Bound Together (23 page)

I held onto her waist and le
t her overtake everything else, all my thoughts, all my senses were consumed by
Zoey
.
I hated her silence, her refusal to tell me what had happened, her focus on only getting one thing from me. Well, I didn’t hate it that much.
Blood starting rushing from my head to my crotch, making it difficult to form coherent thoughts. Especially with the way she was tracing her fingers along my thigh. My
inner
thigh.

I needed to take control of the situation quickly, or it would be over before it started. I
rolled
her onto her back and laid down on top of her. I pushed her shirt up and felt her breasts beneath my palms.
Zoey
moaned and
worked her hand into my boxers.
Gah
.
I shuddered. Her movements weren’t timid at all
—
she knew her way around one of these.

Chapter Twenty
-
seven

Zoey

Matt
got
really quiet
. He
wasn’t making noises like Jordan had when I’d done the same thing I was doing now. Then again, Jordan had been embarrassingly loud and made really ugly faces. Matt seemed much more in control
—
too much so in fact.
It wasn’t like I was going to demand he
say my name, bitch
, but a friendly indication I was doing this right was all I was looking for.
“Are you…liking this?”

“Oh God, yes
,
”
h
e groaned and it sent my heart pounding harder than before if that was even possible. “I’m
just…
concentrating,” he added.

“On?” I wondered aloud.

“You know …on not….” He looked down at his lap.

“That’s
kinda
the
point. I want you to.”

“Oh
.
” He put his hand to the back of my neck and guided me in
to
kiss
him
. After a few minutes his shoulders trembled and he jerked forward, then smiled against my lips.

Just like Morgan predicted, things were over pretty quick after that. After he cleaned up with one of his socks and threw it out the window, we crawled back up to the front and he started the truck. He pulled it into DRIVE, but with his foot still firmly on the break, he leaned over and kissed me
on the cheek
. “Thanks.” He smiled stupidly at me.
I faced forward and stayed silent
on
the ride home, wondering what
the hell I was doing with Matt
Parker
and
I’d be walking into once I got back home.

I hadn’t told Matt, but my mom was
worse
than ever.
Cora had sprained her wrist that afternoon after school climbing to the highest
branch
on the tree in our backyard on a dare. She’d fallen and I’d spent a couple hours at the emergency room with her. When I got home, everyone
was crabby and waiting for dinner, my mom the worst of them all.
After dealing with all that, I just needed the distraction I knew
only
Matt could provide.

I tried not to think about the fact that I suggested we only see each other twice more and I’d just used
up one of those
. I had a feeling he would be helpful to have around all year.
But I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea about things. I knew things eventually needed to go back to the way they were between us before
our trip to
Paris
.
Things
at home
were getting out of hand and sometimes I wondered how I was ever going to get out of this town.

*****

“Brian asked me to the dance,” Morgan beamed, walking beside me through the hall. “
You should come
—
it’
ll be like a group thing.”

At least she wasn’t still holding onto delusions of Jordan and I together.
“I don’t think so Morgan
. A
t this point, I want to hang onto my perfect record of never having
attended
a high school dance.”

“You can borrow a dress from me.”

“No, that’s not what I mean.”
I looked over at her, wondering how in the world that’s what she construed from my lack of interest in organized high school social events.

“It’s our senior year,
Zoe
. We need to experience everything we can before it’s all done.”

Only, she didn’t understand that was exactly what I was waiting for
–
all this to end.

*****

“What are you getting in Calc
ulus
?” Matt asked, leaning over toward me in Global Studies.

“An A.”

“I could use some help studying for midterms. Could you come over Sunday?”

“Is this
it then, your official turn
...the last time?”

“No.” He shook his head, mouth turned down. “My mom will be home. This will really just be
C
alc
homework. The last time…we’ll have to make sure there’s no parental supervision.”

So he was clearly interested in what Morgan
had
said he was.
It explained
why he was still hanging around. And why wouldn’t he be
? H
e was a guy. I’m sure Jordan would still be doing the same thing if I was at all interested in him. 

“U
h, okay. Sure.
Calc.
”

“Sweet.”
He turned my hand over and wrote his address on my palm.

I clenched my fist closed when he was done. Why did it feel strangely like he’d marked me as his?

After school, I headed off toward the elementary school, but was momentarily distracted by what I saw on the football field. Matt was leading the pack of jocks in a drill. They were decked out in their pads and helmets, but I would have recognized that cocky strut anywhere. They ran from one end of the field, tackling a big punching bag th
ing at the end. Matt was fast –
faster than the other guys. They jogged up to him, patting him on the butt as they went by. I couldn’t help but smile and slow my stride to watch
for
a few seconds more. He glanced up just then and caught me watching. I shielded my eyes from the sun and stared right back at him. He looked at me a few seconds too long, until another player on the team slammed into him, knocking him to the side. He jogged to join up with the others.

I had a weird feeling spread throughout my stomach. How was I supposed to tell Matt that our façade of acting like we didn’t know each other at school and then hanging out at night was giving me whiplash, leaving me totally confused? I couldn’t possibly admit that. I was the
one who’d been calling the shots, but he’d been totally fine with
it
too
. I had made
it clear this was all I wanted
—
all I could handle. Only now I wasn’t so sure.
I had a boy who liked me, siblings that loved me and a mom who needed me. But
what did
I
want?
If I wasn’t taking care of everyone else, I didn’t know what to do – how to just be me and be okay with myself.

*****

Sunday
at ten after one, I pulled on
to Matt’s
street, where every house looked the same and the trees
saplings compared with
my side of town
. I
double checked the address
I’d written down
and slowed in front of his house
. It was a neat and tidy spilt
-
level with spotless
green lawn
and beige siding
, just like all the other
s
. I parked my dad’s car in the street, not wanting to spoil the look with his fad
ed old Dodge. I
slug my backpack over my shoulder and headed up the winding sidewalk edged with perfectly groomed shrubs. I rang the doorbell and waited.

His house was
spotlessly cleaned
and smelled like laundry detergent. I didn’t see either of his parents, though he’d said they would be home. At first I was envious of how clean his house was, but as I look
ed closer
—
the perfect vacuum lines in the
white
carpet, the spotless
countertops
and
sparkling sink, it was utterly silent with
white and b
eige as far as the eye could see
—
I started to change my mind. It felt like no one lived here.
I would take my messy, lived in house any day, filled with people I loved over rooms that I wasn’t sure I should walk
into;
less I mess up the vacuum lines.

After getting us
some lemonade
,
which he pl
aced squarely on the coasters on
the coffee table in the family room, we sat down and flipped open our Calculus books.
I started with
the material that would likely
be
on the midterm, and wrote out
an equation
.
I pointed with the end of my pencil as I spoke.
“X is the independent variable, Y is the dependent variable and B is the Y
-
intercept. Got it?” He looked confused, but nodded.

After more talk of tangent lines,
equations, functions and limits
, I could tell his interest was waning.
He was staring down at the page as I talked, but the look in his eyes was faraway.
“
Matt
?”

“Sorry. I wasn’t listening.”

I flipped my book closed. “I have other things
I should be doing today. Never
mind.”

He held my shoulders, preventing me from getting up. “I’m sorry,
Zoey
. St
ay. Please stay.”  His eyes ple
d with me silently.

I settled back onto the couch and he removed his hands from holding me in place. “
Why are you so distracted
?”

He
stood up suddenly and pulled me up by my hand. “Come with me.”

He walked down the hallway filled with pictures of him and
his brother
growing up,
portraits taken when they were chubby and hairless, to sports pictures and school portraits,
ending with a photo of John in a Marine uniform.
I stopped in front of the picture. The resemblance between Matt and John was undeniable. Same square jaw, bright blue eyes, same Adam’s apple. Matt circled back and stood
next to me. “You guys look alike
.
”
I felt him nod beside me, and then watched as he ran his hand across his hair again.

“You want to see my room?” he asked
. I didn’t answer, but let him pull me away from the picture. We passed by his parent’s room,
its
main feature a pink bedspread crisply tucked
in
around the bed
. Matt led me into his
room; it
was filled with stacks of books, CDs,
and
folded
T
-
shirts lined up on the floor. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought they had just moved in and he was still unpacking.

“What’s with all the stuff?” I sat down on his
twin size bed covered with a navy blue comforter
that was soft and faded.

He sat down next to me. “Most of it
was John’s. My mom turned his room into a guest room, and I
didn’t want
her throwing anything away.”

O
n top of his night table was a bottle of vitamins and a folded up section of the newspaper. I looked
closer
—
the obituaries.
I picked it up. “A little dark, don’t you think?”

He took it from me. “I like reading the obituaries and trying to figure out what they’re not telling you. Like for instance, the
y
don’t mention the cause of death if it was AIDS or suicide
.
Sometimes you’ll understand pieces of their life
—
like this one.” He pointed at a two inch square
and read,
“
He
finally succumbed after a long battle with cancer
.”