Seventh Wonder by Renae Kelleigh Page B

kissed her chastely. “Tell me you know how insanely gorgeous you are.” He was whispering for some reason, while Meg’s breath spilled wildly into the dense air around them.
    Her cheeks were suffused with pink, proof that every one of her arteries and veins was dilated to accommodate the multiplication of her blood. At his statement, she flushed a deeper red. “Gorgeous?” she asked, trying the fit of it on her tongue. She would never have believed it of herself before this moment. Seeing the glint of awe in his eyes, though, how could she question it?
    He kissed her, and the whole world slowed. Her blood shimmered, her muscles unscrewed, her bones deliquesced. He was doing it on purpose: braking. Meg closed her eyes as he kissed the inside of her wrist, her palm, the first knuckle on each of her fingers. When his lips left her skin, she knew it was over - and she’d never wanted anything less. He covered her with his shirt, and she felt paradoxically colder.
    John softly kissed the corner of her mouth, then drew back to lie beside her. He wrapped her in his arms and whispered into her ear. “I want to know you, Miss Lowry. Tell me everything.”
    There was more to his words than met the eye. They’d been on the verge of crossing a line - but first he wanted it to mean something.
    * * *
    She told him about the home she’d grown up in: an old, wooden craftsman style house in Rustic Canyon, facing Santa Monica Bay. The dormers like gabled dollhouses and balconies like so many pulled out drawers. She described the sprawling rose garden and the man named Esteban whose job it had been to tend the flowers for as far back as her memory reached. She spoke of the library jammed with books: the place where she’d spent hundreds of hours turning pages until her fingers turned sore and her joints ached.
    Her father was an engineer who’d been exempt from the draft during the Second World War because of his job, designing and machining parts for military trucks. His pervasive sense of guilt at not having served on the front lines alongside his contemporaries had lent him a wary, defensive edge in his older age. The wealth he’d accumulated during those wartime years, Meg felt, was his only real source of comfort.
    Her mother was twelve years his junior; she had insisted that Meg call her Irene from an early age. Irene was a concert pianist-turned-private piano teacher who’d studied at the music conservatory in San Francisco. In the course of her education, she’d furtively picked up an idea or two about feminism, in a time when it wasn’t yet fashionable to adopt those leanings. She could have been a strong female role model for her only child, had she taken any particular interest in motherhood to begin with. Instead, she’d delegated roughly half her maternal obligations to her fraternal twin sister, Meg’s Aunt Virginia, a blithe yet kindhearted woman who even now had yet to meet a man she considered worthy of marrying.
    She talked of her time at Berkeley, only superficially alluding to her relationship with Michael, which, sadly, had shaped her undergraduate experience in many more ways than she cared to admit. She painted herself as a pariah, an impostor of sorts: an old soul in a land of incipient spirits. “Not because I’m any wiser,” she clarified. “It was more like I’d been surpassed by my own generation. Everyone around me was fighting for something they believed in, and I was left trying to fathom where I fit in the whole scheme of change they’d already dreamt of and launched a thousand missiles from.” Looking down, she admitted, “Still am.”
    John rested his chin on her shoulder and drew the bridge of his nose along the hard line of her jaw. He sat against the headboard, his bent legs spread apart, while Meg sat between them, reclining against his chest.
    The entire room beyond the circle of watery light shed by the bedside lamp had vanished into unknown blackness. Meg knew it was late, but