Penny

I’m not sure what wakes me, but between one heartbeat and the next, I’m up. The moon washes over my bed and for a moment, I don’t know where I am.

No, that’s not quite right. I’m not sure who I am.

That’s how different I feel in my skin. My body. I have never felt the way I do right now.

The bed is empty.

“Simon?” I call out, thinking he might be in the bathroom. But there’s no answer. My whole trailer is quiet.

He’s gone, I think and I try not to feel anything about that. I try to remember there were no discussions. Absolutely no promises. He had every right to leave.

But it doesn’t stop me from aching, just a little.

I roll over and find him standing in the doorway, his arms are braced on the door jamb. He’d pulled his underwear on and they are low on his hips and the way he’s standing, the muscles of his arms and chest are popped out in relief. His skin looks like velvet and my fingers twitch to touch it.

I’m lying to him, I think, in the predawn silence. And I wish I wasn’t.

“You’re awake,” he says, his voice a low bass murmur that I feel more than hear. All the hair on my arms rises up.

“What are you doing?” I ask. I’m naked under the sheet and I stretch like a cat. He notices and leans forward a little, but his hands are still on the door frame and I like that. That he’s holding himself back from me. That perhaps I am a temptation he finds hard to resist.

I kick my leg out from under the sheet. Just to see if I can help him not resist me.

His face doesn’t change. He doesn’t smile or say anything. He seems…cold. And suddenly I’m cold.

I pull the blanket over my leg.

“Are you — Is everything okay?” I ask.

“What could be wrong?”

His tone is weird and I sit up. The old lessons learned from my mother return and I’m highly aware that I’ve done something wrong. And I have this instinct to try to make it right. But I’ve lost too much skin and worth to do that for a man I don’t really know.

“You…you should leave?” I’m embarrassed that it comes out as a question.

“I should,” he says, still cold. “I should go.”

He walks across the room to me and I sit up in my bed, suddenly nervous. Suddenly unsure.

“You’re…you’re kind of freaking me out, Simon.”

His jaw clenches and his body is hard like he is fighting something with every muscle he has. My brain is cloudy and I’m confused, but my body…my body likes the uncertainty.

Then he smiles at me like he knows it. His fingers reach out and stroke my leg under the blanket and my skin rises up in goose bumps and I gasp at the sensation. Hot and cold at once.

His hand circles my ankle and he pulls it, straightening my leg. Another pull and I’m flat on my back, panting up at my ceiling with fear and desire.

He pushes my leg wide and shoves the sheet out of the way. I flinch. So painfully aware that I am completely bare to him. He can see all of me. And I lie there and let him.

With his other hand he pushes my other leg out and I make some strangled moan sound.

“Tell me no,” he says.

I shake my head. I don’t know what’s happened and part of me doesn’t care. I expect him to rise up on his knees. To find another condom, to push himself inside me.

I expect it and I want it.

But instead he lies down, his shoulder between my thighs.

The flat of his tongue licks me and I cry out. All the things we’ve done tonight, there hasn’t been this.

“Simon!”

“Shhhh,” he tells me and I catch the glimmer of his eyes looking at me over my tummy and the intimacy of it is awful. Painful. So I look up at the ceiling and I put my fists in my mouth and I’m silent as he licks me and tongues me. As he puts his hands under my hips and holds me to his mouth. The pleasure is sharp. So sharp I flinch away but he doesn’t let me go.

He gives me more and I’m biting my knuckles and crying out his name and coming and coming and coming.

“Simon,” I pant, wiping tears from my eyes, looking at the dent I put in my hand with my teeth. “Oh, my God…”

“Go to sleep,” he says, sitting up at the foot of the bed. I can see his erection in the moonlight and I sit up to reach for him, but he catches my hands.

His smile is strange, like it’s something he thinks he needs to do.

“Sleep,” he says.

“Are…are you leaving?”

His sigh is long and silent, but I watch his shoulders slump.

“Not yet,” he says and crawls into the bed with me.

He’s warm and he’s big and I curl against him and I tell myself that whatever was weird about all that. It was in my head.

It feels off because I’m lying.

And suddenly all those lies are a cage. Keeping him out. Keeping everyone out. This staff I want to be family won’t ever be a family. Won’t be anything but people I’m lying to.

Megan.

Simon.

I’ll never have anything more because I’ve locked myself up in these lies.

I’ll never have anything more. I’ll be alone, my whole life. And in this bed, the sweat cooling on my body, I can’t stand that idea. I can’t bare it.

Because I want Simon for as long as I can have him. I’m not in love. Or at least, I don’t think I am. But I’ve never been in love. I feel something I’ve never felt before. Like it could be love, if given water and sunlight. This lightness in my chest, this fizz in my blood could turn into love.

In a split second, I imagine him coming back here during the weeks. Staying in the trailer with me. Working from another one of the trailers. I imagine us running up the mountain. Sampling breakfast beer. I imagine everything I’ll cook for him.

His father’s mutton biryani.

It’s so clear what I imagine. And it will only happen if I’m brave enough to stop lying.

“I need to tell you something,” I say. And the words are like gunshots in the silence. His body goes stiff.

But mine goes fluid. My brain everything goes fluid. And I can’t stop myself.

It’s happening, I think. I’m doing this.

“You want me to leave?” he asks, getting up from the bed, but I stop him.

“No,” I say. “Not at all. Not even a little.” I try to smile but I’m too much a mess. He’s standing beside the bed and I can’t lie there and look up at him like this, so I get up on my knees.

I’m so naked. So totally fucking naked. But there’s no other way to do this.

He opens his mouth to say something, but I put up a hand, stopping him. Because if don’t say this now, I’ll never say it. I’ll lose my nerve and this chance will be gone. “Can I just…talk. Just let me say what I need to say?”

He nods.

“So, like…eight years ago, I read this thing. Something dumb on the internet. How to choose your porn name or your author name, I don’t know. But it was the name of your first pet and the street you live on. And we…we had a dog. It was my papa’s dog, actually. But I loved her. She lived up in the mountains with us outside of Athens and well, her name was Penny. And the street I was living on when I read this dumb meme, was McConnell.”

Oh, God, it’s fucking amazing telling the truth. It’s revolutionary. Addictive. I’m light-headed and drunk.

“My real name is Tina Andreas.” I laugh. I actually laugh. “I haven’t said that name in eight years.”

A long, slow breath hisses out of his body, but that’s all. I can’t tell what he’s thinking. Or how he’s feeling and I find it doesn’t even matter. I’m telling the truth.

I can’t stop.

“The stuff about the farm and the brothers. The over-salted dinner. I made it up. I…created this whole story because I wanted it to be true. Because I wanted something that was completely different than what I knew. Different from the family I had. My mom —” I stop myself. I don’t need to tell him everything, do I? But then I realize I do. I need to tell him everything. Otherwise, what’s the point? No more half-lives for me. “My mother went to jail about eight years ago. For something she didn’t do. Or maybe she did. I don’t know anymore. And I can’t keep feeling guilty all the time for what my parents have done.”

He steps back. Away from me. His hands in fists. His jaw as hard as granite. And it occurs to me that he might not care. That I’ve imagined all of this. I’ve created another story in my head, this time about him. That he might want something more with me. But I can’t stop talking.

“But I also…I can’t have anyone in my life if I’m lying. And I’m not saying I want you in my life…well, maybe I am. Maybe I’m saying I’d like a chance. Or something. Anything…”

My embarrassment is filling the room like a stench. And the longer he stays silent the worse it gets.

I was completely wrong.

Humiliation leaves a copper taste in my mouth. It makes my hands numb. My body cold.

I get off the bed and we’re both standing here, naked. I’m looking at him. He’s looking at the floor.

“Simon? Can…can you say something?”

“Why are you telling me this?” he asks. “Why now?”

“Don’t you…? Can’t you guess?”

“You don’t love me,” he says in a hard voice.

It’s like he’s punched me.

My hands shaking, I grab a T-shirt from my dresser. My whole body is shaking. I can hardly get it on. “I’m sorry. I got this wrong. I thought —”

I pull the shirt over my head and he’s standing here. So close.

“You don’t know me,” he whispers.

“But I want to,” I whisper back and I can feel my eyes filling with tears. And I wish I was stronger. Less needy, but I can’t stop myself. “I really do.”

I reach for him and he grabs my hands in one of his, holding me so hard it hurts. But he doesn’t push me away, or pull me close.

He doesn’t let me go.

“Simon,” I breathe.

“I was in a foster home,” he says, then shakes his head, like he wants to stop. Like he doesn’t understand why he’s saying these words.

“No,” I say, straining towards him, but he still keeps me away. “Tell me. Please. Tell me. When, when were you in a foster home?”

“After my parents died, before I graduated high school. It was just a few months, but…it was a bad place. The man who was supposed to take care of us, he hurt us. All of us. Over and over again. Tommy —Tommy got it bad. But the girls…”

I sob, bending forward. But he’s still holding my hands like manacles in a jail and I know. I so understand that if I touch him, he’ll fall apart.

That feeling is as familiar to me as breathing.

“One night, we just…we couldn’t take it anymore. We broke out of our rooms. We busted into his office, we stopped him from raping —” He shakes his head. Swallows. “I’ve never — We never talked about it.”

Snot and tears are running down my face.

“It was awful. Every day in that place and every hour for years after, it was so fucking bleak. And sometimes I feel like it’s me that’s bleak. That all the shit and all the darkness that I see in the world, it’s in me, too.”

“It’s not, Simon. It’s not. I know you and you’re not bleak.”

“But you don’t know me. And all this time, all those months in the foster home and all the years after, I dreamed of one thing. One. Fucking. Thing.”

“What?”

“You.”

It doesn’t make any sense. But then it doesn’t matter, because he’s let go of my hands and I’m in his arms.

I hold onto him as if we’re weathering a storm together. As if there are terrible winds that want to pull us apart.

And he’s kissing me the same way. We fall, back onto the bed, our hands feverish. Our bodies searching out each other’s warmth. There’s another condom and I’m crying out as he enters me. Crying out as I come. And then again when he comes. We shudder and shake against each other.

He leaves to take care of the condom and I put my nose in my pillow that smells like sex and us and I grin as I drift off.

I told him my terrible secret.

And nothing bad happened.

I’m not cursed.

I can be happy.

When I wake up again, he’s gone.