She did this ridiculous little hop—two, maybe three inches into the air—and then looked at me. The sun was setting, and the air smelled like cheap hot dogs, and there was only artificial grass and rich people being ironic and a strawberry milkshake sky for as far as the eye could see. She tapped her foot, laughing.
“It’s customary,” she said, “in my culture, when you take a girl on a very long date, and she wins a goldfish at a run-down carnival or gets a hole-in-one despite her lack of hand-eye coordination, to kiss her.”
“That so?” I said as she stepped between my legs.
“Yep. That’s so.”
“How convenient,” I said as she angled her chin toward mine. She had to strain to do it, so I lifted her in the air. My hands were wrapped around the small of her back, and my club was dangling from my fist. “Because it’s exactly what I was about to do.”
I walked Katie back to the terrace of the main house, hands in my pockets. She’d been wearing this tiny white sundress all day, and its ruffles had wilted a bit in the humidity. Her hair was down and windswept, and her nose was pink. I chewed on my bottom lip, shuffling from sneaker to sneaker. The grasshoppers were beginning to play, and a hint of fog was gathering on the windowpanes.
“Tell me you had a really good time today,” she said.
I laughed. “I had a really good time today.”
Her eyes crinkled like I knew they would. She’d always done that: smiled with her eyes first. “Now, traditionally,” she said, “you would kiss me again.”
I rolled my eyes and brought her face toward mine.
“Oh!” she said. “A face grab! Daring!”
I glared at her. “You’re lucky I’m obsessed with you.”
“You are? You—”
I kissed her hard. I pinned her up against the warm, wet glass of Meredith Bradford’s twelve-foot-tall door and kissed her hard. She moaned into my mouth, bunching the hem of my shirt into her fist, twisting her tongue into mine, laughing as I cupped her ass, as I yanked her into me, as she tugged me closer, panting.
And then, all of a sudden, she pulled back.
“Now what?” My chest heaved, and one of my hands hovered midair, right where I’d had her.
“I’ll go upstairs and spin around in circles. You’ll go home and, I assume, think about what it’s going to feel like to fuck me. And then, I guess, we’ll sext.”
“But I’m a hundred feet away,” I said. “And our phones don’t work.”
She pecked me on the cheek and, just before she disappeared into the house, said, “That’s going to make it so much hotter.”
49
Katie
I had “talked” to a lot of guys over the last seven years. I was good at it, obviously. You had to be. Plus, I wrote a lot of highly explicit sex scenes. And sure, I’d experienced my fair share of FaceTime orgasms and late-night dick pics, but one thing I had never, ever done was lay in my bed with my body flushed and my mind mushed while a nearly twenty-eight-year-old man I could see from my own window listened to me breathe over a goddamn walkie-talkie.
“Do you do this a lot?” I said. I was still in my dress, and my room was dim. My skin, still covered in salt and sweat from our long, hot day.
“Do what, Katie?” he said in a voice that was too low and too slow to indicate he did not.
“This,” I said, because we were playing a game. Because it felt good. Because blood was rushing from my heart to my hands to between my flexing, restless legs, and I didn’t want it to stop. I didn’t ever want it to stop—not any of it. This night, the weekend, our summer. The way it felt when the words he muttered were only for me.
“It’s different with you.” His voice was thick and gravelly, and it wasn’t just the distortion. It was more guttural, more of a growl. I inhaled, drawing a long, slow line where the lace of my underwear turned to bare and bothered skin. Remembering his hands, right there. Working through the frill. Working through the water.
“Why’s that?” I said.
There was silence for a moment. And then, the whisper of static. And then, him.
“Because you drive me crazy. Because when I look at you...”
I whimpered. I was still pushing that lace down my hips, exactly like he’d shown me. Exactly like I knew he would.
