Kissing Ezra Holtz (and Other Things I Did for Science)

by Brianna R. Shrum

  Ben says, “Like what?”

  “Electricking.”

  “Yeah, that’s what they call it.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I do, though.”

  “Yeah?”

  He takes a long swallow. “That so weird?”

  “No,” I say. “I just—you never wanted to do that before. I’d always kind of thought it was maybe a temporary thing until you figured it out.”

  He says, “It kind of was, at first. I didn’t know what I wanted to do and I sure as hell wasn’t about to drop ten grand a semester to not figure it out. But then, I don’t know, I wound up liking it. I like working with my hands. I like the challenge, every day, figuring out how to fix these problems that no one else knows how to do. I like the guys I work with. I like the money.”

  I laugh.

  “Plumbing makes more but I don’t want to deal with all the . . . shit.” He frames his smile in this cheesy pun exaggeration and I’m laughing but shaking my head.

  “It’s weird,” I say, “the way things work.”

  “Seems like you’re saying more than you’re saying.”

  In the breath between his suggesting that and my answering, Mom walks in.

  “You’re home early.”

  “Mmhmm,” I say.

  She doesn’t press. Mom isn’t a person to pry, and it’s one of the best things about her. She just waits. Trusts you to tell her if you need to.

  She says, “Coffee?”

  Ben says, “Nah, Amalia made me some.”

  I scowl and say, “Please.”

  Mom’s mouth curls and she heads to the coffee maker.

  I look back at Ben. “I—you know it’s so weird, but I actually really like chemistry?”

  He whisper-yells, “Neeeeeerd.”

  I hit him and Mom says, still facing the coffee pot as the water heats, “Go for the throat, baby, whose daughter are you?”

  I say, “I honestly might major in it. I can’t believe it but I might?”

  “What about your art?” Mom says.

  I shrug. I say, “I don’t know.”

  Mom says, “You don’t have to.”

  “I might restore art. I’d need chemistry to do that anyway. That would be kind of cool, right? Maybe not. I don’t . . . I guess I don’t know, but I didn’t know I would be the kind of person who liked science before and I was wrong about that, so.”

  “So, I’m right,” Mom says. The coffee starts dripping into the pot.

  “Hmm?”

  “I’m right. You don’t have to know.”

  “Ugh,” I say.

  Ben says, “Moms, man.”

  Mom singsongs, “My life is a blessing to my children,” and brings me a mug.

  This morning, things feels slow and warm and . . . stressful in one way.

  But despite everything, they don’t feel dire.

  It feels like . . . like everything has a prayer of being okay.

  I spend the next week poring over chemistry textbooks, feeling bad for ignoring more smoker’s corner texts until they stop coming, and a little bad that I don’t even get any at all from my Cooler Friends. But I’m busy anyway. I don’t have time. Not for them, not for Skylar, not for anything but freaking academia.

  Sukkot comes and Ezra wants to know if I want to come hang out in the sukkah he built with his own two hands because of course he did. Of course he totally overachieved.

  A sukkah is this temporary structure you build for Sukkot, and you spend a ton of time in it theoretically. You eat in it, read in it, hang out in it, whatever. Until the holiday is over. Our synagogue built one like they do every year, but Ezra actually built his own, and I don’t know why it surprises me except that I’ve never actually been in, like, a personal one.

  Of course, I go over to his house.

  I am unsettled, deeply, by how much I’m looking forward to getting there.

  I pull up in his driveway and go to knock on his door, but he pulls it open.

  Because, what? He was waiting for me?

  Well. Who could blame him, I guess. We have been having a hell of a time together. It’s been . . . fun. Mouths and hands and skin type fun.

  I’d be waiting for me, too.

  He says, “Come on,” and we walk back through his house into his backyard. There’s a structure, wood-framed on three sides, draped with canvas. Woven through the roof are little vines, so the whole thing looks . . . magical. It’s not expertly put-together, exactly. Even from here, I can see the uneven joints, the places where the wood frame has splintered just a little from an imperfect hammering job. But that kind of makes it better—less manufactured. It looks like he cared.

  This is how Ezra is.

  About everything.

  He leads me to it with a bright smile in his eyes, and then he turns around. He sweeps his arm behind him and puts on an affected academic voice, and says, “Step into my sukkah.”

  “Okay, professor.”

  “You should see me in tweed.”

  “God,” I say, rolling my eyes and stepping past him into the little house. “You would own tweed.”

  He snorts, and I can’t see it because he’s behind me, but I imagine him smiling and that’s enough to send downright dangerous warmth through my stomach.

  I pull out a little folding chair from where it’s situated around an equally cheap folding table and say, “You built this?”

  “Sure did.”

  “With your own hands.”

  He holds his hands out, palms up, and I can see the scratches on them. Where the cheap wood splintered and dug into his fingers, his palms, a couple scratches up his forearms. I cross my legs because something about it is ridiculously hot, I can’t help it.

  “Impressed, Yaabez?” he says with a smirk.

  “Don’t get cocky.”

  “Too late.”

  I groan. “I thought I told you not to last-name me. It sounds weird in your mouth.”

  “I thought you liked my mouth.”

  I cough and he looks instantly extremely pleased with himself. Because I really am enjoying spending time with him, talking with him, I say, “Only when it’s not talking.”

  I can’t quite interpret the look on his face. It’s amused, but also . . . I don’t know. His brow is drawn in just a little too tight, eyes not quite smiling. He almost looks hurt?

  Which can’t be right.

  I decide I’m imagining it when he says, “That makes two of us.”

  I let out a breath. “So,” I say, “you bring all the pretty girls out here?”

  “No,” he says. “Just you.”

  And suddenly that tightness is back in my chest.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  A muscle twitches in his jaw, and his fingers are moving to smooth away nothing on the table. He says, “I’ve kind of been wanting to talk to y—”

  And I talk over him to say, “A sukkah is a strange spot to start a seduction.”

  He stops talking. Rolls his eyes. “I’m not always trying to seduce you. Step into my sukkah, in retrospect, was maybe not my best move anyway.”

  I laugh. “Eh. Well. It’ll work on me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why else would I have come over?”

  He raises an eyebrow.

  “It’s not like you asked me to come over because we’re friends, Holtz.”

  He blinks. Takes a second while another unreadable looks flashes over his face. Then says, “Right.” He looks at me. Peers at me. “Right.”

  “Sure is fun to fool around, though.”

  He’s back to cocky in a blink. “That I cannot argue with.”

  My gaze dips down to his collarbone, to his hands all scratched up and calloused. I say, “Your parents home?”

  His mouth curls. “Not for hours.”

  I stand and cock my head toward the house. “Well then. You want to show me that tweed collection?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  TEST GROUP JANE
LLE AND LINA

  INT: Car. Black cloth seats, vehicle is pretty small. Unclear what make and model. Front seat, camera is clearly braced on the dashboard. Lina sits in the front seat, hair in big bouncing curls, lips a brilliant red. Janelle leans back in the passenger’s seat, in a pretty purple and blue headscarf. She has a soft smile on her lips.

  Lina: We’ll get you the full report, the questionnaire for your data?

  Janelle: Mine’s already filled out, but slacker here—

  Lina, shoving Janelle, eyes sparkling: Shut up.

  Janelle: Finish up this recording and I will.

  Even through the screen, Lina’s immediate blush is obvious.

  Lina: I was . . . we were both nervous about jumping into that last set of questions. It’s a little like ripping your heart open for someone, isn’t it? Answering questions about your deepest pains, your biggest dreams, the only memory you wish you could erase, the only one you would save if you had to let every one go but one? That’s . . . that’s not. It’s not easy.

  Janelle starts playing with the ends of Lina’s hair.

  Janelle: I just . . .

  Janelle turns to Lina, and Lina stops looking in the camera to stare back at Janelle.

  Janelle: I feel like I know you better than I should. And like . . . like I feel more for you than I should? But I swear, Lina, I feel like I’m in love with you. And—

  Janelle darts her eyes to the camera.

  Janelle: Turn that off?

  Lina, grinning at the camera: We’ll get you those evaluations.

  End recording.

  Ezra smirks, this self-assured, obviously sexual thing. I am comfortable again. It’s a pattern, I guess, now. But one I wove all on my own, one I am happy to continue weaving.

  I take it as a yes and move past him to leave the sukkah and sneak into his house. Well, not sneak exactly; there’s no one home. But it’s rule-breaking and that feels sneaky anyway.

  I feel fingers on the crook of my elbow. Gentle pressure.

  I turn around and Ezra tightens his hand, cocky smile curving up just a little higher, crooked as the break in his nose.

  He says, “Amalia.”

  I say, “Holtz.”

  I’m afraid he’s going to turn me down. Suddenly there’s a pre-embarrassed knot in my throat, because this is always how it goes. Maybe I’m just a little too slutty to be interesting. And the experiment is winding down anyway; things are about to come to an end.

  It’s fine.

  I misinterpreted some stuff.

  It’s fine.

  It’s. Fine.

  But then Ezra just raises his eyebrow, making his expression even more uneven, and he says, “Far be it from me to judge you on your level of halakhic observance.”

  Now it’s my turn to raise an eyebrow.

  “But Levitically, we should be dwelling in the sukkah.”

  My eyebrows climb to my hairline. Because I’m not sure if he’s suggesting what I think he’s suggesting, but all signs point to him implying that we should.

  Well.

  Hang out in this open-air temporary structure, which is basically the same thing as hanging out outside. In suburbia. In a backyard.

  Then again, I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone use the word Levitically in a come on. So I could be wrong.

  I say, “Levitically?”

  “Leviticus 23:42-43. You shall live in booths seven days—”

  “I know what Sukkot is, Ezra!”

  He laughs out loud, and then I’m laughing because I’m a little on edge trying to decide if I’m interpreting him right, and not knowing whether it sounds like the best idea in the world or the worst one. I’m also laughing because I’m so delighted to hear him laugh.

  God, what am I doing?

  He steps a little closer to me, fingers still pressing into the crook of my elbow. I could slip away if I wanted to but I do not want to. I want him to touch me. With his scratched-up hands.

  He says, all mischief, “It’s a mitzvah, Yaabez.”

  “Fucking in the sukkah?”

  Ezra’s eyes are sparkling. “You perv. Dwelling in the sukkah.”

  “Is this like a known in a Biblical sense translation thing?”

  He shrugs. “I’ve seen no evidence to the contrary.”

  “Are you telling me you want to show me your lulav and etrog?”

  He’s grinning. Full on, genuine. He says, “Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”

  I step a little closer to him. Close enough that my thighs are brushing his. A warm breeze blows through the open air side of the sukkah and tickles my legs, ruffles my too-short skirt.

  Ezra says, “Well. This gonna work on you?”

  “You are the biggest nerd.”

  “Is that a no?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  He laughs again, throws his head back when he does so I can see his Adam’s apple, the tendons at his throat shifting. The shadows of the evening playing over his jaw. Good lord. I swallow, or try to.

  He looks at me when he’s done laughing, adjusts his glasses but for once not in a disapproving way, and I run my hand up his chest, behind his neck, fingers threading through the hair at the base of his neck.

  I whisper, because our faces are close enough now that that’s all we have to do. He can probably feel it on his mouth when I say, “And here I thought you were such a nice Jewish boy.”

  He can’t stop smiling and I am living for it.

  “Please. As though my insisting upon halakhic observance changes that.” He walks me back until my butt hits the folding table.

  “You want to hook up outside.”

  “Only kind of outside.”

  I shift back until I’m leaning on the plastic, texture digging into my lower back. I don’t care.

  “Outside enough that now I know you aren’t nice.”

  “And I thought you were wild.”

  “Come find out.”

  His hands are at my hips and his teeth are at my throat. If you’d asked me, I never, in a million years, would have predicted that this was how Ezra would be.

  Overwhelming.

  Intoxicating.

  All edges, precise and clean and sharp.

  He skates his hand up my thigh and slowly, murderously slowly, kneels down in the dirt. His teeth are at my leg, the sensitive inner skin of it that I never bother shaving. Gliding up above my knee until his nose nudges the hem of my skirt.

  He murmurs, into my skin, “Yes?”

  I say, “God, yes.”

  And then I’m gone, I’m just gone. I don’t even have the mental energy to expend on my disbelief that this is Ezra, because I’m so focused on what he’s doing, on this kaleidoscope of sensations coursing through me, and screw anyone, anyone who thinks I am less because of this.

  Who thinks that enjoying this, that craving this, makes me less human.

  I don’t care about any of it. I don’t care about the imminent end of this. I don’t care that I’m all wrong for him and we probably both know it and we’re just biding our time with each other until a letter grade marks the end of it. I don’t care that I am an absolute jumble of feelings I never, never intended to feel about Ezra Holtz that I cannot seem to banish from my heart.

  I don’t. Care.

  I care about biting down on my own tongue so I don’t make a sound, so we don’t disturb his neighbors. I care about getting what we both want from each other right here, right now, in the freaking sukkah. I care about everything, every sensation, pinpointing to his hands and his mouth and everything else about him and me and all of this.

  Even with my dedicated efforts to be quiet, I can’t help this sound rising up in the back of my throat when I rise up on my tiptoes and then finally relax. Ezra looks up at me and scrapes his teeth over his lip, and I’m so freaking high on everything, and what I want, what I really desperately want more than anything, is to reciprocate.

  So.

  I pull him up to his feet.
>
  And I do.

  Here is the terrifying thing.

  Here is the thing that has me shaking in my bones.

  When we’re done, when both of us are so exhausted in the best, most incredible way, when we’re high on each other and just cannot feel better than we do, when I know that staying will only be a downhill journey because how can it even plateau, I don’t want to leave.

  Ezra doesn’t kick me out.

  I stay.

  We’re lying there on the dirt floor of the little booth, and I’m still feeling just a little self-conscious about the open air to my left, but no cops have shown up so either his neighbors are very tolerant, or we were quiet enough and his fence provided enough cover that we’re not going to freaking jail.

  My head is on Ezra’s chest. Ugh, my head is on his chest and I don’t want to move it. I’m so comfortable and he’s so warm and solid and I love this too much. He’s absently running his fingers through my hair, which, I don’t even know how; it’s a mess, as always. But he manages. And I love it.

  I’m so scared, because I love this too much.

  I haven’t even had the time to begin to contemplate feeling like this, but suddenly I am, and this wasn’t supposed to happen.

  This doesn’t usually happen to me, and it never, never happens to people about me, and especially not long-term. Never. So it doesn’t matter what random sensations are confusing me right now.

  I’m a little scared.

  But I’m not scared enough to move.

  Ezra is just staring up at the sky through the vine and board roof and so am I. Crickets are singing and the stars are popping out, and that is actually a rule of the sukkah: you have to be able to see the stars through it.

  So here I am.

  Lying with Ezra, practically purring while he plays with my hair, staring up at the stars.

  It’s downright romantic.

  And there’s absolutely nothing to be done for it.

  Ezra shifts so I can feel his mouth against my hair. He says, “How you doing?”

  I laugh. “How do you think?”

  “Well, I’m hoping for the best.”

  “Good. I feel good.”

  “What’s better? Doing it in the pool house or in the sukkah?”