Tall. Broad. Hair so thick you couldn’t see her scalp. Skin that didn’t freckle or burn. Her nose was long and perfectly straight. Her eyelashes were so dark, she always looked like she hadn’t quite washed off her stage makeup. The only thing wrong with Shiloh was her crooked bottom teeth, and Cary wanted to touch them. He wanted to kiss them. He wanted to stick his dick in her mouth and cut himself on them.
(He’d built walls around these feelings once—those were gone now. Disassembled, along with all the reasons he and Shiloh couldn’t be together.)
He kissed her. He kissed her again. Her hands were on his neck.
“I got tested,” Cary said.
Shiloh looked confused for a second.
“At my last checkup,” he said. “Just to be sure.”
“Oh.” Her forehead smoothed out. “Okay. I’ve been tested a lot.”
That was strange; he let it go. “I also have a condom.”
She smiled. “In your wallet?”
“Yes,” he said. “Like a douchebag. There are more in the car.”
Shiloh laughed and touched his cheek. “You’re very prepared.”
“I’ve had six months to think about this.”
“Is that all you needed to fix everything—six months at sea?”
He nodded. Literally, yes, that was true. He could make any decision with six months to focus. He kissed her again.
“We’re good,” she said.
He kissed her.
“You’re good, Cary.”
His eyes welled up, he wasn’t sure why. He kissed her again. He didn’t trust himself yet to shove his tongue against her teeth. He unbuttoned her dress to the waist, then got on his knees to take it off. To pull it up over her head. He went right for the fly of her jeans and pulled those off, too. Shiloh’s legs were too good. He wanted to fuck them. Didn’t know how to fuck them. Thought about spreading them wide right now and moving the crotch of her underwear aside, so he could push in.
He kissed her back onto the mattress, then sat up to pull her underwear off.
She was ten miles long.
The hair between her legs was dark.
She was every centerfold.
Cary used to tell himself that it was wrong to think this way about a friend. To use her in his imagination. She drove him crazy... Pressed against him in the car. Draped over his desk. Sitting between his thighs once on a roller coaster.
Did it make it better or worse, he used to wonder, that he loved her?
Cary was so hard, he was seeing stars. He was hallucinating. He was making too much of this. It was just sex. (He’d never believed that.)
He stood up. He’d almost forgotten he was in uniform. He wished it was one of the better ones—he should have worn his dress blues. He pulled off his T-shirt. Got rid of his white pants. Decided to lose the boxers, too. He didn’t want to stand up again.
Shiloh had lifted up onto her elbows. Her hair was still in a ponytail. Her eyes were big and shiny. He put a knee on the bed and leaned over her, unfastening her bra. In a second, he was going to see his dog tag hanging between her perfect breasts. In two weeks, he was flying back to San Diego. How many months before he could marry her?
When they did this at nineteen, Cary had thought he’d never be able to stop, that he couldn’t live without it. How had he managed tolive?
“Shiloh,” he said, pulling the bra away. Her breasts were heavier than he remembered. There were stretch marks across her stomach. Her bottom teeth were crooked, and he wanted a way to fuck them.
“Cary,” she whispered. She touched his neck.
