by Kristen Mae
“I like your boobs.”
I laughed again, too loud for the still night, but I was too emotionally stripped to hold back anymore. She played with my hair, stretching the long strands down my back a few at a time. The tension in my muscles let go with each stroke of her fingers. I was sure I wouldn’t be able to sleep with her lying so close, but my exhausted body was more ready than my brain to give up on the day, and so I fell asleep, and awoke the next morning, tangled up in Claire.
TWENTY-ONE
Her face was mere inches from mine, alabaster skin and bright blue eyes watching me as I emerged from sleep. The night before came back to me and suddenly I was freefalling, a waterfall rushing me away from myself. I reached for her and she grabbed me back, our arms twined around each other. We lay that way for a few minutes, or an hour, until she finally said, “We have to get ready for rehearsal.”
I wanted to ask her if that was it, if that was all I would ever get from her, because if it was, then I needed to beg her to not be done with me. But my throat seized and wouldn’t let the words come out. I pulled her closer.
“Can I come back tonight?” she whispered.
I nodded and gritted my teeth against the tremors of relief that tried to consume me.
She tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear. “You’re pretty, Hazel.” Then, with one quick, graceful movement, she was out of my bed and gone.
All that day, during rehearsal, during lunch, during la pausa, electricity crackled in the air between us, knocking the wind out of me with each errant thought that crossed my mind. I shared a bed with her, I’d think, and I’d almost double over from the shock of it. I saw her naked, I’d think, and my vision would blur. I panicked, I’d think, and every inch of my skin would flame. She seemed less uncomfortable than I, moving effortlessly through the hours, though her smile was different now, quicker to appear and laced with knowing.
I skipped dinner that night. I couldn’t be there in the Anfiteatro with everyone—with Claire—shaken up the way I was and knowing she would return that night. I went for a run on top of the wall to gather myself, to steel myself against my own cowardice. I refused to freeze again. But fifteen minutes into my run, I caught the gleam of Iris’s sleek, bleach-blond hair ahead of me on the path. It was the first I’d seen of her in two days.
I jogged by her, raising my hand in a detached hello. But the wrongness of her posture set off an alarm in my head. I turned to get a better look and realized her cheeks were blotched red and streaked with running mascara.
My legs sputtered to a halt and I walked back to her, trying to catch my breath. She rolled her eyes at me in that haughty way of hers and tried to wipe away the black mascara from her cheeks with her fingertips, a movement meant to be proud, but she only managed to smear the streaks further. It made her look pathetic.
“You can drop the act, Iris.” By the droop of her shoulders, I knew she understood what I meant.
“Why are you always on my neck?” Her voice sounded hoarse, as if she’d been crying for hours.
“What did he do to you?”
Her face went red as she stared at me. Her chin quivered—puckered in a way that obscured her beauty—and then it was like she couldn’t contain it anymore and she covered her face with her hands, her shoulders heaving with her cries. There was a bench a few yards down the path, and, still sobbing, she allowed me to lead her to it by the elbow. I sat quietly with her while we waited for her tears to subside. She kept running her fingers under her eyes, trying to clear the mascara, but only succeeded in smearing it everywhere. I wished I had something to give her to clean her face; I hated that I had nothing to offer her.
Finally, she took a deep breath and quieted. She looked out over the wall to the idyllic Italian countryside, a scene that, for her, would be permanently spoiled by the senseless brutality she had endured.
She turned to me then, the whites of her eyes marbled with red. “How did you know?”
I hesitated. “It…happened to me, too.”
A muscle in her jaw flexed, and she returned her gaze to the view beyond the wall. Delicate blue veins shone under the thin skin of her face and neck, making her seem more fragile, more vulnerable—more human. “Funny thing is,” she said, “I was going to fuck him, you know? I wanted to. I planned on it, like it’d be this sexy Italian love affair. I thought it would be romantic.” She laughed, but it was a bitter snort. Her eyes flicked at me for a second, nervous, like she was waiting for me to judge her. I said nothing. “But he was really rough. He wanted to do things,” she winced at the memory, “things I didn’t want to do. I told him I was going to leave, but he wouldn’t let me. Or maybe he didn’t understand me.”
I sighed and put a hand on her back. “Iris. You know he understood you.”
She faced me again, her eyes narrowing with sudden awareness. “You know what? You’re right. Of course he understood. I was pushing him away. I cried. That’s clear, isn’t it? This is clear, isn’t it?” She lifted her hair and showed me her neck, where I had thought I’d seen a red mark several days before. Now I could see traces of purple and green, a nasty bruise midway through healing. “I’m hurt in other places too,” she said. Her voice broke on the last word and her face twisted.
My chest felt too tight, too small to hold my lungs. I worried I might not be able to hold it together for this girl. “Iris, I’m very, very sorry for being so harsh on Sunday.”
She shrugged noncommittally. “I guess I needed to hear it. I was just going to deny the whole thing, as if that would make me forget.” She kicked at the ground with her toe. “I’ve been wondering…if maybe I should go to the police.”
“Do you want to?”
“Well…I don’t speak Italian, for one thing. And what would happen if I reported it? Would I be required to stay here to testify against him if there was a trial?” She shivered a little and wrapped her arms around herself. “I don’t want him to hurt anyone else, but I don’t know if I can go through that.”
I shivered too, her fear passing to me like a virus. “Iris, I want you to be in control here. If you want to tell, I will go with you and translate for you. I speak some Italian and Claire knows even more than I do—maybe she could help.”
Her eyes widened. “Nobody else. I do not want people to know this happened to me.”
“You have nothing to be—”
“The fuck I don’t! I went to his apartment with him, didn’t I? I’m so fucking stupid.”
Trey’s big ugly hands flashed through my mind, and I could feel my child self nodding in silent complicity, welded to the spot while he experimented on me. I saw my mother’s back as she washed dishes at the sink, heard her stern voice over the clattering plates and cups: “Stay out of the woods, Hazel. It’s not safe.” It didn’t matter how many times anyone told me otherwise, I would always be convinced that by going through the woods alone, in defiance of my mother, I’d set the stage for that awful day in the woods.
“Iris, listen to me.” I took a deep breath and blew it out slowly, forcing myself back into the present. “It doesn’t matter what you did. You didn’t ask for it. It’s not your fault.”
She looked at me, eyes glistening, and shook her head.
“It is not your fault.”
Her face reddened again. I wrapped my arms around her shoulders and let her dissolve into me, trembling with terrible, choking sobs.
“It’s not your fault,” I said again and again as she cried. After a while, I wasn’t sure which one of us I was talking to.
When I entered the apartment building an hour later and was greeted by the faint sounds of Claire’s cello wafting down the stairwell, a little of the tightness in my chest let go. I climbed the stairs, pushed open the door with still-shaky hands, and crept inside. Claire was playing a Popper etude; I couldn’t tell which one, but it was intense and virtuosic.
She acknowledged me with a little nod and a smile but did not stop playing. I forced a smile in return and focused on
her spider-like fingers, so sure as they climbed up and down the neck of her cello, and her bow, slicing across the strings like a knife through a warm loaf of bread.
I thought again of Iris with her mascara-stained cheeks, soiled and despondent and wrecked, and my chest tightened again with grief and…fury. I remembered the day I’d walked home from the woods, how my hands had been drenched in blood. The memory of all that blood normally disturbed me, but today, for the first time, it did not. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.
Claire finished the piece with a flourish and grinned at me as if I were a full audience and she expected me to clap. The tiny gap between her two front teeth made my stomach flutter in spite of myself. She was here. We both knew why she was here. The twisted energy of too many emotions pulsed and writhed inside me as if it was trying to escape through my skin. “I’m going to take a shower,” I said, almost whispering. But I didn’t move away from the door.
Claire examined me with quiet curiosity for a moment, then stood to put away her cello. With her back to me, she said, “How was your run?”
“I saw Iris.”
She continued fastening her cello inside the case, but her hands moved a little slower. “Yeah?”
I hesitated, struggling to find the words. “She asked me not to say anything. But…I trust you.”
She turned and faced me. “She was raped?” For the first time I’d ever seen, her eyebrows furrowed. “What can we do? Is there something we can do?”
My heart swelled at her urgency to help. “She doesn’t want anyone to know. And it’s been several days already, so there wouldn’t be any evidence, and…”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“That fucker.”
“Yeah.” I finally moved from the door to go shower.
Under the hot spray of water, I took deep breaths and tried to clear my mind. Running into Iris had done a number on my nerves. I thought of Claire waiting for me in the next room, remembered how I’d frozen the night before, and between that and stressing over what had happened to Iris, I almost hyperventilated trying to convince myself that I could do whatever it was that Claire and I thought we were going to do. By the time I came out of the bathroom with my towel wrapped around me I was such a tangled mess of desire and fear that I could hardly hold myself upright.
I found Claire in the bedroom sitting on the arm of a wingback chair and gazing out the window at the tiled orange roofs that stretched for miles. Her hands were resting together between her spread legs, and her hair fell in a cascade of ringlets over her back and shoulders. She wore a tank top and short cotton shorts, and her thighs splayed in a way that would have prompted any other woman to adjust position to make herself look thinner. But not Claire.
She turned to where I stood in the doorway, saw me clutching my towel around me and shivering. “You okay?”
“No.”
She nodded, her face grave. “So, maybe we shouldn’t…I mean—”
“No.” I didn’t want to waste any more time, or worse, lose my chance altogether. And I wanted to forget Iris. And everything else. I approached her chair, shuffling each foot forward as if my legs had petrified. I was a violin string again, drawn taut and ready to vibrate with the slightest touch.
I reached a tentative hand out to one of her pale thighs, dragging my shaking fingertips down to her knee and back up again, stopping at the edge of her shorts. I willed myself to slide my fingers under the hem, but my hand would not budge. I exhaled an awful, staccato breath.
“Shh.” Claire put a hand on either side of my face and, though I knew she was staring into my eyes, I couldn’t focus on her. My eyes darted behind her, to the side, anywhere but at her. I couldn’t catch my breath.
“Hazel, look, if you can’t, then we won’t. We just won’t.”
All the chaos in my mind ground to a halt. I’d been letting myself go, letting myself fall apart, hoping that she would take control and leave me free from culpability. But she wasn’t going to let me off so easy. I had to make the call. My breath came quicker again, but this time I was resolute. I took Claire’s hand in mine and raised it in the air between us. Then I did the thing I’d seen flash unbidden through my mind hundreds of times: I put her finger in my mouth. Keeping my eyes on hers, I sucked slowly from middle to tip and then let go.
Her mouth dropped open. “Holy fuck.”
I swallowed hard.
“You are hiding all sorts of naughty things in that quiet little head of yours, aren’t you?”
I nodded. I’d meant to say something sexy and mysterious, like, “You have no idea,” but I’d forgotten how to speak.
“Just while we’re in Italy, right?” Her blue eyes pierced me all the way through. “For fun?”
I nodded again, breathless, dizzy, weak with need. In that moment, I would have promised her anything.
She put her hands on my hips and leaned forward to press her lips to mine. My heart pounded so hard I worried I might freeze up again, but I was still able to move, and I wasn’t seeing any stars other than the ones that were normal. I brought tentative, nervous hands to her neck and pushed my fingers into her soft curls while I explored her mouth with my tongue.
Her hands slid down over my towel, moving from my covered hips to my bare thighs and sending shivers over every inch of my skin. She traced her fingers along the front of my thigh and brought her hand to rest in between my legs, and I was sure I would combust from the thought of her going further. I moaned into her mouth and felt her lips curve into a smile in response. God, she was intoxicating. I wished I could be like her, so confident and sure.
Her hand inched slowly upward, coaxing another helpless moan from me, and when she reached the apex of my thighs, just shy of touching me where I really wanted her to, she paused. “Are you sure, Hazel?” In that gravelly voice again.
I whimpered and pushed my hips at her, and she laid her hand flat between my legs, palmed me in a motionless tease. I knew now that she was toying with me, enjoying making me squirm—it made me sick with desire. I couldn’t even kiss her anymore; my lips went still against her mouth while I waited to see what she would do next, unable to focus on anything but the feeling of her soft hand against my bare skin. Finally, she let me have it. With her mouth still pressed against mine, she thrust a finger deep into me, then dragged her agile cellist’s fingers along the parts of me that I never dared touch, circling and stroking until my breath poured out of me in ragged gasps. I pulled my face away from hers so I could look at her, and came unraveled when I saw the look on her face, that satisfied smirk.
Jesus, we’d gone and done it now.
TWENTY-TWO
With her free hand, she tore the towel from my body. I shuddered, overwhelmed by her assertive touch and my sudden nakedness. I couldn’t have been more vulnerable.
“Have you done this before?” I asked, suddenly aware of how amateur I was. Every bit of me throbbed with a desperate need to be good for her.
“No,” she said, “but I have an excellent imagination, and I’m good at paying attention.” I blushed from my scalp to my toes. She guided me the few feet to the bed and I let her push me down, let her crawl up between my naked legs and hover her body over mine while she worked me with her fingers like the prodigy she was. I was so wet I was embarrassed.
Was I supposed to be reciprocating somehow? I could hardly focus given what her hand was doing between my legs. Somehow, with clumsy, fumbling fingers, I managed to pull her shirt over her head. My nipples hardened at the sight of her pale curves, and I thrust my hands back into her hair and pulled her down to me and kissed her and moaned into her mouth like she was the last sweet thing I would ever taste.
She worked me with her fingers, first slowly, then gradually increasing intensity in time with the quickening of my breath. A tingling bloomed in my groin. “Oh my god,” I whispered. I’d never said that before, never understood why people said it in movies, but there it was, spilling out of me almost without
my permission. “Oh my god,” I said again, louder.
Claire pulled her fingers out of me. I almost bucked off the bed trying to chase down her hand, but she sucked at my neck then, and my body went limp, totally surrendering to the feel of her mouth on my skin.
“Oh fuck.”
She giggled and traveled down my chest with her kisses, her soft lips brushing over my nipples, moving light and teasing down my belly, lower and lower. I was both horrified and mesmerized by the scene before me; my naked body writhing and trembling, and Claire, kneeling with her face between my legs.
She palmed my thighs and pressed them apart.
Holy shit.
First I felt her warm breath on me. Then her tongue. Then her fingers, at the same time. The bloom that had begun in my groin was all over me now, creeping through my veins, teasing in my toes and fingers. I remembered the first time I’d ever used the showerhead on myself, how I had exploded into orgasm and awakened a thousand nerve endings in an instant. This was much, much slower, a massive wave approaching from a distance, surging, rearing up, readying to come crashing over me.
For an instant, I could not believe any of it; where I was, who I was with, the licentious spread of my legs. I saw a quick flash of Oren’s sweet face, felt a stab of guilt over my years of cold detachment, over how much it would hurt him to know I’d given myself over so easily and so completely to someone other than him.
But Claire’s soft lips and tongue were on me, in me, and the bloom unfurled itself completely, rippling through my body until I was incapable of feeling anything but my exploding nerves. I arched and threw my head back and forgot everything, inhaling and exhaling long breaths and feeling oxygen spread to places in my body that had gone far too long without.
Claire kept her mouth on me as I settled, kissing me languidly until my muscles relaxed. I groped for a pillow but realized I’d flung them on the floor. Stunned and breathless, I pushed my hair back from my face and blinked. Claire was kneeling between my legs, staring at me. “How was that?”