Vegas Boys

After school that day, Brendon said he was driving out to Spencer's grandma's house, where the band had been practicing lately, for a couple of hours, and I hid my disappointment as best I could. I had been hoping that I could use the age-old I-need-help-with-my-homework excuse to spend at least an hour or two with him, but obviously that wasn't going to happen.

I got my homework done in less than an hour and then moped around the house for a while, more restless and bored than usual. Now that I'd gotten used to having Brendon around, I was suddenly ill-equipped to pass my spare time alone.

You're pathetic, Kelsey, I thought bitterly as I caught myself glancing longingly at the phone for what must have been the fiftieth time in an hour. This is exactly what you were afraid of--you're already dependent on him.

And it was true: the way he preyed constantly upon my mind; the way I kept weighing the pros and cons of calling him and running the risk of interrupting a song and coming to the same conclusion again and again; and the way I kept relating everything I saw or heard elsewhere, on T.V. or on the internet or in a book or magazine, to something Brendon had said or done--all of these things scared the shit out of me, because I knew I would be devastated if he ever let me down.

Which had never happened yet, but nothing lasts forever.

Except love, I reminded myself, thinking, of course, of all the cheerful fairy-tales we're spoon-fed from birth. But then again, that was ridiculous; why should love be an exception? And why, if love really did last forever, had my parents exchanged only a handful of stiff words over the past eleven years? Why was my mother so keen to instill in me the fear of "Vegas boys"? The fear of love?

Maybe love was just as fragile as everything else in the world. But we all leaned on it so heavily, made it the basis of our very happiness--and then we all fell to pieces when it collapsed on us.

Maybe that was what my mother was trying to protect me from.

-----

Over two hours had passed since I had returned home from school, and I was going out of my mind with boredom. So I grabbed a rusty rake out of the dilapidated little shed behind the house, and started raking leaves in the backyard to pass the time.

Considering that it was located right in the middle of an enormous desert, our neighborhood was pretty well-landscaped. There were a good number of trees in my backyard, so leaves were also abundant; I had only managed to cover about a third of the whole yard in about half an hour when I heard a familiar voice that made my heart jump up in my throat.

"Kelsey!"

I stopped and looked up to see Brendon sauntering around the side of my house into the backyard, smiling, with his hands shoved in his pockets. The first thing I noticed as I saw him coming towards me was that he was wearing a brown bomber jacket that I didn't recognize. It was kind of strange, and probably should have been ugly--but somehow, it looked really good on him.

"Hey," I said, a little breathlessly, as he finally reached me.

"Hey, yourself." He smiled, wrapping his whole arm around the back of my neck and bending down to kiss me briefly.

"What's this?" I asked, grabbing at the jacket.

"Oh." He shrugged. "I don't know, just something Ryan gave me. Said it was too big for him."

I rolled my eyes. "I bet just about everything's too big for him. He probably has to special order all his clothes from American Girl catalogues."

Brendon laughed at that, his smile reaching his eyes in a way that made my stomach do a couple of flips. "I missed you, kid," he mumbled, kissing me on the forehead this time.

I tried not to blush, but of course it didn't work. "I missed you, too," I replied honestly. "I had to resort to yard work to keep myself occupied."

"Yeah, I see that," said Brendon, grinning as he looked around at the few small piles of leaves scattered across the yard.

"You want to help?" I smiled and wiggled my eyebrows persuasively.

He gnawed on his lip for a moment, as if thinking it over. "Do I get to jump in the leaf pile when we're done?"

"Only if I can jump with you."

"Deal!" Brendon's whole face lit up with a huge smile, and he darted over to the side of the house, where a couple more rakes were propped up against the wall.

The raking went a lot faster with two of us working at it, and we were all done in half the time it had taken me to get only the first third of the yard done on my own. I sighed and stood back to examine the fruits of our hard work, but Brendon had other plans.

"Lets make a mega-pile!" he said excitedly, and quickly set about raking all the smaller piles into one huge pile in the middle of the yard. I rolled my eyes and followed his lead.

Once we had pushed all the leaves in the whole yard together into one enormous "mega-pile," Brendon grabbed my hand and pulled me over to stand beside him. "On three, we jump," he told me seriously, and I nodded in agreement.

"One..." we said together. "Two... Three!"

We both jumped into the leaf pile simultaneously, hand-in-hand, and I cringed, expecting at least a slight impact--but there were a lot of leaves to cushion our fall, and we really didn't hit the ground at all. We had jumped in face-first, on our stomachs, and after a few moments, we both raised our heads and craned our necks to look at each other, and burst out laughing for no real reason.

"There's a leaf in your hair," said Brendon.

"Imagine that," I laughed.

He just grinned and reached over to pull it out delicately.

"You're ridiculous," I told him, knowing that my hair must have been full of them.

After a while, we both rolled over on our backs so that we were lying side-by-side on our bed of leaves, looking up at the sky above. We just lay there in silence, watching the November clouds skid by, and Brendon reached over and interlaced his fingers with mine.

"I really did miss you," I said finally, because, for some reason, I felt that he should know about how much of an effect he had on me. Like I shouldn't even bother trying to hide it anymore.

He squeezed my hand, and I heard the leaves rustle as he turned to his head to look at me. "You should have come with me."

I turned to face him then, and saw that an odd little smile--a content, wistful smile--was playing across his lips. "I didn't know I was invited," I said.

"Of course you were." Brendon frowned slightly, but that indomitable smile resurfaced again almost immediately. "You're always invited. To everything. I always want you with me."

I was at a loss for words at that, so I just smiled back.

We both returned to staring upwards at the sky above, and a moment later, he asked, quite tactlessly, "Is this the part where we pick out the shapes of the clouds?"

I laughed. "I guess so. I don't know."

"I have an idea," said Brendon. "Lets be non-conformists and pick out what the clouds don't look like."

"Okay." I pointed to the tiny puff of a cloud right in the middle of the sky. "That cloud does not look like a clarinet."

"Quite true," he agreed. He paused and pointed to a cloud just to the right of the one I had picked out. "That cloud does not look like a sailboat."

"True." I picked a long, pencil-thin, streak of a cloud hovering just above the horizon. "That cloud does not look like Rosie O'Donnell."

He laughed really hard at that one. "Okay, okay, I've got one," he panted as his laughter finally ceased. "That cloud right there does not look like an apple."

"Actually...it kinda does."

With a loud rustling of leaves, he rolled over on his side to face me. "Well, damn, I guess I lose," he said in a cheesily sarcastic voice. "Do we get to make out now?"

I sighed and folded my arms across my chest, turning away from him dramatically. "Well, we could've, if you hadn't asked--"

"Oh, I'm sorry," he insisted, reaching over to try and force me to turn back towards him. "I didn't mean to--"

"You know, when you ask first, it kind of ruins the moment," I snapped in mock irritation.

"Kel-sey!" pleaded Brendon, still tugging on my arm. "I'm sorry..."

"Nope. It's too late."

I was still stubbornly pretending to be upset with him when he suddenly said, "Oh, shit. Hang on--there's a spider on you--"

And of course, I freaked out.

I'm deathly terrified of spiders. It's absurd, really--I know they can't hurt me, for the most part, but I will scream and run away like there are murderous zombies after my brains if I see one.

I froze. "Get it off!" I half shrieked.

Brendon laughed a little. "It's not gonna hurt you, Kels, it's just a spider--"

"I don't care, get it off!"

He laughed even harder at my unreasonable hysterics, but told me to hold still and reached around to pick it off my back, I assumed. "Got it," he muttered a moment later.

I turned over just enough to check and make sure, and my whole body shook with instinctive terror as I saw him holding it by the string it was hanging on to, playing with it. I shuddered. "Kill it!"

"It didn't do anything to you," said Brendon, grinning as he bounced it up and down like a yo-yo--he knew he was getting to me.

"I don't care, just kill it! Kill it!"

He just laughed again. "You're funny when you're hysterical."

"I'm not hysterical!" I screamed, ironically. "I hate spiders! I hate them!"

"They hate you too," he chuckled. He was still playing with it--dangling it in the air, dragging it across his arm and over the leaves.

"I'm serious, Brendon. Get rid of--" I absolutely shrieked as he let it hang down right over my face for a moment, and a second later he was leaning over to rub the spider guts off his fingers after smashing it.

"Okay, okay, I killed it, you can calm down now." He was still chuckling at me, clearly amused.

I didn't think it was nearly as funny and laid back down in the leaves with my hands over my chest, pissed off at him for real now.

"You can't seriously be mad at me," said Brendon, shifting closer to me through the rustling leaves.

"Well, that's funny, because I am."

He snorted. "Oh, come on, Kelsey, I was just playing around. I wasn't gonna let it get on you." He moved closer yet, wrapping one arm around me protectively. At the tenderness in his dark eyes, I melted and gave in, and let him pull me up against him. When he spoke next, his lips were right up against my temple, his breath sending shockwaves all across my face. "I wouldn't let some stupid spider get you. I won't ever let anything get you."

He made his way down the side of my face and then down my neck to my collarbone, planting kisses all the way. He shifted so that his whole body rested overtop of mine, supporting his own weight with his arms on either side of me. We just lay there like that for a long time, kissing and mumbling soft words to each other, his warm body shielding mine from the cool autumn breeze.