Chapter 10: Why I’ll always have a soft spot for park benches.
Back to the future: Summer before my senior year in high school.
Jenny’s hand finds its way to mine, wrapping around three fingers as we wait in line for the roller coaster ride. My heart embarks on its own short roller coaster at her touch, because usually, she doesn’t like holding hands in public. And by “usually,” I mean it’s never happened before. But I don’t let my surprise show; I just give her a gentle squeeze back.
“I’m nervous already,” she says, looking up at me. “What if they don’t maintain it the right way and there’s some kind of freak accident? That happens, you know. You hear about people dying on roller coasters every couple of years.”
I shake my head. “Stop. You’re being paranoid.”
“I don’t know that it’s all that paranoid. It’s not like this is some place sophisticated, like Disney World. It’s the Ohio State Fair. And wasn’t there an accident at the Indiana State Fair just last year?”
“If there was, I don’t remember hearing anything about it,” I lie.
“That’s because the only news you pay attention to is sports,” she says disdainfully. “It wouldn’t even surprise me if you don’t know who the current president is.”
I tap my chin thoughtfully. “It’s Al Gore, right?”
She bumps her shoulder into me. “Oh, stop it.”
I grin and then — daringly — I let go of her hand and wrap my arm around her shoulders, pulling her into a quick, sideways hug before I let her go. I know better than to try to keep an arm wrapped around her; the hand-holding was already at the edge of her PDA comfort zone. “It’ll be fine. If we start falling or something, I’ll just position myself under you to make sure that you land on me instead of the ground.”
Her eyes flash briefly with affection. “What about you?”
I shrug again. “I’m tough. Not breakable like some people.”
It’s a reference to the nasty fall she took a week ago at band practice — like the football team, band practice starts before the school year itself does. Jenny tripped over her own two feet walking off the practice field and into the parking lot, landing on her wrist and badly bruising it. The bruises are only beginning to heal now, but her pride is still wounded.
She makes a face at me. “That’s not nice. I didn’t break anything.”
“I know,” I say. “And I’m glad you didn’t.” I smile, because without her realizing I did it on purpose, I just successfully redirected her attention away from her roller coaster paranoia.
A few minutes later, with Jenny screaming with delight next to me, I pull out my phone and snap a selfie.
#
I’ve got the Ford Explorer tonight for our trip to the state fair, the one that I share with Dutch and PJ. Dutch usually has possession of it, because even though she already graduated, she’s still living at home and driving back and forth to community college, so she actually has the most legitimate need for a car. The other reason she usually has possession of the old Explorer is because she’s Dutch. But tonight, I’ve argued and bribed and pushed for use of the car, and so, like some sort of overgrown, Blasian fucking Cinderella, it’s mine until my midnight curfew.
Which is why Jenny and I drive around aimlessly around Columbus after we leave the state fair instead of heading straight home. It’s almost a two-hour drive back to Marcine, but it’s not even nine yet, and I can tell she doesn’t feel like going home any more than I do.
We end up at the Highbanks Metro Park thirty minutes later, wandering through an empty playground because the park officially closed an hour ago. Now that we’re all alone, Jenny holds onto my hand without hesitation, rubbing absent-minded circles over my knuckles while she leads me to a bench and chatters about some guy in band who’s been flirting with her recently.
“…And it’s like, I told him, ‘I’m with someone already,’ and then he was like, ‘Who?’ And I said, ‘Anika Singh. The basketball player,’ and he made this face and was like, ‘You’re dating a girl?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah,’ and then he said — I can’t believe this, Ani — he said, ‘Well, when you decide you’re ready to date someone for real, call me.’ As if being with you doesn’t count!”
I roll my eyes and pull Jenny onto my lap before brushing a strand of blonde hair away from her heart-shaped face. “Want me to beat him up for you? ’Cause I’m pretty sure I could take Jeremy Wheeler. In the dark. With one fucking hand tied behind my back.”
Her brow furrows and she sticks out a bottom lip. “Don’t be so violent, Ani. He can’t help being ignorant.”
“I was only kidding, Jen.”
Her lips twitch into a smile. “Halfway. If I’d said ‘yes, I want you to beat him up,’ I bet you would’ve.”
I press a kiss onto her forehead, taking in her smell of laundry detergent and flower-scented lotion. “Only because I’d do anything you wanted me to do,” I say.
She nestles down against my chest, using the hand that’s not pinned between us to trace a whisper of a line down my neck. “How did I get so lucky to meet my soulmate when I was just seventeen?” she murmurs. “Most people spend their whole lives looking for their soulmate, travel the whole globe looking for them, and all I had to do was register for trigonometry.”
I keep my face carefully blank, but my heart is thudding hard against my ribs. This is the first time she’s ever said anything like “soulmate,” and what the fuck are you supposed to say when someone springs that kind of shit on you without any warning? We’d already said “I love you” to each other a couple months ago, but somehow, “soulmate” feels like taking it to a whole new level.
I kiss her gently again, first on the corner of her tiny, dainty, perfect mouth, then brushing my lips against hers, letting our tongues find their way to each other.
When she pulls away, I clear my throat and say, “I think you’re my soulmate, too, Jen.”
She meets my eyes, and hers are extra-big, nervous about something. But she doesn’t say a word; she reaches behind her, takes one of my hands from where it sits behind her back, and pulls it around to the front, placing it on her breast.
My heart starts hammering even faster, jumping around inside my chest like a fucking puppy trying to escape a cage.
Slowly, still watching me with extra-big eyes, Jenny slides my hand down the front of her body. With only a thin, tight t-shirt between my hand and her skin, I feel every contour, every tense muscle rippling beneath the surface. She doesn’t stop until my hand comes to the place where the form-fitting t-shirt tucks into cut-off jean shorts.
I can feel her stomach rising and falling to the rhythm of shallow breaths beneath my palm. I swallow audibly, heat cascading in waves through my body.
She tugs my fingers forward until they rest on the top button of her jean shorts and presses them against the warm surface of the smooth metal. “You said you’d do anything I wanted you to do?” she asks in a breathless whisper.
“Yes,” I manage, just as breathless.
“Then I want you to touch me,” she says.
Another wave of heat floods through, flushing up my neck and face, coiling down into a tight knot deep inside my lady parts.
But you have to fucking hand it to my eighteen-year-old self because what I say in response, with a restraint I didn’t know I was capable of, is, “Jenny, are you sure?”
Because you have to understand: On this infamous night of the Ohio State Fair, we’d been together for about eight months. And in eight months, there was a lot of kissing, there was a lot of groping, and sometimes there were some clandestine meetings between boobs and nipples and tongues, but there was never any south-of-the-border action. Instead, there were a lot of late, post-date nights that involved me locking the door to my basement bedroom and flopping down onto my bed, shoving a pillow against my face while I let my fantasies and my own goddamned hand take me further than Jenny ever wanted to go.
But now, sitting on a park bench on the outskirts of Columbus, holding my hand to the top of her shorts, Jenny nods and closes her eyes.
“I’m sure.”
A tangle of nerves and inexperience, I glance down at where my hand sits at the top edge of her shorts. Acting on instinct and what little I’ve dared to look up on the Internet, I push my hand down along the outside of the zipper flap and into the hot space between her legs, then squeeze experimentally.
Jenny sucks in a breath, eyes still closed.
She grabs my hand by the wrist again, and at first, I think I’ve already done something wrong and she’s changed her mind, but instead of moving my hand away, she pushes my fingertips beneath the waistband of her shorts. And when my enormous paw doesn’t seem to fit in the tight space, she reaches down and pops open the button and slides down the zipper.
“Touch me, Ani. Please,” she says again, pressing her small hand against the back of my big one.
“Well, since you asked nicely,” I say, joking like a dumbass in an attempt to cover up my nerves, but the words sound half-strangled coming out of my tight throat.
I lean her back, one arm still behind her, holding her weight, while my other hand angles down against the flat plane of her stomach and slips beneath the line of her unzipped shorts, then her underwear. I stop breathing when the tips of my fingers encounter the thick mat of wiry hair, gasp in a sharp breath when my middle finger touches the top of her slit, then encounters the wetness pouring out from her.
Jenny lets out a soft moan, her back arching against my arm. “More,” she says in a pant, wrapping her hand against my wrist and pushing it further beneath the fabric of her underwear. My eyes flutter and close of their own accord as my fingers slide between Jenny’s slick folds. Still not knowing exactly what the fuck I’m supposed to be doing, I guess and do what I’ve only ever done to myself before in the quiet privacy of my bedroom: I start rubbing.
Just gently, tentatively at first, constantly checking her face to see if I’m doing anything she doesn’t like, savoring the wet, hot textures of her skin against my fingers. Gradually, letting her rocking hips and quiet moans guide me, I add speed and pressure. I lower Jenny down against the bench and shift until I’m basically above her, one knee digging into the bench beside her, my other leg slung over the side, foot trying not to slide through the mulch beneath. It’s not particularly comfortable, but the fuck if I’m going to complain.
Jenny’s hips buck and she slides her hand over mine. “Oh. More. Harder,” she breathes, pushing on the back of my hand.
And I, the girl who would forever do anything she wanted, obey. Her hand still on top of mine, I press up into her soft flesh, every bit as aroused and wet as she is, and try not to groan in pleased surprise when she pushes on my middle finger, sending it deep inside her. She tilts her head back against the bench, mouth falling open, and the sight of it obliterates the last traces of my nervousness because I realize in that instant that I was born to please this woman.
Soulmates, I repeat silently to myself.
Still just guessing, still not really knowing what I’m doing, I send my index finger up the same rabbit hole where my middle finger disappeared to, finding a new rhythm as I thrust inside her. She lets go of my wrist and claws her nails down my forearm, and it’s so sexy that my insides go hot and numb and gelatin, all at the same time. I want to form words, I want to say “I love you,” but I seem to have lost my capacity to speak.
She comes a couple minutes later, in a rocking series of spasms and hushed moans. When she finally stills, I bring my hand back out, wiping Jenny off of me onto the rough wooden slats of the bench.
I stay perched above her, searching her closed eyes and frozen face for signs of life.
“Jenny?” I ask when she still doesn’t open her eyes a few seconds later. Worry starts to overtake arousal as I wonder if this was all just too much at once, despite what she asked for. I run a damp finger down her cheek. “Are you alright?”
Finally, heavy eyelids break open and she blinks up at me a few times. She lets out a long, contented sigh.
“I’m more than alright. I’m… If I’d known I could feel that way, I would’ve made you do that a long time ago.”
I grin, more pleased with myself than I have been in a while. Then I shrug. “Beginner’s luck,” I suggest.
She uses my arm to lever herself up. She zips up, buttons her shorts.
“We should probably get out of here and head home, right?”
The stupid grin on my face falters, spell broken. “Yeah. We probably should.”