face as I stood on my tiptoes, balancing myself against his chest. How when we stopped for a moment we both gasped for air as if we’d been underwater the whole time.
I could hear his heart as I rested in his arms, galloping so hard that it sounded as if it might race straight out of his chest and through the door. It slowed as we stood there for a while, adjusting to this new reality. “You don’t have to do this out of pity or something,” he whispered into my hair.
I pulled back, smacked him in the arm. “I kissed you, stupid.”
His eyelashes fluttered, his eyes as soft and watching as a deer’s. I smelled the vodka on his breath, like sweet gasoline. “You’re beautiful and smart and tough and I don’t get it.”
“There’s nothing to get,” I said. “Stop thinking so hard. Let me like you without second-guessing it.”
But maybe he had a point. Nothing is ever as pure as it seems at first glance; there is always something more complicated to be found if you peel back the unmarred surface of pretty things. The black silt at the bottom of the pristine lake, the hard pit at the center of the avocado. I can’t help wondering now if I kissed him as a kind of statement of intent; a way of putting my mark on him. His parents were going to forbid me to see him, they thought I was a bad influence? Kissing him was my way of saying to his parents, Fuck you, he’s mine. You don’t get to win this one. You may have everything else in the world but I have your son.
Maybe that’s why I felt so sure of myself as I took his hand and led him, stumbling, to that dormered bedroom with its creaking bed. Maybe that’s why I let the fire of the vodka light me up with a boldness I didn’t recognize in myself; why I abandoned myself so readily to the tugging and prodding, the clothes on the floor, the tongues against flesh. To the piercing, momentary pain; the gasp and thrust of it all. To the path forward into my future.
* * *
—
And yet, however tainted our motivations might have been at the time, what happened to us that day—and in the weeks that followed—felt pure. The cottage was ours, and the things that we did there, hidden inside its walls, seemed to belong to some kind of liminal space. At school, our relationship remained the same—racing past each other in the hallways on our way to class, occasionally eating pizza together at lunch, never really touching, although our feet sometimes found each other under the cafeteria table. Even on the bus to his house, as I felt the electric anticipation building, we still didn’t play out the typical boyfriend-girlfriend roles. There was no hand-holding, no doodling initials on each other’s forearms in blue ballpoint pen or sharing a single soda with two straws. Nothing was articulated out loud, nothing assumed. Only once we got to the cottage did everything shift, as if it had taken us that long—the better part of a day, plus a half-hour bus ride—to find the confidence to step into our insurgence.
“So who’s the boy?” my mom asked one evening, as I stumbled through the door just before dinner, everything askew. I could still smell Benny on my skin and I wondered if she had smelled him, too, a pheromonal red flag signaling adolescent lust.
“What makes you think there’s a boy?”
She stood in the doorway to the bathroom, pulling curlers from her hair. “Baby, if I know anything about anything, it’s about love.” She considered this for a second. “Make that sex, actually. You’re using protection? I keep condoms in the upper drawer of my nightstand, you can take as many as you need.”
“Jesus, Mom! Stop. Just say something like You’re too young and leave it at that.”
“You’re too young, baby.” She raked her fingers through her curls to soften them, and then shellacked them back into place with hair spray. “Fuck, I was thirteen, so who am I to talk? Anyway, I’d like to meet him. Invite him for dinner sometime.”