Page 45 of This Might Hurt

JUDE

“I’m not tired,” Andrew murmurs when we’ve stopped making out and are sitting kind of propped against each other in a daze of crashed adrenaline.

I can’t tell from his voice how he feels about what just happened.

He sits back more firmly against the ground, resting his palms against it like he needs one thing to stop shifting and changing, and doesn’t look at me.

I sit back, straightening my hoodie. “We barely got four hours.”

He shrugs raises his eyebrows like and what are you gonna do about it? Not much, because my insomniac ass was planning to sit up and read while he slept. I can see dried sweat on his neck in the faint light, and I feel sticky all over. “Can I swim?” I gesture to the pool cover.

He points toward a little glowing switch embedded in the wall near the barbeque-cabana-thing, then leans back and watches me go mess with it.

The dark shape of the cover peels back with a low hum, following hidden tracks until it disappears into a raised area at the end of the deck.

Even the safety lights under the shifting surface of the water look expensive—tall, thin rectangles of glowing white.

Andrew pushes to his feet with a grunt of pain as his cramped legs stretch.

“I’ll be right back.” But he stands and watches hungrily as I drag off my hoodie and step out of my boxers, leaving it all in a pile on the deck while I do a backflip into the pool.

The splash is so fucking loud it almost scares me.

Has he always lived in such an unnatural quiet?

When I break the surface, shaking water out of my ears, he’s gone.

I tread water slowly, wondering if I should go after him.

I tell myself to swim three lengths first, to see what happens.

I’m a decent swimmer in the way of kids who never took lessons, who played in the river, whose dads threw them off boats in the summer like a game.

Lena was always better, swimming circles around me like a fish.

I wonder if there’s equipment that can help her swim now if she wants to.

It hurts how much I want to be at a pool with her, to help her or watch her do it herself or just sit on the side with her and judge peoples’ stupid swimsuits like we used to do.

When I stop after two lengths, out of breath, the back door opens a crack and Andrew slips out.

He’s holding something in each hand that I can’t make out until he circles the pool to where I’m floating on the edge.

“Isn’t there a rule like never bring glass on a pool deck?

” I ask, wiping my nose with my equally wet arm and taking the bottle of Heineken he offers me, watching it glow faintly green in the pool lights.

He already popped off the lids because he’s much too anal to forget something like that.

“Don’t drop it then,” he says drily.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to drink beer in a pool either.”

“Well, don’t drown,” he murmurs. He sets down his bottle and tugs his white t-shirt off over his head. “Or do, I guess.” His chest and shoulders are so naturally broad but not muscled, toned and silky-soft with pale freckles scattered all over his back.

Instead of getting in the pool, he stretches out on his back and hangs his head off the edge with a sigh, his light auburn hair dangling a centimeter above the surface of the water.

His eyes finally drift shut after two days of staring at me, staring at the world, staring at this house like if he doesn’t watch hard enough, something’s going to jump out and hurt him.

Heineken always tastes like wet compost to me, but he could have brought me a bottle of piss and I’d still drink it like a lovesick teenager.

I gulp down half of it at once to get it over with, then set it on the deck and dive to the bottom over and over again like a kid, even though it’s not that deep.

Andrew doesn’t look like he’s moved when I come back up, but his eyes are open and my beer is empty, his still untouched. I swim over and grab the wall on either side of his head, looking upside down into his eyes. “Drink your own beer.”

“I wanted yours.”

I study him, the way he gazes back with a careful, intent watchfulness. He wants something.

He twitches with a discontented growl when I sink my wet hands into his hair, scooping up more water to drench it until it’s hanging limply, dripping. “Why did you have to do that?” he grumbles. But he doesn’t move.

“Because you’re all crabby and stressed out and now you want me to bully you.

” Maybe I’m projecting hard. What’s that thing—cuteness aggression?

Where you want to crush babies and eat puppies?

He gives me that. The existence of his sweet, annoying little face makes me mad, and I want to pick on him until he makes it up to me.

Maybe getting married and shooting guns in the house are the least fucked up things going on with us.

“Roll over,” I demand, prodding his shoulder. “Come on.”

His nostrils flare as he hesitates, watching me.

“I’m done with this,” I tell him quietly, matter-of-fact. “You know what’s happening. Go inside and go to sleep, or roll over.”

The jagged ridge of his stretched Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. He inhales slowly, his chest rising, then rolls onto his front. His hip bumps the other bottle and he flinches as it tips over and cracks in half, shitty beer running all over the tile. “Damn it,” he breathes, grimacing.

I prop my chin on the edge and watch his tangled hair drip water down onto his nose. “I want to take you out in Ramona’s backyard with a bunch of bottles and the gun and teach you how to break the things you want to break and not break the things you don’t want to break.”

Something soft leaks in around the edges of his brittleness, like he can see the picture in my head of us together without all this shit.

It’s the only time I’ve looked at a hypothetical future and known so clearly that I would be happy there.

He blinks, like he doesn’t know what to do with it, then opens his mouth.

I don’t think he has an answer, and I don’t really want to hear him talk, so I slip two fingers in—not hard or anything, just to the second knuckle.

The man shudders, his wide eyes fixed on mine.

He doesn’t make a sound. I’m over this whole thing—he asked me for space and I fucking gave it to him, then he took it back and told me all that shit he said last night was true, then he melted down and kissed me, and now he’s pushing all my buttons on purpose because he can’t make himself take the last step.

I pull my fingers out, leaving a streak of spit on his full lower lip. “Say it.”

He stares at me with the fixation of an animal seeing something it wants. “I said it twice last night. It’s not my fault if you don’t listen.”

I fold my arms on the edge and prop my chin on my stacked fists. “You’ll say it as many times as I want you to say it.”

“I—” His jaw clenches. “I stayed for you. I don’t have anything but you. And I don’t understand what it is about me you want so fucking much, but it’s all yours.” He presses his lips together, like he’s scared to let anything else slip out.

“Come here,” I breathe, coaxing him with a finger under his chin until our faces are an inch apart. “Tell me what you want back. What do you want me to promise you? Anything.”

The only sound for a long time is the faint gulp of water against the walls of the pool. “When I get lost, bring me back. Don’t ever leave me out there.”

I can feel the words melting along my bones, leaking and fusing into every part of my body so I can never pull them out. “Okay.” I cup the side of his neck in my palm. “Open for me.”

He goes very still for a moment, then relaxes his jaw.

He sticks out his tongue as far as it will go, the wet flex of muscle in the pool lights.

And he waits. My heart quits beating, just gives up, and I don’t think it’s ever going to start again.

I never knew this part of me existed, not until him.

He cracked me open last night, and this is what came out in his hands, and he told me it was enough.

Tonight, I don’t spit fast. I push up onto the edge of the deck until his hair brushes my forehead, our noses touching as I gather up saliva and let it trail slowly off the tip of my tongue onto his.

Before he can close his mouth, I shove two fingers quickly between his teeth. “Hold it this time. Let me see.”

There’s the noise he was holding back, a low, throaty whine as his eyes drift half shut. I take my hand away but he keeps his tongue out for me, like he’d hold it there for days if I asked him to while I watch our saliva mix together.

“Good boy.” I tap his chin. “Go ahead. Keep it warm for me.”

He swallows and kind of collapses, gulping air in and out raggedly against the stone.

Now that I cleared my head a little, I’m kind of scared I broke him.

Finally, he cracks his eyes open and squints at me.

“I think I can sleep now.” A smile tugs at the corner of his damp lips, and when he opens his eyes the rest of the way there’s a quietness in the way he looks at me that I haven’t felt all day, an aching gap I hadn’t even realized was empty.

“Yeah?” I push my arms straight so my hips are pressed against the stone edge, my body weight balanced between the air and the water. “Maybe me, too.”

I almost fall back into the water when he sits up and presses his dry forehead to my damp one. “Why are we so messed up?” He doesn’t sound upset about it.

“I think we’ve dissected that pretty well the last two days.”