earthgirl
Page 11
I was so excited I practically raced up the narrow creaky staircase to his room on the third floor. But since I didn’t want to be all winded when I got there, I slowed down near the top.
Vray’s door was ajar and I could hear the lowing sounds of Thom Yorke’s squeaky strange voice in the background. I never quite got Radiohead. I could barely understand what they were singing, even if I liked their politics.
I took a long deep breath and tried to calm the crazy smile that was exploding off my face and filling up my entire body at what was about to happen! My boyfriend and me consummating our love for each other and the world. What a funny word, consummating! Combo of consuming and mating, har har!
I was practically bouncing off the walls as I stepped through the door and saw him.
He was lying propped up in his messy bed with his arm in a navy canvas sling like a broken puppet. His cheek had the pale, yellowish hue of a bruise in progress. It looked like he’d been jumped and clobbered. Swarmed.
“Hey babe,” he slurred when he saw me. His eyes were glassy and he looked completely spaced out.
“What happened?” I asked as I darted toward him, wanting to hold him and kiss his damp face, but frightened I might break him more than he already appeared to be broken.
“Busted my collarbone,” he sighed. “Hurts like a bastard so I’m hopped up on painkillers, which I’d like to point out live up to their name.”
“How? What happened?”
“Some MoFo Navigator who couldn’t navigate squeezed me out,” he snorted with a drowsy drawl.
“Didn’t he see you?”
“Obviously not,” he half laughed, lifting the sling an inch before clenching his teeth and wincing in pain.
“And he didn’t even stop? That’s hit and run!” I was shocked and horrified as my mind raced at what could have happened to poor Vray.
To my Vray.
“Oh, he stopped. Had to inspect the damage to his pig-mobile. Too bad there wasn’t any. Then, get this, creep has the nerve to say I shouldn’t ride my bike in the winter, like it’s any of his fucking business. Jerk-off.”
“Did the police come? Did they charge him with dangerous driving? Nail his ass to the wall?”
“You know, you’re pretty cute when you get all worked up,” Vray laughed, patting the damp pillow beside him. “I think he got a ticket for an improper lane change or something, like he cares.”
I sat carefully beside him, brushing the sweat-knotted hair off his forehead and kissing his unbruised cheek. I looked at my broken boyfriend and even though I didn’t want to be selfish, I couldn’t help feeling disappointed and even angry that this had happened. At this supposed-to-be epic moment.
He couldn’t even hug me and I might hurt him if I touched him.
“Are your parents coming back?” I asked, suddenly realizing the other implications of this horrible accident.
“Nah,” he sighed. “I’ll be okay in a coupla days. My dad dispatched his sister Martha to make sure I’ve got food and don’t OD on meds or something, but she’s cool.”
“What about the band? The Christmas show?”
“Don’t remind me,” he groaned.
“Well, at least you can still sing,” I offered, even though his thrashy guitar was actually the best thing about his singing.
“I don’t want to think about any of that right now.” He let out a breath that sounded like he was deflating.
“I can’t believe you got hurt,” I said, snuggling gently up to his good shoulder. And how much it hurt me to see him lying there like that. All mangled and broken and beaten down.
“It’s a collarbone, Green Bean. Most commonly broken bone in the body, but hurts like a MoFo, I’ll tell you that much.”
“This is awful. I’m so sorry this happened,” I said as I ran my hand through his curls.
I’m so sorry this happened to you. To me. To us.
“Finn nearly got his eye taken out by some asswipe waving a cigarette out the window last summer. Should’ve seen the scratch he left on the dude’s Lexus. Priceless,” Vray said with a glint in his eye.
“He scratched his car?”
“Not intentionally, unfortunately, and it was the guy’s fault anyway. He pulls over in the No Stopping bike lane like a pompous jerk. So Finn’s riding in front of me and pulls out to pass him when this fat, pasty arm shoots out the driver’s window and nails Finn with a lit butt. Finn’s so freaked he swerves, but there’s cars beside us and he ends up scraping against the guy’s fender, cccccccrrrrrrsssskkkk. It was a beautiful thing.”
Even though I was sort of shocked at the way Vray described it, I was also a little pumped. And almost sorry I hadn’t done some of my own scratch-worthy damage to the littering lunatic lady’s car.
At the very moment, I hated drivers and especially those arrogant S.U.X. drivers with every cell of my being. I hadn’t exactly liked them and their obnoxious oversized steroid-fed cars before, but that didn’t compare with the anger and disgust I was feeling right now.
Before this moment, it had been an abstract kind of anger at what they stood for and were doing to the planet. How they drove around in their monster machines as if their lives depended on it. Like it was their right.
Now their greed and gluttony had had a direct impact on me and my life. Their choices and actions affected me, my boyfriend, my life and my plans.
It was outrageous.
“We should do something,” I said. “When you’re better, we should do something major. I mean, what’s with these people? First that crazy woman hurls her garbage at me and now this! It’s like some kind of four-wheel conspiracy to kill and maim cyclists! We have to do something.”
“Man, you’re hot when you’re all amped up like that,” Vray said quietly. “Sucks that I can’t do much about it. Can’t even wrap my arms around you and slobber all over your hot little bod. Well, just my one arm, but I wish it were both.”
Me, too, I thought, letting out a sigh and snuggling carefully against his chest.
•••
We must have fallen asleep because it was Vray’s Aunt Martha who woke us a while later.
“Hey, there, Matty, looks like you’re feeling a bit better,” Martha said, giving us both a gentle nudge.
“Painkillers,” Vray answered sleepily. “And I asked you to please not call me that.”
“Roger that, Vray. Hi, I’m Martha, his amazing aunt, and you must be the fabulous Sabine,” she said, turning to me with a big smile and the same sparkling green eyes as Vray. “At least I hope so, or I’m going to be more embarrassed than either of you at this particular second.”
“Who else would she be?” Vray snorted.
“Yes,” I nodded as I scooched up from the pillow, wiping away the grotty film of sleep from my mouth. “And I was just leaving.” Not to mention epically embarrassed to have been caught like that, even if she was very sweet about it.
“Don’t even think about it,” she said nonchalantly. “If you stay here tonight I can go home. You’re good to stay over, right?”
I didn’t know what to say. I’d never met an adult who was so casual in a situation like this. Even if it did involve a sensible girl and a dosed-up, busted and groggy boy.
“She can hang out and play nurse,” Vray answered for me. “We were talking about it right before you got here.”
“Great. It’s about time Matty — sorry, Vray — had more positive female energy in his world,” Martha smiled as she swept across the room briskly tidying things up like a jeans-and fleece-wearing Mary Poppins. “Nice contrast from that pack of wolves he usually runs with.”
“Grrrr,” Vray growled at her.
“I’ve got pizza and salad in the kitchen. You can get your sorry butt downstairs out of this manky room to eat something, right?” she said as she bounded out the door onto the landing.
“Did she just ask me to sleep over?” I looked at Vray.
“Yup,” Vray grinned wickedly.
�
��To sleep over here with you, alone?”
“Oh, like you hadn’t planned to?” he said, pointing to my bulging backpack on the floor beside one of his many teetering towers of smartypants books.
“You knew?” I asked, feeling vaguely thrilled he was so clued in. So in tune with me and what was on my mind.
“Sort of,” he answered, his glassy eyes sparkling and nodding toward an unopened box of condoms tucked beside the night-table lamp. “I definitely hoped so. If not tonight sometime during the holidays.”
“I can’t believe I’m so transparent,” I said, leaping off the bed to smooth my hair and unrumple my clothes. “I might even be insulted.”
“Why? We’re just totally in sync,” he said softly.
“We are, aren’t we,” I agreed, with another one of those overwhelming body-engulfing smiles taking me over. “Like two of a kind.”
“No, more than that,” he said. “Almost like you’re the other half of me, if that even makes sense.”
I took a deep breath and held myself steady. It was almost more than I could bear, hearing him say the very things I was feeling. Saying the words that made those very feelings true.
Absolutely, totally, completely true.
•••
That night, in his bed, in the dark, we did things I’d never done before. Things I’d only read about or talked about or imagined. It was totally unexpected when he unspooned himself from me and with his good arm nudged my body toward him and started tracing and touching me in ways I’d never been touched. With his fingers and his toes, his eyelashes and his mouth, his hands and his heart. He whispered things and sighed and asked and explained. And I did the same in return.
It was calm and intense. Quiet and yet cacophonous like a sudden thunderstorm tearing through a humid summer night and then suddenly gone as quickly as it appeared.
Because of his limited mobility and my anxiety that I’d hurt him, we weren’t totally intimate, but I have to say it was still extremely intimate. It wasn’t everything, but it was almost more.
And afterwards, even though I didn’t sleep a second, as I watched him lie there supported by a stack of pillows, breathing noisily, I’d never felt more awake in my life.
Everything was amazing. The jagged outline of frost on the edges of the window. The sour-sweet heat of his breath on my neck and shoulder. Even the way he sprawled diagonally across the bed, barely giving me any room or sharing the duvet was wonderful.
“How’s you?” he asked sleepily as the gray morning light filled the room.
“Fine. Pretty tired, but amazingly fine,” I said, turning my head and covering my mouth to spare him my jungle breath. “How are you? Is your shoulder okay?”
“No, it sucks,” he half laughed, reaching past the untouched toy box for another painkiller and a sip of water.
“Watch it with those things,” I cautioned. “They’re pretty powerful.”
“I know,” he said, his eyes widening a bit. “I had the wildest dream. All this soft gorgeous naked skin and hair and wow. It was so real, it’s getting me all, um, you know, just thinking about it.” He didn’t have to explain himself since it was quite obvious as he got up from the bed and tottered slowly to the bathroom.
“I had the same dream, too,” I called softly behind him. “Funny thing is I wasn’t asleep.”
When he returned he handed me the glass of water he’d refilled and climbed back in beside me. I took a long cold sip, amazed that I could be lying here on the duvet-covered bed of this messy, stinky boy room beside such an amazing creature.
“It’s funny. You know so much about me, and I sometimes feel like I barely know anything about you,” I said. “I mean, do I even know your real name.”
“Sure you do. I told you that day we met.”
“No, your real, real name.”
“I don’t have a name or a label or a barcode,” he sighed, leaning forward to kiss me again. “I only have this mind and this body and this amazing moment right now with you.”
Then there was another kiss. A warm, wet, sloppy, untoothbrushed hypnotic kiss. Anything else he said at that point was like the roar of a jet overhead. The breathless crashing of the ocean against a rocky beach. An epic, supernatural, sonic swoosh. And a warm, completely comfortable and safe feeling like the greatest hug on earth.
Love and kisses were the absolutely best thing ever! Better than fresh raspberries. Better than just-baked chocolate chip cookies. Maybe even better than fresh air and wild dolphins and blue-black starry nights and snow-covered mountains.
Or at the very least just as great!
Yup, even if the world was in crisis, choking and struggling amidst the crap we were foisting on it, this moment was transcendent.
Because where there’s love, there’s hope. And that made me certain there was something we could do. Had to do.
fourteen_
After two seriously long days and nights of no sleep, I was severely exhausted and a tad grumpy. This despite the extreme dreamy bliss of Vray’s companionship and cuddle-ship. With my few awake and operational brain cells, I realized I had to get home and into my own bed for some major-league zzzzz’s. And rather soonish, too.
Part of me wanted to stay at Vray’s for every single solitary second possible. I even flirted with the idea of calling in sick for one of my co-op shifts to snuggle for a few more hours. Who could blame me, really? I’d never ever shared a bed with a boy before, so even if it left me sleep deprived and punchy, it seemed worth the sacrifice.
Another part of me could barely think or sit up or consider another trip up and down the three flights of stairs between his room and the kitchen. Then there was the annoying fact that after our first night together, it seemed like we were never alone again.
I don’t even remember Vray inviting them, but it seemed like Finn and Eric were at his house for the entire time, too, practically inhaling every last crumb of food that Aunt Martha had thoughtfully left in the fridge.
Don’t get me wrong. I was happy to be with my guy, even if I did have to share him. And at times it was very exciting, not to mention enlightening, to be around such feisty and politicized guys. But it was also incredibly tiring. For socially conscious world-aware green-beings, there sure was a whole lot of boy energy hogging the room. Not to mention hogging my boy’s attention.
Like when they spent what seemed like three hours riffing on possible song lyrics and potential fantasy gigs for O-Zone.
“Definitely Linkin Park,” Vray announced. “We open for them, we’re set for life.”
“As long as it’s not on the downslide or some lame reunion tour,” Eric scoffed. “We gotta make it happen soon.”
“Yeah,” Finn agreed, looking soulful and moony like he could actually see them on stage in front of that many people at some point in the near (let alone far) future.
Maybe I was missing something, but I found it hard to even imagine a full club of people coming to see them for a free gig. But if you’re going to have dreams, they may as well be big, right?
“Me, I’d bring back that vulvapalooza tour,” Eric said. “All the little hotties with those low back tattoos. Yum, it would be like a buffet.”
“It’s called the Lilith Fair and the point of those concerts was to showcase female artists,” I said.
“Exactly, and times are a-changing with babes or babe-fronted groups all over the charts, so if they did a retro-tour, they should put a trip like us on the bill to help us break large,” Eric answered. “We should write a song about it – a protest song demanding equality.”
Sometime during this particularly infantile conversation, it was also decided that even if they couldn’t find a sub, the Christmas Eve gig would go ahead minus Vray’s guitar. Even though I could hardly picture Vray tearing up the stage in a sling, it somehow seemed like the sanest thing they had actually said in hours.
I was hoping the guys might decide to leave after that so we could be alone again, but no such luck.
“The dude was a major highballer so he always gets the run of the cream,” Eric waxed on.
“Hello?” I waved. “Tree-planting virgin here. Same language, please?”
“So there are virgins in the room,” Eric smirked. “As suspected.”
I pretended I didn’t hear him. Or care. And tried to will myself to not turn pink.
“He means the guy planted the most trees at the camp so he gets a nice clean block of land to plant,” Finn explained when Eric stopped yammering long enough to take a gulp of beer.
I definitely preferred Finn to Eric, who was a bit raw and a lot rude. Not that it mattered since my taste was for Vray Foret and he was already on my menu and hopefully daily diet!
If Vray hadn’t been mangled and medicated, I might have been miffed he didn’t steer his buddies to include me more. Not that I needed him to stand up for me, but just to point out that I was there and important to him. Clearly I’d have to force the issue or suck it up. And since fatigue was the deciding factor, I closed my eyes, tuned them out and tried to have a mini-disco nap against Vray’s uninjured shoulder.
It didn’t exactly work. It was “Bella this” and “Bella that,” followed by “slashes and stashes and screefs and duffs.” At one point I thought they were making up words just to confuse me until I later checked the map and realized the two Bellas actually did exist. And treeplanters do have their own vernacular.
It was already dark outside and yet Eric and Finn showed no signs of having anywhere else to go. Didn’t they have other friends? Or families?
I tried to stay Zen and relaxed. I didn’t want Vray to think I was jealous and possessive. Or that I didn’t adore hanging with his buddies as much as he seemed to.
So I ate lentil soup and crackers while they spent what seemed like the next three weeks arguing about the proliferation of “agroceuticals and genetically modified crops” that were going to leave subsequent generations with extra limbs and strange stupid superpowers like the ability to lick your own earlobes.