Return to Us

by Julie Cross

  She nods her agreement but doesn’t move. “People never ask me what I think. Except for Coach Bentley, no one asks for my opinion. And I know things. I freakin’ know things!”

  I charge up the steps and reach around her, opening the door and guiding her through it. She knows things. Message delivered.

  “You and Liberty…” she laughs again, shaking her head. I steer her toward her and Karen’s room. “That’s not even a real name, is it? And you know what that’s all about, right?”

  “Sex?” I suggest. “Being horny?”

  “Well, yeah.” She enters her room and then reaches behind me to shut the door. I feel trapped all of a sudden. “You like Jordan.”

  I snort. “Trust me, he’s not my type.”

  She turns around and begins making the climb up to her top bunk. “But he’s your friend and you’re subconsciously trying to sabotage it. That’s why you hooked up with his ex. There’re a lot of girls here. Why her?”

  Drunk Stevie is pissing me off. I give her a wave good night. “Don’t fall off the bed.”

  “Why don’t you come up here and protect me then, Mr. Hero.”

  I can’t tell if she’s kidding or not.

  “I’m kidding,” she says eventually. “I don’t know how you do the one-time thing with girls. I’ve tried it. You probably don’t believe me, but I have. And it’s just so… less. You know? I want more. That’s my motto now. I want the real thing. No faking it, no getting by with flash. That’s the old Stevie.”

  I flip the light off and head out the door before she can say anything else. My limbs feel numb, but my heart is racing. I hate being transparent. I hate this confusion, like I don’t know what I’m doing or feeling.

  I fucking hate Stevie Davis for doing this to me. What is her deal? I hope she wakes up with one hell of a hangover tomorrow.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ~KAREN~

  It takes me until it’s nearly dark out to get up the nerve to hike back to our campsite. My apprehension only grows with Jordan’s lack of need to come and make up with me or whatever. Is he really mad or just scared to talk about his problems?

  Fear is building inside me, twisting around in my stomach and gaining ground. The jittery stomach only gets worse when I spot him sitting on a log in front of the fire. He looked so into everything earlier and now his expression is grim and stiff, not open and excited.

  I take it back, Jordan. I take it all back.

  “I’m sorry,” I say right away, standing in front of him.

  “Me, too.” His gaze is locked on the fire.

  I take a seat beside him. “Explain to me what you’re afraid of. I can’t wrap my head around it.”

  He shakes his head. “I can’t explain it. It’s irrational. I know that just as well as you do. The whole being put to sleep thing freaks me out. It always has. Call me whatever names you want, but I can’t get past it.”

  Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. What would Jackie say about this? I need to channel her. “When I had surgery on my shoulder last year, the anesthesia part freaked me out, too. But you just show up when you’re scheduled and then they don’t give you the chance to back out. It’s like you’re answering basic questions, they’re putting in an IV, and then bam, you’re waking up and it’s over.”

  “Assuming you wake up,” he says. “It’s stupid, I know. Trivial compared to what some people go through, but what the hell am I supposed to tell you besides the fact that I’m scared shitless?”

  Those last few words strike a chord with me and suddenly my breathing is labored, several different emotions tumbling out of me at once. “What are you gonna do? Just let it go and then what? Leave for school and wait to get sick again? Wait until everything is more urgent?”

  He snaps around to face me, maybe after hearing the struggle to breathe in my voice. “It’s gonna be okay, Karen.”

  “How do you know?” He reaches a hand toward my cheek but I push it away. “You have an abscess that could be a tumor, I looked it up. What if you have cancer? What if your throat swells up in your sleep and you suffocate to death?”

  He scoots closer but I slide back away from him. “You’re making this sound like it’s life or death and it’s not.”

  “How do you know?” I demand again, raising my voice. My hands are shaking. I’ve been shoving these feelings down for way too many days. “What if your strep infection travels to your kidneys because you become resistant to all the antibiotics and then you have kidney failure? And who knows if your dad is a match to be a donor.”

  Fear and panic are crawling around inside my chest, trying to claw their way out.

  “Karen, calm down.” Jordan’s face wrinkles with worry, but I can’t calm down.

  I stare at him, hard and intense. “Promise me you’ll be okay. Promise me you know what you’re doing.”

  His brown eyes widen. “I can’t—”

  “I know you can’t!” I stand up and back away from him. “And I need you to be okay. I need you.” I swallow the lump in my throat and swipe away the loose tears making tracks down my cheeks.

  “Karen…” He jumps to his feet and manages to get his hands on my shoulders, holding me firmly in place. “Relax, okay. Take a breath.”

  I pull away, backing up toward the tent. “I would do it for you. I would never make you feel this afraid for me. I’d never make you worry about losing me, not after everything—”

  “That’s not gonna happen.”

  “How do you know that? People die, Jordan! They crash their cars or get blown up or…” I suppress a sob and shake my head. “I need you to be okay. Please, just do this for me. Please.”

  I cover my face, unable to hold back the sobs any longer.

  “Okay. Okay.” He grabs me up in his arms and I just want to hold on as tight as possible. He buries his face in my hair and repeats the words again, his own voice shaky. “Okay, I’ll do it. I promise I’ll do it.”

  The constricting feeling in my chest begins to loosen and I can finally breathe again. “Thank you,” I whisper into his T-shirt.

  “You’re right,” he mumbles, tightening his grip on me. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  I pull back, examining his face to make sure he means it. The second our eyes meet, we’re both leaning in, our mouths coming together in less than a second. I’m so relieved, so emotionally overloaded that it all transfers into this kiss and I can’t get close enough. When Jordan reaches down and unzips the tent, I don’t even hesitate before climbing inside. The entire floor of the tent is covered with two self-inflating air mattresses and our unrolled sleeping bags.

  He tosses his shirt into a corner and then pulls me down beside him, eventually throwing my top beside his. And then before I have time to get nervous all over again, I reach down and slide my bikini bottoms off.

  “Okay, then,” Jordan says, laughing.

  My cheeks flush, but I hold his gaze steady. “What? They were cold and wet from the lake.”

  “In that case…”

  I should have known that was coming. I suppress a giggle and immediately shift my gaze upward. I’m okay with him taking off his suit, but I’m not quite ready to look yet.

  Jordan catches my hand and kisses the inside of it. “Okay?”

  My eyes fail me and drift down for a split second and back up again. “That wasn’t so hard.” Oh boy… bad choice of words. “I mean, I’m all right with this but maybe not like everything.”

  He laughs again. “I’m not prepared for everything and besides, I promised my dad I wouldn’t go there. Well, that we wouldn’t go there.”

  “What!” I prop myself up on one elbow, almost completely forgetting our nakedness. “Tell me you’re not serious? I will die of humiliation knowing that conversation took place.”

  “I’m serious, unfortunately.” He turns on his side to face me. “But if it helps any, I did my best to make him as uncomfortable as possible, so I doubt he’ll want to have a repeat of that conversation. Like
ever.”

  I lace my fingers through his, still keeping my eyes up. “Have I mentioned that you’re my very favorite person?”

  He smiles and places a hand over my eyes. “You trust me, right?”

  “You should never open with that line.” My heart picks up again, my hands shaking. “What are you doing?”

  “Looking…”

  “Looking for what… ?” Oh… looking.

  His lips touch mine, kissing me quickly. “Relax. I’m just making this easier on you.”

  Easier? I give him a few seconds to… um… look and I pull his hand from my eyes. “Jordan, that whole deal thing earlier… I was just trying to help, but—”

  He kisses me again, stopping me. “I know, it’s okay. I promise to keep my promise no matter what.”

  This isn’t going right. I’m gonna have to be more direct. More honest. “I want to do this. Even before the whole ‘let’s make a deal’ plan, I wanted to do whatever is next. For me.”

  Tension I hadn’t even noticed a few seconds ago dissolves from his face. “Really?”

  “I have no clothes on,” I remind him.

  He rests a hand on my cheek, studying me. “Then why are your hands shaking and why do you look like you’re going to cry again?”

  As if to prove his point, a single tear slips down my cheek. It’s hard to explain the crying part. I think it’s a combination of things I just said outside of this tent and the emotion behind it. I need him. I really need him. And that’s difficult for someone like me to admit and at the same time, it’s a blessing. Loving someone that hard means I’m not alone.

  But I don’t want to say all these things right now. I’m not sure the words would come out right. So I wipe the tear from my cheek and say, “I’m a girl, Jordan. Crying at random times is pretty common. And I spend so many hours doing something I’m good at. Not knowing what I’m doing throws me off my game.”

  He smiles. “You have a game?”

  “Yes, I have a game.” I move his hand from my face and use it to cover his eyes. I sit up on my knees and take a deep breath, before pulling my gaze from his face to… well, lower. He must have heard my nervous inhale because he’s trying not to laugh. “What? I’m getting the part that makes me most nervous over with. Aren’t you at least a little apprehensive about the fact that I’m seeing you naked?”

  “I already told you my parts are in perfect working order. I have nothing to hide.”

  Is he really that confident? Having nothing to hide is the part I’m most afraid of. And I wonder who will answer all these questions that have already started rolling into my brain since we stripped down minutes ago? Topics like puberty, boys, and sex are all subjects I’ve discussed in great detail with my mom on several occasions and it was never awkward or uncomfortable for either of us. But even if she were still here, I’m not sure I’d be able to ask her the things I want to know. Before, it was all hypothetical, all something I’d do or deal with in another lifetime. The second I started seeing myself experiencing everything with Jordan, it became a potential reality and it’s like if I open my mouth to ask a question it will become a personal inquisition rather than a hypothetical discussion. Even with Jordan, talking about this stuff was way easier when I couldn’t fathom the possibility of me and him ever being… us.

  But I’m not completely naïve either. I’ve seen pictures, I’ve read books. I understand the basics of what things are supposed to look like and how they operate. I’ve even read scenarios where characters are going through the same relationship steps that I’m going through right now. I think about Kath and Michael in Forever. She got nervous about not knowing what to do, how to touch him, just like me. She compared his anatomy to descriptions from romance novels and found the reality to be much less intimidating. I’ve always wanted to have an experience similar to that because it felt okay to be bad at things. At first, anyway. Though I’m really hoping that if Jordan has named his penis, he doesn’t share that information with me.

  “You haven’t fallen asleep, have you?” Jordan asks. “That would not be good for my ego.”

  I laugh and rest a hand on his stomach so he knows I’m still awake. I want to slide my fingers further south—touch him there—but I don’t know if I can do that just for curiosity’s sake or if it has to be done with a specific purpose. My two years in middle school are pushing their way back to my frontal lobe and I’m suddenly recalling all the immature middle-schooler conversations and teasing about the size of male anatomy, but now I’m wondering how you really know if it’s big or small? How many do you have to see before making an accurate assessment and what does that say about the person making those claims?

  And then there’s this whole other slew of conversations regarding “gross” girls who probably touched themselves all the time (I think, looking back, I sat with some horrible people during lunch and had absolutely nothing to contribute to their conversations). The logic is completely lacking. It’s wrong for girls to touch themselves and I guess guys are supposed to know exactly what to do because the girls obviously don’t since their hands have to stay far from that area? And how do guys know what to do with us? Do they all have plastic models of vaginas that come with a diagram and directions on what to do? It’s hardly fair to expect them to be good at this. At least gay guys, like Tony, know what they’re dealing with. They’ve been living with the same parts all their lives. I wonder if they compare sizes? I wonder if they bother learning about vaginas?

  And assuming Jordan ends up exploring that region of my body, is it going to hurt? I can’t even use super tampons without feeling pain, so how much will it hurt to have fingers inside me? I glance at Jordan’s hand lying on the air mattress beside me, trying to guess whether the diameter of his finger is larger than a super tampon. If it does hurt, should I pretend it doesn’t so that he won’t feel bad? I mean, babies come out of there, right? It’s not like it will hurt forever. Eventually, I’ll adjust… I guess? Weird. It’s like conditioning.

  A warm hand touches my hair, making me aware of the fact that Jordan’s eyes are now uncovered. How long has he been watching me stare at his supposedly functional parts? Or is it just one part? No, he’s the one that said parts. Plural.

  “What are you thinking about?” Jordan asks, breaking the long silence between us and quieting all the thoughts flying through my head.

  My face heats up, but it’s completely dark outside now and the only light in our tent is from the glow of one flashlight lying on its side. I don’t think he can even see my blushing. “Trust me, you don’t want to know.”

  “Trust me, I do.” His face is full of so many emotions—concern, fear, love—I can’t play it cool anymore. A few more tears leak from my eyes and Jordan sits up quickly, holding my face in his hands. “What’s wrong?”

  I close my eyes and shake my head. “Nothing… Well, everything. But… I don’t know. I have way too many thoughts and questions and—”

  “Shh,” he whispers, pulling me down next to him, my cheek resting over his heart. “You have questions… ?” he prompts.

  I shake my head again. “I can’t ask you this stuff. It’s like the ultimate mood killer.”

  “I seriously doubt that.” His hand makes circles over my back and then I feel the other hand rest right on my butt. My completely bare butt.

  Maybe I should be touching his butt? Maybe I’m so bad at this, he’s going to think I must not love him? I know girls aren’t supposed to equate sex and not-sex with love and guys who do are assholes and only want one thing. But I’m starting to realize that it isn’t that simple. If you really love someone, then you trust them—enough to see you without your clothes on. Maybe you don’t want to have sex because of pregnancy and diseases or for religious or cultural reasons but regardless, emotional and physical love do overlap. I don’t care what we’re supposed to think, they do.

  “Believe me,” Jordan says, “You can’t ruin the mood with questions.”

  I think he’s
wrong about that, but I decide on a compromise. I want to get this over with quickly. “I’ll ask and you have to answer in three words or less, okay?”

  “Okay, sure.” He touches his lips to my hair and then tightens his arms around me. Wherever his fingers land, the skin heats up instantly. I’m already as turned on as I’ve ever been, but also more confused than ever.

  “How do you know what you’re doing?” I guess I could’ve started by asking him if does actually know what he’s doing because really, how would I know?

  “Trial and error,” he says right away.

  “You told me before that touching in certain areas is done with a specific purpose, so does that mean if I want to touch you there, I’ll need to—”

  He cuts me off by lifting my chin and looking me right in the eyes. “No,” he says firmly. “You don’t need to do anything. Nothing that you don’t want to do.”

  I nod, my face flushing even more, and return to lying on his chest. He seemed so serious and intense about that question that I don’t point out the fact that he went over the three-word limit. “How do guys know what’s big and what’s small?”

  “Ruler.”

  I burst out laughing and lift my head again. “Seriously? You measure yourself?” He just shrugs, obviously not wanting to elaborate. “Do you think it’s going to hurt me?”

  “You mean sex?”

  He’s pretty good at the three-word limit.

  “Not sex, the… other stuff.”

  Jordan takes my face again and pulls me closer, kissing me long and slow. “It won’t hurt.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.” He turns me over and this time I have to watch his eyes scan over my entire body. Then he’s working his mouth over all the skin on my neck, my shoulders, my chest. Heat trails from one spot to the other. Any chill from the cool night dissolves before I can even feel it. “What else?”

  I think for a second, distracted by all the lips and kisses covering my body. “Is the diameter of your index finger equal to or great than the diameter of a super absorbency tampon?”