Earthquake Zone

Spring break, and the hours stretched like days. All her friends were away. Except Andrew, and she didn’t want to see Andrew. She wrote letters to the others, Gretchen and Amanda. They wouldn’t get them until they were home again, but it would be like a gift, she thought, to come home to a stack of hand-addressed envelopes. She decorated each one elaborately, first with stickers and then dense ink drawings, covering and recovering each area until only the small box she’d drawn for the address showed any white paper.

“There’s no way I’m getting out of here in one piece” she wrote Gretchen. It was too late to turn back. The earth had trembled, smoke rose, and she’d run towards the conflagration instead of away. Pull apart the burning rubble to look for survivors, or simply watch it quake and fall, these were her choices now.

Then it was time for dinner.

James and Jean talked about lab equipment and tenure applicants while Lacey daydreamed about drawings, taking automatic bites of pasta and vegetables. Her mother laughed, and Lacey tuned back in. James was funny, sometimes. "What’d I miss?" she asked.

"Oh, it was just a miscommunication James had with the equipment sales-rep," Jean explained. "Half of them don’t have any idea what they’re selling"

James gave her an apologetic smile. "Boring, I know," she read in his eyes. He wishes they could talk about something other than work, Lacey thought. He’d rather be alone with me. She felt a flare of heat in her chest. It was uncanny the way they read each other’s minds.

“Did I smell something chocolate when i came in earlier?” James asked.

"Not chocolate," Lacey answered. "You must have smelled the almonds. I tried to make biscotti, but I’m not sure they came out right." Baking was her other spring-break activity. Precision in measuring, said her cookbooks, was the key to success. She leveled her measures with military discipline. Still, things failed. Fell. Curdled. Burnt. The biscotti were crumbly rather than crisp. "I control my reality," Amanda had told her. All Lacey’s care was not enough. Maybe Amanda’s reality was more tractable.

Jean suggested decaf, to dip the cookies. “It doesn’t matter if they’re crumbly. You’re supposed to dip them anyway,” she said. James declared them delicious and ate three. Lacey nibbled hers, after discovering dunking left an unpleasant sludge in her cup. There was silence. Lacey gave a sigh of relief when Jean went downstairs to work at her desk. James gave her a conspiratorial wink, and she got up to help him clear the dishes.

His hand grasped her wrist as she reached for his plate. Lacey looked up at him, into his brown eyes. "Tiger’s eye" she thought, as he pressed her back into the wall behind her, kissing her intensely, one hand almost painful on her wrist, the other soothing against the back of her neck. His kisses were deliberate, despite the seeming spontaneity ot the maneuver. She was certain he’d planned this moment. In the seconds before she lost herself in sensation, she wished he would come with her, into that chaos of desire.