“Because you’re a goddamn wrestler at the top of his game. You get out of headlocks for a living.”
“Okay, fair enough, fair enough, just…here, lemme show you how to”
She didn’t mean to jerk away when his hands closed over her forearm. It just happened, like feeling pain when someone stabbed you in the gut. She tried to grit her teeth against it, but still it came.
“Easy, easy.”
“Sorry, I just”
“It’s okay. It’s cool. You want me to just tell you how?”
“No. You can…you can put your hands on me.”
“All I’m going to do is just…”
He reached up again, and this time it was better.
Partly because he went real slow.
Mostly because he was weirdly excellent at saying soothing things. That laid-back drawl she used to loathe so much swung effortlessly into a low sweetness. And each time she tensed, he gave her a little more of it. He doled it out like good medicine, until she was barely thinking about the closeness of their bodies at all. Instead, she focused on squeezing right where he told her to squeeze. At first gently, but then as hard as he prompted her to go. Go on, he urged, so she did. She tensed the muscles in her arm and tightened one hand around the other, until her heart was pounding and her breath was coming fast.
With the effort, she told herself.
But had no idea if that was true.
It could have been something else that made her bare her teeth and bear down hard. He’d told her to do it, but telling her to do it wasn’t a great excuse. Not when she could nearly feel the pulse in his throat and the hand on her arm had slipped away and he was…he was…
Oh, Jesus, he was sagging forward like a puppet with its strings cut.
“Oh my god, Tate. Tate are you going to sleep? Am I putting you to sleep? Jesus Christ no, no, wake up, wake up, this is not cool. It’s not cool. I don’t like this, wake up now.”
She released him and jumped back, but that was a mistake. Now he was falling backward instead of forward. She had to brace herself against his shoulder blades to stop him from crashing to the groundthough it wasn’t exactly a successful move. Her feet started sliding as soon as she did it. She just wasn’t big or strong enough to hold his enormous bulk, and now he was going to crush her.
This was how she was going to die.
Squashed like a bug beneath Tate’s dead body.
“Tate, fuck, I can’t hold you up,” she said, but still he kept coming.
She was almost on the floor by the time he shook himself awake.
“Yeah,” he half slurred as he staggered woozily to his feet. “That’s much more like it.”
“So knocking you unconscious and getting crushed by your body was the aim?”
“Pretty much. Except, you know, if I attack you, just let me crash to the ground.”
“I was more afraid for it than I was for you. Probably would have punched a hole to the floor below.”
He grinned, not in the least bit offended.
And then he told her why.
“Feel a little more comfortable now?”
She answered yes, because it was true. She did in fact feel more comfortable about being close to him. How could she not, after spending an hour play-wrestling with him in the goofiest possible way she could imagine? Hitler would probably seem like a great guy to hang out with, after that.
Yet when they sat down, it suddenly seemed like a lie.
Their knees bumped beneath the table, and when they did, a strange, slithery tingle ran right up the inside of her thigh. Like the kind of thing that usually happened when she felt embarrassed, only more intense somehow. Sharper, as though humiliation had just stabbed her. She had to spread her legs around the bulk of his to avoid it happening again, but doing so only seemed to make it worse.
The space she opened up between them turned hot and thickjust as it had when his hand came close to touching her. And the longer they sat there, the hotter it got. It burned, in a way that made it impossible to concentrate. She read over the same paragraph thirteen times and still it didn’t sink in.
Though she did her best to pretend. She kept her head down, one hand almost shielding her face from view. Occasionally she wrote something in her notepad, sure he wouldn’t notice that all of it was an irrelevant mess of song lyrics. He was probably just concentrating on the book he was looking at: The Female Body in Film. It had plenty for him to concentrate on, after all. Lots of juicy pictures of babes in tiny panties.
Or so she thought.
“Not really convinced we should write three joint essays and deliver two presentations on the lyrics to ‘You Ruin Me’ by The Veronicas.”
She kept her head down in the wake of his words.