Leni stared at him, realizing now, all at once in a sweep of goose bumps, how she loved him.
Not in the toxic, needy, desperate way her mother loved her father.
She needed Matthew, but not to save her or complete her or reinvent her.
Her love for him was the clearest, cleanest, strongest emotion she’d ever felt. It was like opening your eyes or growing up, realizing that you had it in you to love like this. Forever. For all time. Or for all the time you had.
She started to unbutton her wet dress. The lacy collar fell down her shoulder, exposed her bra strap.
“Leni, are you sure—”
She silenced him with a kiss. She had never been more sure of anything. She finished unbuttoning her dress, which fell down her body, landed like a parachute of lace at her booted feet. She stepped out of it, kicked it aside.
She unlaced her boots, pulled them off, threw them aside. One hit the cabin wall with a thunk. Down to her bra and cotton panties, she said, “Come on,” and led him up the loft ladder to her bedroom, where Matthew hurriedly undressed and pulled her down onto the fur-covered mattress.
He undressed her slowly. His hands and mouth explored her body until every nerve in her tightened. When he touched her: music.
She lost herself in him. Her body was autonomous, moving in some instinctive, primal rhythm it must have known all along, edging into a pleasure so intense it was almost pain.
She was a star, burning so brightly it broke apart, pieces flying, light spraying. Afterward, she fell back to earth a different girl, or a different version of herself. It scared her even as it exhilarated her. Would anything else in her life ever change her so profoundly? And now that she had had this, had him, how was she supposed to leave him? Ever?
“I love you,” he said quietly.
“I love you, too.”
The word felt too small, too ordinary to contain all of this emotion.
She lay against him staring up at the skylight, watching rain boil across the glass. She knew she would remember this day all of her life.
“What do you think college will be like?” she asked.
“Like you and me. Like this all the time. Are you ready to go?”
Truthfully, she was afraid that when it was time to actually go, she wouldn’t be able to leave her mother. But if Leni stayed, if she gave up this dream, she would never recover. She couldn’t look that harsh future in the eyes.
Here, in his arms, with the magical possibility of time between them, she didn’t want to say anything at all. She didn’t want words to turn into walls that separated them.
“Do you want to talk about your dad?” he asked.
Leni instinctively wanted to say no, to do what she’d always done: keep the secret. But what kind of love was that? “The war screwed him up, I guess.”
“And now he hits you?”
“Not me. My mom.”
“You and your mom need to get out of here, Len. I’ve heard my dad and Large Marge talking about it. They want to help you guys but your mom won’t let them.”
“It’s not as easy as people think,” Leni said.
“If he loved you guys, he wouldn’t hurt you.”
He made it sound so simple, as if it were a mathematical equation. But the connection between pain and love wasn’t linear. It was a web. “What’s it like?” she asked. “To feel safe?”
He touched her hair. “Do you feel it now?”
She did. Maybe for the first time, but that was crazy. The last place Leni was safe was here, in the arms of a boy her dad hated. “He hates you, Matthew, and he doesn’t even know you.”
“I won’t let him hurt you.”