by Piper Lennox
He rubs his sternum as we both sit up. “It hurts a little,” he admits, “but I just thought I was tired.”
“Maybe you had too much tequila. Or you need your inhaler, or something.”
“Maybe.” He swings his legs over the side of the bed. “Let’s go downstairs and get some water. Probably just dehydrated.”
We get dressed and go raid his kitchen, snacking on the remnants of cracker boxes and splitting the one granola bar in the house. Blake finds a box of mac and cheese, then realizes they have no butter or milk.
“This is ridiculous.” I slam the fridge door so hard, the flour and sugar canisters on top rattle. “Doesn’t your dad ever go shopping?”
“No. It’s usually me.”
I feel stupid and mean, suddenly, because I should’ve known better. Blake’s dad is less of a dad, more of a roommate—and not a very good one.
“Let’s order a pizza,” I say, pulling a twenty from my purse in the hallway. It’s still tucked inside the graduation card my grandma gave me, but I make sure Blake doesn’t see that.
“Oh,” he says, smoothing it out against his pants. “Thanks. Dad didn’t leave me any cash.”
Of course he didn’t. I don’t say this, though. I just roll my eyes and he does too, because sometimes it’s easier to turn that kind of stuff into jokes.
We sit on the stairs. I order the pizza, extra cheese, the way we like. When I hang up, I realize he’s smiling like an idiot again, lost in his own thoughts.
“What are you grinning about?”
He scratches his neck. “I’m just...glad I finally got you.”
I laugh. If he notices how forced it sounds, he doesn’t show it. “Into bed, you mean?”
“No.” His face gets serious. “I mean, like…all of you.” He runs his tongue between his lips, thinking. “I’ve wanted you to be mine for so long, and now it’s—”
“Yours?” I interrupt. “Blake, look.” What’s going on? Why is this knot of panic unfurling in my gut, when just a few minutes ago, I loved the sound of those very same words?
“What I said in the laundry room, I meant it. We aren’t boyfriend and girlfriend. We’re just…friends.”
“So?”
“So it’s weird, and—and super fast.” Out here, in full light and clothes, it’s hard to remember the dream-like fog from his bedroom. It’s hard to remember what, exactly, made me think of him so differently.
He’s just Blake again. When I stare into his eyes, the dance in my chest doesn’t thrill me, like it did on the couch in the dark, or upstairs in the glow of the sunset. It scares me.
I let things go so, so far. A few hours ago, I couldn’t even imagine kissing him. Now, in a single afternoon, he has my virginity. He almost had me thinking I was in love with him, which is insane. You can’t possibly go from just friends to true love after a few hours.
He managed to get more from me during one storm than any boy I’ve ever known—and each of those still left their scars. How much more would a breakup hurt, if it happened with Blake? I wouldn’t just lose a boyfriend. I’d lose my best friend.
“It isn’t fast,” he counters. “Not when you think about the fact we’ve known each other fourteen years. It might seem fast, because there’s no awkward dating and all that, but…isn’t that a good thing?”
My arm gets goose bumps again when he brushes it with his fingers. The fingers he touched you with. The ones he used to make you feel so….
“I don’t want to mess up what we have now.”
His eyes get dark. I’ve never seen a look on his face like the one I’m seeing now: pure fury and hurt. But mostly fury.
“What we have now,” he says, his voice so low, I can hardly hear him; I’m afraid to lean closer, “is you putting me in the friend zone every fucking day, and only letting me out when it’s convenient for you. And now you’re doing it again.”
I think I see tears in his eyes, but he looks so angry, it’s hard to tell. “Blake—”
“How many dates did you sneak out for where I covered for you?” he asks, getting to his feet. “How many guys broke your heart and I was there to fix it, like the sucker I’ve always been, huh?” He stops, panting, and rubs his chest. When he winces, I get up and start to reach for him, instinctive. We’ve always healed the other one’s hurt, or at least tried.
But now my feet are fixed to the spot. I can’t touch him. I don’t dare.
He’s right. There were times I asked more of him than a friend should. And I have kept him in that friend zone, the safe space where you’re less likely to lose it all, if things go wrong.
Yet, somehow, they still are.
“Hey, you’re the one who never told me how you felt.” Now I’m shouting, my voice strangled in the high ceiling of the foyer. He isn’t completely right. This isn’t all my fault. “How was I supposed to know? And now you expect me to accept it and automatically feel the same, just like that? Don’t get mad at me because you weren’t man enough to put your feelings out there.”
He rubs his chest again. Even that seems like an angry gesture, now.
“Get out,” he says.
The command is quiet, but it still hits me so hard, I have to blink at him until it makes sense. “Is that what you want?”
He looks beyond my head, not in my eyes.
“Well?”
“Yes,” he barks. “Okay? That’s what I want. Just go.”
My muscles are paralyzed. It takes me a long time to move, but when I do, I can’t get out fast enough.
I strip out of his clothes, right there in the hall, and gather my stuff from the dryer, pulling on each piece as I go. The pizza guy gets an eyeful of me struggling into my pants as I pass him on the porch.
It’s not until I’m almost home, my bike seat wringing water out onto my butt and legs, that I realize the rain has finally, totally stopped. The storm is over.
My brother Josh is in the carport with his busted-up shell of a Corvette. Pieces clatter to the asphalt as he culls this machine down to nothing, rebuilding from almost scratch.
I sit on our old tire swing and watch him a while. I wonder what’s easiest: building something up from nothing, or tearing down the old to find out what’s useful, what can be saved, and going from there.
Part Two
Twenty-One
Six
Blake
“Wait a minute. It’s all his?”
Caitlin-Anne stares at me with this open-mouthed smile as the lawyer confirms that, yes, my father’s entire estate has been left to me. And only me.
“Excuse me,” I say politely, heading for the door, then basically running through the reception area. I throw up the second I’m outside.
Dad’s house. The cars. Every single thing he ever owned and probably his ghost itself, wrapped up in a place I hated enough while I lived there. Why would he leave it to me? What kind of sick joke is that?
Somehow, vomit is still coming up. I haven’t eaten in at least two days, so it’s nothing but bile and black coffee. I feel dizzy. My chest aches, that now-familiar jackhammer feeling.
“It’s okay, Mellie. That’s it, you’re okay.”
This happens every time I throw up: I remember that night with Mel, behind the Gulls’ carport, kneeling in gravel and retching sour fruit all over the place.
Whispering that it would be okay, pulling back her hair. Pretending, for a few minutes, that she was mine.
Finally, I’m done. I get up, brush the grass off my suit pants, and shove some gum in my mouth.
Caitlin-Anne is still talking with the lawyer when I come back. I don’t stop to hear what the conversation’s about.
“Okay,” I say, letting my voice boom, hands on his desk, “let’s say I want to get rid of it.”
“Get rid of it?” Caitlin-Anne pulls on my arm. It’s like she’s getting me to sit, but I know she really wants me to recant the blasphemy that’s just left my mouth.
The lawyer looks confused, too, but nods. �
��Um, of course,” he says, clearing his throat. “If you decide you don’t want any of his property or effects, you can have an estate sale. I’d be happy to help arrange that.”
“This weekend. Can you schedule it that soon?”
“Well, yes,” he stammers, “but you won’t get as many buyers, with such short notice. And you might accidentally sell some things you want to keep.”
“I don’t want any of it. I just want it gone as fast as possible. What about Saturday?”
He looks at a stack of notes on his desk. “I’ll have to make some calls, but I think that’s doable. I know a company that specializes in quick sales. They aren’t cheap, though.”
“Fine by me.”
“All right, then. I’ll set it up, then let you know.” Cutting his eyes at Caitlin-Anne, he adds, “But perhaps you’d like to discuss it?”
“Yes,” she says, at the same time I say, “No.”
The silence is like cracked glass. “It’s my choice,” I tell both of them, only I’m too exhausted to say it to their faces, so I just tell it to the mahogany pencil holder in front of me.
On the way back to my apartment, Caitlin-Anne alternates between pouting and coaxing. “You know,” she says, “it’d be nice to have an entire house, paid off and everything, before you’re even twenty-two. I mean, we could break our leases this summer and move right in.”
I see what she’s doing. You could see it from space.
“I can also buy myself a house with the estate sale money,” I say, fighting the urge to emphasize “I” and “myself,” even though I probably should. Caitlin-Anne is pretty WASP-y, if I’m being honest. In the six months or so we’ve been dating, she’s gotten cut off from her daddy’s credit card twice. He’s trying to teach her independence. Which, in her mind, seems to mean locking down a guy with a lot of money.
A guy like me, I realize. I already bring home a good paycheck, but this estate thing is icing on the cake, for her.
The car gets quiet again. At an intersection, Caitlin-Anne asks what I’m thinking about.
I run my tongue along my teeth. The taste of peppermint gum is strong, but the taste of bile is stronger. It’s weird, how something so disgusting can take me back to such a good memory.
Well. It used to be good.
“Moonshine,” I tell her.
Mel
“Did he see you?”
I throw my sunglasses on the table in front of Josh, who’s playing a video game on mute and blasting Sublime from the sound system. “I stayed at the back, so I don’t think so.” After I’ve let a beanbag chair consume me, I tug my black dress—used almost exclusively for funerals, like today—down to mid-thigh and add, “He had a girl with him.”
“A girl, or girlfriend?”
I shrug. It’s easier to pretend I don’t care. On screen, Josh blows up a tank and four people.
There’s a stack of games on the table, each more violent than the last. When he turned eighteen, a video game system was the first thing Josh bought. Our parents couldn’t enforce their rigid, crazy rules forever, after all.
“You have, like, four zombie games,” I tell him. “And who needs this many first-person shooters?”
“You sound like Mom.” He rolls his eyes at me. I throw one of the zombie games at him.
“Speaking of which,” I say, still trying to act casual, “where is she?” The last thing I need after a day like this is Mom clucking about my attire. My dress is perfectly fine, but anything more than two inches above the knee earns the label of “hoochie dress” from her.
“Don’t know. Upstairs, I guess.”
“Thanks so much. That really helps me out.”
“Hey,” he protests, “don’t get huffy with me just because Blake has a girlfriend.”
“I don’t care if he has a girlfriend. Today was about paying my respects for Patrick, not seeing Blake.”
Josh glances at me with one eyebrow raised, clearly not buying this. “I still don’t get why you didn’t just call him when Mom gave you the obituary,” he says, after a minute. “I mean, if there was ever a reason, that would’ve been it.”
“Yeah,” I sigh. I should have known I couldn’t play it cool with Josh. He knows me too well.
Not everything, but more than most.
I get up and climb the basement steps two at a time, headed for my room.
I should’ve called.
Not just the day the obituary got printed, but when I heard his dad was sick last year. When I saw him downtown that night, some month between our twentieth birthdays, and suddenly missed him so much I almost approached.
When I passed his house, every day the year we were nineteen, on my way to work. Any of the hundreds of days I’d thought about him, since the last one.
I change into sweats and a tank top. My bed is unmade and looks softer than usual, after such a long morning, so I climb inside and cocoon myself.
“I promise, I won’t hurt you...my Mellie girl....”
My hands slip down to my sex, a light touch, at first, as I pull the memory up from the depths. It’s something I thought about a lot, the first year or so. These days, I do everything in my power to avoid it.
It’s hard, though. He was my first, in so many ways. Don’t they say your first is always the hardest to forget?
My fingers trace up and down from my navel. “I dare you to let me give you an orgasm.”
How can it still turn me on so much?
In the three years since, I’ve had my share of sex. Boyfriends. Hook-ups. Even a girl, once, on a drunken night I don’t remember, at a sorority mixer downtown.
There are some fond memories, and a lot of hot ones: the time Elliot Gull’s brother bent me over his couch and, in the middle of everything, put a finger where I didn’t expect it; that guy from Green Ochre Bar who never told me his name or asked for mine, but made me come so hard I cried; Hyatt Bridgewood and Whit Porter, best friends who had me service one while the other took care of me, then switched.
To be frank: I slutted it up pretty hard, right after Blake and I stopped talking. It was like I wanted to prove something to him, or maybe my parents. I wasn’t his Mellie; I wasn’t their chaste, good girl, either.
Maybe I just wanted to prove something to myself. That I was over him, that my choice that day was the right one. I don’t know. Whatever I was trying to prove, I don’t think I did.
Because the fact was, for every hot, steamy memory, there was always a sad and pathetic reverse of the coin.
Elliot Gull’s brother, making me have sex with him when I couldn’t pay for the weed he fronted me.
That guy from Green Ochre Bar who made me climb down the lattice of his bedroom window, because surprise, surprise, his wife was home.
Hyatt Bridgewood and Whit Porter, best friends who secretly taped the entire thing and slapped it online for the world to see, until I filed a lawsuit and they had to take it down. I got a small settlement, but no apology.
But my memories of that afternoon with Blake, few as they are, still get to me. The flipside hurts more than the others, but the good parts never fail to light my nerves on fire. Even now, as I touch myself and sigh inside my chest, I think about him doing these things instead.
He took my virginity. He gave me my first orgasm, and the second. Hell, he even showed me how to touch myself the right way. Is it really so strange that I still think about him? Is it really that bad?
I push two fingers inside and alternate between my fantasies: reliving that night all those years ago with that tall, lanky boy, who I’d known basically my whole life…and experiencing a new night, one I’ll never have, with the man he’s turned into in my absence.
I haven’t seen him up-close in person, but I’ve seen pictures online. He’s bulked up. He wears ties. Even a lip ring, for one short summer, now just the dot of a scar.
I pretend my fingers are his, and imagine his hands are bigger now, too. Rougher. My sex is underneath his tongue. He works it like a sec
ret code.
When I come, I whisper his name to the ceiling fan. The pleasure sparks and bursts like a Roman candle inside me.
“That’s it. My Mellie girl.”
Seven
Blake
Caitlin-Anne is obedient. I’ll give her that.
“Aren’t you tired?” she asks, when we get into my apartment and the first thing I do is whip my dick out.
“No,” I lie. The last few days have been nothing but funeral arrangements and lawyer talk. I’m not hard yet, but I want a distraction—any distraction. And we’re both here.
“Okay,” she says, stretching the syllables sarcastically. Her face is skeptical as I touch myself, trying to work something up. Still, she starts to undress.
“No,” I tell her, when she starts for the bedroom. “I want the patio again.”
It’s light outside, and we don’t have sex outdoors unless it’s dark. Instead of pointing this out to me, though, she shrugs and leads the way.
Like I said: obedient.
The sun is scalding. I blink against the sweat already beading on my forehead as Caitlin-Anne bends over the deck chair I keep out here, presenting herself to me like a gift.
I put my tip against her entrance and drive it home.
“Oh, God, yes,” she squeaks. Literally. She’s got a pretty high-pitched voice as it is, and during sex it’s like a hinge that needs oil. It used to turn me on, when we first hooked up; it reminded me of my Japanese porn phase in high school. Nowadays, I find myself wishing I owned a ball gag.
I lean forward, bracing my hands on the chair, and start to pound into her. I’m still not totally hard, which makes me that much more annoyed at her moans and oh Gods: it can’t possibly be that good, yet.
The harder I thrust, the more noise she makes, which turns me off. Then I have to thrust harder to stay up, which makes her squeak more. Soon we’re trapped in an endless cycle of bullshit. I decide, not for the first time, that I’m going to break up with her as soon as this is over.