The Charlotte Chronicles (10 page)

“Where do I put my hands?” I ask, wishing it was my hand around the base.

“Anywhere you want.” 

“Here?” I place my hands against his rock hard thighs.

“Yes.” He pauses and then opens his hand to release himself. “Or you can hold on with both hands.”

I make a tunnel with my palms and slide it down over his penis. “Like this?”

He stumbles. “Shit. I can’t stand up.” With a breathless laugh, he toes off his jeans, which I hadn’t gotten around to completely discarding. He pulls me up to my feet.

“But I want—” 

He cuts me off with a firm kiss. “I know, and so do I. But I’m going to fall over because I’m so turned on, so if you don’t mind, I’d like to sit on the end of the bed.” 

“You’re going to teach me to give you a good blow job, though, right?”

His eyes bright with desire and laughter, he croaks out, “The best.”

M
y time
with Charlotte flies by. I had taken her presence in my life for granted, and it isn’t until she is gone that I realize how much she is part of my daily routine. Even before we touched each other in ways that I’d fantasized about, she was always 
here.

And now she’s not. 

Nick feels it too. In the week following her departure, after the whispered private promises and the tear-filled public goodbyes—her tears, not mine—we are both uncharacteristically quiet. 

“Miss her, man.” Nick powers down the car window as we speed to class. “Didn’t think I would because Skype and shit. And because she’s been out of school for weeks. But I still expect her to be home, ready to hear all the crap that went on at school.” 

“Yup,” I answer. My feelings are too intense to give them much verbal play. I don’t want to sound like a preteen who is so insecure that he keeps checking his phone to see if the girl he likes has responded to his last text. But Christ, I do miss her in so many ways. 

I miss her small body next to mine at night. I miss her fingers running through my hair as I sit on the floor to study. She’d lie on the bed and prop her chin on my shoulder, pretending to read but more often distracting me because she claimed I smelled too good not to lick.

Taking a deep breath, I drive those thoughts away so I don’t walk into the school with a hard on so massive my backpack won’t cover it. Yes.
Fuck.
I miss her.

“Guess you’ll have to get used to missing each other if you’re going to spend four years after graduation in the military,” Nick muses.

Guilt spears me because I 
still
 haven’t told Charlotte. I meant to, but then I was distracted by sex. I’m a seventeen-year-old male whose girlfriend wanted to be taught how to give a blow job. Nothing would have steered me away from that course of action. Not a tornado, a five-alarm fire, or confessions about future plans.

And there I go again. The jeans are feeling too tight again. I have to stop thinking about Charlotte and sex. At least for the next eight hours or so. After? Once I’m back in my bedroom, I’ll be jerking it like a madman. My hand will probably be calloused by the time she gets back. I can just picture it.

“Why, Nathan, your hand is so rough. Been working out much?”

“Yeah, I fapped every night for three hours looking at your pictures, smelling your pillow, and remembering your tongue all over my body.”

I’m not sure whether she’ll be disgusted or turned on. As if he’s reading my mind, Nick asks, “Think it will be hard to go without? I mean, like I can’t not have sex every weekend, or I think my brain processes shut down.” 

“Nice, Nick. Real classy.”

“What?” He raises his hands, trying for the innocent look. “There are guys out there who are only pleasuring one woman, and there are guys—like you—who aren’t having sex at all. I’m doing both genders a favor by picking up the slack.”

Shaking my head, I snort. “If that helps you sleep at night. Hope you are wrapping it up. No need for little Jacksons running around before you graduate. Not to mention disease.” 

“Thanks a lot for jinxing me. Next girl I see, I’ll impregnate. And I’m going to blame it on you.”

“You can blame anything you want on me. You’re the one whose life will end when Dad finds out.” 

This shuts Nick down. “I’m mostly just sleeping with Josie and she’s more concerned about pregnancy than I am. I swear she’d prefer it if I wrapped twice. As it is she’s on the pill, wears a diaphragm and requires condom use.”

Josie is a senior at an all-girls Catholic school. She lives on the eighth floor. I’m sure Nick picked her because of the easy access.  “Better than dating a girl who doesn’t know the first thing about birth control.”

When we get to school, I check the time. Charlotte is seven hours ahead, so right now she’s probably getting out of treatment or tutoring. We don’t have a good lock on her schedule yet. I send her a quick text.

As soon as I send it, I realize that this is a bad idea. I don’t want Charlotte asking anyone about sex over there. What if her tutor is a guy and thinks she’s coming on to him?

The bell rings. I try texting and running into the building. 

“Ask her if Sandrine is hot,” Nick says waving his phone at me. Charlotte is texting us both at the same time. He speeds off toward his class, and I run up the stairs for Advanced Comp. “Because Sandrine sounds sexy as fuck.”

When the noon bell rings, I lope down to the entrance, taking the stairs two, three at a time. Near the bottom, I use the railing and catapult myself past three sets of slowpokes. As I’m adjusting my backpack after the vault, I feel a shove against my shoulder. More like in my pectoral area than my shoulder. Looking down, I see the angry face of Charlotte’s friend Greta.

“Whoa there. You drunk this morning?” I straighten her by her shoulders and set her out of my way. I hear the click of a camera phone. It’s another girl whose name I can’t ever remember. Sarah, Susan, Shelly. One of those. I don’t really care though, so I just continue to walk past them until Greta’s next words stop me in my tracks. “Your girl off to get her abortion?” 

Over the blood rushing to my ears, I hear my father’s voice repeatedly telling me to respect the other gender, to be cognizant of my size and how it can be used to intimate without meaning to, how I should treat women in the manner I would want my mother—or Charlotte—to be treated.  With his admonitions in my head, I manage to bite back the word
bitch
and say evenly, “What do you want, Greta?”

She smiles, but there’s no affection there. Not for Charlotte at least. “Just kidding. I know she’s having treatment. She okay?”

I wonder at their closeness if she’s asking. Wouldn’t she have heard from Charlotte if they were friends? I never really paid attention to Charlotte’s female friends. They didn’t interest me. And she has no close male friends; if any of the sausage holders tried to kiss up to her, Nick and I made short shrift of them.

“She’s fine.” I’ve had enough of the conversation. As I turn, the camera shutter sounds again. “What the fuck?”

“Sorry, Nathan,” another girl mumbles and looks at the floor.
Seela.
Her name pops to the front of my memory bank. Her father is a tech venture capitalist, and Seela has all the latest gadgets including camera-embedded glasses. They aren’t allowed in school, however. Reaching over, I pluck the frames off her head. Behind me I sense Nick coming up for support. As Seela attempts to grab her glasses from me, I toss them to him. He squeezes the camera apparatus between his fingers until it cracks.

“Looks like your camera is broken.” Nick smirks as he hands back the lenses. “You’d think they’d be able to make those a little less fragile after all these years.”

I give him a chin nod, and we take off.

“What was that all about?” Nick asks when we are driving to a nearby restaurant for lunch.

“That was about Greta being a complete asswipe. How good of friends are her and Charlotte?”

Nick shrugs. “Not real close. They were on the same competitive gymnastics squad and my guess is that their friendship is more of a frenemy thing.”

“Frenemy?”

“Yeah, like they compete but are teammates.”

I let that thought marinate for a few moments. “Charlotte asked her for condoms, so I figured they were like best friends or something.”

“Nah. Charlotte probably went to Greta because her older sister is in college.”

“Got it.”

It made sense now. Charlotte and Greta were friends of convenience. This didn’t excuse Greta, but it did explain a little why she was trying to get her digs in.

“We going to the Milhawk party this Friday?” Nick asks, done with the conversation about Greta. I am happy to let it drop as well.

“Why not? We got anything better planned?”

“Nope. Can’t drink though, so if you want to get shitfaced, I’ll drive your weak ass home.”

“Thanks for the offer,” I say dryly. Maybe I should tie one on this weekend. It’d make the time fly by a little faster.

J
ason Milhawk lives
in South Loop where old money and new are on display between the historic row houses and the newly furbished townhouses. Milhawk comes from old lumber baron money and lives in a row house which has seen a lot of cocktail parties but only a few ragers.

Milhawk has a fully stocked bar and game room in the basement that his parents had built and sound-proofed so he could practice with his band. Milhawk’s band is terrible, but when you’re drunk it all sounds good.

And I am really drunk. Milhawk dragged me behind the bar the minute that Nick and I got to his house, and we proceeded to see how many shots of Patron we could drink in ten minutes. A lot is the answer to that. I stopped counting after the tenth one because . . . well, I couldn’t count anymore.

Nick’s not allowed to drink because North Prep athletics has a zero tolerance policy. One drop and you’re out and I obviously don’t give a damn but for all his careless attitude, sports mean something to him. I suppose that is why he sleeps around so much. It’s the only vice he’s allowed that won’t affect his eligibility.

If Charlotte were here, I wouldn’t be downing shots either because I’d be too concerned about keeping an eye on her. But she left me and went halfway around the world to hang out with
Fraus
and
Frauleins
and people she says have been puked on by the good looks fairy. I wonder if she means guys too. A chill skitters down my spine. I’ve never been uncertain with Charlotte before. She’s never looked at another guy with any interest . . . but she was a virgin before.

She was nearly animalistic with me before she left. After we had sex that first time, it was like a dam had broken, and she wanted me all the time. Which was great in the moment, but now I’m worried. What if she’s horny and she looks to some other guy close to her to fulfill her needs?
Fuck me sideways.

I fumble with my phone to see if I can call her. What’s the time zone difference again? Would I be waking her up? What time does it say on my phone, anyway? I peer at the screen, trying to get a fix on the numbers that keep moving. Is that a ten? Is it ten? Or is it ten minutes after one?

A slim arm hooks under my arm, and little fingers curl around my biceps. For a minute I think it’s Charlotte, but then the overwhelming scent of musk hits me. The obvious cologne is something Charlotte would never wear. Peering to my left, I see Greta. Something is smudged around her eyes, making her appear alarmingly like a raccoon.

“You’ve got shit under your eyes.” I make a circling gesture in the general direction of her face.

She rolls her eyes at me. “It’s eye shadow, genius.”

I grunt. Looks like raccoon eyes. “Charlotte doesn’t wear her eye shadow like that.”

Greta rolls her eyes even harder. So hard that I wonder why they don’t actually fall out of her eyes. Maybe her eye shadow is like a force field and holds them in. Hmm. I’ll have to ask Charlotte about that. I pick up my phone again, but Greta pulls my arm down.

“Nathan,” she breathes against my neck. “I’m sorry about earlier this week. I was just kidding. I know Charlotte was sick and that she’s not pregnant.”

The air is warm, and her breath smells like she just chewed five mints. There’s an almost medicinal feel to it, and it reminds me uncomfortably of the hospital. I try to move away but realize that I’m sitting on one end of the sofa with the arm against my left side and Greta plastered to my right. I shake my right arm a little to let her know that I need room. When she doesn’t move, I scowl at her.

“Even if she was pregnant, so what? Kid would be mine, and all of us would be happy.”

That’s not entirely the truth. Her mom and dad would frown. A lot. But in the end, Charlotte and me having kids is the culmination of both our families’ dreams. They’d get over it real quick. And we’re going to have kids. Not now, I mean, but later after I’m out of the Marines. We should talk about this. I tap the glass of my phone and the hazy shapes form into the numbers 1:15.

With a finger hovering over the call button, I contemplate the time difference. She might be up. Or I might wake her up. Before I can dial, though, the phone is plucked from my fingers. Greta holds it behind her.

“What the fuck?” As I reach over her body to grab it, she leans backward and I collapse on top of her, somehow falling between her open legs. Her thighs grip my hips, and she rubs against me as I try to get my phone back. A flash of light followed by a shutter sound goes off. I turn toward the offending noise, and it’s that S girl. Fuck. I can’t remember her name again.