The Space Between Us

“I don’t want to share my secrets with strangers. Then they wouldn’t be secrets anymore.”

“Why’s it have to be a secret?” She smiled.

I drew my fork through the mashed potatoes left on my plate. She’d been right about the shepherd’s pie. “I have to face those people every day at work. I don’t want them knowing about my sex life.”

“We don’t only talk about sex. We talk about lots of things.” Meredith had eaten only half her food, and now she pushed her plate away with her fingertips.

I wiped my mouth with a paper napkin and thought of how she’d left the imprint of her lips behind on the one I’d eventually tossed in the trash. “What is it about secrets and stories you like so much, anyway?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve always liked knowing things about people. I guess you could say … I’m a collector.”

“Of what?”

“People,” Meredith said. “Interesting people.”

“How do you do that?” I asked, meaning to sound light, but realizing I was leaning closer again.

“I watch them for a while, see if they look interesting. You can’t always tell at first.”

I nodded. “Of course not.”

“So I talk to them. See if they don’t seem stuck-up. If they’re cool, I get them to tell me about themselves. People like talking about themselves, Tesla.” She paused. Smiled a bit reproachfully. “Most people do, anyway.”

I thought of the group she gathered around her at the Mocha. I was probably my least interesting at work, where Joy managed to suck the life out of any attempts at creativity. “Did you collect me?”

“Doing my best,” Meredith said, with another of those smiles that turned me inside out. She cocked her head. “I’m not a stranger, am I?”

I wasn’t quite sure what she was, but it wasn’t that. “No.”

She looked around the bar, which had become steadily more crowded as the evening went on, but still offered us a lot of privacy. “And you’re not at work.”

“Thank God.”

Meredith was the one who leaned, this time. “So, Tesla. Tell me something.”

“What do you want to know?”

She pretended to think, in such an exaggerated way I was sure she’d already thought of what she wanted to hear before she’d even asked. “What’s the best sex you’ve ever had?”

“You go first.” I made the same offer I’d made the last time I told her a story, but again, she put me off.

“The best sex I’ve ever had is always the last sex I had,” Meredith told me. “Otherwise, what’s the point?”

“Lucky you,” I murmured.

She leaned closer. The table was just large enough for our two plates and glasses, and since I’d already leaned in a bit myself, she got pretty close. Her pupils had gone wide in the dim light, giving her a look of innocence completely at odds with the tilt of her mouth.

“So. Tell me,” she said, and again, I did.

Chapter 9

Her name was Melissa. She was two years older than me, and unlike the other partners I’d had, she came on to me first. We were camping, of all the crazy things to be doing in the late fall, but the leaves were turning colors, the rates at the state park campgrounds had gone down, and I was friends with a bunch of people who liked to go out into the woods and get liquored up and rowdy.

She had dark, dark hair that fell to her ass in long, straight lines. Her hair was heavy. Even now I can remember the weight of it against me, how when she slept next to me her hair would cover me, warm as a blanket. She had dark eyes, too, tilted at the corners, and she wore eyeliner to emphasize them.

We had mutual friends and had met a bunch of times before, but we weren’t quite friends ourselves. When we got to the set of matching cabins we’d rented for the weekend, people started pairing off—some of them couples, some friends who’d already decided they were going to bunk together. I didn’t mind sharing with a guy, but I didn’t want to share a room with Shawn, who had some personal hygiene problems. Kent had a nervous laugh and bad acne, which wouldn’t have been an issue except that rumor also had it that he had the hots for me—and I didn’t feel like fending off his advances and ruining the weekend for all of us by turning him down. I hadn’t met the other three girls, Cindy, Dee and Tina, before, so when Melissa asked me casually if I wanted to room with her, I said sure.

“We got the room with only one bed,” she said, as if she was surprised, and I like to think she was. “Hope you don’t mind sharing.”

I didn’t care. We dumped our things and headed out to the campfire, where there was plenty of beer and marshmallows. And if she sat a little closer to me on the downed log that served as a bench, well … there were a lot of people and not many places to sit.

I didn’t realize Melissa liked me romantically until we were taking a hike along one of the trails toward what was supposed to be a “pretty bitchin’ waterfall,” according to Scott, one of the guys who’d organized the trip. When she took my hand, linking her fingers casually through mine, I must’ve looked startled.

“Is this okay?” Her palm was warm on mine, her fingers strong.

“Sure.” And it was, actually. Before that moment I couldn’t have told you if, my crush on Marilyn Monroe aside, I liked girls. Not definitively, anyway.

I’d put the Murphy boys years into my past, Vic even further back than that. I’d had a few boyfriends in between, nobody serious. Nobody who’d made me feel as thrilled as Melissa did when she took my hand.

We slept together in the same bed that entire weekend, and though I lay awake listening to the sound of her breathing as she fell asleep, and waiting for her to touch me, Melissa never did. She didn’t move fast like that, she said seriously on our last morning there, when we’d both rolled over to stare into each other’s eyes.

“I’m not in this for giggles,” she said. “I want you to be sure this is what you want.”

By that point, I wanted it. I wanted her. It had grown from a kind of giggly curiosity into full-blown desire, hot and aching in my blood. But I didn’t know how to make the first move on a girl. I wasn’t afraid she’d turn me down, but it was like I was a virgin all over again. I had no idea where to put my hands, which way to tilt my head to go in for a kiss.

We saw each other for two more weeks before she kissed me. It seemed longer than forever. And then when she did, her mouth was so soft, so different from a guy’s, that I could only sit there with my eyes closed and let her do it.

“You can kiss me back.” She was amused.

So I did.

I closed my eyes again and opened my mouth, and kissed Melissa with everything I had. I lost myself in the taste of her. Strawberry lip gloss. In the perfume of her shampoo and the weight of her hair against the backs of my hands when I buried them in it. And most of all, her softness.

Her belly, smooth and curving, firm but not muscled. Her arms, the skin like satin. The column of her throat without the lump of an Adam’s apple to distract me. Her smooth cheeks, no beard stubble. Everything about her was smooth and soft and sweet, and I soaked it all in as we made out for hours. She took her time with me, and I didn’t quite know how to handle it.

“Relax,” Melissa breathed against my mouth. “We have all night.”

We used all of it, too. I’d been happy to demand multiple orgasms from the guys I’d slept with in the past, but since they only ever got that singleton climax, when they were done, so was the fucking. It wasn’t like that with Melissa. With her mouth and her hands she built me up until I was close to the edge of coming, then eased me off.

Melissa was the first person to make me come just with her tongue. I went up, up and over into bliss. Then again, until I broke with it. I wasn’t in the habit of crying during sex, but I wept a little at how good it felt.

That amused her, too. So did my clumsy attempt at going down on her—I was willing enough, and I had a good idea of what would work on women, since I could imagine what worked on me. But I was too hard, too fast.

“Too focused,” she told me, holding my face in her hands as I looked up at her from between her legs. “Think butterfly, not bee.”

Eventually, I figured out how to make her clit pulse under my tongue, her pussy to clench my fingers. I learned to make her come, then come again with barely a pause, come so hard the bed shook and she cried out.

“And that,” I said to Meredith, “was the best sex I’ve ever had.”