by Cara Malone
“You’re right, I shouldn’t have. I just got caught up in the moment, and if we’re being honest I got a little tipsy and forgot myself,” Ruby said. She grabbed Max’s hand and pulled her upright, frustrated and determined to be heard. “Look at me, please.”
Max looked at Ruby, but it was with a reluctance that Ruby wasn’t used to seeing there.
“I don’t know what my dad said to you just now, but whatever it was, I’m sure he said it with the best intentions,” Ruby said. “I love you, Max. I don’t care about Megan.”
All of her anger had melted away, along with most of the alcohol in her system, and Ruby was left with a profound feeling of guilt for her reaction to Max’s disappearance. She’d been selfish, and she wanted to make it up to Max. Although the whiskey sours had run their course, she was still feeling a little more bold than usual and she shoved Max onto her back, pinning her on top of the pile of towels and blankets.
She kissed Max, then added, “She doesn’t hold a candle to you. Max, you’re pretty fucking incredible.”
Then her mouth traveled over Max’s jaw and down to the collar of her borrowed blouse. She had to get that ridiculous thing off Max – maybe if she felt like herself again, she’d be comfortable enough to go back downstairs… eventually. As the party thrummed beneath them, Ruby started unbuttoning her blouse.
CHAPTER 10
Max felt Ruby’s hips moving against her and she immediately felt better than she had all week, putting her hands around them and guiding Ruby’s movements. She wondered how long it would be before Ruby caught herself and pulled away again – she’d been so jumpy since they’d arrived in Chicago and it was a pleasant surprise to find her changing her tune, if only temporarily.
Feeling Ruby moving on top of her, sliding her hands down her chest as she undid the buttons of Max’s shirt and squeezing her thighs against Max’s hips, was something she had been dying for all week. However inadequate she felt in other areas of her life – socializing, winning over Ruby’s parents, vanquishing her rivals – she knew that she could always give Ruby this one thing and do it well.
Max flipped Ruby over so that now she was the one on her back and Max was straddling her. She ran her hands over Ruby’s breasts above the silky fabric of her dress, and then she inched backward off the bed and came to her knees on the floor beside it, pulling Ruby’s legs with her so that they rested on Max’s shoulders. She slid one hand under the hem of Ruby’s dress, running a finger softly over her most sensitive area.
Circling the pad of her finger around and around Ruby’s clit on top of her panties, she could hear Ruby’s breathing intensify and her thighs beginning to quiver on either side of Max’s head. It had been so long since they’d had a true, unguarded moment together, she was already close to orgasm and Max had barely touched her.
The fabric between her legs was growing damp and Max flipped up Ruby’s skirt so she could bring her mouth down to Ruby’s thighs, teasing her by licking and sucking and nibbling her skin all around her but carefully avoiding the spot that needed her attention the most. Max just kept stroking her finger in slow, lazy circles over her – enough to drive her wild but not quite get her there.
Ruby arched her back, then pulled one of the towels over her face to mute any involuntary sounds she might make. Max liked that, and she liked the way Ruby’s thighs were tensing and squeezing against the sides of her head.
She peeled away Ruby’s panties, the delicious smell of her making Max’s own body throb with desire, and then she brought her mouth down to her. Ruby immediately threaded her free hand through Max’s hair, her other hand holding the towel firmly against her mouth as a muffled moan filtered through it. This was where they were at their best, and Max wanted to give her an orgasm to remember, a memory that would keep her company through the long summer.
She licked and sucked at her, fingers sliding into her wetness as she shoved her other hand down the front of her own pants and kept in rhythm with her tongue. She could feel Ruby’s muscles contracting around her hand and her body shivering beneath her. She was raising her hips to meet Max’s tongue, riding out a rhythm of her own as her body took over the motions instinctively.
Max moved quicker, thrusting and licking and stroking herself until her breath took on a furious, staccato quality. Her orgasm bloomed beneath her fingertips, wonderful heat spreading out from her core as her muscles convulsed and it was all she could do to stay on her knees and keep her mouth on Ruby’s wetness.
She didn’t have to maintain that posture for long, though. Ruby joined her moments later, screaming mutely into the towel as her thighs shook and her hips bucked. All she could do was throw her head back and ride it out, Max still pumping her fingers inside her and bringing her to greater and greater pleasure.
Then Ruby melted back into the blankets and towels as all of the tension drained out of her muscles, and Max fell back on her heels on the floor, breathing hard. She turned to lean against the mattress and catch her breath, then turned her head to kiss Ruby’s thigh.
“Wow,” Ruby said behind her. “That was great.”
“Yeah.”
Ruby was still running her hands through Max’s hair, crossing her ankles in front of Max’s chest in a way that made her feel secure and protected. After a minute or so, Ruby asked quietly, “Do you think we could go back downstairs for a little while? I bet people are wondering what happened to us.”
Max sighed, then picked up Ruby’s panties from the floor and handed them back to her. She hoped they could enjoy this moment for a little while longer, but she supposed Ruby had a point. They would all guess what they’d been doing in no time flat, thus defeating all of the effort Ruby had put into the appearance of chastity earlier this week.
She stood up and straightened her clothes, cleaning her hands on one of the towels and finding the blouse where Ruby had tossed it on the bed. Ruby got up and stepped into her panties, and Max watched as she brushed the wrinkles out of her dress.
Suddenly, she was feeling anxious all over again with a new idea floating through her head. She didn’t want to go back downstairs just yet.
“Can I ask you a question?” she asked.
“Sure,” Ruby said, but she wasn’t paying particular attention to Max.
Her heart was pounding and she had to resist the urge to ball her hands into fists and pace the floor. She’d failed to ask Lamar’s permission – Max was pretty certain that the ship had sailed on that possibility – but this was the best moment she and Ruby had shared all week and it felt like the only time to accomplish her second objective for the week.
Ruby was preoccupied with the state of her clothes, and whether the flush of her cheeks would give away their actions. She went over to the mirror hanging above the dresser while Max went to her duffel bag on the floor and started digging into the bottom of it, looking for the ring box.
“What’s your question?” Ruby asked, still fixing her hair in the mirror. It was an anti-climactic moment, but Max never intended to make a big production of it. As long as she was here, and Ruby was, and she had the ring, that was all the necessary components.
Ruby turned around and Max took a knee in front of her.
“What are you doing?” Ruby asked, her eyes growing wide.
Max turned the ring box over and over nervously in her palm and asked, “Will you marry me?”
Ruby opened her mouth, but no words came out. Some people were speechless after a proposal, but Max didn’t think their expressions looked quite like that. Ruby said, “You’re joking, right?”
“No,” Max said.
“Get up,” Ruby said, pulling Max to her feet.
“I have a ring,” Max said, fumbling to open the box.
“Stop-”
“I wanted to ask your father’s permission but I couldn’t get up the nerve,” Max rambled. “I’ll try again if you want me to, though-”
“Max,” Ruby said sharply enough to stop Max mid-sentence. She put her hand ov
er the box to keep Max from showing her the ring. “We’ve never even talked about this before.”
Ruby’s utter lack of excitement mirrored the way that Mira acted when Max took her to pick up the ring. It felt like a cold blade in her chest. Did Ruby think they were in a honeymoon period too? Was she just waiting for them to start growing apart? Had they already started?
“I just love you so much,” Max said weakly. Even though she’d failed to plan what she would say to Lamar, she’d thought about this moment extensively and it was happening all wrong. “I want us to be together forever, so I bought you this ring.”
Ruby closed her hand tighter around Max’s on top of the ring box, then closed her eyes and said, “Max, it feels so sudden. Why now?”
“I’m going to be leaving in two days,” Max said. “I wanted you to have the ring.”
Ruby opened her eyes and there were tears in them. She took the jewelry box out of Max’s hand but didn’t open it, saying, “I don’t want you to think you have to do this just because we’re going to be apart over the summer.”
“So your answer…”
“I’m sorry, babe,” Ruby said, going over to Max’s bag on the floor and tucking the ring box carefully inside it. Then she came back and put her hands in Max’s. “It just doesn’t feel right in this moment.”
Max felt like her heart was splintering in her chest, and all she wanted was to be alone to wallow in Ruby’s brutal rejection. No part of her proposal had gone according to plan, but she never imagined the answer would be no.
“Why don’t you go back down to the party?”
“No, we should talk-” Ruby started to say. The pitying expression she was giving Max was just too much. It made her stomach hurt.
“You were right,” Max cut her off. “People are probably wondering where you went.”
“Are you going to come back downstairs?”
“I don’t think so,” Max said, letting her hands slip out of Ruby’s. “I want to be alone for a while.”
“I feel awful leaving you up here by yourself,” Ruby said.
“I want you to,” Max said, thinking she might cry if Ruby stayed any longer. She walked over to the window for lack of a better destination, turning her back to Ruby and waiting for her to leave.
“Okay,” Ruby answered reluctantly, and then Max heard the door closing and she was alone.
She listened to Ruby walking away down the hall, and then faintly, the creak of the stairs. Max could hear music beyond her window, and the drone of happy conversations taking place outside. She went over to her bag and picked up the ring box, opening it and examining the sparkle of the diamond against the light from the night table lamp.
A quiver of tears threatened in the back of her throat, and then she bent over and stuffed the ring box back into the bottom of her bag. Max couldn’t imagine waking up tomorrow morning and going downstairs to have breakfast with the Satterwhites like she had every other day this week. She didn’t know what kind of crowded tourist attraction Ruby would want to drag her to, or whether they’d be obligated to have a long and painful talk about Max’s rejected proposal. She wanted to get out of Chicago, a city about which she had absolutely nothing nice to say.
***
It was very early the next morning when Max went into Ruby’s room with her bag slung over her shoulder. The sun hadn’t risen yet and she’d hardly slept at all, but she had called the Greyhound station around midnight to change her departure time. Another day in Chicago seemed unendurable, and she didn’t want to know what Ruby was thinking in the wake of the proposal.
Not to mention the fact that she couldn’t possibly face Lorna and Lamar if it turned out that Ruby told them all about her failed proposition. Their relationship had sustained a critical hit.
She didn’t want to leave the city without one last look at Ruby, though. Max crept over to Ruby’s bedside table with a quick, factual note in her hand telling her that she’d gone back to Granville. She intended to go outside and wait by the road for a taxi to the bus terminal, but she wanted just one last chance to commit Ruby to memory.
As Max leaned over to set down the note, though, she stepped on a squeaky floorboard that made just enough noise to rouse Ruby from sleep. “Max?”
“Go back to bed,” Max said. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“Is that your luggage?” Ruby asked, wiping the sleep from her eyes. She sat up, wincing. “Where are you going?”
She had bags under her eyes and she looked a little green around the gills, but she was still the most beautiful girl Max had ever seen. Her heart splintered in her chest again just looking at her.
“Home,” Max said, stuffing the note into her pocket now that it had been made redundant. “I feel like an asshole and I don’t want to be here anymore.”
“Please stay,” Ruby said, putting one hand to her temple and looking like she wanted to be sick. With her other hand, she grabbed Max’s wrist and pulled her down to sit on the edge of the bed. “We need to talk about last night.”
“I really don’t want to do that,” Max said, standing up and pulling her hand away. “I’m going to call a cab to take me to the bus depot. I just wanted to tell you I’m leaving.”
“Max,” Ruby started to object, but Max was already heading toward the door. Those tears were threatening again, and she didn’t want to stand there and cry in the dark. She was almost to the hall when Ruby called, “Wait. I’ll drive you.”
Max paused in the doorway while Ruby climbed out of bed, once again squeezing her eyes shut and putting her hand out to steady herself, and then she went to her dresser to throw on a pair of jeans along with her pajama shirt.
“You don’t have to,” Max said. Ruby clearly looked on the verge of sickness, and she must have drunk quite a bit when she got back down to the party last night. “Stay in bed.”
“No,” Ruby said. “If I can’t convince you to stay, then at least let me drive you to the bus station.”
Max grudgingly accepted this compromise. She couldn’t turn down one last chance to be with Ruby before the summer separated them, especially when their future felt so uncertain. How many couples survived a rejected proposal, followed immediately by three months of separation? Max didn’t know, but she figured the odds would be bad.
They went downstairs and Ruby made a quick pit stop in the kitchen to grab a bottle of water, and then they climbed into her Fusion, Max clutching her bag to her chest protectively. Ruby seemed to spend most of the drive attempting not to be sick, sipping constantly from her water bottle and squinting at the road from beneath a pair of dark sunglasses, and Max remained silent as they drove out of the opulent suburbs and to the grungy edge of the city.
It wasn’t until Ruby pulled up at the drop-off lane of the bus terminal, the smell of diesel wafting through the air, that she turned to Max and asked, “Are you sure you won’t stay another day?”
“I probably shouldn’t have stayed as long as I did,” Max said, and then almost as an afterthought, she added, “I’ve never been gone for the first week of summer before and my dad always has a lot of work planting annuals around the city at that time.”
“Oh, okay,” Ruby said. She looked sorry, or maybe just sick, but it didn’t compare to how Max felt. As Max opened her door and the car began dinging at her, Ruby said, “I love you.”
Max paused, unable to look at her, and said it back. Then before Ruby could say another word, she got out of the car, shut the door quickly, and started walking across the asphalt toward the ticket counter. In her peripheral vision she could see that the Fusion didn’t move the whole time she was talking to the woman at the counter, trying to figure out which bus would take her to Granville. It wasn’t until Max had shouldered her bag and was heading toward a line of Greyhounds in the parking lot that she heard someone honking and Ruby finally started her car and drove away. Max didn’t have the heart to turn and see whether Ruby waved on her way out of the drop-off lane.
Max fo
und her bus, climbing aboard with at least fifteen minutes to spare before departure time. She was the only one there besides the driver and she knew she’d have seven hours to think about last night’s events over and over again. She wondered if Ruby told Megan what happened when she went back down to the party, and she also didn’t want to know the answer.
She dug her phone out of her bag and dialed her parents. It was early, but they would be up by now. Her father liked to start working before the heat of the day made everything harder, and her mother never failed to get up and cook him a hearty breakfast.
Her mom answered and Max asked, “Can you pick me up around three?”
“Tomorrow?”
“No, today.”
“Why, what’s wrong?”
“Can you pick me up around three?” Max repeated her question. She hadn’t even begun to articulate what was wrong, and she couldn’t imagine describing the problem over the phone. She hadn’t told her parents about the ring, or her plan – after Mira’s unenthusiastic reaction, she’d gotten spooked, and now she was glad that she hadn’t broadcast it all ahead of time. At least that would make it a little easier to go home with her head hung low.
“Whatever you need, honey,” her mother answered, and Max hung up, sliding the phone back into her pocket and letting her head thump against the seat. She closed her eyes and tried not to think about anything. It was going to be a long summer after all.
CHAPTER 11
Ruby went home and spent the rest of the morning laying on a lounge chair on the patio, feeling sick for a variety of reasons and listening to Jade and Celeste splashing around in the pool. Four years younger than Ruby, they were both obnoxiously immune to the after-effects of alcohol, and she couldn’t help but think the way she felt was penance for how badly last night had gone. She shouldn’t have come back to the party after Max’s proposal, and she shouldn’t have let Max go home without talking it over.
