The Sound of Us

by Poston, Ashley

  “Then that’s a deal-breaker.”

  “Muggles,” she scoffs, sliding her phone into her back pocket, and twists her long dreads up into a bun behind her head. She fans the back of her neck with a drink menu. “Just means I’ll have all the Nevilles to myself. Dear fuck, it’s hot. Are you ever going to get the air conditioning fixed?”

  I shrug apologetically. “Eventually?”

  “Eventually, eventually. Well, eventually you’ll regret not coming with me to the Quidditch match.”

  Normally, I would cave and go with her, just to be a good wing-woman, but I’m just not feeling it tonight. “Eventually, I might.” Before she can rebuke, I ask my bartender, “You closing tonight?”

  He gives me a salute and quirks a teasing eyebrow to the hottie in the corner. “I’ll take my time,” he replies coyly, more to the patron than to me.

  Maggie and I slide off our stools together. She holds the door open for me as we exit the bar and split our separate ways. “I’ll make it up to you?” I offer.

  “We both know that’s a lie!” She calls over her shoulder, waving goodbye with her middle finger.

  Chapter Two

  What I don’t tell Maggie—and what she doesn’t know, and probably never will—is that while she’s pretending to fly around with a broom between her legs, I’m not going home to pack for vacation tomorrow. Not yet, anyway.

  I find the number I’m looking for in the backlog of my phone, and call it as I get into the station wagon. The phone rings three times before a soft, liquid voice answers, “Yeah, this is Caspian, how can I help you?”

  “Hi, Cas,” I squeak.

  “Junie?” He sounds surprised. “Hi baby, is everything all right?”

  “Can I come over for a while?” I ask, trying to not sound too hopeful, glancing at the clock on my dashboard. It blinks 2:09 AM in ominous green numbers.

  “Yeah, come on over. I just got in.”

  Ten minutes later, I park behind the barn at the rear of his house, and sneak through the bushes to the side of the yard so the security cameras won’t see me. His dad is a pilot, so he travels a lot, and his mom is one of those investment bankers, so she takes frequent trips to Bora Bora with her girlfriends and leaves the house to Caspian. It’d be lonely, I think, to be in a huge house like this with nothing but the best security system money can buy, but he says he doesn’t mind. During the few times I’ve been over to his house, he’s had either the radio or TV on. I think he’s scared of silence, and when I retrieve the key from under the back porch doormat and let myself into the kitchen, silence sounds a hell of a lot better than what’s playing on the radio. I cringe.

  Roman Holiday.

  “Don’t tell me you’re listening to that, too,” I groan, dumping my purse down on the inlet counter.

  He looks up from a bowl of leftover Chinese, and outstretches a half-eaten egg roll to me between his chopsticks. “Food?”

  “Not really hungry,” I reply, tugging my hair out of its ponytail.

  His perfectly tweezed eyebrows shoot up in surprise, as if he just notices the color. “What did you do to your hair?”

  “Do you like it?” I ask.

  Cas’s eyes are this crazy sort of cornflower blue that remind me of a summer sky, accented by a strong jaw and a thick head of straw-colored hair, tonight pulled back into a small ponytail with a rubber band. It’s hard not to blush when he looks at me.

  We’re less than a couple but more than friends. We don’t use each other. We’re just…I dunno. We just run into each other. First, it started as harmless cat-and-mouse games at house parties, a kiss here and there, but then it escalated into making out in back bedrooms as the year progressed.

  So, sort of like the buddy without the fuck in it.

  He tilts his head, as if gauging his words, before saying, “It looks sexy.”

  My heart rises like it’s tied to a helium balloon. “Really?”

  He laughs, a sound like velvet. He outstretches his hand, and when I take it he pulls me around the counter to where he’s sitting. “Really,” he replies, kissing my neck. It takes a lot of self-control for me to not melt into my Converses here and now.

  I lean into him, closing my eyes, so welcomed to losing myself for a while.

  “How does your bartender like it?” he asks.

  My eyebrows furrow. “Geoff?” I sigh, rolling my eyes, and turn around, pressing my palms against his hard chest. He’s still wearing the clothes he must’ve went out in, a blank V-neck shirt and boot-cut jeans. “Oh, I doubt he noticed. He was flirting with another mountain man. Like he always does. Where was the party tonight?”

  “A bonfire down at Matty’s,” he replies, distracted, and kisses my cheek. “You’re so tense.”

  I pout. “Not everyone can have a good time all the time like you. Some of us have responsibilities.”

  He snorts, pulling away. “Sure, but we can have a good time right now.”

  I study him. There’s a mischievous glint in his eyes that begins to twist a grin across my lips. I pull my arms around his neck and hang on him. “I’m listening…”

  “We could have a great time, baby.” To demonstrate, he runs his fingers up my arm so gently, goose bumps ripple up my skin, and he traces his thumb along my lips. My heart leaps into my throat so I can’t breathe, and my head begins to buzz.

  I jump, startled, as “Rock of Ages” fills the kitchen, and pull away from Cas to read the caller ID on my phone. It’s Mom. Probably worried sick over where I am. I’m usually home by now, or if I’m not I tell her I’m with Maggie.

  It slipped my mind tonight to tell her anything at all.

  I hesitate for a moment. If I answer it, it’ll ruin the mood, but if I don’t she’ll burst a blood vessel and keep calling. “Sorry,” I mutter, ashamed that I’m eighteen and still being babysat by my mom. I answer the call. “Yeah, Mom?”

  “Where are you?” she snaps.

  Cas moves away to the kitchen sink, and squirts a small bit of hand sanitizer into his hands, rubbing it all the way up to his elbows.

  “It’s two-thirty in the morning,” Mom goes on, “and you’re not even packed yet! I called the bar and they didn’t even know where you were! What if something happened to you? I would’ve never found you.”

  “I’m at a friend’s,” I reply, trying to restrain my impatience, twirling my hair around my finger.

  “Do I know her?”

  Him. “Uh, no. It’s someone from…school.”

  “At two-thirty in the morning?”

  “Yes…” I reply, no matter how unlikely it is that she’ll believe me.

  She sounds like she can smell my bullshit from four miles away. “Well, we’re leaving at nine o’clock sharp—so you better be packed by then.”

  Couldn’t I just stay home? But I knew that wasn’t an option. Family vacations, even without Dad, still required my presence.

  I hang up and heave a sigh. Cas looks up from picking at his cuticles with a raised blond eyebrow. “I’m so sorry,” I say. “Mom’s a little…”

  He shrugs. “At least your parents care.”

  I can’t argue against that. “But trust me, you wouldn’t want to meet them.”

  “What, don’t want to introduce me?” he teases, closing in on me again, and grins. “How long has it been since we started this?” he asks, bemused.

  “Six months,” I say before I realize how spot-on I am. Six-months to the date, almost, and only seven months since Dad…

  He must read the crumbling look on my face. “Don’t think,” he whispers against my lips.

  So I don’t.

  I reach up on my tiptoes and crush my lips against his. He makes a surprised noise, but then he catches himself and fights back, aggressive and passionate, like he can’t get close enough. I dig my fingers into his chest as his lips migrate to my cheek, to my ear, to my neck, wanting to coat every bit of me.

  The heady scent of AXE aftershave fills my lungs as I breathe him in, caught
up in the way he tastes—like beer and cigarette smoke—and the way his tongue runs across mine, and how teasingly he bites my bottom lip.

  Mom has her vacation starting tomorrow. But tonight…tonight is mine.

  He lifts me onto the counter, and presses his hand against my breast. My heart thunders in my ribcage faster than a Led Zeppelin drum solo. We’re breathing heavy, and my face is flushed, my lips throbbing. A lock of hair has fallen into his face, but I push it back behind his ear, looking down at him, our eyes connecting.

  There’s an understanding there, one that reminds me of the first night we met, but so much heavier, like we’re about to forge a path we can’t ever undo.

  “Do you want to?” It’s my voice, crazy enough, that asks the question.

  He nods. “Bedroom?”

  “Yeah—do you have a condom?”

  “I think so, but aren’t you on the pill?” He helps me off the counter.

  “What is this, an interrogation?”

  Chuckling, he kisses me one more time before asking me to hold on a moment. He has to clean off the bed. The second he’s out of the kitchen, I tear off my LINING IT UP? bar shirt, shoving it into my purse, and take the tissues out of my bra. Despite the wonders of push-up bras, they don’t do wonders for me. Carpenter’s Dream—flat as a board.

  “Did you get lost?” Cas yells impatiently from his bedroom upstairs.

  “Hold on!” Looking around, I try to remember where the trashcan was—“Pantry!” I whisper to myself, throwing open the pantry door and shoving the tissues into the garbage

  “Baby!” he calls, almost whiny.

  “Coming!” I snap, looking at my reflection in one of the hanging frying pans over the inlet. I muss up my pink hair, hoping it looks bedhead sexy instead of barmaid greasy, and wipe away the smudges of eyeliner in the corners of my eyes.

  “One thousand and one…” he starts and I roll my eyes.

  “Fine!” Spinning toward the stairs, I take them two at a time. It’s not until I get to his bedroom door that I realize I still have my socks and Converses on. Is he the type to leave his socks on? Does he care, either way? Should I pee before…before whatever the hell’ll happen in there. It feels like I’m about to go into a black hole, where no one has gone before.

  There are manuals for everything—except how to lose your virginity. The closest things I can think of are classic rock songs. You can practically throw a dart blindfolded and hit a song about sex, but tonight isn’t “Love in an Elevator” or “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” I’m at a loss of what it is, and my heart is beating so hard it feels like it’ll rip out of my chest any minute.

  When I reach the top landing and turn into his room, my mind drops a blank. Cas is lying on his side, facing me, leg crooked up to display his born talent, in nothing but a…a tie.

  A purple tie.

  But I’m not looking at the tie. My throat constricts.

  “C’mon, baby,” he purrs, shifting back on his elbows, and all I want to do is jump on top of him. That’s not weird, is it? Oh who cares, I’m on birth control.

  And a virgin.

  He knows that, right?

  I can’t remember whether or not I ever told him I’ve never actually done the nasty with another guy—or girl, if I swung that way—but I can’t really stop thinking about that tie. That long, thick, hard tie—I mean—Stop thinking Junie.

  Swallowing my heart back down into my throat, I take a tentative step into his darkly lit bedroom. Posters of Harleys and European cities are plastered on his walls. Somewhere downstairs, Roman Holiday’s “Crush On You” echoes through the entire house in a sick sort of sadistic irony. My ankles wobble, but I keep my cool, trying to slip out of my Converses on the way to his bed.

  “I even have mood lighting,” he adds, thumbing back to the flickering electric candles on his headboard.

  “They’re...nice…” I get one shoe off halfway to the bed, and dig my toe into the back of my other shoe right when I hit a silky pair of underwear on the ground. I catch myself on the edge of the bed. With my Converses successfully off. Score.

  He gives me a wide-eyed look. “Baby, you okay?”

  I flip back my hair, trying to play it off. “Oh yeah,” I say, trying to sound aloof and sexy, because I didn’t fall and bust my ass on his silky underwear. I lean back on the bed. “I’m perfe—”

  But my hand meets complete air.

  With a cry, I pinwheel my arms forward, grappling for anything I can to keep myself from falling back. What I manage to grab a hold of his tie.

  “Wait!” he yelps a second before his words are strangled out of him, and we fall into a heap at the foot of his bed together. He gasps, clawing the tie loose from around his neck, and coughs. “You choked me!”

  “I was falling!”

  “You could’ve fallen alone!” He snaps, crawling back up onto the bed.

  I frown, untangling my legs out from under me. This is a disaster. “I’m sorry, I just ruined everything.”

  After a moment, I feel a tap on my shoulder. He outstretched a hand to help me back onto the bed before his eyes flicker down to my black polka-dotted bra. “Is that Victoria Secret?”

  “My only one,” I offer meekly. “Any other night would’ve been Target.”

  He reaches over me and kisses the skin between my breasts, as if he’s accepting my apology. His lips travel down my breasts to my navel, his fingers curling around the belt loops to my shorts, before they begin to undo the button and zip them down. We take them off together, and he kisses my hipbone, and the splotch on the side of my waist where a birthmark never quite faded. I shiver, unable to take a full breath, feeling his lips move their way up my body again, his hands undoing my bra.

  His naked body presses against mine, skin on skin, the connection so startling it’s like there are live wires just under the surface, and every touch sends a jolt to my center. It disrupts me, interferes with my thoughts, my signal.

  What bar? What sound guy?

  Who’s Junie?

  It doesn’t matter. I’m not her for the moment. I’m not anyone, lost in the dark, and the thought is so frightful and so relieving at the same time, because there’s no expectation, no plans, no plots. Only the traces of his fingers against my skin, like a sculptor creating Venus, and his lips on mine.

  He slides on top of me, and the only thing separating us is my thin black underwear. My hands wrap around the tie instinctively, but then on second thought, I undo the knot and slide it from around his neck.

  “Just in case,” I tease.

  “I hope not,” he replies, and I help him tug down my underwear, and throw them somewhere across the room. Then he takes out a condom from his nightstand, and tears it open.

  I’m not sure when I started to like Caspian, or when I began thinking that these moments could be something more. But couldn’t they? It’s crazy, but isn’t it possible? That he likes me as much as I like him? It’s like serendipity, meeting over all these months, wherever I was he showed up, or wherever he was I happened to be, too. We’ve always found each other. For six months.

  Do I like Caspian? Or is that even the question anymore?

  He plants his hands on both sides of my head, his shoulder muscles rippling in the light from the electric candles, and kisses me. “Ready?”

  “Yes,” I say against his mouth. He kisses me again as he slides into me, the movement so orchestrated he must have practiced it with other girls. How many other girls? Why am I thinking about this right now? Why—

  He eases deeper, and pain shoots through my stomach, straight up my spine and into my scalp. I gasp, blinking the tears out of my eyes.

  He pauses for a moment. “You okay?”

  In reply, I grab both sides of his face and kiss him again to make the pain go away. It almost does, and it lets him keep going. I stare into his face, so close to mine, but I’ve never felt so far away. His eyes are closed like he’s concentrating, in and out, in and out. It feels uncomfortable and
too quick, and all I can hear is Roman Holiday echoing up from somewhere downstairs, howling “I want to crush, crush, crush on you. I want to crush on you like back, back, back in high school.”

  God, he could’ve at least turned off that stupid radio.

  I close my eyes as he grunts, and try to imagine what we might look like. Sexy like in the movies? All bed sheets and lavender throw pillows and close-up blurry shots of arms and legs and me throwing my pink hair back as I come in ecstasy…but this isn’t good sex. This is terrible.

  Robotic.

  But the worst thing is, in my head I don’t imagine Cas. Not his blond hair or dimples or chiseled abs. I try, but every time I do—every time I think about how he kisses me and how he touches me—all I can hear is that fucking radio.

  His shoulder muscles seize, and then he rolls off me without so much as a sigh.

  “Crush On You” fades into another pop-rock ballad as he brings my hand to his lips and kisses my knuckles, one at a time.

  “Happy six months,” I whisper, finally opening my eyes to stare silently up at his dark ceiling, but he’s already snoring.

  Chapter Three

  The condo has a new paint job this year. Guess the sea-foam green didn’t cut it anymore. There’s a new pullout couch too, and a new TV to replace the one from the Stone Age that kept losing reception last year. The bedroom is a drowning blue to match the sailboat picture hanging above the bed, and the kitchen has new tile in the pattern of a checkerboard. The only thing the renovation hasn’t touched is the bird-shit yellow bathroom Dad hated.

  “I feel like I should be following the yellow brick road every time I lay a brick in here,” he used to complain. Of all the things to keep, it was that god-awful yellow?

  Staring around at the condo, I realize that I don’t remember a lot of the other smaller details of our yearly beach week. Like who gets the ice for the cooler? Who checks us in? Who unloads the suitcases and who make coffee in the mornings?

  It isn’t two minutes after we’ve walked in the door with our suitcases before our loud neighbor Darla pays her cordial visit. She doesn’t knock. She never knocks. She’s loud, smokes a pack of Marlboros a day, and downs tequila as if it’s low-calorie soda.