Descending Star

PROVISO SIX

Ben drove Zoey straight back to her apartment. He could never have offered Zoey a tour of his room, not after the shambles that Charlie had made of the evening, but it was just as well. He could no longer properly recall whether or not he had put the ten picture frames back up on the shelves. Besides, he suspected that he had only been imagining his conversation with Edythe, earlier in the evening, but he couldn't be sure. The uncertainty impaired him so thoroughly that he couldn't imagine taking Zoey upstairs, for fear of finding Edythe on the rocking chair, or at the electronic keyboard, or on the bed.

Edythe guarded his bedroom and denied Zoey entry so effectively that she might as well have been real.

On the way back to Newton's Olympic Outfitters, he tried to apologize for Charlie. "He's a bitter pill most of the time. And he has it all wrong."

"No," Zoey disputed, "he has it right." Her emerald irises bore into him like drill bits and enforced his silence. She looked out into the foggy night with pursed lips and gradually brought herself to a pivotal conclusion. When she did speak again, she said, "Our lives are not our own. We are not free to die. Not when people love us."

She watched him for his reaction. His eyes looked furtive. He constantly glanced right, left, and into the rearview mirror. He gave the road a quarter of his attention at best. They had always tussled for the last word, almost like a game, and she watched him now, to see if he would come up with something trite and vacuously clever, but he didn't.

He parked at the exterior stair behind the store, observed with relief that Jacob hadn't made an encampment here, and hoped that Zoey would not invite him up. She did not. Without a word, they walked across the empty parking lot, down to the picnic tables and the climbing wall, gray under the weak light of the two streetlamps on either end of the parking lot.

The rain had stopped, and a thick super-saturated soup had settled in at ground level. They took opposing bench seats at a picnic table and could barely see each other.

"We can't stay here long," Zoey said, glumly. "I tried, one night when I first arrived, when the rain let up. Big mistake. The mosquitoes will devour us."

She glanced up wistfully at her apartment. They would be much more comfortable there. Too comfortable.

He faced the climbing wall and the woods beyond it. He studied everything except the woman in front of him, and she knew it. She watched the frenzied saccades of his irises with amusement and concern.

She put out her hand, palm up.

He sighed. He caught that gesture, well enough. He wanted to hold her hand. Friends did that. But the mosquitoes were out, homing in through the impenetrable fog, and her apartment awaited, just a short walk, a much more comfortable place to continue this conversation.

He put his palm in hers.  The clean hand, the unsullied hand. As to the other, the hand Jillian had bitten,with its ice cold crescent shaped porcelain scar, well he tucked that one underhis seat with the conviction that this encounter had more than enoughcomplication for getting on with.   His fingers crept halfway up her slender forearm, She put her other hand on the top of his palm, with gentle yet firm assertiveness, to hold him there.

She softly said, "Well, my friend, here we are. And I'm feeling this immense pressure, right now. I take it you know what I mean."

He whispered, "I know exactly what you mean."

"I suppose no progress will be made, without Proviso Six."

He locked eyes with Zoey, in dread.

She said, "No absconding to bedrooms, until our homework assignments are officially concluded."