The Sound of Us (3 page)

There’s an understanding there, one that reminds me of the first night we met, but so much heavier, like we’re about to forge a path we can’t ever undo.

“Do you want to?” It’s my voice, crazy enough, that asks the question.

He nods. “Bedroom?”

“Yeah—do you have a condom?”

“I think so, but aren’t you on the pill?” He helps me off the counter.

“What is this, an interrogation?”

Chuckling, he kisses me one more time before asking me to hold on a moment. He has to clean off the bed. The second he’s out of the kitchen, I tear off my LINING IT UP? bar shirt, shoving it into my purse, and take the tissues out of my bra. Despite the wonders of push-up bras, they don’t do
wonders
for me. Carpenter’s Dream—
flat as a board.

“Did you get lost?” Cas yells impatiently from his bedroom upstairs.

“
Hold on
!” Looking around, I try to remember where the trashcan was—“Pantry!” I whisper to myself, throwing open the pantry door and shoving the tissues into the garbage

“Baby!” he calls, almost whiny.

“
Coming
!” I snap, looking at my reflection in one of the hanging frying pans over the inlet. I muss up my pink hair, hoping it looks bedhead sexy instead of barmaid greasy, and wipe away the smudges of eyeliner in the corners of my eyes.

“One thousand and one…” he starts and I roll my eyes.

“Fine!” Spinning toward the stairs, I take them two at a time. It’s not until I get to his bedroom door that I realize I still have my socks and Converses on. Is he the type to leave his socks on? Does he care, either way? Should I pee before…before whatever the hell’ll happen in there. It feels like I’m about to go into a black hole, where no one has gone before.

There are manuals for everything—except how to lose your virginity. The closest things I can think of are classic rock songs. You can practically throw a dart blindfolded and hit a song about sex, but tonight isn’t “Love in an Elevator” or “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” I’m at a loss of what it is, and my heart is beating so hard it feels like it’ll rip out of my chest any minute.

When I reach the top landing and turn into his room, my mind drops a blank. Cas is lying on his side, facing me, leg crooked up to display his born talent, in nothing but a…a tie.

A purple tie.

But I’m not looking at the tie. My throat constricts.

“C’mon, baby,” he purrs, shifting back on his elbows, and all I want to do is jump on top of him. That’s not weird, is it? Oh who cares, I’m on birth control.

And a virgin.

He knows that, right?

I can’t remember whether or not I ever told him I’ve never actually done the nasty with another guy—or girl, if I swung that way—but I can’t really stop thinking about that
tie
. That long, thick, hard tie—I mean—
Stop thinking Junie.

Swallowing my heart back down into my throat, I take a tentative step into his darkly lit bedroom. Posters of Harleys and European cities are plastered on his walls. Somewhere downstairs, Roman Holiday’s “Crush On You” echoes through the entire house in a sick sort of sadistic irony. My ankles wobble, but I keep my cool, trying to slip out of my Converses on the way to his bed.

“I even have
mood
lighting,” he adds, thumbing back to the flickering electric candles on his headboard.

“They’re...nice…” I get one shoe off halfway to the bed, and dig my toe into the back of my other shoe right when I hit a silky pair of underwear on the ground. I catch myself on the edge of the bed. With my Converses successfully off.
Score
.

He gives me a wide-eyed look. “Baby, you okay?”

I flip back my hair, trying to play it off. “Oh yeah,” I say, trying to sound aloof and sexy, because I didn’t fall and bust my ass on his silky underwear. I lean back on the bed. “I’m perfe—”

But my hand meets complete air.

With a cry, I pinwheel my arms forward, grappling for anything I can to keep myself from falling back. What I manage to grab a hold of his tie.

“Wait!” he yelps a second before his words are strangled out of him, and we fall into a heap at the foot of his bed together. He gasps, clawing the tie loose from around his neck, and coughs. “You choked me!”

“I was falling!”

“You could’ve fallen
alone
!” He snaps, crawling back up onto the bed.

I frown, untangling my legs out from under me. This is a disaster. “I’m sorry, I just ruined everything.”

After a moment, I feel a tap on my shoulder. He outstretched a hand to help me back onto the bed before his eyes flicker down to my black polka-dotted bra. “Is that Victoria Secret?”

“My only one,” I offer meekly. “Any other night would’ve been Target.”

He reaches over me and kisses the skin between my breasts, as if he’s accepting my apology. His lips travel down my breasts to my navel, his fingers curling around the belt loops to my shorts, before they begin to undo the button and zip them down. We take them off together, and he kisses my hipbone, and the splotch on the side of my waist where a birthmark never quite faded. I shiver, unable to take a full breath, feeling his lips move their way up my body again, his hands undoing my bra.

His naked body presses against mine, skin on skin, the connection so startling it’s like there are live wires just under the surface, and every touch sends a jolt to my center. It disrupts me, interferes with my thoughts, my signal.

What bar? What sound guy?

Who’s Junie?

It doesn’t matter. I’m not her for the moment. I’m not anyone, lost in the dark, and the thought is so frightful and so relieving at the same time, because there’s no expectation, no plans, no plots. Only the traces of his fingers against my skin, like a sculptor creating Venus, and his lips on mine.

He slides on top of me, and the only thing separating us is my thin black underwear. My hands wrap around the tie instinctively, but then on second thought, I undo the knot and slide it from around his neck.

“Just in case,” I tease.

“I hope not,” he replies, and I help him tug down my underwear, and throw them somewhere across the room. Then he takes out a condom from his nightstand, and tears it open.

I’m not sure when I started to like Caspian, or when I began thinking that these moments could be something more. But couldn’t they? It’s crazy, but isn’t it possible? That he likes me as much as I like him? It’s like serendipity, meeting over all these months, wherever I was he showed up, or wherever he was I happened to be, too. We’ve always found each other. For
six months
.

Do
I like Caspian? Or is that even the question anymore?

He plants his hands on both sides of my head, his shoulder muscles rippling in the light from the electric candles, and kisses me. “Ready?”

“Yes,” I say against his mouth. He kisses me again as he slides into me, the movement so orchestrated he must have practiced it with other girls. How many other girls? Why am I thinking about this right now? Why—

He eases deeper, and pain shoots through my stomach, straight up my spine and into my scalp. I gasp, blinking the tears out of my eyes.

He pauses for a moment. “You okay?”

In reply, I grab both sides of his face and kiss him again to make the pain go away. It almost does, and it lets him keep going. I stare into his face, so close to mine, but I’ve never felt so far away. His eyes are closed like he’s concentrating, in and out, in and out. It feels uncomfortable and too quick, and all I can hear is Roman Holiday echoing up from somewhere downstairs, howling
“
I want to crush, crush, crush on you. I want to crush on you like back, back, back in high school.
”

God, he could’ve at
least
turned off that stupid radio.

I close my eyes as he grunts, and try to imagine what we
might
look like. Sexy like in the movies? All bed sheets and lavender throw pillows and close-up blurry shots of arms and legs and me throwing my pink hair back as I come in ecstasy…but this isn’t good sex. This is terrible.

Robotic.

But the worst thing is, in my head I don’t imagine Cas. Not his blond hair or dimples or chiseled abs. I try, but every time I do—every time I think about how he kisses me and how he touches me—all I can hear is that fucking radio.

His shoulder muscles seize, and then he rolls off me without so much as a sigh.

“Crush On You” fades into another pop-rock ballad as he brings my hand to his lips and kisses my knuckles, one at a time.

“Happy six months,” I whisper, finally opening my eyes to stare silently up at his dark ceiling, but he’s already snoring.

The condo has a new paint job this year. Guess the sea-foam green didn’t cut it anymore. There’s a new pullout couch too, and a new TV to replace the one from the Stone Age that kept losing reception last year. The bedroom is a drowning blue to match the sailboat picture hanging above the bed, and the kitchen has new tile in the pattern of a checkerboard. The only thing the renovation hasn’t touched is the bird-shit yellow bathroom Dad hated.

“I feel like I should be following the yellow brick road every time
I
lay a brick in here,” he used to complain. Of all the things to keep, it was that god-awful
yellow
?

Staring around at the condo, I realize that I don’t remember a lot of the other smaller details of our yearly beach week. Like who gets the ice for the cooler? Who checks us in? Who unloads the suitcases and who make coffee in the mornings?

It isn’t two minutes after we’ve walked in the door with our suitcases before our loud neighbor Darla pays her cordial visit. She doesn’t knock. She never knocks. She’s loud, smokes a pack of Marlboros a day, and downs tequila as if it’s low-calorie soda.

In other words, Dad loved her.

Picking up my Vera Bradley duffle, I haul it into the bedroom before she sees me. Not that I don’t love Darla—because I do—but she couldn’t wait another ten minutes before barging in with her big hoorah? I press my ear against the crack in the door to listen.

“Knock knock!” Darla trills, her flip-flops making slapping noises against her feet as she prances inside. Mom squeals in excitement, throwing her arms around her. “Oh, Sherry,” Darla says. “I’m so sorry about Willy, dear. I’m so, so sorry.”

That sobers Mom up quickly. “It’s all right. He would’ve wanted me to move on.”

I disagree. Wrenching away from the door, I fling myself down on the bed and clench fistfuls of duvet in my hands.

How could she know what Dad would’ve wanted? Did he tell her to marry her high school sweetheart three months after his death? Everyone thought it was just so
convenient
that he died. Thought she had been cheating on Dad with Chuck. They looked at me with a mixture of pity and leprosy, as if infidelity was catching.

I haven’t been very subtle about how I feel about her new husband. At the wedding, I boycotted the bridesmaids’ dresses, showed up late to the ceremony, and skipped the rest of the reception where I think I was supposed to give a speech. At school, I started writing lyrics to my favorite songs instead of essay papers. At Prom, I spilled my punch all over the DJ’s turntable when he wouldn’t stop playing Usher and Jay-Z. I wasn’t a bad apple. I was just sick and tired of not being heard no matter how loud I screamed.

I unwind my earphones from around my iPod, and put it on shuffle to drown out their voices, shoving handfuls of shirts and shorts from my suitcase into the top drawer. I reach back into my suitcase for my underwear.

My hand comes out empty.

I pat down the rest of my suitcase, but all I find are socks and bras. “
Fuck
. It’s official. This vacation can’t get any worse.”

“Junie! Darla wants to see you! Why don’t you come out and say hello?” Mom calls from the kitchen. I’ve been summoned.

I stand, pulling out my earphones and dropping my music player into my suitcase, before I open the bedroom door and force a smile. “Darla! Didn’t even hear you come in!” Lies, all lies.

Darla gives an overly theatrical gasp when she sees me. “Oh my gosh, what the hell did you do to your hair?”

Keep smiling
, I remind myself. “I dyed it.”

She rakes me over with a studious look, pursing her pink lips together. “It’s definitely a change.”

“And she will be going to the beautician as soon as we get back,” Mom adds, giving me a meaningful look.

“I like my hair,” I defend, even though it
is
a little bright. Out in the sun I look like a walking bubblegum lollipop.

“But think about what everyone else thinks,” she chides.

Like she can talk. I clench my jaw to keep from saying as much. Darla notices the tension and eases in with a wave of her hand. “Girls just want to have fun, Sherry. Let her experiment and find herself. It’s not like she has a
tattoo
,” she adds.

“She’s eighteen,” Mom tells her, as if that will finalize the argument. Yeah?
She’s
forty-two. That didn’t stop her from making poor life choices.

“Well, I think she looks gorgeous. It brings out her gray eyes,” Darla replies, finally pulling me into a rib-crushing hug.

“I’m gorgeous too,” Chuck jokes, pulling the luggage cart into the condo. He parks it in the kitchen and wipes the sheen of sweat off his wrinkled brow. “In fact, I’m damn near
beau-tee-ful
.”

“For a Hobbit,” I mutter so only Darla can hear, and her cheeks balloon as she tries to keep from laughing. Chuck is short like me, but stockier, with an angular jaw and some pretty hairy feet. I really hope Mom convinced him to Nair them last night. Grabbing my purse from the kitchen counter, I pull it over my shoulder. “I’m going to the store.”

“For what?” Chuck asks.

“Underwear!” I call exasperatedly over my shoulder and slam the front door behind me before Mom can say, “I told you so.”

CherryTree Ocean Club is a condominium on the north side of Myrtle Beach. It’s a nice place if you overlook the peeling tan and peach paint and the tarnished railings. The parking lot has potholes, and the palm trees planted by the entrance droop like soggy sponges, but that doesn’t stop the tourists. Overlook the smell of diapers and chlorine and you might have yourself a really good time. It’s definitely not Chuck’s kind of place because it’s no five-star resort, but Dad loved it. He said, “Places like these have character!” Sort of like the Silver Lining. One of the toilets might not work and you might find gum on the bottom of a chair, but it’s a place where everyone knows your name. Like in
Cheers
.