by Lana Sky
He laughs but not in that hollow way I’m used to. My ears sting. Was it real? “It’s a little too late for that.”
About the marriage part. He hunches over with his hands flattened against his knees and glares out the sliding glass windows at the magnificent view. His relationship with Elaine is a bit like those distant waves. There, you can still hear it. But you won’t know for sure just what the status is until you toe the line between it and the brittle, dry land.
“Are you getting divorced?” I forget for a second that I’m not a true grown-up when he doesn’t answer. I’m tempted to use his real name to see if that does the trick. Tell me the truth.
“I don’t know,” he says, shrugging. “It doesn’t really matter. We… We need to talk about us.”
Not him and Elaine, but me and him.
“Later,” he clarifies as the totality of that scenario sinks in. “We need to talk about this later.”
For now, his morning wine awaits. Sighing for the umpteenth time, he stands and staggers to the bedroom door, unsteady on his feet. Near the threshold, he pauses and looks back at me, still calculating, trying to suss out my real motivations. Am I a good witch or a bad witch?
Very bad, he must decide. So bad that I can’t be left alone.
“I’ll be downstairs,” he says as if to warn me.
No jumping from balconies.
No swallowing pills.
No shenanigans, and most certainly, no nonsense.
I can’t stand hearing the goddamn ocean. I wonder if it’s the same for Thorny? Maybe that’s why he and Elaine rarely sleep in here. It’s like being trapped in a box with the real world yawning before you. There is an illusion of freedom and it is tempting to think you can escape, but if you step beyond these doors, you’re not free. You are just in an outside cage.
I heed Thorny’s unspoken rule though. I don’t do anything rash. I creep into my little girl room and tug my clean, innocent clothing on. I brush my hair and grimace at myself in the mirror.
I do the same old things I’ve always done.
But, now, my old clothing feels too damn tight. I strip them off in favor of his larger, sinfully tainted shirt. Sensing that he’s out on the balcony, I tiptoe down the stairs wearing only the light cotton.
Fresh air eludes me when I crack the front door open and stick my head out. It’s just unbearably hot. I’m sweltering in my crusty, used skin—like a caterpillar stuck inside a cocoon with no way to stretch those shiny new wings I was promised. Being corrupted is a sweaty, stifling business.
Desperate for relief, I descend the steps and wander toward the only hint of a breeze. It blows off the ocean, carrying the scent of sea salt.
I follow the well-worn path weaving between the sand dunes and walk right up to the water’s edge. It’s shockingly cold, but the deeper I wade, the more I can breathe. Without a second thought, I leave Thorny’s shirt crumpled on the beach and dive in naked.
Swimming was never my strong suit, but I learned ages ago how to float. How to lie back and let the current take you away while your own body does the hard work of keeping you suspended. I wade out beyond the waves until the water is as high as my neck and not as violent. Lying back, I let it carry me back and forth, gradually drifting down the shore.
The sun can’t touch me in here. It beats down aimlessly, but the water resists its heat. Nothing can touch me.
But the shouting. It starts off faint. A distant murmur straining above the waves. Then louder. Louder, mixed with splashing. Frantic, desperate splashing.
“Maryanne? Where are you? Maryanne!”
My eyes jolt open and the spell is broken. Poof! I sink like a rock, sputtering seawater. My limbs flail as the current changes, displaced by a heavier body. Before I can brace my feet against the sandy bottom, strong hands cinch my waist, hauling me upright. I choke down fresh air as I’m steered unceremoniously toward the shore.
“What the hell?” Thorny’s furious, his eyes blazing, his hair damp. He’s still wearing his pants—as well as a fresh shirt he must have put on before racing out of the house. It’s ruined too. Oops. “What the hell were you thinking?”
I laugh. I can’t help it. He looks so serious, but I’m butt naked. It’s a beautiful morning, but we had sex—so it’s not. At least it shouldn’t be.
It can’t be.
Everything is different—his stern expression says so. Swimming in the ocean takes on a newer context now that I’m a dirty, corrupted woman. I struggle, and he stops, furrowing his eyebrows.
Then he looks down and sees my naughty bits distorted by the water. Suddenly, I’m standing on my own and a foot of space separates us.
“I was just swimming,” I say softly.
He’s scared, I realize. His chest heaves up and down, his eyes wide. His fingers shake as he tears them through his hair, processing his overreaction. “I thought…”
I stop listening. His tone is too serious for today. My brain just wants to float and think of only trivial things. Hot sun and ocean breezes. Cool salt-tinged water and skinny-dipping. No adulting for today. No, thanks.
I can’t help myself. My fingers dip into the water and fan out. Then I lift them and watch a stream of water splash him from forehead to waist.
He blinks. Licks his lips in shock, tasting seawater. His face goes redder by the second and I just know he’s going to shout. Yell.
Instead, he turns, maneuvering through the water. Then he twists around. Whoosh! His muscular arm summons a wave that drenches me completely. I shriek, raking the hair from my face, sputtering on water.
“Hey!” I push at him with both hands. In retaliation, he grabs me by my waist and my stomach twists as my feet lose contact with the ocean floor. “No!” I claw at his hands in alarm, shrieking when something devious erases the previous concern in his gaze. “Don’t! Don’t you dare!”
He lets me go and I fall in slow motion. The water sparkles beneath me a split second before I land. Splash! I go under only to shoot up and throw myself at him, trying to knock him off-balance.
“Dick!”
We’re loud, making noise that takes my ears a few seconds to recognize. Laughter? His is shameless and booming. Mine is cackling and high-pitched. I do my best to drown him, but he resists my every attempt until I have no choice but to latch onto him, locking my legs around his waist. I grab his shoulders for stability and try to drag him down with me.
But he’s too strong and leans backward instead. I’m thrown against him, giggling so hard that I don’t realize our foreheads are touching until his lips are on mine. My tongue is in his mouth.
And my nails are in his skin.
The first time was a fluke. I was drunk and so was he.
But this is too damn real. I’m aware of every hesitant motion of his mouth. How my lungs inhale his pained groan, and my nostrils flare, desperate to breathe him in. Consume.
Together, we don’t float. He has to stand here, shouldering my weight as I slide my hands down his shoulders, peeling his shirt away. I’m clawing at the zipper of his pants next, but he shifts to let me tug them down, just enough to give me another biology lesson.
Erections. I’ve never seen one up close. Never felt a pulsing ridge of flesh against my palm before. Sammy Kean wasn’t interested in me in the slightest. He didn’t grunt when I snuck a peek at what lurked between his legs. He definitely didn’t grab my hand when I hesitated, putting me right there, like he’d die if I didn’t touch him.
I don’t know what to do. I just let myself feel him, exploring every inch. Thorny shudders, grating out curses against my lips. In a good way? Bad way? I don’t know. Our lectures didn’t go so far at any of the schools I’ve been to.
I have to struggle to keep up with this new Thorny lesson. He starts to move, guiding us back toward shore. The moment my waist clears the water, he staggers forward and I land on my back, tasting sand.
Then him. He fits between my legs, better this way than he ever could on a shitty lounge c
hair. There’s no resistance when he thrusts inside me. No need for leverage.
He shoves all the way in and I know I scream. My stomach drops like it would on a roller coaster. The thrill is too much. The anticipation is even harder to bear. Grunting, he fists his hands in the sand and just moves. Sinfully. Slowly. Violently.
I’m moaning. Gasping. Making all those pathetic sounds Lily did that one time I caught her and her husband having sex. “It’s sooooo good,” she told him.
But she was lying.
This.
Is.
So.
Good.
I can’t catch my breath enough to tell him that. I can only bite at his skin and scrape at his shoulders with my nails. I feel like I’ll explode if he doesn’t go faster. But too fast…and I’ll fall apart. In the end, he lets the waves set the motion and the water floods between us, washing our naughty deeds away.
I can feel it in trickles, licking heated flesh, heightening every grinding, electric bit of friction. We’re dirty, dirty, clean. It’s a false sense of security—we both get carried away.
Because I can’t stop kissing him. Inhaling him. Drowning in him.
And he forgets.
One final thrust has him grunting in my ear. When he stiffens, my body tenses as naughty reality floods me in dangerous, warm spurts.
Lesson two is shorter than the first one. He rolls off me, panting, unconcerned as the sand sticks to his skin and gets in his hair.
“Damn it,” he says to the sky. There isn’t even anger in his voice. Just relentless, uncaring reality.
Damn it.
We don’t have that all-important talk he promised on the way into town. He must have fixed the car sometime when I wasn’t looking, because it runs enough to drive us to a drugstore in a town three hours away from Thornton. We get there just as the sun sets in the sky and ten minutes before the place closes.
Thorny goes in alone, leaving me in the car while Mozart blares to fill the quiet. He comes out carrying a paper bag, which he wordlessly sets on my lap. Then he heads back toward the southern edge of Frick, letting the classical music play.
A good niece would let him have his silence. He deserves it, after all, to contemplate just how badly he let himself fuck up. Perfect Thorny, he of the stellar judgment and golden wisdom. We screwed up bad.
“I’m not going to tell Elaine,” I say.
There. That should erase his surly frown. Secrets are more fun anyway. Especially the dark, deep kind no one can ever know. I tuck him right there, beside my fear of clowns, safe and sound.
“Son of a bitch.” He swerves to the side of the road and parks. His hands form fists that hammer the steering wheel. Once. Twice. Breathing deeply, he cocks his head, letting me glimpse an expression I’ve never seen on his face before. Brilliant, piercing eyes, knitted eyebrows, and a twitching mouth aching to shout something. Yell. In the end, he just grits his teeth and snarls, “Will you stop bringing up Elaine? She’s not fucking here, and everything I do doesn’t have to revolve around her.”
But it does. Otherwise, that opens up our little predicament to new interpretation: not revenge. Something darker, maybe?
And that would be a dangerous topic for a young girl’s mind to comprehend.
“You’re angry with her,” I say, like that explains everything. Angry people do things out of spite to hurt that nasty person in their life. It’s how the cookie crumbles—in devious little crumbs.
Thorny laughs to himself, shaking his head. “You have no idea, do you?” He looks at me as if for the first time. A battered blond with too-big eyes, blinking at him from the passenger’s seat of an expensive car. “You know what most men my age would say? You’re a sexy, barely legal piece of ass and I took advantage—”
“Don’t say that,” I say, closing my eyes. Took advantage. Eww. Not what Jeff told his conquests. “I’m manipulative, Thorny. And I act too old for my age. And—”
“You’re young.” And he doesn’t mean numbers wise. “You’re so damn young.”
“And it’s too late,” I finish for him. “We did it.”
I stress it, that naughty word.
“We did.” He scoffs. “Fuck. If people find out…it’s not like it fucking matters.”
His life is ruined anyway. Might as well go out with a bang. He scored a sexy, barely legal piece of ass. I pour over those words individually and then string them all together. Should they seem like an insult?
They don’t.
“Look at me.” He sounds too serious to disobey. So I lift my heavy eyelids and watch him, bathed in shadow and dusted with moonlight. “Listen to me. I took advantage of you—”
“Stop saying that.”
“I did,” he insists. “I bet you’ve never even had a boyfriend.”
He waits for me to confirm that suspicion, but some cards should be held tight to the chest.
“I’m a big girl, Thorny,” I say. “I can make my own mistakes. And don’t worry. I’m not suddenly hopelessly obsessed with you Single White Female–style. You don’t have to worry about me stuffing love letters in your mailbox or stalking you.”
I wiggle my fingers suggestively.
He doesn’t laugh. His eyes widen as if a sudden thought just occurred to him. “I’ve never cheated on my wife. Never. Not once.”
I squirm, uncomfortable. “But she cheated on you.”
We both frown as our confessions mingle, making the air too stuffy and hot. He rolls a window down and starts the car.
“I want us to be honest about this,” he says, sounding serious. “To talk about this maturely. It happened. We don’t have to pretend like it didn’t.”
But I’m so good at pretending—he should have been counting on that. He should be warning me not to talk. Bad things happen if mistakes come out into the open. Jeff had a whole treasure trove of text messages to Becky, warning her to stay silent, interspersed with romantic descriptions of her “bouncy little tits.”
Thorny wants maturity.
“James?” I don’t look to see how he reacts. I just watch the sky flicker by through the windows, speckled with stars. “Can I ask you something?”
He grunts in that wary, cautious way. “What?”
“What are blow jobs like?” I worked so hard to stage my scene with Sammy Kean, but even he didn’t have an answer when I asked him. “For real?”
“Messy,” Thorny says without missing a beat. “And you never give a guy one without a condom.”
Oh. Good to know.
We say nothing else during the entire trip back, but when we reach the house, he gives me one of the items inside the paper bag.
Plan B says the colorful packaging. A simple pill capable of erasing mistakes. I swallow it down with ice water and curl beneath my rosy bedsheets.
He’s pacing again, circling the entire length of the living room down below. He completes the trek once. Twice.
Then I hear him ascending the stairs and wandering down that long hallway that separates his room from mine. He crosses that threshold this time. The door closes behind him.
And the entire house falls silent.
Our talk finally happens at midnight, when I creep into the bathroom and find him lurking in the hall the moment I attempt to return to my room. He stands there, bathed in the moonlight drifting in through a nearby window. One tilt of his chin beckons me closer, into that infamous bedroom.
A part of me wants to run away. My heartbeat plays a frantic soundtrack, urging me to escape. It’s practically a constant, steady thrum. Instead, I follow him, inching forward in my nightgown. He retreats to a safe distance, watching me from the center of the room. Neutral territory, I realize. He even has an emergency exit ready: the door to the balcony is open, allowing the roar of the distant waves to pierce the silence.
“I want you to be honest with me,” he says, his voice rasping. “Can you do that? Be honest?”
Uh-oh. That’s a dangerous word.
Before I can respond, he
adds, “You want something.” A conclusion I suspect he came up with just now. He’s a ball of nervous thoughts, Thorny. His hands rake at his jaw, grazing the thicker stubble. “Is that it? You want to go to Walden? Fine. You want Elaine upset? Fine. Just tell me what it is.”
“Can I ask you something, James?” I’m eyeing the floor beneath his feet. It’s stained with his shadow, distorted by every shift in his stance and twitch of moonlight. Deep inside me, I feel muscles tense with every flutter. “Was… Was it good? Was I… Was—”
“What?” He’s frowning, wary.
Inhaling, I try again. “Was I too…” Terrible? I can’t even say it. My nails pick at my wrists as my toes flex against the floor. “Is that why you think I was…”
Faking.
“Damn it.” He’s closer. Too close.
I’m enveloped in sturdy warmth as my cheeks catch fire and my words crawl down my throat.
“It was good,” he murmurs low enough for only me to hear. The rest of the world is denied this secret. I’m the only audience of this particular tale. “Too good.”
So good that I had to plan it.
Bank on it.
Cause it.
Use it.
Because otherwise…
What did it mean?
He doesn’t tell me his own suspicions out loud. He holds me close instead, letting me breathe him in. Pretend. We’re normal people the day after a normal first time. There’s no hostility. No doubting.
Just grim acknowledgment of the consequences.
“I’m sorry I let you take advantage of me,” I murmur into the cotton of his shirt.
He laughs in a way that sounds so, so real. Dare I believe it is? Maybe. I feel his grip jerk over my arms, loose and unsure. Then tighter and resigned a second later.
“I’m sorry,” he says into my hair.
My lips curl into a frown. Sorry. If he keeps using that word so carelessly, I could get addicted to hearing it.
I might even expect him to say it the next time he hurts me.
We come up with new rules, heeding them in silent agreement without ever acknowledging them out loud. While in the house, we’re the same. Surly Uncle Thorny and bratty Maryanne. I work on my schoolwork while he drinks himself into a stupor on the balcony.