outside, I lost a few weights from the inside.
Wow.
“Thanks, Stella.”
“No problem.”
We hold each other’s gaze. One second. Two. It goes into three. With a flutter of her eyes, she glances away and red paints her cheeks. My own heart beats irregularly and it’s not from panic but from the fact I’m so alone with her.
Water drips from her long, tanned legs and for a second I wonder what it would be like to touch them. To feel them rub against my legs. And my gaze wanders to her lips. How soft would those—
Ah...no. Stella’s been good to me and I need to be good to her. Even in my mind.
“Can we do this tomorrow?” I ask.
“Maybe,” she answers. “Ri ck says it’s going to rain.”
9
Jonah
Stella plants the fall mums I bought for Lydia’s grave around the edge of the flat stone, creating a colored pattern of purples, oranges, and golds. “So Joss tells the guy that if he wants to steal her car, then go ahead, because she’d love to file a police report and get some money from the insurance company.”
We’ve been meeting at the cemetery nearly every day for the past month. The October weather is warm, not as hot as September, and both of us are in jeans. A shame since I highly admired Stella’s tan legs. Stella wipes at a trickle of sweat falling from the purple hair she’s pulled into a tiny ponytail. While she’s successful in removing the bead, she is also successful in smudging dirt across her face.
“Here.” I reach over without thinking and the moment my fingers sweep along her face, her gorgeous gray eyes snap to mine.
“There’s...ah...dirt.” I don’t lower my hand.
“Okay,” she whispers and it’s the closest Stella’s given me to permission to be in her space. I rub at the dirt and it easily transfers onto my fingers, but I caress her skin again because her cheek is soft. Warm. And I like the blush forming there.
Stella’s chest rises as she inhales and as she slowly releases the air, I find myself breathing out along with her. Wow. What was that?
I drop my hand and clear my throat. “Did he steal the car?”
Stella blinks several times and I decide to help her out. “You were telling me how Joss found someo v
“Oh.” Stella stabs the ground again with my mother’s garden spade. “No. She told him that the engine was going out and he decided to leave.”
I chuckle. “You make up half your stories.”
I expect her to laugh, but instead she mumbles, “I wish.”
“So is Joss your stepmom?”
“What did I tell you about personal questions?” she says.
She told me that if we hung out together, not to ask them. In exchange she said she’d forget who I was friends with. Not wanting to face my past decisions of either laughing or saying nothing when it came to Stella, I agreed. I also promised that I’d give her space at school, but as each day passes that I spend time with her outside of class, the urge to break that promise grows stronger.
“You bring up Joss a lot but you never mention your mom or dad. Is she your sister?”
Stella pauses mid-dig, my mother’s spade suddenly resembling a weapon more than a garden tool with that darkness radiating from her face. “You made a promise.”
I hold my hands out in a white-flag motion. “Consider me backed off.”
“Good,” she says. “We’ll need to pour water over these mums. There’s a spigot across the way in the other section, but we’ll have to bring a container to lug it.”
“I’ll do it.” I glance over at James Cohen’s grave. No one has visited that I know of, and it creates a hollowness inside me, a feeling that reminds me of loneliness.
The wind blows and a few orange and yellow leaves float to the ground. Stella brushes them off her newly planted masterpiece then sinks from her knees back onto her butt. “There. Now Lydia has more.”
A few strands slip from her makeshift ponytail and spill onto her face. She doesn’t move them as she focuses on her favorite grave.
“Why do you come here?” I ask.
“That sounded awfully like a personal question.”
“It wasn’t one.” It is. “It’s like discussing the weather.”
“Why do you keep visiting James Cohen?” she replies.