by Mercy Brown
I go to pull my tank off over my head but he tells me to leave it on. And the socks. But he slides my panties down and off and I never see them again, so I don’t even know what he does with them. Inhales them, probably. He’s a beast right now. A beautiful, starving beast who feeds on sex.
“Turn over,” he says. “So I can appreciate my handiwork.”
“Where’s the Sharpie?” I say. “You’re not appreciating anything back there until I’m safely in possession of it.”
He smirks but otherwise ignores this demand. He flips me over to my belly and pulls my hips up so I’m on my hands and knees and there’s something about needing my arms to support my weight that gives him this total-access pass to my body, and he’s enjoying the hell out of it as he feels me all over. He bites me on the shoulder as he reaches up and slides his hand up under my tank. He cups my breast in his hand, his fingers teasing, and then he spreads my legs apart with his knee and now I can’t talk because I’m breathing like it’s my job as he starts to stroke between my legs. He slides two fingers into me and my legs are shaking as I feel him hard against my thigh.
“Do you know how fucking sexy you are?” he breathes in my ear as he touches me. “Do you have any clue at all what you do to me?”
I really don’t until he puts me in this headspace with him and makes me feel this way, that’s the truth. And from him saying these sweet, sexy things and touching me, I am now begging him again, to please, please give it to me. Let me have it.
He’s on his knees behind me, I hear the condom package rip open, and I’m nothing but eager anticipation as I hear him roll the latex on. He leans over me again, I feel him against my back, his breath against my ear, his cock against the inside of my thigh and he pauses.
“Just promise you’re not going to freak out on me this time, Emmy,” he whispers. “I want this too, but I don’t want to freak you out again.”
“If you don’t put it in me now, you’re really going to see me freak out,” I say through clenched teeth.
“Pinky swear it,” he says, and hooks his pinky around mine and it feels silly yet is somehow the most intimate thing I’ve ever done. With anyone. It’s a gorgeous dissonant-chord harmony, two things that don’t necessarily feel like they would go together until they do and then they’re perfect. Like we’re these grown people about to get down in the secret treehouse where I played as a girl.
I don’t understand it yet, but this is exactly what love feels like.
“Okay, I swear,” I whisper.
Travis exhales into my neck and kisses behind my ear as he slides himself into me slowly from behind, gripping me around the waist and I am crying out, “Oh fuck, oh my God!” as he slides it all the way in. He pauses, holds himself there and it’s every bit as good as I remember. No, it isn’t, it’s better. It’s deeper from this angle and when he starts to move, it’s harder. Less careful, more sure. It’s familiar this time, and I never knew that familiar could ever mean better, but with Travis it does. I know how he feels inside of me the way I know the songs I write. My body remembers, and now it feels like it remembers him, too. Already.
Travis puts his hand on my lower back, and I know he’s looking at his name inked across my ass and it makes me even wetter. As he fucks me steady and hits me in the sweet spot, the one all the way deep inside of me sort of up and in the front, over and over and over at this angle, I feel like a star collapsing, waiting to go out in a brilliant explosion. Then I feel his hand between my legs, his fingers on my clit and there’s my gamma-ray moment. I scream so loud I don’t know if I have ever been that loud doing anything. I come and I come and I am shuddering in his arms as he’s struggling to hold back because I’m coming so hard.
“Jesus, oh, Jesus, Emmy Emmy Emmy,” he mutters into my back as he stops moving, gripping me tighter around the waist.
“Don’t stop,” I cry.
“I have to slow down or I’m going to lose it,” he says, panting. “I don’t want to come yet.”
Give him a hand, folks, because he doesn’t. He barely holds it together, but he hangs on. And I am impressed.
We fuck like this all afternoon. I let him violate me, desecrate me, penetrate me, complicate me for a good four hours. We don’t even do anything else but fuck. We don’t fondle, we don’t do oral, we don’t cuddle, and we don’t really talk. We don’t need to.
By the time I’m done fucking him, his room is no longer tidy, I’ll say that much. The textbooks are strewn all over the floor, notes scattered everywhere after he fucks me on the desk. After we do it on the bed in every conceivable position we can think of, we throw the pillows and comforter on the floor and get down and fuck like animals there, too.
When we’re finally out of condoms and I’m worried about his dick needing medical attention if I hop on it one more time, we curl up on the floor on top of the comforter (which definitely needs to go in the washing machine now) and he kisses me again.
“Are you hungry?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “Starving.”
“Let’s make grilled cheese,” he says.
And I don’t worry about anything being weird between us now that I’ve got a Travis Sharpie tattoo on my ass, because what could be weirder than that?
I pull on my pants and my tank top and throw his sweatshirt back on. He puts on his T-shirt and jeans and his hair is a mess, sticking up all funny in the front. I run my hands through it for him and calm it down and he kisses me on the nose and says thanks and checks himself in the mirror and it’s still not weird. And I feel good, really, really, amazingly good right now.
When we head down to the kitchen, I am honest to God limping from all the fucking and Travis is looking pretty worn out himself. Happy, but tired like he’s run a marathon, and in terms of calories burned, he probably has.
I hobble down the stairs behind Bean but halfway down we hear George whisper, “Scarlet Knights, feet!” Apparently, he and Molly and six other rugby team members got home from practice while we were otherwise occupied and too oblivious to notice. When they see us, they all stand at attention and George leads them in an awful rendition of something to the tune of “God Save the Queen”:
God save the Queen of Rock
Impaled on rocker cock
Of thee I sing!
Omaha’s own Don Juan
Hung like a mastodon
What gal wouldn’t hop right on
Travis Bean the King?
When they’re done, they slow-clap for us. Or maybe just for themselves.
Jesus fucking Christ am I red. And so is poor, pale-ass Travis. In fact, he’s so red I stop feeling embarrassed for myself and just feel bad for him.
“You’re all assholes, every one of you,” Travis says, pointing his finger around the room. “At least tell me you brought home beer.”
“Is that any way to treat your fans?” George says, then turns to me. “It’s no wonder you’re the singer, Emmy, because that was fucking inspired.”
“Oh man,” I say. “Was I really that loud?”
“That loud?” George asks. “Sweetheart, I think there are paramedics still out there looking for the car accident.”
Travis laughs, and then I can’t help but laugh, too.
“The beer is in the fridge,” Molly says. “Help yourself to the Sam Adams. You’ve earned it.”
Travis tries to stagger past George, but he sticks his arm across the hallway, blocking us.
“Holy shit, Trap,” George says. “You look like someone tried to hang you. Like you caught ringworm of the neck.”
Travis puts his hand over it like he’d totally forgotten it was there and shoots me a look.
“It was an accident,” I say. “He fell neck-first right off his bed. He’s lucky it wasn’t much, much worse.”
“His mom is going to love that when he picks her up on Monday.”<
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“What?” I say, all of the blood draining from my body. “Your mom? Is coming to New Jersey?”
“Yeah,” Travis says, hands on his hips. “She’s here for a nursing conference at UMDNJ this week. I have to get her at Newark Monday morning.”
“You didn’t tell me that!”
“I just found out today,” he says. “If I’d known you were going to maul me . . .”
“Tell her Millie did it!” I blurt out.
“Lie to my own mother?” he says. “The woman who gave me life and ironed my Levi’s all through high school? I don’t think so.”
“She’ll hate me!”
“She’ll lecture you on the dangers of breaking blood vessels in the neck,” he says. “For an hour, at least.”
“Maybe she should lecture you on the dangers of Sharpie poisoning,” I shoot back.
“If you want to show her that, that’s on you.”
“Show her what?” George asks, eyeing me suspiciously.
“Nothing,” Travis and I both say at the same time, but he’s got an enormous shit-eating grin and I most definitely do not.
“Jesus, Emmy, I always knew you had pipes but you must have a mouth like a Hoover,” George says, inspecting Travis’s neck.
“Tell me about it,” Travis says as I cringe. Then he turns back to George. “Don’t even think about it. Seriously.”
“About what?”
“Whatever it is you’re thinking about her mouth right now,” Travis says.
In the kitchen as we’re making grilled cheese for the rugby team and drinking George’s beer, I stop to appreciate again how not weird it all is. Bean is asking me for the Kraft slices and if I want tomato and to hand him more butter, and none of this is weird at all. George and the women’s rugby team just ribbed the shit out of us for desecrating the upstairs of the Lincoln Hill house, and it’s still not weird. It’s the first time I question the “no fucking” rule, because so far? Fucking Travis really doesn’t seem like a bad thing. It seems like the exact opposite of a bad thing, in fact.
“Aren’t you worried about how this is going to affect the band?” George asks, sobering me up as I bring him a sandwich and some chips. “Band relationships can be a real cock-up.”
“Two words,” Travis says. “Sonic Youth.”
“Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore are married,” George points out. “That makes a difference.”
“Well, there’s Julia and Matt from Circle Time,” he says. “They’re in a band together and they’re not married.”
“They’ve been a couple since junior year of high school,” George says. “They were together before Circle Time got together. It’s different.”
“Can you just not?” says Travis.
Because I’m standing here quietly freaking out about what George is saying, and Travis knows me well enough now to know if I’m quiet, if I’m not giving an opinion on something like this, if I’m not weighing in, it’s because I’m still not sure how I feel. Travis gives me that look he gives me when I’m unsure about something, usually reserved for the stage when I’m worried about fucking something completely up.
“Pinky swear,” he says. “Remember?”
“I’m not freaking out,” I say. I’m lying. All my insides feel like they just vaporized and escaped out through my ears.
“No need to freak out,” George says. “I’m sure it’ll all work out one way or another.”
“It needs to work out so that Soft can play Ag Field Day and hopefully land a slot at CMJ in the fall,” I say.
“Do the beat brothers know?” George asks.
“No,” I say. “They don’t.”
“You’re going to tell them, right?”
“It’s none of their fucking business,” Travis says with a scowl.
“Trap, honey,” Molly says. “You really think they won’t figure it out? With a tramptoo like the Great Red Spot of Jupiter on your neck?”
“And look at the way he looks at her, for Chrissakes,” George says.
“It’s all very romantic,” Molly says. “You won’t be able to keep this secret for long.”
“Not secret, private,” Travis says. Then he glances around the room full of skeptical-looking rugby players. “Relatively private.”
“Why would you want to keep it from them?” Molly asks. “I don’t get it.”
“It’s a band thing,” George explains. “You wouldn’t understand.”
***
When Bean walks me home, we both agree we’re not going to say anything to Joey and Cole right now and they can speculate all they like about Bean’s neck wound. They’ll probably think Millie did it anyway. To keep it a secret feels weird for a champion over-sharer like myself, but I’m relieved. When I had convinced myself that sex with Travis was off-limits and would never happen again, I was all for coming clean, confessing our sins, and moving on. Now that I’m pretty sure I want it to continue, I don’t know what to tell them. Travis has made it pretty darned clear he doesn’t want me with anybody else—with his name scrawled across my ass this seems like a safe bet—and I guess I’ve made the same thing clear to him today with my juvenile hickey stunt. But we haven’t defined anything else between us. There’s no awkward “will you be my girl” proposal, thank God. So what exactly would we tell them? Everything is basically the same but now we’re fucking like rabbits on hormone injections and we’re not going to fuck anybody else right now?
There’s no question the beat brothers will be spooked by the whole situation. They’ll stop seeing Soft as a whole unit and they’ll see Bean and I as some kind of power block, like they’re just our backup and we’re really not that kind of band. The thing about Stars on the Floor is that it’s not my band. It’s not anyone’s band. It belongs to all four of us. We all count the same in the cave, and nobody is replaceable. That’s what we always say, that’s what we’ve always said. What we have together, the give-and-take between the four of us when we’re writing, when we’re playing and planning, really works, and I don’t want to mess with that chemistry. It’s too good. It’s a rare thing among bands, worth protecting. Luckily, Bean agrees.
We’re lingering at my front door and Travis isn’t coming in, and he’s not going out with all of us tonight. He’s got to get this paper done because he has to work tomorrow and his mom comes Monday, and I’ve kept him from doing any work today. He’ll probably be up all night working on it now, and I actually do feel bad about that.
“I don’t,” he says. “I feel fucking fantastic about it.”
I look up expectantly and I realize I’m waiting for him to kiss me good-bye, like this is something we do now. He smiles down and puts his lips to mine and tells me to call him when I get home tonight so he knows I got home okay. I nod, and this is new, too, this calling him when I get in. And what strikes me is that it’s new but immediately feels normal.
“What is this thing we’re doing?” I whisper. I’m not sure I mean to say it out loud, because I am pretty nervous to put an actual label to it. “I don’t even know what to call it.”
He touches his lips to mine again, all soft and sweet.
“Just call it awesome,” he says. “We’ll figure the rest out as we go.”
Chapter Six
“So, are you and Travis an official power couple now?” Jeff asks. “Are you pulling a Kim and Thurston here?”
I love Jeff. He’s never, ever one for subtlety. He has the downstairs back room and his boyfriend, Adam, practically lives with us, too. Sonia and I call them our two dads because they’re both three years older than we are and they cook all the time so there’s always brownies, leftover potpies, and stuff like that around. Last Christmas Eve when I came home from Mom’s, they’d gone out and bought a last-minute Christmas tree from the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot and decorated it with strings of popcorn and construction paper and
yarn ornaments they made on the spot. Anyway, Jeff and Adam have both been bugging me about Travis for at least a year, so when Jeff catches us kissing on the front stairs, he’s absolutely thrilled.
“We’re just exclusively doing it,” I say. I’m standing in front of my closet and Jeff and Sonia are sitting on my bed, helping me pick out an outfit for Rock and Roll Bowling tonight.
“What does that even mean?” Sonia asks.
“It means we’re only fucking each other, not anyone else.”
“Come on, Emmy. Do you think I’m stupid?” she says.
“No?” I’m not sure how much clearer I can be. “We’re bandmates, just as we’ve always been.”
“Are you in love?” Jeff asks. “Because you should be by now.”
My mouth sort of hangs open like I’m going to answer, but “no” doesn’t feel exactly true, and “yes” feels psychotic. I shrug like an idiot instead.
“Don’t you think he’s in love with you?” Sonia asks.
“Yes,” Jeff answers. “Obviously.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” I say.
“Well, what did he say about it?” Sonia asks.
“He didn’t say ‘I love you,’” I say.
“That doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you,” Jeff says.
“Fine, if I have to define it, I guess right now it’s sort of like bandmates with benefits.”
“That sounds complicated,” Sonia says.
“No, no, it’s very simple,” I say. “Everything stays the same, but with sex.”