Innocents

by Mary Elizabeth

  “Yes,” I tell him.

  “Where are you?” he asks again, wind whipping around his voice as he shuts his car door. The sound echoes. He’s here, outside, and the thought of surprising him lights me up.

  “Where do you want me to be?” I ask in turn, bending and unbending my legs.

  I hear his keys. “Right now?”

  The front door opens, and the eagerness in me that’s taken over doubles.

  “In my bed,” he answers after a pause, stoned sincerity making my craving heart and impatient ache tingle. “Underneath me. Holding on.”

  My blood burns under my skin, through all my limbs, everywhere. I half-hum and press my palm against the bottom of my stomach.

  “Come on, L. Where are you?”

  I hear him a floor below me, shuffling around, taking too long.

  “Come find me.”

  For one, two, three beats, Thomas is quiet. Then he hangs up, and the sound of his footsteps taunt hard pressed passion. My heart rate rushes and my fingers close anxiously around nothing as I pull my hands up from touching. I bend my knees again, exhaling as he opens the door.

  Upturned lips and breathtaking blues that are hooded with juvenile delinquency and surprised satisfaction make me smile. Sweater unzipped, backpack on one shoulder, trouble holds his sunglasses in his left hand and pushes his hair back with his right.

  “Where’s Rebecka?” he asks, closing in on me.

  I hold his eyes. “With her valentine. Where have you been?”

  “Around,” he says, grabbing each of my ankles and straightening my legs out. I slip from my elbows to my back, giggling as he brings me to the edge of his bed so my calves hang over and my feet dangle.

  Brushing each of his hands up my legs, curving them behind my knees, he asks, “How much time do we have?”

  Flat on my back as he stands above me, I bite my lip to keep from smiling as high as I want to. I love him from this angle. I want to savor this. When I don’t answer right away, Thomas strokes my kneecaps through my jeans, and I curve my ankles around the backs of his legs.

  “How much time do we need?” I ask, kind of playful, sort of completely serious.

  “All of it,” he answers, looking at my mouth. He looks at my chest and my hands, and back to my eyes, narrowing his like he’s searching for something. His smirk lifts on the left side, like he’s found it. “What were you doing when I called?”

  Dropping my lids, finding his hands and curling my fingers with his, I fib.

  “Nothing.”

  But his grip tightens, and he tugs me closer. He leans over me, and blues that look like they know the truth are impossible to hide from. Bringing my legs all the way around him, he holds me under his eyes and lowers his voice.

  “Tell me what you were doing in my bed without me, Bliss.”

  I cross my ankles behind him, trying to get him more near as my heart opens up.

  “Thinking of you.”

  Sliding his hands up my thighs, Thomas leans closer, coming all the way down until his lips are on my lips and his chest is right above mine. He kisses me softly, barely parted and sweet, lifting away before I’m ready.

  “When’s Becka coming home?” he asks, standing up while my pulse clamors and my longing is left in want.

  I sit up, securing hair pins that almost came loose. “I don’t know. Late probably. She’s going to text me when she’s on her way.”

  Sitting down on the edge of his bed and grabbing his backpack, Thomas says, “Okay.”

  He unzips one of the pockets, and as I shift onto my knees beside him, he pulls out three black and multicolored packets. I look up at the boy in front of me, and I can feel the excitement coming off him as he spreads various blunt wraps out in his hands. I think about right and wrong, and I can almost taste the thrill that courses through me.

  “I got strawberry-kiwi, cotton candy, and vanilla,” he says, offering them to me. He looks up, and I get it.

  Thomas smokes with ZigZags or Phillies, nothing like this. He bought these with me in mind. It’s Valentine’s Day, and he’s putting the most Dusty-perfect gift in my hands. Looking over each of them, the choice is a no brainer.

  I hold the vanilla one up, and Thomas smiles. He opens his window and turns music on low, and as he sits down next to me and starts breaking up on his history book, I watch closely.

  All rolled up, he hands me the finished product. While I bring it to my nose, inhaling dark vanilla and dank trees, he stands and tugs my right sock off.

  “Hey!” I wiggle naked, pink-painted toes. He grabs my left foot and tickles my sole. “Stop that!”

  “Come here,” he says, tugging me by my ankle like I weigh next to nothing. At the edge of the bed, he pulls off my other sock and I raise my eyebrows.

  Slipping his hands under the hem of my sweater, he pushes it up. I lift my arms so he can bring it over my head, leaving me in a camisole. I want this, but when his fingers slide to my jeans, I don’t understand.

  “Thomas?”

  Meeting my eyes, he undoes the button under his thumbs, and my heart thumps fast and hard.

  “You can’t go back to your parents’ house with this smell on your clothes,” he says, brushing his fingertips over the same skin I was touching before he got here, right where my craving is tightly concentrated. “Your dad wouldn’t let you come back. I’d have to break into Judge McCloy’s house to see you.”

  The thought only increases how good this sneaking feels.

  We sit across from each other on the middle of his bed, my bare knees touching his denim covered ones. Sunlight from his window heats my skin and makes his hair and hands and face look touchably warm. My conscience prickles as he brings the blunt up, but once it’s on his lips and he’s setting fire to the end, puffing hits back-to-back, making the cherry burn bright, my sense of right and wrong is overwhelmed with floating smoke and the sound of his inhale.

  Smoldering slow and steady, he takes a longer, deeper pull and blows it up toward his ceiling. This boy makes it look easy, and sexy, and when he passes it to me, I want to look that smooth too.

  “I just … breathe it in?” I ask, holding the contraband between my thumb and fingertips.

  “Pull until you feel it right here,” he says, patting the front of my neck. “Then when you do, stop and take another little breath and hold it.”

  Thomas brings the blunt up so that his fingertips touch my lips. His eyes don’t leave mine as I slowly start to pull smoke, and I feel him watching as my own lids dip. I don’t feel anything in my throat, so I pull a little harder, and then it’s there, like he said it would be.

  Leaning back with a quick gasp of air, I hold my breath until it’s impossible. Smoke seeps thinly from my lungs, and when I lick my lips that taste like vanilla, I do it again.

  I cough the second time, but we’re both laughing. At some point, I climb onto his lap, where I blow puff-clouds of smoke upward, and he exhales his all over me. He holds the blunt to my lips for each hit, and I hold onto him.

  Smoke and sunlight and mellow guitar chords float around us. Thomas runs his nose along my neck, and I can’t keep my hands out of his hair. It’s brushy-soft between my fingers, and his scalp is warm. I think I could fly on how good he feels, but his left arm remains around me at all times. I’m safe-kept, and loved, and high.

  Time drifts with the breeze. We shift onto our sides in his bed, covered with nothing but this heightened sense of connectedness, and I swear I can feel the earth moving.

  “Baby,” Thomas whispers, touching my hair, kissing my cheek, my chin, my neck. “Baby, baby …”

  Somehow, the blunt ends up in my hand and lifting it to his lips comes naturally. He pulls a deep hit before taking it from me and setting it on his nightstand. Tilting my head back, he presses his thumb in the corner of my mouth, and I part my lips for him. Forehead on mine, lips to lips, he breathes his smoke into me.

  What I can’t take floats around and between us, and my awareness feel
s like swimming. Our lips brush, but we’re not kissing. His forehead rests on my own, and when I wrap my arms around his neck, trying to bring us closer, he plants his hands firmly above my shoulders. He slides his nose along the side of mine, and it’s here: the ache that he gives but won’t give in to.

  Gripping his sleeves, breathing faster, I arch and stretch and whisper, “Touch, touch, touch …”

  His hands stay, but he kisses me and my heart beats overwhelming love. It floods all my senses, overwhelming me everywhere. There’s nowhere I can’t see or smell or taste him. The feel of his denim on my bare legs is everything in one second, and then it’s the strength in his arms, holding himself above me, the weight of his lips on my skin, the sound of him breathing. I can hear it as clearly as I can hear my own, and the birds outside, and the music, and his phone.

  Ignoring the sound, Thomas moves the strap of my camisole aside, kissing my shoulder until the ringing stops. But it starts again, and I hate it. I’m underneath him, wide open in love, but all I can suddenly think of is Valarie.

  “Stop,” I tell him, my voice vanilla-smoke raspy and not half as strong as I need it to be. “Your phone, stop.”

  Pulling away abruptly, this boy plucks his phone from his back pocket, pops it open, jerks the battery out, and tosses all the pieces across the room. He looks down at me with eyes that tell me I should know better. That this is love and none of anything else matters, but it’s too late.

  Knowing doesn’t bring the mood back.

  STILL BLAZED and ill-tempered, I lean against Thomas while he flips channels. I don’t want to feel like I do, but I don’t want to fight, so we sit.

  Picking at the bottom of my sweater, I remain silent until he can’t take it anymore.

  Shutting the television off, he sets the remote down and nudges me up.

  “Come on,” he says, grabbing his hoodie. “Get your shoes.”

  FRONT WINDOWS cracked, we’re relaxed in the back of his parents’ old Audi and it feels good again.

  “Caffeine isn’t good for you, you know,” Thomas says, glancing over.

  The sun has set and the purple sky and the Yaquina lighthouse paint my temperamental troublemaker in soft hues. The scent and sounds of the sea drift in with the breeze, mixing with smoke from the blunt he’s relit and the low melodies of Citizen Cope singing about a girl that won’t give in and he’ll never let go of.

  Taking another drink of the coffee he bought me, I shrug. I don’t know what he said to get the baristas to make a pumpkin spice latte in February, but cinnamon and caffeine fill me with warm relief.

  Under his breath and around a hit, Thomas chuckles.

  “It’s bad for your bones and skin,” he says, smirking as I tuck my toes under his leg. “And your heart. Uncontrolled beats are a prelude to heart attack, princess.”

  I roll my eyes and laugh some, because I do feel them. I felt them earlier in his bed, and before that, when I was thinking of him. My unsteady heartbeats have nothing to do with coffee.

  “Bring on the palpitations,” I say before taking another drink, letting Dusty lecture me about bad habits, as if I’m too young to understand irony.

  “I’m serious,” he continues, smoking up and blowing out. “Your body will build a tolerance. When you feel it’s becoming bad for you, you’ll want more. You’ll need more. Caffeine’s a drug, Leigh.”

  I laugh. I can’t help it. Maybe I’m still high.

  “Oh yeah?” I ask. “Like pot?”

  This boy blows a cloud of smoke up, and I watch it swirl-spread out across the car’s ceiling.

  “Pot’s from the earth,” he says, puffing smoke rings while I wrap both hands around my cup, absorbing its warmth through my palms. I inhale the cream-sweet scent of cinnamon and nutmeg and ginger, and it may be full of stimulants, but I feel calm.

  Thomas’ presence is the best Valentine’s Day gift. Candy is nice, and candy flavored blunt wraps were thoughtful, but this is what I wanted most. Just us.

  “Pumpkins are from the earth,” I say. “And coffee beans.”

  “You think there’s real pumpkin in that?” he asks. When I can’t do more than smile and stare at his lips, he sits up straighter.

  “Caffeine’s an analeptic. It fucks with your impulse control and your insulin resistance.”

  I laugh because, “What?”

  He pulls a hit. “That shit will give you stress hormones, Bliss.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Baseball.”

  We’re quiet for a second, looking at each other. His carefreeness is back, but his smile is understated.

  “You sure you’re not worried it’ll stunt my growth?”

  Between licking his bottom lip and bringing the blunt back up, Dusty glances at my chest without a stitch of modesty.

  “You’re growing up fine, girl.”

  My cheeks heat, and I hide my smile with another drink.

  After I’ve finished my coffee, Thomas offers me the blunt. When I decline, my actual addiction leans into me, nudges his hood from my head, and exhales his smoke all over my neck.

  The playful punk that was lecturing me is gone. This honest to a fault, recklessly unflinching, too-beautiful, fated youth is a person only I know. This is my person.

  He tosses the blunt out the window while I drop my empty cup to the floorboard, and we shift together. We kiss open and deep, claiming and binding. We kiss the way I wanted to earlier, with eyes closed and hearts open, and I know the real drug is here. It’s between us and inside us.

  It’s the way he opens my lips with his lips to kiss me deeper, and the way my pulse feels like his name is in my veins.

  It’s the way I can’t stay hurt or mad or jealous, and the way he can’t stand for me to.

  It’s the craving that never goes away, the need for more that grows as we feed it. It’s the tolerance he was talking about and knowing he’s right.

  It’s this, our secret.

  We’re the drug.

  “Thomas, wake up.”

  My hangover-heavy eyes snap open at the sound of my mother’s disapproving voice. I sit up, panicked, squinting against harsh sunlight and a throbbing headache. The sickening taste of flat beer and nicotine lingers in my mouth, making it hard to swallow, but Leigh’s side of the bed is empty, easing my drunk heart.

  I fall back, covering my face with Leighlee’s sweetheart scented pillow.

  “What do you want?” I ask, each syllable more painful than the last.

  Mom jerks my small salvation away and tosses the pillow across the room. The potent aroma of her high-end perfume turns my stomach. I don’t know how she’s up and dressed when the world is obviously ending.

  “It’s after two. Get up before I call your father,” she says, throwing dirty clothes from my bed to a pile on the floor. “You’re a pig.”

  “Sorry.” I rub my hands over my face. The smell of cigarettes between my prints is worse than the scent of her cruel fragrance.

  The woman who gave me life walks around my room, stacking dirty plates on top of each other, tossing out empty soda cans, and scoffing at the cigarette burns on the carpet below my window.

  “You’re a piece of work, you know that?” She kicks a pair of pants into the growing stack of crap that needs to be washed beside my bed. “I know you took the car out last night, and you’re lucky I moved it before your dad saw it parked on the fucking lawn.”

  “I went over to Petey’s. His mom—”

  She holds up her hand, stopping me. “I don’t give a shit about Petey. You’re drinking and driving, and you’re taking the car when you’ve been told not to. Do it again and the keys are mine.” At my dresser, pulling out random, mismatched clothes, Mom throws them at me. “Get up. You’re a horrible example for your sister and Bliss.”

  I smile to myself.

  She has no idea.

  My doting mother is halfway out the door when she stops and actually looks at me. “You know, if you get in any real trouble
, Judge McCloy won’t allow Leighlee over here anymore.”

  I can translate the threat in her tone: fuck up your own life, but not hers—not mine.

  “Got it,” I say.

  She slams the door, splitting my piercing skull. I roll over to my stomach, spreading out on cool, void of meaning sheets. Last night is blurry. The boys. The Sluts. Maybe we were at Pete’s. I have zero recollection of the drive home.

  But I remember love.

  I remember what her lips tasted like: powdered sugar and need.

  Baby was brave and rolled me over, straddling my hips. She blushed, caught. And I laughed, amused. The mini powdered donuts wrapper crinkle, crinkle, crunched as I pulled it out from under my back.

  “How many times do I have to tell you not to eat in my bed, baby Bliss?” I asked.

  I smile at the memory of her little moans, and somewhere between closed-tight eyes and rocking hips, I fall asleep again. I don’t wake up until my powdered-sugar princess is back with me.

  “Shh …” L presses her finger to my lips. “I can’t stay,” she whispers in the low light coming through my bedroom window.

  “Where’s my sister?” I ask quietly, gripping onto Leigh’s sides, moving her under me.

  “She’s outside. Smitty dropped by.” My girl’s breathless. Love’s eyes are wild and her cheeks are rosy, reddened as she eagerly moves herself against me, firm and deliberate.

  I press my lips to her neck, kissing her pulse point before opening my mouth and pulling thin skin between my teeth. Leighlee’s warm where she’s made me hard—baby came in here on a whim, but she had no idea what she was walking into.

  There’s thrill in this secret.

  “No marks, Thomas,” she says faintly.

  My lips curve into a smile along her collarbone. I pull down her top and breathe over the pink lace layering her slight breast, tempted to rip the bra off entirely. I know she wants me to, but I don’t. My hips still and my thumb doesn’t brush; my lips don’t kiss and my mouth doesn’t cover.

  Leigh’s chest rises and falls tensely—timidly. She’s sure, but so uncertain. She’s never shown herself to anyone before … I’d know if she had.