He eyed me warily. “Pardon?” He sipped his beer.
“Spring break’s almost over. You’re here alone. Time’s a-wastin’.”
“Wha—” he spluttered into his cup. “Am I giving out virgin vibes?”
“Kind of.”
He gaped at me, then closed his mouth and shook his head in disgust. “I wanted to come here. At least, I thought I did. I really like to look. But when it comes right down to it…I want it to mean something, you know?”
I nodded. “Actually, no, but I can imagine.”
A cell phone rang. “And don’t you dare tell John I said that,” Will went on. “Some things guys just don’t say to each other.” He pulled his phone from his back pocket and looked at the screen. “Speak of the Devil.” He clicked the phone on. “Yes, Governor?” Then he whirled around, glancing in every direction around the beach. “You’re watching us? Where are you?”
“He’s sneaky,” I said.
Will clicked the phone off and pocketed it. “John told me to move six inches to the left.” He picked up his plastic chair and edged away from me in the wet sand. “He really likes you.”
“He does stuff that makes me think so,” I admitted. “Bringing me to the beach.”
“That’s serious,” Will agreed.
“And then he does stuff that makes me think he doesn’t like me at all. For instance, Tuesday night, he made sure I saw a dead body in a car wreck. That’s not my idea of date night.”
Will cringed, and shook his shoulders like he had the shivers. “He takes that cop stuff very seriously. But I know he likes you, Meg. The night I saw y’all at McDonald’s, he called me from Martini’s and told me to back off. You didn’t think I was coming on to you, did you?”
“No.”
“Neither did I.” Will was a little drunk, I saw.
“Wait a minute,” I said. It was my turn to gape at Will. “He called you from Martini’s? He was supposed to be breaking up a bar fight! I feared for his safety! Bastard.”
“Yeah, I think the fight was over. He just talked to the manager for a second. Then he probably stood in the corner and glowered at people like he does, and called me, pretending it was Official Police Business.” He imitated John in a low, serious voice. “‘I’m in charge of her while I’m at work, and I can’t have my best friend hitting on her.’”
“Will, that sounds like he doesn’t like me.”
“He likes you, trust me. He doesn’t want to like you.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re leaving. And he’s staying. That’s exactly the problem he got into with Angie.” He traced a heart in the condensation on his cup. “Personally, I didn’t see why they couldn’t stay together. Birmingham is only a twenty-minute drive from town. It would have been hard for them to see each other because of John’s weird working and sleeping schedule, but they could have done it. It hardly even qualifies as a long-distance relationship. I think John just wasn’t that into her.” He rolled his eyes. “There’s not a whole lot there, anyway.”
“She broke up with him, though.”
“Right,” Will said, pointing at me. “But now she’s interested in him again.”
“It makes perfect sense to me that she’d be conflicted, if she has any sense. He’s this awesomely handsome, really cool guy who’s chained himself to a bridge. He’s hot, he’s cold.” I moved toward Will, and I didn’t care whether John was watching or not. This was important. “When you were a kid, did you ever watch The X-Files? Mulder is this smart, cute, funny guy who’s obsessed with catching the aliens who stole his sister. He’s totally oblivious to the red-haired Scully standing right in front of him—”
“I don’t think John is totally oblivious to you. I don’t think that’s possible. You talk really loudly.”
“—and if he happens to throw her a kiss, she’ll take it. If he happens to think to screw her, she’ll really take it. And she says things to him like, ‘Logically, Mulder, this doesn’t make sense, please let go,’ and she pats him on the shoulder and hopes he’ll screw her again.”
Will was staring at me with big eyes. I’d forgotten he was a virgin. Talking to him about sex was like talking to Tiffany.
“Well, I’m not Scully,” I went on. “I can’t pat John and comfort him. I want to put my hands around his neck and shake him and scream, ‘What are you doing?’” I demonstrated in the empty air and I hoped John saw me choking his ghost. “He frustrates me. He makes me angry. And I don’t think that’s a good relationship, one built on frustration and anger. Do you?”
Will shook his head somberly.
“He’s good for a lay, though,” I mused.
“Oh, please don’t say that.”
I waited for Will to explain what he meant. He just stared at me.
Then he whacked himself in the forehead with the palm of his hand. “I can’t believe”—he gestured all around us—“that I’m sitting here at a spring break party on the Redneck Riviera, warning a girl not to have casual sex with my best friend. I think we’ve entered a parallel universe. I keep expecting people to come out of the porta-toilets with their heads on backward.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Stop trying. It doesn’t make sense for John and me to date. It makes sense for us to do it.”
“But I’m telling you, that’s not how John works. He’s going to want more than that from you.”
“I don’t have anything else to give him,” I said. “Not while he’s chained to the bridge.”
Will took a deep breath and let out a long sigh. “I wish there were some way to unchain him from the bridge, so he could go do his art. I’ve been trying to figure that out for years.”
“I gave it a shot.”
Will eyed me, then drained his beer. “What’d you do?”
“To get out of trouble, I had to write a proposal to the DA for a project to keep other teenagers out of trouble. I suggested that they put a camera at the bridge, with a feed to the police dispatcher. That way, they’ll always know when someone tries to go on the bridge. John will have no reason to check for trespassers every five minutes. And the DA said the city is actually going to do it.”
Will produced another beer from beside him in his chair and took a big gulp, then glanced at me. “Sorry. I need this worse than you do, because I’m a virgin.”
He was still thinking about that? “No prob.” I felt bad about my virgin comment, especially when we were talking about his friend hooking up. Boys were so sensitive about odd things. And sometimes I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.
“What did John say about the camera?” Will asked.
“I haven’t told him. They were supposed to install it today. But I doubt it will do any good. John has a short-circuit. Logic doesn’t touch that part of his brain. It’s going to take more than a camera to unchain him.”
I wanted to hear what Will had to say about this, because he looked worried, and he was drinking fast. But John came back then with virgin (ha ha) drinks for us, frozen coconut and pineapple juice in plastic hurricane glasses with straws and paper umbrellas and monkey figurines stuck into the ground ice. Very spring break.
We sat with the cool tide scooting past our bare feet, sipping our drinks, watching the crush of dancers inside the tiki torches. Will chatted with us about the girl trouble Rashad and Skip had gotten into during the past four days, and the escapades of some of their other high school friends—now college friends, at least to Will. Then he made a Star Wars reference to John that was clearly boy-code for sex, and stood up unsteadily. “See you on Saturday at Rashad’s party?” We both said yes and watched Will wander away into the crowd.
I settled closer to the John side of my chair. “You’re not worried about him?”
John shook his head. “He’ll go up to his room and watch movies, fall asleep. Rashad and Skip will come in with girls at about four A.M. and kick him out. He’ll go run fifteen miles. That’s what Will does on road trips.”
“That’s so sad!�
� Immediately I wished I could take it back. I didn’t want John to think again that I was interested in Will.
I scanned his dark eyes in the moonlight. I thought I saw anger there, but no—it was lust. Oooh.
The throbbing dance beat inside the tiki torches transformed into a slow groove. John stood. “Don’t be sad on spring break. Let’s dance.”
He led me across the sand and into the crowd of couples. This time, no mean girls gave my blue hair the evil eye. These girls were very intent on the boys they were with. More feeling up was going on than dancing.
I hoped John and I would fit right in for once. He put his arms around me, bent over with his chin resting on my shoulder, and swayed with me. As the song progressed, he slipped his hands to my waist and moved them slowly up my sides. So far so good. If his hands made it another inch, he’d be touching my boobs.
The next slow song started. Surely this would prove to be the boob song. But wait a minute. He skipped over my boobs to stroke the sensitive skin on the undersides of my arms. It certainly was titillating, but it wasn’t the good old-fashioned feeling-up I wanted.
I wondered why he didn’t touch my boobs. Maybe he was afraid I had Stockholm Syndrome after all, the kind where your captor makes your arms tingle. Maybe he was afraid of taking advantage of me. Or maybe I had read him completely wrong all this time. He liked me as a friend and didn’t want to touch my boobs.
“Why don’t you touch my boobs?”
He took his chin off my shoulder and looked at me. “Here?” He glanced around at the other couples. “Because we’re not drunk.”
“Right.” I tried not to sound disappointed. But the air was charged with sex, positively sparkling with it. It didn’t seem fair for us to be the sober ones and the pristine ones.
“And it’s not very original.” He hooked his thumbs on either side of the waistband of my jeans, and slowly, slowly dragged his thumbs across my skin until they touched in front, just below my belly button.
Oh, God. He didn’t put his hands any farther down my pants, but there was no question now of what he wanted. And he kissed me exactly as I had kissed him in the car: along my jaw, then back toward my ear.
I should have been more careful what I wished for. The claustrophobic feeling crept up on me at the same time I opened and grew hotter for John. It was the best and the worst at once, and it was going to tear me apart. I couldn’t stand it much longer. God, I wished I didn’t feel this way. I wished I was a different person. But I would not get trapped in our town for the rest of my life. Not even for John. We needed to get this over with.
“Are you ready to go?” I whispered.
“You’re not enjoying your spring break?” he murmured before he gently bit my earlobe.
“I am, very much. But if we left now, when we got back I’d still have a couple of hours alone with you before work.”
He pulled me through the crowd so fast that I got the giggles. Yes, everything would work out perfectly. We would have a one-night stand. And then, as long as I skipped Rashad’s party, wore my helmet when I rode my motorcycle, and managed to stay away from the bridge until I moved to Birmingham in June, I would never see John again.
I DID GET SOME SLEEP IN the truck on the way back, despite his hand softly stroking my shoulder. I think he meant it to be soothing, but of course any part of me he touched leapt to life.
I was so beat that I slept anyway. And had wild dreams about him on the dark beach.
The truck lurched over a bump. I sat up. We’d reached Chilton County, still about twenty minutes from home. Looming over the interstate was the water tower shaped like a giant peach. Or a giant ass, depending on how sleepy you were.
I lay back down on the seat with my head on his thigh, like before. But this time, I couldn’t help myself. My hand slid up the inside of his hard thigh. I didn’t quite dare, because I didn’t want him to tell me no. But I got very close to touching The Place Prisoners Should Not Touch Policemen.
His breath caught. I thought he was going to pick up my hand and move it back to my side of the car, where it belonged.
He didn’t.
I never really went back to sleep after that. I was so alive with thoughts of what I was going to do to him, and what he was going to do to me.
At least I thought I didn’t go back to sleep. But his door slammed, and I started up. We’d already stopped at his apartment complex. He walked around to my door and opened it, bracing his big body inside the frame. “You’re too tired for this,” he said gently. “Come inside and sleep.”
Drat, he was trying to get out of it. At least he wasn’t offering to take me home.
I shook my head. There was no way I was going to miss this. Scooting to the edge of the seat, I wrapped my legs around his hips and pulled him into a full-body embrace. I ran my fingers through his short hair, pressed his head down to mine, and kissed him.
And then he took charge.
Oh. My. God. He kissed exactly like I thought he would. Slowly. Thoroughly. Styled for her pleasure.
And I’d been dead wrong when I thought he might not like me after all. I could tell from the way his hands grasped my hair and trembled on the back of my neck that he wanted this as much as I did.
When we pulled back to breathe, he guided me out of the car and up the stairs. Our footsteps echoed against the other apartment buildings. It was about four in the morning. Even the hum of traffic on the interstate had quieted.
He unlocked the door and held it open for me as I walked into the dark living room. Then he closed the door behind us with an official-sounding thunk and locked the dead bolt. And turned to me.
This was it. Almost a week of crushing on him—more like two weeks if I admitted to myself how interested I’d been in him the first night at the bridge. And today, fourteen hours of slow, grinding, up-close-and-personal pining for him. Finally, this was it.
17
He backed me up a pace and pressed me into the corner. His big middle finger stroked down my cheek, across my chin, and up to my lips. In the softest filter of streetlights through the blinds, he touched me like he really did think I was beautiful. Or at least was determined to make a good show of it. His dark eyes were so tender that I was ready to believe it.
Then he kissed me again. I opened my mouth and let him kiss me as deeply as he wanted. His hands slid down my sides and started to wander, and I let them wander where they would.
It was all good, until I flashed hot in my very small shirt, too hot. My chest pounded like I was having a heart attack. Red warning lights flashed behind my eyelids.
I pushed him away, and held on to him at the same time to keep from falling.
Dazed, he looked down at me, panting. He couldn’t catch his breath. “What is it?” he whispered.
“Not in the corner,” I breathed. “Anywhere but the corner.”
He put his heavy arm around my shoulders and guided me across the room. I thought: Couch? Couch? Couch? No couch. We passed the living room couch and crossed the threshold into his bedroom. I thought: jackpot.
Lois’s voice crackled on the humming police scanner.
I ducked from under his arm, dove across the bed, and switched the scanner off.
In the silence, I felt a wave of relief. Then it occurred to me he might be weird about keeping his scanner on at all times, listening for trouble.
I sat up cross-legged on the bed. He still watched me from the doorway, beside the large drawing of the bridge.
Since I’d already turned the scanner off and he hadn’t kicked me out of his apartment yet, I considered asking him to take the bridge drawing down and deposit it in the closet, just for the next two hours. I opted not to, lest he think I was a complete fruitcake.
Wait a minute. Who was the bigger fruitcake? He was the one with the bridge obsession.
Okay, I did not want to hold a fruitcake bake-off just then. I wanted John to do me.
I held out my hand to him.
He approached me cau
tiously, beams of moonlight through the windows blinds moving over him. He thought I was going to bolt. He sat in front of me, weighing down the bed so I sank toward him a little on the mattress. With a hot palm on each of my thighs, he leaned in until our foreheads touched. Then he brushed his sensitive lips up my cheek and toward my hairline.
Here was more of what I expected from John. Tortured self-control. Now I didn’t have nearly as much self-control as he did. I leaned in and kissed him hard.
We played this game for the next hour and a half. He would take over and kiss me carefully, with attention to detail, like I was one of his drawings. It was the slowest, most thorough, most agonizing, best make-out session imaginable. Until he tried to take my shirt off, or my jeans. I couldn’t allow that.
Then I would take over, and things would go faster. There was also a certain amount of fascinated experimentation on my part. After his show of being a big strong policeman, it really turned me on to find out he was a normal boy after all. An unusually well-built boy, granted, but still a boy who reacted in predictable ways. When I whispered in his ear, he shivered. When I touched him, he gripped me harder. I managed to get all his clothes off while it was my turn to play authority. His beautiful naked body pressed down on me, wanting in.
I could have very happily spent a whole week in foreplay with him, but I had to leave for the diner soon. I needed to get what I’d come for.
One of the condoms I’d bought for Eric yesterday was in my pocket. If I pulled it out, I might look slut-whorish, like I was always on the ready. Anyway, I figured John was so über-responsible, he had his own. Even if he hadn’t intended them for me. I rolled out from under him, opened the side table drawer, and fished inside. “How lucky,” I murmured. “An assortment.” I spread them out beside us on the bed to look.
“Meg, I don’t think we should do it.”
His soft words stabbed me. The only other sound was the sheets slipping against each other as we breathed. Suddenly I longed for the hum of cars on the interstate, even the scanner. Anything to drown out those gentle words I’d known were coming all along.
Going Too Far Page 16
