Kissing in a Dream

What's Done in the Dark

I was sitting at the table chatting back and forth with P'Tar when Lala's footsteps sounded in the all. But I couldn't focus on that. Talking to P'Tar was so different from speaking with my friends or other guys at school. Though P'Tar didn't seem much older than I was, he was worldly, seasoned, intelligent—speaking with him was like an out of body experience in the best ways.

But I was still a little worried about how mysterious he was. He'd always had that look of a man who could make me do anything he wanted—in his bed. I trembled.

"Why are you smiling like that?" Lala asked.

I shut down the screen and shoved my phone into my pocket. When I turned to look at her, she a box that looked as though it had seen better days. The top of it was covered in dust, and the sides had began rusting like it had been sitting in the rain.

"What's that?" Curiosity got the better of me.

"I'm not sure." She replied, setting it on the counter.

"Where'd you get it?"

"It was under grandma's bed." Lala replied.

Our grandmother had died a mere year before. Our parents had gotten over it instantly and rushed off to Milan for business. They hadn't come back once and had left Lala and I to go through our grandmother's things.

We'd gone through most of it. The last left was what little she kept in the bedroom.

"I think it needs a key." I told her while turning the box around to see all sides of it. "Or it could be rusted enough to take a hammer to it."

"We're going to have to try the hammer." Lala was distracted, inspecting the box. "We've backed everything. I don't want to have to unpack the boxes to find some key."

She rushed for the door. "Nong? Where are you going?"

"The garage, khrap."

She disappeared out the door and I wondered why our grandmother had a locked box under her bed. My parents—and by parents I meant my mother—didn't believe we should have secrets from each other. One night, when I was about five, my parents had a loud argument about some kind of secret my father had been keeping. I didn't hear all of it. The first part of the argument, I was asleep. The last part of it, I had a pillow pressed over my head wishing they'd keep it down so I could sleep.

I fidget with the box while I waited for Lala. This was the thing to take my mind off how I felt for P'Tar. Sure, he took me out for dinner and coffee, but I was pretty sure he was doing it because he believed we could be frowned.

Come to think about it—I'd rather a friendship with him than nothing at all. The thought of going back to where we were—what we were—saddened me.

"Okay." Lala called. "I got it."

I accepted the tool, turned the box onto its side and slammed the hammer into it. Debris broke off the box and fell onto the island. I merely turned it again and let the hammer fall, hard, on the lock. It took about three hits for the box to pop open and I set the hammer down.

Lala and I crowded around the box, looking in at different keepsakes my grandmother had kept. We found a small book that was blank aside from two roses squished between the pages. There were two strange looking, light pink bottled. I recognized them as empties from grandmother's favorite perfume. I wrung the caps off and sniffed but they had long since lost their scent.

There were postcards which someone had gone through and scratched out who they were from. They were all addressed to my grandmother. Strange, if they were from our grandpa, why would she cross out the names?