by Claire Adams
She motions for me to proceed and then leans forward to grab a thin pair of scissors from her coffee table, cutting about half an inch off of a lock her hair.
“Ian’s dad told me to stay away from his son because he thought I’d just end up holding Ian back. He was pretty angry at the time, but he seemed to make a convincing argument,” I say. “Then tonight, before I went out to meet Ian, I just saw this look on my dad’s face. I wouldn’t say I knew the conversation was coming tonight, but I had a pretty good idea that it was coming sometime soon.”
“So it’s a forbidden fruit thing?” she asks.
“No,” I tell her. “It was just this realization that it’s time to grow up and stop letting my dad or his dad or anyone else’s dad dictate what I do and don’t do or who I see or don’t see.”
“Or who you do or don’t do?” Abs says with a smirk.
“Haven’t really gotten that far yet,” I tell her. “It was just that thirty seconds… Abs, I can’t even—you know, right in the middle of everything, I just pulled away, told him I had to go and walked off?”
“You’re such a—” she starts.
“I just didn’t know what else to do,” I say, barely noticing that I’m interrupting. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything like it.”
“I’ve seen you kiss guys,” Abs says. “I know it’s been a while since you’ve had a boyfriend or whatever, but you can’t tell me it was that much different.”
“It was, though,” I tell her. “I mean, the kiss felt the same, maybe a bit—all right, pretty substantially better, but it was everything that went with it. Ever since I saw him that first time, he’s just continued to confound my expectations.”
“So, what are you going to do about it?” Abs asks, holding up a hand mirror to make sure her hair’s still even.
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I know I don’t want that kiss a couple blocks from my house to be the end of the story.”
“You’re staying over, though, right?” Abs asks, glancing up at me as she starts trimming her fingernails.
“Yeah,” I answer, “if that’s all right with you. I just need to be away from my dad for a little while.”
“It’s fine,” she says, picking up a stray nail clipping and dropping it into the wastebasket in front of her.
I still haven’t sat down.
We have dinner—leftover pizza—and settle in for a movie.
After a while, I hear snoring from the other end of the couch and it’s hardly a debate. I get up off the couch and make my way to the door, locking the knob on the way out.
My body’s weary, but my mind is racing.
I don’t know if he kissed me or if I kissed him, but I do know neither of us seemed to be holding anything back. Well, until I got scared and bolted anyway. That’s the problem.
I’ve never really been the type that could get away with playing games like that for too long. I know that’s what he thinks I was doing.
It occurs to me about a block from Ian’s house that I’m probably not going to have a lot of luck going through the front door. I would just call or text, but I want it to be more of a surprise than that. That way, if he’s changed his mind, at least I’ll have a few more moments with the fantasy.
Ian’s house looms against the starless night sky, and I don’t know what my plan is, but I should probably figure it out pretty quick.
If I knew which room was Ian’s…
I set off around the side of the house, for once grateful for all the light pollution in this town. It makes the areas without street lights just that much darker.
Most of the windows are dark, and even those that aren’t all seem to be covered by blinds or curtains. This might be a short trip.
I reconsider knocking on the door, but even if Ian’s dad wasn’t such a despot, it’s still too late to risk waking the whole family.
I’m almost all the way around the house when I notice something different about what’s blocking the view into one of the windows. It’s a capital A with a circle around it.
I seriously doubt Ian’s lawyer dad considers himself an anarchist.
The room is on the second floor, though.
I look around for a ladder or some other way to avoid trying to go up the drainpipe, but decide maybe I shouldn’t just break into his room. The romantic in me still thinks the idea has its merits, but the rest of me is insecure enough not to take being welcomed for granted.
I’ve got an idea.
I cautiously make my way back toward the front of the house and continue to the side of the street, bending down and collecting a small handful of gravel.
Making my way back to the side of the house with what has to be Ian’s room, I feel my face growing hot and I’m becoming very aware of the more sensitive areas of my body.
I throw the first pebble and immediately rush to the side of the house, crouching down and out of sight.
“What are you doing?” I ask myself under my breath.
Rather than talk it out with myself, huddled in a little ball at the side of somebody’s house, I let my will dominate my won’t, and I take a few steps away from the side of the house.
There’s no motion in the window, the flag’s still in place and there’s no sign of light in the room.
I throw another pebble and, though I once again feel the urge to hide, this time, I stick it out.
There’s no response.
You know, it’s entirely possible he’s not even home, or if he is, who’s to say that he’s even in his room? I should just call him.
No, I’m not going to do this over the phone. I don’t want to talk to him until I can talk to him face to face.
I throw another pebble and am really starting to feel silly. That’s when something moves one corner of the anarchy flag to one side. It’s too dark in the room for me to see in, so I just look in the direction of where I think his face might be, and I smile and wave.
The flag resettles, and that’s a clear enough answer for me.
I let the rest of the tiny rocks fall from my hand, and I turn to head back home or back to Abby’s or I don’t even know where when I hear the sound of a window opening.
“Psst!” a hushed voice comes from up above and I turn to see Ian standing with most of his upper body out the window.
PART 3
Chapter Ten
The Hesitant Miss Dillinger
Ian
“I’m pretty impressed,” I whisper to Mia as I help her the rest of the way into my room. “Most people have a harder time climbing that thing.”
She shoots a glance at me, asking, “Just how many people climb your pipe on a regular basis?”
“You know, the way you phrased that, I’m not quite sure how to answer,” I laugh.
She lets out a derisive snort and leans her head forward a little, looking up at me. “Really?” she asks.
“I reinforced that drain back when I was like thirteen,” I tell her. “Rob’s dad always had tools lying around and my parents were out of town. When I was younger, a lot of people climbed up that thing. Not so much the last few years, though.”
Her stance relaxes a little.
“So, what’s up?” he asks. “You took off so suddenly earlier. What are you doing here?”
She opens her mouth and takes a breath, but she doesn’t speak. Before I even realize it, we’re kissing again and she’s lifting her shirt from the bottom.
We pull apart long enough for her to get her shirt over her head and then she starts kissing my neck and running her palms up under my shirt, the warmth of her hands exciting every inch of skin on my upper body that she touches.
“You sure?” I ask.
“Yeah,” she says in a hurried whisper. “Now shut up. I really don’t want to have your dad coming in here right now. The guy kind of freaks me out.”
Yeah, me too.
I undo the clasp of her bra and she’s got the straps off of her shoulders an instant later and she tosses the bra of
f somewhere into the darkness of my room.
I’m kissing the arch of her neck and she’s unbuttoning my pants.
This is moving a lot faster than I expected it to, though I’ve had a few fantasies that have actually come reasonably close to tonight’s reality. I’m not complaining.
I tear my shirt over my head and throw it blindly, possibly out the window, though I’m not paying anywhere near the kind of attention to know for certain, and Mia’s kissing her way down my chest, over my abs and navel.
She stops a moment at the top of my boxers and she works the fingers of both hands between the fabric and my skin before she slowly starts pulling both pants and boxers down together.
I’m most of the way hard already, and the feeling her soft hand encompassing me and her lips teasing my tip only hasten the transition.
“Why’d you take off earlier?” I ask.
She coyly shakes her head and doesn’t respond, only takes me into her mouth, her lips sealing around me, her tongue already massaging the underside of my cock.
Mia’s working me with her mouth and a hand and, a second later, her mouth is free of me and she’s pushing me backward.
Between the darkness and the general disorientation caused by the moment, I’m not entirely sure of my relationship to my room as Mia’s final shove sends me backward and off-balance, so my arms shoot out on their own and I’m just hoping my head doesn’t hit something on the way down.
I land on my bed, though just barely, and from the direction of my knees, I can hear Mia’s stifled giggles.
“You know,” she says, “for someone for whom motion is art, you’re not particularly graceful.”
“Sure,” I scoff, “I’m sure if I were to push you over backward in a dark room, you’d just float to the ground like a flower petal, wouldn’t you?”
“I’m not the one trying to impress the world with the way I move,” she says and puts one of her hands on each of my knees.
Mia slowly moves her open palms up and over my quads, over my stomach.
When her fingertips reach my chest, I can feel the warm thickness of her tongue at the base of my shaft, and she moves the rest of the way up me, reversing direction when her mouth reaches and again enveloping my part, and I wonder if this is what people are talking about when they say relationships are complicated.
Earlier today, she was hesitant to spend any time with me at all and now, she’s snuck into my room and taking me ever deeper into her eager mouth.
This wasn’t even my idea.
Not that I’m complaining.
She slides up me again, this time all the way until her eyes are above mine and we both look at each other a moment.
“You’re sure this isn’t going to ruin the friendship?” she asks.
I chuckle. “What do you mean?” I ask. “You don’t even like me.”
Her eyes go up and to the left, and her bottom lip matches their direction as she carefully considers her response.
“I guess you’re right,” she says. “We should be fine, then. Condom?”
“Nightstand,” I answer.
“On the one hand, I’m a little skeeved out that you just happen to have a box of condoms in your nightstand,” she says, crawling over the bed. “On the other, though,” she continues as she opens the drawer, “I’d rather you be prepared and not prepared, so what say we just leave it at that?”
“Just one problem,” I tell her.
“What’s that?” she asks, turning toward me, her brow slightly raised.
“That’s the wrong nightstand,” I tell her.
“Okay,” she says, raising herself to a kneeling position and pointing to the other nightstand as if she were Patton conducting troop movements. “Get ‘em.”
I laugh a little at the dramatic gesture, but I do as I’m told and take a single, wrapped condom out of its place and toss it to her.
“Oh, you think I’m going to do all the work?” she asks.
“I can never get those things open,” I tell her. “It’ll be better this way, trust me. If I do it, ten minutes will pass and we’ll both end up too frustrated to stay naked. It’s very important that we stay naked.”
“You sound like you’ve thought this out,” she says, raising her chin and turning a little away from me, skeptical, but still happy enough to leave her breasts bare and beautiful.
“Who says I haven’t?” I ask. “Be prepared: they teach you that in Boy Scouts, you know.”
“Girl Scouts, too,” she says, “though when I went through it seemed like what we were supposed to be most prepared for were making kitschy little crafts and learning to be better wives to our bread-winner, WASP husbands.”
“Yeah, we didn’t get that part of the lesson,” I tell her.
A tight smile twists one side of Mia’s mouth and she goes to open the wrapper.
“Not that easy, is it?” I ask.
“Shut up,” she says. “You’re just trying to make this more difficult than it actually is.”
“Then open it,” I tell her.
It’s somewhere around here I realize that now’s not the best time to toy with the power of suggestion, although it would make for a particularly interesting conclusion to my earlier point on the placebo effect.
“You can do it,” I tell her. “That’s why I gave it to you.”
For a student of psychology, she fell for one of the simpler mind games. Then again, she probably wasn’t expecting such an experiment when we’re on the verge of admittedly more important things.
It’s not really my brightest move.
Fortunately, having given her permission to easily open the condom wrapper, she does and I think she knows I was toying with her, because she’s tossing each half of the wrapper at my face, one at a time, saying, “You’ve got a weird sense of humor.”
“It’s part of my charm,” I tell her.
Somehow, she manages to tolerate me well enough that she rubs her hand over my cock to make sure I’m good and hard and she slides the condom over me.
“You’re lucky I’m a sucker for a guy who can skate,” she says and positions herself above me.
I’m working on thinking of an answer, but banter isn’t what’s holding my attention as I cup her soft, perky breasts and feel the heat of her body as she lowers herself onto my cock, gasping with that mix of pleasure and excitement that has me thinking about team sports to keep from getting too saturated with the intense pleasure of her.
My fingertips move over her sides, before lightly running up her back just so I can feel the raising goose bumps on her skin.
She’s looking down at me, her mouth slightly open, her hair falling to the sides of her face, and she puts her hands on my chest to hold herself up as she grinds herself harder over me, encouraging me deeper inside of her.
Our hips move as mirror images, meeting most at the point of impact, and my hand is moving through the hair falling to one side of her face and affix it behind her ear, giving that face as much exposure as possible to what little light is in the room.
Her eyes are closed now and she moves over me with a near-breathless smile, almost seeming to laugh voicelessly at just how simple things can be, though admittedly my understanding of the motivation behind that smile is speculative at best.
She leans down, kissing my lips before lifting herself again only to take her hands from my chest and stretch them above me, pressing the whole of her upper body resting against mine now.
I take the opportunity to wrap my arms around her and, with her ready cooperation, I roll so I’m now above, looking down at the shadowed body of my lover, growing ever more eager as she rests a forearm against the back of my neck, looking up at me like she’s expecting me to tell her a secret, only I already am, one breath at a time.
It’s hard to think between the darkened vision of her and the feel of her inviting body.
Her bottom half moves a little and I feel her heels coming to rest on my lower back, and she uses that as leverage to
lift herself to meet me, just as voracious as before.
“So, I take it this means you like me, huh?” I ask.
“Barely,” she breathes. “Don’t ruin it by talking.”
I’m amused and, honestly a little offended, but she’s smiling and caressing my hair, so my ego manages to make it through reasonably unscathed.
“Keep going,” she says. “Just keep going, okay?”
“Okay,” I tell her, and both of her arms are around me now, and she’s pulling me into her with renewed vigor.
“I’m going to…” she whispers, her body quaking beneath me. “I’m going to…”
I start to lean in for a kiss, but she’s grabbing a pillow and putting it firmly over her mouth, though it’s doing surprisingly little to dampen the sound of her ecstasy.
My only option here is to push the pillow harder over her face, and I don’t feel particularly all right doing that, so I just enjoy the music of her orgasm as she twitches and writhes beneath me, trying not to think too hard about how far the sound could travel.
She’s so wet and growing even wetter as the contractions of her muscles slowly eases into a new rhythm and she’s tossing the pillow away now, pulling my head down and kissing me with almost scalding lips.
I work myself in and out of her, trying to contain my smile, but it’s not working.
“What?” she asks, looking up at me with her big eyes.
“I don’t know,” I answer. “I guess I just wasn’t expecting this when you were telling me not to use foul language.”
“I said ‘not in public,’” she corrects. “What relevance could that possibly have right now?”
“I don’t know,” I tell her and kiss her cheek. “You just didn’t strike me as the climb up a drainpipe and have amazing sex with a skater guy from class type.”
“I’m full of surprises,” she says. “Now stop talking and get back to work. I want to come at least one more time tonight.”
I snicker.
It’s hardly, “shut up and fuck the shit out of me,” by any means, but considering the way she normally speaks, I think we’ve about reached her equivalent of it.