Jack Kerouac is Dead to Me - Gae Polisner Page 0,25

of crickets in the space between hushed shouts that rise in the nearly autumn air.

“We have to keep it down,” Ethan says. “I don’t want my parents to come out.”

A girl named Shamika teams up with some kid named Randy, and a girl named Mariah teams up with Dante, and I feel a little better about you missing this since she’s not nearly as pretty as you.

Ethan pushes water aside as he wades to the shallow end steps, and holds out his hand for me. “Come on, slowpoke. I’m going to need you to get in fast and climb up here.”

My heart beats overtime as he turns his back to me, his broad, tanned shoulders waiting for me to climb on, my legs now straddling his neck. He wraps his hands around my thighs, pulling me against him.

“Hold on tight,” he says, parading forward.

And we’re in motion, a frenzy of splashing and laughing, and hushing each other, and tugging, and parading, and bodies falling, tangled, into the water, then scrambling to get back up.

At first, Ethan is tentative with me, but as the game gets more raucous, his hands slide higher up my thighs, squeezing my ass. I find myself breath holding as I wait for each new place he might inadvertently touch me. My butt, my waist, my back. I want to feel him there, holding me. I want the current that runs beneath the surface of the water to explode like lightning up through his body and into mine.

More than that, I want the pool and the game and the remaining partygoers to all disappear, and for Ethan to carry me out of the pool and onto the grass, and crawl on top of me, and have his way with me.

Granted, I’m not sure what this means, and granted, I know it’s wrong, but I don’t care. I can hardly breathe thinking about how much I want it all.

When someone announces it’s almost 1:00 a.m., we finally get out, and stand around waiting for the last, exhausted dregs of life to be sucked from the party, from your backyard, from the keg, for the parents to pick everyone up, or designated drivers to sort out who they can fit in their cars, and Ethan comes over to where I stand, more than drunk, desperate with wanting, shivering in a towel by the fence.

“You okay, Markham?”

“Yeah. Just a little tired and cold.” His eyes bore through me in the dark, in the haze of the moon.

“You should go inside.”

I want to scream, No! I want to wrap his arms around my body, I want to re-catch the lightning in a bottle that minutes ago I was so sure was us, in the pool.

He takes off his towel and drapes it over me, pulling me toward him. I look at him, my eyes surely pleading, trying to tell him.

The air hums, silent but alive.

“You know I need to kiss you,” he says.

My breath releases. “You do?”

“Yes. Badly. For a long time.”

I try to say no for you, Aubrey; I do. I want to. I think the word, No, loudly in my head. Urgently. But what comes out instead is, “I want you to.”

And like that we’re kissing, and he’s moving me backward into the shadows of the bushes, and his hands are on me, in my hair, down my back, in the fabric of my bikini top, everywhere.

It’s delirious. I’m delirious. The air swirls. My legs feel boneless, so I can barely stay upright.

I think I’m fucking in love with him.

“Can I?”

I nod, and whisper, “Anything,” and he opens my towel, and pushes in against me, and kisses my lips again, and lets the towel fall to the ground, his mouth moving down to my collarbone, his fingers pulling my bikini top aside so his lips brush the skin of my nipples, before moving down my stomach toward my bottoms. And the whole time he’s saying things like, “Jesus, Markham, you’re beautiful,” and, “You sure it’s okay? You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to…” and I’m nodding without breath, and figuring out how to keep upright.

“I love you, Ethan,” I say without meaning to, and hear his name again, “Ethan,” in my ears, except the second time it isn’t me, my voice, my words. It’s coming from elsewhere, but he doesn’t hear it.

“Ethan,” I say, urgently this time, yanking him back up, and checking his face in the moonlight, in the darkness, because I need to—because before it’s