by Piper Lennox
I thought a moment. “What do you love to do, more than anything, when you’re not at work?”
Arrow wandered from my now-empty hand over to Camille, pushing his nose into her palm to lick up the bone shards.
She laughed. “Hang out with my dog. All dogs, really.”
“There you go. I mean, you walk dogs as one of your jobs. It’s not a career, but it’s a passion in its own way.”
Camille’s smile grew serious; her brow creased. She watched Arrow’s tongue press against her fingers. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s a good point.”
I brushed my hands off as I stood and, taking her many cues that it was time for me to leave, headed for the door. “Thank you,” I told her again. “This was a fantastic date. Even the coffee-on-the-crotch thing wasn’t so bad.”
“Thank you for the career advice. I feel weirdly better about dropping out of college.”
“Glad to help.” I kissed her goodbye twice. First a quick one, to gauge if something longer would be out of line. Since she shut her eyes and leaned into me, I made the second kiss deeper, pressing her back against the door she’d shut to keep Arrow inside. I braced my hand by her head and let the other linger near her hipbone.
My leg found the space between hers. It was the lightest pressure, my thigh hovering near her sex, all that fabric between us—but I could tell it left her wanting so much more.
So did I. I could have let every ounce of the feeling take over. I could have grabbed Camille by the hips and pulled her against me—taken her back up to her bedroom, locked the door, and been her first. If she would have let me, that is.
But I knew she wouldn’t. Not yet.
And even I knew it was too soon. Sure: in that one second, the weird connection between us finally clicked. It suddenly wasn’t strange that we’d shared so much in so little time. It wasn’t strange that it felt like we’d known each other two decades, instead of two days.
It was still too early, though, especially knowing what I knew now. When she was ready for something more, she’d tell me.
“Goodnight, Camille,” I whispered, when I pulled away from her.
She looked up at me from behind her hair. She wasn’t smiling: the look on her face was almost fear, maybe just shock, but mostly desire. Just what I’d been going for.
“Goodnight, Silas.” She waited until I was halfway down the walkway before shutting her door. The farther it closed, the more I saw her smile.
I drove back to my motel, dazed with a head full of color. Fake grass from the dog park. That pink daisy wallpaper in her bedroom. The crimson in her face when I kissed her.
My body felt imprinted by hers, like she’d molded herself to me; the warmth on my thigh when I pressed it between her legs lingered until I was alone, nothing but the darkness and a locked door, nothing but my own thoughts.
I undressed and got into bed. Every stroke sent those colors melting through the shadows of the room. My breathing was so much louder than usual, like I couldn’t catch it—like I couldn’t help myself. It really felt like I couldn’t.
My speed picked up. Every muscle tightened.
Be my first, I imagined her saying.
I came hard, violent but slow, lightning spreading through every limb until it was over.
I lay there panting. Counting my heartbeats. Willing at least one cell to resume its regular function, before the colors flashed back, every memory, and I would have no choice but to do it all over again, just to try and get her out of my head long enough to fall asleep.
For a second, I let myself believe she was thinking of me in this same way, right then. Maybe she shut the door when I left and paced around her house in the same fog in which I’d driven home. Maybe she had her own list of colors and memories from today, tunneling through her mind.
She might have gone to her bedroom, locked the door, and gotten under her covers to sleep—determined to forget me.
Maybe she couldn’t. Maybe it was uncontrollable for her, too, and the burn and ache in her sex grew stronger, until she just had to touch herself, pretending her fingers were mine.
I sat straight up and wiped myself clean with my shirt. I couldn’t get caught in the loop just yet, amazing as the fantasies were. I had a letter to write.
It might have done me more good to just lie there touching myself over Camille all night, though: after two hours, I had nothing written. Pacing the room and coming back, over and over, to that blank sheet of paper was like playing peekaboo with the barrel of a gun.
“Like this,” I remembered Camille saying. “Admit you feel so much, you don’t even know where the letter’s going to end up. Then...see where it goes on its own.”
I wrote “Dear Dad,” with my pencil. Erased it.
“Dear Tim.” Erase.
Forget the opening. Just start.
My first sentence was exactly what Camille recommended. “I’m not sure where this letter will go. I don’t even know what I feel, exactly. I just know it has to get out.”
I finished in twenty minutes.
It was a mess, to say the least. Cross-outs, run-on sentences, more cursing than I liked to put in personal letters—but it was real. What I held in my hands when the letter finished itself was two full pages of raw truth, all the things I’d never told him. A lot of it was stuff I’d never admitted to myself, either.
By the time I went to sleep, I was too drained to keep fantasizing about Camille.
I did think about her, though. And when I finally fell asleep, that’s what I dreamed: Camille’s hand overtop mine, helping me carve out this letter into pink daisy paper, one character at a time.
* * *
Graham looks at the letter in my hand now and shifts his jaw. “You sure you want to give that to him today?”
“When would you recommend doing it?”
“Never.” He chuckles as we approach the door to the conference room. “In my experience, most people don’t change. If they do, they do it way before it gets to the courtroom.”
“We aren’t in the courtroom,” I remind him, and edge past him politely so I can open the next door myself. I feel his stare against my back all the way into the meeting.
10
Virginity isn’t something I think about much.
I guess that’s obvious: if I gave it much thought, I probably wouldn’t still have it. It would have bothered me at some point, wondering what I was missing.
But until last night, I thought I knew. And the answer always was, not much.
Brynn lost hers at fifteen, to a senior she met at a pool party. They did it in the equipment shed on a deck chair, doggy-style. It sounded awful.
“Don’t call it ‘losing’ virginity, first of all,” she’d grimaced, when she relayed the story and I couldn’t hide what I really thought. “I chose to sleep with Jackson. I gave him my virginity, okay? And who even came up with that idea? How can you have something by not doing something else?”
I saw her point, and it was actually a good one overall—but it still sounded like a terrible first time. It was hard enough just turning over on deck chairs for an even tan. Who’d want to have sex on one?
My first time would be something amazing. Where or when, I wasn’t sure, but I knew I didn’t want almost any of the stories Brynn shared.
What was I missing? According to Brynn’s anecdotes: late periods, full-blown panic, broken condoms and condom allergies and, once, a condom slipping off and getting stuck. She had to go to the emergency room; while they removed it, I held her hand and closed my eyes so tight I saw spots. The nurse assured her this happened more than we thought.
I was missing sore mornings and walks of shame. Boys making and breaking promises so fast, it was easier for Brynn to just doubt them all, and instead be pleasantly surprised at the ones who did call the next day, the ones who didn’t kick her out before breakfast or call a cab while she was in the shower.
Brynn said I was missing a lot more than the bad stuff, but I couldn’t fathom
what. A few minutes of feeling good? There was nothing a boy could do to me I couldn’t do to myself. In fact, judging by most of her accounts of the men she slept with, I could do those things far better and save myself the heartache.
Last night, I started to see what she meant.
After Silas left, I shut the door and turned like I was underwater. Everything moved slower. Even Arrow, now abandoning his bone remnants to burrow back into the couch, seemed to hobble along at half his usual pace.
I made it to my bedroom and leaned against the door until it clicked shut. My hand turned the lock.
My other hand roamed between my legs and pressed. No friction yet, just pressure; I closed my eyes and pretended it was still Silas’s leg there, one confident motion of seduction I never knew could hold so much power.
He had kissed me with this fierceness like he knew, sooner or later, he would get to be my first.
And the worst part was, I couldn’t think of a single reason to doubt it.
Every piece of information I knew about him collided, a collage spinning past my eyes the harder I touched myself. I slipped my hand past my waistband and panties.
I pictured that smirk.
My fingers dipped inside.
It was too easy to imagine the kind of lover Silas would be. Gentle, at first, but unbound and doting as soon as he got the response he wanted.
I once heard that the difference between fucking and lovemaking has nothing to do with how rough or wild it is—it’s about whether or not the man makes his woman feel loved. He can fuck you senseless, whether it’s in a bed or on a deck chair, or he can take you down slowly and beautifully. All that matters is how you feel afterward. If he leaves you feeling ravished and exalted—you’ve made love.
That was my standard. Whenever Brynn asked what the hell I was waiting for, that’s what I thought of.
And for the first time ever, I felt like I could get it.
My fingers worked inside my sex non-stop, drumming a rhythm so strong, I forgot it was me doing this. I imagined Silas right here, in front of me on my bedroom floor, working me to a height so much greater than anything I could do myself.
That was what she meant. It was different when someone else did those things to you. And if it was this good in my imagination....
The heel of my palm pressed against my clitoris. I slid to the floor and wondered, as I touched myself and pretended it was him, if he was going to touch himself that night and pretend it was me.
I pictured him in a nondescript motel bed, whispering my name when he finished.
My orgasm mounted and crashed across me. It took me at least five minutes to open my eyes. And when I did, the reality of what I saw didn’t match the fantasy still assembling itself inside my head: Silas Fairfield, the boy I’d tried to keep out of my life, fitting himself into me and wracking my body with pleasure. Whispering my name. Showing me everything I’d missed.
11
He doesn’t look at me until I hold out my hand.
That’s the first thing I notice: that no matter how intensely I stare at him as Graham and I enter the room, even when his lawyers stand to greet us and he does the same, not once does the man look at me. It’s only when my hand appears over the papers in front of him that he looks up.
I don’t blink. I don’t say hello.
His hand shakes mine. Just once, strong but short, before he does the same to Graham. We all sit.
He’s back to staring at the papers, then the water pitcher and cups between us, so I put the letter back into my pocket. Maybe Graham was right.
“...concessions, of course, to make this possible. Silas?”
My head snaps up from the pitcher. I didn’t even realize I was staring at it too, until now. “Concessions,” I repeat, nodding. “Sure.”
“Silas and I have discussed what he’s willing to do, in light of the current offer. And yes, he’s prepared to drop the lawsuit.”
“Offer?” I look at Tim again. He stares at Graham instead. “Wait a second. Is that really all it is to you? A counter, or a settlement?”
Tim doesn’t answer—but to be fair, the guy I assume is his head lawyer, if such a thing exists, chimes in before he can. “Not in those terms, specifically, but as I said: certain concessions—”
I ignore him, leaning forward until Tim at least looks at the shadow I cast across the table, if not me. “Hypothetically,” I challenge, “let’s say I don’t drop the suit. What happens then?”
“You know as well as we do this case would be dismissed in court,” the lawyer snaps. “Tim’s offer is incredibly generous, considering you don’t have a leg to stand on.”
One of the other lawyers reprimands him, while Graham’s hand materializes on my shoulder. I shrug it off, hard.
“Silas,” he mutters, “remember what I said. We’re here for one reason: to try and resolve this in a way everyone’s happy about.”
“You know what would make me happy?” I ask, but direct my voice at Tim. “If he’d at least have the fucking guts to look me in the eye while he tries to buy his way out of this.”
His eyes snap to mine instantly.
“If you don’t drop it,” he says, “I would still add you to the will. No matter how things turned out in the courtroom.”
The silence is thicker than before, electric. Everyone else is probably in shock at his words themselves, while I’m sitting here in shock at his voice. It’s lower than the television interviews I watched, in secret at the public library as a kid. Raspier, too, but fuller, like the difference between a record and digital sound.
“Tim,” one of his lawyers hisses, most likely because he just blew their leverage right out the window. If I was into being petty, I’d keep the suit going just so I could waste their time in court.
I sit back in my seat and nod at him. “Okay, then. I’ll drop it.”
A cloud of rustling goes up as the lawyers adjust their files and notes, while Tim and I study each other in silence.
He looks better than when I saw him in the hotel, but barely. Sober, pressed suit—but that drained look in his eyes is still there.
They hand us contracts, a non-disclosure for me when I hear the contents of the will. Someone reads me the highlights and I watch the pitcher sweat the entire time, not really listening. I sign everywhere Graham points. Tim does the same. We all stand and shake again.
“Wait,” Tim says, when everyone starts filing out. I didn’t realize I was following Graham until he tells me to stop.
“I want you to know,” he starts, glancing at everyone else before the sentence trails.
I turn back. “Yeah?”
He straightens his tie, his shoulders. This is the Tim Fairfield I know, even if it’s just from photo ops on the news.
“It wasn’t like I didn’t want to be in your life,” he says.
Behind me, his lawyers shuffle through the door. Graham stays, but checks his watch and pretends he isn’t listening. I narrow my eyes. “What?”
“It was your mother.” Tim pushes in his chair and braces his hands on the back of it. “She wouldn’t let me see you anymore.”
I step closer, but not around the table. I make sure to keep that between us. “If you want me to have any semblance of respect for you,” I seethe, “you’ll stop blaming anyone but yourself. You don’t have to apologize for what you did—I’m sure your ego wouldn’t allow it—but at least own your actions.”
“I do own them.” He pushes his chair in the rest of the way, rattling the pitcher and cups. “But I’m not about to take blame for things I didn’t do. It wasn’t my choice to stop talking to you or visiting, Silas. It was your mother’s. Ask her.”
“I don’t need to ask her.” My voice rises, but instead of filling the room, it feels like it’s in a vacuum. “Why would she lie? At the very least, you think she wouldn’t have wanted child support from you? You think she liked living off food stamps and leaving me home alone while she worked doubles every night?”
> “I was paying child support,” he says, matching my volume, cutting off the end of my sentence. “I was giving Becky thousands every month, paying your tuition at Pines Charter in Hillford—who do you think bought your mom that Towncar? You remember the Towncar, don’t you?”
The mention of the Towncar is what gets me. I knew Tim used to send checks. I remembered Pines Charter, the private school I briefly attended before being funneled into the public one in Filigree.
But the Towncar. The one Mom told me we inherited from her great-aunt Genevieve.... The one we sold, a couple years later, to catch up on the mortgage.
The air scrapes my throat. I take deeper breaths; it gets worse.
“I have no reason to trust you,” I mutter, and realize, as the words materialize, I’m saying it more for myself than to him. I don’t have any reason to trust Tim, and no reason to doubt my mother.
“Ask her.” He pulls on his coat, striding for the door. Graham steps out of his way in one motion, like a rehearsed dance move. “Make her tell you the truth for once. Then give me a call.”
“Oh, you mean you’ll actually answer, this time?” I shout, without turning the rest of the way. I grip the edge of the table and taste blood, where I was biting my cheek to keep from hitting him.
“Glad you didn’t do the letter?” Graham quips as I pass him in the doorway a minute later, the anger in my body pushing me outside. If I keep breathing that stale, cologne-drenched air, I know I’ll do something stupid.
Thank God it’s cold. I take in lungfuls and release them slowly as I head to Graham’s car. Riding together from his office seemed like a good idea yesterday, but now, I wish I had my car to ride in silence the entire way home. I don’t even think about my motel. I don’t even picture my apartment in Hillford.
I’m thinking of Mom’s house in Filigree. The place where she raised me, all on her own, no matter what it took.
That’s the bottom line. Tim can say whatever he wants about my mom. He can lie and spin shit all day; I’m sure he’s good at it. But I won’t believe any of it, because I know at least that much: Mom was there, and he wasn’t. It’s been her and me, just us, as long as I can really remember.
