by Piper Lennox
“As they should have been. I was infinitely cooler.”
She laughs again. “Yeah, right. You didn’t make a move till we were eighteen. So that’s, what, four years?”
“Six,” I correct, reluctantly. “I, uh…I think my crush started when we were twelve. At track practice. Remember when the high school team came to share our complex?”
“Since we were twelve?” She turns more, propping her chin on my chest to look at me. “You liked me all that time, and never said anything?”
I could honestly cringe, thinking of how spineless I used to be. “Could we change the subject, please? I mean, it isn’t like I kept it under wraps forever. I did tell you, eventually.” I arch my eyebrow at her. “And I think I did it pretty smoothly.”
“Daring me to let you give me my first orgasm,” she scoffs. “That wasn’t smooth. That was cheesy.”
“Maybe a little.” We laugh together, this time. “But it worked.”
Her hair brushes my face as she lies down again. “So you started liking me at track practice. What did it? Like, was there a specific moment?”
“Just watching you run.” I tighten my arm around her when a breeze plummets in through the roof. “You were so fast, and…I don’t know. Graceful.”
“Was?”
“Oh, please. Don’t pretend you’re still pulling a five-minute mile.”
“I can still beat you.” She gets up and shakes out my jacket, then slips it on. “Let’s go. From the barn door to the edge of the creek.”
“I’m in a suit. And you’re drunk.”
“If I win,” she goes on, already starting down the ladder like I haven’t even spoken, “you have to take me to Cats. It’s coming to the Nelson Center this week.”
I groan to the ceiling. We both liked musical theater, growing up, but she knows I hate Cats with a passion.
As I start down the ladder after her, waiting until her feet touch the floor before I put my full weight on it, I ask, “And what happens when I win?”
She watches me descend. When I jump off halfway and land, right in front of her, the rattle of the barn doesn’t even faze her.
“If you win,” she says, reaching for my tie; this time, she tightens it, “we’ll go back to your place, and you can do all those things you talked about in the planetarium.”
Wind hits the side of the barn and whistles through the cracks. I put my hands over hers and loosen my tie again, then all the way. She watches me take it off and ball it up into my pocket.
“Deal.” I’ve never backed down from one of Mel’s dares before, and I’m not about to start.
The barn door screeches shut behind us. Mel stretches her legs and arms thoroughly while I make fun of her, until I decide to do the same. Running still isn’t my specialty, so some warm-ups definitely won’t hurt.
“Jumping jacks?” she muses. “Man, you really want to get me into bed, don’t you?”
“No.” I stop, roll up my sleeves, and get into starting position beside her, our heels braced against the side of the barn. “I just really hate Cats.”
She shakes out her hands and touches one to the ground. “Ready? One…two….”
I glance at her. The night has shaken her bangs loose from the clip; a piece feathers in front of her eyes, which are honed in on the creek we can’t see, but trust is still there. A lot changes in three years, but most things don’t.
“…three!”
Already, she has the lead. I could blame the fact I was looking at her instead of paying attention, but we both know the truth: I’m slow. I always have been, especially compared to Mel.
On top of that, I’m in dress shoes. She’s barefoot, flats kicked off and stuffed into the pockets of my coat, billowing behind her as she flies ahead into the field. The echo of her laughter reaches me like a bell through snow, and it isn’t until I catch up with her, hunched and panting at the creek, that I hear my own echo, pealing behind us.
“Memory…all alone in the moonlight,” she sings. Her voice is choked with more laughter as she catches her breath.
I wrap my arms around her waist. “Still fast,” I announce. “Still graceful.”
She licks her thumb and swipes at a grass stain on my wrist, where I stumbled after my late start. “And you,” she says, “are still slow as shit.”
“To be fair, I never denied that I was still slow. I was just skeptical that you were still fast.”
This time, it’s Mel who kisses me. I have to bend down so she can reach, her tiptoes sliding in the mud.
“Well,” I sigh, as she pulls back, “you won. I look forward to our terrible musical date.”
“Me, too.” The smile that forms on her face is small and sideways. I recognize it.
It’s the face she gets when she has a terrible idea. One that could be a lot of fun, or a total disaster.
“You know,” she whispers, spreading her hand across the side of my face, “we said from the barn, to the edge of the creek…and I didn’t officially touch the edge.”
I look behind me. Sure enough, there’s a foot of space between us and the rocks that line the creek, dried to nothing but a trickle through the mud.
“So the race is still going on, technically?”
Mel runs her bottom lip through her teeth. Another dare.
I let go of her and take a step backwards. My heel lines up with the very edge of the creek.
“Looks like I win, after all.”
“Yep.” Her eyes flash. I wish I actually did have a skylight in my bedroom, so I could see the moonlight hit them again, just like this, the entire night. “Fair is fair.”
Fourteen
Mel
“Pike’s Landing.” The low whistle I give bounces around the lobby. “It’s exactly as fancy I imagined.”
“It really isn’t. It’s just new.” He puts his hand on the small of my back as we get in the elevator, steadying me. I’m sober, but I’ve been tripping nonstop tonight, ever since our walk from the field. The road wound through about a quarter-mile of farmland before our phones could catch a signal for another ride-share.
It was so clichéd to think I was “drunk on him,” but it really did feel that way: his hands were all over me, his mouth finding new places to kiss and make me sigh, without fail. We were immersed in each other, and didn’t care that our feet were killing us, or that we both had work in the morning.
“I finally got Melanie Thatcher in the barn,” he shouted at one point, aiming his face right at the sky. The noise sounded like it went on forever. I knew it wouldn’t, just like I knew tonight would eventually end. But in that moment, it felt like it could.
“You,” I laughed, “are ridiculous.”
“Come on. You can’t tell me that stuff doesn’t flatter you, at least a little. Knowing you were basically all I thought about, all through middle and high school.”
“Not all you thought about.”
He put his hands in his pockets and kicked a soda can ahead of us, towards the stop sign where we were supposed to wait for the car. “Yeah, actually. Other than schoolwork and video games.”
We reached the sign. All of our town’s farmland—what was left of it, at least, from Civil-War era—was uphill, on this strange slope that overlooked the city, buzzing and postcard-sized below. It granted the fields prime sunlight, even though no one grew anything here, now. Nothing but cows, horses, and empty lots where kids came to party.
“What about other girls, though?” I asked. It was Blake’s fault he didn’t tell me about his feelings sooner, no question, but I would have felt immense guilt if I was the reason he never approached anyone in school.
“I got crushes, I guess. Like Avery German.”
“Oh, God.” My outburst was involuntary, but the snorting laugh that followed was far worse.
“What was wrong with Avery?”
“Nothing, nothing.” I took a breath and fixed my face. “She was…nice.” Avery German was a bookish girl, one year behind us in high schoo
l. They were partners in AP Bio, a class Blake had no business taking; he was terrible at science. Avery found it charming.
She asked him to prom during a tutoring session. Since I was back with Felix by then—strictly for prom’s sake, a mutual arrangement—I invited them to join our limo group. Big mistake.
“It wasn’t the entire ride,” he protested, preemptively. This was a story we’d told and retold—and disagreed upon—many times in the weeks that followed.
“It was. An entire limo ride,” I emphasized, “of Avery freaking German, talking about nothing but koalas and their chlamydia epidemic.”
“Her dad was a zoologist.”
“So?” I picked up a piece of gravel and threw it at the sign. It shuddered on its pole. “Look, she was nice and all. Just painfully awkward.” I elbowed him. “Who else did you like? It can’t be just me and Avery.”
He kneaded the bridge of his nose. This usually meant I was annoying him, or asking him things he didn’t want to answer.
“I ‘liked’ a lot of girls.” The rock he found and threw was much bigger than mine; the clang of the sign belted down the hill like an avalanche. In the silence, he looked at me. “But I only loved you.”
“Hey,” he says now, nudging the center of my back again. I blink. We’re at the fourth floor. “This is our stop.”
As soon as we’re in his apartment, the drunk-on-him feeling fills me again. I kiss him, tongue stumbling into his mouth like my feet across the hardwood.
“Whoa,” he laughs. “Hang on a sec.” He kicks the door shut, adjusts a dimmer switch by the door, and helps me out of his coat. “Thought you wanted romance.”
“I did.” I grab his belt buckle and pull him back to me, undoing it without breaking eye contact. “Now I want the rest of it.”
He laughs again, muting it in his throat. “I knew you couldn’t resist it. Nobody can.”
My arms tighten against my sides as he undoes my dress. It’s shimmery and pink, the kind that leaves glitter everywhere. I watch flecks of it fall, catching the recessed lighting overhead on its way down.
“Nobody?” I ask. Blake, as always, understands what I’m really asking.
“It was a joke, Mellie.”
“Oh.”
He runs his hand down his face. I see some glitter get caught in his stubble. “Okay,” he says, “yes. I’ve had other girls up here. I’ve had sex with them, just like I’m sure you’ve had sex with other guys. Right? We can’t pretend the last three years were some chaste ‘I’ll wait for you’ deal.”
“I know that.” Idly, I finish undoing his belt. “I just want to make sure I’m not…just some number on a list, I guess.”
He grabs my chin in his hand and angles my face to his. I remember him doing it in the car yesterday: first hard, then softly. Right now, it falls in the middle.
“You,” he whispers, voice low, “are not a number.”
My smile is weak, but there. I feel better, even though I’ve now got a hundred more questions: how many were there, between our first times and now? Did he say anything to them like what he said to me, in the planetarium? How many girls have stood in this exact spot before me and stared into those iced blue eyes, entrusting him with all they had?
You can’t be upset, I scold myself. He’s right: I’ve been with plenty of guys since then, too. Those three years apart could destroy this, if we let them. And I’m not sure what “this” is, right now; I have no idea what we have, or what it might turn into, but I won’t let it crash and burn before we can even find out. Not again.
My dress slips down my skin and pools on the floor. My bra and panties follow quickly, while I unbutton his shirt and toss it down. His phone rings, but he kicks off his pants and ignores it, adding it to the trail of breadcrumbs we’ve left from the front door to the bedroom.
There’s a dimmer switch in here, too, but he shuts it off after he lights a group of candles on the bureau. In the dancing light, we look at each other. I fight my instinct to cover myself, wondering how my extra ten pounds look to him, or if he even notices.
“As beautiful as I remember,” he smiles. I relax.
“You,” I say, as he leads me to his bed, “look very different, I’ve got to say. Not that I couldn’t tell that, already.”
“Weights and patience.” His mouth flinches to a smile as he kisses me. He’s so sweet and slow, his hands barely touching me, that I wonder if all his promises in the planetarium were just talk.
Until I reach for his boxers, when he grabs my wrist and squeezes.
“Go lie down and put your arms over your head for me. I’ll be right back.”
My stomach flips. I actually feel giddy as I climb into his bed and position my arms the way he instructed. While my head somersaults with the echo of his promises, I look around.
His room is exactly how I pictured it: modern and masculine. It’s also a lot like the one at his dad’s house: perfectly clean and organized. The bed is made, but I realize the comforter was already turned down. Did he do that without me noticing? Or did he plan on bringing me back here all along? Knowing what I do about the new, confident side of Blake, I’m willing to bet it’s the latter.
When he comes back, the sight of the rope in his hands gives me that same feeling I had in the car, when he pinned me to the seat and kissed me—fear, but the best kind possible. The kind that hits you like a wave, and you know it could either drown you…or take you higher than you’ve ever been.
He straddles me. His form is so solid and looming, it’s all I can focus on while he loops the rope through the headboard slats.
“There,” he says, tightening it one last time. It’s a laundry line, simple and soft, but the pressure of it on my wrists sends a shower of sparks through me. “Can you move?”
“No.” I prove it to him by straining against his expert knots. Not even a little give.
“Perfect.” Blake brushes his lips over mine and migrates, leaving a tingling trail from my mouth to navel. When he pauses, hovering over the place I need him to touch most, he says, “Don’t worry about keeping count. I’ll handle that.”
“Keeping count?” I’m so excited, I’ve forgotten that part—“How’s ten sound? You think you can handle that many?”—until he’s already started. I sigh his name and lose myself in the night, in him, all over again.
Blake
Every swipe of my tongue elicits a whimper from Mel. I push my fingers into her and flex them slowly, until she asks for more.
“Deeper,” she pants. “Harder, just...God, just—everything.”
I add a third finger and move them in hard circles, pushing into her until she can’t accept any more. My mouth never leaves her skin, relentless.
“Blake,” she squeaks. It’s different from Caitlin-Anne’s; I love it. “Oh, God, baby….”
Hearing her call me “baby” flips that switch in me. I’ve been holding back, trying to show her I can be the boy she remembered—but only enough to make her stick around and see the rest, the guy I am now. The one she turned me into. The one who would never have let her leave, that day.
I keep the pressure of my tongue the same, but work my hand even harder, everything on overdrive to get her there. In this moment, it’s all I want. I showed her I can do romance. Now, it’s time to show her what else I can do.
Within seconds, I feel her muscles clamp down around my fingers and start to quiver.
She gasps. Her hands strain against the rope as the orgasm rises and ebbs away. Instinctively, she tries to push me off; things are too sensitive.
I know she needs a break, so I pause. But I don’t stop.
“One,” I say, before getting right back to work.
Mel
Four. Five. Six. By the time we reach seven, I’m crying.
Tears stream down my temples and into my hair as Blake keeps up his pace. His tongue never stops, except to announce the new number.
He’s loving it. He has me reduced to this tense, shivering ball of nerv
es on his bed. He has all my control.
The weird thing is, right now, I don’t even want it back.
How much time has passed? A few minutes? Hours? It feels like days to me, just an endless session of pleasure that exists outside of time. It’s like being in the hayloft again, staring up at the spaces in between the stars. Lost in a vastness you can’t comprehend until you’re right there, stranded in the middle.
Blake
“Blake,” she rasps, after the ninth orgasm, “put it in.”
I laugh. “Wow. Now who’s romantic?”
She shakes her head. Somehow, I know exactly what it means: I’m lucky I can even talk. No time for romance.
It’s fine with me. I’m more than ready. Her sex is wet and swollen, impossibly tight as I reposition myself and ease inside. She strains against the ropes again, to no avail.
She’s not going anywhere.
“I knew you wanted this,” I tell her, as I start to thrust. “All that shit you gave me in the planetarium—I didn’t buy it for one second.” I sink into her as deeply as I can, savoring the hushed cry of my name she gives, and withdraw while I roll one of her nipples between my thumb and forefinger. When I repeat the sequence, I switch sides.
“You’re losing your voice, aren’t you?”
She doesn’t answer, just nods. The other women I’ve been with repeated everything like parrots; they knew the prompts, memorized the script. But Mel, as always, follows her own rules. It’s one the things about her that I loved, that I still love, but also frustrates me as much now as it did then. I never knew where we were headed, with Mel leading the way.
But things are different now. In here, I’m in charge.
My thrusts stop. I withdraw almost completely, towering over her.
Mel’s bottom lip trembles. “Blake, don’t stop!”
“Don’t stop…what? Fucking you stupid?”