"Let's get dressed."

"I don't want to," I moaned.

"Come on. It's a surprise." He smiled me into submission. I complied wearily.

The next thing I knew, I was sitting in the pa.s.senger seat of the DeVere's freezing Volkswagen minibus, teeth chattering, staring out into the deep blue eastern horizon at the edge of Lake Michigan as the sun crept out through the scattered clouds and over the murky, churning body of that Great Lake. Brennan had driven to Rainbow Beach, the fairly dreadful strand of the rag-tag neighborhoods of the Southeast Side that always seemed to be in the toxic grey pall of the nearby and rapidly-diminishing steel mills.

That New Year's Day morning, however, Rainbow Beach looked as good as the south of France to me.

The sun actually sparkled off of the lake and the large, flat chunks of ice that floated on the surface. The further the sun rose, the fewer clouds there were in the bright blue sky. The windows on the bus were beginning to ice up. We could see our breath in front of us. I could feel Brennan's on the side of my neck. He held me from behind the seat he was kneeling against, resting his chin on my shoulder.

"I always wanted to come see the sun rise on New Year's Day." I leaned my head against his as I caught a squad car turn into the beach parking lot in the corner of my eye.

I yawned long and loudly. "Don't worry. It's not the company, it's the hour." Brennan pressed me tighter in his arms. He was about to kiss the side of my face when we heard a gravel-voiced cop on the squad's rooftop bullhorn order the lot of us out of the parking lot. A few other cars fired up and left. Brennan slid back into the driver's seat with disappointment. We were the last to go.

Well, almost as good as the south of France.

Somehow we got home, got undressed, and fell into the coc.o.o.n of my bed.

Without inhibition or embarra.s.sment, Brennan moaned softly as he crawled into my arms and closed his eyes. If I wasn't tired to the point of collapse, I might have reflected about what I was thinking and feeling about myself and us, there in bed together.

But I didn't. I exhaled with greedy satisfaction and went to sleep with Brennan's face in my eyes, not feeling alone at all, not caring what would happen after that, exulting, dead bodies and frightened so-called best friends notwithstanding, that Jesus loved me, this I knew.

X V I I I.

Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.

Twelfth Night I woke up after the phone rang for the twentieth time.

Nicolasha was crying. Was he drunk? He kept saying he loved me, and begged me to let him come over to our house, locking me in some twisted stage fright. I kept trying to talk to him, to somehow calm him down, but he wasn't listening. He wouldn't let me interrupt either his tears or his nearly incoherent wailings, which drowned out my urgent whispers. Brennan didn't hear me or the racket on the other end of the phone, even though he was curled up alongside of me under the covers, with his face resting next to mine on the pillow.

And then the doorbell started ringing, over and over again.

I accidentally hung up the phone as I tried to move out of Brennan's arms and the warm bed without waking him. Our clothes were nowhere to be found. Someone began pounding on the front door as the doorbell's irritating chime melodies blended into themselves without pause. Christ!

I threw Dad's greatcoat on over my naked body and opened the front door. Felix burst into the entryway and slammed the door behind him. Before I could say a word, he tore the overcoat from my shoulders and wrestled me to the cold ceramic tiles, which were wet from the snow on his shoes. Felix knelt onto my chest and pinned me to the floor, his eyes burning into me with a jungle's frenzy.

The phone began ringing again.

Felix shoved me back to the floor and ran up the stairs, toward my bedroom. Without putting the greatcoat back on, I stumbled up in chase. I thought he would attack Brennan, but, instead, he was kneeling once again, this time at the foot of the bed, sobbing like a child, mumbling my name, and demanding to know why he wasn't in the bed instead of Brennan.

My eyes burst open as I gasped for air. I was sweating, even though I was cold, lying outside the pile of covers that Brennan remained tucked into. He woke up with a start. I looked away from him and sat up at the edge of the bed with my head hanging low.

I ignored the cold air on my body as I sat in silence, catching my breath and feeling the depth of my own exhaustion. I regretted not getting drunk last night, and suddenly felt alone again, momentarily, until Brennan reached up and pulled me back into the warmth of his arms and the bed.

My eyes floated absently toward the ceiling, bright with morning sunlight. Brennan draped half of his body over mine and snuggled his face close to me on the pillow. Neither of us spoke for a long time.

"Happy New Year." I smiled involuntarily as I looked into Brennan's eyes with sad relief. He began running the tips of his fingers over my bare chest, ice skating along my rib cage and over my erect nipples. "It'll be a while before all the hurt goes away." I nodded. A couple of years? "It will, eventually. You just need time. And love."

Love.

"My Dad has an expression for it."

I tried to hide my amus.e.m.e.nt. "Your father has an expression for just about everything."

"Didn't yours?"

"No," I sighed. "Not for the last couple of years."

"I'm sorry."

"Forget it."

"When you're hurt or confused," Brennan continued, "you know, like an animal that's lost its way? You want answers and you want to stop hurting, but you have to keep going."

"Why?"

"If you stop, the hurt will get worse. You'll die, somehow."

"Everyone dies, Brennan."

"I don't mean die as in dead, but die, here, inside." He put a warm fist over my heart. "So you put up walls around you, around your spirit, in your soul." He leaned down and kissed my chest, near my heart. "Rifles go up. Cannons. Missiles. You shoot anything that comes near you as you keep running away."

"Running away sounds good to me, Brennan."

"But it won't change anything."

"Yes, it will. I won't be here." My voice was level and cold. "I won't sleep down the hall from where my Mom and Dad used to. I won't have to take the train through what's left of my old neighborhood. And I won't have to pretend to be happy, or loved, or some person hardly anyone knows doesn't really exist."

"I know. Your teacher knows."

My teacher. I shook my head. My G.o.d, I thought. "I want to go away." Suddenly, I felt tears welling up inside of me, and the rest of my body straining against them. Brennan pressed himself closer until I relaxed again.

"You'll still hurt. Whatever you hurt about here, you'll hurt about there." He shook his head and ran a hand through his hair, brushing it back off of his face. "Time and love will make the falling of walls and the lowering of rifles happen. That's what Dad says."

All you need is love...DA da da da da DA...

It sounded hackneyed, at first, but the earnest intimacy in Brennan's voice carried the words past my reaction into my heart. I began fighting tears again. The d.a.m.ned things followed me into the New Year, I thought! I was comforted back into a semblance of restfulness by Brennan's continued proximity, and the relief I felt when neither the phone or the doorbell rang as we laid there together.

"The falling of walls and the lowering of rifles, huh?" I hated the sound of my voice, pock-marked with the tears I refused to let go.

Brennan kept staring at me with his compa.s.sionate green eyes. "You should just cry."

"No." I then realized Brennan had been writing something on my body with his finger. "What are you writing?"

He grinned shyly. "Do you want me to read it out loud?"

I grinned, too. "Yeah. Make it forever."

"Make it become forever, you mean." Warmth and silence. No bells and no chimes. "I wished you a Happy New Year."

"That isn't what you wrote."

"Yes, it is."

"Is it?"

"No." Brennan closed his eyes and took a short breath. "I wrote I loved you."

I was so shaken by hearing those words and believing them, somewhere deep inside, I tried to make it into a joke. "So, you've decided, then. Love, that's what you were feeling last night."

"No, I was feeling the two of us all over each other," he chuckled. "But I feel it now." Brennan began writing again. "I love you."

"You don't know me so much." My wall wasn't ready to fall, yet.

"I think I know more than most people do. I know I'd like to know more, over time. You know, time?"

"I don't know you very well, either."

"You will." Brennan smiled. "How do you like me, so far?"

I smiled back as a few stones fell off the top of that wall. "I think I love you, too." I should have felt afraid to say that, but I didn't. "I know I want to."

Brennan didn't comment on the appropriation of his very tender, very special expression of our previous night together. We stayed in each other's arms for another sweet, long time. I considered staying there for the rest of the day, the Rose Bowl be d.a.m.ned. "If you're gonna take your pain and go somewhere, don't you dare go without me," Brennan whispered.

I didn't think I would, either.

It was six o'clock a.m.. The deli had just opened. The old brothers from Sverdlovsk were amused to see me almost an hour earlier than usual. I ordered a bowl of their over-spiced oatmeal and some raisin toast, and sat alone, reading the paper without paying much attention to the stories my eyes glanced over. I kept wondering if Felix would be there to meet me by seven, like we always used to, last year.

"How are you?"

I looked up from the dull editorials with faint surprise. Nicolasha smiled poignantly at me, and took a seat at my table.

"I'm okay." He raised his eyebrows a bit. "Really."

"Good. You know you can call me, for anything."

"I know." I surprised my teacher by taking his hand for a moment. "Thanks, little father."

Nicolasha pulled his hand back awkwardly as the older brother placed a carafe of fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice and two gla.s.ses on the table. We both glanced at the steady stream of commuters and students pa.s.sing the deli in their morning rush until we were alone again.

"Who are you taking to the symphony, this Friday night?"

"I thought we were going together," I said, taken aback.

He laughed quietly. "That would not be kulturny, giving you a gift, and using half of it myself."

"Oh." The juice was insufferably tart. It needed some vodka, and a pound of ice.

"Another close friend has invited me already. He doesn't have box seats, unfortunately." Close friend, huh? I wondered if it was the person who took the pictures in the photo alb.u.m. My teacher gave me another one of his melancholic smiles that hung so naturally on his soft face. "Thank you for considering me, however."

It was almost seven-thirty, and there was still no sign of Felix.

"Wouldn't your uncle enjoy going?"

"He's still in Minnesota." My tone revealed my personal misgivings that Uncle Alex intended to come back at all. Nicolasha looked uncomfortable. I decided to brighten things up a little. "A friend of mine from home wants to go. He's never been to see an orchestra."

"Considering your love of Shostakovich, I'm sure you'll be the perfect companion for him."

We walked to school together without speaking.

Felix walked up to me at my locker as I stuffed my satchel full of morning textbooks. There was an immediate and enormous tension in the air between us, one you could almost reach out and touch with your hand. I tried to keep my face blank, but could feel my eyes narrow with a touch of anger that made the impa.s.sivity of my voice that much more cold.

"I thought you were coming back the other night."

Felix looked like a young deer caught in an auto's oncoming headlights. "I was going to." A senior made Felix move to get into his locker. "...I wanted to." His voice trailed off.

"You could have called."

"I'm sorry." I closed my locker and began walking to cla.s.s, with Felix following a step behind. He suddenly took a breezy tone. "My parents were hoping you could spend the weekend with us." I stopped and turned around to face him. He offered me his hand, but I didn't take it.

"I'm going to the symphony Friday night."

"Oh."

I walked off first, and felt bad about doing so almost immediately, but not bad enough to go back and shake Felix's hand, or smile at him, or even turn around, for that matter.