“Is this okay?” I asked her.
She looked at me, breathing deeply. She didn’t answer, but she didn’t protest either.
I knew this was probably wrong—I mean, since her dad just died, she wasn’t thinking clearly. But the tension between us had been building for our entire lives, and if we didn’t do something about it, I was sure that one of us would burst into flames.
She gently tightened her fingers around my breast. I thought this would hurt, like it did when Brad touched me, but it didn’t.
With her other hand, Susan pushed down on my thigh, through the fabric of my pajamas.
Slowly, I leaned in close to her, my eyelashes brushing her cheek. The rest of the world dropped away, and I was left only with Susan, with the desire—maybe stronger than any other desire I’d ever had—to lick her face. Even in the moment, I knew this was the kind of thing animals wanted to do, to lick someone else, to taste them.
“Is this okay?” I whispered again.
“Yes,” Susan breathed into my mouth, and I felt her muscles relaxing. “I like it.”
She reached around me and unhooked my bra, then touched my skin. Her palm was sweaty.
“I like it too,” I said.
I pressed my lips onto hers, too quickly. Our faces bumped together, and the knock of her jawbone hurt, but I kept going. I couldn’t stop.
Susan’s mouth didn’t taste anything like I expected. It tasted like beer. But my whole body was in pain. This radiating kind. And then that pain disappeared. I felt her kissing my neck and my ear. Then her palm was on my belly.
I slid my hand under the elastic band of her white cotton underwear.
It felt boggy inside the fort we’d made, and the close air made me feel drugged.
Susan copied me, and though she was sweating, her hand was cold against my skin.
I put both of my hands on Susan’s shoulders, pulled her on top of me.
“Is this okay?” I asked one last time.
“Don’t talk anymore,” said Susan. She yanked off her shirt, which caught on one of her earrings. Then she tugged at the bottom of mine and pulled it over my head.
“Okay,” she breathed. “Go.”
“Okay,” I said.
Somehow, I knew exactly what to do in a way I never had with Brad—I knew to go slowly, to be gentle, to keep eye contact the whole time. Her skin was slippery and wet, and I could feel that mine was too.
When Brad touched me, I always felt hard and papery. Like a prune.
I looked at her eyes instead of asking her again if this was okay. Her eyes told me yes.
I moved my fingers up and down, slowly, then faster. Then I pressed.
Susan leaned back and closed her eyes. She made a noise I’d always wanted to hear her make, and I felt her pulse from the inside, which seemed like the closest you could get to another person.
I leaned over, my hair spilling onto her chest.
“You’re perfect,” I said to her.
I couldn’t read her face. She looked at me differently than she ever had—like I had magical powers. She ran her forefinger over my lips.
“Let me do you,” she whispered, sitting and pushing me onto my back. Part of her hair was stuck to her cheek, and the rest was sticking up like she’d been living in a jungle for the past month.
I hesitated.
Susan hovered over me, her cheeks flushed.
“I need you,” she said. “Can’t we pretend, just for one night?”
Maybe she wanted to pretend that her dad wasn’t dead, or that she didn’t hate him, and maybe she needed to put something big in front of it, to bury it.
“Yes,” I said.
Slowly, she put her hand inside me. Somehow, she also knew what to do.
“Susan?”
She paused, her finger still, her other hand flat against my stomach.
“What is it?” she whispered, almost impatiently.
“I’m in love with you,” I said. There it was. I needed her to hear it clearly.
She sighed, a little sadly. She kissed my forehead. She began moving her fingers again, and I felt like exploding.
She looked me straight in the eye and said, “I know.”
My orgasm was like letting go of Rapunzel’s hair.
* * *
—
The next morning, Susan woke and immediately moved away from me. Her hair still stuck up on one side.
“Oh my God, I feel awful,” she said. She looked me up and down, rubbed her eyes with her palms, and said, “What happened last night?”
She was a terrible liar.
“Seriously,” she said, shrugging her shirt over her head. “I don’t remember anything. I was so wasted.”
I didn’t say anything. I’d never even fallen asleep. The feeling of my hand inside her—and hers inside me—replayed over and over in my head; sometimes it felt really good, and other times it felt dirty or wrong.
She looked at me and shuddered.
“I need to take a shower,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, pulling on my clothes as quickly as I could. It wasn’t unusual for Susan to sleep naked, but it was something I never did, and we both refused to acknowledge it.
“Yeah,” she said, “you should go.” Her shirt was slipping off her shoulder, and she pulled it back up and crossed her arms over her chest, covering it.
I crawled out of the fort. This was the last fort—the last fort ever. I stood in front of it for a moment before I took off.
It was just a blanket, hanging crookedly over some chairs, falling in on itself. A mess.
The Space She Left Behind
When I got home from Susan’s house, a full week after Susan’s dad died, Sandra was lying on the couch with a floral cocktail napkin over her eyes, an empty bottle of vodka next to her on the floor, and the brown puke bucket. I hated the puke bucket—Sandra had first brought it out when I was a kid and had the stomach flu. It was about seven thousand years old, and we never used it for anything else.
“What’s going on?” I asked. She could usually hold her liquor. “Red Red Wine” was playing softly, on repeat.
“He’s gone,” she said, her breath making the fabric of the napkin puff up.
You should go.
Susan’s words had echoed in my head all the way home. I wanted more than anything to have a mother in that moment—a mother who wasn’t lying on the couch with the puke bucket next to her, a mother like the kind you see on television, rushing around the kitchen, making breakfast, a mother who would listen to me.