Wake

by Abria Mattina

  “You remember the rule about staring?”

  “What?” Oh, right: if I stare I have to touch, or it’s teasing. I wouldn’t want to tease her…

  Her skin is cold and moist and I bet she’d warm up faster if we cuddled. I offer and Willa smiles. “I’d like that.” The droplets on her skin are mostly dry by the time we set up out picnic blanket on the sand. Willa puts on her big plaid shirt and slips her bra off from underneath. I’m a little disappointed that I don’t get to cuddle with mostly-naked Willa, but Willa wearing only drenched panties and a loose flannel shirt is nice too. We lie facing on our sides and tangle limbs. Her damp head fits below my chin.

  “You know, you could push a little,” I hint.

  You’re going to regret saying that the next time she tries to take your clothes off.

  Willa chuckles. “I think you’re still a little too high maintenance for wilderness sex.” That’s an interesting way of phrasing it. My body isn’t screwed up, it’s ‘high maintenance.’

  “You’re such a tease.” I snap the waistband of her wet panties and she squeaks.

  “If I wanted to tease you, you’d know it.”

  “Oh yeah? How?”

  Willa lifts her head from under my chin to look me in the eye. “If I wanted to push you I’d have jumped in the water naked.”

  Why did I ask her not to push, again?

  Because any normal guy’s dick would be twitching right now. What’s yours up to?

  “We really have to come back here sometime.” My enthusiasm amuses her. She indulges me a little, and we make out under the warm sun with her still half-naked and wrapped around me. I get three of the buttons on her shirt open before she notices, and when she does she just shrugs and goes back to kissing me. I love Willa’s tits. Perfectly palm sized, with the softness and texture of a ripe peach, only I bet her skin tastes sweeter.

  I might have accidentally said that out loud.

  “What?”

  “Uh…your tits are like peaches?”

  Willa doesn’t even blink. “Okay. Your balls are like lychee nuts.”

  “What?” Willa goes back to kissing me without bothering to answer. What the hell is a lychee nut? I’m not sure if she just insulted or complimented me. I take Willa’s face between my hands to stop the kiss and make her tell me.

  “It’s a pink fruit about the size of a walnut. It’s got wrinkly skin and bitter white pulp inside.” How far did she think this analogy through?

  “You’re a little strange.”

  “Yup.” She separates herself from me and reaches for her jeans.

  “Drop ‘em.”

  Willa ignores me and stands up. She shimmies out of her underwear—damn those shirttails for hiding all the good stuff—and steps into her pants.

  “Let’s go explore a little more.” She holds a hand out to me.

  “I can make out with you again later, right?”

  Willa rolls her eyes. “Why do you ask such obvious questions?”

  I follow her with a gleeful smile. I do like the image of her bra and panties left alone on the blanket as we walk away. I like Willa in comfy, touchable clothes…with nothing underneath.

  I might need to go slow with her, but I sure as hell don’t want to.

  Willa: June 4 to 6

  Sunday

  Jem follows me around the edge of the beach, exploring the treed areas closest to the grassland. The spaces between the trees are mostly clear, but by high summer this will all be filled with ferns and underbrush. Jem keeps a hand on my waist, comfortably tracing my hipbone through my shirt. I can feel him watching me while we explore the woods.

  Whenever I look at him he’s got a hungry look on his face. It’s not a possessive expression, but one of clear longing. I’ve never seen that before. Steve looked at me as parts of a whole. Ray’s looks clearly read mine. From the others there were suspicious looks, indifferent looks. If they wanted me it was for fifteen minutes at a time and no talking.

  “What are you thinking about?” I ask.

  “Summer.” His answer surprises me. I was expecting something like ‘your tits’ or ‘things I’m going to do to you when we get home.’

  “Summer?”

  “This summer.” Jem wraps his arms around me and gently pushes my back up against a spruce trunk. “Time with you…and bikini season.” He chuckles at his own joke. I didn’t know Smiths Falls had a bikini season. “And actually going swimming with you,” he adds quietly. His smile is hesitant but real.

  “Oh yes? Any word on when you’re losing the hardware?”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  “You’re not going to wear that hat all summer, are you?”

  Jem smirks. “No. Not this hat, specifically. I’ve got a collection that I rotate daily.” I really should give the sarcastic bastard a smack, but all I manage is a kiss instead. Being around him screws with my natural impulses like that.

  “Take it off,” I encourage him.

  “Later.”

  “There’s no one around. Just you and me.” I’m not wearing my gloves, but that does nothing to encourage Jem. He doesn’t see a parallel between our masks.

  Jem shakes his head. “Not yet.” It’s not an argument worth having, so I let it go.

  We return to our blanket when the afternoon makes us lazy and warm. Jem is quick to fall asleep after all the hiking, and I amuse myself by tickling his ear with a long blade of grass. It makes him snort in his sleep, but he doesn’t even wake up a little bit until I’ve tickled him a dozen times.

  “Mm’zit?” he mumbles. I have no idea what that means.

  “What’s that?”

  Jem rolls over with a sigh and puts an arm around me. “Soft,” he mumbles. Apparently my boobs make a good pillow. I rub his back and pet the slope of his neck. He’s so warm and alive. I think about peeling back his hat for a peek, since he sleeps so soundly and probably wouldn’t notice, but that would devalue the gesture when he does decide to trust me with that part of himself. I let it be.

  “I’ll try not to screw it up with you,” I whisper.

  This is a new thing for me, to be with a guy and not screw him in place of conversation—to actually know his full name and have met his family and shared in his hobbies. Steve waited just long enough for me to trust him—or at least he thought I did. Creating pretty fictions for people isn’t so hard, as long as you commit to the lie. We were quite a pair—a liar and a snake.

  He asked me about gardening, like he was just making pleasant conversation. I didn’t like gardening, but I’d grown up around a woman who did. I knew enough to talk with him about it. He said he was thinking of putting some ‘color’ in front of his house and invited me to go to the plant nursery with him that weekend to choose trays of cheap annuals.

  And back at his house, with dirt on my knees from planting, he sat me on his lap and kissed me. I didn’t not like it, and by that point everything I did was just another part of the grand lie. I came back every weekend—to water the plants, ostensibly; it’s not easy to wheel on grass, you know.

  I was numb enough that it didn’t shock me when he progressed from kissing to touching, and from touching to taking clothes off. The man was good with his hands, and my hormones were definitely not on my side.

  “You can touch me back, you know,” he said with an indulgent smile, like I was naïve and cute for not trying to reciprocate freely. I wasn’t keen on touching his dick, but it turned out he didn’t have that sort of thing in mind. His erogenous zones were displaced by injury—he wanted me to kiss his arms and chest and neck. Nails on his biceps drove him insane. That was the reason Steve only went for younger girls—women his own age weren’t interested in a relationship without ‘real’ sex. Young virgins, on the other hand…

  We’d been at this little ritual of ‘watering the flowers’ for a few months when Steve pushed me back against the edge of the dining room table and made me sit on top. It was the perfect height and angle to expose me to a guy in
a chair. I was used to hands touching me, but I wasn’t expecting his mouth. And I liked it.

  I didn’t bother to water the plants the following week. We went straight to the bed and stayed there for three hours, because that’s how slow and methodical sex was with his body. He touched everything. He showed me how a guy comes without an erection. He shocked me out of my numbness for five minutes at a time, and made me feel too stupid with pleasure to care that if I wasn’t numb, life was agony.

  I remember looking at his legs that day, really looking, as we lay there after. No touching. No talking. No cuddling. It was the first time I’d seen all of him bare, and I was fascinated by the way his well-muscled torso gave way to thin, immobile legs.

  “I’m used to it,” he interrupted my musing. “Everyone’s normal is someone else’s weird.” I remembered that lesson well. It was the only honest thing Steve ever said, to the best of my knowledge.

  Ray was equally full of shit. We never had great communication, what with the language barrier and all, and it was a relationship based mostly on hate sex. His hate for the world, mine for myself. The most we ever did was meet each other halfway. He read my lips and I deciphered his awkward speech. My Sign vocabulary never grew beyond the essentials: I want to fuck; Don’t bullshit me; Strip; Condom; Fuck off and die. My lack of signs was fine by him—he didn’t want me for conversation. We’d just screw on the spare mattress in his parents’ basement when they weren’t home. It was different than it had been with Steve. There was a dick involved, for one. The lights had to stay on, for another. The whole thing was very tactile. Touches took the place of words. Ray liked me to face away from him when we fucked. He didn’t like the dead look in my eyes.

  That look scares Jem too. I can see it in his face, and every time his fear almost moves me.

  Things are going to be different with Jem. Because I want them to be, and because he’s different than the others. He’s decent. He has a heart that hasn’t been rendered incapable of love.

  I pet his sun-flushed cheek and murmur, “When are you going realize you’re too good for me?” I’m counting on it that he will. He thinks I’m the one who’s settling, but that’s just the trauma talking. At any given moment there are two people living in Jem’s body: the boy who’s still dying of cancer, and the man with a big heart who’s been to hell and back. One of them is living on borrowed time.

  *

  I wake up after the sun has moved below the treetops, still cuddling with Jem. I can hear him murmuring, but the tall grass rustles in the breeze and I can’t make out every word. I only catch a few: love, Soc, summer. His lips are so close to my collarbone that I can feel it when he speaks. Jem twists a lock of my hair around his finger.

  “How long was I out?” I roll toward him and stretch. Jem opens his arms to catch me. I’d nuzzle into his chest, but he would probably freak out.

  “Not long.”

  I stretch my back and give him a kiss. The afternoon in the wilderness has been fun, but I think it’s time we did other things. I suggest driving back to Smiths Falls for a meal with his family.

  “My parents notice when you’re not around,” he says as we fold up the blanket. “It’s like you’ve always been there—now your absence is the noteworthy thing.” He chuckles.

  “Are you sure it’s me they notice? Or do you make it obvious by turning into a grumpy bastard when I’m not around to spoil you with kisses?”

  “Spoil me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well you’re not doing a very good job.” He brings the corners of the blanket up to my chest to fold and leans in for a kiss.

  “You only get one.”

  “Oh.” He deliberately pouts. “Maybe I’ll save it for later, then.”

  I kiss him. Manipulative bastard.

  As I pull on to the highway I suggest Jem call his mom to let her know that we’ll both be there for supper. He rolls his eyes from where he lounges in the passenger seat and points out that there won’t be any dinner unless we make it ourselves.

  “What the hell did you guys eat before I started coming over?”

  “Frozen veggies and hamburger helper,” he says with complete seriousness.

  “You poor, deprived child.”

  Jem laughs and relents, agreeing that I do spoil him. Eric too, apparently, since he’s been complaining whenever someone else takes the last of the leftover ‘Willa food.’

  “Elise can cook.”

  “That’s a recent development,” he grumbles. Jem’s phone rings. He checks the caller ID and answers the call without hesitation. “Hi Mom.”

  Ivy’s voice is just an indistinct buzz to my ears. A crease appears between Jem’s eyebrows.

  “I’m fine. What’s wrong?”

  There are three long minutes where he just listens with that thoughtful expression in place, and then he tells her that he’s almost home. “Bye. Love you.” He ends the call and slumps forward, scrubbing his hands over his face.

  He’s quiet for a long time, and then all of a sudden he exclaims, “Shit!” like he forgot his keys or something. “Shit. Fuck!” He punches the dash and the glove compartment pops open. Jem slams it shut with another ‘fuck.’ “God fucking damn it!” he yells with real force. Last time I heard someone yell like that, it was a bike messenger giving a reckless driver a piece of his mind.

  “Jesus Christ, what’s the matter with you?” He sounded fine on the phone, and I’ve never known Jem to be so angry with his mother.

  Jem looks at me like he just remembered that he isn’t alone, and this isn’t a private tantrum. “Meira died.” After all that yelling his speaking voice sounds quiet.

  “Who’s Meira?” And why is she worth yelling about while I’m trying to drive?

  “You remember that time we went down to Pediatrics after dialysis?”

  “Uh-huh.” I’d forgotten the girl’s name, but I remember that she was dying at the time.

  “She died this morning.” His voice cracks on the word ‘died,’ and he curses under his breath again. I don’t tell him I’m sorry, because I know from experience that it means jack shit to hear people say that, so I agree with him: “Fuck.”

  “I know.” Jem tilts his head back and sighs. He’s quiet again for a little while, but as we turn onto his street he mutters another curse word under his breath. “She would have been seventeen next week.”

  I don’t bother to ask if they were close or if they spent much time together outside the hospital. What happened on the ward probably matters more. They’re like soldiers who’ve shared a tour of duty; it doesn’t matter if they see each other after, because the bond is already forged.

  “When is her funeral?”

  “Tuesday.”

  “Do you want me to go with you?”

  Jem shrugs. I look over to find his face oddly blank. Is it shock? Disbelief? Or conscious numbness? I know better than I’d care to admit what each of those feels like, but I can’t do much besides hold his hand on the seat between us while I drive home.

  Elise comes out of the house when I turn into the driveway. She runs up to Jem’s side of the car and barely lets him out before she throws her arms around him. She offers soup as comfort food and Jem says he isn’t hungry.

  I’m not sure if I should leave or come inside. Jem is too distracted for a proper goodbye, and I wonder if I should just slink away quietly and talk to him later, after he’s sorted through some of the emotion with his family. Then I notice Eric watching me from the front window, eyeing the way I stand apart from the grieving group. He inclines his head a little, inviting me inside.

  The Harper kitchen has the feel of a funeral parlor. Jem is still quiet, and Ivy chatters nervously to fill the silence. Elise is full of hugs for her brother, but like me, Eric hangs back. Ivy tells us all the details—that Meira died this morning of multi-system organ failure. That’s the piece of information that finally breaks Jem’s blank façade, and he storms away with a sound of disgust. He rushes up the stairs and
slams his bedroom door.

  “Let him be for awhile,” Ivy says to no one in particular. I take it as a hint and say my goodbyes. I go home, make Frank some supper, and wait for Jem to call. He doesn’t, and I don’t blame him.

  Monday

  It’s just after midnight when the ringing of my phone wakes me. I roll over and feel around for my phone. The caller ID is for the Harper house. I try not to fault Jem for staying awake so late with his grief.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Willa?” It’s not Jem. For a moment I’m confused.

  “Eric?”

  “Yeah. I got your number from Elise’s phone.”

  “Why are you calling so late?” I expect to hear horrible news. No early morning phone calls have ever been for a good cause. I sit up against the pillows and try to wake myself up enough for this.

  “Has Jem said anything to you?”

  “Not since I left this afternoon.”

  “He’s been acting…strange.”

  “Strange how?”

  “Not talking. Or really doing anything, actually. He just sort of drifts around. You can tell he’s thinking, but he doesn’t seem upset, and his friend just died.” There’s a blustery echo over the line as Eric sighs into the phone. “You think he’d… I don’t know, be angry or sad or something. He just slammed that one door and that was it.”

  It would creep Eric out that another person fails to express emotion. He lives out loud and expects others to do the same.

  “He’ll get there.”

  “If he says anything—”

  “I’ll let you know.” I like Eric a little more, now. He’s a good older brother. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “You sure?”

  “She was Elise’s age,” he says quietly, and blows out another breath. “That could have been Jem.”

  “Don’t grieve something you haven’t lost,” I tell him. “Elise and Jem are fine.”