by Emilia Finn
So, because I don’t care for her, nor do I care that she knows about it, I shrug a second time. “She’s a slut, and you’re better than that. Just because she’s female and has a vagina doesn’t mean you need to keep going back for more.” I swing my arm around his hips and rest my hand on the opposite side. “Most chicks have vaginas, ya know? And many of them have written an invitation for you to drop in anytime you like.”
“You’re so crass,” he grumbles, and leads me off the school field and onto the sidewalk that surrounds the property. The sun still stings, but we walk under the shade of oak trees much like the one I still climb to his window most nights. “And I don’t want all those girls, or their vaginas.”
“You want Grace’s? Really? Are you mentally challenged?”
“No, I just…” He scowls and switches grip so I’m no longer under his arm, but he takes my hand and leads me across the street. I guess we’re ditching Luke today. “I’m not, like, in love with anyone yet. And I don’t really wanna work on hitting some kind of high number, like I’m gonna get a prize for being the most disgusting. So since Grace and I already…”
My lips curl back with disgust. “Since you already used a number on her, you figure you’ll loiter there since it won’t push your number higher?”
“Right.”
“That’s fucking gross!” I snatch my hand from his, and shove his chest when he tries to race back to me. “You don’t have to use a vagina, ya know? Your hand would work just fine, and you’d get to walk away with your dignity intact at the end.”
“It’s better than sleeping around! One day, I’m gonna meet the woman I wanna marry, and eventually, we’ll discuss who came before them. I’d rather say one than fifty-seven.”
“Not if that one sleeps with fifty in a week, dumbass. Whatever STDs she catches during her college years, you’re gonna catch.”
He rolls his eyes and snags my hand again. “You’re unfairly judging her. She’s not sleeping around, and—”
“You’re riding the train to Naïvetown, stupid. Population, you.”
“Second, you’re the one dating Trent. There was Gage early in the summer. And Calvin before him. So can you talk? Really?”
“Yes, because, unlike you and your faulty slut-radar, I have a hundred-percent success rate in dating gentlemen. So shut your piehole. Don’t fart in glass houses and all that.”
“Throw rocks,” he grunts. “The saying is to not throw rocks in glass houses.”
“I said what I said.”
We come closer to the gym – four blocks away, then three – until we get close enough to see the cars in the parking lot. Mom and Daddy are here, and so is Rob’s dad, though his Mom’s car doesn’t seem to be in the lot. My uncles, my aunts, my brother and sister are all here.
This year’s Stacked Deck tournament – a fighting league my family created a couple years ago and now runs at Christmastime each year – is in the beginning stages of this year’s sign-ups. The summer is over, which means entries are now open. It means the gym is swamped with emails, phone calls, drop-ins, and the website is almost-hacked.
Every. Single. Year.
But we have a top-shelf cyber security team in place, we have a trillion family members to man the phones and email, and the drop-ins pay for hundreds, thousands of meals for the charity shelter homes my aunts established even before I was born.
“What do you see in him, huh?” Rob either doesn’t see the gym the way I do, or he’s just not interested, because he pulls me in close again until our sweat mingles, and his hot breath fries the top of my head. “Trent is just… he’s not your type.”
“Who is my type?” I don’t even try not to hug my best friend as we walk. We’re always touching, always tripping on each other’s feet as we move. “You’d rather another football player?”
“No. It’s just… you’re so wild and silly, ya know? And Trent tutors for college credits. Its just not you.”
“He’s too sensible for me?” I glance up and smile. “Are you afraid I only have room for one sensible friend in my life?”
“Yes,” he pouts.
He abruptly tenses at Luke’s holler from somewhere way back. Maybe he saw us leave, or maybe he only realized after a while that we were gone. Either way, now he plays catch up, and shouts about it as he goes.
“I’m your alibi and bail bondsman,” Rob says quietly. “Luke is your crazy. And your brother is the rest of whatever it is a rounded chick needs in her life.”
“So I’m all set, then?” I shake my head and massage away a strange ache in my chest. “I don’t need any more friends, and I definitely shouldn’t search for love?”
“Right,” he breathes out. “Because I love you.”
And then that ache both grows and dissipates. It’s a swelling throb, an infection deep in my blood that is yet to be diagnosed. “I love you too, Fart.”
“Forever, EmKat. I’m all the man you’ll ever need.”
Rob
Long Days, Short Years
I lay in bed – still on the top bunk, still with EmKat’s evolving art staring back down at me, but now I’m twenty-one, and someone has given each of us a license to drink and drive. Not both at the same time, of course. But we’re allowed to use heavy machinery in public, and when we’re not doing that, we can drink.
And hell, Mom doesn’t even try to ground me anymore when I stumble in and collapse into bed.
However, no matter how much things change, some things remain the same. Like this bedroom, and my brother laid out on the bottom bunk, his dirty chuckle sounding in my ear while he sexts with some chick I’ll likely never meet.
There are packing boxes littering our room, since it’s not all that cool to be living at home at our age, and we’ve secured an apartment not so far from Main Street that we’re moving into tomorrow… But while that change plays out around us, the artwork I stare at now remains the same.
Different, of course, since, ten years ago, that art wasn’t nearly as amazing as it is now. But the artist remains the same, the signature, and the style in which she draws. I could pick an EmKat out of a stack of a thousand similar drawings. Without hesitation, without a single shred of doubt, I could find her in that pile within seconds.
Another thing that remains unchanged… us. Me and my best friend. And though we’re adults now, she still taps at my bedroom window every single night.
I turn at the gentle sound on the glass, and smile when I catch sight of Emma’s beautiful face in the dark. She wears a little more makeup now than she used to. Nothing crazy, and nothing that would reveal another person if you tossed a bucket of water at her face. But she does this stuff with her eyes, this dark smudging, that makes the blue practically glow.
Luke doesn’t move from his bed. He hears her, just like I do. But after two decades of this, a tap at the window is neither exciting, nor taboo, so I swing my legs over the side of my bed, and drop down onto the floor with barely more than a whisper of a thud. I’m a man now, older, trained in my family’s gym. I’m a contender at Stacked Deck’s tournament, I’m a trainer for other fighters, and considering I spend at least six full days a week working out, I look the way I always hoped I would.
I’ve seen pictures of my father when he was my age. He was big, strong, broad, and badass, and all through my gangly teen years, I was hoping for the same.
Now I’m here, weighing in at a boastful two hundred and sixty-two pounds – thank you, heavyweight genetics! – and moving across my bedroom, I stop at the window and slide the glass pane up.
EmKat’s grin is wide and flirtatious, her hair sex-wild and blowing free in the breeze outside. She climbs through my window without asking, drops onto the carpet in boots that are sexy as fuck, but badass at the same time. They’re chunky, heavy, and prepared to kick a motherfucker’s face in. And stretching along her long legs are skin-tight jeans that show off a hell-of-a-lot of the shape and size of her ass.
Thank you, beautiful woman genetics.
She doesn’t even feign to be quiet these days. Every single person on this estate knows she sneaks into my bedroom window, so long-gone are the days of whispering and tiptoeing. Now she lopes on in, stomps with her face-kicking boots, and swings her hair around like she knows she controls this place.
And really, she does. So why not own it?
Grinning, she places her hands on my pecs, and stands up on her toes to press a kiss to my cheek. Lowering again, she heads to my bed and does what she always does: she glances up and studies her work.
The only difference now is that she’s wearing fuck-me clothes, and the top she wears, split down the back, shows off a full piece of ink that covers her from the top of her spine, right down to the snake-eyed dimples that pop above her ass.
She favors drawing faces for her own creative outlet, but the art she puts on her body tends toward Japanese garden – flowers and trees, origami, and love notes. She has barely any room left on her back to add more, and I guess she isn’t afraid of what her parents might say about it, considering between them, the money they’ve spent on tattoos could fund a third-world country.
She steps onto her toes and tilts her head to study the newest addition to my ceiling collage. It’s almost like she’s planning, plotting, deciding what to add next. And when Luke reaches out and tickles her thigh – an action that, from any other man, I would kill for – I only sit back on the sill and smile. Then, when Em thinks she’s got a free shot, she brings her boot up and jams it into his ribs as punishment for touching.
The problem is, they’ve been doing this all their lives, and Luke is getting sneakier about his taunting. He grabs her foot now, and before she can pull back, he yanks her into his bed with a howling laugh, and when she topples down into his little spoon, he swings his leg over hers, hooks her, and presses a noisy kiss to her cheek. “You look pretty, Kincaid. Got a date?”
“You smell like fart,” she counters with a scrunched nose. “You need to use the shower?”
“Nope. This is a man’s bedroom. Men fart. It’s just the way it is.”
“You’re gross.”
“And you’re deflecting. You got a date tonight?”
My heart speeds up. Races. Though on the outside, no one would know.
“No.” EmKat laughs when Luke’s hook yanks her legs apart. He’s not hurting her, nor is he exposing her the way it sounds. Mostly, he’s rendering her useless in a fight, and he knows if she wants out, she’ll say so… with an elbow to his stomach. “But I’m here to steal Fart away. He and I have someplace to be.” She stretches her neck to catch my eyes.
Tell me, why the fuck does my gaze go to her neck, to the delicate, white skin covering blue veins, to the length of her neck, and the zones where, I’m certain, if only I put my lips there, I’d find it warm and sweet?
Why, Robert? Why!?
Fuck.
“Where are we going?” I sit on the sill in a way that means I can cover my cock and no one has to know I’m rocking something for my best friend. My platonic best friend. “I was getting ready to crash. Big day tomorrow.”
“Psht.” She slams her elbow into Luke’s gut – told ya – escapes his clutches, and rolling off his bed, she saunters her way to the tiny mirror hanging above our drawers. She fixes the hair he messed up, and grins at what she sees. “You’re not going to bed. Because I’m going out, and you can’t stand to see me go without you. You hate missing out.”
“No.” I roll my eyes, and while she’s distracted with her reflection in the mirror, I dart to the closet and grab out a pair of jeans. I push my sweatpants down to reveal boxer shorts, kick the pants aside, and step into my jeans.
I turn to Luke, expecting him to notice my protruding… uh… problem, but his eyes are glued to Em’s ass. It’s not a leering stare, but rather, a ‘She grew the fuck up without me noticing’ kinda look.
Or maybe that’s me projecting my own troubles.
“It’s not that I’m afraid of missing out.” I continue to change, switching out my shirt for something clean. “I’m genuinely concerned that you won’t survive your own bad choices.”
“And so you have to follow me.” She meets my eyes in the mirror and smirks. “You’d feel terrible if I died and you could have stopped it.”
“Basically my every fucking nightmare.” I snatch a pair of socks from a pile of clean laundry on the floor. “Where are we going?”
“It’s a secret.”
She turns away from the mirror and pauses when I stand again. Her eyes flicker across my chest, and over the ink on my arms – no way did I let her have her adventure without me following along – and when I say nothing, when I remain perfectly still, something in my stomach swells when her tongue comes out to wet her bottom lip.
She stares the same way she stares at her drawings, and that knowledge fucks with my head.
“Em?”
“Um…” Her eyes flicker up to mine. “You work on your chest today?”
“Er…” I look across to Luke, but he’s on the phone with whoever he was sexting before. Smiling and turned toward the wall, he’s somehow able to ignore the woman whose ass he was staring at a minute ago, the same woman he had in his arms, on his bed…
My every fucking dream lately.
“I work on my chest most days,” I admit, but omit the bit about how I think about her when I do it. And the bit about how I then go to the locker rooms to shower off, and if my mind is still circling around her…
Nope. I don’t tell her that.
“You look good.” She steps forward, reaches over, and gently fingers the sleeve of my shirt up to reveal the new ink on the ball of my shoulder. She knows every single line and dot, considering she was the one who put it there. “Kinda think you’re going through a growth spurt, huh?”
“Well,” chuckling, I bend to tug my socks on, and then, reaching for my sneakers, I skip over untying the laces, and just jam my feet in. “I don’t know that I’m gonna have any more growth spurts, considering I’m not fucking twelve anymore. But thanks for noticing. I worked extra hard today.”
“You gonna be too sore to move your stuff to the apartment tomorrow?”
“Maybe.” I lower my gaze, peek up through my lashes, and smirk. “Pretty sure I’m gonna be way too sore, so we’ll need your help.”
She snorts and turns away to head back to the window. “I have a client until about noon, but after that, I’ll head over.”
“Promise?”
“Of course.” She pushes the window up and swings a foot outside so that I get a view that, while completely appropriate, feels insanely inappropriate considering my dreams about that very place on her body lately.
I’m a pig, I’m whacked in the head, but I can’t help the direction my thoughts run while I’m unconscious. When I’m awake, my thoughts are purely platonic and normal – well, except when they’re not. But when I’m asleep, it’s out of my control, and makes it so I touch my cock in those dark hours when I wake from dreams that would make us both blush if I told her.
I have to touch. I have to finish what was started. Because if I don’t, I think I might legitimately lose my mind.
“You coming?”
Em’s voice steals my attention away from her legs – Yeah, sure, Rob. Her legs, nice cover – and up to her blazing eyes. “Huh?”
“I asked if you were coming?” She swings her second leg over the windowsill and onto the roof of my childhood home, presenting me with the artwork that is her entire back.
I’m forced to swallow down what is really spinning out of control in my mind. “Yeah. No. Um…” I shake it off, shake her off, and rush over to the window. “Yeah, I’m coming. Luke, tell Mom and Dad I went out with EmKat.”
“Yep.” He waves me off without glancing away from his phone. “Go away. I need this room to myself for the next hour, at least.”
“So gross.” Emma, high on life, throws her head back and cackles, then she steps onto the roof, and heads toward o
ur tree, full of confidence. She won’t fall. She never has before.
I hurry out; my usual thing. Always hurrying behind, always scrambling to catch up. Beating her to the tree by a hair, I step across the gap first, test the branch for weaknesses, and when I find none, I slow my movements, reach a hand out, and grin when Em’s cheeks warm. She wraps her fingers in mine, steps across, but I don’t move, when I usually do. I normally step, so that she can have that space.
But, fuck, everything feels like it’s changing.
I remain in place, absorb the way she steps into my space and her chest slams to mine, but she doesn’t freak out. She doesn’t panic or jump back. She merely grunts from the impact, wraps her free arm around my torso, then she glances up to meet my gaze, and provides me with breath that tastes of the sweetest candies. Her lashes are long, perhaps too long to be all real, but they frame her sparkling blue in a way that beguiles me. And her ability to be wild and roll with the punches means that she doesn’t shy away when I stand firm and hold her close.
We remain hidden in our tree. Camouflaged by the leaves, out of view of Luke and the window, and too high up for anyone on the ground to see us. Cicadas chirp in the forest surrounding our estate, the moon shines from high above. And right in this moment, in this time where everything seems to stop, but move at the same time, when our hearts pound together, the bugs scream, but time seems to stand still, my eyes drop to her lips, and they stay.
Normally I would glance away, break that contact, and act like my hormones don’t control my every action. But right this second, I hold on to how it feels to be this close, how nice EmKat feels pressed against me, her thighs aligned with mine, and her chest pressed to me. Her breath is my oxygen, and she ain’t screaming about how this is weird. She’s not bellowing about moving the fuck out of her way.
“You, uh…” She swallows, making her throat bob and move. “Needed a hug, huh?”
