“Stop,” I tell her, gripping her wrists to stop her even though she’s already halfway out of her shirt.
“I want your dick inside me, Brant. I want it now. What the horny hell’s wrong with you?” she asks sweetly, bringing her full lips closer. “Brant Rudawski never declines an invite into my pussy.”
“Penelope Norman isn’t herself right now.”
Her eyes turn cold. “My name is Nell. Penelope died.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Penelope died the day Dog died.”
“Nell, baby, please. Let’s talk about this. I didn’t know. Was that really what your dad was like?” I ask suddenly, trying to search her eyes for truths she’s too damn stubborn to reveal. “I didn’t know, Nell. There’s sometimes … so much I think I don’t know about you.”
“I just want you inside me,” she repeats. “On this lawn. Right now.”
“Your father was a drunk,” I push on, determined to get her to talk. “You had a crap childhood. He ran over your—sorry, I don’t have to rehash the whole thing. I just … I didn’t know about any of this. You—”
“Are you even hearing me, Brant? Stop talking about all that shit. I want to fuck. I’m speaking your language, aren’t I?”
“Not out here on the street, Nell. Let’s go back to my house at least, alright?”
“I want to chain you to that tree,” she says, seeming to decide it on the spot. “I want to wrap the chains around you and bind you to that tree, naked—Mr. McManus’s tree, on Mr. McManus’s lawn—and I want to do things to you until the sun comes up.”
“Can we … Can we just do it normal for once?” I plead with her. “Why must our sex always be so fucking … crazy and weird and out there?”
In an instant, Nell slaps my hands away, her face wrinkled with hurt. The chains protest only for a moment before silence befalls the whole street.
“I thought you like it that way,” she whispers, deathly quiet.
“I … really just want us to be … in a normal girlfriend-and-boyfriend relationship.”
“I’m anything but fucking normal,” she hisses back, as if the word was the most offensive thing ever.
“That’s not what I meant. Of course you are. You’re extraordinary. You’re fascinating. You’re infinitely deep, deeper than I’ll ever be. But Nell … I want … I want something normal. I’ve done the fuck-girls-every-night thing before. I’ve done the weird shit. I’ve done the sex that means nothing. My kind of love has always lasted for hours, but … but not with you.”
Her eyes seem to shake in their sockets. She’s grown so still, she looks like her own latest papier-mâché exhibit—a prison guard caught in some terrible, haunting memory.
Then, finally, she says three words, each of them like a hammer crashing through a glass window. “I’m … not … normal.”
“Did you hear what I just said?” I close the distance between us, the chains rattling at my ankles and wrists. “That part about my kind of love for you? That’s what I said. Love. I … I love you, Nell.”
Her eyes well up, yet she makes no effort to cry. She simply stares at me as if she’s seen a ghost. It’s Halloween; maybe she has.
“Nell?”
“I thought …” she starts. One tear betrays her, letting loose from her left eye and drawing a trail down her cheek that glows amber in the stark streetlight. “I thought this was … what you wanted.”
“You are what I want.” I swallow. I’m fucking all of this up. I have no idea what to do. I feel like I’ve already lost her somehow. “Can we please go back to my house? Let me better explain all of … all of this. Please? We can chill in my room. Put on some music. Just a little safe space with you and me and no one else. Let’s cuddle under the covers. Make a fucking fort, I don’t care. Just come back with me, please, and let’s talk.”
Her eyes linger on my chest. All of the torture and anguish she carries for her alcoholic father and the tragic loss of her childhood dog and all the horrors she must have clearly witnessed growing up … all of that is slowly being locked within her once again, hidden from me, kept in that heart-shaped vault in her chest. She let it out for only that one brief moment at the party. I watch as she literally closes up in front of me. Even that single rogue tear that escaped seems to disappear without her bothering to wipe it away.
“Camera boy,” she murmurs.