In This Moment

by Autumn Doughton

  “I don’t know really. I’m not sure that I meant it.” Aimee sucks in her breath and holds her hands up in front of her face. “Th-there was this guy at school that I knew would have pills… I got them but I wasn’t sure exactly what I planned to do with them. And for a long time, I just kept them sort of like a backup plan that I promised myself I would never use. It’s not like I—it’s not like I planned it out really. It was a moment.” She pauses, holds her breath uncertainly. “Just a single moment when everything slipped away from me. And even though I knew, somewhere in the back of my head that it wasn’t okay—that my parents and my grandparents and my sister all loved me and were counting on me to be okay—I… it was just like none of that stuff mattered enough.”

  “What about now?” I’m not sure how to ask this question but I need to know. “Do you still feel that way?”

  She’s doesn’t hesitate. “No.”

  Aimee

  Once my story is purged, I feel so raw that I can hardly breathe. Cole is staring up through the muted darkness toward the sliver of clear, bright moon. His face is faintly creased with concentration.

  He glances at me. “It wasn’t your fault that Jillian died,” he says. We are so close that even in the dark, I can see the detail of color in his luminous eyes. A thousand shades of green. “It wasn’t.”

  “Maybe,” I say, letting my heart float just outside my body. “Maybe not. We were both stupid. She was too out of it to be driving and I should have known it. But I… I can’t think like that anymore. I can’t go back and change it. All I can do is go forward, right?”

  Cole is quiet for a long time. When he finally fills the silence, his voice is low and steady. “The day before my mom left us, we had a fight. I called her a selfish bitch right to her face. Sometimes I think that our fight was the last straw—the thing that pushed her out the door. I wonder if she decided that if her own kid thought about her that way, what did she have to lose?”

  I crawl over him, no longer worried about the fact that my skin is salty with dried sweat from my earlier run, and I gather his hands between our bodies. Gently, I press my lips to his and slide my tongue into his parted mouth. His stubble scratches my skin as I absorb the taste of him—faintly charged and electric like the air right before a storm.

  Cole tips his head and feathers his lips right above my temple where my hair meets skin. “You’re so amazing,” he whispers as his hands skim my waist and grab at my hips. “You know that, yeah?”

  Maybe it’s strange after all that has just passed between us, but desire, fresh and hot, pumps through every nerve ending in my body. Cole’s mouth is on mine, his tongue winding me senseless until my entire world is reduced to the sensation of his hard, strong body pressed into mine.

  Cole groans approval. He wheels his hands greedily up my bare back over the fabric of my sports bra to rest on my shoulders. He fingers the tiny hairs at the nape of my neck and rotates his thumbs along my jaw, drawing me closer, his lips clinging, sucking, sending a spiral of heat down my back.

  The salty breeze pushes in from the water, coaxing me, rousing a ripple of tiny pinpricks over my exposed flesh. Cole rocks me against him and slips his mouth to the side to brush that tender spot just below my ear with the edge of his teeth.

  “Aimee… Can I? Do you?” His hot breath teases my skin.

  I’m quivering, caught up in the storm surging beyond his eyes. My breath is fast and hard, keeping time with my heart. “I…I… yes, I want to.”

  Cole sits up quickly, bringing me with him so that my knees straddle his hips and his arms twine around my thighs. He shifts his back against the rigid metal of the truck and maneuvers the thin blanket so that it’s carefully bunched around my lower half. Watching my eyes closely, he reaches up and frees my hair from its ponytail. I drop my head to one side, feeling my loose hair fall damp and cool against my flushed skin.

  With the moon and stars as our only spectators, Cole clasps my face within his strong hands and drives our mouths together. As his tongue sweeps over mine rhythmically, I realize how much I want to remember this moment. I want to write it down in black ink on a sliver of plain white paper and keep it in my pocket forever. I’ll write about the sound of our kiss, the coarseness of his face rubbing against my cheek, and the sensation of his hands mapping my body, memorizing every curve and depression of bone and skin.

  “Aimee.” My name is a moan and a plea. He pushes his tongue inside my mouth and glides his fingers underneath the elastic waistband of my athletic shorts to where my upper thighs meet my torso.

  “Ahh!” I close my eyes and tip my chin down toward my breast.

  Considering that this is a public place, I should be more worried about what could happen if someone were to find us, but I’m too distracted by what Cole’s fingers are doing to me and how his hot tongue feels moving against my neck.

  Panting, I shift so that my ankles are hooked in the middle of his back and we kiss like that until we’re both out of our minds with wanting. Cole breaks away, digs a condom out of his wallet and looks back at me with an intensity that has my body practically begging.

  I draw in a breath and skim my hand under his shirt across the expanse of his muscled chest. I wonder if he feels it too—this huge sensation like the sky opening up and swallowing us both.

  He grins sheepishly. “I wish I could give you more than the back of my truck.”

  “I’m pretty happy with the back of your truck if that’s where you are.”

  Cole’s smile deepens until I can see the shadow of his dimples. He kisses my shoulder and runs his fingers down to the small of my back and around my waist. As he removes my shorts, his blunt nails scrape across my bellybutton creating a delicious friction.

  Holding his eyes with mine, I tighten my legs around him and pull him inside of me. Cole goes very still then he kisses me hard and presses his palms deep into my skin.

  It’s hard to say how it happens. How all of the bits of me—even the broken ones—start to tumble. I think it’s my toes that go first. Next—my legs and the hollow spaces behind my ribs. And then my arms all the way down through my wrist bones to the tips of my fingers. My lips part and I realize that this is what it feels like to fall.

  We move with the low rumble of the waves as our soundtrack and I live again and again. His fingers trace letters on my flesh. He’s handing me back my own words.

  This is real.

  Cole

  I never used to think about things like death and life and all the hundreds of thousands of seconds that get stuck in between. Back then I didn’t know the way that a person can crawl so far inside of you that your organs voluntarily shift to the side to make room for the shape of them.

  Her smell is all around me. I clutch her head, my knuckles brushing the smooth line of her jaw, and I tilt her chin back so that I can see her eyes better. Clear blue pools swimming beneath a flutter of dark lashes. She makes a faint sound as her body gets closer and then she cries out and buries her face in the skin of my neck.

  Damn. I close my eyes and give in to the feeling swelling hard and fast under my flesh. It intensifies with each ragged beat of my heart until I think I might explode. She’s everywhere—grabbing at my skin, pulling my hair through her fingers, clenching her muscles tightly around me. I bite back the primal sound scratching at the back of my throat, and all at once I’m erupting, breaking free, coming apart from the inside out.

  That was…

  The damp heat of her breath exchanges with mine as she fits her mouth over my lips and collapses her weight against my chest. I wish I could describe this. This moment. If only I could… fuck. For the first time in my life I want to tell someone how I feel and I don’t even know how to find the words—solid and honest—to do it. Isn’t it considered a chump move to tell a girl all the ways that she rocks your world right after sex?

  I stroke her long hair and pull her into my side.

  “Don’t let me go,” she says so quietly that I have to
replay her words in my head to make sure that I heard them right.

  I run my thumbs over the bumps of her spine. “Don’t worry,” I reply. “I won’t.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Cole

  “It’s way too hot for this shit. Where is autumn? It’s almost November and I’m still sweating my balls off over here.” I drop to the grass.

  Daniel laughs, takes a rasping breath, and bends over to reach for the blue plastic water bottle that he tucked beside the base of a scraggly pine before we took off on our run. “It’s going to be like this until a storm breaks. A patch of warm air is pushing its way inland. Don’t you ever check the weather?”

  “Do I look like someone who checks the weather?”

  Daniel ignores the question. “I think that you’ve lived in Florida long enough to know that changing seasons are a myth anywhere south of Tallahassee.”

  “Then no more afternoon runs.”

  “Hey, you’re the one who couldn’t go later on—not me. If we had waited to run until seven then it wouldn’t have been so bad,” Daniel says as he lowers himself to the ground. We’ve just endured a brutal eleven miles and now it is time to sprawl on the lawn in front of the track and field offices and let our muscles cool down.

  “I told you already… I have plans later.”

  “It’s Friday and we don’t have practice tomorrow. What kind of plans do you have that are so important? It wasn’t too long ago that the only planning that you did revolved around getting drunk and getting laid.”

  “Things change.” I don’t tell him that my plans happen to be showering, putting on presentable clothes, and picking Aimee up to go to some swanky party at her parent’s house. Just the thought of managing small talk and eating off a tiny cocktail plate has me cringing, but when Mrs. Spencer invited me, I couldn’t exactly say no.

  “So you’re really in this, huh?”

  I glance over at Daniel. “What do you mean? In what?”

  He pushes damp hair away from his forehead and takes a large gulp of water out of the bottle in his hand.

  “You and Aimee,” he clarifies, stretching one arm over his head and bending his knees so that they crest above his chest. “I don’t know. It seems sort of serious.”

  How the fuck am I supposed to respond to that?

  The corners of my mouth twitch. “I don’t know that serious is the right word, but yeah, things are good with us.”

  Things are good. Shit. They’re better than good. Ever since that night at the beach—the one that I keep on a steady repeating pattern in my head—things are more settled between us. When I close my eyes, I can almost feel her small, tight body against mine. It was unbelievable and if I let my brain drift too much longer I’m not going to be able to keep my hard-on at bay.

  “I’ve got a ton of shit to do. We should—” The roar of an engine drowns out my voice. I pick my head up off the grass in time to see Adam’s car screech to a stop near the curb. “What the hell?”

  “Cole!” Adam calls out the open driver’s side window. “Get over here, man. Your sister has been trying to call you for the last hour but you forgot to take your fucking phone with you.”

  A nasty sensation shoots down the column of my neck and settles deep in my stomach. I stand up and cross the distance to Adam’s car.

  This can’t be good. Not a fucking chance.

  Aimee

  “Door!” Mara shouts over the noise of her hairdryer.

  Grappling with the bottom of my dress, I dart a quick look at myself in the mirror and decide that the lipstick that my sister suggested is too much. It’s a shade that belongs on the sorority and pageant circuit. I wipe at my mouth with my thumb as I scramble down the hall to answer the knock.

  The door swings wide, pulling in a puff of sticky air. “We’re almost r…” The sentence shrivels up and dies in my mouth. I drop my pink-smudged hand to the doorjamb and crease my forehead.

  Cole is standing on the paved walkway in his sneakers and sweat-stained gym clothes. He tilts his head up and I see that his skin is pulled taut and pale over his cheekbones and his eyes are a starker green than I’ve ever seen them.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask immediately, bile creeping up the back of my throat.

  “It’s going to rain,” Cole says absently.

  “Um…” I can smell the impending storm in the air and feel it like an electrical charge crawling over my skin. A strange, sudden breeze rushes over us and the light shifts. I watch shadows slide into place over Cole’s face. “What’s wrong with you?”

  He narrows his eyes, trails his fingertips over the uneven bridge of his nose and shifts his weight to one foot like he’s uncomfortable. He coughs. “You look nice.”

  My eyes fall to the dark grey sheath dress that I borrowed from my sister and swing back to him. “Cole, what the hell is wrong?” I repeat my question for the third time.

  Cole looks away, nudges the rock-lined path with the side of his foot. “I was going to call you and just tell you over the phone but I… I…” His voice is gruff, filled with an emotion that I don’t understand. He shoves his fingers back into his light hair and shakes his head once, then twice. “I can’t go to the party with you tonight.”

  Feeling shaky, like the ground beneath me is moving as fast as the gathering clouds, I take a tentative step forward. “I-I’m getting that from your clothes, but that still doesn’t answer my question. What’s wrong?”

  “I know that it was important to you that I make a good impression on everyone and—”

  “I don’t care about my dad’s thing,” I say firmly, laying my palms on either side of his biceps. His muscles stiffen and he moves back out of my reach.

  He brings his hands in front of his body like a shield. “Aimee, I can’t right now. I just…”

  My indrawn breaths are shallow. I feel a stabbing, cramping sensation starting low in my belly. This is wrong. All wrong. “Cole,” I whisper, my body shifting back and forth. “What happened to you?”

  I don’t understand the carved-out look in his eyes. I talked to him earlier and everything was fine. We made plans for him to come over at seven so that he could ride with Mara and me. He was laughing, joking about getting dressed up for my parents.

  Cole turns so that I’m looking at his back. The grumble of distant thunder punctuates the quiet. His head falls back and he lifts his shoulders as he drags air into his lungs. “I can’t talk to you about it right now. Maybe later, but… I just wanted to let you know about tonight. Tell your parents that I’m sorry. Tell them that something really important came up and I couldn’t get there, yeah?”

  “No.” My throat is closing in on itself. I’m only inches away from Cole’s body but I know that he doesn’t want me to touch him and that feels a bit like dying. I squeeze my eyes tight and bite down on the inside of my cheek. “No, I won’t tell my parents that you’re sorry because I don’t understand any of this. Cole, I-I want to know what happened and why you’re acting like this and looking the way that you look right now. You’re scaring me. Ha-have I done something?”

  “Fuck,” he moans loudly. “Fuck!”

  I blink my eyes open in surprise and see him pacing the walkway, murmuring and seething air between his teeth. He stops and rests his clenched hands on his hips.

  “You haven’t done anything,” he says tightly. “It’s…it doesn’t have anything to do with us. I got a call from Sophie and she told me that my mom showed up there today.”

  Another gust of wind moves over us. I take an involuntary step forward. “Cole…”

  “She’s dying, Aimee.” His voice catches and his eyes reach into mine. “She’s got a terminal fucking brain tumor. She has six months—maybe a year—and she’s at my house with my little sister and my dad and they want me to fly out there and pretend that we’re all of a sudden a normal family again or some shit.” He curses and hits the wall next to the door with the flat of his hand.

  My insides are twisted and tight like
a thorny vine is growing straight up my middle. I don’t know what to say. Cole and I have come so far and I want to hold him and brush the pads of my thumbs across his lips and kiss a circle around his red eyelids but I know that’s not right. My voice is thin, barely above a whisper. “Did you speak to her?”

  He moves his head sharply. “No. She tried to get on the phone to talk to me but I-I just couldn’t. Not yet.”

  “Cole, you have to talk to your mother and hear what she has to say. I know it’s hard, but if she’s—”

  “But nothing,” he cuts me off. “And where do you get off telling me that I should talk to my mom? When do you talk to your mom about anything important? When have you faced anything?”

  His words scorch my skin. I’m shaking. “Cole…”

  He closes his eyes. “Look, I know that you’re trying to help but you don’t know what you’re talking about. And I really can’t do this right now.” He gestures to me and backs away before I can protest. “I’m fucking sorry, but everything is messed up and I need some time to think.”

  “Please?” I don’t even know what I’m asking him for. I just know that I don’t want him to leave. Not like this.

  He waves over his shoulder without even looking at me. “I’ll call you.”

  My head spins. When I hear the familiar sound of his truck engine coming to life, I keep my eyes trained on my bare feet, not trusting myself not to run after him.

  ***

  I don’t expect the cars spilling out from the driveway to the street. Even over the sound of the rain battering the pavement, I can hear music and voices hammering from the house.

  “Are you ready?” Mara asks.

  I turn and look through the darkness fanning across the interior of the car. Mara is watching me. Jodi is searching the floorboard for her purse and an umbrella, holding her blue hair out of her face with one hand.