TRANSIENT STATES

Adult Speculative / Sci-Fi Romance

SUMMARY

“Did you know,” I leaned in and licked his ear, “that Mary Shelley kept her husband’s heart in her desk drawer?”

He moaned a girlish moan and nodded, like one of those singsong birds from my childhood outside of my window that on one spring day disappeared and that I never heard again, unaware, back then, that that would be the case and that Spring and developers were sworn enemies. I felt the tightness waging war against my pants as I moved to the lips. His blood was pooling in his cock and I felt it all, I felt the churning at the base of his stomach and the throbbing member in his pants and the pleasure that brewed in his chest. I could feel my wetness through the slutty red underwear he’d chosen, of course, and I began to pant, like a man-beast, into the ivory neck that smelled of vanilla bergamot perfume. 

“His body was being burned and she reached into the pyre and took it out before the flames engulfed it entirely.”

The giant Whit-hands tugged at the strap of my dress, the sage green one he’d told me once that he absolutely loved. It made my heart swell that he’d tended to me like a garden, dressing me up like a doll. I imagined him carefully going through my wardrobe, running his hands over each piece, attempting to put together a flattering outfit. I could imagine his exactitude, his carefulness, his sweet boyish confusion. I pulled the strap down my shoulder and cupped one of my breasts in the Yeti palm. He groaned and my body lurched.

“If anyone ever tells you to go fuck yourself,” he breathed, “you can tell them that you have, and that it was great.”

Before I even open my eyes, I know pure bliss. I don’t know fear, I don’t know pain. My body is warm all over. My heart beats so evenly. I am truly at ease.

I open my eyes. Everything is hazy at first, cotton candy, big and bright and new and I look out at a world I’ve never seen and a world I’ve always known, all at once. Rabbit clouds, the sea of blue. 

And then I see you. 

I feel joy like no other my heart swells and my fingers yearn for you and I reach up to touch the glowing spun gold at your shoulders, tucked behind your ear. You smile then and your finger reaches my cheek and my skin lights up and this is so so beautiful and so so wonderful and I don’t know what all of this is but it’s you it’s you it’s you? I laugh and you laugh too and we laugh together, me and you. 

Where is your heartbeat? This is the voice. I know this voice, I’ve always known it. Your voice is not a murmur, now it says Lucy and I don’t know what it means but I think angels are singing to me and all is made of honey. 

Sliczna. You are the most beautiful baby in the world.

I feel your heart even though it’s far away and I laugh and laugh and my little body does not know which way to go it stretches and it tingles and you bring me to your collar and you smell delightful I don’r recognize the other scents but yours I know and have always known. 

And there you are, too, dark haired and smiling boyishly. You’re smitten, yes, your two girls you smile at, and you kiss her and then me and then she places me in your arms and I am held like the deepest and most important secret and it’s different but I know you too and I laugh like I did with her and she leans on your shoulder and you both hold me and remember me as I remember you from some place where we’ve always known each other. 

A pure-souled creature with pink ears and a wet nose snuffs and huffs beside us and you say that you are going to protect me, yes? and it yips so happily and breathes loud and it too is elated, like the both of you are. 

Kocham cie, I love you. 

It gets dark and I don’t see the white tufts or the blue I see a womb with corners, beige-walled and warm and there is a sun flickering in a distant corner. My eyes are heavy and I cannot contend with anymore seeing and through my body courses a certain calmness, gentle and warm and it flows through my limbs and my fingers uncurl and all I do is breathe.

I am at your collar and I smell you and feel you and then I am laying on endless softness but you are not there and I wail, I wail because I remember that I am Lucy and I am so distant from you across a dim kitchen where love does not dance around like it does here and you’re suddenly so far away. 

How readily forgotten the ambrosiac bask of childhood is, and how readily it is drunk up again.  The fiftieth hug in my life time, still kind of new then and therefore its own earthquake of an impression. First tears, first remembered heartbreak. The friends to be made and the not-yet-strange-ness of meeting new people and deciding that such a face would become a memorable settler in your immediate world. 

In this world you are a little badder. Bad bad bad—you’d said bad before we came here, hadn’t you? Well, you’d gotten this wish, somehow, and you often go out late on unnamed quests and do who knows what and mom and dad can only chide you with sighs when you come home, your prattling truck sputtering to rest in the driveway. I’m not allowed to do the things you are, to go out that late. But I like the car-engine hum of the electric guitar coming from your room, thumping through the wooden floorboards and reverberating between our plaster walls in waves. You are sixteen, I cherish this night laying in my bed and hearing all the faint notes. I am fourteen and mildly irritable but never to you. We look as we did growing up in this world, the one I remember that I came from. I am the thin fourteen year old I’d been in my true life, though in possession of a streak of boldness I was sure not to have known back then. 

You are my big brother and I adore you endlessly. I adore how you grew up, who you grew up to become, my older brother who plays electric guitar and sports, too, but who for so long played with dolls with me, too. You liked it—you’d always had that caretaking inclination and the expected reluctance toward these activities always seemed to evade you. None of your friends knew how we hung out, what we did. 

I am eighteen. Warren is twenty—next year he’d be a junior in college. I was only just applying that summer, my eyes raw from a too-blue computer screen. The endless hours of it all, dragging on and on. The little headway routines I’d forgotten about. 

It was well into the evening and our parents are away at Uncle Rory’s and Aunt Gertrude’s. We have an American family, with well-to-do uncles and aunts pronounced ants and they host things often and live one right-outside-of-Boston-suburb over. 

The pool’s water is cold, though early August nighttime is still warm and thus cool water feels nice. I am swimming; Warren is reading in the light from the back porch. When I squint my eyes to see, it looks to be Infinite Jest. He is rather pale in this lifetime as well, but the summer had been relenting and his skin glints almost bronze in the nocturnal lamplight and his face is marvelously spangled with freckles across his nose and cheeks from being in the sun all day and his brows are furrowed as he leafs through the pages. 

I dare to splash him, beads of water catapulting over his boy-legs. “You should come in.”

He sets the book down and narrows his eyes at me. Playful as ever. “You don’t want me to come in.”

“Oh, yes I do.”

“Oh, no you don’t.”

“Oh, I do. I really do.”

Warren has both hands on the pool chair and then he is shooting out of it and into the water and I am promptly getting splashed all over and squealing and raising futile arms in futile defense. 

“Do you regret your wish now?” He has me at the waist and shakes me gently. 

I shake my head. “Nope.”

“What about now?” He lifts me up out of the water and holds me and leaps backward into the water so that I nearly inhale water from laughing below its surface. 

“Now.”

Warren’s hands are so firm and so cool at my waist and yet my skin is aflame. When had he become such a man? Does he have a girlfriend in college?

“Nope.”

Water rivulets run down his face, beyond the playful brows, down the nose and over the freckles, down the soaked lips. A smile then stretches across his face and the pretty white row of teeth jut over the moist, red mouth. My own mouth parts as I admired him—the features I know are older then, a bit of me in him and him in me yet we’d never really looked that alike or maybe we did and Plato was right at the ever-known ancient Symposium. 

“What?” he murmurs. “What is it, Lucy?” He looks down at me. “Are you thinking it too?”

The radiating abdomen before me heaves; Warren’s hands move up and down my sides and he breathes heavily.

“T-thinking what?”

He chews on his lip and looks to one side; then, to the next. 

You are not so bold in other lifetimes, I think, and then I am this Lucy once more, eighteen and soaked from head to toe. 

“Thinking…” Both of his hands travel up to my face and then he takes a deep breath and leans in and his lips brush aganst mine. It is wet, cool and warm at once. A mouth I’ve always known from far away. “This.”

My eyes widen in surprise; heat blooms at my core and I suddenly feel all-too exposed in the cool water in my purple bikini, my budding breasts starting to spill from the ungenerous cups. I remember what this was for. But then I remember who I am now and that he had just kissed me.  

“Again,” I say. 

Tongue meets tongue this time and I feel Warren’s large hand at my back; then tugging on the strings of the bikini and loosening it until there is only unsafe, dangling fabric between my bare chest and his. 

Certain sensations we do not expect to undo us as thoroughly as they do. We used to take baths together; he’d heard me bawling over stupid boys in my room through the revelatory walls. 

He pulls away and looks down—his fingers are then roaming over my bare breasts; the nighttime air had made my nipples hard. Warren kisses me all over: my breastbone, my clavicle, my neck, each ear, slow and light kisses, and then he is lifting me out of the water and sitting me at the pool’s edge, upon the slick tiles. His mouth is at the inside of my thigh and then his fingers are hooked beneath the springy waistband of my bikini bottoms and it is so bad, such a gut-wrenching sensation to have the hands I watched grow big over the years suddenly be upon me, and then he is pulling them to the side and neither of us had heard the car doors close or sensed the slight brightness behind us until we hear a bottle break on the driveway and a string of curse words sound from our dad and we scramble to get dressed. Mom is through the white arch to the backyard and she says, through half-drunk laughs: “come help us clean up, dad dropped the wine bottle.” She is folded at the hip, all genuine mirth; she couldn’t have seen, she wouldn’t be so at ease. I look to Warren, wide-eyed, my heart thrumming in my chest. Incredulity pacifies his strained, anxious features. It is allegedly a dream yet it is so real and it is in such instances that the prospect of consequences becomes profusely apparent. Consequences. Our mother’s horrified eyes. Her running to tell our father. Warren between my legs. How could this be happening under our roof! How close we’d been to this new world falling apart—this world that was unreal, impermanent, yet it was one we weren’t okay with losing. How close that had become to a nightmare, one of those irrevocable strikes of chance like accidentally running someone over that would permanently alter a lifetime and render every forthcoming day unsalvageable. 

“Yeah,” Warren calls over his bare shoulder. “Coming.”

She disappears beyond the hedges and we let out the breaths we were holding.

“That was so close,” I exhale. 

“It was.”

The glass is splattered all over the driveway, glimmering stars in the night, large glass-comets streaking across the cobbled driveway, yet we’re impervious to the looming threats, of glass shards in our feet, glass pressing into our fingers, blood rushing to pinpricks, and our mother shrieks for us to put shoes on and we are both wet from head-to-toe, goosebumps raised over exposed flesh, me then realizing my bottoms are on backward. The cover of night isn’t loved enough. I meet Warren’s eyes and suppress a wild laugh. 

Coming back meant contending with a strangeness I was not expecting to have settled so firmly and irrevocably into my bones. I’d gown up with you; that was permanently seared into my brain, embroidered inextractably into my neural connections. I knew you so well. And still do. How utterly terrifying. 

“What’d you think?”

“That was…weird. Though different from what I expected.”

“Do you believe that people do that?”

“Do what?” I said. “Partake in…familial relations?”

Neither of us wanted to say it.

“Yeah.”

“Probably,” I said. “They get away with it over and over, like we did.” 

“My heart felt like it was gonna burst through my ribcage,” Warren said. “I know none of these are ever permanent. They’re like a dream. But the feelings are real. It is real.”

I want it to go away, the permanence of knowing you, I remember thinking then. But I also really don’t. Want it to go away, that is. 

CHAPTER X (RANDOM)

On the Road (And Really Queasy)

Song: Roma Fade by Andrew Bird

The drive was long at six hours and thirty or so minutes, though not as extensive as mine was from Florida to school, and Whit said he’d do all the driving because he didn’t want to subject me to having to drive especially since it was Thanksgiving at his house, he’d said, not because he didn’t trust me with his car or anything, or that he thought I was a bad driver. Freshman year of college I didn’t have a car and my covert ploy was to subtly make it known that I was a terrible driver so that nobody would ever ask me to drive or be the designated driver, and it worked, and I suppressed laughs at how it became known to never let me behind the wheel, but Warren was unaware of this because we hadn’t known each other as we ought to have back then. It went by quicker than I expected. We talked for hours and hours, traversing the peaks and valleys that were of the same caliber of long conversations we had in bed, inhibitions withdrawn, and also of stupid, arcane remarks that we both found terribly funny because humor is a largely intimate affair and when you like someone you think all of their remarks are witty or on-the-nose or at least baseline amusing. 

It wasn’t until hour six and a half—with one hour left to go—that I was overcome with a case of nerves so preposterous that I was on the verge of either dry heaving or for real heaving. 

I was terrified of parents. I was terrified of the impression I’d make on any parent; going to my friends’ houses was always inadvertently dreadful growing up because I was afraid of what their parents would think and then later say about me, either between themselves or even to the friend in question and I was prone to ruminating over that which I’d never actually be privy to and I made up conversations that I never witnessed. She was a bit strange, no? Why did she answer questions so senselessly? Over time, I outgrew my juvenile aversions and developed the confidence to converse with adults maturely and impressively, but something about meeting Warren’s parents, the dictatorial, high-handed Whitmans I’d grown to resent, undid me nearly completely and I was becoming a nervous wreck. 

I would be meeting your parents. And they might hate me, and in turn, make you hate me. I had grown up thinking the word of my parents was gospel. What they thought was absolute knowledge to girl Lucy, and even if I outwardly disagreed, my parents’ opinions and judgements always managed to affect me to at least some degree. And they still do, in my adult life, over the phone or during fleeting seasonal breaks. Whit’s could very well decide to hate me and my presence there could potentially cement a sort of disdain in his head where he internalizes what his mom says about the girl he brought home and I’ll have been perceived and dissected beyond the scope of our familiar campus and how we’d known each other up until then.

Warren asked me if I was okay a few times and I said yes and so we kept talking and he kept driving but my massive fear of meeting his family did not subside despite his multiple stabs at alleviating my all-consuming unease.

“Maybe I’ll come to Christmas with you next month.” He wiggled his brows playfully. My nervousness was evident, palpable even, and between his suggestive remarks and the way his hand gravitated to either my own hand or my thigh to soothe me, Warren’s tender attempts at quelling my internal restlessness were aplenty. 

Could I really bring this American friend of mine, from a white-picket-fenced and finished-basemented-world I was only distantly aware of all my life, into my own universe? 

My dad would start talking about crypto, which was really a poor person’s scheme, and Warren would smile politely all while thinking about the shark-infested waters of much more sophisticated day trading which his own Wharton-schooled father so expertly maneuvered. He’d see the scraped baseboards at the house and the popcorn-ceilinged bathroom and he would wonder at how people actually lived in the cheap hotels of the seventies unironically. 

“Maybe.”

“Ah.”

It isn’t you; it’s me.

Having you in my room would be fun, my dad would really like you, I could show you the bits of me nobody else knows, I’d love endless days of one or both of your hands on mine and your stupid jokes. I would. I really would. 

“Don’t be nervous, Lucy,” he said, turning to me, reaching to stroke my jaw. 

“Eyes on the road, please,” I squeaked. We weren’t far enough from the car in front of us and I’d hate to be the cause of our demise.

“Oops. Sorry.” He trained his eyes ahead but continued to rub the spot above my knee. “They will love you. And be happy that I have someone nice and normal and pretty to bring home. Not that you’re normal as in commonplace. Far from that. You know what I mean. I’m trying to say that you have absolutely nothing to be worried about.” 

I nodded, realized he couldn’t see me, then mustered: “thank you.” 

He laughed sympathetically. “Every time I turn over, you look a little green. Are you going to yack or something?”

“Um…”

“If it’s my driving, let me know. And I’m happy to pull over. And if you yack in my car, that’s okay, too, but it would ruin your cute outfit.”

“It’s not the driving. Other than taking your eyes off the road for far too long and freaking me out, you’re doing great.”

“When you’re not around, I drive with my eyes closed,” he remarked. “No ferretting. I’m an expert.”

“Maybe one day we’ll see you in the Formula 1 grid,” I said, closing my eyes and leaning back. I put my hand atop Whit’s large cold one and focused there. 

“I’ll only accept if they let you sit in the passenger seat.” 

“The F1 cars are single-seaters.” 

“Okay, fine, you can sit on my lap then.” 

I laughed then, I really did, and then the bile made itself known, rising up hot and intent into my throat, and I begged Warren to pull over, and he did, and I’d only just made it out of sight at the gas station—for I was not one to abandon my decorum, no matter what—when I emptied the meager contents of my stomach onto Lincoln Yonkers, New York Shell Station pavement. 

“Are you okay?”

I jumped back, startled. He’d managed to sneak up on me and was now a few paces away, far too close. 

“Yes,” I said. “I’m fine, just nervous. I’ll be okay.” I hoped that he would get the hint and go back to the car. 

“I came to help you. Like you did for me, that one time.” He stepped nearer.

“No!” I exclaimed and he halted. “It’s okay. I can…throw up alone. Thank you.”

“Are you positive?”

I took a deep breath, still clutching my stomach, mere inches away from where I’d forsaken decency. “Yes.”

“I’ll get you water, then.”

“Thank you,” I said. “And gum, please.”

He nodded and tucked his hands into his pockets and strode back around the corner and I heaved again. 

“I’m sorry for making this about myself,” I said as I got into the car. 

Warren shook his head. “Not at all. I’m a little amused, to be honest. Sorry.” He winced teasingly. 

“It’s okay.”

“And I’m glad you’re coming. I really am.” 

His hand found my leg once more and we ventured onward to Armonk. 

……

A series of gates intercepted us from the onset of our descent into the tenth circle of hell where Dante faces his fear of the scary parents of a person who was beginning to really mean a lot to him: the large gate at the front of the private community, where the security guard in the little booth recognized Warren, the wrought-iron barrier leading to the estate, and then, finally, the massive doors that swung open to beckon me into the fortress of my dread, the vampire empire. 

He led me down the high-ceilinged hallway with a hand on the small of my back. Here he was, comforting me. I ought to be doing it for him, but as he stood tall and confident, protective, even, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe I was, in fact, ameliorating at least some of the apprehension he would have otherwise been feeling, all without even meaning to. I liked his hand there but I also wanted it off, solely because I was embarrassed of his parents being witness to this display of affection. And then I wanted to hold it later in private, secretly hoping his parents would not mind us sharing a room so that I could be with him and would not be resigned to some cold guest abode all by myself. 

Family photos in large frames lined the deep maroon walls. Two auburn haired children, smiling up until around age thirteen, and then there were no more photos. The lighting was warm and golden and possessed none of the sterility I’d been expecting—warmth ensconced us, seeped into everything. Contraditions all around. He fortunately dropped his hand as he led me into a living room with cream-colored couches and tall ceilings and a resplendent fireplace, toward a pair of people I was desperate to impress yet could only hope not to offend. They rose to greet us with inviting smiles and I thought to myself right then that while I disliked them, this might not be so bad after all and maybe my earlier display of aversion had been overwrought. 

Warren’s parents were incredibly good-looking people at their respective ages of sixty and fifty-nine, and the genes he’d suddenly grown into while I lost track of him for two years made sense and my nervousness did, too, though I could by no means throw up all over the expensive wooden flooring and ornate carpeting beyond the massive oak doors through which we’d entered. 

“You must be Lucy,” his mother stepped forward and clasped my hands. Thick, icy blonde hair rested at her collarbones and she smiled what must have once been the most glamorous, girlish smile of all, red-lipped and large and reaching all the way up to the corners of her eyes. I wasn’t sure whether I expected a runway-ready Amazon in stature, or a woman born microscopic and adorable and a jarring antithesis to her husband, but Mrs. Whitman was about as tall as I was, though her pointed white heels afforded her some height over my flats. “So lovely to meet you.”

“You as well.” I smiled.

She pulled Warren into an embrace, not quite reaching his shoulders. He received it as tenderly as a tree might. 

Mr. Whitman, however, was why Whit looked the part of a basketball player, and I could only imagine the existential dread I’d feel as a child if such a Gollum towered over me to dole out paternal cruelties. 

“Pleasure to meet you.” He gave my hand a firm shake and I wondered how much they’d heard of me. It was either nothing at all or far too much and I wasn’t sure which I preferred. My heart hammered in my chest and such a frenzied pulse had surely made its way to my palms. 

“You have a beautiful home,” I said. 

“Thank you,” Mrs. Whitman said, her eyes shifting fluidly between Warren and me; me and Warren. “We recently polished the floors, right in the nick of time for tomorrow’s dinner. The company was a tremendous hassle.” 

“Well, it looks great.”

These are normal people. She is smiling nicely and she did not hug me but perhaps she just did not want to be too forward.

We made small talk and they asked me what I was majoring in, what my plans were after graduation, how the drive was. I told them two truths and a lie: I planned on law, their home was beautiful, and the drive was great. Though perhaps these were in actuality all truths, for I had Warren there with me for all those hours of the drive and he got us here safely and I only threw up one singular time. 

“Phil will be here late tonight with Maya,” said Mrs. Whitman. She seemed more conversational than her stony husband. “They get in after midnight.”

“Would you like help with any preparations for tomorrow?” I offered. 

She shook her head and smiled. “Thank you, Lucy, I appreciate it. But we are all set.” 

I nodded and looked to Warren. I couldn’t help thinking that I’d walked right into dislike, by being the girl Warren was associated with. But that was alright. I could very well avoid these people for most of the stay, in this endless home. 

I was relieved when he told his parents that we were tired after a long drive and we finally departed to his room, which was up an expansive flight of stairs and at the end of a long hallway. 

“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” He closed the door.

The largeness and tidiness of the bedroom was a complete antithesis to the medicinal sterility about his unfinished dorm room with its wayward mattress and scattered beakers and strewn about piles of papers. A hefty four poster bed was propped up against a western wall, parallel to a large, curtained window and flanked by deep wooden nightstands topped with small piles of books. A full body suit of knight armor stood in one corner, complete with a massive sword, as casual as a lamp. I stepped closer to the bookshelf: Vonnegut, Asimov, and Heinlein populated the narrow shelves in tandem with chemistry and physics and mathematics manuals and cracked-spine textbooks. 

“It wasn’t,” I said truthfully, running my hands over all of his things. Children were so different from what their parents knew. The version of me that existed in my parents’ heads and the version of Whit that existed in the heads of his parents could very well be two starkly different people. How wild was this room permitted to be? How had it been restrained? Was the mad scientist dorm an extension of it, or was it emblematic of choice-making that had broken free? “I like your room.”

“Thanks.”

A large desk stood before one of the windows and looked out to a tree-dappled lawn, perfectly manicured, a healthy, not too obtrusive green. Upon it was a green motherboard and a cloth basket of tools: a blue-handled screwdriver, a pair of pliers, spray in a can, and some other gadgets with which I was too unfamiliar to even guess. 

“What’s all this for?”

“I was building a computer.”

“That’s hot.”

“Stop it.”

“I’m being serious.” I whirled around, holding the pliers. “I think it’s really attractive that you’re building a computer. Hobbies are very attractive—it means one is a master of their time.”

“It’s really not that special.” He was blushing. 

“Well, you’re the only person I know who’s building a computer.”

“You haven’t frequented certain spaces, like the e-sports or physics club meetings,” he said. “But these are non-showering demographics, so I didn’t expect you to have ever crossed paths.”

I waved the pliers around like a revolver. “Show me a trick.”

His mouth parted, then he smiled shyly. “If you insist.” He stepped up next to me, before the big window. His fingers wrapped over mine and guided the pliers over to the rudimentary tech. “The motherboard is the heart of the computer,” he said. “All of its functions are tied back to it.” Pause. He frowned in contemplation. “I wonder if the serum would let us be a computer.”

“Or,” I said as I leaned into him, “we can continue what we’re doing because I’d like to be with Warren the person, not some screw sticking out of plastic.”

He laughed then and leaned down so that we were nearly cheek-to cheek. “Okay. The CPU—or central processing unit—socket is right here.” He guided our hands to a white square in the upper right corner of the motherboard. “The CPU does all of the processing and all of the commands.”

He’d been close to me like this a million times and he was merely explaining what the parts of a computer do and nonetheless I was at the negligible mercy of my tingling skin and gentle flush. 

“It’s like the brain,” he murmured, “where all of the impressions occur. Without it, there would be no computer.”

He moved our hands over to a small, thin sheet stuck into the motherboard and used the pliers to pull it out.

I audibly gasped. I then heard the laugh in his throat.

“Did you just break it?”

“No. Doing that did no physical damage. We can always put it back,” he said, holding up the little board. “This is a RAM stick, which stores memory used by the CPU. Remove it from the slot, how we just did, and the CPU forgets what it’s doing and slows down.”

“So, the computer doesn’t need all of its RAM sticks?”

“Nope. It just works better with all of them. The more memory, the better the computer.”

He was so close, his breathing was soft against my jaw. 

“I hope I made a good impression as your girlfriend,” I blurted. 

I’d want him to love my family, to not secretly wish for the speediest curtail of conversation on the planet. I criticized them in my head all the time, but if anyone else were to, I would be upset with them, for those are the people dearest to me and I’d feel a blow aimed at them harder than I would one at myself. 

“You did. I bet they weren’t expecting you to be so pretty. I saw the surprise on my mom’s face.” He gave me a kiss on the forehead and set down the pliers. “I look forward to not hearing Phil call me an incel for the millionth time.” 

You’re not one?

Nope.

Prove it.

His lips were on mine immediately and I jumped back. “What if someone comes in?”

Whit laughed then. “I promise you, nobody is coming in here.”

You swear?

Yes.

Alright, then, Casanova, come here.

I was nervous and stiff because I never had a closed door at home and the family computer with its motherboard heart and central processing unit mind was in my shared bedroom and so was everyone, all the time, so privacy was a notion as distant as Siberia, a pointless whim toward which I never even tried to aspire. Growing up, I didn’t have the room—physically and metaphorically—to wallow in resentment or to cry over pointless things or to sink into depressive episodes and perhaps I’d been saved from myself that way, made resolute and implacable, and his fingers ventured beyond my skirt, slipped into my lace underwear, then into me, warm and filling and all sorts of skin-tingling, and the door which I kept turning toward even though it was locked slowly ceased to matter until I was arching my hips and could scarcely move and subsequently forgot all about it. 

“Never did I think I’d do that in this bed, or in my whole life, really,” Warren was saying as we laid atop his deep green comforter, hearts hammering. It was good that we gave them substantial occupation from dread; something else to thrum for. “Wow.”

We were the same in that regard. Two different rooms, one solitary, the other universal, and yet we ended up together, disbelieving, in this one. I had brought my secreted world into his: sharing the holy space that was a childhood bedroom with another. 

“Do you want to borrow clothes?” 

I shook my head. Having his parents potentially see me in his clothes would be embarrassing. “It’s okay. I’ll just put this back on.” I started to get redressed in my tights and skirt and he sighed and got dressed, too. “I have a hard time believing that you spoke to zero girls,” I said, tucking in my blouse. “You’re more charming than you know. Surely someone else must have picked up on it. Maybe you were just oblivious.”

“Trust me, I would have been attuned to any advances like a TSA dog is to drugs at the airport.”

“I sometimes think those dogs don’t really know what they’re doing.”

“I believe in them.”

“Extend that same grace to yourself.”

“It’s hard,” he said, looking up at the ceiling. “In my head—”

“Is a great place to be.”

“In my head I’ve always been uncontestably unattractive, incompetent, and painfully awkward. Kinda hard to see myself otherwise, no matter if my reflection has changed a bit and if I get decent grades.” 

“I hate to hear that,” I said. “Because I disagree with all of it.”

“Do you really?”

“Yes.”

“Honestly?”

“I don’t make things up just to hear myself speak. Yes.”

“Sorry. I just have a hard time believing that you see me in such a positive light. I don’t know…”

Sometimes I got annoyed when he did this, when he refused to believe compliments, or when he essentially sought them out, and made me repeat things, and thus furthered a wedge between us that he didn’t even really know existed, and I was worried that the closer we got the more frequent such sentiments would become, until it was unbearable, but as I looked to him, in his room, surrounded by all that which reminded him of adolescence, of teen years that are ubiquitously rough, years that were rough on him developmentally and socially, I couldn’t help my swell of compassion and I turned my head to kiss him. 

I think you’re brilliant, and sweet, and that I’m so lucky to know you, I thought, and I really meant it. I had a difficult time doting on people, or complimenting them, or saying nice things, and I wasn’t too sure why, why I thought thinking highly of people was enough, for they couldn’t read my thoughts by any means, but with Warren, almost saying it came easier than it did with my family, who were really the only other people in the world whom I cared for to this extent. I loved them, and liked Warren so much, and…

I thought of what it would be like for someone else to be here, to ameliorate his insecurities, to meet his parents. To listen to his heartbeat, lying on his chest. I imagined a girl that wasn’t me and no matter how hard I tried to feign nonchalance, she was inadvertently an object of my derision, this hypothetical girl. 

“What if we just take a nap right here. After our drive.”

“Thank you for driving, by the way.”

“Of course,” he said as he pulled me to him. “I’d drive thirty hours to have such a pretty girl here with me.”

“What about thirty-one?”

“That’s where I draw the line.” He propped himself up on his elbow, gaze sleepy, then placed a kiss on the tip of my nose. “Kidding. I’d drive all the hours.”

“I don’t know why I’m so tired, given that I drove none of the hours.”

“Which is why we’re going to nap.” He eased me down next to him and I leaned my head into the crook of his arm. “I hope my parents think we’re fucking really quietly for hours and hours.”