“No, you haven’t.”
He rocked on his toes a few times, back and forth. I’d learn later that it was his nervous habit. It endeared me then, a little—instead of retreating from anxiety, he psyched himself up to face it. “I don’t want the night to end like this. Can I take you home?”
I nodded.
He walked at my side, never ahead or behind. Our bodies aligned naturally. I never had to guess where he was going.
He drove a Chevy Monte Carlo built before I was born. It looked like something out of a Tarantino film. I don’t read too much into people’s vehicle choices. Mom drives a minivan, and she’s never taken me to soccer practice or gymnastics. Her van is her office. Only clients get to see the inside.
The front seat of his car was a solid piece of old leather. It smelled dizzyingly masculine. When he got in the seat dipped toward him, peeling away from my skin.
“Where do you live?”
I turned to him. I was breathing hard. He noticed and his hands came off the wheel, his body angling toward me.
We met halfway.
Before this goes any farther, I should tell you I’ve slept with older men before. Some much older than me. Like, x2 and up on the multiplication table. One was almost x3.
Thanks, Dad, for leaving a huge void in my life that Freud says has to be filled with dick.
I don’t blame it entirely on him, though. I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul, and all that jazz. Obviously I’m compensating for something, but I think even if I’d had a normal childhood, I’d have grown bored of boys my age. They’re like over-sensitive car alarms. A brisk breeze is enough to set them off. I should know, since I lost my virginity to one in freshman year. I didn’t even realize it when he came—I thought he was still trying to get in.
Okay, I thought. Bad first pick. The next will be better.
The next one lasted twenty-four seconds. I counted. He said if I really wanted to feel something, we should try anal.
At some point you realize they’re still children, and it starts to feel weird and pervy.
So when a guy in his late twenties flirted with me at a gas station, I got into his car, and he f**ked me on a bare mattress in a stuffy one-room apartment that smelled like ashes and beer. He made sure I came first, and he didn’t whine about wearing a condom. He called me gorgeous and bought me a burger before he dropped me home.
I could get used to this, I thought.
So I did.
It seemed like the kiss would be frantic, urgent, but when our lips actually met it was soft. Restrained softness. All the urgency went into our hands, perched on each other’s shoulder and neck like talons. My heart was ecstatic. He wanted this as much as I did and also wanted to not f**k it up, to not let it become a gross sloppy drunk screw. I kissed him slowly, indulgently, feeling the pillowed satin of his lips, the gritty scatter of stubble all around them. It took serious willpower to go slow. Beery bitterness in our mouths, but it just made everything sweeter—this was something we wanted no matter what imperfections tried to deter us.
His hand circled my skull, pulled me into him. I tilted my face further, my mouth at a right angle to his, opening for his tongue. God, when had I last been kissed like this? Had I ever? It felt like being f**ked, but sweetly, more personally, somehow. Inside my veins my blood glowed the same neon red as those carnival lights. He pulled out, pulled gently at my lower lip. Opened his eyes and looked at me.
“I’m not trying to seduce you,” I said in an absurd gasp.
He smiled. Not the ultra-bright public smile from earlier, but one just for me, small and sly, one corner of his mouth higher than the other.
It was pretty obvious who was seducing whom here.
Some part of my old self wrested control. She curled her hands in his shirt and yanked him toward her. She lowered her body to the long seat and hooked her legs around his, let his weight settle atop her. They kissed again, her and him, and this time it was urgent and frantic and all the things they’d been holding back. Teeth now, and nails. She felt him get hard, the thick ridge of it pressing through his jeans against her inner thigh. She felt our body, mine and hers, getting wet, the sweat between her br**sts, on the back of my neck, between our legs. We grasped the zipper of his fly.
The Guy pushed himself up on his elbows, panting. “Wait.”
Then I was me again, hair sticking to my face, flushed. “What?”
He closed his eyes. I could tell breathing was a conscious effort on his part. He lowered his face, grazed my cheek with his sandpapered one. “I want you,” he whispered into my hair, and a million filaments of electricity raced across my scalp. “But I want to know you. I don’t just want a hookup.”
When he raised his head again, I felt that same weightless drop I’d felt when our hands first touched a hundred feet above the earth.
He combed a hand through my hair, untangling it. “Is that too old-fashioned for you?” A self-deprecating smile. His forehead furrowed when he smiled like that.
“No,” I said.
“You are so beautiful. God, I just want to touch you.” He sighed, his chest moving against mine. Sodium light slanted through the windshield, painting the side of his face with warm lemon. “You know why I was happy up there? Because I completely forgot where I was. All I could think about was you.”
I couldn’t wait anymore.
I took his face in my hands and brought it back to me. We kissed with closed mouths, then tongues again, and he pressed me down, his knee between my legs, like I’d imagined him doing. I felt his kiss all the way through me. I felt it in every hollow place, filling me with summer heat, starlight, sweat, and abandon. When he broke away I said, low and steady, “We can do both. It doesn’t have to just be a hookup.”