by CD Reiss
“Don’t be. Just remember where you are.” Ever so tenderly, he pinched my nipples again. It hurt a little, but the pain was part of the pleasure. “Can you put your hands behind you? On the branch?”
He guided my arms behind me. My shirt fell back down, but once I was secure, leaning back against my locked elbows, he drew it up again. I was exposed to the sky.
“Next time, I’ll do it your way.” He pushed my chin up so I was looking through the branches at the clouds and ran his hand down my body. “I’ll go up first so you can lean on the trunk.”
“Yes, okay.”
Both hands landed on my breasts. “I like it when you agree.”
He kissed my sternum and twisted my nipples.
I groaned.
He twisted a little harder. “Do you like that?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“You smell like roses.” He sucked one nipple and hurt the other in a way that brought pleasure to the surface. I was filled with blood, my insides bigger than my outside, stretching my skin to thin translucence. “I should call you Catherine of the Roses.”
“More,” I gasped, the word falling out of my mouth like a piece of gum I’d forgotten about.
I didn’t even know what I was saying. I was losing my mind as he worked me over. Blind, deaf, dumb. My whole body was wedged between his fingers.
My face was toward the sky, a curtain of dappled orange from the daylight on the other side of my closed eyes. A frame of white-hot shockwaves flickered in my vision, and something broke in me. I stopped thinking, breathing, feeling anything but him as the world pressed in on me and I pressed out into the world.
“Jesus!” he said when I finally gasped and opened my eyes.
“Oh, my G—”
“You came.”
Sitting up straight, I put my hands over my face. I was ashamed. I’d done that, in front of him, from nothing. “I didn’t think I would!”
When I took my hands away and saw him looking at me, I yanked my shirt down.
“It was awesome!”
Awesome? I wanted to die.
Lance yipped right before Harper’s voice came past the fence.
“Catherine!”
Chris looked at his watch, but I didn’t need to see it. Three p.m. had come and my bra wasn’t hooked. I reached behind me and grappled with it.
I had to get down and Chris was in my way. He’d made me come right here, outside, in a tree. I was ashamed and nervous, and he was pulling my shirt down to cover me. He was beautiful, with his blue eyes and the wavy fall of hair over one side of his forehead. He was inappropriate. Unsuitable. Dangerous to my future, whatever that was.
“Hey,” Harper called without shouting, as if she knew I was close by.
Chris climbed up a branch to get out of my way, indicating his handmade staircase, then putting his finger to his lips.
Lance stretched his chain to get to Harper, wagging his tail like windshield wipers in a storm. She crawled through the hole in the fence to pet him while looking all around.
“Cath?” she called.
“Coming!” I shouted, scuttling down.
“There you are!” She stood while Lance sniffed around her ankles. “Mom said to go to the car.”
I slung my bag over my shoulder. “Okay, let’s go.”
“This is Lance, right? Is Chris around?” She pointed at the tree. “Were you climbing with him?”
“I’m sure he’s working.”
“Is that a ladder up the trunk?” She pinched her bottom lip until it creased.
I slapped her hand down. “Stop bending your lip like that. It’s going to stay that way.” I took the hand I’d slapped before she had a chance to bend her lip again, pulling her to the break in the fence. “And don’t even think of climbing that tree. It’s not safe.” She went through first, and I followed. “I’m telling the grounds crew it’s there before someone gets hurt.”
My muscles didn’t relax until we got to the car and I knew Harper hadn’t seen Chris in the tree. If anyone knew the way he’d touched me and the way it made me feel, I’d die. Literally die.
Chapter 12
catherine - present day
The squeaking upstairs was done, and the pipes rattled in the walls when the shower turned on. I read the final draft of my note for the hundredth time. Beginning to end.
* * *
Dear Chris,
* * *
Your letter came as a surprise. It’s wonderful to hear from you after all these years. How they’ve flown by!
* * *
I am so sorry to hear about Lance. I think burying him at home is the right thing. I know Joan buried Galahad on Wild Horse Hill. You should get a space nearby.
* * *
Though it would be great to see you, I’ll be unavailable while you’re here. Please accept my condolences.
* * *
Sincerely,
Catherine
* * *
Harper bounced down the steps in a pair of little pink shorts. Taylor was at her heels. The way he followed her was so cute I smirked a little.
“There’s a pot of soup on the stove if you’re interested,” I said.
“Thanks!” Harper went to the kitchen. She’d say she hated it because I’d used frozen peas and carrots, then she’d eat it anyway because she was a human vacuum.
On the way to the kitchen, still holding the half-crumpled letter, something overwhelming occurred to me.
Was Harper going to leave with this guy?
Leave the house?
Leave Barrington?
Leave me?
She did complain about the soup, and she ate it. She argued with Taylor about a laptop and bowls and I made all the right gestures and sounds, but I wasn’t really there. I was sinking into a quicksand of things that hadn’t occurred to me.
I had been glad to have Taylor around. Glad Harper was happy.
But it had never occurred to me that he’d take her away.
In the middle of the conversation, the letter took on a life of its own. I pulled an envelope out of the rack. It already had a stamp and a white label over my address. The post office hadn’t canceled the stamp, so I’d kept it. The seal that had closed it wasn’t sticky anymore. Nothing a little tape couldn’t fix. It was a gem of an envelope.
Sending the note to Chris that way would make me look cheap, or worse, poor. But I put the crumpled paper in and snapped a piece of tape from the dispenser, pressing it down with my thumb as if getting every corner flat made the decision more final.
You’re really doing it?
I’m really doing it.
“Harper,” I said before she left with Taylor. They were picking something up at the store before church. “Can you mail this?”
She snapped it from me as if it were just another bill before leaving me alone in the house.
For the moment.
For the morning.
Soon to be forever.
Chapter 13
CATHERINE - SIXTEENTH SUMMER
Playground tonight. 10:30pm.
I left him the note inside my racquet case when I took it for restringing. It had been a full week since he touched me in the tree, a week since we’d spoken or since I looked him in the eye.
I’d been avoiding him. He’d said hi a few times and made sure we crossed paths. Once, he stood by the opening in the fence and gestured for me to pass through with him, but I turned and walked the other way.
I’d given him more than I intended up in the tree, and I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t look anyone in the eye. They’d see right into my heart and call me a tramp like they called Marsha. Mom would stop being proud of me, and Dad would be ashamed. Harper would still love me, but what kind of example was I setting?
My shame outweighed my desire for him for five days. By the end of the week, shame was feather-light and desire broke the scales. I handed my racquet through the pro shop window and walked away, holding my breath until my parents went to bed an
d the house was quiet. I peeled off my nightgown to the clothes underneath and tiptoed out the side door.
My bike leaned up against the house. In the dark, I rode it down the service road to the place where the trees opened to the train tracks, then I left it against a tree.
I never realized crickets were so loud until I had to wonder if they were hiding the sound of my footfalls as I kicked up leaves and needles. I’d entered the deep brush, with the witness of owls and insects. A night creature with little nails scratched and crawled over my feet and made me jump. I hit a spider web and clawed through it as if I were fighting an invisible demon.
I didn’t wonder so much if the animals could see me. I wasn’t that paranoid. But whenever they moved or whenever a cricket jumped, I worried that a person could detect that someone was near and they could find me. Or they could ask me why I was even on this side of town.
I crossed the train tracks, looking both ways as if the freight ran on a thoroughfare. It was a few steps to the rows of mobile homes that defined that side of Barrington.
The playground was in a little clearing just west of the center of the trailers. My fingertips were cold, but the rest of my body thrummed and pulsed so hard that I made my own heat. I told myself I didn’t know what to expect from this meeting, but if I didn’t know what to expect, I knew what to hope, and they were pretty much the same thing.
“Catherine!” Chris wasn’t loud, but the excitement in his voice made him sound as if he were shouting.
“Chris?” I spun around, looking for him in the darkness.
And on a three-quarter turn, he crashed into me, all lips and hands, digging his fingertips into the muscles of my back as he pulled me close. I tasted the minty toothpaste in his mouth and thought he brushed his teeth for me. He kissed me as if he would never kiss me again. He kissed me as if this was the last kiss he would ever have in his life. As if he wanted to eat me alive. I’d given over my freedom and my choice to this thing with him, to this moment, to this stupid set of choices that would ruin me forever. As surely as the sun would rise, I was the designer of my own destruction.
I wanted to be destroyed by that kiss.
When Chris took my hand, I imagined I could feel the blood pulsing through the veins, the cells in his skin. I imagined that when my nerve endings vibrated at his touch, they connected to his somehow.
Everything felt new. I was discovering that my body had routes between one place and another that I never knew existed. I never knew that when a man touched my hand or kissed my nipples, I could feel it between my legs.
There was a click behind the tree line, and he stopped kissing me with a jerk. We froze long enough for him to smile.
“I don’t want you to do this anymore,” he said. “It’s not safe.”
“It’s fine.”
“I’ll come to you. Please. I’ve been worried since the sun went down.”
Behind me, a twig snapped and I jumped. “I think I just proved your point.”
“Just a squirrel. Come this way.”
He led me to the play structure, and I giggled as I walked up the plastic ladder. I was so big I barely even needed to hit every step. I didn’t really need him to hold out his hand and help me to the top of the slide. But I took it, because his touch was the spinning center of my curiosity.
The vantage point wasn’t that much better than the ground, but I felt somehow encouraged to look out over the rows of trailers. Most of them had lights on, blue rectangles from flashing TV shows, the shouts, laughs, cries of kids getting ready for bed.
His body pressed me from behind, his hands drifted up and down me. His lips brushed against the back of my neck. My eyes fluttered closed, and I sighed.
When he cupped my breasts over my shirt, I should have been ashamed. I should have run away. But I felt so safe with him. Even when he pressed his pelvis forward and I felt his erection on my bottom. I pushed my hips back against him and he breathed into my neck.
“Catherine, I want to make you come again.”
Even in the tight lasso of his arms, I managed to turn around to face him. “It’s your turn.”
He tilted his head down a little and took my mouth in a kiss that was so much a question, not so much a permission as a demand. And I acquiesced, yielded to him completely. Our knees bent, and he ended up on the small floor, surrounded by gates, under an apparatus where a kid could change the times of day to match the sun and the moon. We barely fit on that little rectangle, but we were so twined up in each other that we didn’t make any kind of reasonable or measurable shape.
“I want you,” he said. “I want you so bad. I don’t know what to do with myself all day. Whenever I feel rose petals, I think of your skin. I smell them, and I think of you. I stick my hands in the soil and think of getting my fingers inside you.”
His words made me nervous. I’d never used words like that, especially with a boy. They seemed dangerous. He must have felt me freeze a little because he took my hand and put it between his legs. My God, he was so hard. I ran my nails along the length of him, through the fabric of his pants. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I must have been doing something right because he let loose a breathy “ah.”
He undid his jeans button, then the zipper, and guided my hand to the skin of him. I couldn’t believe what I was doing and what it was doing to me. I felt how wet I was. The sensation at my core was going to take over and he wasn’t even touching me.
I’m going to do this. I’m going to do what makes him happy.
I wrapped my hand around his shaft, feeling how the thin skin moved against the rigid core. “It’s wet. Did you come already?”
“No, that’s just a little bit that comes out at first.”
With my thumb, I rubbed the liquid around the tip, and he kissed me so hard that my head was pushed up against the plastic floor.
“Move your hand a little bit.” He wrapped his hand around mine and moved up and down. “Like that. Yes.”
“Like this? This feels good?”
“Yes. Like that. You turn me on so much. I’m not going to rush you. I want to get inside you so bad.”
I wanted him inside me. I wanted him to break through, tear me to shreds, open me, but I wasn’t ready. I wanted to feel him in my hand before I felt him in my body.
His hips jerked rhythmically until I didn’t have to move my hand so much. Still kissing me, he jerked back and forth, then he rolled onto his back with me on top of him and pulled up his shirt. We did everything with our lips still connected, as if moving away would break the moment.
He came onto his stomach. I was shocked how much there was, spurting all over him with white arcs in the moonlight.
“Thank you,” he said into my mouth.
I kneeled next to him, the skin of my knees pressed into cold plastic. His bare torso was pooled with semen.
“What are we going to do?”
He dug a tissue out of his pocket and wiped it away. “We’re taking care of you.”
“What do you mean?”
Lazily, his hand drifted to my knee, then up my thigh and under my shorts. He pushed a little. “Spread your knees apart.”
He didn’t wait for me to do it. He slid his fingers under my clothes and touched me where I was wet.
“Oh.” I couldn’t do more than squeak.
His hand wrestled with the shorts and the underwear until he could angle a finger inside me. I exhaled sharply. I’d put my fingers inside before, but when he did it, I couldn’t even think.
“I heard this isn’t what works,” he whispered. “Have you heard about the clitoris?”
“What?” Of course I had, but I didn’t want an anatomy lesson.
“It’s here, I think.” He drew his finger out and up, finding the swollen nub.
“Oh, my God.”
“Wow,” he said in wonderment, running the back of his finger against it as much as he could in the tight space. “Is that it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Does it feel good?”
I fell back on my hands, knees off the floor, with his hand still up my shorts.
He rubbed too hard. Too fast. He was as clumsy and earnest as you’d expect from a teenager.
“I wish I could kiss it,” he said.
And that was it. The thought of his lips sent shockwaves down my spine. I came into his hand.
When he pulled his hand out, he wiped his fingers with the tissue. We lay beside each other and watched the moon cross half the sky before we went home.
Chapter 14
CATHERINE - PRESENT
Harper confirmed she’d sent the letter. I felt a kind of relief that I didn’t have to see Chris. My excuse was in the world, on the way, out of my hands.
What I did with my life now was up to me. Harper had been able to take care of herself for years. I’d drained myself of almost every asset except the house itself for the sake of the people of Barrington. I had nothing left to give them, and the town itself had nothing left for me.
I’d been waiting for Chris and I hadn’t even realized it.
But now that I’d made a decision not to see him, he was everywhere.
The rosebushes that had grown wild, the creaky floorboards, the knowledge that there were still flying monkeys scratched into the back of my great-grandfather’s headstone.
The space behind the beige rotary wall phone led to a pantry, and the counter nearby was stuffed with pamphlets, flyers, phone books, recipes, and any other piece of paper we didn’t know what to do with.
Since I was a teenager, numbers had been scrawled on the wall around the phone. Mother wouldn’t have liked it, but she did it first. And Dad, for his part, never saw any reason to update a phone that worked perfectly well.
In the ridge of molding was a number etched in quick little ballpoint lines. The dark blue had faded and the years of grease and dirt obscured it, but if I put my temple to the wall, it was still readable.
