Dangerous Girls
The truth is, it’s not the act I’m scared of, but giving myself so entirely to someone. As long as there are lines to draw and boundaries to cling to, I can pretend that I’m safe from this wanting that threatens to consume me. I’m separate, still all my own. But after . . .
What then? What comes after, when he has that much of me, to do with as he chooses? When I have him. Will it ever be enough?
• • •
“I don’t want to pressure you,” he told me, his bare chest still rising and falling with quick gasps of air. We were back in his bed last week, the same place we’d been reaching for weeks now: almost naked, almost there, almost too far to stop.
Almost.
His breathing slowed. “I just don’t understand why you’re not ready.” Tate propped himself up on one elbow, leaning over me, a hand gentle on my cheek. “You know I love you.”
I nodded.
“And you love me.” He grinned, trailing his hand lower, down my throat and across the sensitive skin of my breast. I felt my stomach flip over again—as much from the victory in his expression as the sensation of his fingers, soft against my skin. My love was a prize, a triumph to him.
I nodded again.
“So what are we waiting for?” Tate dipped his head, following the path of his hand with his lips now, kissing a winding trail down my body, while the other hand gently stroked, lower, in a slow rhythm that left me gasping. “I want to know you,” he said, lifting his head from my stomach to meet my eyes. There was nothing but sincerity there, hopeful and reassuring. “Completely.”
• • •
Completely.
The group laughs and chatters as I watch the world blur outside the dark van windows, the word spinning in my head. It’s a temptation and a promise, all bound up in one. For there to be nothing left between us—all of him, everything of me.
I want it, and yet I recoil from the idea, all at the same time. But there’s only person who I’ve ever given myself to like that: Elise. And even though it seems odd, even wrong, I wonder suddenly if the reason I’m holding back from sleeping with Tate is because it would mean he’d possess me in a way she never will.
I feel a buzz against my stomach, my phone vibrating with a text message. Tate.
I love you.
I meet his eyes in the rearview mirror. He smiles, the private grin he only ever shows to me—something quieter, and almost sad.
I smile back, shy.
I love you too.
• • •
The party is at an old firehouse on the outskirts of Providence, an hour out of Boston on the freeway. It’s been transformed into a creepy haunted house: cobwebs draped from every corner; jack-o’-lanterns leering; screams echoing out into the night. The partygoers spill out into the parking lot, a chaotic crowd of zombies, werewolves, superheroes, and the usual slutty story-book-character college girls.
“Disney bingo!” AK whoops, heading toward the firehouse. “I’m going to get me an Ariel!”
We party for hours in the dark firehouse space, the group dispersing and rejoining around me, a steady rhythm like the tide on the shore. I watch as they fall further out of themselves, the way you do when the music is just right and the crowd is dense and forgiving—like an out-of-body experience, nothing but deep bass and movement and hot, sweating skin. But I can’t fall, not tonight, with so much on my mind. So I watch them; lost in the middle of the crowd. I see the night in flashes, glittering and dark: AK clutching at a drunk coed Red Riding Hood; Chelsea blissed out in Lamar’s arms; Melanie’s anxious gaze when she loses sight of us; Tate, oblivious to the stares of admiration from the girls around us; and Elise, Elise with her eyes closed, her head thrown back, her arms drifting high in the air.
She never has a problem letting go, not like me: she’ll slip into the rhythm, or a laugh, or a strange boy’s arms as easily as breathing, not asking for a moment what happens when the moment fades away and there’s nothing left but the pale dawn light and all your old insecurities. I try, but I can’t help my mind skipping over the here-and-now and racing on, to what might come next. Consequence and regret and other might-have-beens: plotting out every angle and scenario, knowing all along that the path I take means missing something else.
Soon—too soon, maybe—it’s past three. The music scratches into nothing and the party shuts down: neon lights breaking through the dim. Suddenly the creepy skeletons and draped entrails are nothing but cheap props, dangling sadly against breezeblock walls and a litter of broken bottles, and our costumes are left smeared and disheveled. The others don’t seem to notice the change—they’re still laughing, dizzy and drunk, their faces flushed from dancing and illicit hookups. The crowd spills outside, lingering on the curb out front, bumming cigarettes and flirting, calling out after-party plans.
The night is still just getting started.
Elise links her arm through mine as we pick our way back across the parking lot. “Are you nervous?” she asks. I shrug. “That means yes.” Elise grins. “Don’t worry, it’ll be over real soon. Tate doesn’t strike me as a guy with much self-control.”
“You’d be surprised,” I tell her, and she throws her head back to laugh.
“I guess I keep underestimating him.” She swings our hands back and forth, like kids on the playground, but her next words are sobering. “You don’t have to, you know.”
“I want to. I just . . .” I stop walking, until the group is way ahead and there’s nothing but dark and headlights surrounding us. “How do you do it?” I ask.
“It’s kind of late to be drawing you a diagram,” Elise teases, but I shake my head.
“Not that. I mean . . . You’re always right here, in the present, and I can’t . . . I can’t get out of my own mind like that.”
Elise tilts her head slightly and looks at me again, serious this time. “It’s easy,” she tells me. “The way I see it, the future doesn’t exist. Nothing does—except now.” She looks around, at the party debris and the disintegrating crowd, the couple making out against a car, his pirate hat falling unnoticed to the ground as he gropes higher under her Red Riding Hood skirt. Elise grins affectionately. “You see? It’s all we have. It’s everything. You can’t get tied up in things that might never matter. All that time you waste, you know? You’ve got to be here.” She presses her index finger to my chest, bare through the low dip of the V slashed in my uniform neckline. “Right now.”