ANDREW
20
I’VE BEEN AWAKE SINCE 8:00a.m. I got a call from my brother, Asher, and was afraid to answer because I thought it would be the ‘news’ of my father. He was just calling to let me know that Aidan is pissed off about me taking his guitar. I don’t give a shit; what’s he gonna do, drive down to Birmingham and fight me for it? I know it really has nothing to do with the guitar; Aidan is just pissed that I left Wyoming while our dad is still alive.
And Asher wanted to check up on me.
“Are you doin’ alright, bro?” he said.
“Yeah, I’m perfect, actually.”
“Is that sarcasm?”
“No,” I said into the phone, “I’m being straight with you, Ash, I’m having the time of my life right now.”
“It’s that girl, isn’t it? Camryn? Was that her name?”
“Yeah, that’s her name and yeah, it’s the girl.”
I grinned inwardly, distracted by the very vivid image in my mind of what happened last night, but then I just smiled, thinking about Camryn in general.
“Well, you know where I’m at if you need me,” Asher said and I heard the quiet message in his voice that he wanted to convey but knows better than to speak of it more openly. I told him before never to bring it up again, or I’d have to beat the shit out of him.
“Yeah, I know, thanks, bro—hey, how’s Dad doin’?”
“He’s the same as he was before you left.”
“That’s better than worse, I guess.”
“Yeah.”
We hung up and I called my mom to let her know I was alright. A day longer and she would’ve had the police looking for me.
I get up and shove my stuff into my duffle bag. As I walk past the television, I pound on the wall with the bottom of my palm next to where Camryn’s head is probably lying against her pillow on the other side. If she wasn’t already awake, that might’ve done the trick. Well, OK maybe not, since she is such a deep sleeper—except when it comes to music, apparently. I take a quick shower and brush my teeth and I think about her being in my mouth last night and it’s kind of a shame I have to brush my teeth at all. Oh well, maybe I’ll do it again later. If she wants me to, of course. Shit, I have absolutely no issues with it whatsoever, except that afterwards I have to take care of myself, but that’s alright, too. I’d rather do it than risk letting her touch me. I know that when she does, it’ll all be over. For me anyway. I f*cking want her, but I’ll only take her if the street goes both ways. And right now, I can tell she doesn’t know what she wants.
I get dressed and slip my bare feet down into my black running shoes, glad they’re dry now after being soaked by the rain. I shoulder both of my bags and take Aidan’s guitar by the neck and head out into the hallway and next door to Camryn’s room.
I hear the TV on inside, so I know she must be up.
I wonder how long it’ll take her to crack.
CAMRYN
I HEAR ANDREW KNOCK on the door. I suck in a sharp breath, hold it there for a long, tense minute and then let it out in a spat of air, blowing a tassel of hair outward that hangs freely from my braid—preparation to keep me from cracking.
Like it never happened, my ass.
Finally, I open the door and when I see him standing there so casually—and so edible—I crack. Well, it’s more like a really red blush, so hot that my face literally feels like it’s on fire. I look down at the floor because if I look at his smiling eyes a second longer my head might melt.
I manage to look back up at him seconds later.
His close-lipped smile is bigger now and much more telling.
Hey! I think an expression like that is the same as talking about it!
He looks me up and down, seeing that I’m already dressed and ready to go and then jerks his head back a little and says with a huge grin, “Come on.”
I grab my purse and my bag and head out with him.
We hop inside the car and I do what I can to distract myself from the best oral sex I’ve ever had in my life by finding something random to talk about. He smells extra good today: natural skin with a hint of soap and some kind of shampoo. That’s not helping me, either.
“So, are we just going to drive to random motels and not stop anywhere except Waffle Houses?”
Not that that bothers me one bit, but I’m struggling to find ‘random’ here.
He clicks his seatbelt on and starts the engine.
“No, I actually have something in mind.” He glances over.
“Oh?” I ask, my curiosity piqued. “You’re breaking from the spontaneous rule of our trip and actually have a plan?”
“Hey, technically it wasn’t ever a rule,” he says, underlining the fact.
We back out of the parking lot and the vintage Chevelle purrs onto the road.
He’s wearing the same black cargo shorts he wore yesterday and I get a quick glimpse of his rock-hard calves, one foot pressing gently on the gas pedal. A dark navy t-shirt fits his chest and arms just right, the fabric tighter around his biceps.
“Well, what’s the plan, then?”
“New Orleans,” he says, smiling over at me. “It’s only about five and a half hours from here.”
My face lights up. “I’ve actually never been to New Orleans before.”
He smiles inwardly, as if excited about being the one who gets to take me there my first time. I’m as excited about it as he is. But really, I don’t care where we go, even if it’s the mosquito swarms of Mississippi, as long as Andrew is with me.
Two hours later, after we’ve exhausted the random topics which have only been a distraction from talking about what happened last night, I decide to be the one to break it. I reach out and push the down button on the volume. Andrew looks over at me curiously.
“Stuff like that has never come out of my mouth before, just so you know,” I get it off my chest.
Andrew grins and moves his hand down on the steering wheel, letting his fingers casually steer instead. He appears more relaxed, his left arm lying across the door on the other side of him, left knee bent upward while the right foot stays on the gas pedal.
“But you liked it,” he says, “saying it, I mean.”
Ummm, there wasn’t anything about last night that I didn’t like.
My face is only a little red.
“Yeah, I did, actually,” I admit.
“Don’t tell me you’ve never thought about saying something like that during sex before,” he says.
I hesitate. “Actually, I have.” I look over sharply. “Not that I sit around and dream about it though, I’ve just thought about it.”
“Why didn’t you ever do it before then, if you had the urge?” He’s asking me these questions, but I’m pretty sure he already knows the answers.
I shrug. “I guess I was just chicken shit.”
He laughs lightly and moves his fingers back up the steering wheel, holding it more securely as we go around a curvy section of highway.
“I guess I’ve just always thought of it as something Dominique Starla or Cinnamon Dreams would say in Legally Boned or Friday Night Dikes.”
“You’ve seen those flicks?”
My head jerks around and I gasp. “No! I…I didn’t know they were real, I was just making up—.”
Andrew’s smile becomes playful.
“I don’t know if they’re real, either,” he says, giving in before I die of mortification, “but I wouldn’t doubt it, really. And I get what you mean.”
My face relaxes.
“Well, it’s hot,” he says, “for the record.”
I blush some more. Might as well just leave the blush on all the time because I find myself doing it around him a lot more every day.
“So, you think porn stars are hot?” I cringe inwardly, hoping he says no.
Andrew gently purses his lips and says, “Not really, well it’s hot in a different way when they do it.”
My brows draw together. “Different as in how?”
“Well, when…Dominique Starla,” he picks the name from the air, “does it, it’s just to some random guy lookin’ to get off behind a keyboard.” His green eyes fall on me. “That guy’s not dreaming about anything with her except her face in his lap.” Then he looks back out at the road. “But when someone…I-dunno…like a sweet, sexy, completely un-slutty girl does it, the guy is thinking about a lot more than her face in his lap. He’s probably not even thinking about that at all, at least on a deeper level.”
I definitely caught the secret meaning behind his words and he probably knows as much.
“It drove me mad,” he says, glancing at me long enough to lock eyes with me, “just so you know.” But then he turns away completely and pretends to be concentrating more on the road. Maybe he doesn’t want me to accuse him of ‘talking about it’, even though I’m the one that started this conversation. I take full blame and I don’t regret it.
“What about you?” I ask, stirring the brief silence. “Were you ever afraid to try something sexually you had the urge to try?”
He thinks about it a moment and says, “Yeah, when I was younger, like around seventeen, but I was only afraid to try things with girls because I knew they were….”
“They were what?”
He smiles softly, pressing his lips together and I get the feeling there’s about to be some kind of comparison.
“Younger girls, at least the ones I hung out with, were ‘grossed out’ by anything unconventional. They were probably like you in a way, secretly turned on by something different than the missionary position, but too shy to admit it. And at that age it was risky to say: ‘Hey let me do you in the ass,’ because chances are she’d be freaked out by it and think you’re some sexually disturbed pervert.”
A laugh pushes through my lips.
“Yeah, I think you’re right,” I say. “When I was a teenager, I was grossed out when Natalie would tell me things she let Damon do to her. I didn’t start actually finding them hot until I lost my virginity at eighteen, but…,” my voice starts to trail thinking about Ian, “…but even then, I was still too nervous. I wanted to…umm…,”
I’m nervous admitting it now.
“Go on, just say it,” he says, but not with any measure of playfulness. “You should know by now you can’t run me off.”
That takes me aback (and makes my heart flutter). Is the truth written all over my face, that I’m afraid of giving him any bad impressions of me? He smiles gently as if to give me that much more assurance that nothing I can say to him will give him a bad impression.
“OK, if I tell you, do you promise not to think it’s an invitation?” Perhaps it is, even though I’m not sure about that myself yet, but I definitely don’t want him to think that. Not right now, maybe never. I don’t know….
“I swear,” he says, his eyes serious and not at all offended, “I won’t think that at all.”
I take a deep breath.
Ugh! I can’t believe I’m about to tell him this. I’ve never told anyone; well, except for Natalie, in a roundabout way.
“Aggression.” I pause, still feeling embarrassed to go on. “Most of the time when I daydream about sex, I’m…,”
His eyes are grinning! When I said ‘aggression’ something triggered in his features. It almost seems as if…no, surely that can’t be right.
He softens his eyes once he notices.
“Go ahead,” he says, smiling gently again.
And I do, because for some reason I’m less afraid to finish than I was seconds ago:
“I’m usually dreaming about being…manhandled.”
“Rough sex turns you on,” he says evenly.
I nod. “The thought of it does, but I’ve never really experienced it, not in the way I think about it, anyway.”
He seems faintly surprised, or, is that contented?
“I think it’s what I meant when I told you I always end up with tame guys.”
Something just clicked in my head: Andrew knew before me what I really meant back in Wyoming when I said I ‘end up with’ tame guys. Without realizing it, I basically expressed that ending up with them was unfortunate, something I didn’t prefer. He may not have known my definition of ‘tame’ until now, but he knew before I did that it wasn’t something I wanted.
But I loved Ian, and right now I feel awful for thinking this way. Ian was tame sexually, and the thought of having any bad thoughts of him at all makes me feel guilty.
“So, you like hair-pulling and…,” he starts to say inquiringly, but his voice trails when he notices my eristic expression.
“Yeah, but more aggressive,” I say suggestively, trying to get him to say it so I don’t have to. I’m getting nervous again.
He shifts his chin sideways, his eyebrows rise a little. “What, like….wait, how aggressive?”
I swallow and look away from his eyes. “Force, I guess. Not like flat-out rape or anything extreme like that, but I have a very sexually submissive personality, I think.”
Andrew can’t look at me now, either.
I turn enough to see that his eyes are slightly wider than seconds ago, and full of shrouded intensity. His Adam’s Apple moves gently as he swallows. Both of his hands are on the steering wheel now.
I change the subject:
“You never did technically tell me what you were afraid to ask a girl to do.” I smile, hoping to bring the playful atmosphere back from before.
He relaxes and grins looking back over at me. “Yeah, I did,” he says and adds after an odd pause, “anal sex.”
Something tells me that’s not what he was really afraid of. I can’t put my finger on it, but that whole mention of anal sex I think is just a smokescreen. But why would Andrew, out of the two of us, be the one afraid to admit the truth? He’s the one pretty much helping me to be more comfortable with myself sexually. He’s the one who I thought wasn’t afraid to admit anything, but now I’m not so sure.
I wish I could read his mind.
“Well, believe it or not,” I say, glancing at him, “Ian and I did try that once, but it hurt like hell and needless to say, I mean ‘once’ in the most literal way possible.”
Andrew laughs lightly.
Then he looks up at the road signs and seems to be making a quick route decision in his head. We ease off the highway and onto another one. More fields are sprawled out on both sides of the road. Cotton and rice and corn and no telling what else; I really don’t know the difference in most crops except the obvious: cotton is white and corn is tall. We drive for hours and hours until the sun starts to set and Andrew pulls off the side of the road. The tires grind to a stop onto the gravel.
“Are we lost?” I ask.
He leans across the seat towards me and reaches for the glove box. His elbow and the under part of his lower arm grazes my leg as he pops the glove box and pulls out a rather worn road map. It’s folded awkwardly as if after it had been opened it was never folded back into the same creases. He unfolds the map and lays it against the steering wheel, examining it closely and running his finger along it. He twists the right side of his mouth in his teeth and makes an inquisitive clicking noise with his lips.
“We’re lost, aren’t we?” I want to laugh, not at him, just at the situation.
“It’s your fault,” he says, trying to be serious, but failing miserably seeing as how his eyes are smiling.
I let out a spat of air. “And how is it my fault?” I argue. “You’re the one driving.”
“Well, if you weren’t being so ‘distracting’, talkin’ about sex and secret desires and pornography and that slut, Dominique Starla, I would’ve noticed I was taking 20 instead of staying on 59 like I should have.” He flicks the center of the map with the snap of his finger and shakes his head. “We drove two hours in the wrong direction.”
“Two hours?” I laugh this time and slap the dashboard. “And you’re just now realizing this?”
I hope I’m not bruising his ego. Besides, it’s not like I’m mad or disappointed; we can drive ten hours in the wrong direction and I wouldn’t care.
He looks wounded. I’m pretty sure he’s faking it, but I grab a hold of this opportunity and take a chance at doing something I’ve wanted to do since our time together in the rain on the roof in Tennessee. Reaching over my waist, I unlock my seatbelt and slide across the seat and sit next to him. He seems quietly surprised, but inviting as he lifts his arm so that I can curl myself underneath it. “I’m just messing with you about being lost,” I say, laying my head against his shoulder. I feel a little bit of reluctance before his arm comes down around me.
It feels so right to be here like this. Too right….
I pretend not to notice how comfortable both of us feel right now and be as nonchalant as before. I look up into the map with him, running my finger along a new route.
“We can just go this way,” I say, running my finger south, “and hit 55 straight into New Orleans. Right?” I tilt my head over to see his eyes and my heart jumps when I notice how close his face is to mine now. But I just smile, waiting for him to answer.
He smiles back, but I get the feeling he really didn’t hear much I said. “Yeah, we’ll just hit 55.” His eyes search my face and briefly skim my lips.
I reach out and start to fold the map back together and then I turn the volume back up. Andrew moves his arm from around me to put the car in gear.
When we pull away, he rests his hand on my thigh pressed next to his and we ride like that for a long time; the only time he moves his hand is to take better control of a sharp curve or to adjust the music, but he always puts right back.
And I always want him to.