Hello Now by Jenny Valentine

Author:Jenny Valentine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2020-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

We scaled the wall at the side of the house, up to my roof, Novo and I. I climbed up first so I could watch him arrive: hands first, then face and eyes and shoulders. We looked at each other, for too long, without speaking. I remember thinking if I looked away he might fall and I’d be to blame, like I was the only thing keeping him up there. There’s not much I wouldn’t give to have that over again, that feeling at the beginning, whatever the risks. He crouched there, a hand’s width from me, and it was like seeing him through a microscope or something, so much detail, like I had nothing else to look at in the world. Only him. Nothing but him. Tiny scar on his cheekbone, hairline crack in his tooth, and his mouth—soft, I already knew it, and dark as a bruise. I felt these details, little barbs in my chest and fingers, my limbs, my gut, hooking me in. I can only talk about Novo’s face in pieces. I can’t put it all down in one place, the mind-numbing, accidental perfection of it. Up to my neck in him, even at that distance, happy to drown. I breathed, like I’m breathing now. Things quickened—the blood in my veins, the day’s noise, more urgent suddenly, more . . . well, more everything. Novo wiped the dust off his hands, straightened up.

I knew it already. Nothing compared to this. To us.

“Jude,” he said, and I said, “Novo,” and that was it. Enough. He looked at me and smiled. Gap-in-the-clouds, shaft-of-sunlight wonderful. I could feel it. But I still had so many questions.

“Who are you?” I said. “Where did you come from? And why did you come here? To me?”

He shrugged. “I got out of a car.”

“Nine thirty-four,” I said.

“Yes.” He smiled. “Nine thirty-four. Doesn’t matter where I was before. I’m here now. We’re here now. That’s the point.”

He scanned the houses and the yards and the hills and sea beyond. The shine on his hair was lacquer, the water at night. A pulse ticked, soft, behind his ear. He bit his lip and I thought I could taste it, and I felt all the spaces between my ribs suddenly, all my body’s absences, all the ways I wasn’t only me, and I thought, This is what desire feels like. This is why people lose their minds over it. I had to force myself to look away. I was greedy for the sight of him, but like someone who’s been starved, and has to eat slowly, take small bites, because the thing they want more than anything on earth might be too much, suddenly, for them to take.

Below us, someone smacked flies against a window and the woman opposite-but-one weaved her way up her yard with a long drink to where a deck chair sat cowering under a tree.

“Poor Henry,” I said. “He’s so lonely without her.”

“Do you think it speeds up?” he said. “Getting

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