“I haven’t finished.”
“You finished.”
“Blue —”
“I’m gonna run to the store.”
I don’t run to the store. I go upstairs, and I lie on my bed for forty-five minutes. I try to nap, and I can’t, so at two in the afternoon, I get up and cross the hall to take a leak. I stand above the toilet, unzip my jeans, and I look down at my own dick.
A thought arrives in my head that I’m too tired to fight.
Maybe I could release all of this through jacking off.
Maybe if I cum into this toilet really quick, I’ll be able to think straight again.
It’s a stupid thought. A dumb one. But I’m out of ideas for the day, and I refuse to continue twitching out of my own skin.
I start pumping.
The blood rushes. I tilt my head back. I crack my neck. I tell myself to think of anything.
Anything.
My mind goes straight to her.
Fuck.
I swallow. I shut my eyes.
No. Not her.
My dick says, yes,her.
I drop my head and stop pumping.
I think about our first time. There’s no point in fighting it, because I’ve just, in the last sixty seconds, given my body permission to do whatever the fuck it wants, and what it wants is that night. The party I shouldn’t have been at. The room I shouldn’t have walked into. The hours we spent talking before either of us touched the other one. The way she’d looked up at me from the pillow when I’d finally kissed her like she’d been waiting her entire life for it.
Then a week later, I came inside of her.
No condom, like a fucking idiot.
I freaked the fuck out about it.
I pulled her into the shower with me and washed her body off with my hands like I could undo it, like the water could take what I had done and give it back to me as something I could carry, and she’d let me. She had stood there in the steam under the spray with her hands flat on my chest, her hair plastered down her back, and she let me wash her body. I remember the curve of her waist under my palms. I remember her bright fucking blue eyes looking up at me through wet lashes. I remember the way I held her after, on the bed, both of us in a towel, my arm under her head, her cheek on my chest, and her hair soaking through my t-shirt.
I grab my dick again.
This greedy fucker.
I pull harder.
I tell myself to focus on the sex part.Focus on the sex part, Golding.Focus on the way her thighs had felt around my waist, focus on the small sound she made when I first got inside her, focus on the way her hand had gripped my forearm hard enough to leave a mark I’d looked at in the mirror a day later, focus on anything that isn’t the wet hair on my chest.
I keep pumping.
It’s — I think this every time, and I think it now — crazy how much of that night I can still recall. I didn’t think I’d hold on to it this tight. I didn’t think I would still, at twenty-one, be the kind of man who jacked off to a single night three Aprils ago. I’ve fucked a few girls since. There’s been one in particular during sophomore year who was good and patient with me and made it very clear she’d be available again if I wanted. I’d thanked her and not asked twice. None of them do this to me. None of them have ever done this.
I’m squeezing my balls. Curling my toes against the bathmat. Fuck. I need this so fucking badly. I need the lid to come off something. I need —
