Snark and Stage Fright (8 page)

Sitting on the porch swing later as we were all watching the stars rise up over the horizon, Michael kept touching his knee against mine and every time he made contact I felt a flash run up my spine. He was running his fingers very lightly over the back of my neck when he said, super casually, “Hey, Mom, Dad, I think Georgie and I are gonna go in now, okay?” He kissed his mom on the cheek and I mumbled “good night” but declined to look them in the eye as we went inside and walked single file up the narrow plank staircase to the second floor and I could feel my heart bouncing in my ribcage like a jackrabbit on meth.

He opened the door to the guest room—my room for the next three days—and then closed it behind me, turning the lock with a decisive click. I gulped and in an instant we were on the bed, shoes off, and Michael’s mouth was on the part of the back of my neck that has always been so sensitive. I swear, if you tickle it just a little, I dissolve into convulsions and really helpless laughing so much it hurts a little. But now his lips were rendering me a much better kind of helpless. I ran a hand up his back underneath his gray T-shirt and he shivered a little; when I nuzzled his throat with my mouth he started groaning. Nervous as I was, I felt thrilled that I was capable of making him make those noises, that I could make him feel as good as he was making me feel. It was a little like being drunk, only without the unpleasant nausea and lack of balance. It was so much better.

Before I could congratulate myself on my Olympic-level kissing skills, Michael murmured, “Uhhhh … shirts off?”, his mouth against my collarbone and his hand under my shirt near my navel. I just nodded and he removed his hand to whip the shirt up over his head, making his curls flip to attention; normally I would have found this adorable but the sight put a lump in my throat now. Hours of lifeguard duty had given him a light gold tan and some pretty defined muscles. I don’t have a lot to compare them to in real life—Cassie’s the connoisseur of male torsos in my family—but the sight of his chest and abdomen made me suck in my breath. Of course, I’d seen him shirtless before, having been in his pool and on the beach with him now many times, but somehow this was different. Being on this bed in this room, alone, made me feel like I’d just drunk a lot of champagne really fast, bubbly and giddy.

When I didn’t rip my own shirt off with equal speed, he chided, “Your turn, Georgie. Tit for tat,” before placing his mouth on my neck again.

“I can’t believe you just made an off-color pun.” I gasped while I still had breath enough; the feeling of his fingers gently freeing each of the buttons on my shirt was making me dizzy. While my brain and my heart were still debating each other about the wisdom of the Big Night Together, the rest of my body had already voted “yes.”

When I was shirtless and more than a little self-conscious, he let out a ragged exhale, saying, “You’re so beautiful, George. You really are.”

And then I wasn’t conscious of anything anymore except the amazing warmth of skin against skin and the feel of my fingers gliding all over his torso.

“I love you,” I blurted out when he was kissing his way across the lace edge of my bra.

He stopped and looked up at me, dark eyes hooded, and said, “I love you, too.”

“I’ve never felt like this,” I said as he guided me down onto the bed and looked down at me, eyes incandescent. I cupped his face with my hand and admitted, “It’s a little scary.”

He nodded and took my hand from his face and kissed my fingers and I swear almost burst into flames. He said, “I know. But it’s also more than a little awesome.”

I pulled him down with me and we kissed, our bodies curling and twining around one another, touching and exploring. I didn’t think human flesh was capable of feeling this good. But at the exact moment his fingers fumbled with the button fly of my shorts, I heard a thump on the stairs down the hall and I bolted upright, my heart pounding like I’d been caught breaking into someone’s house.

“What was that?” I gasped.

Michael’s voice was muffled when he said, “Probably just my parents, going to bed.”

When I looked down at him, he looked disheveled and sleepy, his eyes heavy-lidded, hair tousled from my twisting it in my hands, his lips a little swollen from all the kissing, and I swallowed hard. Somehow in the delirium of touch, I had managed to forget that his parents, two adults whom I may respect perhaps more than any two people on the planet, were one floor away from us, a matter of yards, really. However great I had felt in the loss of self-consciousness that comes when you are focused only on your body, on feeling, that was gone now, run off like a small animal that had scurried off the bed and under the closed door and down the hallway. I tugged a piece of hair over my ear and whispered, “I don’t think we should do this.”

He looked stunned for a second, and then a shadow of recognition passed over his face. He smiled and took my hand.

“It’s okay. I came prepared. I’ve got something in my room. I’ll go get it.”

“It’s not, um, protection I’m concerned about,” I sighed. “It’s your parents.” He sat up. And he didn’t look happy.

“What
about
my parents?”

“Weeelll, I don’t know how they would feel about this,” I faltered, gesturing to indicate our bodies on the bed. He frowned and rubbed his right eye with the back of his hand. I explained, “I’ve messed up so much on this trip—and I just want to be a good guest. I want to … respect what your parents would want, what they’d find … appropriate, I guess.” I sounded lame even to myself. So much for my brief reign as a sex goddess.

“They won’t care. Trust me. They’ll be happy that we’re happy.”

“How do you know that, though?”

He covered his face with one arm and groaned. “Because I know, okay?”

I frowned, then gasped as I realized how he knew this.

“Because you had sex here with Catalina? That’s how you know they’d be okay with us being up here?”

Michael lifted his arm and I could see his teeth were gritted and his jaw tight. “No,” he said.

I was relieved—but only for about a second. Then I made myself ask the question I felt compelled to the same way you can look at a roaring fire and think,
What if I stuck my hand in here
…
despite knowing the result.

I asked, “But you did have sex with her, right?”

“Yes. Last summer. And believe me, it did not require a tense series of negotiations to accomplish it,” he snapped.

I burst into tears. I don’t know what hurt more, the knowledge that my foolish jealous fears had not been so foolish after all or that my sense of timing and self-preservation was so off I had invited the confirmation.

“Georgie, it was before I even knew you existed,” he began, sounding slightly less defensive, and he turned to the wall for a moment. Then he sat up and said softly, “Georgie, please, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that about it being easier.” He reached for me and I let him pull me into his arms.

We leaned back against the pillows and I snuffled through my tears, “I shouldn’t have asked, at least not now.”

“You do know how to kill a mood,” he agreed, but he ruffled my hair with is fingers so I hoped he wasn’t mad anymore.

“Have you been with anyone besides … besides Catalina?”

“No,” he said into my hair. “Never even tempted.”

“Well, I haven’t been with
anyone
before, so this is kind of a big deal for me.”

He nodded and assured me, “I get that.”

“I don’t want to do anything to upset your family again and … and I don’t … ” I hesitated but he nodded at me again, once, so I admitted in my smallest voice, “I don’t want to be bad at this.”

I felt a laugh rumble in his chest. “How would you be bad at it?”

“I don’t want to disappoint you.”

He kissed the crown of my head and laid his cheek against it and I was really glad that I had showered before dinner. “Being disappointed is the
last
thing I’m worried about. I’m pretty sure I’m going to like it, Georgie. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to want to do anything else for, like, the next week and a half.”

“That’s a lot to live up to.”

He sat up and turned so that he was facing me. He wiped the last tears off my face with his thumb and told me, “It was one time with Catalina. I never really cared about her in that way. She was there, and I was curious. I didn’t feel about her at all the way I feel about you. I’ve never felt about anybody the way I feel about you.”

I whispered, “Me either. And that scares me.”

“Me, too.”

He pulled me to him and we lay with our arms wrapped around each other in silence. It was so quiet that I could hear the clock ticking on the nightstand, until Michael said, “It’s okay … if you don’t feel right about doing anything with my parents down the hall.” I nodded against his chest and he kissed my head again. “My mom and dad are driving back to Longbourne tomorrow but we can stay here, ourselves, tomorrow night. Just us.”

“I’d like that.”

We kissed, but much more slowly and softly than we had been a few minutes ago, when both of us were trying to chew each other’s mouths off.

“I’m sorry,” I said after a few minutes of this less terrifying restraint.

“Some things are worth waiting for,” he said to reassure me.

“You don’t have to leave for your room, you know. We could just stay like this?” I suggested.

He frowned for a moment in consideration before admitting, “I’m not sure I can. Even if you put on that awful PETA T-shirt again, I’ll still remember what you look like underneath it. And that will make it very hard to sleep.”

I blushed and he sat up, collecting himself for a moment before kissing my hand and saying with a bow, “I bid you good evening, madam. And on the morrow, after my parents depart, I will compromise you in any number of ways you find acceptable.”

When he closed the door behind him, I buried my face in the pillows. Despite that rather risqué promise as he left, I was afraid that I was close to driving him away for good. I’d let go of most of my anxiety about his illustrious family, but now I found that I couldn’t let go of myself, of this last little bit of myself, and I don’t know why I was clinging on to it, or what I was clinging on to. I loved him. I knew that. So why was I afraid to “go all the way,” as they say? Millions of people do it every second of every day, and they do it with people far less attractive and wonderful than Michael Endicott.

What was wrong with me?

I tried to call Tori, but she didn’t answer, no doubt because she was off having fabulous sex unencumbered by neurosis with her BF of almost a year now.

I’d have to figure this out on my own.

I had about twelve hours.

7 
In Which Sigmund Freud and I Get it all Wrong

After saying goodbye to his parents in the morning, Michael and I spent the next day at the beach, lying on enormous plush towels and looking at the water whenever we decided to take a break from kissing. It was pretty much perfect until Catalina showed up with her own beach bag and towel and made herself at home. I wanted to spend the afternoon with her about as much as I’d like to be handcuffed to a rabid baboon, but I was resolved not to say anything snarky, which meant that I didn’t say much of anything at all for the next two hours. Even when she batted her eyes at Michael and asked him to slather her back with sunscreen because she had a photo shoot in two days and if she came to work with a burn apparently the terrorists would win or something. Michael said he thought I’d do a better job, and I appreciated the gesture, even if it meant I had to play lady’s maid. It must be a tremendous responsibility she bore to be freckle-free because she was very exacting about where the lotion should go.

“You’re so lucky you’re not fair-skinned, Georgia,” she assured me at one point with a catlike glance over her Chanel sunglasses. “You could probably be out in the sun all day and just turn brown as a migrant worker!”

“Yeah, I come from tough peasant stock,” I agreed, and Michael laughed as I tossed a bit of apple to a gull that I hoped would peck out her eyes. I tried not to think that, while he thought I was funny, he had obviously found Catalina pretty alluring last summer. While they debated which restaurant had the best chowder in Hyannis, I wondered how exactly they had ended up in bed together. If Catalina initiated it, how did she do it? And what did she do when they were there, wherever it was—in his room or hers? I felt sick in my stomach as I tried to block out any mental pictures and the knowledge that whatever they did that night—and possible subsequent nights—she knew a hell of a lot more about what she was doing than I did. Which meant that despite what Michael had said last night, I was bound to be a disappointment. And the more I thought about that, the more I wanted to bury myself up to my neck in the sand. It definitely did not help to hear Catalina laugh at every single thing Michael said—or to see his responding grin.

It felt like a few weeks went by before Michael put his arm around me and finally said, “Georgie and I have something special planned for tonight, so we’ll have to say goodbye.” My heart felt like it grew two sizes like the Grinch’s in the Christmas special as we gathered our beach gear and walked back to the house. We then made out on the couch for about an hour, which was almost enough time to short-circuit all trepidation and worry about Catalina until the phone rang and we pulled apart, startled back to reality. Michael decided not to answer it but sat there, his hair all tussled and his eyes glazed, listening to his uncle on the answering machine talk about some clambake we were invited to. He groaned and smoothed out my rumpled T-shirt with one warm hand.

“I have to admit that I’m starving,” he said, running his hand along the length of my leg from knee to ankle, then, waggling his eyebrows in comic lasciviousness, adding, “and not just for you, baby. Do you want to go into town for food or just find something here?”

“Let’s stay here,” I said, and he smiled, so we rummaged and found some crackers and soup and salad and ate quickly, like we were going to be late for something really important. I guess Michael already felt we were late for it, after my chickening out last night, and despite the pleasures I’d just experienced on the family couch, I remained torn between wanting to do everything with him, wanting to feel that we belonged to one another completely and utterly, but feeling terrified of giving so much of myself, even to Michael. As we rinsed out our soup bowls, it was getting harder to act cool with my heart threatening to beat down the walls of my chest. Maybe that’s what made me decide to test the level of his commitment by playing truth or dare—or, rather, daring to reveal a truth.