I see something on his face, a fleeting emotion that is quickly lost behind the usual arrangement of his features. “What are you thinking, Daddy?”

Jack laughs softly and turns to fix his blue eyes on my blue eyes. “I was thinking of Grandpa Walter. How much he hated me.”

Mom’s dad. And yes, Grandpa Walter always hated Jack. I make a face because it would be pointless to pretend that Grandpa’s dislike wasn’t obvious. It was blatantly obvious. Jack laughs again.

“Today I don’t blame him. Scary thought, today I really get Walter.”

I make a pout and then a smile.

“I love you, Daddy.”

He drops a kiss on my golden brown hair. “I love you too, baby girl.” Jack smiles, stares at the sky and then sighs heavily again. “Our plane leaves at four, Chrissie. We should really get back to the apartment, pack up, and head out.”

I feel cold and shaky. I know what I want to do, I know what I need to do, and clarity is not always a peaceful thing.

“I’m not going home today.” I say it simply, no bullshit, no drama, no equivocation.

I feel Jack tense. “What are you telling me? You are not staying, Chrissie. You may be eighteen but you are still my little girl.”

I ease out of his hold until I am sitting, hugging my legs, my cheeks pressed on my knees. “There are things I’m not finished with here. There are things left for me to do. Things left for us both to do. I will see you in the morning at the apartment. We are going to clean out Mom’s things, and I think it is right that we do it together.”

If I didn’t know Jack, I wouldn’t see the pain whispering through his eyes. It is that subtle a thing. It makes me think of what Alan says he sees in my eyes. I can feel the tears, but I fiercely fight to hold them back.

“You’re not staying here, Chrissie.”

I kiss Jack on the cheek. “I’ll see you in the morning, Daddy. But now you need to go. Alan gave you last night. But I am keeping today for Alan.”

The look in Jack’s eyes nearly makes me crumble. I want to cry so very badly, because I think I know what I am going to do, but I don’t really, and somehow I don’t think I will know until I am there at that moment when life forces me to choose right or left.

Right or left. I stare at Jack. Is it really true that the turns we make don’t matter and that the journey will end as it should, no matter what turns we take?

I don’t think Jack is right about this. I think the turn I make will be the one I can live with, and I don’t have a clue which one that will be.

* * *

I find Alan in the bedroom sitting in a chair at the far side of the room before a window, staring out at the city below. I lean quietly back against the door and just gaze at him. He is bathed in the glow of dawn and still dressed in the clothes from last night.

The bed is exactly how I left it, his side perfectly tucked in and my side with twisted and scrunched up blankets. My side. His side. I fight back the tears. In such a short time, he’s become everything to me: the mirror I stare at myself in and the other perfect half of me.

“You OK?” he whispers.

I nod.

“Jack still here?”

I shake my head. “I sent him back to the apartment.”

Jeez, why am I standing here like a fool against the door?

“Everything OK between you and Jack?”

I shrug. “Things are OK. Sort of good, actually. We’ve still got a lot to work through.”

I wish I hadn’t said that Jack and I still have a lot to work through. For some reason I now know what I have to do. Taking in a deep breath, I move across the room until I’m sitting on my knees in the space between his legs.

There is something on his face that makes me anxious and afraid. “Are you OK?” I ask.

He runs a hand through his hair and he shrugs. “I thought I was going to go out there and just find that you’d gone. No goodbye. Just gone with Jack.”

“I could never do that.”

Suddenly he pulls me into his arms and he is kissing me, kissing me passionately, all across my face, across my tears and cheeks and lips. The fierceness hits me like a tsunami, because I can feel panic and need and love in how he kisses me.

“I love you,” I whisper against the warm flesh of his neck.

“Don’t leave,” he whispers against my lips as I am carried to the bed.

I lock my mouth to his as we frantically shed our clothes, a desperate almost frenzied passion inside of me. Alan’s breath begins to quicken in response, but he tries to whisper something.

I stop him with my kisses and the twisting urgency of my body. I don’t want to talk. I want to pull him inside of me and to feel that completeness, that total loss of emptiness that I only feel with Alan.

“Love me and be good to me, Alan,” I murmur against his skin, and I know he understands what I am asking.

He lifts me and slowly lowers me onto to him, filling me completely. I moan incoherently as I let him move and guide me.

He tilts his pelvis, guiding my hips with his hands as he moves himself in and out of me. I can’t imagine not being here with Alan. We feel so right together.

I want to consume this slowly, but I can feel my body building and building, climbing higher even as I resist it. I can’t stop myself and I explode around him. He cries out in turn.

We lie as we finish, me draped across his flesh, neither of us saying anything. He holds me and I hold him, and I realize that the tears moistening my cheeks are not only from my eyes.

“I don’t want to talk about anything,” I whisper.

“Then we won’t talk.”

I rub my cheek against his chest. I kiss the flesh above the pulse in his neck. I love him so.

* * *

You can’t hold the minutes back, no matter how hard you try to. The minutes go only faster when you do not want to let them go. I want to stay here in this perfect quiet with Alan, but Sunday morning is here and I can’t do a damn thing about it.

I roll over in Alan’s arms. I look at the clock. 9 a.m. Jack and I settled on 10 a.m. after heated negations for the ritual of packing up Lena’s things and finally saying goodbye to Mom. I have a little time. Not much. I really should get moving. I can shower after the packing. It will save me a little time now, but not enough. No amount of time will ever be enough, and I still don’t know what I am going to do after saying goodbye to Lena.

I turn my face into my pillow to hide my tears. I’m going to lose him. Alan won’t want to be with me if I go back to Santa Barbara. Oh, he’ll try. He’ll do all those be-kind-type of things. There will be the phone calls and maybe a letter or a present. But that won’t last long because the real world exists whether we want it to or not, and the real world made us over from the start.

The bed shifts under his weight as Alan turns me slowly in his arms so I can face him. My head is nestled on his arm. His eyes are black and searching.

I gaze at his beautiful face. It is emotionless, compassionately so, and I hate that he can give nothing away if he wants to. His eyes stare into mine, hardly blinking, calm and smiling, merely because he wants them to. Reaching up, I caress his cheek and run the tip of my fingers across the perfect structure of his jaw. I want to remember each line on his face exactly how he looks at this moment.

Time moves in, hovers and slips away. I can’t stop it.

I rummage on the floor for Alan’s shirt and pull it over my head. I climb from the bed. “I’ve got to go, Alan.”

I start to gather my clothes, and carelessly I shove them into my duffel, carefully avoiding Alan’s eyes. I can feel him watching and I wish he’d just say something, because the faster I get through this the sooner the pain will go away.

“Do you want me to go with you?” he asks.

I shake my head. “No. I’m meeting Jack at the apartment. We’re packing up my mother’s things today.”

Alan sits up. A torturous and heavy pause in the room hits me like a punch. “And then?”