I had no idea what I was doing, I mean I’d watched a lot of porn (a lot of porn), and, well, that was about it. And what she knew, she knew from gossip, and from her sister, and from Lana Del Rey lyrics. But we did pretty alright. She reached up to the foggy glass of the backseat window and let her hand slide down it, fulfilling a boyhood fantasy of mine I’d had since watching Titanic at an impressionable age. Our bodies moved together as skin met skin and I found myself lying down as she inspected me, grabbed onto me, and began a curious hand-job.
Neither of us finished, but it didn’t matter, we just held each other, semi-naked, in the back of her car in an abandoned cliffside parking lot as ignorant armies clashed with the shore below.
The next day we had a concerned conversation about ‘things moving too fast,’ and I agreed in understanding, but not much else. I’d do anything for her, so I was fine with anything, I’d do anything not to lose her or what we had. I did love her.
CHAPTER 16.
Shake Me Down
OL’ KEN SEEMED to like this Livi girl a lot. She was a freshman that year, and I think Ken planned to love from afar until something either changed in him or around him. I hoped he wasn’t holding out for fear of failing, but I don’t know, with a guy like him, maybe it is just better to not get hurt.
My parents had been fighting again, and I was getting ready to submit some of the last pieces of my apps one night in early November when Ken emailed me out of nowhere, he seemed like he’d been drinking and he told me he’d been writing (a dangerous combination). He sent me his newest true-life journal excerpt short story thing whatever.
The weekend before Halloween was the Twain Elementary’s Halloween carnival, and I went with Reuben. There I was, so happy with my childhood memories, the sights and smells and the old buildings brought me back to a time of innocence. After the carnival, we walked a couple of blocks down over to my cousin’s Halloween party (dad’s side, she’s in her senior year at La Jolla High). We arrived at 8:30, and everyone was already drunk. Her sister, one of my other cousins, a junior at SDSU, who works at a Sports Clips (the Hooters of haircuts), hit on me, a lot, and without any restraint.
Being there, I was appalled and truly lost, like I didn’t even know where I was, just taking in the sights and horror of this foreign yet so familiar experience. It was just the same as it would be with the kids at my school, the parties that I’d hear about (not that I would ever be invited). The next few days at school I’d always overhear the gossip about who was drunk, who hooked up with who, which party got rolled, and the brutal and unflattering pictures that I would hear about as they percolated out online; all told and done with the confidence and nonchalance of normality without consequence.
Being there though, it was unlike anything else I had ever experienced but exactly as I would have imagined; the red cups and the tiny clear plastic shot glasses everywhere, the individual water bottles almost definitely not filled with water that everyone clung to, the people draped over each other, the guys hunched over girls wearing almost nothing, the locked rooms that let out the sound of fucking even over the loud and shitty music that was playing, the crowded bathrooms and other closed rooms people were all stumbling to get a line in, the booze inside and pot outside, those acrid smells filling the whole house, savage and bacchanalian, and absolutely bewildering and overwhelming to every part of me. I felt out of place and unwelcome. I hit up the frothy, watery keg until some people asked who I knew and I left as soon as I could after that. And with that, it was over as soon as it had begun, like walking through a dream, a horrible and foreign dream. School goes on, and I’m left behind in life.
And all I can think is that I love Livi Mardling. The feeling has just been building for so long. I love her, and I know that it’s all that I’ve wanted. Olivia Price Mardling. She’s all that I want to think about anymore and just being around her makes me so deeply happy, that deep, warm, happiness, like what home should feel like. That feeling that I haven’t truly had in so very long. I love her, and there’s nothing that I can do about it. I want to be with her, I want to listen, and I don’t want to say a word. I love Livi Mardling.
But Livi, I have resolved, does not like me. I feel nothing anymore. Elementary school was the best. I remember that it was just so simple and fun, and nothing really mattered, but I tried anyway. I had friends, such good friends, and we all just had fun. Then middle school hit and a whole slew of new faces showed up. Everyone knew so much, but it seemed like I was the only smart one. They talked about sex, and other things I had never been exposed to or even heard of. It was such a shock, such a different world. I was bullied too. I was smart and a bit of an asshole about it. And because of it, I was called queer, fag, retard and all other kinds of things, and I let it happen, I fed it. I just remember it was horrible, but I still hung out with those guys because they were all there was, all I had, so I put up with all of it to be accepted. It was bad, and I don’t ever remember it getting better. I was able to move away from those people enough to be okay, and that’s when I met everyone in the group when they all came to the school in 6th grade. Things were better after that. Things were good then. I just can’t imagine them being that good again. I think I have to let Livi go, let Brooke go, let it all slip away. Forgetting you but not the time.
Oh fuck me, I just don’t want to deal with this tonight. I told him I’d see him at school in the morning.
. . . . .
In the morning he seemed agitated and tired. He told me he wanted to tell Livi, but he didn’t know how.
“Well, how’d you tell Lila?” he asked.
“Tell her what?”
“That you liked her, how’d you get her to go out with you?”
I had to think about that, “Well, I didn’t really. We just kind of texted and then talked it out.”
He seemed dissatisfied with the answer and said, “I should write Livi a letter.”
I hesitated to shoot down that insane and out of touch idea. “Sure thing, man,” I said instead. I was about walk away, but before exiting, I turned to ask, “Do you really love her?”
“Yes,” he answered with a concerning amount of self-assurance.
“Well, Ken, I mean, that still might not be love.”
“I think- I believe that it is. I know it is, it has to be.”
CHAPTER 17.
In The Aeroplane
Over The Sea
THINGS WITH LILA and I had gotten pretty regular. We were a known “item” around campus; as a couple, we were something people didn’t expect but also thought made so much sense when they heard about it. We had our routines, we’d see each other when we could during the day, and we’d park in some hidden place to make out, take off our clothes, and do ‘everything but’ in that hour after school. I know how lucky I was to have a girl like Lila, she was great, and she was so adventurous and so sexy. It was incredible. She’d go and read Cosmo articles in her free time and ‘report her findings’ to me orally. I’m just glad she never tried to eat a donut off of my dick. And while she read Cosmo and listened to Lana’s sultry sexuality, I read Vice articles about cunnilingus and did everything I could to make myself the best person for her.
I submitted the rest of my college apps and was happily done, it was out of my hands now. And so, that weekend I wanted to celebrate. Lila and I hadn’t really been on a proper date in a while, or ever I thought so I picked her up, and we got dinner at a place by her house, a cozy-fun little place called the Prepkitchen in La Jolla and then we went to the movies at the Arclight, what an incredible theatre. Nice seats, they served booze to the adults, I felt fancy as fuck there. It seemed like everything was nicer in that part of town, in her life. They were all the same things that were in my life, just nicer, better versions of them. We wen
t to see Moonrise Kingdom while it was still in theatres, it was fun, and we held hands and cuddled up with each other. And then, on our way out of the cinema, we passed by a theatre that was playing an old screening of the 1968 Romeo and Juliet, and she grabbed me by the hand and ran in. It was one of her favorites.
It was such a beautiful movie, it was also an incredibly erotic film. We held hands, and she cuddled up close, and then, out of nowhere, her other hand found its way down my pants. And so, my hand found a similar home up her skirt. The theatre was nearly full. I continued to move my fingers inside of her for what was the majority of the movie. And when the star-crossed lovers arranged their accidentally simultaneous suicides (oh irony, it was just that the time was wrong), I began to withdraw my hand, but she gently held my wrist and kept my hand in place, her other hand moving again into my pants. Oh happy dagger, this is thy sheath.
She kissed me passionately when the credits rolled, and I wiped my fingers on the seat as we left. It was late, and so I drove in the direction of her home. I was about four blocks away from her house, turning off of a larger street when she told me to turn into the parking lot of a church at the corner. It was sometime around midnight, and the neighborhood was empty. I parked behind a wall under the yellow-orange tungsten glow of a parking lot floodlight. We moved to the cramped back seat of the Mustang, like we had so many times before, and did what we did best.
Our clothes were off, and our bodies were pressed against each other, the windows to the outside world fogging and becoming more opaque with each consecutive breath. She straddled me, naked, and rubbed up and down against me, moving her hips. I could feel her warmth as I was perfectly nestled up against her.
“If we’re going to keep doing it like this, I think I should wear a condom,” I whispered to her after nibbling her ear.
“You’re right,” as she shifted over and allowed me to reach in the compartment between the seats to get out a condom.
I rolled it down over myself slowly and cautiously as she watched.
She straddled me again and gyrated her hips against me, kissing my neck.
“Do you want to?” she asked.
“Really? Do you?” surprised and barely containing my joy.
“Put it in.”
Before now we’d only practiced the ‘just the tip’ routine on her bed. Each time it was too painful to continue. We had the condoms for that purpose so we could keep trying until it didn’t hurt. This process frustrated her each time, but I never minded, I always tried to be as patient and understanding, and at her pace as I could. I never expected it would turn into sex though, I hoped of course, but I had no expectations and wanted whatever she was comfortable with.
I slid inside of her with complete and surprising ease. She gasped with pleasure with me.
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
She smiled incredibly, “not at all.”
She raised and lowed herself slowly, and our bodies moved together immaculately.
And then we clumsily tried to switch positions, bumping knees, elbows, and heads and doing the Kama Sutra proud with the flexibility needed to do coitus in the cramped back seat of an American muscle car. I wish I could paint some beautiful, erotic picture like the one I will forever have in my memory, but sex is nowhere near a perfect or pristine act in real life. It’s fun, it’s messy, it’s funny, our bodies make noises and produce various fluids and involuntary exclamations. It’s not some soft-focused act of missionary love in the light of a hundred candles, it’s two bodies moving with and against each other in sweat and in love. And that is more beautiful than anything I could imagine, because what we had, what we did, that was perfect in all of its quirks and imperfections. We wanted nothing more than to share that with each other, and when I finished, panting, I tied off the condom, and we held each other in our warm sweaty arms, catching our breath, and pecking each other’s lips, smiling.
We put our clothes back on, and I drove her home through the cool night, walking her to her door with a kiss and a smile.
CHAPTER 18.
Sappy
LILA CALLED ME on the phone saying that it hurt immensely to pee.
Aww, fucking come on. Can I just have one good thing, please?
We talked, and then she went to her mom with the problem who soon drove her to Planned Parenthood. Her mom wasn’t worried in the slightest while Lila and I had, on the other hand, no idea what was going on. She left the building with a prescription for antibiotics and a bottle of cranberry juice for her run of the mill urinary tract infection.
“My mom said she used to get them all the time when she started having sex,” she said. Well, I guess the cat’s out of the bag now, or the pussy or something, no more meeting the parents for me, “she told me I just have to pee afterword, and this shouldn’t happen again.”
Goddamnit. Well, I’m glad it was fairly innocuous, I’m damn sorry I caused her that pain though. Nothing the miracles of modern medicine can’t fix though. And by the time my 18th birthday came around at the end of November, we were back in business, as I started to come to glad terms with the fact that I was now a sexual being (protected fully under the Romeo and Juliet Law, I think).
. . . . .
Ken told me he had written a letter for Livi, and he wanted to give it to her before school got out for December break.
“I put a lot of work into it, and I think I’ve perfected it, will you take a look at it tomorrow?” he asked after school one day.
The ‘tomorrow’ in question was Friday, December 14th, a day that started as unassumingly as any other. Until around lunchtime, when I walked around campus and passed a person crying, then another, and then another sobbing while on the phone. I went online to find that some sick fuck had just killed 20 little kids in an elementary school in Connecticut. I tried to find Lila, and I held her as she cried. I called home and left a message simply telling my parents that I loved them.
Kenneth didn’t seem as affected as I thought he should be, and he still gave me his letter during break, “Here,” he said handing me the folded up, printed out sheet. I didn’t read it until that weekend.
Olivia Price Mardling
Livi, although it is impossible to say what I mean, I will try to tell you in writing, the only way I know how.
The heart of an artist beats inside her. And I want her to know me as I want to know her. I want to be hers, and I want to be in her arms. I want to listen, and I don’t want to say a word. She is all that I want to think about, all that I can think about anymore. My heart aches when I see her, when I pass her when she smiles. It hurts so profoundly to see her and not be with her. But the hope that she will feel the same way, and just being around her, makes me so deeply happy, that deep warm happiness, like home.
Lying is usually easy because lying is usually easier than telling the truth. Telling her that I don’t like her amongst suspicion and rumor, is the hardest lie I have ever told.
So I tell you now, Livi. I Love You. With all my being and all my heart, I Love you.
Ever since I first saw you, so many years ago, I knew you were different, I knew you were special. And now I know your heart as you have stolen mine. I Love you Livi, I love your kindness, your humility, your boldness, and your elegance, I even love your laugh. You are so beautiful in every possible way, and just being around you makes me feel alive, warm, and at peace. I love everything about you and am willing to do anything for you. Just being around you makes me the happiest I have ever been, but it hurts as well. Just to see you, in all of your beauty, it hurts to see you and know that I am not with you, it hurts to think about you and not be with you, it hurts to be right next to you, and know how far away we are. I love you Livi, and I love your heart. The heart of an arti
st beats inside you, kind and loving, the heart of an artist beats inside of you, and I want to be right there with you, because now I know that’s all I’ve ever wanted.
I Love You.
Kenneth Chester
I didn’t know whether I’d rather her break his heart later or break it myself right now. The poor, goddamned, hopeless, romantic sop. He wanted to give it to her on Monday.
Monday evening I’d get the Facebook message explaining that Livi wasn’t at school that day.
“I don’t know maybe I shouldn’t give it to her; maybe nothing ever works out for me. Maybe this is just how it is. I don’t know anymore.”
I was with Lila and didn’t respond, and it seemed like he was getting the right idea, anyway.
He messaged me the next day.
“I gave Livi the letter at school today; I handed it to her and told her that I had written it for her and I said thank you and so did she, taking it and walking away. I hope this works; I hope that this will get her to see so she can like me.”
He didn’t hear from her or see her until the next week, on the last day of school before break. I don’t know how he handled the anticipation. I saw him after school just standing by his locker, I asked him if he’d heard from her.
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