Sheltered

by Charlotte Stein

  A subject change was in order she felt. A nice, lighthearted subject change that somehow felt much less lighthearted once she’d gotten it out.

  “It’s weird—I don’t even know your name.”

  She wanted to kick herself as soon as she’d said it. Even in her limited experience of action movies, she knew it was the kind of thing the heroine said to Tom Cruise after he’d rescued her from a crashing helicopter.

  She, on the other hand, had fallen over gardening equipment.

  “I mean, I—”

  “It’s Tyler. Vandervoort—but usually people just call me Van.”

  She should have known he’d have a cool name. Not like Eve, all ready to do some stuff in the Bible with a stick in the mud called Adam and God breathing down her neck all the time.

  He hadn’t even been saddled with a terrible first name, like Barry or George or Phil. He had Tyler, and he had a cool nickname, and it made her want to tease, for once.

  “Not Voort then?” she asked, but couldn’t believe she’d actually done it a second later. The urge to apologize rose immediately, like an old friend—but then she saw his face. Surprised, over halfway to smiling, that rueful look again.

  He wasn’t going to make her pay for it. He wasn’t at all.

  “Ha ha. Very funny.”

  “Hey—it’s better than my surname. Bennett. Might as well be Smith.”

  He glanced down at the iPod he’d started turning over and over in his hands. The ones she couldn’t stop looking at, no matter how hard she tried.

  “Evie’s pretty,” he said, and she immediately had to think about something other than those words. They just sounded far too much like he’d told her she was pretty, and nothing could make that idea sensible or sane.

  She pointed to the only other noticeable object around them. Took the heat off herself, and her addled mind.

  “What are you listening to?”

  To his credit, he didn’t draw attention to what she’d just obviously done. He just answered, cool and casual.

  “Portishead.”

  Of course, she had absolutely no idea who or what that was. He could have said “bacon tastes like cheese” and it would have made the same amount of sense to her.

  “Oh.”

  “You like them?”

  Honesty was best, she felt.

  “I’ve never heard of them—but not because they’re not great, or anything. I mean, I’m sure they are. It’s just that, you know. I’ve not heard of a lot of bands.”

  “There must be some music you like.”

  She noticed he omitted the “you’re allowed to listen to”, and thanked him silently for it. It had been implied in her words, and was definitely implied in his, but no one had to come out and say it.

  “I don’t even have a CD player,” she said, as carefully as she could. Something like a smile on her lips—though one that didn’t meet her eyes.

  “You want me to make you a playlist?”

  She hesitated then. There were a lot of things he could have meant, after all.

  “I…uh…”

  “I’ll make you a playlist,” he said, without waiting for her to fumble toward words that were probably all wrong anyway. She’d thought he meant making her a mix tape, or something like it, and now here he was messing around with the little sliver of metal in his hands.

  “You want moody or uplifting?”

  She answered without even thinking about it.

  “Both.”

  “Yeah—this one’s perfect. You’ll like this one,” he said, which just made her wonder how he knew. They’d only spoken a couple of times, and both conversations had been fraught with missteps and blunders and lots of hedging.

  But the thing of it was…she had faith that he did. He understood, and the thought made her greedy for whatever songs he finally settled on.

  “Are you going to…” she started, but he’d already finished with the iPod before she’d even gotten the words out. In answer to the question she hadn’t quite asked—Are you going to actually let me have that thing?—he passed it to her.

  “Here,” he said. Just like that.

  “I can’t borrow this. I can’t…I don’t even know what to do with it. I’ll break it.”

  He leaned over the fence. Showed her the little wheel in the center and the buttons that made the screen light up.

  “You won’t break it. Just click on this—see your name? Click again, press play. Done.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “It’s not as though you’re gonna run away with it. Are you?”

  She tried not to laugh. Her insides felt too giddy to let something like that out.

  “Doubtful.”

  “And I know you’ll be real careful with it.”

  “I will. Thank you. That’s really…”

  She struggled to come up with the right word? Sweet? Sweet just put her right back into Hello Kitty territory again. But the fact remained—that was how he seemed. Like the sweetest person ever, in a coarse punk package.

  “It’s really kind of you,” she settled on, finally.

  But in response he just shrugged. No big deal. The nicest thing anyone had ever done for her was really no big deal at all.

  * * * * *

  The music started out slow. Just a thumping, distorted beat, of the kind her father would tut and try to correct the levels on his stereo over. It seemed to shiver out of the little metal rectangle in her hands, up the wires and through the earphones and into her body, where it sounded like the loudest thing in the world.

  Did he always have it this loud? She couldn’t imagine how anyone could listen to a beat like that, at a volume like the one he had it at. It was too much. It drowned out her heartbeat.

  And then a woman’s voice thrummed over the top, like nothing she’d ever heard before. It sounded like an echo of the beat, haunting and low and able to reach some part inside her that hadn’t previously existed.

  She couldn’t breathe for a second. The screen said that the song was being sung by something called Massive Attack, but that didn’t tell her anything about who this woman was or how she could make her voice sound the way it did.

  And it didn’t tell her about the words either. The ones that struck like a gong in her chest and made her want to get up and pace the room. Maybe find Van’s phone number, even though she didn’t have a phone and couldn’t have called him even if she had.

  This girl I knew needs some shelter. But she don’t believe anyone can help her.

  She thought of Van’s eyes, so dark and wounded. Like this woman’s voice, pouring out of a stupid bit of metal at her.

  I’ll stand in front of you, the woman sang. I’ll take the force of the blow.

  Of course it could have meant any number of things. That the woman was willing to take some sort of punishment. That the woman lived in an abusive relationship, and wanted it to continue.

  But none of those were the way her mind wanted her to hear it. Someone’s willing to stand in front of this person, and take the blow for them. Someone’s willing to be their champion, to help them even though it hurts to.

  Of course, she immediately thought of her father saying…that thing he’d said. The one about what would happen if she, Evie, decided to run away one day. For example, all sorts of accidents could befall people, without another person to keep watch. Her mother was known for being clumsy, so really…it wouldn’t be such a surprise, to find her at the bottom of the stairs.

  Though weirdly this wasn’t what she found herself thinking of, as the music wound on. It should have been, but it wasn’t. She thought about Van instead, turning to some faceless friend of his to say, This girl I knew…

  And then she had to put the thing down, turn it off, not listen. There were too many other songs on the playlist he’d made so quickly, with all sorts of telling titles. And though they tempted her, she couldn’t quite bring herself to play another.

  Instead, she clicked off her lamp and buried the
iPod back beneath her mattress, hand over it at all times in case something should happen in the night. Maybe it would slip out, and when her father came to wake her in the morning it would be there, on the floor. Black against beige, all full of accusation.

  But there was no accusation in her head. Just those words, over and over. This girl I knew…

  She could feel sleep coming, but the song remained. It thumped through her head, without the need for things like batteries and power and earphones. It thumped through her body too, until dreams started fingering the edges of her mind.

  Weird, twisting dreams about his charcoal drawings and his charcoal gaze and his mouth, like the split center of some exotic fruit.

  The naked limbs she hadn’t seen moved off the page and coiled on a bed somewhere. Thighs curved and breasts rounded, everything tangling with something she couldn’t make out so distinctly.

  A man, she thought. A man.

  But even her free-flying dream-self didn’t know what a naked man looked like. Or at least, her dream-self didn’t know entirely. It just guessed some of it and filled the rest in with Calvin Klein ads she’d seen on billboards, shoulders broad and torso covered in delicious bumps, everything gray and black, gray and black.

  Even though Van wouldn’t be gray and black. And he didn’t have a body like those models—she knew he didn’t. He looked big beneath his layered jerseys and t-shirts. Solid and unmovable. He had shoulders twice the size of any of those men, and the moment the subconscious thought occurred her dream turned into something different.

  The charcoal lines became clearer, more distinct. Then after a moment she could make out the backs of his real hands—honey-colored and rough-knuckled—as they traced a line down over something soft on her.

  My thigh, she thought, just as he turned those sandpaper knuckles over and gave her the smoothness of his palms.

  And oh God, it felt good. Better than she would have imagined, in all of her halfhearted thoughts about this sort of thing. Sometimes in her dreams the billboard guy took her out on an imaginary picnic and gave her some imaginary pecks on the cheek, but he almost never put his hands above the knee.

  The dream-Van put his hands above her knees. He did more than that, in fact. He kissed her there, just at the beginnings of her thigh, and when she tried to get away he gripped her harder. Kissed in a filthier, open-mouthed sort of fashion.

  It felt like heaven. It felt like hell. She wanted to tell him to stop, but her conscious self had pressed a hand to her mouth ages ago and all she could manage was a startled whimper.

  He was kissing her inner thighs. She’d never even thought about kissing his lips, and yet here he was with his mouth as close to the slippery seam of her sex as she could imagine it being. And worse than that, the dream wanted him to carry on. The dream said, He could, you know. He could kiss you there in the same way people kiss with their lips, and no one would have to know but you and me.

  While back in reality her own hand found that sweet ache between her legs. Of course she didn’t go under her clothes. And though she could feel something pretty spectacular when she rubbed over that little plump shape between her legs, she didn’t press inward. Doing so was bad, it was wrong, it would send her straight to hell.

  Even if Van didn’t seem to think so. He just ran a finger all the way through her soaking slit, spreading it open as he went. Exposing things she’d only ever thought of in the abstract, or while half-asleep like this. Rubbing things she never rubbed, unless she absolutely had to.

  Though she knew its name. My clit, she thought, in Melissa Markerson’s voice. Melissa Markerson, who’d told her in the tone of someone with a terrible secret that between girl’s legs was a little bud, and if you rubbed it, amazing things would happen.

  And by amazing things she had of course meant have an orgasm. Like the feeling that rose in her now, unstoppable and unchecked. It began in the place her hand was pressing, in the place Van was kissing in a dream with no real form and absolutely no morals, and spread outward, warm and thick.

  Then cycled back, to grab ahold of her harder. Be dirtier, be naughtier the dream said, and though her conscious-self couldn’t quite manage it, her sleeping-self could. Her sleeping-self produced images of Van pushing himself between her legs, all big and solid and too much.

  And just as she started to panic, it murmured a series of utterly soothing things in her ear. You’re lovely, Evie, it said, in Van’s molten-metal voice. You’re so lovely, and I just want to slide my cock inside you until you beg me for more.

  God yeah, that did the trick. Just the word cock felt like enough on its own, but then the dream-Van said beg and more and suddenly she found herself rutting against the mattress. Hand pressing too hard over her now swollen sex, body thrumming with that pleasure she hardly knew.

  But definitely wanted to know better. This wasn’t like before, with a bar of soap lingering just a little too long between her legs, or a faint feeling of having humped the mattress in her sleep. This was real and wet and visceral, and it wasn’t just about him.

  There were other things in there too. A need. A driving need she hadn’t really considered before. It took on shape and form, walked the halls of her thoughts, slathering and hungry.

  And when she wanted to turn back, not face this pleasure, it got hold of her and made her take it. It grabbed her by the hair, pulled her back into the steady and pounding thrusts of the person now behind her.

  Though it wasn’t just a person. It was him, gasping in her ear and moaning how good she felt, everything still so vague somehow and yet so clear at the same time. This was what sex would feel like. She knew it. Could almost tighten her aching pussy around it, as his hands came up to fondle her breasts and his cock fucked into her harder.

  Don’t stop, she wanted to tell him, but back in reality her hand pressed more firmly over her mouth. The tension between what she should be doing and what she wanted to do warred, briefly, and then quite suddenly everything broke.

  It broke so hard she didn’t quite know what to do with all of it. In the past, her orgasms had been quiet, private sorts of affairs. Not like that one word Melissa had used, or the thing people talked about in magazines she wasn’t allowed to read.

  But this thing…this was the real one. She knew it was before she’d even slid out of the dream and back into reality, though once there that bright and brilliant pleasure took on a different connotation.

  Suddenly it didn’t seem quite as bright and brilliant. Oh, she could still feel it all right. Her heart still raced, her body still trembled with it. When she moved, she could feel the slippery wetness it had produced, and blushed to know that she had done that to herself.

  But there was a problem, beyond such furtive, delicious and potentially mortifying things. She knew it had happened, and yet for a long moment couldn’t bring herself to face it. No one could have brought themselves to face this.

  She’d made a sound, in her sleep. One that had definitely gotten through the press of her fingers, because as she’d woken with that pleasure still surging through her body, she’d heard it.

  She could still hear it now—a guttural and not just potentially mortifying moan. And as she lay there in the dark of her bedroom, breath held, she felt almost certain she could hear her father getting out of the bed. Were those his footsteps on the hallway carpet, heavy and slow?

  For a long, long moment she couldn’t tell. So long that her breath started wanting out and her body began trembling under the pressure. He was going to come in here, and see her like this—awash in desire for a punk—and by God she didn’t even know what he’d do.

  There were no rules for masturbation. It was just a given that she would never dare partake in anything like it. The punishment for this had to be somewhere off the page, somewhere past the point of guidelines and don’t-you-dares.

  A hole dug in the garden and you in it, she thought, as the absolute silence of the house sunk over her. No one was coming, but she didn’t l
et out a breath until she absolutely had to. And though sleep returned, it only did so when those words returned to her, over and over like a prayer.

  This girl I knew…

  Chapter Three

  She didn’t want to go out there. No sane person would. She’d had a sex dream about him and touched herself right in the middle of it. If she went out there, he’d read this indisputable fact all over her face and then offer to dig her father’s hole himself.

  No one like him would ever be able to tolerate someone like her having sex thoughts about his body. He’d made that playlist for her because he found her fragile and pitiable. He hadn’t done it because he wanted to wander the garden of earthly delights with her.

  Lord. Even my dirty thoughts are filled with religious nonsense. He probably thinks I’m a Jesus freak. He probably follows me to Bible college, and then laughs.

  It didn’t look as if he was laughing when she caught a glimpse of him through the patio doors, however. He had one arm on the fence, just like before, only this time he wasn’t listening to music—obviously—and he didn’t seem to be looking out for Mickey Ryerson.

  He was waiting for her, for definite. Of course he was. She had his gift, clutched sweatily in her right hand. And the gift told her the sorry truth of the matter—she would have to go out there, if only to give it back to him.

  She braced herself. Clenched her teeth hard around nothing, tried to make her face as neutral as possible. But even after she’d successfully done all of this, she found she couldn’t reach for the patio door.

  Instead she just had to stand there, watching him through glass, as he brought something to his lips. Like a hand he wanted to kiss, only small and smoky and completely and utterly forbidden.

  God, she’d been worried about silly little things like sex thoughts and masturbation, and here he was smoking pot about three inches away from her house. Because that was almost certainly what he was doing. She knew that cigarettes didn’t look that way. And the way that he was smoking it—it didn’t look like that guy she’d seen at the bus stop, puffing away on his Marlboro Light.