'O' Beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties,
Above the fruited plain...
O' Beautiful, for patriot dream,
That sees beyond the years,
Thine alabaster cities gleam,
Undimmed by human tears.'
She looked down to where he stood below her; she lifted her arms, and he opened his, and she leapt into them. Jungkook caught her, held her a moment suspended between the hot earth and the cool sky; and when her feet were on the ground he didn't take his hands from her waist. She lifted her face to him, sure she had guessed right, so certain of it that the little tight hand that had seemed to grip her heart all day let go of it at last, and it beat hard and wildly.
It was a long blind kiss, but then he ended it, with a breath like a sob, and laid his cheek against hers. She tried to turn him toward her, nuzzling, her hands on his shoulder. He drew away and looked down at her. How could his face be so alight in nothing but starlight, she thought. She could read his face as though it were day: great-eyed and plain like an archaic Greek head.
"I'm staying with you tonight," she said.
"M--," he said.
"You don't have to be afraid," she said.
"But I am afraid," he said. "You make me so."
"Well you just... You need to get over that."
"M--," he said again, and seemed to ponder-- not what to say but whether he would say it. "I do not think it is..."
"Oh jeez," she said. "Well, what." She swallowed, or tried to; her throat was tightening with the onset of a deep embarrassment or shame. She turned from him, crossed her arms.
"Is not what you want," he said.
"You don't know what I want," she said.
"Perhaps what you do not want. Perhaps I know this."
"How?"
He didn't answer, and she wouldn't turn to look at him.
"You would like to go back?" he said.
Without speaking she went to the door he had opened for her, and got in, her arms still crossed protectively, and looked at the night. The eastern sky had paled, and now an amber moon, comically huge and full, rolled up as if with a soft exhalation that could be heard. Big moon, summer night. How could she have been fooled?
His hand covered hers where it lay on the car seat, his hand large and real and cool.
