Such a Rush(69)
Author: Jennifer Echols

I rolled closer and watched over his shoulder. “Not that one. They don’t deliver to this trailer park because they’ve had so many problems out here.”

He gaped at me again. “What do you mean, they—”

I chopped my hand across my throat.

He closed his mouth and showed me the screen for a different pizza place.

“Perfect,” I said.

An hour later, we were full of pizza, and I loved him a little more. I’d figured things would get awkward when we sat down on the pitted couch to eat with no TV in front of us. What were we supposed to do for entertainment, stare at my second-grade photo?

But we talked airplanes. He told me about his dad taking him and Alec and Jake to Sun and Fun in central Florida, to which everybody flew their planes instead of driving, and the biggest fly-in in all of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where he’d seen his first Harrier. He said the noise of a Harrier put the Chinook to shame. I’d never heard a Harrier.

We put away the pizza, he stepped into the bathroom, and I snuggled back into bed. I felt comfortable with him here. The only person who’d ever been in my bedroom, besides me and my mom, was Mark—and only that first night, when I thought we were going to do it and he fell asleep instead.

My mom had issued the invitation for him to live here, and when he passed out drunk, it was like she’d invited her life to become my life and lie useless beside me in my bed, the most private of spaces, and I wasn’t allowed to get rid of it. Most nights after that when he’d stayed here, he’d gone out with his friends to get plastered, and I’d locked myself in my room. I knew from experience with the trailer that he could easily have kicked the door in if he’d wanted to badly enough, but he’d been too drunk to care that deeply. He’d only knocked on the door, then yelled threats at me, then passed out on the couch in the den. I’d stretched to take up both sides of my bed, relieved.

Funny how my feelings about Mark and Grayson were night and day. I’d thought I liked Mark at first. I’d tried hard to like him, but I just couldn’t. I’d never wanted to like Grayson. I just did. And whereas I would have cringed at seeing the silhouette of Mark reentering my bedroom in the moonlight, my heart sped up when I saw Grayson coming back. To say good night, maybe. That was better than nothing. Or just to slip on his clothes. The promise of making love again seemed too good to be true.

He slid through the sheets next to me and nuzzled my neck until I giggled. He reached out. With one gentle hand, he turned my face to his so he could kiss me long on the lips. No urgency this time, just a lazy exploration of my mouth with his tongue.

After a few minutes, he said, “The floor in the bathroom is spongy.”

He paused, allowing me to explain.

When I didn’t say anything, he went on, “Like the pipes have had a slow leak for decades, and the water has disintegrated the floorboards. That thin layer of linoleum on top is all that’s preventing you from falling through.”

He paused again.

When I just glared at him, he instructed me, “You should call the landlord. He’s required to fix stuff like that, even if you’ll only be here a few more weeks.”

This time when he stopped running his trap, he realized from the look on my face that he’d said something wrong. He bit his lip. “What.”

“My mom did call the landlord,” I said self-righteously. “Years ago, right after we moved in. He said the floor had been like that for twenty years, it had been like that when my mother signed the lease, and if she hadn’t been too good for the trailer when she signed the lease, she wasn’t too good for it now.”

“Leah. Okay,” he said soothingly, a soft contrast with my voice, which had risen to a shout. He touched my lip with two long fingers, shushing me. “I’ve hit a nerve and I don’t know what it is. What are you trying to tell me?”

“I am trying to tell you to shut? Up!” I was so angry that my brain was flooded with it and I couldn’t even see him anymore. Everything was ruined now. I had known better than to let him into the trailer.

“Why didn’t you do like that?” He chopped his hand back and forth across his throat. “I thought that was the signal.”

I chopped my hand back and forth across my throat in turn. “Because I would be doing this all night!”

“Great,” he muttered. “Now I have to start all over.” He rolled out of bed, dragged me after him, and threw me over his shoulder.

“Hey!” I yelled. He was laughing, a sound I’d longed for so deeply that, despite myself, I laughed too.

He set me down on the counter in the kitchen and kissed me again.

I knew he was making a point of working his body over my body in exactly the way he’d done it when he first arrived. I knew he was being sweet and accommodating my hang-up. I tried to get into what he was doing. But my mind was still on the bathroom floor with the leaking pipes, the slow rot, the landlord who thought that’s exactly what my mother and I deserved.

In my mind I put Grayson back where he belonged, at his shack by the beach, furnished with nothing but a futon and a surfboard. Instead of the counter, he kissed me on the sand, and I rose to meet him again.

The radio startled me awake. Grayson must have set the alarm accidentally when he turned the radio off. I hit the button and nuzzled against him, glad to have another hour in bed with him, another hour of sleep. But he slipped from the bed. The streetlight through the window lit the edges of his hard muscles as he felt around on the dark floor for his clothes.

“Leaving?” I asked, trying not to sound disappointed.

“I have to get back to the other side of town before Alec wakes up so he doesn’t guess where I’ve been.” Grayson sat on the edge of the bed and put his hand over my hand. “I know this sucks, but I need you to keep dating Alec for me. Now that you know why, you’ll do that for me, right?”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I slid my hand out from under his hand. But I managed to keep my voice ironically pleasant as I asked, “What if he tells me tomorrow that he feels like we’ve gotten really close, and he wants to take it to the next level? What if he wants to come back here with me alone? What if he wants to go all the way? Should I let him? Can you stop by the store and buy me a new pack of condoms just in case?”

He closed his eyes like I’d slapped him. His face was three horizontal lines: two eyes, grim mouth. “That’s not going to happen. Either he doesn’t like you very much and none of this has worked, or he’ll see this week as just the beginning, and he’ll ask you to our prom next weekend.”