All four of them are sprawled on the hoods of the cars—boys on one, girls on the other. They listen to the lullaby of the motorway and stare up at the dirty orange sky. The night air smells hot and dense. Beneath a low moon, the town cowers: smokestacks, parking lots, roundabouts. Everything has washed out to gray. Katia and Evie share a cigarette, ringing the filter with sticky lip-gloss in varying shades of pink.
Katia smokes like she’s sucking a cock, slow and deliberate, a performance. She knows Evie is watching her, and she arches her body slightly on the hood so Evie can see the curve of her back-hips-tits. Katia knows Evie has a crush on her because she’s older and always has a boyfriend. Katia has a crush on Evie too, because she has high round tits and a rosebud mouth and makes amazing noises when she fucks. Evie likes Katia because she is jaded, and Katia likes Evie because she is not.
The boys are still looking up at the sky, but they start to make grumbling noises. They want cigarettes, beer, music. They start jingling the car keys in their pockets, but the road down the hill is pitted and neither car’s suspension makes any difference.
Without conferring, the girls slide off the hood, their skirts riding up and flashing their brightly colored thongs. Hand in hand, they walk down the winding hill toward the beacon of the all-night garage.
Wearing sunglasses inside at night makes Evie feel like a movie star. They aren’t just a conceit: the fluorescents inside the garage are blinding after the dim glow of the car’s interior light. Evie’s calves are itching and gray from the dusty path, her skirt stuck to her thighs with sweat. The garage’s air-conditioning is cold enough to make her nipples harden, and she crosses her arms over her chest so the guy behind the counter can’t see. She paws through the meager collection of wares. Tree-shaped air fresheners, trees on the labels of the mineral water, Country Life magazines full of trees. It’s fucking stupid: nothing around here even resembles a tree.
Katia snorts, and Evie looks up. Katia is standing, arms akimbo, face raised to the top shelf of the magazine rack. She waits for Evie to walk over then grabs an armful of the magazines. Evie looks over Katia’s shoulder at the plastic-wrapped covers showing girls with glazed eyes and black bars over their nipples. She’s close enough to smell Katia’s hair: sweet fruity shampoo under bitter hairspray. Katia pulls one of the magazines out of the plastic bag and flips through it. Every page is a different girl, her hair dyed and legs spread. There are no black bars on the inside pages, and the girls’ cunts are spread open, the bull’s-eye of every image.
Evie’s clit throbs. The images aren’t sexy, but she can’t stop staring at the honesty of their open legs. Their tits are clearly fake, high on their ribs and beach ball–tight. But their cunts are pure truth: wet and pink, like steak freshly cut. Evie wonders whether Katia’s clit is throbbing too.
Katia is pretty sure she knows more about Evie’s sexual tastes from those blurry glimpses through the car window than her own boyfriend. Although Evie is acting like she’s totally unfazed by the array of cunts, Katia knows otherwise. She can tell by the way Evie is shifting her weight from one leg to the other, the way she’s chewing on her lip, the loudening of her breath. When Evie walked over to the magazine rack, Katia could see her nipples through the thin fabric of her bikini top. Katia knows that Evie can probably see her nipples too, but she doesn’t give a shit. She doesn’t even care if the perv behind the counter can see. Katia has great tits, and she knows it, and so the whole fucking world can stare.
Katia jams the magazines back onto the top shelf and turns to Evie. She looks stoned, pupils huge and mouth hanging slack. Katia pulls Evie’s chin, opening her mouth farther, imagining it will snap back and start rolling up window blind–style like in a cartoon. It’s meant to be a joke, but standing there with her heat-swollen hands on Evie’s jaw she can see the tiny lines of her lip, can feel the stickiness of her lip-gloss on the tip of her thumb, and it doesn’t feel very funny. Katia is suddenly aware of the buzzing fluorescents, the dust itching her legs, the slow stare of the man behind the counter. Her clit feels swollen, her nipples tight. All the pressure in the air seems to coalesce between her legs.
She knows what she should do: let go of Evie, buy cigarettes for the boys, go back out into the dusty night and climb the hill back to that sweaty backseat. She takes Evie’s hand and leads her out the back door of the garage.
Walking outside feels like crawling under a blanket. The air is hot and completely still, and Evie can feel the sweat already prickling on the small of her back. She hopes her palms won’t feel wet against Katia’s. Her whole body feels tight, her skin as thin as an expanding balloon.
They forgot to buy the cigarettes, and Evie is about to mention it when Katia spins her around and presses her up against the brick wall of the garage and slides her tongue into Evie’s mouth. All the blood rushes out of Evie’s head. She kisses Katia back just to stay standing. The atmosphere is so humid she can barely take a breath, the air like cotton wool in her lungs.
Katia kisses hard, but her lips are soft and she tucks Evie’s hair behind her ear before pulling away to smile at her. Evie has Katia’s tits pressed up against her tits, Katia’s legs tangled in her legs, Katia’s fingers entwined with her fingers. All she can think to do is return the smile. Katia seems to take this as consent. She lifts Evie’s hair in her hands, piling it up and pressing her palms against the heat of Evie’s neck, before kissing her again.
Katia has two heartbeats, one in her chest and one between her legs, and she’s pressed up so close to Evie that she must be able to feel both. Evie’s skin smells sweet and metallic: fresh perspiration and sugary lip-gloss and boys. Evie’s body feels unfamiliar pressed against her own, with bumps where boys don’t have them and an absence where they usually do. Katia wonders how she is supposed to know if Evie wants to fuck—she’s used to the reassurance of a hard cock against her hip. She stops for a moment, unsure, and Evie wriggles against her, pressing her pelvic bone against Katia’s, and then she knows for sure that Evie wants to fuck.
Evie loves having her nipples sucked, and judging from the way Katia immediately takes them into her mouth, she seems aware of the fact. She sucks hard, and Evie’s thong is already sliding up into her slickening cunt, the fabric uncomfortable against her swollen clit. Evie’s skirt is up around her hips, her bikini top shoved to the side, and she pushes her thong down with one hand and guides Katia’s fingers into her with the other.
Katia slides two fingers in, curling them round so the pads press against that little patch of ridged skin, the web between finger and thumb pressing against Evie’s clit. Evie can’t make words so she just rolls her eyes up to the fading sky and rides Katia’s fingers, feeling her wetness pool in Katia’s palm. Katia presses her up against the gritty brick wall, fucking her harder, and then Evie feels it, the crest of the wave, the tip of the mountain, and the feeling throbs from her clit to her throat and back down again to settle low in her belly. She can feel her cunt spasming around Katia’s fingers, and before the feeling fades she drops to her knees and pulls Katia’s thong to the side.