My Year Zero

by Rachel Gold

  Naked.

  When you’re going to be looking at a naked person, especially a cute naked person, up from the floor is not the angle to pick. That is if you don’t want to feel like a ten ton weight dropped onto your chest. Maybe if I’d been off her left shoulder and a hundred miles away…

  Looking up at her, I wasn’t numb anymore. I could see a million places I wanted to touch with my fingers and my tongue and my fingers again. I was white-hot, burning with a fire that didn’t consume but spilled light through every cell of me.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Oh yeah, I do this all the time,” I said.

  I pushed to my feet and grabbed my shirt.

  Turning to fully face Blake, I asked, “Why are we naked?” The words came out harsher than I’d planned because if all that fire wasn’t going into lust, it had to go toward anger.

  As she heard my question, the slowest, widest grin spread across her mouth and up to her eyes. Those eyes narrowed, grew wicked and joyful. I felt her delight that we were naked together and her desire. The hair on my arms rose. The impact of her grin hit my throat and my gut. It disintegrated the world around us.

  “Oh,” I breathed out the sound. I couldn’t form words, but the rest of the sentence in my head was: you do want me.

  My fingers dropped the shirt on the way to her.

  Her lips met mine already open and I felt her tongue right away, still rough like a cat’s, perplexing, fascinating. I drank in the feeling. I inhaled it. I wanted to compress my whole self into her mouth and feel nothing but her tongue. My hands on her back barely registered her skin because I was so into her mouth and kissing her.

  Blake made a small sound and her knees bent. We went down in a tangle, half-sitting, half in the bathroom doorway so we couldn’t lie down. Kissing her, I got to my knees and moved back a few feet into the bedroom, trying to figure out how to navigate with four legs and four arms. Her lips were neat and agile, her tongue playing in the joined space of our mouths.

  She pushed against me, pressing me back from kneeling to sitting. Every time the movement of our bodies pulled our lips apart, she found my mouth again. Somehow with our lips together and her hands on me, she climbed into my lap.

  Our breasts touched and a wave of vertigo hit me. My legs were out in front of me and she settled in my lap, facing me, wrapping her legs around my waist. Our hips rocked together. I couldn’t tell who started the motion; it was like the rocking arose first and we followed like boats on a wave.

  I wanted to touch her all over but I couldn’t stop kissing her. She ground down against me and I rocked up into the heat and wet between her legs. She broke our kiss, panting near my ear as I kissed her neck, her chin, the side of her face. She smelled like shampoo, bright and commercial, but under that I got her real scent: maple-sweet and earthy, honeysuckle flowers and vibrant green moss.

  Blake was holding onto my shoulders so hard I felt the edges of her short fingernails. She buried her face in the side of my neck and shook. She was coming already. I held her tightly, pressed my lips to the curve of her jaw and inhaled while the tremors in her body expanded then quieted.

  After a while she said, “We’re on the floor.”

  I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to let go of her and I couldn’t figure out what that meant. I was supposed to be with Sierra. I loved Sierra and I’d never been completely sure what to think of Blake. But in this moment I couldn’t imagine how I could take my hands off Blake. I ran my fingers down her spine to the small of her back and she wriggled against me.

  “Lauren,” her breath was hot in my ear. “Can we get on the bed?”

  “On?” I asked.

  Her question didn’t sound like a person who was done and ready to get dressed, but my brain was spinning and I might not have heard right.

  “Yeah, or in it,” she said and brushed the tip of her thumb over my lips. “You know, like people do.”

  “Get in the bed?” I asked.

  What I meant was: you want me to get in the bed with you and keep going? But as usual the gulf between my brain and my mouth swallowed most of the words. My tongue felt clumsy in my mouth without her tongue to balance against.

  With Sierra, after she came we were usually done. Occasionally she’d reciprocate but more likely I’d take care of myself somewhere in the middle of things. Even if she did reciprocate, I wasn’t a sure thing and sometimes would just end up more frustrated, so it was easier that way.

  “Do you have a thing about beds?” Blake asked. “Or is it too close to where the spider was?”

  Remembering the spider, I laughed, but not so hard that I couldn’t say, “The bed. Yes. I like beds.”

  She got up and pulled back the blanket, got into the bed and I followed. We started kissing again, deliberately slow, luxuriously. The feeling of her and the cool sheets on my skin was maddening.

  I kissed her neck and chest and all over her breasts, watching her nipples rise and tighten. I reached between her legs and felt the light prickle of stubble. She pressed her hips up, pushing into my fingers and I slid my hand down to feel how wet she was. I played around, finding my bearings and spreading the wetness everywhere.

  She grabbed my wrist. “Too soon,” she gasped. “Anyway, your turn.”

  “You don’t have to…”

  The words faltered because her eyes were so close to mine, an inch away, full of intense sky and storms and shadow. She put her mouth on mine and rolled on top of me.

  Then she was moving down my body quickly, not kissing or teasing, on top one moment and between my legs the next. Her breast grazed my inner thigh and the protest I was going to make caught in my throat.

  I meant to say, “I don’t think I like…” or “I can take care of that…” but she looked up at me with her face bright.

  I tried again to say that I wasn’t sure I liked oral. I’d never done it on the receiving end. I was sensitive, too self-aware. The words didn’t work themselves out for me. I thought about how she’d grabbed my wrist, how I could catch her shoulder the same way and pull her up again, but she was leaning on the inside of my thigh, touching me, and I didn’t want her to stop.

  Her fingers and her tongue weren’t tentative. She pushed against me in ways that felt intense, on the edge of pain. Not fluttering and nervous. Not like I’d been the first time.

  Had she learned that from having sex with guys? Was that what they liked? Was this what I liked?

  The pressure of her mouth varied soft to hard and I squirmed under her—part trying to get away but more pushing closer. Some of it hurt. Some of it was light but irritating. Moments of jarring pleasure shot through me, laced with strokes that made me more frustrated.

  I kept thinking I should tell her to stop. It wasn’t going to work. I couldn’t come this way and I’d taken too much time already, too much focus on me. I felt strange and exposed. We’d showered, but I was so wet—did I feel okay to her? How did I smell? What did I taste like? Was it bitter like Sierra? I hoped not.

  Her mouth moved away. Maybe that was it, she was done. I glanced down. Her face was turned toward me and she grinned. Another grin to add to my collection. A variation on the yes-I-want-you grin. I relaxed a little; I guess if she wanted to be doing that, I wasn’t going to argue.

  Watching my face, she slid a finger inside me. I gasped because it was good and I wanted more, but I couldn’t talk. With her between my legs, I was too vulnerable. She pulled away again and I closed my eyes, steeling myself to kiss a bit more and be content, but her fingers were back inside me, more of them. Her tongue was there too, around and above, driving spikes of dizzy fire.

  My brain shut the hell up.

  I didn’t come and I didn’t care. The rough surface of her tongue on any part of me was shocking and brilliant. I had no idea what she was doing with her hand but I wanted it to go on and on. Concentric circles of wonder spun out from her through my whole body.

  When the intensity turned more painful than
good, I reached down, grabbed her shoulder and tugged. Blake pushed up and rested on one arm, looking questions at me. I sat up to where I could kiss her, both of us hesitant for a heartbeat and then deep in each other’s mouths again. She lay down on me, our bodies jammed against each other.

  I shoved my hand between my thigh and her legs, slid around until my finger was over her clit and let the rocking do the rest. She came shaking, quivering and making a half-sobbed sound into my shoulder that I wanted to hear about a thousand more times. That, plus the pressure of her leg between mine, made me come too, the pleasure shrill and disorienting, gone too quickly.

  I wanted to catch my breath and do it all again. I wanted to never leave this bed and at the same time, I wanted us to be together anywhere but here.

  All the moving parts wouldn’t fit back into my mind. I didn’t know where to begin thinking about this and I didn’t want to. I wanted to hold onto Blake and explore how I felt with her. I wanted time and space enough to feel everything.

  There were steps on the floor above. Lots of them. Everyone else must be coming in from the fire. We held tightly together and listened. Her chest shook with silent laughter and I wondered what she was thinking. The spider or something else?

  I wanted to ask, but I realized with a chill of fear that Sierra could come down here any second and find us naked, covered in cooling sweat, wrapped around each other. I needed another shower.

  “I have to get dressed,” I said. “What do I tell Sierra?”

  Blake shook her head but rolled away so that I could disentangle myself and get out of the bed. (What did it all mean? I needed to know.) I looked at Blake lying there, her hair coal-black against the pale pillow, her slate-blue eyes looking at me with warm humor or lust or both.

  I wanted enough time with her to separate out the strands of what I was feeling and examine each one and figure out what it meant.

  “Tell her I saved you from a spider,” Blake said.

  “That won’t make sense.”

  “What would?” she asked.

  “Uh…ask me again when I can think.”

  She laughed, got up and kissed me roughly. Going to her pile of clothes, she shrugged into them. She went from a beautiful, lithe form back to a black-wrapped mystery.

  “You’re lovely,” she said and walked out of the room.

  I put on my clothes and sat in the chair by the mirror, thinking: what the hell just happened?

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I didn’t tell Sierra right away. I wanted to hold being with Blake inside of me and look at it again and again. I wanted to figure it out before I talked about it.

  Sierra and I went home after the party. She fell asleep. I didn’t, not for a long time. In the morning she asked if she could borrow my car for errands. I said yes and went back to bed. Later, in the silence of the house, I wrote everything in my journal and read through it and still didn’t know what to make of it.

  Blake would have words for all this. She knew four different kinds of numb. She’d know what to call these feelings. Inside I was like a box of crayons left in the sun, colors and textures running together until they could never be pulled apart into what they’d been.

  When Sierra got back I was sitting on the couch with my journal in my lap, staring at the words on the page. I had to tell her because she came over and kissed me. It didn’t feel right to be kissing her without having told her.

  “Can we talk?” I asked and closed my journal.

  She sat on the other end of the couch and crossed her arms. “About what?”

  She hadn’t gelled her hair that morning and the purple locks tousled together all messy. I wanted to run my fingers through it and settle it. Her mouth turned down, halfway between a frown and a pout.

  “I kind of did something,” I said.

  I remembered the stinging jealousy I felt when she told me about Dustin. I didn’t want to go on. Why had I done that to her? I wasn’t that kind of person. And at the same time, weirdly, having sex with Blake didn’t feel wrong—but hurting Sierra felt awful.

  “Did something bad?” she asked.

  I braced myself against the couch, let my breath out in a quick huff, and went for it.

  “I had sex with Blake,” I told her. “But it was just a thing, you know? I still love you and I’m still with you…” I wanted to keep talking and fill the space with words, but I ran out of points to make.

  Her pale face went paler. “You? When?” she asked.

  I ran a fingernail along the rolled edge of the couch cushion.

  “Last night,” I admitted. “At the party.”

  “When?” she asked again.

  “After the lake. It was late, you were out back smoking. I went to take a shower.”

  Her eyes were crushed ice as she said, “And then you had sex with Blake? After the shower?”

  “Um, yeah.”

  “Why?”

  How could I explain it? We were naked and there was this gross spider and suddenly I was kissing Blake. There was no way to put those words together that made sense to a reasonable person. I could pretend that I would have stopped after the kiss, that it was Blake who pushed it, but that was a lie. Even thinking about it now brought back an echo of incandescence from touching Blake.

  Fear mixed with longing, how did that even make sense as an emotion? With Sierra it was simple. Our relationship had about three emotions to it: love, anger and…what was the third? Lust? Numbness? Numb lust?

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Were you trying to hurt me?”

  “No! You had sex with Dustin. I guess I thought it was okay. That we weren’t exclusive.”

  That sounded stupid even to me, but it was better than agreeing that I was trying to get back at her. She could run with that for days.

  “So you thought it was okay to fuck my best friend?” Her words were knife-edged.

  “I…”

  I hadn’t been thinking. That was kind of the thing. Also not a point that I wanted to say out loud—that Blake gave me this beautiful, wicked smile and I’d stopped thinking. That at the time, I couldn’t imagine doing anything but kissing her.

  “I only hooked up with Dustin because you’re so fucking far away,” Sierra said. She got up from the couch and stalked around the room. “You like Blake.”

  “No I don’t. I mean, yeah, I like her but not like like. Not like you. I love you.”

  “Well you have a weird way of showing it.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  I wanted to curl up in a ball, put in my earbuds turned up as high as I could stand, and wait for her anger and hurt to pass. But I’d done this. I was responsible. I had to sit and get through it.

  “Was that why she was talking to me again?” Sierra asked. “Because she was fucking you? Was she laughing at me?”

  “No! That was before. I mean, she was already talking to you. We didn’t plan this, it just happened.”

  She glared at me and walked out of the room. I heard her get in my car and drive away. If she fucked up that car, my father was going to kill me.

  I couldn’t settle down enough to draw or journal. I kept bouncing between rooms, trying to find something I could do until she got back. I texted her that I was sorry and that she should come back and talk, that I’d make it up to her. She didn’t reply.

  I walked to the park with the dogs. Sitting on the bench I’d shared with Blake, I put my palm on the bare wood where she’d been. I wanted to talk to her—but what I wanted to talk about was Blake. I couldn’t call her up as a friend to talk about the girl I’d had sex with when she was that girl.

  Had I lost her as a friend? She was the one person I could talk to. She was the only one who saw what I was drawing and got it.

  My eyes burned and my chest was so tight I could hardly breathe, but I couldn’t cry. I could never cry in front of people, not even strangers in a dog park watching their pets.

  I walked back to the house. In the bedroom, I
put in my earbuds, curled into one corner of the small couch, and let the metal tear through me.

  After a while, the door opened and Sierra came in. She got on the couch, crouching in front of me, not sitting, and brushed her hand over the top of my head. I took out one of the earbuds.

  “Lauren, it’s going to be okay.”

  I turned off the music and took out the other earbud. She put her arms around me.

  “We’ll figure it out,” she told me. “I get it. You were pissed off about Dustin and you wanted to make it even. Now we’re even.”

  If that’s what she had to think to make us okay again, I wasn’t going to argue.

  “Yeah, I guess I was,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  She sat back on the couch, resting one hand on my leg.

  “I can’t say I’m not hurt. I am. Blake was avoiding me and suddenly she gets friendly again the same night she has sex with you. It’s like I don’t know who I can trust anymore.”

  “You can trust me,” I said.

  “I hope so. I love you, you know.”

  “I love you too.”

  She turned toward me and studied my face. I don’t know what she was searching for, but she said, “You do, don’t you?” It sounded more like an answer than a question.

  I nodded, feeling tears behind my eyes. I pushed them back.

  “Let’s go out somewhere,” she said. “Let’s get all dressed up and go out and have a date. It’ll be fun.”

  “Sure.”

  She went across the room to change clothes and I dug around in my suitcase for something clean to wear. Stepping into my jeans, I saw myself in the mirror on the back of her bedroom door and shook my head at the reflection. She seemed to be judging me, saying that my father was right, I was a reckless, undisciplined girl. All I’d wanted was a girlfriend and now that I had one, I was destroying my relationship.

  Maybe I was sabotaging my whole life. That’s what the grade in American history was about, that’s why I was so dramatic, that’s what was wrong with me.

  Maybe, like Zeno, I was masquerading as human. But I wasn’t elegant like a colony of nanites. Whatever my true form was, it was monstrous.