sure my eyeliner is all over my face so I’m not going to make a point of talking to him. Bean and I drink our round in relative silence. Travis isn’t even looking at me now, but looking around like he’s searching for someone else. I hope it’s not Millie, but I’m pretty sure it is. I’m staring at his profile, the bead of sweat he wipes from his brow with a cocktail napkin. I poke him in the arm and he gives me an annoyed look, so I raise my glass to him in toast.
“For that feedback solo,” I say. “The best I may have ever heard.”
He stares blankly at me. He doesn’t raise his glass. He just finishes his beer as he levels this stern sort of look at me. Then he orders us another round and damn, we must have played really well because my drink is strong as hell.
Red Five has started to play and it’s louder than war in here. I lean over and yell in Travis’s ear so he can hear me.
“What the hell is your problem?”
“What’s my problem?” he says. “What’s yours?”
“You’re so mad at me all the time now,” I say, and then I try to take a teasing approach and punch him in the shoulder and lean in. “This is the thanks I get for letting you fuck me?”
“Letting me fuck you?” he says, and he doesn’t find it funny, that’s obvious. “Emmy, you begged me to fuck you.”
I blush, bite my lip like a fool because this is actually true. And fuck him anyway because now I am remembering fucking him all over again, in acute detail. I was so thankfully distracted by all that excellent rock we just conjured up in this joint, but now in my mind I’m right back to last weekend, when I was fully naked on my bed, on my back with Travis hovering over me. I shoved his pants down, his boxers, felt the muscles tensing in his thighs, and then he was naked on top of me, hard against my leg.
For a few minutes we did nothing but kiss, with him harder and harder against my inner thigh, teasing me with his tongue, breathing into me until I couldn’t take any more. I needed him and I told him, just like that.
“I’m here,” he said. Then he took my hand and intertwined his fingers with mine and kissed them. “I’m right here.”
“I want you now. Please, now,” I said, and then reached down and felt him in my hand the first time, and oh holy God he was so long and thick and hard I thought he was going to break me. But that only made me want him more.
“Let me get a condom,” he said, his voice low and raspy.
“It’s all right, I’m on the pill.”
That was me being stupid and horny and carried away, but I have to be honest and say I meant it. I would have let him fuck me bare. I’d already come on his fingers, his tongue and all I wanted was to see his face when he came inside of me. And it wasn’t fair, either. He went still and groaned into my neck, swearing as he fought with himself. I wrapped my hand around him and guided him between my legs and brushed the tip of him against me to get it wet and I could see him agonizing over it but he finally said, “No, come on, let’s take care of each other.” I don’t know how he was able to be so levelheaded, because I sure wasn’t, but it’s very much like him to be the careful one. To be sensible when I cannot. It’s like his job or something.
He reached down to the floor and pulled his wallet out of his jeans. There was a Trojan in there. With spermicide. And I still try not to think about why, or who he intended it for, whether that might be Millie or any other girl in this town who wants him who isn’t me. I took it out of his hand and opened it with my teeth and with one hand rolled it down his cock, and as he leaned his head down to kiss me again and I felt his hair tickle my face, I was both terrified and elated because I had wondered about this very moment for a long, long time. And I worried, What if it sucks? What if