“You can tell me anything, Lilith.” She smiled at me as though someone was teasing her.
“When I heard you guys fighting, I wanted to come in and rescue you.” I don’t know what motivated me to say this. The sentiment was hollow, but once I started, I couldn’t stop. “I just really care about you, I want us to be friends and more than friends.”
She gasped and then pulled me close. “We are more than friends,” she said. She began to laugh and stroke my hair. I moved my hand to her neck and her skin was so soft. I knew the entire moment was contrived but I didn’t care, and I continued to tell her embarrassing things about how I longed for her companionship. She kissed me and I felt like a door had been unlocked somehow, but I knew it wouldn’t carry through to morning.
My phone flashed—a text from Patrick. I ignored it. He had been texting me more every day. I had been sending smiley faces after each text and was always nice. But right now I didn’t need him. I didn’t need to work an angle because everything felt so perfect.
Tasty asked me if I’d ever had a Seabreeze before. I said no. He moved us so that we were sitting cross-legged and facing each other and I smiled. He put a Vicks inhaler in his mouth and started rubbing my face in a really nice way.
“You can’t kiss me, okay?” he said. I nodded as he massaged the fatty part of my cheeks. He started blowing air from his mouth, metabolized by the inhaler. I closed my eyes against the astringent feeling and imagined myself on some beach, a place I’d never been. Suddenly, it felt like there were many hands massaging me, rubbing my shoulders and arms, releasing tension. Then someone, I think Tasty, reached out of the dark and pried my eyelids open, breathing hard into each eye. A disembodied voice that sounded like his told me to breathe in deeply, and when I did, the ocean feeling filled my mouth and nose, burning like a cold fire. When I touched my face, my eyes were leaking hot liquid and the ocean feeling spread across my cheeks. I fell back into someone’s arms and disappeared into myself.
I heard Frankie’s voice against my ear, but I couldn’t see anything. She placed her hand on my hand and then pulled me up out of my seat and into what felt like a whole new world. Walking was floating. We moved together the way two wind currents might gently meet on a calm summer day.
It felt like a different Frankie. Our mouths fell into each other as if I was with Jenny. How I wanted things to be, easy. How it was a secret but it was our secret.
My vision came back slowly and the intense ocean feeling faded. We did another bump of K. The rising feeling in my chest stopped just before the climax, rode out slow. Back in the alcove of pillows and string lights, I made out with Matt, moving my mouth and tongue around the whole cosmic world. Frankie was on the dance floor, moving in between Jenny and Sam.
Everything was right and in tune with what needed to happen. In the heavy music, Matt yell-whispered words I couldn’t hear.
“What?” I shouted.
Matt moved his body into my body and put his mouth right at my ear. This muffled, blown-out speaker sound came out of his mouth.
“I HAVE REALLY STRONG FEELINGS FOR YOU.”
Matt moved away from my face, his eyes holding this innocent, childish look. In the mix of UV and dark and flashing lights, I felt dizzy. The lights flashed white; he put his hand on my waist and moved his fingers up the hem of my shirt. The bridge piercing between his eyes reflected every flash and my cloud-covered high zoomed in on the perfect intensity of his lips. He gripped the side of me, began to massage my skin, and the ocean feeling came back. The lights flashed purple, the music beat against me, the sweat on his chest was coming through his shirt. I stared at the tattoos on his upper arms, his chest, his eyes, his lips. The lights flashed a pale blue. I fell into him and placed my lips against his and we kissed and it was warm and the boundary dissolved between us until in the music there were just the two of us and no one else. Then the adrenaline rush, water hitting air and wet sand, waves cresting. It moved through my body, from the place where I bit my lip down to my core.
The music reverberated against the walls like a hymn through a large, empty church. I pulled away from him, feeling drunk, like I was inside a very humid cloud. My vision bludgeoned from his touch. He grabbed my wrist and pulled me closer, said he wanted to make love to me, not just animal-fuck. I put my hands together in prayer and he kept his hands wrapped around my wrists. I wanted his hands to squeeze tighter, to crush the bones into a single mass.
In the deep house beat with all the lights flashing, I kept my eyes closed and my hands in prayer and thought Daddy.
“I want to get closer to you,” he said. “Want to know you. Want to run away.” Matt pressed his body against mine through the heavy fog that felt so good. He said the words again, one by one, into my mouth.
“We could run away together, you know?” he said. “A place with evergreens growing, a place we can sleep in every Sunday morning. I’ll put you through college, whatever you want. Take me with you there.”
There were bruises on my body from the way we’d all been fucking. I pulled my hands out of prayer. “I want that too,” I said, chewing my tongue. “I want
