The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,17
him, or maybe they kissed each other. Either way, it was a good kiss. A really good kiss. He didn’t do the oil-drill thing with his tongue that the heartbreaker had thought was such a great idea. She talked more, and then they kissed again. Still good. Kissing turned into making out, and then they broke apart while Laurel talked. He listened, shifting closer and closer until they were kissing again. Every time it started up, it went a little further.
David was good at things. Different at things. Dale had been Laurel’s first “serious” boyfriend, and the sex had been exciting mostly because it seemed like such a grown-up, college thing to do. It was bouncy and friendly and interesting, and Dale was made so helpless by it that Laurel felt proud, like she was pretty and necessary. But it wasn’t something she would have missed Melrose Place for.
This wasn’t like that. When David touched her, he did it like an experiment, bent on finding out what kind of touching worked. It was as if he had hypothesized that the female body had nerve endings in it, and his five-year mission was to seek all of them out. He woke something up when he slipped his hand under Laurel’s shirt, drifting his fingers against the thin nylon of her bra. Laurel’s previous boyfriends had always treated her breasts like knobs or squeezy bath toys. In high school, she’d let boys feel her up because it distracted them from trying to work her jeans off, but David made her want to take them off.
She didn’t decide to have sex with him so much as, at some point, her body decided. Everything he did made her want the next thing without even knowing what the next thing was, but then they’d find it out. She didn’t think they were going to have sex; this was something else, something she and David were inventing as they went. Her body got hungry, and her mind blanked itself into an animal place. She went blind with it, her panties tossed away, her hips pressing up toward him, thoughtless and asking, and he was there, answering. They gave themselves up to it.
Afterward he fell asleep like boys do, sprawled naked on his back with his head propped on a cushion he’d pulled down off the futon. Laurel lay beside him with her blood running through her veins all irregular but sexy, as if it were made out of jazz. She scooted down to align her hip with his and looked at their thighs together. His was a long line, mostly bone. Hers was curved, shorter and paler. She couldn’t be still. Her eyes wouldn’t close. She stood up and pulled on her panties and David’s discarded T-shirt, liking the wood-smoke and cinnamon smell of him on it. She was dying to talk, and she thought about slipping across the hall, but she realized she didn’t want Jeannie to know. She didn’t want any of her friends to know. This thing with David, unpredicted and peculiar, didn’t match them.
David’s apartment had a breakfast bar between his den and the minuscule kitchen. Laurel boosted herself up to sit on the low counter, resting her feet on one of the two stools. His phone hung on the wall beside her, and she picked it up and dialed her sister. Thalia was already living with Gary over in Mobile. They had dropped out of Chapel Hill and were trying to scrape together the cash to open their theater.
Thalia picked up on the fourteenth ring, barking, “What, Jesus Bug, what?” into the phone. She knew only Laurel would let the phone ring on and on past eleven, the same way Laurel knew Thalia would not be sleeping.
Laurel could hear a piano and raucous conversation, distant, from another room. She spoke barely above a whisper. “Dale dumped me, and then I had complete sex with David Hawthorne. On his floor!”
“David Hawthorne?” Thalia said. “I don’t— Wait, is that Lurch?”
“Don’t call him that. You’ve never even met him.” Laurel’s whisper had turned fierce. “Sex is an amazing thing, Thalia.”
Thalia laughed. “Um, doofus, I know.”
Laurel said, “But I didn’t.”
“Dale was bad in bed!” Thalia crowed. “Ha! Gary owes me five bucks.”
“You bet on that? You’ve never met Dale, either.” But Laurel didn’t have the brain space to think about Dale, not an inch. She said, “This changes everything.”
Thalia made a piffling noise and said, “An orgasm doesn’t change things, Bug. It’s just a nice