The Wide Night Sky

by Matt Dean

  Chapter 17

  Doris’s mother lived in a ranch house built into the side of a hill. To John Carter, a lowcountry boy through and through, the novelty of even a modest elevation was practically inexhaustible. He stood at the window of Doris’s bedroom, looking out on the scraggly firs that lined the slope below.

  From the bed, Doris said, “I’ve never seen anyone so fascinated with the idea of a hill.” She sat with her back to the headboard, cuddling a stuffed Tigger against her chest. “I didn’t spirit you away from Charleston to look at trees, you know.”

  “I can’t help it.” He lifted the window. Clutching the sill with both hands, he breathed in the winter smell of fallen leaves and woodsmoke. “Even the air’s different. Is this what they mean when they talk about mountain air?”

  Doris laughed. “I don’t think so. It’s Greenville, not Quito.”

  Still hugging Tigger, she got up. John Carter turned from the window at last and watched her as she crossed to her desk. Even in her simplest and most comfortable clothing—gray sweatshirt, pink sweatpants—she looked inexpressibly beautiful.

  She set Tigger in her chair, arranging him so that he faced the desk and not the bed. She sorted through a stack of CD cases, moving them off the pile in twos and threes. When she found the one she’d been looking for, it turned out to be empty. The disc was already in the stereo. She pressed play.

  Crowd noises, people whistling and cheering, and then a piano riff, a sequence of arpeggios descending chromatically. The voice, when it came, belonged to Carly Simon, one of Doris’s great idols, along with Carole King, Diana Ross, and Dusty Springfield. It was a song he’d heard before. A sexy song, all about how good It was with one particular man. It, with a capital I.

  His knees weakened. He made his way to the bed and sat down.

  Turning from the desk, Doris lifted her sweatshirt over her head and tossed to it the floor. Underneath, she wore a white V-necked T-shirt. No bra. He could see the tight buds of her nipples and a hint, even, of their color. The color of teak. He’d seen them before—her nipples, her areolae—but only like this, obscured by cotton or lace.

  She walked toward him, one foot directly in front of the other, catlike, her hips swaying. She lifted the bottom hem of her T-shirt, just enough to get at the drawstring of her sweatpants. She yanked one end of the string, and both ends fell limp.

  When she reached the bed, he took her hands in his and moved them aside.

  “No?” She bit her lip.

  “No! I mean, yes! But let me.”

  He let go of her hands, and she smoothed her palms down her hips. He tucked his fingertips into the waistband of her sweatpants. She shivered. He jerked his hands away.

  “Okay?” he said.

  She nodded.

  Again, he slipped his fingers between fabric and skin. Slowly—though not with the suavity he’d hoped for—he eased her sweatpants down. Her underwear was plain blue cotton.

  The smell of her came to him, musky and sweet, nearly indescribable. It was too complex and unfamiliar to name, but it reminded him of apple cider. She stepped out of her sweatpants and he kicked them aside. With the tips of his fingers, he stroked the back of her thigh, and she shivered again.

  When he lifted her shirt, she shooed his hands away. He fell back and looked up at her.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” She smiled—sort of—but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. “I— Nothing.”

  “If you don’t want to— It’s okay, if you don’t—”

  He was so hard in his jeans that he thought he might faint, but he was sincere. If he were honest with himself, he was terrified of disappointing her. Part of him thought it’d be a mercy if they could wait a while longer.

  All at once, Doris was kissing him. She grabbed his shirt by the fistful. He had the sense that he’d been in the middle of saying something, but he couldn’t remember what. Returning the kiss—grunting, in fact, with the intensity of it—he hugged her tight against him. He touched the hem of her shirt.

  “Can I leave it on?” Her eyes darted around the room. “If it weren’t so bright in here—”

  The song changed again. More cheering, more whistling, and then a broken-chord figure on electric guitar. It gave him an idea. A crazy idea. An idea he should ignore. But then—

  He leapt off the bed and stumbled across the room to the desk. By luck, the CD he wanted—another Carly Simon CD, Boys in the Trees—lay on top of all the others. He swapped out the discs and skipped ahead to “Tranquillo.” A disco number if there ever was one—cymbals chattering, rhythm guitar scratching, strings squalling. You could almost hear the swish of polyester. Ordinarily he skipped it, but right now, the corniness of it was perfect for his dumb idea.

  Bobbing his head, tapping his feet, he taught himself the song’s rhythm. Within a bar or two, he felt his shoulders popping with the upbeats, and then his knees and hips loosened and he began dancing for real. He tried undoing the rubber buttons of his rugby shirt, but he succeeded only in ripping the second one off its threads. Crossing his arms in front of him, he lifted the shirt by the hem and eased it up and up and finally pulled it off and let it fall.

  Doris sat on the edge of the bed. She giggled and covered her mouth with her hand. “What are you doing?”

  As if in answer, he tugged hard at the button of his jeans. He’d forgotten that he’d worn pants with a zipper fly. Buttons were innately sexual, the way they more or less burst open if you worked them right, but zipper was just a zipper. He’d never given the matter a moment’s thought before now, but the proof was in the popping.

  He turned his back to Doris and shimmied his ass. Thumbs hooked in hip pockets, he wiggled his jeans down his legs. He let them fall and kicked them away. He glanced over his shoulder. By now, Doris was laughing so hard that tears gleamed on her cheeks. She’d stuffed her mouth with her fist.

  In his mind’s eye, he saw his next move clearly—a spinning jump that would end with him facing the bed, his feet spread wide, his hands out at his sides. He’d seen it in countless music videos and YouTube skating clips. Simple enough in theory, but in real life he stubbed the toe of one foot on the opposite calf. First one ankle and then the other struck the desk chair—two different spots on the chair, but the same place on each ankle, right where the nerve crossed the bone. Making the sound anyone would make, halfway between ow-wow-wow and oh-ho-ho, he staggered to the bed.

  Still laughing, Doris met him partway and took him by the hands. She towed him toward her and sat him down beside her. He saw that he’d knocked poor Tigger to the floor.

  “Sweetie,” she said. “What on earth were you doing?”

  John Carter rubbed his ankles. “I just wanted to—”

  “Show some skin? Get me hot? Lighten the mood? Be a complete dope?”

  He turned sideways and drew his legs up under him. He folded her hands in his. She turned to face him. Her eyes—the splendor of her umber eyes—broke his heart, as they had at least once a day for the past month.

  “I was just trying to make you feel comfortable. Whatever you think you’re hiding under here”—he plucked at the hem of her shirt—“it doesn’t matter.”

  Leaning back, he touched an angled white line on his belly. “Appendectomy,” he said. He lifted his right foot. With his fingertip, he traced a long thin scar on the inside of his leg. Jagged at the top, wobbly at the bottom. “Fell through a rotten floor. Got scraped up on a rusty nail. About a billion stitches and a tetanus shot. Totally Ben’s fault, but I got grounded.”

  Standing up, he took a step back from her. “One more thing.”

  What had come before had been easy. This took courage. He steeled himself. In a single quick motion—get it over with—he jerked his boxers down to his ankles. He plucked the end of his foreskin to give himself a bit of length.

  He lifted his penis out of the way with one hand. With the other, he plumped his scrotum and let it lie in the cup of his palm. To his
eye, the peculiarity was plain, unmissable. On the left side, his sac was normal and full. On the right, it was as flat as a deflated balloon. But she didn’t see it, didn’t understand. She looked him up and down.

  “There’s only one,” he said. “The right one never descended. They did surgery. I was just a baby, so I don’t remember, but there’s a scar.” He looked for it—a short diagonal mark somewhere below his appendectomy. He couldn’t find it. He pulled up his shorts and sat next to her on the bed.

  “I feel like such a fool,” she said. “I’m self-conscious about my weight, is all. I’m usually a do-it-with-the-lights-out kind of girl.”

  They fell back and lay side by side.

  “This didn’t go like I planned,” he said.

  When he rolled onto his side to face her, she turned toward him. She lay with one hand cradling her face and the other draped across her belly, so that her arms formed a kind of frame around her breasts, pressing them together. At the same time, the neck of her shirt sagged open, and he could see the upper edge of one areola. He hardened again. As his penis stiffened, it poked out through the fly of his boxer shorts.

  With a finger under her chin, he brought her face to his and kissed her. She scooted toward him and he wrapped his arms around her. He crushed her body against him. He couldn’t get her close enough.

  He couldn’t get her close enough— But—

  He pulled away. “I’m not sure if this is the time or not—”

  “The time for what?”

  “I brought some…um…protection. Should I…?”

  “I’m on the pill.”

  He blinked at her, thinking, Aspirin…Tylenol…Advil…

  “The pill,” she said. “Birth control.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh. Well, then. Um.” He touched the fabric of her shirt. “Is it—is it okay now?”

  She shifted her weight, lifted herself, helped him remove the shirt. When she lay bare to the waist, arms across her breasts, he splayed his fingers across the mound of her belly. She trembled. He kissed her skin in each of the gaps between his fingers—mumblety-peg with kisses—and then moved his hand to stroke her from her navel to the cleft between her breasts.

  She let her hands slide away and drop to the coverlet. He gazed at her breasts. He’d waited for ages, it seemed. Tenderly, he held them and kissed them. He took one nipple into his mouth, but he soon released it again. He feared he might come.

  Doris grabbed at his hands and heaved him toward her. Reaching down, fumbling, she shoved and prodded the waistband of his shorts. He lifted himself up just enough to slip them down his legs and kick them away, and then he stripped off her panties.

  As soon as they were both naked, the logistics of the next step escaped him. When he’d thought about this moment before—and he had thought about it, millions of times—it had seemed like a natural thing, simple as breathing. But now—

  Her hand stole into the space between them, and she guided him. And then, and then, it was as simple as breathing.