Stacy's Dad Has Got It Going On (18 page)

Wear something comfortable?
As in, “let me slip into something a
little more comfortable,” or as in, “Put on your sweats, we’re digging for
worms”? She cut her losses and tossed on her famous blue flare jeans over the
sluttiest thong in her underwear drawer.

As Savannah slid into the passenger
seat of Chris’ roommate’s car, she couldn’t conceal the smile that had
plastered itself to her lips. Moreover, she didn’t want to. It matched his.

Chris’ driving was smooth, like his
personality and his manner of speech. They had everything to talk about. She
asked about his roommates, and he told her they were actually his fellow band
members—this was Eve’s car. That’s how they ended up with a vocalist who was
afraid to sing in public. Chris and Yu had collaborated on a few projects when
they started to hear this angelic little voice singing from the bathroom, or
the hallway, or wherever. Eve was a true poet. She made up lyrics on the fly as
he and Yu rehearsed their songs over and over again. Soon, they had a singer.
Before that, they hadn’t even realized they were writing songs.

When Chris slowed down, Savannah
looked around. “I don’t think you can park here. This is a hospital zone.”

“That’s okay,” he replied. “We’re
going to the hospital. You’re going to have someone look at that ankle.”

Savannah’s fingernails dug into her
purse. She took a sharp breath in and held it high up in her chest. Chris
definitely heard it, but he only smiled as he stepped out of the car. If she’d
wanted to go to the hospital, she would have damn well gone to the hospital on
her own. There was nothing wrong with her ankle. Well, there was, but it wasn’t
a big deal. Why did nobody believe her? She was
fine
.

“Oh,” Chris said, almost as an
afterthought, when he opened the passenger door for her. “Did you bring your
health card? Because they’ll want to see it at triage.”

“Yes,” she hissed through gritted
teeth. This was not her idea of a memorable first date.

Chapter Eighteen

“Aren’t you glad I brought you here?”
Chris teased as he helped Savannah into the car. “All this time you’ve been
walking around on a torn anterior talo-fibular ligament!”

“Also known as a sprained ankle.”

After spending three hours in emerge
and one hundred and twenty seven dollars on a damn brace, she was back to
liking Chris…a lot. Her mood had dipped below sea level for a while. She was
really and truly pissed at first—she’d said no doctors and he took it upon
himself to bring her anyway? How could she not feel a little trampled? But
Chris’ spirits were so eternally high that she couldn’t help feeling hers
elevate after fifteen minutes sitting next to him. In the waiting room, they
talked about everything and nothing, they flipped through magazines and poked
fun at pop culture. They laughed a lot. And then they talked about Eric.

“I’m surprised by your reaction,”
Chris had said.

Savannah’s heart nearly stopped at the
perceived criticism. “What do you mean,
my reaction
?”

He’d set down his magazine on the
messy table in the middle of the waiting room, and turned to look her straight
in the eye. “When you learned new information about this man, Eric, you
automatically shut him out?”

“Yeah,” she said in a whisper. She
didn’t want the other people waiting at emerge listening in. “I guess, but so
what? He wasn’t the person I thought he was.”

“Or maybe the person you somewhat
idolized turned out to be human, and that disappointed you.”

Idolized?
She hadn’t idolized Eric, had she?
No, she’d felt sorry for him, if anything. “Maybe when I found out he was a
pothead, he didn’t seem as worthy of my sympathy…or something…you know?”

Chris had nodded. “But maybe that
quality actually makes him more worthy of your sympathy. We don’t seek refuge
from pain that isn’t there.”

Savannah had laughed, then winced as
she tried to lift up her ankle. “I don’t even seek refuge from the pain that is
there.”

When Chris laughed, she’d watched his
lean body bounce in the ratty waiting room chair. His smile was inexplicably
bright in the dead of night. He’d shifted his orange dreads from his shoulder,
and she’d set her head down against it. Was it her imagination, or did he still
smell like jasmine tea?

* * * *

As Chris guided Savannah into her
apartment, he said, “Remember RICE: Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation.”

Ice
. Savannah felt a brief ‘what was I thinking?’ chill as
she looked over at the couch. Eric’s hands had melted ice down her belly, his
cock had infiltrated her numb pussy...what a strange few days. A fizz of
ebullient emotion sprang up in her heart, and she hugged Chris’ arm tight to
her chest. Most guys wouldn’t want to hear everything she’d told him today, but
she trusted Chris with her secrets. He seemed to understand everything. There
were no other guys like him.

“Can you take me to my bedroom?” she
asked. “It’s at the end of the hall.”

She hopped alongside him, clinging to
his arm. The strength within him trembled in his lean muscles. He was
commanding in a metaphysical way—she could feel the power resonating from his
soul. It was strange, but comforting.

“I was hoping they’d put you in a
cast,” Chris laughed as he opened her bedroom door. “I wanted to sign it.”

She watched him look around her space
as he led her to the bed. They sat together on the edge of the mattress, side
by side, and they looked at each other in the mirrored length of her closet
door. For what seemed like a very long time, they rested together, touching
only at their thighs, gazing into the mirror and breathing deeply. She felt so
attuned to him already. Just sitting here next to him, her body tingled…no, it
wasn’t just her body, was it? Her psyche trembled in his presence. She
remembered his music, and how impressed she’d been, how it had impacted her on
levels she couldn’t comprehend. He was so deep in her already. He’d touched places…he’d
been places inside of her she didn’t know yet.

“You can sign me,” she said.

“Hmm?”

Pointing to her backpack, she said,
“There are markers in the front pouch. Since there’s no cast to sign, you can
sign me.”

With a grin across his cheeks, Chris
fell to his knees and zipped open her bag. “Where?”

Why did she take off her top? She
couldn’t quite say. It just seemed like the thing to do. She pulled it over her
head and traced a finger across her belly. “Here.”

Chris laughed. “I meant ‘where are the
markers?’ but don’t worry—I found them. Non-toxic, huh?”

She could have felt embarrassed for
misinterpreting, but why bother? With Chris, she felt strangely at ease. She
felt a kind of freedom she’d never experienced. It was wonderful, and it
encouraged her to unzip her jeans and shuffle out of them—which was easier
accomplished in her mind than in practice. Chris smiled, of course, as any boy
would smile in the presence of young nudity, but he also shifted toward her to
help pull her jeans past the ankle brace.  She noticed him noticing her
barely-there thong. The lust in his eyes seemed tempered by something else.
Adoration? Appreciation on some level beyond the purely sexual. And that made
her nod, as though her body were saying, “I understand the sentiment, and yes,
I agree.”

Setting the markers out on the bed
beside her, he kneeled before her and gently lifted her injured ankle up and
over his shoulder. “Elevation.”

He wore jeans and a threadbare
button-down shirt over a visible undershirt, and still Savannah felt
overdressed. She unhooked her bra with one hand and the weight of her breasts
brought the cups swinging down and the straps tumbling across of her arms.
Raising one hand at a time from the bed, she untangled herself from her bra as
Chris looked on. “Bare,” she said. “Almost completely.”

Nodding, he gazed the length of her,
from her eyes, down her chest, to her very extremities. “What colour should I
sign in?” he asked, running his fingers across the markers on the bed.

“Every colour,” she replied. “Maybe
not yellow—it won’t show up on my skin.”

But Chris was apparently not one to
take things for granted. He uncapped the yellow marker first. The tip felt wet
and cold as it met the flesh of her belly. She watched him sign
Chris
,
but when he moved the marker away, she said, “Nothing’s there.”

“That isn’t true,” he replied. “You
saw me press the marker against your skin. I’m sure you felt it as I signed.
Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”

Suddenly Savannah’s heart felt too big
for her chest. She inhaled quickly, in a gasp, as her eyes filled with tears.
The inexplicably big emotion overtook her, until she was gulping back sheer
sentiment. What was this feeling? It wasn’t sadness…no, sadness she’d met many
times before. This…this was elation. She felt too big to be embodied. Her soul
seemed to expand in every direction. And when she released her hold on that
cascade of tears, Chris kissed his fingers and pressed them to her wet cheeks.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,”
Savannah said, trying to make light of herself.

“Nothing’s wrong with you,” Chris
replied with a smile that glowed past her tears. “You have emotions, and you’re
letting me see them. There’s no greater commune.”

“Sex,” she countered before she could
stop herself.

“Sex is emotion in motion.” He picked
up the red marker, and wrote the words across her belly. “Mae West said that.”
And then he slipped out from under her leg and lifted her, laid her out like a
gown on the unmade bed. Sitting beside her, he traced her flesh with his eyes
and she felt his gaze like feathers upon her skin.

She felt as though the happenings of
now were somehow bigger than the world outside her bedroom. This experience,
strange and exciting, was the microcosm of a new conviction of the heart. She
would be changed by it.

As Chris reached for a new
marker—blue, this time—she asked, “Could you write me a poem?”

“On the spot?” he asked, tilting his
head to the side.

She could tell he was surprised she’d
request such a complicated task. Tracing her fingers up her legs and her belly,
then around her bare tits and down her arms, she replied, “On all these spots.
Can you?”

Licking his pink lips, Chris smirked.
“I don’t see why not.”

Fully clothed, he straddled her
stomach without setting his weight down. She watched him cogitate. Already, she
loved his mind. He was a creative and a scientist—what more could she desire?

And then his eyebrows jumped and a
huge smile broke across his lips. He set the felt tip of her blue marker
against her upturned wrist and started to write. The slick ink tickled her skin
as he wrote on it in devoted silence. She couldn’t read the words, and asked,
“What does it say?” as he traced the marker across her chest.

“Patience,” he whispered, grabbing the
green marker and continuing down her left arm. He worked fast. The letters were
big and sloppy, but his work made her smile. When he reached her left wrist, he
sat between her open thighs and wrote in black and then red and then purple
down her belly, down her right leg, up her left. The markers tickled her tender
flesh, but the pressure of his fingers filled her with desire. Under her thong,
the one item of clothing that remained, she was wet with anticipation.

“There,” he said, obviously
self-satisfied. “Your poem. It’s finished.”

She gazed down at her multi-coloured
body and her heart burbled with giggles. “What does it say?”

With a formal nod, Chris perched
himself over her. She gasped at his proximity. Setting his fingertips against
her left wrist, he traced them across her body as he read:   

Savannah’s skin

is my palimpsest,

to write on and over

everything that’s been written

on and over

and on and over

and on and over

her guarded heart,

her determined mind,

her weary life,

and not least,

her torn anterior talofibular
ligament.  

She laughed at the last line. Now she
could see the words
anterior talofibular ligament
ran the entire length
of her left leg in purple markers, like a series of big, letter-shaped bruises.
“Your poem doesn’t rhyme,” she chuckled.

“Well,” he replied in a mockingly
taken-aback tone, “you never said it had to rhyme. Should I clear it all away?”
Lifting her wrist to his mouth, he placed the tip of his tongue against her
flesh and gave it a warm lick.

She gasped, though she didn’t intend
to. “No. Leave it. It’s beautiful.” She wished he would read it again—she
wasn’t sure she caught the full meaning the first time around—but his tongue
was now moving up her arm, smudging his beautiful words.