by N. K. Smith
I meant to say hello to Elliott but it came out sounding more like a lustful, “Mmmmm, Elliott.” And lustful over him I was. I spent most of the hour ignoring the fact that there was a lecture occurring, and instead of listening to Mr. Reese, blatantly stared at the boy next to me who caused such deep and conflicting emotions.
He was perfect and sexy, and he had no clue that if he’d just fake a little confidence, he’d have most of these bitches hanging off his junk. Not that I wanted any of them on his junk. In fact, I probably would have fought a bitch over his junk.
Elliott remained blissfully unaware.
I didn’t think he had any idea that his sexy-but-not-too-pouty lips were making me clamp my legs together. He was clueless as to what those gorgeous hazel eyes and extremely long eyelashes could do if given the chance. If he had only a little more confidence, he’d make every fucking girl in this school melt into a puddle of goo by just looking at them.
Morphine made me want to have sex.
His hands were absolutely exquisite, with beautiful long, strong, elegant fingers. They were marked though. Both hands had small divots and tiny, barely-noticeable scars littering them. His right hand was gripping his black ink pen tightly as the fingers on the other constantly curled and uncurled around the closed textbook on the desk.
Elliott’s chest was rising and falling more rapidly than most people’s, but it was a strong chest. He had broad shoulders and narrow hips, and his lap made me want to crawl up on it.
I could’ve totally done him. I would lick his neck and taste his skin while I straddled his lap. I’d do most of the work, but his hands would be on my hips, pulling me forward and pushing me back at erotically even intervals. I would grip his chest, using the hollows of his collarbone as handles as I rode him.
I’d also bet he was relatively well-endowed. Poetic justice like that was rampant in this world, and nothing would be more right and in-tune with what “should be” than Elliott wielding a massive instrument. It would fill me up and take away the ache that was ever-present. I would sink down on him and become whole, if only for the long minutes we were connected like that.
I would make him pant, make him grunt. I knew he wouldn’t be like some guys, who might as well have been girls the way they screamed their way through sex. I could see him biting his lip and casting his face up toward the ceiling, his eyes shut, while his quiet sounds told me how far along he was on the path to orgasm.
Damn, and those fingers that looked so fucking sexy strumming a guitar would dig into the flesh of my hips and my ass. Since he was quite a bit larger than I was, it would be nothing for him to lift me up while we were still connected and press me back into the wall.
My legs would automatically wrap around and lock at the ankles behind his back and he’d take over thrusting up into me while I held on, burying my face in his neck. He’d smell so good too, like grass and citrus, and I’d flick my tongue against him once more, just to taste the saltiness of his skin.
The wet, flat stroke of my tongue would own him and make him shiver as he pressed against me even more, his chest putting pressure on my breasts, his soft sprinkling of hair teasing and tempting me.
His delectable mouth would suck in my earlobe before trailing open, wet kisses along the line of my jaw. He’d kiss my chin, bringing it into his mouth briefly before sucking on my lips until they were swollen.
All the while, his hips would never stop thrusting between my thighs and I would grip…
“O-o-okay?”
I blinked and sucked in a ragged breath. “Hhhmm?”
What the hell? As I came out of the intense fantasy and found myself still sitting in my seat while other kids were leaving the room, I wondered about my daydream. The sex I could understand, but the chin-kissing? Trailing kisses along my jaw line?
What. The. Hell. What was my problem?
“I-I asked if you w-were o-okay.”
I looked up at Elliott and he was breathing hard, as if we truly had been doing it in the middle of class. I wondered what sounds he would make, and if he’d be able to say anything coherent for long minutes afterward.
“I’m good.” My voice sounded tired and lazy. I started gathering all of my things.
I dropped my pencil, which Elliott picked up, and by the time it was securely in my bag, about ten pieces of paper floated to the floor. I watched lazily as he picked them up, stacking them straight before putting them in my bag for me.
“Thanks. I’ll see you later,” I said, knowing that the Screw-Up Club was holding its weekly compulsory meeting.
He curled his hand around my wrist as I tried to go and I froze for a moment before I came to my senses and pulled my arm away. “What?”
He didn’t disguise the hurt on his face very well, but I didn’t like that shit from anyone, so I wasn’t going to feel bad.
“W-w-wwwhat are you on?”
I blinked at him, but he waited, staring into my eyes. I played it as cool as I could while drowning in a sea of hazel. “Nothing.”
“S-S-SSSophie,” was all he said, but it made me shiver.
“I’m fine, and I’m not…on anything.”
“M-maybe n-no one else p-pays attention, b-but I do.” The crease on his brow deepened. “W-what are you on?”
I didn’t want to tell him. Morphine was a derivative of opium, the same as heroin. He would know that shit and he would make a direct connection with his junkie-mother and I didn’t want that, for him or for me. I smiled slowly. “Nothing, Elliott, I’m just…” I looked around. “I have to get to the gym, but I’ll see you at your house in a few hours.”
“S-SSSophie, you are—”
I cut him off as I began walking away. “I’m fine, Elliott.”
The morphine numb carried me through to the rest of the school day and clung to me during my twenty-minute wait to see Wallace, but after the first few minutes of talking to her about random things like school and photography, I recognized the signs of coming down.
And I hated it.
It was way too easy for that voice to ring out inside my head.
Shhhh!
I drew my legs up onto the chair and wrapped my arms around them, resting my chin on my knees.
Quiet, Sophie.
“Sophie, I think it’s time we talk about some actual issues, would that be okay?”
Pulling myself out of my mental downslide, I shrugged. “It’s your show. You can try.” I felt kind of sick.
“It’s been very interesting to see you interact with your father.” I narrowed my eyes, but that was my only reaction. “Why won’t you let him get close to you? You seem to keep him at a distance and get annoyed when he tries to involve himself in your life.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You should have seen the irritation and anger on your face last Friday when he and Stephen spoke about your diabetes. Doesn’t it make you feel at least a little happy that someone is concerned about you?”
I shook my head. “He doesn’t need to be close to me.”
“Is it all men you stay away from in general or just authoritarian men?” I stayed silent, suddenly entirely too sober for this shit. “Let’s go back to a question I’ve asked you before.”
I rolled my eyes. I knew exactly what Wallace wanted to discuss. “About sex, right?” Wallace nodded and I sighed, ready to give her the juicy details she so obviously wanted. “What do you want to know? I prefer doggie-style and I find it sexy when guys lick my neck.”
Her reaction was muted as her eyes continued to bear down on me. “Do you think you prefer that position so that you don’t have to see the person you’re having sex with?”
“No.” She might’ve had a point, but there was no way in hell that I was validating that shit for her. I wanted to shock her. “Is that why you let Doctor
Dalton fuck you from behind? So you don’t have to be faced with the fact that you’re boning your daughter’s future father-in-law?”
Although she took in a sharp breath, Wallace’s face was impassive. “How many men have you slept with, Sophie?”
“Men or boys?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm like hers. I wondered if it made a difference to her how many people over the age of eighteen had done me, and whether or not it mattered if they’d known I was underage, because most of them couldn’t have cared less. “And do you actually mean ‘sleep,’ because we don’t.”
“No,” she said seriously. “No, sleeping next to someone without sexual contact would be a challenge for you. It would be a deeply intimate act.”
My whole body bristled, but I said nothing.
“When’s the last time someone hugged you?”
I shrugged.
“When was the last time you let someone touch you in a manner that wasn’t sexual and did not lead to, or stem from, sex?”
I thought about Elliott, but it had been uncomfortable and I didn’t let it last long.
She looked at me hard. “Just because in the past people might not have shown you affection in the form of hugging or holding your hand doesn’t mean you’re not worthy of those small acts of love, Sophie.”
I hated her words, and I hated that she thought she knew anything about me. Despite my internal vow to remain silent, my mouth said, “They make me nervous.”
“Yet sleeping with men you barely know is something you do with ease.”
Screw her. “You don’t know what I do. How the fuck do you think you know how easy or hard something is for me, or that I fuck anyone I don’t know?”
She ignored my question. “Perhaps you should refrain from sexual activity in order to better understand intimacy. You might find that simple things like a touch or a smile are actually much more rewarding than sex with people who most likely don’t even care for you at all.”
“Perhaps you should mind your own fucking business,” I spouted off immediately without really thinking about it.
“Do you worry that your father will take advantage of you?”
My breath caught. “What?” I stood up, my chest feeling tight, as if I couldn’t breathe. Bitch was suffocating me, drawing the fucking air out of my lungs to watch me flop around like a fish out of water. “I’m done with this shit. Screw you. Don’t ask me shit about Tom. Ask him.”
“Sophie, please sit down.”
I didn’t want to sit. I wanted to leave the room, but my body did as she asked.
“Why do you call him Tom?”
“It’s his name,” I answered tensely.
“Do you wish to distance yourself from him? Calling him by his first name prohibits you from acknowledging the familial bond you share with him.”
“He distanced himself from me.”
Wallace cocked her head and jotted something on her legal pad. “Perhaps one day the two of you can sit down and talk about that. Your feelings are valid, Sophie, but you should also give him the opportunity to share his with you.”
Again, I said nothing. She could have her little moments of counselor clarity, but I wasn’t going to be involved with them.
“Are you upset that he didn’t save you?”
I bit my lip as I tensed up.
“Shut up.” I had meant it as a forceful command, but it came out a whispered plea. “You don’t know anything.”
“Do you think he should have stopped your mother from hurting you?”
My lip slipped from between my teeth and my jaw clenched. My teeth hurt from the pressure. She didn’t know anything. I never told her about what my mother did, but of course he could have, and should have, stopped my mother from hurting me, but he didn’t quite care enough to figure that shit out.
If he would have just asked me a question about how I got one of hundreds of scars, or why it was that I was so bruised when I arrived every June, I would have told him the truth. But he never asked, and by the time I came to Damascus the summer after sixth grade, I didn’t want to be in the same room with him. Plus, being alone in a house with a big man I barely knew, no matter if I called him Dad, Daddy, Father, or Tom, would never be comfortable again.
Then the fucking voice had to make an appearance, reminding me that no one ever did ask any questions, and no one ever saved me.
Shhhh! Quiet, Sophie. Don’t wake your mother.
Wallace didn’t need to know all that. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Group therapy was about as annoying as it could have been, and as I reached Elliott’s bedroom, with him following closely behind, I felt wiped.
I flopped down onto his couch, thanking the universe that such a wonderful place as his room even existed. Wallace had me thinking, and I wished I was high because I hated thinking about all the things that people like her wanted me to think about.
I had told Elliott about the fork and the day Helen decided she’d had enough of taking care of me, which was not to be confused with the day that Helen decided she didn’t like me or whatever. I couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t just outright mean.
I’d seen those melodramas on TV where the big bad mother/father/husband/whatever beat his or her loved one up and then the next day was all like, “Hey, I’m sorry, here’s a gold necklace to make up for it.” Helen wasn’t like that. She never apologized. She never gave me anything.
Except scars and bruises.
I wished I was high. Why the hell couldn’t Elliott be a burner? I could be high right now.
I wanted to be high.
“S-S-SSSophie?”
I blinked as he said my name and I felt myself come back to the here and now just long enough to remember again that I was in Elliott’s room and that just last week, I’d danced with him, and it was the best I’d ever felt for just a split second. His hands were perfect for that short time. The smell of him was just so…damn! I didn’t know what it was, but I liked it!
It was too much. He was way too much.
He didn’t even know it.
It was like he was burning me, but from inside myself. That didn’t even make sense.
I had broken that contact as quickly as I could, but I ached for him when I was across the room and no longer in his arms.
How could he fucking want me?
How could he do what he did to me? I wasn’t capable of these feelings.
How could he make me want him when I didn’t want any fucking one?
Why the hell wasn’t I high? I still had one pill left, but I was going to save it for tomorrow morning. I wasn’t sure about being on morphine with Tom around.
“S-Sophie?”
I took a deep breath and looked up at him.
“What’s up, Elliott?” I whispered, taking in his furrowed brow and nervous posture as he sat on his bed, and I gave him a small smile.
Although he didn’t respond, his expression told me that he was worried about me.
His eyes burned into me; they breathed into me.
It made me hurt.
“A-a-ar-are you o-okay?”
I breathed out a near silent, “Yeah.”
Shhhh!
I breathed in and forced myself to look away from him. “I’m fine.”
Quiet, Sophie. Don’t wake your mother.
I let a long moment go by before saying, “You don’t look like you own that bed, you know?”
When I could finally allow myself to look over at him, I saw him scooting back, looking more comfortable like I’d taught him to do, and I smiled. That was better.
“What do you want to do tomorrow?”
“If it sssssnows, w-w-w-we c-can—”
“We can play in it,” I finished for
him, not because I was impatient, but because the idea was sort of exciting. “Then I’ll make you chili.”
I liked making food for him. It was like the one thing I could do to give him the comfort he silently gave me. The thought of playing in the snow with Elliott made me think of being innocent with him; of being childlike and just losing ourselves in each other.
Now that there was such a creature as Elliott in my life, I hoped for snow. I wanted that childlike innocence back.
Saturday morning came too soon. Tom was already up when my tired eyes finally cracked open. I could hear the TV downstairs, and smelled the coffee growing stale and burning to the bottom of the pot. Apparently it was a day off for him. I guess he didn’t have to go to the firehouse or his paramedic gig. Grumbling because yet again I didn’t get much sleep, I rolled out of bed, my bare feet hitting the cold wooden floorboards.
I shivered and went to retrieve my socks. It was probably eighty degrees right now in Tampa, but as I glanced out of my window, I found that the weatherman had been accurate. An early snow had settled upon Damascus, making everything outside blindingly white and everything inside much colder than I’d experienced in a long time. Tom mentioned the other night that snow would be a welcomed change from all of the ice this part of Maryland experienced.
I wasn’t excited about the ice or the cold.
I stumbled out of my room and down the stairs, fully intending to go straight for the coffee pot, but was stopped short by the sight of Elliott sitting across from Tom at the kitchen table.
We’d made plans, but not until the afternoon.
I looked at the clock.
Oh.
Oh shit. It was already twelve-thirty. Elliott had probably been here for a half-hour at least.
“Uh, hey.”
Both of them looked up at me. Elliott smiled. I probably looked utterly horrible and yet he still smiled at me like I was fresh water to a parched throat.
“Tried waking you up, but guess you didn’t hear me knock.” My father sounded worried.
Well, shit.
There I was in my sweatpants and t-shirt, both of which were clearly too big for me. I could either be incredibly embarrassed that I’d slept too late and looked so bad, or I could own it.