Free Mad Honey: A Novel by Jodi Picoult, Jennifer Finney Boylan Page B

of us folded perfectly into each other, human origami. Sun pours through the open window of the tree house, and a shaft of light pools on the floor like a spotlight in a theater. I imagine all of the people in the past who’ve climbed up here before me. Are we the first people to have slept together— together together—up here?
    “What do you call this place?” I ask him. “The tree house? Does it have a name?”
    Asher leans up on one elbow and smiles. “The Stronghold,” he says, in a voice kind of like Christopher Lee in those Lord of the Rings movies.
    It is impossible not to laugh at this. “That’s very—medieval.”
    He looks around. “When I was a kid, we came up here all the time. I spent days here in the summer, me and Maya. We had a whole world. I was the king, she was the queen.” He points to one of the beams on the ceiling, and there are his initials, A.F., and Maya’s, M.B. There are other initials, too: O.McA and J. McA. And D.A.
    “O. McA is your mom, right? And J. McA is—?”
    “My uncle Jordan. My grandfather built this place for them, when they were kids.”
    “And D.A.?”
    “Dirk!” says Asher with a smile.
    “Let me guess. He was the court jester?”
    Asher laughs. “Not quite. In ninth grade we’d come up here to do bongs. We’d look through the telescope to make sure Mom wasn’t coming.” He shakes his head a little, caught in the web of a memory. “You should have seen Maya’s face when she learned I brought Dirk up here. I thought she was going to punch me. She said, You’re not supposed to get high in the Throne Room! ”
    “The Throne Room?”
    “Yeah.”
    I glance around. “I don’t see anything to sit on.”
    Asher pulls me over him, so that my legs fall on either side of his hips. He’s hard again, against me. “I’ll be your throne,” he offers.
    I lean down and kiss him. “God save the king,” I whisper.
    My hair makes a curtain around us. Asher’s hands are on my waist and coasting up and my own palms flatten on his chest. Then he lets go of me, and I hear the rip of foil and the shuffle of our hips as he puts on the condom. I think about how you never realize how empty you feel until you are filled. Then I stop thinking at all.
    By the end, we have flipped, and Asher is heavy on me, his nose pressed to the curve between my shoulder and my neck. “This is my favorite part of you,” he murmurs.
    “It’s not a super-exciting one.”
    “Speak for yourself.” He nuzzles my skin. “I’m never moving. Forward my mail. I live here now.”
    I laugh and push at him until he rolls to his side. Then I get up and put on my bra and panties. While Asher searches for his boxers, I move the telescope around, looking out on the world he grew up in. I think about him peering through it as a kid, and about Olivia and her brother, too, doing the same thing when they were little. “ Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, ” I murmur.
    I can feel Asher’s eyes on me. “It’s John-Baptiste Karr.” I translate: “It means the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
    I glance over my shoulder, but he’s still staring.
    “What?” I ask, self-conscious.
    “You,” Asher answers, and just the way he says this sends a thrill of electricity through me, and I think: You know, I could just rip my underwear off again and we could go for the hat trick. Sometimes when Asher looks at me, it’s like he’s a flower in a field and I’m a strange rain he just wants to drink in.
    A second later I feel Asher’s arms encircle me from behind and I lean back into him. I don’t know how long we stand like that, the two of us. That’s the thing I can hardly believe. That we have all this, and there is no end to it.
    My eyes fall upon a rafter on the far side of the tree house, where there is another pair of initials. “Who’s B.F.?”
    Asher lets go of me, goes over to the corner, pulls his pants on.
    “Asher?” I say, and he gives me a look. Now