Only thing is, Jack isn’t at the end-of-year dance or any photo for the last term. I shut the book, cutting off the memories.
“So?”
Charlee shakes a pile of books in her hands, thumping the door closed with her heel. “Mom and Dad have their own collection.”
I pat the spot next to me and she sits. We spread the books over the floor in front of us. Just like the era, the books are bright and colorful. At least they were when they were printed. The chicks’ hair is as long as it is wide, skirts and slacks were worn as high as they are today, funnily enough, and at school events or outings, some girls liked to wear cone bras and leg warmers.
“What are we looking for?” Charz asks.
I hear it, but it takes me a few seconds to answer, my eyes focused on scanning every face in every picture. “Um…just…I’ll show you,” I end up saying.
Here. I see the first picture. There are five or so guys in this one, all arms hooked around each other’s, forming one line. My dad is on the left, Walter second from the left. It shows they knew each other. It shows that much.
“Hey, Charz—” I begin, but halt when I look up. She’s staring at me, and has been for God knows for how long. I look away, shuffling back slightly, skimming through in my head what I could have possibly done wrong.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to, but when it happened you reminded me of Mom lying there in her coffin and just now Dad, in his coffin, and I couldn’t take it anymore, so I think I’ve been trying to convince myself to stay away or maybe we shouldn’t be together for all these silly reasons, but maybe it’s just that I’m—”
I press my fingers against her lips and she continues to talk for a moment before realizing she isn’t making any sense. She stops, blushes. Finally, I pull my finger away, but only to stroke her lip. She closes her eyes and sighs, pushing her lip farther into my finger.
What happened to me, to us, since I collapsed in her pool? This week in her absence, I daydreamed of ripping another guy to shreds if I caught him on her. I got so fucking bored with my life that I cleaned up my room. I punished my body at the gym for a week straight and pushed myself so far I threw up on two of those occasions. I wrote the stupidest damn romantic lyrics for my guitar.
Charlee May and Dexter Hollingworth can’t be apart, so we might as well stop making living apart hell because that was never going to work.
I scoot to her side and cup her face. Feeling her skin on mine has a natural way of soothing me the way a deep breath eases tension.
“I guess that makes sense. I was pissed.”
“I’m sorry,” she mumbles into her chest.
I pick up her chin and pull her to me in the slightest of motions, hoping she’ll come. She does. I’m neither pulling her to me nor she is coming forward, but then our noses are resting against each other’s and my breaths are loud, ragged puffs of air.
I rub my cheek along hers, along that smooth skin that’s more addictive than the rush of adrenaline. I pant. Her hands wander for a moment before they find my waist, and then she’s gripping my sides, with her fingers slipping beneath my waistband. They push under my boxers.
“I fucking missed you,” I breathe against her lips. She moves around, straddling me while I’m still sitting on the floor, legs spread.
Our foreheads and noses never lose contact, somehow. My hands, my thoughts are of her scent, her hair, her hands, her lips. For me, that’s sweet candy pulled into my lungs when she sweeps her blonde hair over her shoulder and bites those lips.
God, the visual makes me want to lose myself deep inside her.
“I fucking missed you,” I repeat, sliding my cheek against hers, feeling her silky skin hot against mine, the both of us groaning and breathing heavily, her legs wrapped around my back. I’m hard, and I want her to feel it this time. She knows it; it’s obvious by the way she grinds against me.
I’ve never wanted a girl like this—never wanted to hold every bit of her naked body against mine, just so I can memorize what it feels like for our skin to touch. Her breasts to my chest. Her hip bones to mine. My dick against her skin. Our feet tangled together. Just to feel our bodies as one.
Before this, getting naked with a girl had only been a way to come and forget about the real world for a little while.
I pull back a bit. “Is that door locked?” I jerk my chin in that direction.
She licks her lips, staring at mine. I know she’s thinking the same damn things I am, and my dick can’t wait any longer for her to mentally, or physically, undress me. I lift her up, still pressed against my chest, arms wrapped around my neck, legs hooked just under my ass and waddle to the bed until I feel it behind us. Then we collapse together in a thunderstorm of kisses. I push myself back with my hands and feet, digging into her mattress and she lunges at me, forcing me to move toward her pillows, crawling over me, still connecting us with breathy kisses.
We thump into the headboard and I catch her, pulling her back onto me. She finds the right spot, getting in place.
The image of her little stripy undies flashes repeatedly in my brain, so I slip my hands underneath her leggings and cup her ass in my palms. I want to rip her pants off. I want to rip this flowy shirt off too and suck on what’s underneath…
“I need to take this off,” I mumble against her lips.
Her nipple is a hard nub through the material even before I circle it with my tongue. Once I lick it senseless, I almost unzip myself and rub my hard cock over it.
“You’re so gorgeous I want to feel your nipple on my cock,” I blurt out, which doesn’t help my sexual hunger.
“H-here,” she stutters, bringing her hand to the hem to lift her top off.
Stopping her, I say, “No, Charz. I want to take everything you have on clean off and love you senseless, but you’re going to be my girlfriend when that happens and you’re going to feel like the only woman on this planet when it happens. We’re not going to be in this mess because everything will be as close to perfect as I can make it. For now…”
Her response is a barely audible “yes”, but she squealed as she said it, and I felt her chest shudder under my palm, so I got the response I needed.
Every time she tries to speak, I close her jaw with a finger and tell her to shush.
I grab on to her top and slide it over her head, and then I reach around and fiddle with the silly bra clasp until it magically unclips and I fling it away as fast as I can. Charz is quiet and trembling, pushing her nipples up at me and thrusting her sex against my thigh and I start sucking on her breast. I suck so much her nipple makes a popping sound when it slips from my lips.
I flip her under me, moving on to licking trails from both nipples to the V leading to her sex. I slide a finger under the elastic of both her leggings and her panties and glide them down her smooth legs and flick them off somewhere. Just off.
Once I crouch between her legs and lower my lips to her mound, she’s thrusting so hard at me it aches to watch her want my tongue on her that badly.
It doesn’t take long to trace her sex and plunge my tongue in and out. I need to feel her, more than ever, so I vibrate my finger on her sex as fast as I can. I alternate speeding up my finger on the tip of her sex to slow circles that make her shudder deeper than ever before.
Halfway through, she can’t control her natural response to moan and scream. For me, it’s victory. Charlee is cute when she’s awkward and embarrassed, but I love seeing that freed look when she steps out of her comfort zone and lets loose.
I feel her sex pulsing, so close, so I speed up, tongue lavishing her sex and plunging in and out faster because now I can really taste her, which sets my cock to fucking saluting her ultimate sexiness. I’ve been going so long I’m starting to go numb and stiff but she’s so close, so fucking dripping wet, that I don’t care. As she finally lets loose her fears and gets close to climax, a rush of adrenaline kicks me off once more.
Her hands are wrapped in my hair, ripping at clumps. It fuckin
g hurts so good it’s better than my dreams. Her hands hurt, clamped as tight as they are to my head and pushing me deeper, thrusting against me, but it gets me going so hard.
When she comes, she freezes, my hair taut in her grip, and she shrieks a moan of pleasure so hard I swear I almost come in my pants having her around my tongue, my head shoved between her legs and deep in her sex.
It feels like she’s holding on as long as she can before slowly comes back to Earth. My view is gorgeous—looking up at her glowing cheeks and wide eyes swimming with pleasure from down between her legs. She slowly releases me.
She lies in awe, panting as hard as I imagine she would after a swimming session, then lunges at my buckle and pops it open. A surge rips through me, and it takes all I have to push her back.
“No, Dex. I need you to take everything off now.”
“I laid out the rules. I’m making you feel like the only girl in the world. And I can wait.”
“Now,” she growls at me in a way that makes me want to shove my cock at her to suck this instant.
“Charlee May. I made you come and I will not allow you to do anything other than lie and appreciate. Today is me showing you how much you mean to me. Please, don’t make me feel like shit for having you repay me. We have forever for that.”
“I need you. I need more of you. Please. Please.”
“Fuck, I want you, Charlee. I mean, I really want you,” I say. “But I want to take my time with you. Is something’s going on? What’s up?”
She looks my body over, stopping at my forearms, tracing lines over my tattoos. Within a couple of minutes, she’s got her stripy undies on and her top.
“I don’t know anything about you,” she says, confused. “I didn’t want to miss my ‘window’ to do it for you with what just happened between us.”
“Well, you’re definitely not missing any opportunity to touch me—but later. What are you talking about not knowing me? Of course you know stuff about me. We’ve known each other since school and have been close for at least a couple of months now.”
“I thought.” She shakes her head looking past my eyes. “So you’re really, unbelievably hot but,” she starts a count on her fingers, “I don’t know who your real friends are, I don’t know what all your tattoos mean, I don’t know what you like to do with your time—nothing.”
“It’s because I really have nothing to tell. Well,” I say, rephrasing, “nothing interesting to tell.”
Charz tut-tuts and gives me a look. “So you’d call the death of my parents and the hell I’ve been through uninteresting for you, then. That’s what you’d rather discuss?”
“Oh shit. You’re twisting my words. C’mere.”
I grab her waist and pull her to me, turning her around and pressing the back of her against my chest. I wrap my arms around her waist. They snuggle into the dip so perfectly.
“So you really want to know about me?” I breathe into her ear, nibbling along the edge.
Snuggling close, she says, “Of course I don’t want you to tell me things because I’ve asked, but yeah, I want to know. I find it odd you never say anything. That’s why I think I, um, almost broke your rule just before.”
Pressed against her ear, I laugh into her and she sighs, pressing her ass farther into me.
“That’s hard to resist, you know. Especially with your moans in my head and that fucking sweetness still in my mouth…I’m trying to finally be responsible. I want to get to know you by words, and not by rubbing myself on you.”
“But you rub it so well?”
“No such luck.”
“Friends?”
“You were there at KFC that night. Not anymore, none.”
“Liar. What about Elliot?”
“If he’s still my bud then, yeah. He’s my friend.”
“No more?”
“We’ll get over it.”
A silence fills the air between us. She knows why I can’t call any other guys my friends, but I don’t want to go into any more detail. She’s got more than enough shit to deal with.
“Not even that Raych girl?”
How does she remember her? Oh, fuck. Charz should not be thinking of her now, ever. “A bad memory. She’s definitely not a friend.”
“This one,” Charz says, fingering the scythe on my arm. “You goth or something?”
“No, relax. It’s just for someone, is all.” Before she can ask who or why, I point to a few more. “Same as this thorned heart, but this jellybean is me. It kills Mom that I almost always forget or refuse to carry candy on me for my hypos. I dunno, I just hated being controlled by something. I had a jellybean inked there symbolizing my diabetes, yet also to give a fuck you to my body. But since what happened at your pool I always carry sugar with me.” I tap my pocket. “I can’t risk never seeing you again.”
She flips to face me and fingers the lines and drawings, tracing the way the forest climbs over my muscles and veins. Her fingers are like a golden touch, seeping liquid pleasure through my skin, and it makes me want to melt. I close my eyes, drop my head back against her pillows, just feeling it. Her fingers snake into the space just above my top button. Then, pop. She opens the first button and the next, until cool air coats my entire chest.
Looking at her is like watching an artist paint. She traces down my chest, down my snail trail. With both fingers, she follows the “V” down my waist, then back up, stretching her hands up and over my shoulders.
“They’re everywhere,” she says, more of a surprised exclamation than anything else.
“Yeah, lots of stories and memories, I guess.”
“Tell me one.”
“Charz.” I trace her face, outlining the curve of her lips with my finger. “We don’t have to do this all tonight. I promise I won’t keep anything from you. I’ll be open. I—”
Whoah, Dex! I clamp my lips together just in time before I slip out a stupid “I love you” that’ll inevitably be exactly what gets me kicked out. Too much, too soon.
I’m rushing nothing with Charlee.
“But you’ve lost someone you love. I can see it in your eyes, Dex.” Charz touches the side of my eye with her knuckle, stroking my face. “Who is she?”
“She, he, them. Long story. Can we talk about this another time?”
“Is she the reason why you have all the tattoos? Are they for her?”
“No, that’s not who they’re for or why I came here.”
“So you came here to use me or my house or something?”
“God, no.”
“The yearbooks,” she says. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t—”
“Now. No lies. No anything else. What’s in my dad’s yearbooks?”
“Both of them,” I yell.
We both jolt back, surprised by my voice. I try to keep her in my arms but she slithers from my grip, slinking off the bed and back to the books. “Show me.”
“Charz, I’m sorry. Will you let me—”
“Here, no lying excuses. Just show me why you came here.”
I find the picture of our dads arm-in-arm. In the yearbook the next year, graduating year, there are more of them. They’re so easy to find now. Playing soccer, even my grandma and Walter’s mom next to the two of them. Holding up a set of drawers they must have made in a shop class.
I point to all of them one after the other.
“Something has obviously happened in the last decade or two but our dads were best friends, family friends even, and I have no idea why they wouldn’t have told us. I forget sometimes that Mom and Dad grew up here. They were only in Chicago when I was a kid. But Melbourne was—is—their home.”
“So your dad was pissed at my dad for a fight they had back before we were born and decided it was time to pay my dying dad back by stealing his money?”
“No.” I thump my fist into my forehead, fighting back the urge to punch something, or cry, or both. Fighting my damnedest to save this day so I only have happy memories of the first
time Charz let me experience making her come. “For some reason my dad feels that he owes—owed—your dad something and was trying to give money back to him.”
“Why?”
“FJH,” I say.
It takes a moment, but she remembers the name from the accounts. She flips through the recent yearbook from the year before we graduated and finds my brother’s picture.
“For Jack Hollingworth,” she states.
“Yes, for my dead brother.”
30. Define Dad
Charlee
“So you’re unpacked, right? All of it?” I call, rapping on Darcy’s bedroom door when he doesn’t reply.
“Define ‘all’,” he replies.
I open the door, step in, and see Darcy’s lone backpack unzipped, indeed. The contents are strewn all over his bed like someone just shook out the bag.
“Wait a sec,” I say, realizing something. “You started this when I knocked on the door?”
“Define ‘start’,” Darcy replies.
I thump him over the head with my fingers—well it’s a light tap, but I muster up all the seriousness I can.
Sitting on the edge of his bed, something occurs to me. I haven’t felt as angry at someone—haven’t felt angry at anyone, really—since Dex came into my daily life. And I’ve also never been as happy as I am when I’m with him. And definitely have never come as hard as the way he made me. I think I died from embarrassment and came back shrieking like a girl, but since then, I’ve felt loose, carefree and happy. Before Dex, I didn’t understand the feeling of “intense”.
On the bed, Darcy sorts his stuff into piles. One pair of sneakers: complete. Four undies: complete (how often did Nana wash, or worse, how often did he change them?). And so forth.
“Here,” I say. I begin pulling the random bits into a cohesive group. “You’ll take all day. And no, I will not define ‘all day’ because if you’re old enough to talk back to me, you’re old enough to do at least half of this.”
“It’s only been a couple of days.”
Drowning in You Page 23
