“Do you have any idea how beautiful I think you are since we were in ninth grade?”
She laughed. “That sentence came out pretty ungrammatical,” she said. She was overcome with lust, pulled Jared’s T-shirt over his head, pressed her face into the amber-colored fur on his flat chest.
“You’re so beautiful,” she said, as Jared pulled the bandanna out of her hair, which he ran his hands through, then slowly lifted her batik sleeveless jersey off her chest, her arms rising in the air. He unlatched her bra in the back, then, as she stood there with her arms out, crouched down and kissed her nipples all over until they rose.
He looked up at her, his hair wild where she’d run her hands through it. He smiled.
“I love your little crooked tooth,” she said.
“I was going to get it fixed, but now I won’t,” he said. Gently, he put her at arm’s length. “Get naked in front of me.”
She smiled. In her stonedness, Jared was both Jared and not-Jared; he was also some hot frat creep she didn’t know who scared her a little bit, and she liked this duality. She stepped out of her huaraches, out of her skirt. They both lost their smiles and stared at each other flatly. She pulled off her panties in front of him until she was naked.
Now he smiled again. “Fuck,” he said.
“Now you go,” she said.
He pulled off each dirty Chuck Taylor low-top with the toes of his other foot. He was sockless and Milly could smell the faint, sour smell of his large, sweaty feet, his toes flecked with light brown hair. He unbuttoned his Levi’s and stepped out of them, his erection tent-poling his light, paisley-patterned boxer shorts.
She laughed a little bit, raising her eyebrows. “Wowza,” she said. “Are you gonna show me the goods?”
He cocked an eyebrow. “It’s big, right?” he asked, without a hint of humor.
Milly laughed. “It looks that way. I’m a little afraid. Can I see it?”
Jared blushed, but he was clearly so proud. He pulled it out of his boxers. It was sizable and stood there, bobbing, pointed at her like a greedy weapon. Her mouth fell open; she was amazed, but also a bit scared.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it’s huge.”
She laughed. “Don’t be too self-deprecating or anything!”
Jared just shrugged. The chorus of the song came up. Nothing compares to you, she sang to him, then cracked up.
His face lit up. “Millicent Heyman,” he said slowly. He stepped in toward her, sang, All the flowers that you planted, Mama, in the backyard. He knelt down, put his arms around her waist, brought her down to the shag rug with him. He reached up, pulled a rough shantung roll pillow off the couch, put it behind her head. He sank below her again, his hands up over her breasts, lying on his stomach.
“Oh my God,” gasped Milly when she felt his tongue inside her. “I’m new to this rodeo.”
He looked up at her, his mouth glistening. “Really? A cunnilingus virgin?”
She giggled and nodded.
“I’ve been jerking off to this thought for about a year,” he said.
“Oh my God!” she gasped again. She was horrified and delighted. “You really had to share that with me?”
He looked up again. “After all those art classes. Looking at your picture in the freshman directory.”
“No, please tell me you haven’t,” she said. She arched her head back on the roll pillow and put her hands up to her face, but he pulled them down and held them. She lay there. Oh God. She was terrified, mesmerized. Every arrow in the world is pointing right at me, she thought. It’s like a white-hot spotlight. I don’t deserve this much attention. She writhed and moaned. It was almost as if Jared had disappeared in the dark and there was just a lapping demon on her. She felt almost unbearably uncomfortable having the world focused on her so completely like this.
She gripped his hands, choked out, “No, it’s too much.”
He gripped her hands back. “No, it’s not.”
She started crying.
He stopped and pulled up to her, head to head, brushing back her hair. “What?” he asked. “You don’t like it?”
“It’s too much.” She couldn’t believe she was crying. What a — what a wuss she was! “I don’t deserve it.” Now she was mortified. Had she really just said that? She wanted to die.
Jared laughed. “That’s the issue? Did you like it?”
“I can’t take that much pleasure. I’ll go nuts on you.”
His face lit up again. “I want you to. Such a good girl.”
“You don’t really know me,” she told him. She was fully stoned now and had no idea what she was saying. “I can’t lose control.”
He sighed a bit. “I might know you more than you think,” he said.
“No, you don’t.”
He ran a finger around her lips, over her nose. “People show themselves,” he said.
This possibility truly dismayed her. Jared put one arm around Milly and moved the other one back down between her legs, which she’d absently left open.
“What do you want, Milly?” he asked her.
Why did he have to ask her that? But — she locked into the deepest center of his eyes, and in that random moment, she had the blessing of having her self-consciousness taken away, replaced by the full gratitude of feeling him naked against her in the big room with jumping shadows on the walls.
“Okay,” she managed to say. “If you really want to know. I want us to fuck and to feel you inside of me and feel incredibly close to you.” A fire truck blared by several stories below and threw crazy lights against the ceiling for a second.
Jared smiled, quite self-satisfied. “I can give you that,” he said.
After that, it got better for Milly. She had lost her virginity that past year to a guy from Atlanta she’d dated for exactly seven weeks in the fall and she’d had her share of sex, but she’d never felt both so satisfyingly base and so safe as she did in this moment with Jared. The allure of his honey-fuzz-covered pale skin, that little bit of white softness right around the waist, the claylike flatness at the end of his nose. He was very close to entering her with his prize trophy when he reached over for his pants, pulled out his wallet, and took out a condom.
“Here,” she said, sitting up and rolling it over him. In the time between his first entering her, with the gasps and fits and starts, and the thirty, thirty-five minutes when they simply didn’t stop, her world spun over her. There was her senior year, that bizarre road trip with her dad when they’d visited Vassar and then visited her mom on the way back, that image of her mom — Milly and her dad entering a living room of zombielike people sitting in front of Sally Jesse Raphael, no Ava in sight, until a tight ball on the couch covered in a hospital-issue thermal sheet turned out to be her, out cold. Then the spittle around her mouth as she tried to talk once they’d woken her up. These were the images going through her head as Jared slowly moved in, their eyes locked, their lips grazing. It really didn’t pay for her to get stoned before sex, she noted, feeling like her brain would burst as Jared’s widest point approached.
“What is it?” He stopped, looked at her. “Where are you?”
“I’m here,” she said. She pressed his hips down harder into her. The two guys that night, Hector and the blond, the kiss she’d caught on the street and how they’d caught her looking, how she’d darted away. What had she wanted to say to them? Jared was so deep inside her now, sweating in the air-conditionless, ceiling-fanned apartment.