Free Gemini by Carol Cassella Page B

attached.”
    She unlocked her car and stood with one foot inside so the door was between them. Still, he stood close enough that she could smell the soap from his white shirt, could see the shadowed notch of his collarbone above his loosened tie. His eyes moved over her face, lingering on her mouth. “You were good with that man tonight. Kind,” he said.
    “Thanks. And your reading was good. I’m glad I came.”
    “My reading sucked. But I’m glad you came too. Got you and two homeless people out of the rain.”
    Charlotte laughed and started to close her car door. Eric held his hand against it and leaned in. “Why did you come, by the way?” She smiled and shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t tell him it was because she had decided that if she was still single on her thirty-eighth birthday, she would consider artificial insemination and raising a child on her own.

• 6 •
    raney
    Raney didn’t hear a word from Bo from September to July. By December she had quit checking the mailbox. By March she decided she didn’t care. By April she convinced herself he’d gone all preppy and would be no fun even if he did come back to Quentin. But by June she was taking the long way home from school every day on foot, just so she could pass Hardy’s Store. When she chanced upon him sitting on his aunt’s front porch in early July she could see straightaway that she’d been partly right—he was paler and more awkward than in her angriest memory. His arms and legs seemed to have grown six inches but forgotten to notify his brain. She gave him a look intended to show she was trying to recall his name, and when he said, “Hey, Raney,” his voice broke high and then dropped onto a low note she would never have recognized.
    “Hey yourself.”
    “Friendly as ever, aren’t you?”
    “I’m friendly enough. To people that act like a friend. How’s New York ?” She drew the words out in a pretentious drawl.
    “Connecticut. It’s okay. How’s Quentin ?”
    His own pretentious drawl naming this unpretentious town sent a hot flush from Raney’s chest up to her face. “No worse for missing you, if anybody did.”
    But after the rust was chipped away, they found a friendship intact if more tempestuous for reasons Raney could not discern. The year had changed more than his voice and his height. He wasn’t as bookish anymore, and suddenly she wasn’t always the one laying down the dare. A splinter of anger seemed to be lodged inside him, working its way to the surface in the violent rocket of stones he hurled off the bluff, or the heights he was now willing to climb to. Sometimes in the way he looked at her. Some days they were friends like they’d been friends the summer before, moving from one adventure to another, one joke to the next, fluid as a river flowing downhill without any inkling of consequence. On those days they were a team—a unit of two kids against the grown-up world. But other times Raney saw something else quiver through Bo, something primitive and scary and repulsively attractive at the same time. She attributed it to his parents’ divorce or the headaches he complained about—it would be years before she connected the changes in him to what was changing in her too. It was as if, after fourteen years of knowing exactly who she was, some ancient, alien being seeded inside her had awakened to throw the old Raney out on her ear. It brought out something mean in her. It made her want to hurt him in a way she hadn’t since the day she stranded him in the seal pup cave. It made her want to cry, which she had not done in a long time.
    —
    August started with a week of hard rain, and the stream at the back of Raney’s grandfather’s property clogged up behind branches and brush until the shallow duck pool became a full-blown pond, thick and olive green. She woke up to Grandpa’s cursing in the yard and pushed aside her curtains to see him standing beside a shovel planted in the mud with his hands on his