Darla
“Wow, you can pick ’em, can’t you?” I said as we flew out of the parking lot. Trevor shook his head and opened the window, cranking it enough that the wind started whipping my hair about, the wild, loose, frizzy curls forcing me to take one hand off the wheel and pull my hair away from my forehead.
“He’s not usually like that, Darla,” Trevor insisted. “I swear to God I’ve never seen him like that.”
“Have you ever seen him outside of Boston?”
That gave Trevor pause. “Sure. Yeah. We’ve gone on, you know, class trips…been to New York, up to Niagara Falls, his parents have a beach house on the Cape.”
I snorted. “And where else?”
“Well, they took us to Vail that one time to go skiing and then there have been a couple trips to Martinique….” His voice trailed off as he realized what he was saying.
“No humanitarian trips with your church to New Delhi to wash the feet of the poor people?” I couldn’t keep the acid out of my voice. Trevor seemed to deflate with every word that I spat at him. This wasn’t the way our last few hours were supposed to go but I was doing it, I was making it like this. Dammit. The “Mistress of Sabotage” Mama had called me once. I hated when Mama was right.
He took a deep sigh. In it I could hear so many of my own emotions: anger, frustration, confusion, uncertainty – and a touch of hope. Joe had turned himself into a lightning rod for a lot of feelings that we were both experiencing but not talking about. At least, I wasn’t – and as much as turning over the rock that was Joe revealed an awful lot of creepy, crawling critters underneath, now they were facing the cold, hard sunlight. Sunlight kills germs. It’s the great disinfectant and I suspected we both had an awful lot of mess inside ourselves that needed a good cleaning.
“He’s right,” I admitted. There – a little bit of decluttering of my emotional state began.
“He’s wrong,” Trevor protested, shaking his head, sitting up straight and patting my knee. “There’s nothing that makes us better than you.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that part,” I said, loud and brasher than I wanted it to sound. But hell, that was me. Trevor was getting me and if he didn’t like it he could just leave. He was gonna leave anyhow, right? “I don’t mean that you guys are better because you have money. I mean that you live a completely different life than – ” I gestured at the highway storefronts flying by the window. A liquor store, an ammo store and a fireworks store. “That isn’t a Gucci, that isn’t an American Girl Doll store, and that, certainly, isn’t a Starbucks,” I pointed and a little smile twitched on his lips.
We were starting to get serious here and I didn’t do serious well. The wisecracks poured out, trying to cover emotions that I didn’t process properly, either. Maybe I needed to think of Trevor as practice – a guy I could practice these deeper feelings on, someone who understood nuance, who even gave a shit about it. Then again, maybe that would be like exercising a muscle that I’d never use again, the energy a waste.
I had to find out if I even had that muscle, though, so right then and there I made a decision and we drove straight past the bowling alley. Trevor pointed at it as it went past, his hand flying in the wind. “But wh – wait…what?” he asked and then turned to me with a puzzled grin.
“I have a better idea,” I said.
His hand clamped down on my knee and slid up. “Whatever your idea is,” he said, his hand moving up to hold my hair back, his knuckles brushing gently against my neck, making me shiver, “can it involve some balls?”
Trevor
She shifted from anger, to reasonable, to playful so well it was like being with a grownup. As if I were a grownup and she were, too, and we were relating to each other on this mature but incredibly arousing level that made me hard and made me want her all the more. It was a bit like looking in and capturing your parents in an intimate moment by accident or seeing them struggle with a difficult ethical problem – but handling it with such grace that you wanted to be like them.
Except, right now, I didn’t want to be – I didn’t need to be – like anyone except me. The me that was with Darla. Is that what love –
She interrupted me. “I hope you’re not allergic to wildflowers.” Her grin was saucy and impish and sexy as hell. I wondered what she had in store for me. We turned down a dusty, country road. Giant plumes of beige clouds floating in the air as her little car bumped and jumbled and rocked along a rutted dirt throughway.
The area got more and more isolated, like conservation land…except around here everything seemed to be trailer parks, bars, truck stops and conservation land. I had a feeling that out here they didn’t need to preserve twenty or fifty or a hundred acres of wetlands because land was about the only thing they seemed to have in abundance.
It was beautiful, though, as the dust settled and I could see the field she’d brought me to. It stretched out for what seemed like miles, a bedspread of early spring flowers and long grasses, some still mottled by the old, dead fronds from last year’s growth. A thin path took us from the hodge-podge parking lot and I could see at the base that a thin strip of dirt poked through. This must be some sort of walking path for people in better weather and we were catching it new, virgin territory again as spring erupted.
We could cross. We could blaze the trail. We could claim it for ourselves this fine season and build a memory that I knew would have to be enough, that I hoped would linger long enough. In reality and in my memory.
Darla jumped out of the car, whipped around the back, and was pulling on my door with such force that I thought she was going to yank me by the collar and drag me into that field. I wouldn’t have minded. Instead, she let me climb out on my own and I reached for her, the wind whipping through our hair as I wrapped my arms around her and kissed her, the sunlight shining on us as if saying yes, yes, yes. And then, something else in me said yes, standing up at attention, pointing to the sun, an all-too-familiar hardening and tightness in my jeans that needed to be lessened, and could only be lessened by Darla.
She took my hand and, laughing like a child, with glee and frolic in her feet and in her body, she pulled me down the narrow channel of grass. It came up over my hip and I waded through, my hands brushing against the tops of the flowers and grasses, her head and shoulders weaving in front of me, my knees and feet struggling to keep up without dragging us both down. Then, a clearing – and I smiled. It was completely hidden from everyone, everything. No one could find us here and somehow the grass had lessened. Layers of moss and shorter grasses covered the area before a large, wooded thicket.
“How do you know about this place?” I asked. She seemed to be a keeper of secret places, seeking asylum in the unknown, carving out her own place in a world so hostile to what she could offer.
“This is my reading spot,” she said. “This is where I go when I want to be alone or I want to sink into a book.” Her face became troubled for a fleeting second and then she seemed to decide to say something that she struggled to confess. “And this is where I go to think about my daddy.”
I kissed her lightly, on the nose, and then on the lips, a tender gesture that was more an acknowledgment than anything driven by passion. She looked up and her face was open to me, more of an offering than any part of her body in lovemaking and when I looked into her eyes it was her heart that was open too. And that was where I caught my first glimpse of her nak*d soul.
Darla
Urgency. A wave of eager, pressing need rained down on us, pervading everything. I needed Trevor now, I wanted him in me now, and I wanted to feel cared for and taken and needed right back. This wasn’t the same fire that swept over me last night in my little purple passion place. This was something frantic and intense.
I wanted him to know my body the way I imagined people did when they could truly indulge in lust, could just get funky and fun and be all about the release of all their urges, ticking them off one by one. We had another chance at that today. I unbuttoned his pants as he kissed me, unzipped his fly, and exposed him nak*d, dropping to my knees and –
“Oh, God,” he groaned as my mouth covered his rigid hardness. He was already ready for me; my warm, accepting mouth was able to play and tease him, tongue lifting up the underside of his hard shaft, making his knees buckle slightly, his hands slipping into my hair like a man seeking grace. His fingernails brushed against my scalp, the effect so erotic my own orgasm came to the surface like a tsunami, holding back just before crashing onto shore.
I decided he was worth this – the two other guys I’d tried this on, ever, had been jerks about it, shoving my head down onto them and making it hard to breathe, with no consideration for me. That’s the thing – sometimes when you give to someone it really isn’t selfless. It’s selfish. You find joy in it because you’re giving freely. The point where it’s not freely given is the point where it all falls apart.
Trevor’s groans and little shakes of abandon made me swell with pride – and arousal. I didn’t want this to be all we did, and apparently – neither did he, because I found myself suddenly in his arms, his hands pulling at my pants, his mouth against mine, searching and taking and frantic. He felt it, too – the sense that we needed to join as fast and hard and intensely as possible, to shoot for the moon with the precious time we had left.
Soon my nak*d ass hit the moss covering the ground, and Trevor was out of his pants, stripping off his shirt, returning to the state he’d been in when I met him. My eyes could never, ever get enough of that body, and he wanted to see me, too. The warm sunlight really didn’t allow me to be hidden, and a flash of bashfulness hit me. Where did that come from? I willed it away and as he stripped my bra off, my final piece of clothing, he gently stretched me out on the ground, arms above my head.
“I just want to look at you, Darla,” he said, an open, marveling grin stretching that pensive face. “You are so beautiful.” Warmth filled me in all the right places, including my heart. Snappy comebacks and deflections filled my mind and died out within seconds, a deeper part of me accepting his words – really accepting them. Integrating them.
Because I was beautiful. That he could see it in me made me feel it all the more, made me revel in the attention and the recognition and in the validation that no matter how much people tried to convince me otherwise, or how life threw so many nasty messages my way, that internal divining rod of love I’d always hoped was inside me really was.
And it led me to Trevor.
Or, maybe, he had one inside him, too, and it had found me.
One of his hands reached down to find me slick and wet, and the other fumbled in his jeans, pulling out a condom. I kissed his nose and asked, “How’d you get that?”
“Wallet. Joe brought it with my clothes and phone.” A moth flew by and the sky was an unusual blue, with little puffs of cloud the only evidence we weren’t facing an unbroken chain of space leading to the heavens. It was the kind of spring day in Ohio that made you feel blessed. The long expanse of flesh that our bodies made, buried in the clearing behind flowers and grasses and new hope, made me feel a sense of peace and excitement I never, ever wanted to let go of.