All Our Pretty Songs by Sarah McCarry Read Free Book Online

see if he’s real.
    “You,” I say, and he smiles.
    “I’ve been looking for you.”
    I open my mouth. Nothing comes out. I close it again.
    “Are you doing anything after work?”
    “I get off in half an hour.”
    “Can I come and get you?”
    “Yeah,” I say. Trying not to squeak. He grins at me, tips an imaginary cap. Vanishes back into the crowd.
    “Who was that, ” Raoul says.
    “Some boy I met at one of Aurora’s parties.”
    “My goodness,” Raoul says. “Next time, invite me.”
    I drop an entire flat of plums before I leave, and Raoul laughs at me. When I pick up my backpack at the end of my shift my hands are shaking. Jack’s waiting for me down the street, leaning against a wall, one booted foot tucked behind the other. I hold up a bag of peaches and he smiles. People turn their heads to look at him as they walk past. He leads me to a motorcycle parked down the block and hands me a helmet. “Do you have to be anywhere?” he says.
    “No.”
    “Good. Have you ever ridden on one of these?” I shake my head. “Just hold on.” He throws one long leg over the back of the bike. I put the helmet on. My body fits neatly behind his. He takes both my wrists and pulls my arms tight around his waist. I can feel the muscles of his back moving against my chest. The bike roars to life, and for a moment I can see the possibility of my entire life, the story waiting to be written.
    We drive for a long time, through the city and through miles of suburbs with their identical streets cluttered with identical houses and identical stores selling identical objects, out onto the long country roads that wind through farmland and sun-dappled woods. Overhead the green-leaved branches meet to make a latticework ceiling as we hurtle westward. I can feel every movement of his body. The wind tears merrily at my clothes, fluttering my shirt against my ribcage. At last the trees thin and ahead I can see a line of blue-grey. He’s taken us all the way to the Pacific.
    He parks the bike and we walk through the trees to a stony beach littered with driftwood. It’s late in the day, but the sun-bleached trunks hold the sun’s heat. I sit next to him, our backs against a log, our legs stretching out toward the water. Great green waves crash against the tideline and I can hear pebbles clattering as the water sucks back out to sea. Underneath the pebbles is another, different sound, like music, but nothing I could recognize or name.
    I know how to draw, and I know how to kiss, and I know how to put fabrics next to each other in a way that makes their richness clearer, or arrange a line of glass jars on a windowsill so that they catch the light in a way you would not expect. I know how to run for a long time, head down, knees pumping. I know how to see beauty in other things, but I have never taken much time to see any beauty in myself. I am to Aurora what a gift-store postcard print is to a Klimt hanging on the museum wall. I do not love her any less for it; I think it is best to know what you are and make peace with it. I like myself, but I do not have any illusions about what I am. Why me? I want to say to him, but if I ask he might start to wonder himself, and out of all the beautiful things in my life he is already the most extraordinary. He takes a knife out of his pocket and cuts a piece of peach and puts it in my mouth, licks the rivulets of juice from his wrist cat-quick, cuts me another piece. The soft felt of the peach skin is hot, the flesh cool and sweet beneath. I bite his thumb and hold it there in my mouth and he sets aside the peach and the knife and puts his other hand in my hair and kisses me.
    Kissing him is like falling into a river, some great fierce current carrying me outside of my body, and all around us the music of the water rises and rises, and I can hear the wind moving over the sand, the distant singing of the stars veiled behind their curtain of blue sky, the slow, resonant chords of the earth