by Anthology
You can feel anything you need to feel and that’s fine, because your truth is your truth.
My answer to his words was a touch that made him inhale sharply.
“This is what I want to do,” I whispered. “I want you to be inside me. I want,” I said, my mouth going numb as my body because exquisitely sensitive, “you to make love to me.”
I felt his smile against my neck. “Gladly,” he answered. And then I quite literally felt him frown.
“Damn it,” he muttered under his breath. “We don’t have a condom.”
“Uh, actually,” I said, squirming under him, reaching for my backpack, “we do.”
“We do?”
“Lena packed them.”
He chuckled. “Your sister packed you condoms for a road trip with me.”
I shrugged and pulled out the foil packet. “She wanted us to be prepared.”
He took the condom from me and tore the package open, shaking his head with a smile. “She bakes cookies and she packs you condoms? She’s quite a catch.”
“Hey there,” I said, “she’s not your type.”
“She’s not?” he laughed.
“No, she likes pussy.”
“Then we have something in common.” He began to tear the packet and I took it gently from him, our fingers fumbling against each other, his face tight with a frown.
“May I?” I asked. I hadn’t done this in years. It meant something to me in that moment, but I didn’t know what.
He pulled back and I looked down, seeing his erection, the veins prominent, the flesh so...simple. The same body part on another man (men) used as a weapon against me all those years ago looked so harmless. Fresh and alluring, something to bring pleasure. He hissed as I stroked up, twice, then carefully rolled the condom on.
He smiled.
“Why are you smiling?”
“No one’s ever put one on me before.”
“You don’t normally wear them?”
“No, no!” he said quickly. “I do. Always. It’s just...I’m normally the one putting it on.”
“Then I’m pleased to be something new for you, Tyler,” I said. His kiss in answer was full of yearning and buildup, of being in the moment. Of holding our breath as we paused before crossing over.
I stretched beneath him and he moved over me, my legs opening in invitation. I didn’t want to have to say it. Consent was important, but he already had that. I’d given it to him and to myself, and now it was time.
Tyler’s beautiful mouth opened and I knew, before he began to speak, what he was about to say. I pressed my finger against his lips and he startled.
Our eyes locked.
“Please.” That was the only word in my head, the only word I cared about. “Please.”
And then I said:
“Now.”
He nodded, eyes serious and watchful, arms powerful and protective as he balanced over me. I guided him in and oh—the fullness. The aching, slow relief of having someone enter me on my own terms.
My own timeline.
My choice.
If I’d looked him in the eye in that moment as he hovered over me, my thighs pressing into his hips, my hands on the small of his back as he rocked his way into me, I might have cried. I might have laughed. I might have done neither. I might have frozen and gone cold inside.
Without his eyes aimed at me, I closed mine and just felt. Felt the brush of his abs against my belly. Took in the rasp of his chin against my shoulder. Considered the push of him going in me and the sweet, soft slide as he pulled out, then thrust in again. Inhaled the scent of soap and musk and man his skin exuded. Reveled in the chanting loop in my head that whispered:
You did it. You did it. You did it.
You’re free.
I kissed his shoulder and Tyler tensed, his ass clenching and his throat clicking with a swallow.
“You okay?” he asked softly.
All I could do was nod.
“This okay?” he asked.
“Better than okay.”
I moved my hips up to meet him and take him in deeper and he groaned, a wild sound that ignited something in me. In that split second this went from a healing moment to something more visceral, more carnal. I wanted him more—wanted his raw power, to commune with him, and as I pushed up to meet his gentle thrusts he came back faster, harder, with less restraint and more abandon.
And then he slowed down.
I sped back up, my body unleashing a torrent of pinprick sensations that spread high and low, but halted as if they struck a massive wall. I knew this feeling. I’d known this feeling earlier.
I wouldn’t come.
My body wouldn’t let me.
But oh, how this felt so good. So right. So...Tyler.
“I want to make this good for you,” he confessed, his words soft and tight, his breath hard and choked.
“It is,” I replied, my arm sweaty against his back, my inner thighs aching.
“I just...oh, Maggie,” he gasped. Puzzled, I stroked his back and reached down to touch his hips, then realized what he was saying. Aha.
“Please don’t hold back,” I said, trying to keep the pleading tone away. I wanted him to come. I wanted to know I could give a man pleasure, and that he could find it in me. With me. From me.
He thrust in, hips curling as my legs wrapped around him and he groaned into my neck, his mouth dipping down to take one nipple in, the feeling both fleeting and electric as he pushed and I lifted to match his movements.
One, two, three....lost in the sensation, I lost count until his entire body pushed hard once, then froze, his chest impossibly big for a moment, and then a long sigh poured out of him, ragged and full.
He sagged against me, sated and finished. My legs bowed out and down, my arms sliding off his back and resting on the rumpled sleeping bag beneath us. I tried to breathe but he pressed down on me, his body boneless.
I’d done that. Done that to him. With him.
I gently pulled him to the side and he roused, shifting so I could breathe. Our legs were tangled in a delicious way, my core raw and aching. My thighs began to tremble and I felt so exposed. Not uncomfortable, though.
He turned away from me and sat at the edge of the bed, then stood. I watched his naked ass as he went into the bathroom. I heard a flush. The condom, I supposed. This ritual was so unfamiliar to me that I just mused and openly tracked him with my eyes, a thousand Maggies spinning inside my head and chest as I tried to make sense of the last hour.
I’d had sex.
With someone who cared.
He came back to the bed and wrapped his arms around me.
“Thank you,” I said. The words seemed so anemic, impossibly bereft of the power I wanted them to have.
“Thank you,” he replied.
We rested, the only sound our breathing. After too many minutes, I cracked.
“This is going to sound so...wrong,” I said, my words coming out with a gasp.
“Go ahead.”
He seemed to know what I was going to ask, so I sat up a bit and looked him in the eye, my naked breasts resting against his ribs.
“How old were you?”
He closed his eyes and took a deep sigh. “Thirteen.”
“Oh, Tyler.”
“And because I know you’re going to pester me until I tell you the rest, here’s all I’m saying.” He swallowed, hard, and took a deep breath. “My dad was doing business with this guy.”
“Drugs?”
“Yeah.” He looked away. “And Dad didn’t come home for a long time. The guy was high as a kite and huge. By the time Dad walked in, he was...well. I hadn’t hit puberty yet, and he was big.”
“Oh, God. Your dad walked in?”
“Yep. Beat the fucking shit out of the dude. Nearly tossed him out the window, and we lived on the third floor back then. Kicked his ass down a staircase.”
“Your trial must have been awful. Testifying when you’re only thirteen. It was hard enoug
h at twenty-two for me.”
He jolted, then froze.
Oh.
“There wasn’t a trial, was there?” I asked, my voice high, my body going cold and numb.
“No.”
“Did your dad—”
“No.”
“I’m sorry. I’m an idiot for bringing this up, here, now, while we’re in bed together and we—” He pressed a finger to my mouth. I went quiet.
“There’s never a wrong time to talk about the truth.”
I gave him a squeeze. He softened slightly.
“Did your dad get you any help?”
He made a short, distinct snorting sound. “He told me to forget it happened. Threw the guy down the stairs, came back in the apartment, told me it was my fault, to forget it happened, and went into his bedroom. We never talked about it.”
“Your fault? No medical attention? What?” Horror filled me. Some deep, reptilian part of me knew that I was deflecting my own emotional struggles about my sexual abuse by talking so openly about his. Throwing myself into his story was easier than grappling with my own.
There was also a part of me that was about to cry for the thirteen-year-old child that Tyler had been.
“No.”
“And you got over it...how?”
His neck tightened. His jaw clenched. His breath became even. Too forced. He was controlling his emotions with great effort.
“By not talking about it.”
I pressed my ear against his heart and listened to it quicken, then steady. My eyes filled with tears and I let them drop into his chest, like a baptism. Like an offering. And we rested like that until I drifted off to sleep, my mind filled with too much to handle awake.
Tyler
As she fell asleep in my arms, her curves a warm comfort I didn’t know I needed, all I could think was:
I’m not good enough.
I couldn’t make her come.
I couldn’t give enough.
I tried. Fuck, I tried. And as she had wept in my arms my own eyes had teared up, my throat tight with anger and anguish. Anger for what those monsters did to her and anguish that I couldn’t fix it. Maggie explained it and I got it on some level. Of course she couldn’t come. The mind makes hellish spirals that go deeper than we realize when we go through bad shit.
Unscrewing the corkscrew is a hell of a lot harder than putting it there.
This had been it, though. This was all I could give her. She’d done nothing but sacrifice for me and in the moments we had made love what I offered felt like something more than just giving. I was getting something back, too. Not just sex. Not just my own orgasm. Not just a fuck. She opened herself up to me. She trusted me. She made me “that guy,” the guy she wanted. Two months ago she tried and I’d shot her down.
And now?
Now I’d failed her.
I was too fucking tired to do anything but let sleep take over.
Hours later I woke up in the dark. Maggie snored lightly next to me, her back facing my front. We weren’t exactly spooning. Some of her hair stuck to my mouth. We smelled like sweat and sex.
I liked that scent.
I loathed myself, though. I sat up slowly and rubbed my eyes. The morning light was that kind of eerie glow you get before sunrise. I climbed out of bed, peeling her arm off me, and quickly got dressed. No time for a shower.
But I had time to scribble a note.
Afterward, I sat in the greyish dark, staring at the changing light as it peeked out over the horizon. Maggie’s breath changed, then she rolled over, the air whooshing out of her, muscles going limp. Then regular breathing again, her face slack with sleep.
God, she was so fucking beautiful.
She deserved so much more than I could give her.
I grabbed Lena’s guitar, put $200 in her backpack on top of the note, and paused. Maybe this was a bad idea. Maybe I should stay.
But she’d given so much to me. If I got to the main road fast enough, I could hitch a ride with a trucker and get to L.A. on my own in the nick of time. Spare her the last leg of this fucked-up journey.
Spare her from me.
I could be more of a man for her in the future. A real man, with money and stability and a fucking driver’s license. Shit. I had nothing right now but the last hundred bucks, Lena’s borrowed guitar, my clothes, and a raging case of falling for the woman who was smiling in her sleep right now.
That smile nearly broke me. Nearly made me stay.
I closed my eyes and imagined that future me, coming back to her in St. Louis or Boston. Coming back with something to give.
I wasn’t enough for her now.
Which was why I needed to let her go. Make her go home. This wasn’t the end. But it was the end of me being so dependent on her.
I couldn’t bear it.
I couldn’t bear failing her again.
Chapter Twelve
Maggie
I woke up to an empty bed.
That, alone, wasn’t alarming. The little cots were tiny, and so maybe Tyler needed more space to sleep. I looked. Nope. No Tyler.
Okay.
So, maybe he was using the bathroom?
I looked around some more.
No guitar.
I sat up and muttered, “What the fuck?” under my breath, my hands gaining purchase on the hard, plastic-covered mattress under me.
And then I saw it on the floor.
A note.
I groaned before I even reached out for it, my eyes coordinating with my hands to get my fingers on it, the sound from my throat involuntary.
It read:
First of all, don’t panic. I’m not some asshole who sleeps with women and leaves them in the morning with just a note of thanks.
My eyes filled with tears. It made it hard to read the next part:
And this is more than a note of thanks, so bear with me. You know I suck at words. At least, the spoken ones. I’ve always been better with written ones, but not much better.
Maggie, I feel like a total jerk for everything I’ve put you through. I showed up on your doorstep with nothing but my clothes and a little money. You listened to my story and listened to Charlotte and Darla and came to my rescue. People don’t do that. No one rescues me. You did. I’m grateful. I’m so fucking grateful.
The tears spilled over as my heart squeezed down to half its normal size. Something about this note made me fear reading it all the way to the end. My inner thighs ached with an exquisite kind of pain, and the ache spread up through my belly, between my breasts, and into my throat as I slowly, painfully, read on:
I have nothing to give you but these words. And the $200 I left for you in your backpack. Before you freak out, that’s all I have to give to say thank you. And no, I don’t pay for sex, so stop thinking that shit.
I smiled in spite of myself, thinking about Darla’s story of waking up to an empty hotel room after she met Joe and Trevor and how those idiots left her a stack of twenties and a note. What the hell was it about these band members and their stupid weird abandonments?
Last night was amazing. This whole trip was even more amazing, though. I didn’t need the sex to know how real and gritty and fucking astoundingly beautiful you are. I knew that the first time I set eyes on you. You are a woman who sees into people and finds the marrow. You stole my soul the minute you came on to me, and you stole my heart when you kissed me out in the desert yesterday. You steal things from me, Maggie. You take everything good I have left and you capture it inside you and show it to me so I remember it’s there. The only way I can get it back is to be with you and show you the rest of me.
And last night was the first step.
I’m on my way to L.A. By the time you read this, I’ll—
I flipped the page over.
—be with some trucker and getting closer to the concert. Don’t follow me. Go home. I can’t help you drive anyhow, and this time you won’t have to stop every thirty minutes so more gummy bears can catapult out of our re
spective asses.
I snorted, sniffed, then cried a little more.
I’ll be back in St. Louis as soon as the concert’s over and I can get Darla to give me an advance. I’m coming to see you, Ms. Maggie, whether you like it or not. Now, go back to Lena and tell her she’s a very good packer.
“Ha,” I said aloud to no one.
And if I didn’t make myself clear: we still have a lot of ground to cover and a lot more learning to do about each other. I’ll be back for you. Just make sure you’re there.
Yours,
Tyler
p.s. You have a body carved by God.
“FUCK YOU!” I screamed, balling the paper and throwing it at the wall. It barely arced, sailing limply in the air and falling with an ineffectual sound. That felt symbolic; everything I thought, felt, and did in these seconds felt ineffectual.
So I sat on the bed and sobbed. Sunlight peeked in through the window, around the faded pink curtains that must have once been bright red. Tyler had given me the most precious gift he could have ever offered me: sensuality. Mutual respect. A series of touches and strokes, kisses and murmurs, sighs and moans that etched into my memory, over-writing what had been corrupt and replacing it with breathtaking pleasure.
I rescued him?
He rescued me right back.
And he thought he could do this? Just send me on my merry way back home through twenty-one hours of driving, back to Lena, back to the empty house where I’d hang out for a week or two until I went back to Massachusetts to manage girls at science summer camp?
No.
I jumped up, face hot from crying, and pulled on my clothes, not even bothering with my shoes as I shot out the door and ran to the campground office. Rosita was at her desk and looked up, alarmed.
“Maggie! What’s wrong?”
“Have you seen Tyler?”
“Oh, honey,” she said, her face tight with confusion. “He left earlier. Walked up to the road. Haven’t seen him since—”
“Did he have his guitar?”
