Page 24 of Summer Skate

JESSICA

I T KEEPS COMING BACK TO ME in flashes.

I am driving, the sun beating down on my windshield. I am focused on not dying in a horrific car crash. Flash of the bay at night, pitch black, his face and hair in the rain.

I smile at the cashier at the Golden Pear. “Hi, can I please have a . . . ” Flash of his naked body, him saying: I need to kiss you first .

I walk across a parking lot with a coffee in my hand. Flash of my body falling forward into his.

I am talking on the phone with Alejandro, staying in the moment, very carefully staying in the moment, and then, there is a lull. Flash of my voice saying: Oh, fuck, that feels amazing .

I wake up from dreams about Carter and find myself reaching for the nearest notebook, which turns out to be a notebook that I bought for my daughter.

It’s pink with a picture of Hello Kitty on the cover.

It says Stay Cute . I am hesitant to use it.

I am mortified, actually. But I don’t want to be on my phone or computer in the middle of the night and it’s got to land somewhere.

So I reach for it and write down the dirtiest things I’ve ever written. Avert your eyes, Hello Kitty.

I wake up the next morning and open the notebook, to see if there’s anything in there I can use for my novel. It’s like surveying the wreckage after a hurricane. I examine my scribbles on the page, the flying debris that’s landed.

I’ve never experienced anything like this before, not to this degree.

My first thought is that maybe I’m in the throes of some kind of deep lust that only hits women during their thirties.

I google it. Nothing. My second thought is that maybe I’m a sex addict.

I google it, just to be sure, just to rule it out.

But I don’t seem to qualify. Because it’s not about sex with anyone. It’s about him, specifically.

I tell the Internet: But the cravings don’t get put out! They only seem to get worse. I can’t think straight, can’t find a way to stay trapped in the guilt I should feel because I’m simply overpowered. Or I’m a sex addict. Time will tell.

All day, I am fighting an internal battle over whether to text him.

Don’t do it.

Don’t do it .

DON’T .

But as soon as the sun goes down, I take my phone and go to his name and start typing: Come over?

And now I wait for his response in agony.

WHY did you do this to yourself, Jessica?

WHY? I’m in such a state that I say this, out loud, to myself, while pacing around my house.

You could have had a pleasant evening! But I don’t want a pleasant evening.

If I know one thing about myself, it is this: Jessica does not want a pleasant evening.

She wants angst and chaos, and she won’t stop until she gets it.

My phone beeps. I look at the screen. Carter Hughes . I click on his name. It says:

YES .

Well, I guess that makes two of us.

I look in the mirror and try to decide if what I’m wearing is sexy.

It’s exactly what I’ve been wearing all afternoon to lounge around the house—white pajama shorts with tiny yellow flowers on them and a white T-shirt that’s slightly see-through, no bra.

I briefly consider putting on lingerie or something more exotic, but the shorts barely cover my butt and when I stand straight, you can see a strip of my stomach, so I decide to go with it.

A real “come as you are” type of policy.

He knocks. My heart takes off.

I open the door, and he lifts me up and takes me to the staircase, places me down on the steps, kisses me with the door wide open. We are ravenous for each other, as the night air blows through the whole house. I almost fuck him right there on the stairs with the door open.

I am pulling him toward me with the back of his head, with his T-shirt, with his waist. I hear a car whizz by and it startles me. I move my lips and body to the side. We are both breathing deeply like we’ve been submerged under water.

“Holy shit,” he says.

“Let’s go upstairs.”

I close and lock the front door. I follow him upstairs. He doesn’t look around at anything. He walks around like he’s been here a hundred times before.

My bedroom is dimly lit, just one small lamp is on, on my desk. He goes to turn it off.

“Leave it on,” I say. “I want to see you.”

He turns and kisses me. “I want to see you too,” he says, running his hands along my hips and thighs.

The window is cracked slightly open and it’s chilly. I get into bed and pull the covers over me, taking my clothes off under the comforter, and throwing them on the floor. He takes his clothes off across the room and gets into bed, positions himself on top of me.

We are kissing naked, and it’s so satisfying to finally have his body all to myself, in my bed. My legs are wrapped around him. I take his dick and use it to play with myself. I’m so wet for him, always.

“Go slow,” I say. “I want to feel it. I want to feel everything.”

“I will,” he says. And then I kiss him until the feeling is too good, until I can’t kiss anymore. I have to moan instead. We do this for a while, totally consumed by the feeling, incapable of making any sort of slight change in movement. He goes slow.

“Do you want to stay like this?” he asks.

“Sure,” I say.

“Really?”

“No.”

I wiggle away from him and turn over onto my stomach and he slips inside of me. He touches my butt, my hips, my stomach, and I’m face down on my forearms.

He’s going faster now, grazing my nipples, touching my back. I’m pushing back into him. I can feel myself getting close.

Don’t stop. Keep doing that. Don’t stop .

I just keep saying it, my mouth in the comforter. He touches my clit.

I groan. Harder. Faster. Harder . I gasp. He presses down on me as I come.

I breathe heavily into the comforter, and I can feel him gathering my hair and putting it to one side of my neck, kissing the other side.

He grabs my ass and starts going hard again.

I feel like he’s deeper inside of me somehow and like I’m enjoying my orgasm all over again, like it might happen again.

I feel split open and raw, like he’s hitting every nerve ending that I have in my body.

He’s about to come, and I love the feeling of him coming, of him losing control.

I love what my body is doing to him, that for those few seconds, he is mine, all mine, and nothing and nobody can take him away from me.

Soon, his body collapses onto mine, and his arms are around me. We roll to the side, lie next to each other in bed, the covers haphazardly strewn across our bodies.

“You have nice feet,” he says, holding onto my foot. “I don’t typically like feet, but yours are nice. My feet are so flat from being in skates.”

“No problem here,” I say, pulling my toes back, showcasing my arch.

“My god. How do you even walk? Your feet only hit the ground in two places.”

“I get by,” I reply. “Oh! You want to see something?”

“Okay . . . ”

I pull the covers down so that he can see my stomach. “I’ve been swimming so much that . . . look! Parentheses!” I touch a slight indentation on one side of my stomach, then the other.

“You mean ab muscles?”

“I’ve never had them so visible before! It’s very exciting.”

“Yeah . . . it looks nice,” he says, and then traces his finger along the line. “Parentheses . . . ”

“That’s what they look like to me.”

“You’re such a nerd.”

We decide to get dressed and go downstairs to the kitchen to find something to eat. He puts his phone on the kitchen table.

“I made a playlist,” he said.

I laugh. “You did? You’re such a nerd.”

“Yup. Six songs. Thirty minutes apiece. Three uninterrupted hours of Phish.”

“This relationship is over.”

The music starts. “Settle in,” he says, and opens my fridge. “What do you have?”

I look around. It is a paltry selection. “Eggs . . . bread.”

“Egg in a hole it is.”

I hand him a frying pan. “Isn’t it called something else? Like . . . egg in a nest?”

“No. Just . . . egg in a hole.”

“But ‘nest’ is so much more romantic.”

I sit at the kitchen table.

“There’s no nest!” he says, looking back at me. “It’s just a hole.”

He removes a shot glass from the cabinet and carves holes into two pieces of bread.

“I think it’s a nest.” I can hear sizzling butter.

“ Eggs in a nest? I’ve never heard that before in my life.”

“Maybe you’re not running in the right breakfast circles.”

“That’s a low blow.”

“‘Nest’ is a much nicer word. It implies a home for the egg, which implies shelter. A hole is a black hole, something you fall through. It’s bleak.”

He rolls his eyes. “The world is full of dark mysteries. Best to realize that at breakfast. It’s a hole.”

I get up, stand next to him and get in his face. “I will not concede this point and nothing you say or do will make me.”

“Then I’m sorry, but we’re at an impasse.”

“Apparently.”

“Kiss and make up?”

I move in closer to him, and we kiss. He turns and as we keep kissing, he presses me against the oven, reaches behind me to turn off the burner.

We eat sitting on the floor in the living room, with our plates on a low table that contains coffee table books and a few of my children’s toys. When we finish eating, he surveys the packs of card games on the table.

“Up for a game of Crazy Eights?” he asks.

I look through the pile. “How about a more sophisticated game? Like Slap Jack.”

I split the cards into two piles. We play Slap Jack, then Old Maid, then Crazy Eights, then Go Fish. There is a lot of hand slapping on the table. Cursing. Yelling.

This is the most out of hand Old Maid has ever gotten!

A Crazy Eight is not carte blanche to do whatever you want!

What’s unfair? How can it possibly be unfair? Those are the rules!

HEY! You can’t slap just to slap!

At some point, the cards are all over the floor, because we’ve thrown them at each other. He says: “I’d like to declare a truce and go outside and teach you how to roll a joint.”

I laugh. “Do you have the necessary ingredients here to do that?”

“Always.”