tacked to the exposed wall beams. There was even a shitty little weight bench with those old-school plastic plates that you have to fill with sand. Nothing about this room screamed “cool,” even to a kid like me who had a résumé full of dork.
“How old is your brother, fourteen?”
“No, he’s your age. He went to school with us,” Meg said nonchalantly as she led me past the Fisher-Price weight bench.
“Oh, okay. So your parents just kept this sort of preserved for him?” I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“No, he still lives at home,” she said. “He’s staying at Steve’s house tonight.”
“Yeah, Steve. Cool,” I said confidently. I don’t know who Steve is and after the nickel tour I didn’t really want to find out.
Apparently, knowing that Steve is a name that guys have was enough to put an end to the small talk. Meg quickly removes her top and leads me over to what appears to be a large pull-out futon bed with a huge comforter stretched over it. The comforter is tucked in around the sides on the concrete floor. No metal frame, no box spring, just floor. That’s okay, though, I’ve slept on worse.
Meg sits downs gently and I hear a loud crunch. I take off my shirt and she extends her hand toward me.
“Just sit down carefully, okay?”
I have no idea what she is talking about, so I let her take the lead and guide me down on top of her, but when the weight of my body presses down, I feel a loud metal crunch, accompanied by the same noise she made when she sat down. She giggles like this shit is adorable. Like fucking inside a recycling bin is a turn-on.
“What is this thing? This doesn’t feel like a futon.”
“It’s our old garage door,” Meg says with a laugh. “My dad didn’t really know how to dispose of it, so he’s just kept it in here all these years. My brother uses it as a bed.”
“Wait, you want to have sex on your brother’s bed, which is actually your old garage door, that is inside your garage, which is covered by your current garage door?”
“Yeah. Why not?”
“You don’t find that weird?”
“I’ve never really thought about it. We just have to be quiet—”
“—because we’re having sex on top of an old metal door.”
“Well, yeah,” she says.
As I take off my jeans, I can hear and feel every single crunch from the garage door. Part of me is terrified that we’ll wake up her parents; another part of me wants to yank back the comforter to get a look at this thing. Meg insists it’s a garage door, but to me it sounds like a giant potato chip bag full of tetanus. When we finally get all of our clothes off and I put a condom on, it sounds like a tornado in a tin can. The metal garage door is being less forgiving of our movements than a tight satin dress in high definition. There is no hiding anything. At first I go slow, trying to muffle as much noise as I can, but instead of a tornado now there’s this eerie creaking sound echoing through the room, like a crab boat trying to cut through the Bering Sea ice pack.
“You can go faster,” she whispers in my ear. “My parents’ room is on the other side of the house. They’ll never be able to hear us.”
“Are you sure?” I ask. I’m not buying it. Jiminy Cricket slept in a matchbox that was bigger than this fucking house.
“Oh, totally,” she says, as if she’s gone the distance on top of this garage door plenty of times. The idea that her sexual sample size is statistically significant enough to make a confident claim like this is a little unnerving, I’m not going to lie. Not because it makes me think less of her. To the contrary, it makes me think less of myself. I don’t have the bedroom reps that she has (though technically neither does she if she spent all of high school hooking up on top of a door). If I don’t find my groove on this thing, I’m going to blow it and be totally disappointing. This is not how I want to end block leave.
Goddammit, Mumblecore Mat, get both your heads in the game!
I start to pick up the pace. Eventually, my body adjusts to the grooves of the metal door, and not only am