Loud is How I Love You (6 page)

“Wait, those are my only options? To be mauled or to walk home? What about the paper?”

“Fuck the paper,” he says. “I’ll drop it off for you on my way to work tomorrow.”

“What about . . .”

“What about what?”

“What about Millie?”

“Millie?” he says, spinning back around to face me. “Oh yes, Millie Vagaboss. Let’s definitely talk about her.” His sarcasm really isn’t bad for a Midwestern boy.

“It’s none of my business, really,” I say as I realize I don’t actually want to hear this, most likely.

“No, no, it’s your business, especially since you gave her your blessing to basically dry hump me in the van last night.”

“What the hell?” I think I feel my nostrils flaring, but I really hope not. “I did?”

“Yeah, thanks for that,” he says. “She told me you said there’s nothing going on between us, and you were cool if she hooked up with me, like I’m some guy in your personal boy harem and you’re giving me to her as a token of your appreciation.”

“It was so not like that! Are you kidding me?”

“She was really drunk,” he says. “But that was the gist of it, yeah.”

Now I’m mad. I have no idea why, since I basically did tell Millie she was free to go for it with Bean.

“What’s wrong?” he says. “Did you really expect to find her hiding in my closet? Were you going to fight for my honor or something?”

“Stop making fun of me.”

“Stop giving me to your friends like I’m some kind of manslut.”

“I didn’t do that!”

“You did tell her there was nothing between us, though.”

“Yeah, I know,” I say, feeling guilty and I’m not even sure why.

“And then you walked right over here in my favorite tank top without a fucking bra on, and by the way? Your five
minutes is up.”

“I know,” I say.

Cue eye lock. I feel like motherfucking Cyclops I’m owning this stare-down so hard.

But then Travis pounces, throws me over his shoulder and dumps me onto the bed. He jumps on top of me and starts to tickle the hell out of me. His fingers are in my armpits, in my side, the crook of my neck. I’m howling with laughter until I cry and beg him to stop. I haven’t laughed this hard in I can’t even remember how long. I finally get a breath in and he’s smiling, wide, his eyes are all happy and when he finally kisses me, it’s gentle and sweet. He hovers, his lips barely touching mine until I’m lifting off the bed for him, pulling his face to mine so I can slide my tongue into his mouth. He moans and now he’s really kissing me, leaning on his elbows over me, concentrating all of his attention on my lips as he licks them, then licks into my mouth.

Now I’m back in that other place, the awesome place. It feels a lot like being in the band cave with him, where we don’t need words to let the other know what’s going on inside. In the cave it’s all tone and feeling. Here it’s the sound of his breathing over me, into me, the sexy, hungry noises we make together because we just can’t help ourselves. It’s the feeling of his lips sliding over mine, the feel of his tongue as he slips it into my mouth again, tasting hazelnut coffee and whatever else I taste like when I want to get fucked, because I want it. Right now. And he knows it.

He’s known it all along, I’m sure.

I could do this all day, all night, all week, except it’s making me ache fiercely between my legs and he hasn’t gone there yet. I’m hoping he’s going to move his hand up under my shirt, touch me, move things along, but he’s taking it so slow. It doesn’t dawn on me that he’s just being careful—he doesn’t want to spook me again. I’m not here for slow, though, so I climb on top of him and his hard dick is all the invitation I need to take my pants off. He groans when I climb back over him and kneel there in nothing but black lace panties (because I definitely planned ahead this time), candy-striped kneesocks, and his favorite Pixies tank. And no bra, of course.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Emmylou,” he says as he runs his hands over my ass. His thumb hooks the waistband of my panties like he might yank them down but he just keeps it there. I feel his other hand sliding up the back of my thigh, under the fabric and he rests it on my ass, sweeping his thumb across my skin. Now we’re getting somewhere.

I lean down and kiss him again, feel him run his hands up my back, under my tank. I start licking and kissing his neck. I love the clean smell of it, the long and smooth contours. When I put my mouth on it, he breathes even harder and grips my ass with both hands, pulls me down right onto his dick and God, he feels so, so, so, so, so, so good. I start to suck on his neck, just like I’ve been wanting to suck on every part of him. I keep sucking right in the same spot, running my tongue over
it, scraping my teeth as he’s holding me and rocking into me and I suck harder and harder and think,
Oh shit, he’s going to be pissed when he sees what I’ve done.
It’s March and as far as I know, Travis doesn’t even own a turtleneck.

“Emmy . . .” he says in this accusatory tone. “You did not just give me a hickey, did you?”

When I giggle and don’t answer he rolls me off of him, gets up, and walks over to the full-length mirror on the closet door. I follow him over and we both see this big, bright red-and-purple bruise right on the front—the front!—of his very pale neck. He looks like he fell down the stairs. I didn’t realize it would be so big, but I’m actually sort of impressed with myself.

“Emmylou!” he yells at me. “What are you, thirteen?”

I stand there and shrug like I’m thirteen, basically.

“You did this on purpose?”

“No, not really?”

“You totally did this to get back at Millie, I can’t believe you.”

I don’t even realize this is true until he says it. Then I feel sort of bad because I really want to laugh but I can’t tell if he’s actually angry or not. Then I just laugh because I can’t even help myself.

“Good God, I have never in my life wanted to spank a girl as much as I do right now,” he says absently in the mirror as he’s inspecting the damage.

My mouth drops open because I have never even considered the possibility of being spanked by anyone until just now. And I’m a little alarmed by how much it turns me on.

“You marked me like I’m some sort of Catholic high school girl,” he mutters, apparently oblivious to the situation he’s just created in my underwear.

“You’d look adorable in a plaid skirt and kneesocks,” I say, leaning my chin on his shoulder as I stand behind him, watching him in the mirror. “They go really well with hickeys.”

“That’s it.”

That’s all the warning I get before he grabs me, drops us both down on the bed, throws me over his knee and I swear to God I have no idea how to make sense of what I’m feeling as he pulls my panties down to my knees and my bare ass is exposed. I’m surprised his hard-on doesn’t give us both internal injuries. I’m shaking and I feel like I might come and he hasn’t even touched me yet. Can a girl come from having a boy just look at her naked ass? Is that physiologically possible?

“You’re in so much trouble, Emmylou,” he says, running his hand over my ass. I tremble because I believe him, but I’m not exactly sorry.

“I’m sorry,” I say anyway. He’s not convinced when I giggle like an idiot.

“Oh, you will be.” He pins me down on his lap as I squirm.

Oh my God, oh shit oh shit oh shit
, I think.
Is it going to hurt? Will I like it? What the hell will it mean if I do? What is he going to think . . .
I guess I’m willing to find out, because I’m not trying to get away or anything. I’m too busy laughing at how ridiculous this is and being more turned on than I know how to handle.

Travis reaches across me into his desk drawer and I wonder if he’s going to pull out a ruler and smack me with that. I cringe a little at the thought, but then I see he’s holding a Sharpie permanent marker.
The
Sharpie, in fact. The thick one that he uses to tag our band name on things.

“What the hell are you doing with that?”

He pulls the cap off with his teeth and then I feel the tip of it, cold and damp with ink, on my left ass cheek. It tickles so I’m writhing and giggling and I have no idea what the hell he’s doing back there.

“Hold still,” he says. “You’re messing it up!”

“Messing what up?”

“My art.”

“You’re drawing . . . art? On my ass?”

“God, your ass is pretty much a work of art as it is. I’m just, you know, embellishing.”

I shake my head and try to be still but it tickles and holy God am I turned on. I feel slick between my thighs as he drags the marker across my skin. I have goose bumps all over my back, all down the back of my legs. I complain that he needs to hurry up because I really would like to get back to the sex part, but he shushes me. When he’s done, I feel the warm air of Travis’s breath as he’s trying to get the ink to dry.

“Do I at least get to see it?” I ask.

“Oh yes,” he says. “Most definitely. Damn, I wish I had a photo of this.”

“Don’t you dare!”

“Emmy, come on,” he says. “I would never do that. Unless you wanted me to, of course. Then I’d oblige.”

“I don’t!”

“Fine, fine, let me let it sear into my memory for the ages then, because this might be my life’s masterpiece right here.”

Then he rolls me off of his lap, which is kind of too bad because I really like it there. I pull my underwear back up and he maneuvers me back over to the mirror by my shoulders, turns me around, and tugs my panties back down so they’re just below my ass, and when I see what his Sharpie masterpiece is? I go fire-engine red all over.

Because that asshole wrote his name, in enormous, fancy letters, right across my ass!

“Oh, no you didn’t,” I say, blushing so hard I cover my face with my hands.

“Oh, hell yes I did,” he says, that cocky son of a bitch. “So now, if anybody else asks you if there’s anything between us, you can tell them I’m your tattoo artist and you’re my canvas. Or maybe you can just show them.”

Then he smacks me right on the ass.

“Jesus Christ, Travis,” I say, and I am so mad and so fucking turned on right now I can’t even handle it.

“Hey,” he says. “You started it.”

“I just fired a shot. You went nuclear!”

“I did not go nuclear,” he argues. “You gave me a hickey on my neck for God and the entire human race to see. Your ass is our secret. That is, unless you’re planning to show your ass to anyone else.”

“Well I’m not now!”

“Damn right you’re not.”

When he takes a step back like that and smiles, I want to smack him.

But not nearly as much as I want to fuck him.

If Travis is going to tattoo his name on my ass in Sharpie, he’s obligated to satisfy all my sexual needs until it wears off. I inform him of this and he nods thoughtfully, like he’s thinking it over. He’s taking it under consideration. I tell him he’d better be prepared to fuck me. And fuck me very, very well.

“You’d better impress me,” I say.

“It’ll be hard to live up to the Michael Bolton Fan Club president,” he says. “But I’ll do what I can.”

“Shut up. How do you know that’s the last guy I had sex with? You don’t know that.”

“
I’m
the last guy you had sex with,” he reminds me. “So I guess I’m in competition with myself. Now I really am worried.”

“Shut
up
, you dork.”

“Lay down,” he says, pulling his T-shirt off over his head.

I lie down on the bed, propped up on my elbows, and stare—no, no, I ogle him as he undoes his pants and pushes them with his boxers to the floor. This is the first time I have ever looked at him totally naked in front of me in broad daylight, and Christ in a Kinko’s, he is something to look at naked. To study. His shoulders are strong and broad like a swimmer’s, his chest is defined but not bulky. His arms flex as he leans over me. That sleek expanse of taut skin between his hip and his navel is where I plan to spend eternity after I die. And I’m not even going to describe the finely crafted specimen of male anatomy otherwise known as his cock, because fuck you, hands off, that’s why. But it’s gorgeous. Thick and straight and cut in a way that makes it a real standout. I’ve had just enough experience with dicks to know they all look a little different, and no dick I’ve ever seen in person or in print makes me salivate just looking at it. But his does.

I go to pull my tank off over my head but he tells me to leave it on. And the socks. But he slides my panties down and off and I never see them again, so I don’t even know what he does with them. Inhales them, probably. He’s a beast right now. A beautiful, starving beast who feeds on sex.

“Turn over,” he says. “So I can appreciate my handiwork.”

“Where’s the Sharpie?” I say. “You’re not appreciating anything back there until I’m safely in possession of it.”

He smirks but otherwise ignores this demand. He flips me over to my belly and pulls my hips up so I’m on my hands
and knees and there’s something about needing my arms to support my weight that gives him this total-access pass to my body, and he’s enjoying the hell out of it as he feels me all over. He bites me on the shoulder as he reaches up and slides his hand up under my tank. He cups my breast in his hand, his fingers teasing, and then he spreads my legs apart with his knee and now I can’t talk because I’m breathing like it’s my job as he starts to stroke between my legs. He slides two fingers into me and my legs are shaking as I feel him hard against my thigh.

“Do you know how fucking sexy you are?” he breathes in my ear as he touches me. “Do you have any clue at all what you do to me?”

I really don’t until he puts me in this headspace with him and makes me feel this way, that’s the truth. And from him saying these sweet, sexy things and touching me, I am now begging him again, to please, please give it to me. Let me have it.

He’s on his knees behind me, I hear the condom package rip open, and I’m nothing but eager anticipation as I hear him roll the latex on. He leans over me again, I feel him against my back, his breath against my ear, his cock against the inside of my thigh and he pauses.

“Just promise you’re not going to freak out on me this time, Emmy,” he whispers. “I want this too, but I don’t want to freak you out again.”

“If you don’t put it in me now, you’re really going to see me freak out,” I say through clenched teeth.

“Pinky swear it,” he says, and hooks his pinky around mine and it feels silly yet is somehow the most intimate thing I’ve ever done. With anyone. It’s a gorgeous dissonant-chord harmony, two things that don’t necessarily feel like they would go together until they do and then they’re perfect. Like we’re these grown people about to get down in the secret treehouse where I played as a girl.

I don’t understand it yet, but this is exactly what love feels like.

“Okay, I swear,” I whisper.

Travis exhales into my neck and kisses behind my ear as he slides himself into me slowly from behind, gripping me around the waist and I am crying out, “Oh fuck, oh my God!” as he slides it all the way in. He pauses, holds himself there and it’s every bit as good as I remember. No, it isn’t, it’s better. It’s deeper from this angle and when he starts to move, it’s harder. Less careful, more sure. It’s familiar this time, and I never knew that familiar could ever mean better, but with Travis it does. I know how he feels inside of me the way I know the songs I write. My body remembers, and now it feels like it remembers him, too. Already.

Travis puts his hand on my lower back, and I know he’s looking at his name inked across my ass and it makes me
even wetter. As he fucks me steady and hits me in the sweet spot, the one all the way deep inside of me sort of up and in the front, over and over and over at this angle, I feel like a star collapsing, waiting to go out in a brilliant explosion. Then I feel his hand between my legs, his fingers on my clit and there’s my gamma-ray moment. I scream so loud I don’t know if I have ever been that loud doing anything. I come and I come and I am shuddering in his arms as he’s struggling to hold back because I’m coming so hard.

“Jesus, oh, Jesus, Emmy Emmy Emmy,” he mutters into my back as he stops moving, gripping me tighter around the waist.

“Don’t stop,” I cry.

“I have to slow down or I’m going to lose it,” he says, panting. “I don’t want to come yet.”

Give him a hand, folks, because he doesn’t. He barely holds it together, but he hangs on. And I am impressed.

We fuck like this all afternoon. I let him violate me, desecrate me, penetrate me, complicate me for a good four hours. We don’t even do anything else but fuck. We don’t fondle, we don’t do oral, we don’t cuddle, and we don’t really talk. We don’t need to.

By the time I’m done fucking him, his room is no longer tidy, I’ll say that much. The textbooks are strewn all over the floor, notes scattered everywhere after he fucks me on the desk. After we do it on the bed in every conceivable position we can think of, we throw the pillows and comforter on the floor and get down and fuck like animals there, too.

When we’re finally out of condoms and I’m worried about his dick needing medical attention if I hop on it one more time, we curl up on the floor on top of the comforter (which definitely needs to go in the washing machine now) and he kisses me again.

“Are you hungry?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “Starving.”

“Let’s make grilled cheese,” he says.

And I don’t worry about anything being weird between us now that I’ve got a Travis Sharpie tattoo on my ass, because what could be weirder than that?

I pull on my pants and my tank top and throw his sweatshirt back on. He puts on his T-shirt and jeans and his hair is a mess, sticking up all funny in the front. I run my hands through it for him and calm it down and he kisses me on the nose and says thanks and checks himself in the mirror and it’s still not weird. And I feel good, really, really, amazingly good right now.

When we head down to the kitchen, I am honest to God limping from all the fucking and Travis is looking pretty worn out himself. Happy, but tired like he’s run a marathon, and in terms of calories burned, he probably has.

I hobble down the stairs behind Bean but halfway down we hear George whisper, “Scarlet Knights, feet!” Apparently, he and Molly and six other rugby team members got home from practice while we were otherwise occupied and too oblivious to notice. When they see us, they all stand at attention and George leads them in an awful rendition of something to the tune of “God Save the Queen”:

God save the Queen of Rock

Impaled on rocker cock

Of thee I sing!

Omaha’s own Don Juan

Hung like a mastodon

What gal wouldn’t hop right on

Travis Bean the King?

When they’re done, they slow-clap for us. Or maybe just for themselves.

Jesus fucking Christ am I red. And so is poor, pale-ass Travis. In fact, he’s so red I stop feeling embarrassed for myself and just feel bad for him.

“You’re all assholes, every one of you,” Travis says, pointing his finger around the room. “At least tell me you brought home beer.”

“Is that any way to treat your fans?” George says, then turns to me. “It’s no wonder you’re the singer, Emmy, because that was fucking inspired.”

“Oh man,” I say. “Was I really that loud?”

“That loud?” George asks. “Sweetheart, I think there are paramedics still out there looking for the car accident.”

Travis laughs, and then I can’t help but laugh, too.

“The beer is in the fridge,” Molly says. “Help yourself to the Sam Adams. You’ve earned it.”

Travis tries to stagger past George, but he sticks his arm across the hallway, blocking us.

“Holy shit, Trap,” George says. “You look like someone tried to hang you. Like you caught ringworm of the neck.”

Travis puts his hand over it like he’d totally forgotten it was there and shoots me a look.

“It was an accident,” I say. “He fell neck-first right off his bed. He’s lucky it wasn’t much, much worse.”

“His mom is going to love that when he picks her up on Monday.”

“What?” I say, all of the blood draining from my body. “Your mom? Is coming to New Jersey?”

“Yeah,” Travis says, hands on his hips. “She’s here for a nursing conference at UMDNJ this week. I have to get her at Newark Monday morning.”

“You didn’t tell me that!”

“I just found out today,” he says. “If I’d known you were going to maul me . . .”

“Tell her Millie did it!” I blurt out.

“Lie to my own mother?” he says. “The woman who gave me life and ironed my Levi’s all through high school? I don’t think so.”

“She’ll hate me!”

“She’ll lecture you on the dangers of breaking blood vessels in the neck,” he says. “For an hour, at least.”

“Maybe she should lecture you on the dangers of Sharpie poisoning,” I shoot back.

“If you want to show her that, that’s on you.”

“Show her what?” George asks, eyeing me suspiciously.

“Nothing,” Travis and I both say at the same time, but he’s got an enormous shit-eating grin and I most definitely do not.

“Jesus, Emmy, I always knew you had pipes but you must have a mouth like a Hoover,” George says, inspecting Travis’s neck.

“Tell me about it,” Travis says as I cringe. Then he turns back to George. “Don’t even think about it. Seriously.”

“About what?”

“Whatever it is you’re thinking about her mouth right now,” Travis says.

In the kitchen as we’re making grilled cheese for the rugby team and drinking George’s beer, I stop to appreciate again how not weird it all is. Bean is asking me for the Kraft slices and if I want tomato and to hand him more butter, and none of this is weird at all. George and the women’s rugby team just ribbed the shit out of us for desecrating the upstairs of the Lincoln Hill house, and it’s still not weird. It’s the first time I question the “no fucking” rule, because so far? Fucking Travis really doesn’t seem like a bad thing. It seems like the exact opposite of a bad thing, in fact.

“Aren’t you worried about how this is going to affect the band?” George asks, sobering me up as I bring him a sandwich and some chips. “Band relationships can be a real cock-up.”

“Two words,” Travis says. “Sonic Youth.”

“Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore are married,” George points out. “That makes a difference.”

“Well, there’s Julia and Matt from Circle Time,” he says. “They’re in a band together and they’re not married.”

“They’ve been a couple since junior year of high school,” George says. “They were together before Circle Time got together. It’s different.”

“Can you just not?” says Travis.

Because I’m standing here quietly freaking out about what George is saying, and Travis knows me well enough now to know if I’m quiet, if I’m not giving an opinion on something like this, if I’m not weighing in, it’s because I’m still not sure how I feel. Travis gives me that look he gives me when I’m unsure about something, usually reserved for the stage when I’m worried about fucking something completely up.

“Pinky swear,” he says. “Remember?”

“I’m not freaking out,” I say. I’m lying. All my insides feel like they just vaporized and escaped out through my ears.

“No need to freak out,” George says. “I’m sure it’ll all work out one way or another.”

“It needs to work out so that Soft can play Ag Field Day and hopefully land a slot at CMJ in the fall,” I say.

“Do the beat brothers know?” George asks.

“No,” I say. “They don’t.”

“You’re going to tell them, right?”

“It’s none of their fucking business,” Travis says with a scowl.

“Trap, honey,” Molly says. “You really think they won’t figure it out? With a tramptoo like the Great Red Spot of
Jupiter on your neck?”

“And look at the way he looks at her, for Chrissakes,” George says.

“It’s all very romantic,” Molly says. “You won’t be able to keep this secret for long.”

“Not secret, private,” Travis says. Then he glances around the room full of skeptical-looking rugby players. “Relatively private.”

“Why would you want to keep it from them?” Molly asks. “I don’t get it.”

“It’s a band thing,” George explains. “You wouldn’t understand.”

***

When Bean walks me home, we both agree we’re not going to say anything to Joey and Cole right now and they can speculate all they like about Bean’s neck wound. They’ll probably think Millie did it anyway. To keep it a secret feels weird for a champion over-sharer like myself, but I’m relieved. When I had convinced myself that sex with Travis was off-limits and would never happen again, I was all for coming clean, confessing our sins, and moving on. Now that I’m pretty sure I want it to continue, I don’t know what to tell them. Travis has made it pretty darned clear he doesn’t want me with anybody else—with his name scrawled across my ass this seems like a safe bet—and I guess I’ve made the same thing clear to him today with my juvenile hickey stunt. But we haven’t defined anything else between us. There’s no awkward “will you be my girl” proposal, thank God. So what exactly would we tell them? Everything is basically the same but now we’re fucking like rabbits on hormone injections and we’re not going to fuck anybody else right now?