—Oh, I forgot you—
—Yeah, I translated. But it is bad, it sounds ridiculous. There’s another part where the real translation is godhead, I have to make that also not ridiculous.
—Well, go on.
—Really?
—Yeah, really. What did you think?
The paper sinks down. She curls my leg over hers. —Even the girl, who thinks she knows her young lover …
—Why did you ask me over that time?
—The first time? I don’t know, we just met, right? Maddy introduced us?
—No, you just beckoned me over.
—Before that, we met at lunch. No, wait, maybe I was just looking at you. I remember your jeans were too tight.
—What?
—Your black ones, Cole. How could you not know that, the way that was. Even she isn’t close enough for him to tell how this lord of lust.
—You’re kidding about that. Lord of lust?
Her leg keeps rubbing over me. I’m getting thicker and thicker. The line about my jeans too tight, it’s working.
Done with homework, or half-done anyway. Think of a good search term, amateur outdoors. Hello, girls. Then her name comes up on the screen. Still not used to seeing it.
—What are you up to?
I shut all the naked windows. —Nothing you?
—To be honest I was masturbating.
Hard to type “whoawhoawhoaohmygodwhat” so I type nothing.
—Not super successfully, though. Can you call me? Are you alone?
My pants are already uncomfortable as I walk to lay my backpack across the door.
—Yeah one sec.
—Are you hard, Cole?
Fingers on the phone, I’m saying it out loud to the waiting screen. —One sec one sec one sec …
She speaks up for it, the sex. It’s not just something she lets me do or enjoys. It’s something she wants and asks for. Actually, she’s like that, I am seeing, about everything, and it’s exciting. It’s spooky.
She shows up one morning bounding into school with a quick kiss and a motorcycle helmet, shiny black like a smooth globe of a blank new planet, tucked under her arm trying to look like no big deal. She cannot help grinning no matter how long she’s lived in Europe.
—My mom let me have it for the day. I’m taking you on a ride after school.
We’d already had sex, but that afternoon with the howling wind, my fingers clenched on her back real hard, the shriek in my ears rushing by and the cooped-up sight with my eyes locked on her back, reined-in with terror and the buzz, the stupendous vibing of the thrum of the shiver of the engine all up between my legs pushing its electrics through my throttling spine to my gasping teeth, the dismount onto the gravel of the rest stop to be tugged through damp trees to the woods shady and chilly on the damp ground, ripping the wrapper open while she smiles with her jeans off and socks on, that was the first time we fucked.
—Officially together?
She repeats this in the tone of what’s-the-problem-officer. I already thought it might not work, to ask her.
—OK.
—Do we need a permit, Cole? Do I have to pay for the whole year up front?
—I was just asking.
—Can we just, play it as it goes along, by ear?
And, like a sock to the stomach, I get how every previous girl felt looking and asking that question, officially, at me.
We walk in together to a party, and it’s like they can smell it on us. She must have told some girl who told everyone. I get high-fivey nods from guys I don’t know. Girls only talk to me about her. We dance a little but everyone is wondering why don’t we just leave. We have a car. Lords of lust. We should be in it fucking.
—You’re with Grisaille now? Officially.
Alec was waiting where we meet up sometimes, mad. He hadn’t answered the last couple times but I hadn’t thought about it. —Yeah.
—And you didn’t tell me. It’s officially, and you didn’t—
—I did tell you. What, Alec, the fuck? Is it the details you want?
He shoved me, a real shove, and then scraped at his eyes a little. —Fuck you.
—What?
—Figure it out.
He was already stalking away toward the gate. What are the rules on this? If he was a girlfriend, I would try more onscreen, I’m a dick or sorry or Are you OK are we OK now? or try to hack it out through his friends. But his friends are me, and guys I wouldn’t ever talk to about anything, and besides he is not, not, not my fucking girlfriend.
—S, A …
I tell her she’s wrong already. —It wasn’t even S.
—Felt like S. Do it again.
—I love your eyes when I do this.
—It feels like finger painting.
—It’s not finger painting. I’m writing a real word on your back. Guess.
—L.
—Not L.
—Don’t make me guess, Cole. It could be anything. Just keep writing.
And I do. I keep writing, and not just, I’m thinking, the dirty parts. There’s more.
—So you lived in Cairo and Lisbon.
—Italy as a kid. Germany for, I guess it was, one semester, and then back again.
—Like here.
—Well, not much like here.
I lean into her belly, the smell so warm and strange with something girls at my high school do not wear, do not smell like. Familiar, foreign at the same time, like someone I literally dreamed up. —Did you have a guy in Germany?
—Cole.
—I’m just asking.
—You want me to start that, you? You who can’t be in the same room or else Adrienne will tear you limb from limb she hates you so much?
—What are you doing?
I stop it, I was nervous about it anyway. —Sorry.
—No, no, go ahead. I’m just curious.
—You’re a beautiful girl.
—I don’t know.
—What? You are.
—Girl feels weird.
—You’re a beautiful woman.
—No, no, now I’m old when you say that like that.
—Well not girl not woman, I don’t know—
She moves close. —Just say beautiful.
And I do.
—Keep your panties on.
—What?
—Keep—
—But how could we—
—I’ll pull them aside, leave them on.
—OK …
She stands up with a ridiculous, ridiculously sexy smile. —… If you wear one shoe, and both of these barrettes …
Kristen waves her hand in front of my face. —Group project. Not, Kristen does it while you think about your girlfriend.
—OK, shut up, OK.
—She is something to think about, though. You’ve met your match with that one.
I say it dirtily so she’ll shut up maybe. —A perfect fit.
She just rolls her eyes. Nothing’s dirty to her now, not in month four, is it, with Mark and his beard. —She could snap you in two, Cole. She probably has, come to think of it.
We sit at the donut place all day after school. I have an English paper I totally spaced and Grisaille is at her phone and drawing birds on napkins. Her bare wrist brushes me and I remember her skin and look up slow, her leg tendrilled up with mine now, the epic happy, so calm, that there’s so much time with her stretched out, plenty to finish this moment before we go home to her room.
Rob runs into me in the parking lot.
—You’re with that Spanish girl now?
—She’s not Spanish. She just lived in Lisbon for a while with her dad, so actually—