Kiss Me, Genius Boy (No More Dreams #1)

1.2 Sometimes I wanted to tell her I loved her

1.2 Sometimes I wanted to tell her I loved her

Dad hadn’t yet arrived when we pulled up outside the café. Instead, I saw a girl there, waving at me from an outside table. Imogen. I hadn’t known she was invited. She was like my sister, but … It was all kind of sick, when I thought about it carefully. I loved her, but her existence made me uncomfortable.

She was dressed simply, in layers of black and gray. Her luxuriant red hair curled around her face and tumbled over her shoulders. Hanging over her breasts there was a thin silver chain pulled down by a single blue stone, more likely a piece of colored glass, that echoed her eyes and the clear sky. She stood and we kissed each other on the cheek.

Lily, greeting her, put her hands on Imogen’s hips, like a man, and pulled her in—too close—so she could kiss her lightly on the lips. “It’s so good to see you again,” Lily said. “Who are you fucking these days?”

“God, Lily,” I said, as she sat beside me and, full of provocative irony, insinuated herself under my arm, leaning her head in close so that my impulse was to kiss her affectionately on the cheek. She could be so offensive that sometimes I wanted to tell her I loved her. But I didn’t want to lose her.

“All you need to know, Lily,” said Imogen, “is you’re no longer on the list.” The line was cruel enough for Lily herself, but I could see the hurt in Imogen’s eyes. Lily ignored the effect she had on the girl.

At that moment, Dad rounded the corner, looking like a freak. He was wearing turquoise Thai fisherman’s pants, Birkenstock sandals, and a red silk jacket that would have looked in-place on a kung-fu master, over an open-necked peasant shirt. On his head, covering short-cropped gray hair whose thinning embarrassed him, was a square-topped, brimless cap embroidered in a multicolored tribal motif.

In greeting, he hugged Imogen and shook my hand, but avoided Lily. Sometimes it was for the best. It was an understatement to call her flirtatious, and I think he feared getting too close lest he trade a son for a short-lived lover. I’d have forgiven him for sleeping with her, if it ever came to that—far better men had fallen for her. But I never told him so. I didn’t want to give him license.

It was a shame for Dad. Since not long after Mum died, his love life had resembled an illustration for the Parable of the Straight Stick, which in years to come I’d hear single female friends tell ruefully.

This is how it goes:

A warlock sends a princess into the forest with a mission: bring me a perfectly straight stick by dark or I’ll have your soul. In the morning, she finds a stick near perfectly straight, but with a crook in the end. She throws it away, and all through the day she finds and discards stick after stick, each more bent than the last. By nightfall she is desperate and clutches at any chance she can find. Leaving the forest with a stick as crooked as a Medici pope, she knows she is forever damned. And yet as she regrets leaving the straightish stick of the morning behind, she knows even that would not have saved her.

The year after cancer took Mum, Dad met a charming woman who worked at the local library. But ever the womanizer, he cheated on and left her, and since then, he’d appeared with a succession of increasingly shopworn floozies from Rosebud and its surrounds, along with a few disconcertingly mental girls barely out of high school who had a fetish for old men. Lily, by contrast, was a goddess. But he believed, on my account, he couldn’t have her even for a night.

“Well, what are you up to, lately, Im?” I asked, when we were all sitting.

“Oh, you know, just studying, doing recitals. I’m doing a Ravel concert at Melba Hall in a few weeks’ time. You should come.”