Free Thalo Blue by Jason McIntyre Page B

cost someone a few dollars at least, and she didn’t care.
    She caught his eyes as he looked at the skirt, but it didn’t matter. His comfort with this girl was alive now. And it didn’t seem to be waning. Not on her end either.
    Do you have many people in your life, coming and going? she asked. Lots of stupid dinner parties and stuff at your place, Zeb? That’s what they call you right, your friends? Zeb.
    Yeah. Zeb. He was standing before her with his stomach touching her knees. Behind him was the darkness and above them was that halo of light, flecked by the squirming moth whose wings batted his cage. Their faces were only a little ways apart. He reached past her, brushing her warm arm, and picked up a snipped, nearly starved looking hyacinth bloom from the shallow shelf behind her. Its petals were white and cool to the touch. Looking at them made his fingers feel the contoured texture of his guitar case—the part just above the plastic handle where the tan stitching was starting to fray. Did you know that the hyacinth, particularly the white hyacinth, represented ‘unobtrusive loveliness’ to the ancient Greeks?
    Her eyes met his and she responded with: I didn’t know that...
    He handed her the flower and her response glowed brighter than the living room of people listening to throbbing hip hop inside the main house. She was looking at his eyes and he matched her full-on stare, thinking about how he might seem to her. She loves my blue eyes. They pulled her in because of what they see reflected in a dark pool of lake water. Because of what I hear there.
    She leaned forward and kissed him. Then she picked up another wilting flower from the shelf on her other side and handed it to him. And what did the ancient Greeks believe the meaning of peach blossoms to be?
    Zeb looked down and took a whiff of the sweet flower, then back at Vivian.
    “I am your captive.”
     
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    The night of Sebastion’s first real kiss also became the first night he ever made love. He got up on the dirty wooden slats of the potting bench to join Vivian and they laid their clothes beneath them. The moth continued to flit and fuss in the fixture above, but nothing would have dissuaded them. No outside sounds or sights, save for the ones they traded across each other’s bodies, intruded. It was all distant: the stereo and the partiers in the house and in the yard, even the moon’s eggshell coat across the water’s brilliant façade. To Zeb, the act evoked bright swirling circles of purple, tinged with baby blues and shards of silver. They were deep shades defined by solid and spattered paint strokes. There were lavender-skinned orbs that made everything real disappear. They exploded into each other, reformed, and dribbled out of sight. Behind that he heard a symphony of aural sensations. Vivian’s voice, her breathing and all the rest, was gone and in its place was a troop of conductors each commanding a full orchestra of strings, brass and timpani.
    The startling conclusion, just as they each came, was when the wine colored orbs finally dissolved from his sight. His body’s million nerve endings had been reeling and exalted from firing all at once and they fell to an exotic calm. Ocean waves settling on a beach, he might have said. In the midst of both their relaxing pants, he looked down in horror to find the face and porcelain skin of his aunt Sicily—
    (or was it mom?)
    beneath him. The moth had fluttered with agitation during the whole encounter and finally it flew too close to the little sixty watt sun which had been holding it rapt in so much thrall. It died with an audible snap that also promptly burned out the bulb. Darkness fell across the face of his aunt. The face that should have been Vivian Leland.
     
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    During Zeb’s last year of high school, time seemed to be speeding up. It was out of control and he felt like he was falling down a mountain, felt like he was swooping into the gorge on a Bat track,