When at last they pulled back, their eyes searched each other. They had no answers for what they had done or for their feelings about it. They said nothing to one another. They looked to the sun low in the western sky and knew they had better hurry down the mountain or soon they would be hiking in the dark.
For the several miles it took to get back to the car they hiked in silence, racing the oncoming darkness, feet tumbling over each other and minds scrambling to make sense of what had happened between them. By the time they reached the trailhead the deep gloom of twilight had settled over the mountain.
In the car on the way home, and during the four years that passed, neither Aaron nor Emma ever talked about what happened on the mountain. But Aaron never forgot about it.
Now, in his sister’s apartment, Aaron looked at himself in the photo, four years younger. In the photo he wore his hair longer and wavier than he did now. But it was his eyes that Aaron noticed. In the photo, Aaron stared directly into the lens, at the photographer. His sister. And his eyes shone with the unmistakable look of love.
“I’m back!” Emma called, breaking the spell that held her brother.
“You O.K.?” she asked, after Aaron shook his head and did not say anything.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to a colorful gift bag in her hand.
“It’s your present. I thought we’d open it before dinner.”
“Thanks,” Aaron said, taking it. He pulled the blue and white tissue paper out the top, and reached in. He pulled it out and opened it to reveal his present.
A stick of pink lip gloss.
“What is this, sis?” Aaron asked, shaking his head. Emma smirked at him.
“Don’t you remember?”
Aaron looked at the stick again and scowled, puzzled. His eyes went wide when he realized what it was.
“No way!” he said. “Is this what I think it is? My 15th birthday? How do you have this?”
Emma clapped her hands and giggled. She fell against the back of the sofa.
On his 15th birthday, Aaron, a shy, awkward, and, at that time pimply, teen, opened Emma’s present in front of twelve of his friends, and he pulled out a stick of lip gloss — the same one he held now. His friends howled with laughter and Aaron’s cheeks burned red with embarrassment. He tossed the lip gloss at Emma, and it hit her in the forehead. Later in the day, long after the party was over, he apologized to Emma for throwing it at her and even laughed about it a little, but he never saw the lip gloss again, until now.
Emma held her hand out.
“Here,” she said. “I’ve saved that for 11 years. I don’t expect you to use it, but you don’t have to throw it back at me. I’ll take it.”
He handed it to her. Emma popped the lid off and screwed the tip open, and she ran it over each lip, slowly. When she took it away her lips sparkled in the low light.
“I’m fooling!” Emma said. “That’s not really your present. That’s for later, and it’s real. I thought this birthday, out of respect for your old age, I’d get my prank done early.”
“I appreciate that, baby sister,” Aaron said. Emma’s lips shone with the succulence of a ripe, red plum.