Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
DEF LEPPARD, “LOVE BITES”
Gabby
I smiled on cue, nodded, and answered “fine” to everything I was asked on Thanksgiving.
How’s school? Fine.
How’s your roommate? Fine.
Do you like the campus? It’s fine.
Then Grandma Bonnie asked me another question. “How’s Ben’s hearing?” she asked.
I stared at my plate, absentmindedly rearranging my turkey and mashed potatoes. “He’s deaf, but shit happens.” My knee-jerk response silenced everyone at the dinner table, but it took me several seconds to register the words that fell from my lips.
Swearing wasn’t my thing, and definitely not in front of my parents in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner. And the insensitive tone wasn’t me either. There must have been a low level of anger that I was suppressing, then boom! It came out at the worst time.
As I glanced up, everyone gawked at me, except Eve. She grinned like a proud older sister.
“Well,” Grandma Bonnie cleared her throat. “It’s too bad that stuff happened to him. He’s so young with his whole life ahead of him. I can only imagine how devastated he must feel.”
“That’s,” I tried to recover with something between a sincere grin and regretful cringe, “what I meant. Devastated.”
And cruel.
Mean.
Unrecognizable.
“Ben doesn’t want to see anyone right now,” Mom said. “So Gabby’s a little sad that her best friend won't let her be there for him. We just have to keep him in our prayers.”
I kept him in my prayers. I prayed for him to get food poisoning this Thanksgiving, and to fall on his pile of Legos and end up with a few lodged into his dumb, stubborn ass.
And when I wasn’t praying for him, I was praying for myself—asking God to forgive me for thinking such awful things. I didn’t really hate him; I hated how he shut me out of his life.
After dinner, my sisters and I helped clean the kitchen, then I escaped to my room, thinking about calling Ben’s sister to get an update. Was he eating Thanksgiving dinner with them? Or was he still hiding in his room? Had he shown any remorse for how he treated me?
“Take off your clothes.”
I turned toward Eve after staring at my phone for more than a minute.
“Why?” I glanced down at my shirt. There was nothing on it.
“You love Ben. Take off your clothes for him. No guy can stay mad at a naked woman.”
I scoffed. “Then what? Dance?”
“No.” Eve snorted. “Well, maybe. That would be quite the picture. It might brighten his day. But I was thinking you could then take off his clothes.”
“Sex? You think the solution to him losing his hearing is sex?”
“No, Gabby. I don’t think you have a magical vagina. I’m just saying it could break the ice between you two.”
“Sex isn’t an icebreaker.”
“How do you know until you try?”
“I’m not you, Eve. I don’t just ride a guy for the heck of it.”
She chuckled, gathering her long brown hair over her shoulder while sitting next to me. “Maybe you should.”
“You’re going to Hell, and there’s nothing anyone can do to save you at this point.”
“Duh. I know that. So does the rest of the world.” She nudged my shoulder with hers.
I didn’t want to laugh. Damnation was no joke.
“Can you even imagine what it must be like to not hear?”
I slowly shook my head.
“Well, I don’t know how he feels, but I can imagine just from my own experience with shitty tragedies that he’s feeling scared and lonely. Lost and confused. He may never hear anyone speak to him again. Sure, he’ll read words on a paper. He might even learn sign language. But he’ll never hear his favorite song or the whisper of a lover in his ear while making love. However, he can still see the beauty of a woman’s body. And he can feel her fingernails digging into his back and her breath on his cheek. He can see stars behind his eyes, and waves of pleasure as an orgasm rips through his body. And for a moment, he might even forget that he can’t hear.”
Fire ignited in my cheeks and down my neck. Eve talked about sex with the ease of reading off a grocery list.
I cleared my throat. “Just because you slept with my math teacher doesn’t mean I’m going to take advice from you.”
She giggled. “Your math teacher was so hot. I wonder what happened to him?”
I smirked. “I heard he got ran out of town after a sex scandal.”
Eve stood and held out her hand. “Come eat pie. You don’t have to choose between Heaven and Hell right now.”
* * *
On Friday, I shopped with my mom and sisters.
On Saturday, I returned to Ben’s house to see him one last time before going back to school.
“He ate Thanksgiving dinner with us, but since then, he’s been locked in his room again,” Carmen said as I slid off my wool jacket and hung it on the hook. “Did you and your family have a nice Thanksgiving?”
I smiled. “Yes. Thanks for asking.” I stepped toward the stairs with a lot more hesitation than I had the day he tossed me out of his room.
“Tillie is in her room. She’ll get him to open his door.”
I nodded nervously while mumbling a soft, “Okay.”
Madonna blared from Tillie’s room, and it broke my heart to think that Ben couldn’t hear it and yell at his sister to turn down her “stupid music,” because he wasn’t a Madonna fan. Ben preferred more sophisticated music.
I came prepared, pulling a paperclip out of my pocket and straightening it to open Ben’s door. There didn’t seem to be any point in knocking first. In hindsight, I should have announced my arrival with a note under his door. Ben’s back was to me, hair wet, green towel around his waist, and rivulets of water running down his back. He dropped his towel, and I slapped my hand over my mouth to muffle my gasp, realizing in the next second that he couldn’t hear me.
Having never seen a naked man, I had no comparison, but my best friend was hot. Broad shoulders, trim waist, tight butt, and defined muscles. He pulled on a pair of white briefs and turned. His eyebrows shot up his forehead as water dripped from his shaggy, wet bangs.
I jumped back into the hallway and closed his door. A few seconds later, Tillie emerged from her room.
“Oh, hey Gabby.” She grinned. “Just a second,” she said, stepping back into her messy bedroom then returning with a paperclip.
Before I could say anything, she jabbed it into the round hole, stabbing it in different directions. “Hmm …” she turned the knob. “Oh. Wow. He didn’t have it locked.” She pushed open the door.
Ben eyed both of us with a cautious expression. He had on gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt. Tillie waved at him and mouthed, “Be nice.”
Was he reading lips?
I was on the fence between stepping back into his room and running away. Ben broke eye contact first, sitting on his bed to put on his white tube socks. On a deep breath, I stepped into his room and closed his door behind me. There was no hiding the residual embarrassment that lingered like a warm washcloth over my face.
I navigated the minefield of Legos to get to his desk where I picked up a pen to write something. But what? Suddenly, I’d forgotten why I was there or what I wanted to say. Seeing my best friend naked messed with my train of thought. Was I there to apologize? It’s not like I did anything wrong. He’s the one who kicked me out of his room. Maybe I was there to tell him goodbye and good luck for … being deaf? Closing my eyes, I shook my head at that stupid thought.
Was I there to take off my clothes? If so, he beat me to it. My stripping would have felt like a copycat.
I started to write on the notebook paper.
I’m
That’s it. That was as much as I could think of. I was what? Never had I felt such a loss for words around Ben. Just the opposite. He was used to enduring my long spiels about everything from my sisters to how lucky he was to be a boy and therefore had no menstrual cycles. Everything came easily with Ben. He’d been an extension of myself. We had no secrets. No lines. In fact, nothing in life felt real until I told Ben, and I had always thought he felt the same.
But writing the words was different, and I don’t know why it felt so hard. Writing was easy for me. I wrote all my feelings in the margins of books or the blank pages of journals. My every emotion and entire existence had been recorded in ink.
I X’d out the word and set the pen on the notebook. Then I noticed the pile of unopened letters I sent him. He was completely shutting me out, so I made my way to him, finding a few open spaces to step. He looked so sad with his forlorn eyes, downturned lips, and curled shoulders.
I wedged my way between his legs to stand as close to him as possible, simultaneously bracing for him to physically kick me out of his room. When he didn’t move, I pressed my palms to his cheeks, the softness of his beard teased my skin. When he closed his eyes and leaned into my touch, it made my chest ache. To distract myself from the tears burning my eyes, I leaned in and kissed him. It was slow and easy, unlike our previous kisses. A leisurely stroll in the park on a sunny afternoon. At first, I couldn’t tell if he was kissing me back, but then his hands slid up the back of my legs and he leaned into the kiss.
Those tears burned hotter instead of going away. I’d missed him so much. The longing and loneliness mixed with the guilt and uncertainty had left me feeling broken and lost. My nerves were replaced with need.
I needed Ben to hold me, piece me back together like one of his Lego creations. As I threaded my fingers through his damp hair, he guided my legs, one at a time, to straddle his lap without breaking our kiss. He made a noise that sounded like a drawn-out groan, and I wondered if he could hear himself. As he flicked my tongue with the tip of his, he hugged me to him, laying me on his bed with his pelvis cradled between my legs.
We kissed for what felt like forever, yet I never wanted it to end. I liked kissing my best friend, and I wanted to tell him as much, but he couldn’t hear me. That brought more tears to my eyes, so I turned my head to catch a shaky breath while Ben kissed along my jaw to my ear and down my neck. When his mouth returned to my face, he opened his eyes, seeing the first few tears escape.
His brow tightened, and his lips moved, saying something, but his attempted whisper wasn’t audible, but it looked like, “Are you okay?”
I quickly nodded and lifted my head to kiss him again. He rested his elbows on either side of my head and brushed his thumbs along my wet cheeks while we kissed. A soft hum unexpectedly escaped my chest, and he must have felt it because, in the next breath, he rocked his pelvis. His erection pressed firmly against me.
It made my heart skip a beat before sprinting out of the gate. What were we doing?
Ben lifted his head, his lips hovering over mine as he gazed into my eyes and thrust his hips again. My breath caught. It felt foreign and forbidden, but it also felt good.
He whispered, “Is this okay?”
I nodded a half dozen times before kissing him and closing my eyes. I couldn’t look at him because I was too afraid he’d see my vulnerability. Everything was novel and unexpected. I didn’t know where it was going, but as a flood of new feelings hijacked my body, I didn’t want him to mistake my nerves for fear and then decide to stop.
For the record, I wasn’t stupid despite the sixty-nine misunderstanding. I knew why it felt good. I’d passed my anatomy class. But it was the firsthand experience that was new to me. The fullness in my breasts. The pressure building between my legs. The euphoric jolt I experienced every time the bulge behind his sweatpants rubbed just the right spot between my legs.
We kissed for a while, but then he broke the kiss to catch his breath, eyelids heavy as he worked his erection against me harder. I curled my fingers, digging my nails into his back. My thoughts jumbled between wondering what was happening and berating myself for thinking it … because I knew. And I had no idea where it fell on the spectrum of sins. We were fully clothed. It wasn’t sex. But it was … something.
It was something the way I dug my heels into the mattress and lifted my body toward his.
It was something the way he kissed me so hard I felt like we would be melded together forever.
It was something the way he grabbed a fistful of sheets above my head while every muscle in his body went rigid.
But the biggest something of all was the explosion of sensations that ricocheted through my body in wave after wave as my heart throbbed in my chest.
Ben rested his forehead on mine as we exchanged breaths in our little cocoon. Then he slowly deposited kisses over all of my face, even my eyelids as they drifted shut. Without a word, because there were no words, he rolled onto his side and pulled me into his embrace. I nuzzled my face into his neck, and we took a long Saturday afternoon nap.