I didn’t go all the way, which somehow made me think it was okay. I was young. I lived on the beach. I surfed and partied and made out. What else was there to do?
Kit did things another way. Dylan’s injuries, past and present, focused her attention on the body, on medicine, and she applied to some geeky camp in LA for aspiring doctors, and naturally she got in—which curtailed my partying because my parents were also going to be out of town for two weeks at some conference for restaurants, and it was in Hawaii. They were making it a second honeymoon. By my count, it was more like the fifth honeymoon or the twentieth. Over and over and over, they battled furiously, then came back together.
This time, I was left in charge of Dylan. I was pissed off about it at first. He was so boring that it was ridiculous. Even when I read the really sexy parts in books, he didn’t look at me or respond or anything, just kept staring out the window.
But he’d been there for us, both Kit and me, and I couldn’t leave him lying upstairs all alone for two weeks. The first couple of days, I tried again to coax him out of bed, get him downstairs, but he would only use his crutches on the upper level. He hadn’t gone downstairs since he’d come home.
I carried his meals upstairs. Carried his dishes back down. Brought him clean clothes. Medicine. Helped him to the shower. “Wash your fucking hair this time,” I yelled.
Three or four days in, it was close to evening, and hot, and I was sick of the whole scene. “Come on, Dylan. Get your ass out of bed, and let’s get outside.”
“You can go,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”
I rolled my eyes. “This is ridiculous. What the hell is wrong with you?”
His silvery aqua eyes glowed in the twilight. “You wouldn’t understand, Grasshopper.”
“Oh, why, because you’re the only person who ever had bad things happen to them?”
He whipped his head around. “No!” He reached for my hand, and I let him take it. “I’m just so goddamn tired.”
“Of what?”
He closed his eyes, and his lashes made long shadows over his high cheekbones. His mouth, so battered, was healed now, and the soft evening washed his lips with pink light. He was like a fairy who’d stumbled into the wrong land. It made my chest ache to think that he might really actually kill himself one of these times. Acting on some wild impulse, I leaned in and kissed that beautiful mouth.
It was electric. My mouth buzzed, and it sent a shock through every nerve in my body, and for a long moment—I don’t know how long—a minute, maybe, or two, he responded, almost as if it was automatic or he was high, or both, probably. It didn’t matter to me why. My body blazed so hard I thought I might faint as we kissed, as his lips parted and our tongues touched.
He pushed me away. “Josie. Stop. No.”
I yanked back, aware that my face was bright red. I tossed my hair over my shoulder. “Just wanted to get you moving.” I dropped his hand. “Get over yourself, dude.”
From the top of the dresser, I grabbed his pain pills. “I’ll be downstairs.”
It took two days, but he finally roared out his frustration and came down the stairs on his ass. His hair had come loose, and he wore only a pair of boxers, his leg too awkward for even split shorts. “Give me the fucking pills.”
I smiled, walked over, and dropped them in his hands. “Want some water? Some food?”
He started getting better finally after that. He came down to play card games at the table, and a couple of times, his friends came bearing rum and serious weed, buds so crystallized with THC that they looked like they’d been dipped in diamonds. Even a couple of bong hits knocked me on my ass.
And maybe he hadn’t noticed that I’d grown up a lot, but his friends sure did. One kissed me in the hallway when we’d all been drinking rum and smoking so much that I couldn’t form a coherent sentence. I pushed him away, shaking my head. He was in his twenties, already sporting a pretty hefty spread of hair on his chest. I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to let me off the hook with a blow job.
Dylan came around the corner while the dude had his hand on my ass, and he lost his shit. “What the fuck are you doing, man?” He slapped his friend’s hand away. “She’s a kid.”
Dude laughed drunkenly, backing off with his hands in the air. “All right, all right. But, buddy, she’s no kid. Have you looked at her lately?”
In my very inebriated condition, my ears buzzed, and I wanted, suddenly, for Dylan to see me that way. See me as a girl.
And when I looked up, I saw that he was looking at me. It was the two of us, drunk and high off our asses. He didn’t have a shirt on, only a pair of low-riding jean shorts. He leaned on a crutch, just looking at me. I felt it. On my shoulders. My hair. My bare belly beneath the crop top I wore. I was as tan as I ever got, dark as pecans, and my hair was loose, trailing over my shoulders and arms and my braless boobs. For one second, I thought about how easy it would be to take off my top and show myself to him, to that expression that really did, to me, look like the same one I saw on other guys’ faces.
“You’re so pretty, Grasshopper, but you’re still just a kid. You’ve gotta be careful around guys like that.”
He turned around and left the hallway, leaving me with a crystal-clear understanding that the only guy I wanted then or ever was Dylan. It had always been that way. It would always be that way.
I also knew, in some gut-deep place, that it was the same for him.
My parents would be home in five days, so I didn’t have a lot of time. I thought of a thousand ways to seduce him, and some of them I actually employed—I didn’t tie my halter top quite tight enough, so that when I helped him get into bed, a lot of side boob showed. He didn’t seem to notice. I wore a thin blouse without a bra under it, and when I looked in the mirror, I was pretty sure I could see actual nipples, accented by the triangle of white skin that didn’t get tanned. I wore it the whole day, and he never saw me at all.
I read a Johanna Lindsey to him, but he stopped me when we got to the really juicy part, covering his ears with a laugh.
One evening, crickets were whirring and the ocean was singing on the beach. Overhead, stars gleamed like diamonds. “Let’s go to the cove,” I said. “You can make it with a crutch now, can’t you?”
He inclined his head, passing me the bong. “Maybe. You want to grab some tequila out of the storeroom, maybe?”
“Yes!” I took a hit, gave him the bong, and said, “I’ll be right back.”
I gathered up a bottle of tequila, limes, and my secret weapon—a tiny cellophane packet of cocaine I’d found in my mom’s nightstand—and stashed them all in my pack, along with a blanket we could sit on and four sodas to keep us from drying out completely.
“Let’s go.”
He gave me his half smile, and I was so happy to see him being something close to himself. “Wow, dude. It’s good to see you again.”
He laughed, and we made our way down the wooden steps to the cove precariously, me in front in case he stumbled. When we reached the sand, I whooped.
He threw an arm around my shoulders. “Whoo! Whoo!”
We spread out the goods—the tequila and limes and salt, the bong and a bag of weed, and then I produced the tiny envelope of cocaine and lifted an eyebrow.
“You’re kidding, right?” he said.
“Nope. The real thing. Mom’s cocaine.”
“She’ll kill you when she finds out it’s gone.”
I rolled my eyes. “She’ll never know it was me.” Ceremoniously, I gave him the packet. “You do the honors.”
“Have you ever done it before?”
I lied and said, “Couple of times, but only a little.”
He set up the lines, and we snorted them, and it was in ten seconds the best high I ever had. I leaped to my feet and started dancing in the sea breeze, arms over my head. “Wow!” I cried breathily. “Wow.”
He grinned, watching me spin. All my inhibitions were gone. I became my little-girl self, dancing for all the customers in the bar, my hair swinging around me, my head full of songs. Music from the patio reached us, and I embroidered on it. I was wearing a blouse with swinging sleeves and hem, and I could feel the breeze swirling over my middle. It made me horny. On a wave of heat and delight, I fell on my knees, pulled my shirt over my head, and kissed Dylan, all in one movement.
He tumbled backward, driven by the force of my body, and his hands fell on my bare back, on my arms. For a time, a long time it seemed to me, he kissed me back, our bodies rubbing against each other’s. I could feel that he was hard under me, which made me bolder. I sat up, my crotch against his, and pulled his hands to my breasts.
He started to resist, to protest, but I moved against him. “Show me what it’s supposed to be like, Dylan. Just this one time. We never have to tell anybody, ever.”
“Josie—”
I pressed my hands to his face. “Please,” I whispered over his mouth. “What we have is special. Real. Please.” I kissed him again.
And in the darkness of the beach, high on cocaine, he gave in.
In my fantasies before that night, we had sex like in a movie, all soft focus and music playing a romantic score. In real life, it was both better and worse. Touching him and kissing him was a million times more charged than I’d ever expected. It was like we melted together, and I slid under his scarred, wrecked skin and into the blood that still flowed in his body. He swam into my blood, into my soul, and I became something else, someone else. He showed me, gently and slowly, what it should feel like when somebody who loved you touched you in just the right way. I learned to have an orgasm for the first time, and it blew the pieces of my body out into the stars, bringing starlight back when they settled into my flesh again. I learned to please him too, and at that I’d had some practice.