Page 58 of Licks

“You covering me in mustard?”

“It really was tonight’s highlight.” Joking with August was the highlight. The lightness allowed me to live in the moment. The here and now. Keep my mind from running ten steps ahead.

He pinched his defiled black T-shirt and pulled it away from his chest. “Maybe we should change first.”

The stains on my tank top had begun drying, and I smelled like a hotdog, but tonight was all about momentum. We had twenty-four hours until my birthday was over. The deadline rolled closer, taunting me. “I don’t care if you don’t.”

He shrugged and released his shirt. “Then let’s move out.”

We bickered during the drive. I knew the fastest way to Twin Peaks Boulevard; he thought his way was better. Men were naïve like that, and I was verging on giddy. The hysterical kind of silly unleashed when a slew of untapped emotions engulfed you. It was an epidemic.

A bubble of happiness built along with my delirium. It rippled while we argued. Another ballooned when I elbowed August, and he elbowed me back. It grew when we laughed and fake-sneered and rolled our eyes at each other. There were a lot of floating bubbles filling my chest. I didn’t try to pop them or pretend playfully arguing with August didn’t fill my car with joy. These were my seconds, and I’d savor every one.

We grabbed the flashlight from my glove compartment and hiked up the steep stairs to the hilltop. Our beam of light skipped over roots and logs, skimming the few trees and bushes growing on this stretch of earth. A swing hung from a tall branch, the lights of the city beyond. We stood on the precipice, the flashlight switched off, the backs of our hands brushing.

Darkness cocooned us.

I listened for August’s breath, the even in-out of his lungs. Imagined his chest rising and shrinking. I matched my inhales to his.

“It’s beautiful,” he whispered.

“Like an alien city. No traffic. No noise.” Perfect stillness.

We exhaled slowly. My world shrank to this moment. No before or after or morning or night. Just now.

“It’s because Barbie-Man lives there,” he said. “Keeps the criminals in check.”

I shuddered. “Barbie-Man was, and always will be, an abhorrent mutation. Way to kill my moment.”

His lips found my cheek in the dark. His heartbeat found mine in the shrinking space between us. “Does this make it better?”

I tried to say yes, but only managed a sigh.

He flicked the flashlight back on and led me to the large swing. It was wide and flat, a wood plank big enough to share. We crammed together and trained the light on my mother’s journal. Stars shone down, the night warm and still. He shifted against me, a squirmy move as he yanked off his shirt and tossed it on the ground. The soft glow of the flashlight draped his body in sharp relief—the ridges of his abs, the firm cut of his pecs and shoulders.

My mouth dried. “Are you about to teach me pole vaulting?”

“Say the word, and I will. But the smell was getting to me.”

A valid point. The ketchup whiffs from my tank top weren’t exactly pleasant. Taking his lead, I squeezed the journal between my thighs and freed my hands to whip off my top and toss it near his.

“Jesus, Gwen. We’re in public.” His voice sounded scratchy.

“We’re in a dark place at one a.m., not a soul around. And wearing a bra isn’t any different than wearing a bikini top.”

He still groaned. There was no denying the sexual energy pillowing around us. It was always there, whether bickering or breathing or sharing a swing. I was in jeans and my favorite Victoria’s Secret black bra. The one that gave my girls a lift. August’s hand coasted over my back, crisscrossing the silky straps. My nipples pebbled. Shivers danced along my skin. Dirt rolled under our feet as we swayed.

I wanted to tug him to the ground, lose the rest of our clothes, but I wanted this, too. To sit with him under a star-filled sky, my history unfolding as the night wore on.

I found where I’d closed my mother’s diary last and read her words. “The lookout is our place. No one is ever there. We lie on a blanket and he tells me about the stars and the shapes he sees. He kisses me tenderly, like I’m a secret he’s unlocking. But last night, it finally happened. I had waited so long. He had been so patient. I’m not a virgin anymore.”

August inhaled sharply. I should have been horrified to read about my mother popping her cherry. Like hum songs and cover my eyes horrified.

Instead I hunched farther over her journal, devouring her private words. “It hurt at first, like he said it would. Then it was good. He felt so good. We moved together in the best kind of dance. I wrapped my legs around him. He told me I was beautiful, that I make him feel alive. He said it while he was inside me, moving deep and slow. I tried to say something, to tell him he was the reason the sun rose, but I couldn’t find the words. They caught in my throat. The second I tried, tears threatened. I have never known this. How a person can make you so happy you want to cry. And I couldn’t risk it. He would think I’m too young for crying. A baby. He may be older, but we are the same. Age doesn’t matter. Not with us. Not after what we did.”

My voice had thinned to a whisper, my mother’s love life stealing my breath. My giddiness absconded, too. He was an older man, this Tom or Ted. He seemed to have fallen for my mother. Yet Uncle Rex had mentioned another woman on the hunt for him. A jilted girlfriend? An angry one-night stand? As unsettling as those possibilities were, this diary entry provided…peace.

I’d once asked my mother, after her cancer diagnosis, when I’d realized she could die before telling me my father’s name, if she’d been assaulted. If that was why she’d refused to give me this scrap of information. It had plagued me, the possibility that I’d come from something dark, but I’d finally found the courage to ask.