The Difference Between You and Me(20)

Emily’s face, so sunny-cheerful in everyday life, so bright and cute and alert, deepens and darkens when Jesse is kissing her. Her eyes fill with smoke and fall half closed, her cheeks flush. Sometimes she slurs her words. A lazy, wicked expression comes over her face, like she’s a little bit hungry and a little bit dangerous—good for nothing, ready to do damage. She can stop Jesse’s heart when she looks at her like this.

When Jesse is kissing Emily, it is all she wants to do for as long as she lives. The kissing becomes her first and last name, her only skill, the reason she was born and the way she wants to die. Most of the time while they’re kissing, it’s impossible for her to imagine how she even made this happen in the first place. How can she have gotten this girl—Emily Miller!—to kiss her at all, let alone to keep kissing her, to come and meet her in secret every week to kiss her? It’s a miracle. It’s the best thing that has ever happened. While it’s happening.

“I have five minutes,” Emily breathes, and Jesse slips two fingers into Emily’s ponytail holder and tugs it off, Emily pulling free from it and then shaking out her thick, caramel hair so Jesse can wind her fingers through it. Emily’s hair smells like coconut and pears; Jesse hugs her close and buries her face in the hair at the back of her neck, breathes in the smell deeply. While she’s there she kisses Emily’s hairline, then moves her lips down along the warm ridge of her shoulder, then along the satin curve of her collarbone in the front. Emily exhales and drops her head back, giving Jesse room. Jesse reaches up with her left hand and undoes the top button of Emily’s sweater, then the second button. (It’s the pink J.Crew cardigan with the fake pearl buttons.) She folds the neck of the sweater back and exposes the line of Emily’s white cotton bra, kisses down along the swell of the top of her breast, the delicate skin there as light and sweet as meringue against Jesse’s tongue as she kisses lower and closer.

Emily breathes, then breathes deeper. Her breath catches in her throat as Jesse kisses into the V at the center of her bra, then slips her whole hand up over Emily’s right breast. Emily leans into Jesse’s palm and whispers, “Yes.” Jesse pushes Emily back against the wall and looks up at her face; it is a picture of total surrender, her eyes closed, her mouth open, her chin tipped up so her long, pale neck is exposed. In a burst of desire, Jesse peels Emily’s bra back to expose her naked breast. Emily pulls back abruptly and stands up straight, shaking her head.

They have some rules that they haven’t ever said out loud to each other but that they both always follow. Jesse just broke one.

“I’m sorry,” Emily says, pulling her sweater closed at the neck. She seems flustered, but mostly genuinely apologetic. “I want to. I wish I could, but I can’t.”

“I know,” Jesse mumbles, furiously embarrassed. “I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry.”

“No, no, it’s okay.” Emily turns away from Jesse to re-button her sweater.

“It was dumb. It was stupid.”

“No, no, it’s okay. I have to go back to work anyway.”

Emily bends at the waist sharply, flipping her tousled hair forward, then whips back up into a standing position so her hair fans out straight and neat down her back. Jesse looks down at her rubber boots dully, at the dingy, tessellated tiles on the floor beneath them.

“I’m so glad I got to see you, even for a second,” Emily says pleasantly, in a voice a bank teller might use with a well-liked regular customer. She turns back toward Jesse as she regathers her hair into a ponytail—the same pony-tail Jesse disassembled just moments ago. She looks past Jesse at her own reflection in the mirror as she twists her perfumed mane up into a single cable, swift and sure, snaps it through its stretchy tie and tightens it up.

“I kind of, actually, wanted to talk to you about something,” Jesse says, low, halting.

“Yeah?” Emily smiles. “About what? I only have a few seconds, so… but what?”

She gives Jesse a look that exactly matches the one she gave her in the girls’ room on Friday morning—brightly lit emptiness, like a sunny, unfurnished room. In a flash, Jesse pictures herself reaching for Emily in a dozen different bathrooms, a hundred different closets, a thousand different hidden secret stairwells forever….

“I…”

“Yeah?” Emily’s expression doesn’t change, doesn’t expand or contract even a fraction of an inch.

“I feel like, I don’t know, I feel like…”

Now Emily tips her head to the side and scrunches up her eyes and nose into her pity face.