Bay City Runaway

Chapter 16

(1995)

"So she just kissed you? Out of the blue?" said Zach as we found our seats on the bus.

"Yeah, it caught me off guard."

"But she hasn't said a word to you since," he said.

"Right. I don't really know what this means. I mean, does this mean she wants to get back together?"

"It's gonna happen, James. She's just testing the waters. Think about it. We had just sung one of the best performances any of us had ever sung, and she wanted to share that with you. That definitely means something. Like she said, you're her person."

"Do you think I should go try to talk to her?" I said.

"Naw, let her come to you. She's taking her time. She asked for space, remember?"

We were quiet most of the rest of the way back to Norman. I watched the flat landscape of north-central Oklahoma roll by and began to feel a melancholy that I often felt at the end of momentous trips. I laid my head against the window. It was cool, and it calmed me, and I began to think about the kiss. I had not kissed her since the summer before my junior year.

At the end of that summer, we had taken her father's cabin cruiser out on Lake Thunderbird east of town. We brought a picnic of cold fried chicken, Reser's potato salad, and small fried apricot pies, which were her mother's specialty. It was in August, but a wet spell had cooled things down into the eighties. She wore a blue and orange bikini, and I wore some swim trunks I'd been wearing every summer since high school that's drawstring had long since been lost.

She had lost her girlish figure and was looking like a grown woman. I knew that we would soon be apart for nine months, and I wanted to make that day count. I had managed to procure a jug of White Zinfandel, and we swigged on it throughout the day along with ice-cold club sodas, which we kept in a cooler on deck.

We found a secluded cove, and I did a little fishing while she sunned herself. I pulled up perch and the occasional smallmouth bass, most of which I threw back. But I'd caught two bass which were big enough to eat and put them in a pail of water for when we got back to the shore to grill them over charcoal. While I had been fishing, she had pulled off her bikini top and was laying on her back for only me and the sun to see.

We'd talked late into the night many times that summer, about our school years, about our dreams, our future careers, and places we'd like to live, but we never talked about people we had dated. That was the arrangement. We had known each other since the tenth grade, and there was nothing we didn't know about our souls. We were content to let the lake do the talking.

After lunch, we went down into the cabin and took a long, lazy, warm nap until there was sweat between us, and we began to grind into each other, half asleep. After we both climaxed, we put on our bathing suits and jumped into the lake, sharing a blow-up raft. I knew that would be the last time we could be this close until the next summer, and I felt a familiar ache deep inside my chest and stomach. I'd have to let her go again to a place I'd never been to, friends I'd never met, and possibly to boys I refused to imagine.

But she'd always come back to me, until this last summer when everything had changed. Whatever this was, it was something new. Our old arrangement was gone. Perhaps our old love was gone. If we got back together this time, it would be different. There would be no more separations at least until we graduated, and then what?

As we rolled up behind the music center at OU, I began to think about finding Laura, but what would I say? Perhaps there was nothing to say...yet. We had not yet begun. I decided not to seek her out. If she wanted to find me, she would find me.