by Leah Raeder
He touched my elbow and bent close. “You want to go somewhere quieter where we can actually talk?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t let go of my elbow, and I thanked a whole pantheon of gods for that. It felt different now. His skin on my skin caused a chemical reaction. My cells were rioting.
We walked out of the carnival into the night sea of grass and stars.
I did a suave little twist of my arm until our hands joined. I pulled him through the darkness toward the picnic bench, then let go and hopped up, hugging the pony between my knees. He stopped a foot away.
“You look incredible,” he breathed.
A rush of sweet blood to my head.
“So do you,” I said, my voice also gauzy.
He moved toward me. Cool platinum starlight played off his hair, the gold sheen on his arms. He wasn’t super tall, maybe five-foot-ten, but his frame was elegantly made, lithe muscle knitting around finely sculpted bones. That muscle rippled beneath his T-shirt, and the jeans that molded to him. I pressed my palms to the splintered wood but I could still imagine them running down a hard thigh. I’m going to fuck you, I thought. Somewhere not far from here. Maybe the back of your car. The only question is how we’ll get there.
“Did you bring me out here to talk,” I said, “or for something else?”
He looked chagrined. He sat beside me on the table. The rides were shutting down, great mechanical dragons folding their wings, coiling up their segmented tails. I popped the stuffed pony behind my head and lay back, looking up at a perfect planetarium sky.
“You asked why I’m here alone.”
I glanced over at him. He stared straight ahead.
“I see the lights every night. It seems like the whole world has figured out how to be happy, but no one’s letting me in on the secret.”
There are moments, when you’re getting to know someone, when you realize something deep and buried in you is deep and buried in them, too. It feels like meeting a stranger you’ve known your whole life.
“Why’d you get on the rollercoaster?” I said.
A little comma formed in the corner of his mouth, a half-smile. “I’m starting a new job soon, and…I’m terrified, honestly. I thought that if I faced another lifelong fear, it’d give me confidence.”
“You didn’t seem scared.”
“You don’t remember me screaming.”
I grinned. “Au contraire. 08/21. Never forget. But you seemed happy.”
It should have tipped him off that I didn’t talk about his job, I talked about feelings. I was too young to care about boring adult jobs. I was still testing out how my heart worked.
He was smiling at me now. I imagined him putting a knee between my legs, holding me down. The sky felt like a huge hot aquarium, swimming with tadpole stars.
“How about you?” he said. “Why tonight?”
“I’m starting a new job too, actually.”
“What kind of job?”
High school senior.
“It’s sort of an unpaid internship. Anyway, I guess I wanted to do something the old me wouldn’t have done.”
“Would the old you have done this?”
I sat up, slowly. My body was languid and light. We were very close, mostly by accident. His stubble glittered like gold dust. The ledge of his lips cast a shadow I couldn’t look away from. “What am I doing, exactly?”
I felt the heat of his hand before it touched me, and shivered. He laid it above my bare knee. Didn’t stroke, didn’t squeeze, just placed it there like a card he’d dealt, waiting for my move.
“This?” I said. My voice had lost all body again, becoming air contained in a thin envelope of words. I mirrored his movement, rested my hand on his jeans. The denim was smooth-worn and warm.
His other hand cupped my face. Somehow he’d gotten closer without quite kissing me yet. There was a carnival smell still on us, beer and popcorn and motor grease, but all of that faded into a kind of white noise, and now I smelled him. Something between suede and smoke. The clean tang of sweat mixed into his cologne, turning into a musky alcohol. Pure delirium. I couldn’t breathe any more of this. I couldn’t get enough of it.
My body was on autopilot. Mouth opening, face tilting, everything yielding. “What am I doing?” I whispered again, and knew he felt my breath in his own mouth.
“Seducing me,” he said.
My eyes opened all the way. My bones regained solidity. Blood pumped furiously into my throat, my temple, fleeing my hands and every part of me that had wanted to be touched by him. I pulled away.
His brow creased. If we’d known each other’s names, he would have said my name then with a question mark.
Was that what I was doing? Seducing him? Another throwaway fuck?
Was that all this was?
“Did I say something wrong?”
I shook my head. But I stood up anyway, grabbed the stuffed animal, mangled it in my hands.
Again, that pained pause on his face where he wanted to say the name of this girl who was clearly upset. Funny, how our own names soothe us. It’s okay, Maise. You are yourself. Whoever that is.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Why?”
“I wasn’t trying to seduce you.”
The tension went out of him. It wasn’t his fault. It was just the crazy girl and her crazy girl-feelings.
Was that unfair? Maybe I wanted to be unfair.
“Hey,” he said. He came close, his hand hovering over my shoulder blade, waiting for clearance to land. “I didn’t mean it in a bad way. If you weren’t trying, it would’ve happened anyway. You are so beautiful.” The hand retreated. “I’ve upset you.”
“No, you haven’t.”
He rocked on his toes a few times, back and forth. I’d learn later that it was his nervous habit. It endeared me then, a little—instead of retreating from anxiety, he psyched himself up to face it. “I don’t want the night to end like this. Can I take you home?”
I nodded.
He walked at my side, never ahead or behind. Our bodies aligned naturally. I never had to guess where he was going.
He drove a Chevy Monte Carlo built before I was born. It looked like something out of a Tarantino film. I don’t read too much into people’s vehicle choices. Mom drives a minivan, and she’s never taken me to soccer practice or gymnastics. Her van is her office. Only clients get to see the inside.
The front seat of his car was a solid piece of old leather. It smelled dizzyingly masculine. When he got in the seat dipped toward him, peeling away from my skin.
“Where do you live?”
I turned to him. I was breathing hard. He noticed and his hands came off the wheel, his body angling toward me.
We met halfway.
#
Before this goes any farther, I should tell you I’ve slept with older men before. Some much older than me. Like, x2 and up on the multiplication table. One was almost x3.
Thanks, Dad, for leaving a huge void in my life that Freud says has to be filled with dick.
I don’t blame it entirely on him, though. I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul, and all that jazz. Obviously I’m compensating for something, but I think even if I’d had a normal childhood, I’d have grown bored of boys my age. They’re like over-sensitive car alarms. A brisk breeze is enough to set them off. I should know, since I lost my virginity to one in freshman year. I didn’t even realize it when he came—I thought he was still trying to get in.
Okay, I thought. Bad first pick. The next will be better.
The next one lasted twenty-four seconds. I counted. He said if I really wanted to feel something, we should try anal.
At some point you realize they’re still children, and it starts to feel weird and pervy.
So when a guy in his late twenties flirted with me at a gas station, I got into his car, and he fucked me on a bare mattress in a stuffy one-room apartment that smelled like ashes and
beer. He made sure I came first, and he didn’t whine about wearing a condom. He called me gorgeous and bought me a burger before he dropped me home.
I could get used to this, I thought.
So I did.
#
It seemed like the kiss would be frantic, urgent, but when our lips actually met it was soft. Restrained softness. All the urgency went into our hands, perched on each other’s shoulder and neck like talons. My heart was ecstatic. He wanted this as much as I did and also wanted to not fuck it up, to not let it become a gross sloppy drunk screw. I kissed him slowly, indulgently, feeling the pillowed satin of his lips, the gritty scatter of stubble all around them. It took serious willpower to go slow. Beery bitterness in our mouths, but it just made everything sweeter—this was something we wanted no matter what imperfections tried to deter us.
His hand circled my skull, pulled me into him. I tilted my face further, my mouth at a right angle to his, opening for his tongue. God, when had I last been kissed like this? Had I ever? It felt like being fucked, but sweetly, more personally, somehow. Inside my veins my blood glowed the same neon red as those carnival lights. He pulled out, pulled gently at my lower lip. Opened his eyes and looked at me.
“I’m not trying to seduce you,” I said in an absurd gasp.
He smiled. Not the ultra-bright public smile from earlier, but one just for me, small and sly, one corner of his mouth higher than the other.
It was pretty obvious who was seducing whom here.
Some part of my old self wrested control. She curled her hands in his shirt and yanked him toward her. She lowered her body to the long seat and hooked her legs around his, let his weight settle atop her. They kissed again, her and him, and this time it was urgent and frantic and all the things they’d been holding back. Teeth now, and nails. She felt him get hard, the thick ridge of it pressing through his jeans against her inner thigh. She felt our body, mine and hers, getting wet, the sweat between her breasts, on the back of my neck, between our legs. We grasped the zipper of his fly.
The Guy pushed himself up on his elbows, panting. “Wait.”
Then I was me again, hair sticking to my face, flushed. “What?”
He closed his eyes. I could tell breathing was a conscious effort on his part. He lowered his face, grazed my cheek with his sandpapered one. “I want you,” he whispered into my hair, and a million filaments of electricity raced across my scalp. “But I want to know you. I don’t just want a hookup.”
When he raised his head again, I felt that same weightless drop I’d felt when our hands first touched a hundred feet above the earth.
He combed a hand through my hair, untangling it. “Is that too old-fashioned for you?” A self-deprecating smile. His forehead furrowed when he smiled like that.
“No,” I said.
“You are so beautiful. God, I just want to touch you.” He sighed, his chest moving against mine. Sodium light slanted through the windshield, painting the side of his face with warm lemon. “You know why I was happy up there? Because I completely forgot where I was. All I could think about was you.”
I couldn’t wait anymore.
I took his face in my hands and brought it back to me. We kissed with closed mouths, then tongues again, and he pressed me down, his knee between my legs, like I’d imagined him doing. I felt his kiss all the way through me. I felt it in every hollow place, filling me with summer heat, starlight, sweat, and abandon. When he broke away I said, low and steady, “We can do both. It doesn’t have to just be a hookup.”
His expression was pained, but he didn’t argue this time.
I raked my fingers through his sweat-damp hair. Wrapped my legs around his. His weight made my breath shallow. I felt the rotation of the earth, our bodies pulled together by gravity. “I want to fuck you,” I said.
The pained look melted away.
I’d burned off my alcohol. The drunk feeling that surged in me now was self-generated. I didn’t even think of where we were parked, if anyone might walk by. I didn’t care. He kissed my throat, my collarbone, pulled the tight sticky tee off with more grace than I would have. His stubble tingled against my breasts. He opened my bra, pressed his hot mouth to my skin. Every string in me tightened and hummed. There was some jerky shifting as I tugged off his T-shirt and he took off my shorts, then our bodies rejoined, skin on skin. Every time an article of my clothing came off he would spend a moment exploring the revealed area with hands and mouth, then he would kiss me again. Something was spiraling wildly inside of me, more and more out of control. My usual surgical approach to sex wouldn’t work here. He kept confusing it with these tender, adoring gestures. Just fuck me, I wanted to say. But I didn’t want him to just fuck me. I wanted this to keep going on forever, never running out of clothes or new places to be touched.
Finally his fingers slipped into the waistband of my underwear. I popped the button of his jeans, and he didn’t stop me this time. He didn’t stop me as I unzipped his fly, either. Or as I slid my hand around his dick. It’s almost surreal, the first time you feel it and realize this man is going to fuck you with it. It was thick and hard, entire degrees hotter than the rest of him. As I touched him his eyes closed, his eyebrows slanting upward, toward bliss. I love that. I love how absolutely helpless they get when you touch them. I pulled him out of his jeans, pressed my thighs around him. My underwear was still on.
He reached out for something. Flipped the glovebox open, extracted a foil wrapper. Pressed it into my hand.
I love when they let me do this, too.
I tore it open, rolled it over him. There’s something so final about it that makes my insides turn to water. No going back. No more excuses. It’s going to happen.
He ran a hand through my hair again, his eyes almost sad. Tucked both thumbs into my underwear and pulled it down. I didn’t let him take it all the way off. Too cramped inside the car anyway. I wanted it to feel desperate, difficult, necessary.
“Fuck me,” I said. My voice shook.
He pressed himself against me, but not inside. We both grimaced. Then again, letting me feel the length of him. The condom was instantly slippery. I breathed through my teeth.
He clamped one hand to the side of my face and said, “Tell me your name.”
Oh, fuck. He was going to do this, make it real.
I bit my lip and rolled my hips against him.
His breath flooded over me. I felt each muscle in him flexing, his abs crunching against my belly, his thighs stretching inside of mine. He slipped his arms beneath my back, pulling me closer to him. That hard dick right up against me was making my brain explode.
“Fuck me,” I said again. No shake. A growl.
“Tell me your name.”
It wasn’t easy for him. I probably could’ve waited him out. He probably would’ve given in. But I said, impatiently, “Why?”
“I don’t want this to just be sex. I want to know who you are.”
Men have a thing I call sex logic. When they’re horny, which is most of the time, the rules of logic change. Instead of being an organized system of reasoning, logic becomes the shortest path to getting what they want. In my present situation, I also succumbed to sex logic. It’s not like he could find me with just a first name, anyway. Even in a town this small. Even with a name this uncommon.
And maybe a part of me wanted to let him in. Really let him in.
“Maise,” I said, shaky again.
Something shifted in his face, a puzzle piece sliding into place.
“Hello, Maise,” he said.
“Hi. What’s yours?”
“Evan.”
“Evan,” I said, “please stop talking and fuck me.”
He kissed me first, and held my lip between his teeth, sharply, when he did it. I cried out, not from pain but relief. I’d been aching for this, and it wasn’t until he was inside me that I realized it. He fucked me slowly, his eyes open, on my face. My fingers and toes curled and then sprang loose. The funny thing was that his
kiss had felt like fucking me, and his fucking me felt like being kissed, everywhere, every bit of my body unbearably warm and buzzing. I had to turn away, close my eyes. Shut down some of my senses. I heard my own voice, the breaths I vocalized without meaning to, and I sounded so girlish and young that it excited me. I was getting off on myself. Crazy. Evan—oh god, he had a name now—lowered his mouth to my breasts, kissed them, sucked at a nipple as he thrust into me, and I felt like I was being turned inside-out. Everything became a confusion of overlapping sensations. I hadn’t even realized I’d slipped my hands into the back pockets of his jeans, pulling him deeper into me. Fleetingly I was aware of my bare foot splayed against the cool window. The smack of my skin against leather. Eventually the outer world fell away and all that remained was pressure points. His hands cupping my ass, holding me still, making me feel all of him inside of me, filling me with hardness and heat. You start feeling crazy things when you’re close. All the inhibitions dissolve. I wanted him in every part of me, my mouth, my ass, between my breasts, every place that could be fucked. He held still inside of me and I could have screamed. When he started fucking me again he was so slow, so fucking slow I felt every inch of him, sinking in all the way to the hilt, pressing my clit, and my eyelids fluttered and I said, “I’m gonna come, I’m gonna come,” and he sucked in his breath and kept fucking me steadily and I let go, every coiled bit of tension shooting out of my nerves in an electric storm. He came with me, his whole body seizing up, monstrously strong for a heartbeat, his fingers digging into my ass and his dick a startling hardness inside me when I was already softening, melting. He pumped into me, softer and softer, his head falling, body going slack, until his weight hung there, poised on the fulcrums of his elbows.
Planets moved in their orbits. Dawn broke in the United Kingdom. A car door slammed like a typewriter key.
I looked up at his face. He was already looking at mine.
When was the last time the man who’d just fucked me wanted to see my face after he came?
Neither of us blinked or seemed to breathe. He was still inside me, soft now. I didn’t know what to do. They usually pulled out immediately, or I disengaged and started looking for my clothes. I couldn’t move, trapped under him.
