Her smile faded. “I didn’t mean to...”
“Hi.” Next to me, Jake stuck out his hand. “I’m Jake. You’re Christa, right?”
Christa’s head swiveled toward him. “Uh, yep, that’s me. Hi, Jake.”
“Want to sit with us?” Jake scooted over on the bench to make room.
“No, thanks.” Christa fumbled with her hands. “Listen, Aki, do you want to go somewhere for a second?”
I glanced around the table. Jake suddenly seemed very absorbed in his food. No one else was paying attention to us.
I followed Christa around the corner of the house. We couldn’t go far, not with vespers in a couple of minutes.
The view back here was incredible. On the bus ride in from Tijuana the day before we’d mostly seen hills and sparse trees and a pretty, golden landscape. Since we’d arrived in this tiny town, Mudanza, we hadn’t seen that much besides houses and churches. But now Christa and I were standing on the town’s northern edge, with Mudanza on one side of us and empty country on the other. Ahead of us were hills, valleys and trees as far as the eye could see, with a painted pink sky to frame it all.
Christa was walking toward the hills now, into the last sliver of sunlight. It shone on her dark hair and reflected off her long bead necklace. She was wearing a fresh, clean T-shirt that clung to her body and jeans that looked brand-new and paint-free. She must’ve changed for dinner.
She turned around and smiled at me over her shoulder. “I missed you this afternoon. I mean, I wound up less covered in polka dots compared to this morning, so there’s that. But it turns out painting by myself is way more boring than getting polka-dotted by cute girls.”
I stood motionless. “You didn’t tell me you had a boyfriend.”
The smile fell from her face. We’d passed the peak of the hill. When I looked back, I couldn’t see the rest of our group. We were alone out here.
“I—” She paused and took a breath. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tell you that way. It sort of slipped out.”
“Slipped out?” How could she be so casual about this? And right after she’d said that thing about getting polka-dotted by cute girls that made my insides want to melt? “Who is he?”
“His name’s Steven. He goes to a private school in DC. I met him at drama camp a few years ago. He’s a really talented actor.”
“Oh.” I tried to stick my hands in my pockets, but Lori’s track pants didn’t have pockets. I stuck my thumbs in my waistband as though that was what I’d meant to do all along.
I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. Christa had flirted with me, but it wasn’t as if she owed me anything. If she’d flirted with me even though she had a boyfriend, he was the one who had a right to be annoyed about that, not me.
Plus, I wasn’t exactly in a position to be self-righteous about telling the absolute truth. Not when I was still straight-up lying to her by acting like I still did music.
The boyfriend thing hurt, though. A lot.
We’d made it to a little valley between two rows of hills. They were sort of hills-slash-sand dunes, now that I looked closer, with trees scattered along the peaks. We couldn’t even see the town behind us anymore. We’d barely come any distance at all, but it was as if we’d gone straight into the wilderness. It was cool enough that for a moment I stopped thinking about how upset I was.
“Wow,” I said. “It’s gorgeous out here.”
The sun was almost down. Everything was gray and hazy. All I could see were sand and hills, trees and sky.
And Christa. She was gorgeous, too. She was biting her lip and brushing her hair out of her face and looking at me with her steady brown eyes and I wanted... I didn’t even know what, exactly. I just wanted.
“You’d like Steven,” Christa went on. “He’s really smart and funny. Open-minded, too.”
“Great.”
“Yeah. We’re actually a really modern couple. Steven hates all those old-school rules about how relationships are supposed to work, and I do, too.”
“That’s great.” I wished she’d shut up about Steven.
“Everyone’s stuck in this 1950s mentality,” Christa went on. “As if people still ‘go steady.’ I mean, what a boring idea, that you’re supposed to be with one person all the time and never so much as look at anyone else. Haven’t we evolved past that as a culture?”
I was about to reach my breaking point with this conversation. “What are you talking about?”
Christa looked down at her hands. “The thing about Steven and me is that we’re taking a break for the summer.”
“A break?” I watched her closely. “What does that mean?”
“You know.” She met my eyes for a second and then looked away, her shoulders shifting. “We don’t believe in that old-fashioned rule about how you always have to be totally monogamous. It isn’t human nature, you know? So, since I was coming down here, we decided we’d take the summer off from our relationship. So we could see other people for a little while. If we wanted to, I mean.”
“Oh.” Ohhhhh. “So you mean—he was your boyfriend up until this week, and he’ll be your boyfriend once you get back home, but right at this moment, you’re boyfriend-free?”
She nodded. “That’s the general idea.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about him last night?” My annoyance was fading fast, but I tried not to let it show. This kind of changed everything.
She bit her lip. “I’m sorry. I should have. Steven and I agreed before I left town that we’d both be totally up front about the whole thing so no one gets the wrong idea.”
“And what would the right idea be, exactly?”
She looked back up at me, her mouth set in a straight line. “The right idea would be...that even though I technically have a boyfriend, I could still like a girl. A particular girl, I mean.”
My chest felt fluttery. Damn it. I was supposed to be mad at her.
Also, this meant Christa was definitely bi. The same as me. I’d hardly known any other bi people.
“I mean.” She stepped closer. “You know my thing for artist types. Because as it happens, there’s this one artist girl, a musician in fact, who I happen to like a lot. But only if she’s okay with the temporary thing, since that’s all I can do. And only if she likes me back.”
This time, I was the one who looked down at my hands. She was being honest with me, but I wasn’t being honest with her. She still thought I was an artist type, like her. And like the super talented actor that was Steven.
“Because the thing is,” she went on. I glanced back up. She was still biting her lip. Was she nervous? Did Christa get nervous? “I mean, if that particular musician girl did like me back, then, well, we’re here in this totally new place, where we hardly know anyone. Where we can basically start a whole new life, just for ourselves, just for these next four weeks. No one even needs to know about it. It could be our own private universe. And then once we get on the plane at the end of this trip, we go back to the real world.”
Christa tugged at her shirt again. She looked so awesome, especially next to me in my paint-splattered pants. Had she changed her clothes because she knew she was going to see me?
I looked away again so she couldn’t tell I was smiling.
Christa had a boyfriend. If we really did hook up, a little summer thing was all we could have anyway. We’d say goodbye at the end of the trip with no harm done. It would be a fling. Exactly like the one Lori and I had fantasized about that morning.