“What was she like?” I ask.
“Angry,” he says. “She was a very angry woman.”
I bite my lip, unsure what to say.
“She didn’t care for me,” he adds, “and I could never figure out why.”
“Is she still alive?”
“They’re both dead.”
I start to say I’m sorry but he cuts me off, squeezes my hand. “It’s fine,” he says. “Ancient history.”
We lie quiet for a while, our hands linked under the blankets. Breathing in and out, I close my eyes and try to pinpoint the scent of his bedroom. It’s a thin, masculine smell, traces of soap and deodorant on the flannel sheets, cedar from the closet. It’s strange to think this is where he lives like a normal person, sleeping and eating and doing all the monotonous everyday chores of living—washing the dishes, cleaning the bathroom, doing laundry. Does he do his own laundry? I try to picture him hauling clothes from washer to dryer, but the image dissolves as soon as I conjure it.
“Why didn’t you ever get married?” I ask.
He glances over at me and I feel his hand loosen its grip on mine for a moment, long enough to tell me this was the wrong thing to ask.
“Marriage isn’t for everyone,” he says. “You’ll figure that out as you get older.”
“No, I get it,” I say. “I never want to get married, either.” I don’t know if this is exactly true, but I’m trying to be generous. His worry is obvious, about me and what we’re doing. The smallest movement makes him jump, like I’m an animal prone to bolt or bite.
He smiles; his body relaxes. I said the right thing. “Of course you don’t. You know yourself enough to understand what you aren’t made for,” he says.
I want to ask what I am made for, but don’t want to show I don’t actually know myself, and don’t want to push it now that he’s again holding my hand and tilting his head toward mine like he’s moving in for a kiss. He hasn’t kissed me since I got here.
He asks again if I’m tired and I shake my head. “When you are,” he says, “let me know and I can go to the living room.”
The living room? I frown and try to figure out what he means. “Like you’ll sleep on the couch?”
He lets go of my hand and starts to speak, stops, starts again. “I’m ashamed of how I first touched you,” he says, “back at the beginning of the year. That’s not how I like to behave.”
“I liked it, though.”
“I know you liked it, but wasn’t it confusing?” He turns to me. “It must have been. Having your teacher touch you out of nowhere. I didn’t like doing that, acting without talking it through first. Talking through absolutely everything is the only way to redeem what we’re doing.”
He doesn’t say it, but I know what’s required of me here—to tell him how I feel and what I want. To be brave. I roll toward him, press my face into his neck. “I don’t want you to sleep on the couch.” I feel him smile.
“Ok,” he says. “Is there anything else you want?”
I nuzzle against him, slide my leg over his. I can’t say it. He asks if I want to be kissed, and when I nod into his neck, he takes a handful of my hair, draws my head back.
“My god,” he says, “look at you.”
I’m perfect, he says, so perfect I can’t be real. He kisses me and other stuff starts to happen fast, things we haven’t done before—pushing the tank top over my breasts, pinching and kneading, slipping his hand under the pajama shorts and cupping me down there.
For everything he does, he asks permission. “Can I?” before pulling the pajama top all the way over my head. “Is this ok?” before pushing my underwear over, slipping a finger inside so quickly that, for a moment, I’m stunned and my body plays dead. After a while he starts asking permission after he’s already done the thing he’s asking about. “Can I?” he asks, meaning can he tug the pajama shorts down, but they’re already off. “Is this ok?” meaning is it ok for him to kneel between my legs, but he’s already there, letting out a groan and saying, “I knew you’d be red here, too.”
I don’t understand what he’s doing until he starts doing it. Kissing me there, going down on me. I’m not an idiot; I know it’s something people do, but it hadn’t occurred to me that it’s something he would want. Wrapping his arms under me, he pulls me closer, and I dig my heels into the mattress, reach down and grab a fistful of his hair so hard it must hurt, but his kissing and licking and whatever else he does—how does he know exactly what to do to make me feel good? how does he know everything about me?—none of that stops. I bite my bottom lip to keep from crying out, and he makes a slurping sound, like sucking up the last of a soda through a straw, which would embarrass me if it didn’t feel so good. I drape my arm across my eyes, fall into swirls of color, ocean waves rising to mountains, the sensation of being so small until I come, harder than when I do it to myself, so hard I see stars.
“Ok, stop,” I say. “Stop, stop.”
He recoils as though I kicked him away—sits back on his knees, still in his T-shirt and jeans, hair mussed and face shiny. “Did you come?” he asks. “Really, that fast?”
I squeeze my legs together and my eyes shut. I can’t talk, can’t think. Was that fast? How long did it even take? A minute or ten or twenty, I have no clue.
“You did, didn’t you? Do you know how special that is?” he asks. “How rare?”
I open my eyes and watch him wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, then pause and hold that hand to his face, take a breath, and close his eyes.
He says he wishes he could do that to me every night. Pulling the comforter up with him, he lies down beside me and adds, “Every single night before you fall asleep.”
Him cradling me feels almost as good as him going down on me, his chin resting on top of my head, his big body curled around mine. He smells like me. “We won’t go further than that for now,” he says, and I turn liquid-warm at the thought of sex being nothing but him doing that to me.
He reaches over and turns off the nightstand light, but I can’t sleep. His arm grows heavy across my shoulders as I replay in my head the way he said “oh no” when he saw me in the pajamas, the way he wrapped his arms under my legs to pull me closer to his face when he went down on me. The way he, at one point, reached up and held my hand in the middle of it all.
I want him to do it again, but don’t dare wake him to ask. Maybe he’ll do it again in the morning before I leave. Maybe we’ll be able to do it after school in his classroom sometimes, or go for drives off campus and do it in his car. My mind won’t quiet. Even as I eventually doze, my brain still schemes.
When I wake a couple hours later, it’s dark outside. Hallway light streams in through the bedroom doorway, across the floor. Beside me, Strane is awake, his mouth hot on my neck. I turn onto my back, grinning, expecting him to move his face down between my legs, but he’s naked when I roll over. Pale skin covered in dark hair from his chest all the way down his legs, and in the center his penis, enormous and erect.