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PETER
WE LIE THERE FOR A while afterward. I Run my fingers through her hair, liking the murmurs of satisfaction this elicits from her. In return, she peppers kisses all over my chest. My chin. My neck.
“I should probably go,” I whisper, and she groans. “It’s late. I—I don’t want to wake anyone up.”
“Noooo. I like this too much.”
“Me too, but . . .” I glance down. “I don’t know what to do. With that.” I gesture to the condom, which I’m still wearing. Suddenly I want to throw a blanket over myself. My body looks too skinny, my legs like matchsticks.
“Oh,” she says, regarding it strangely. Like it’s no longer something sexual. Now it’s something to throw in the garbage. “Right. Don’t want my parents to . . .”
“Find it. Yeah.”
As quietly as I can, I get dressed and tiptoe into the bathroom. I clean myself up, and mummy-wrap the condom in a dozen layers of toilet paper before burying it in the trash. I’m a strange combination of exhausted and on edge. Jittery, I splash water on my face, try to cool down. Blink at my reflection a few times, not sure what I’m expecting to see, because all I see is the same person who’s always there.
When I get back into Sophie’s room, she’s sitting on the bed in a T-shirt and underwear, her legs bare. She smiles when she sees me. A kind of smile I haven’t seen before. A smile that knows things about me it didn’t know yesterday.
“Hey,” she says quietly. Smiles again. “Hi.”
“Hi.” And then I’m not sure what else to say. What happens now is a complete mystery. Was this a one-time thing? Are we together now?
Sophie stretches, her T-shirt riding up and exposing her scar.
All of a sudden, my logic, which I must have left at the Blaze, comes rushing back. Every reason I thought a relationship with Sophie was doomed threatens to choke me. I can’t feel like I constantly owe my girlfriend—if that’s what Sophie were to become—my life. Can’t have that debt between us. My body took over, asserting its independence, forgetting how easily this could lead to heartbreak for both of us.
No. Not just my body. I wanted to see what we had together, and what we had was frantic and sweet and maybe inevitable.
She had given me so much, and all I wanted was to make her—us—happy.
Slowly I sit back down on the bed next to her. She gets up on her knees to kiss me. “I love you,” she says again.
“I—I love you too,” I say, and at least right now, I must mean it in every possible way. You and your big brain, I want to add, to lighten this situation somehow. But I don’t.
I don’t want to break this girl.
And I don’t want this girl to break me.
My body’s heavy with exhaustion as I head across the street, my heart still calming down. Once I sneak inside my house and into my room, I shut the door and lean against it.
I’d never taken our pact seriously, mostly because I couldn’t ever think that far ahead. We were so young. Babies.
The light in my own bathroom illuminates everything I didn’t see in Sophie’s. What we’ve done is tattooed all over my body. In the half-moons her nails left on my chest and back. My swollen lips. The red mark beneath my ear.
I crawl into bed, certain I won’t be able to sleep.
Morning comes too soon. Winter sunlight peeks in through my blinds, and I groan, throwing an arm over my face. I let Mark run around my room for a while, but I don’t leave my room until ten thirty.
My mom’s at the kitchen table, frowning at her laptop behind her huge reading glasses.
“Where’s Dad?” I ask, pouring myself a bowl of cereal.
“He got called in. Kid fell off his bike and chipped his entire front row of teeth.”
“Ouch.”
She types something on her computer, then deletes it. Then retypes it. “What are you up to today?”
“Probably homework.”
