Chapter 34 Fear
Fear
Marín
I’m freaked out. Completely and totally freaked out. I don’t know what I’ve done. I don’t know what happened in this room. And I always thought I knew what I could do with my body. Is this what an out-of-body experience feels like?
My conviction that Coco is the ultimate girl for me is driven home when she snuggles into my chest. Normally, I feel the need to go straight to the bathroom after sex; everything smells like fucking, and after I come, that sensation makes me feel uncomfortable.
But she curled up there, on my chest, and…
we smell like sex, saliva, and semen…and I don’t care.
I’m scared to death, and I think she knows it. We’ve spent too many minutes in silence, sharing slow kisses, which are tender but weird. I don’t like silences that are heavy because they’re full of things left unsaid, but sometimes you have to figure out how to soften those words.
“I know about Gus and Blanca,” she suddenly blurts out, like she wants to clear the air.
“What’s that?” I shift on my pillow, put one arm under my neck, and look at her. “You know? Since when?”
“This morning. Blanca fainted. Don’t worry. She’s fine. But, well, she fainted, and Gus showed up out of nowhere. All you had to do was look at them to see that they’re in love.”
“They’re not,” I correct her, fidgeting by twisting a lock of her hair around my finger. “They’re not in love. Well…her, yes. She is. He’s not.”
“Believe me, he is.”
“You know something, Coco? The feelings we carry in our hearts matter, but what we do with them matters even more. If that’s Gus’s way of loving…it’d be better if he didn’t love her.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“He’s had a thousand opportunities to say, ‘Listen, Blanca, I don’t love you’ or even just ‘I made a fucking mess,’ but he’s always resorted to the same thing: He doesn’t say yes, he doesn’t say no, he blocks the door so it can’t be opened all the way.”
“But Blanca’s getting married,” she says.
“Coco…let’s not judge people for how they decide to live their lives. It’s all too complicated.”
She presses her cheek into my chest and nimbly strokes the sparse hair there. “How long have you known?”
“Not long, a few days. They told me that morning at La Marína.”
“Have you talked to Gus about it?”
“I tried, but no… He doesn’t want to talk. And if he doesn’t want to…”
Coco sinks into a heavy silence for so long that I start to think she fell asleep.
I don’t know what she’s thinking about, and not even empathy can help me figure it out.
I can’t stop thinking, going in circles about what just happened between us.
I just slept with my best friend—I’m more haunted by the knowledge that I’ve never done what we just did. And that makes me kind of nervous.
I feel weird because when I came inside her, the only thing I could think about is that my whole shitty life has had a purpose from the beginning and it was her.
The painful childhood, the hard adolescence, having to watch other people raise my sister, not ever being either young enough to not care or adult enough to be able to do anything.
Everything I’ve gone through, I went through so that the path would lead me to where I am now: on a bed wrapped in sheets drenched in sweat and love. With Coco.
How long ago did I break up with Aroa? Seven months? I don’t know. I’m all mixed up. But even I know it’s too soon to start branding things with forevers. I can’t dive headfirst into this; I can’t be reckless. We live together. That speeds everything up.
“Coco,” I mumble, “how are we going to do this?”
“I don’t understand how people love each other,” she replies.
I look at her, and her eyes start bulging as she tries to explain herself.
“I don’t understand it,” she repeats. “Love…is that how it is?”
“Are you talking about Blanca and Gus?”
“Yes. Or Aroa and you. Or Gus and me. Is that how love works?”
“Is that how you love me?”
She raises her eyebrows and smiles ironically. “I thought you were pretending I didn’t desperately confess my love.”
“I’m not avoiding it. I just use my words differently. They have a different rhythm. Aroa would say, ‘I love you’ every time she hung up the phone, and it didn’t mean anything. An ‘I love you’ now has nothing to do with what I really feel.”
“And what do you feel?”
“Fear, excitement, skin… I’ve been feeling my skin a lot ever since…we finished.”
“That’s because I woke it up.” Coco climbs on top of me, straddling me, with an excited smile on her lips, and I don’t know how to tell her this without hurting her.
“I don’t want to go too fast,” I whisper.
“What do you mean?”
“We live together, I just broke up with Aroa, and this…has kinda caught me off guard. There are things that…I don’t know, I have to think about how I want to do them.”
“Okay.” She nods. “And what do you propose?”
“The trip with my sister. That’s a good chance for me to get my head straight. You don’t mind, right?”
“No.” She shakes her head with a half smile. “I’m just a little scared. I don’t want that to mean that, well, I don’t know. I’m sorry, but there’s no going back. It either goes forward or it doesn’t go.”
That’s exactly how I feel. I stroke her hair. “You’ve had a lot more time to prepare for all this. I’ll admit that up until this trip, I had never even imagined or fantasized that you and I…”
“That you and I…what?”
“That…” I shimmy under her, playfully, relieved to be able to take the conversation in a less tense direction. “I’d lick you, come inside you, that I would lose my mind watching you come on top of me…”
“Stop.” She smiles. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
“I’m not promising anything.”
“I’m just saying I’m going to get all turned on again and you’re not going to be able to right now. We don’t want any disappointments…at least not in the first ten tries.”
“Okay. Well, roughly calculating how much I want you and how much time we have…I think we can allow ourselves a bad one tomorrow. In the morning, if you want us to do it in the shower, I’ll come up and ask you to do something that will horrify you and totally turn you off.”
“You’re an idiot.” She kisses me, and her hair tickles me everywhere…even inside my chest. “I barely slept at all, I just tossed and turned… How about we put on the AC and we sleep?”
“I’m hungry,” I say sheepishly.
“Well, you can order something to eat while I sleep. Turn on the air.”
That. How no one can change her mind when she feels like she needs something.
That’s probably the first thing that drew me to Coco and the seed of all this.
I should have known I was going to fall in love with her when I saw her come into the house with all her stuff and say, “Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life…with me.”
* * *
She sleeps. She sleeps the way men supposedly do after sex—like a passed-out bunny. I get out of bed, fold her clothes, wash my face, and open an app to order food. When it arrives, I get an inkling that I was more excited for it to show up so I could wake her up than to eat.
I go over to the bed, in my boxers, and lie down behind her. I stroke her hair, her shoulders, her arm, and I look for a gap, a little corner of skin where I can kiss her. She smells like her, like me, like sex and happiness. I’m so fucking scared.
“Coco,” I whisper.
She pulled the thin sheet over her naked body, but she didn’t cover herself very meticulously, so I can see her left breast. I feel an irrepressible desire to put it in my mouth.
Why the hell have I never sucked on her tits before?
She has perfect tits, or at least that’s how they seem to me because I like them so much. But no… Focus…
“Coco,” I repeat. “The food is here.”
“Mmm.”
“I ordered you a chicken burger.”
“Cool,” she mumbles.
“And fries.”
“Cucumber,” she says, more there than here.
“Come on, get up.”
“I’m tired,” she moans.
Good. More excuses to do what I’m feeling the urge to.
I press my lips against her ear and say, “If you don’t wake up, you won’t eat. And if you don’t eat, you won’t regain your strength. And if you don’t regain your strength, I can’t fuck you like a fucking dog in heat until you ask me to stop because you want to die.”
She turns her head slowly toward me, with one eye closed. “Excuse me?”
“What?”
“I’ll bet anything you want that you can’t repeat that to my face.”
I half smile, yank the sheet off her, and climb on top of her.
“I want to put my cock in your throat and have you suck me until your eyes roll back in your head. I want to fuck your cunt with my fingers. And then my cock. And I want to come in your mouth, on your tits. I want to fuck you hard with my hand around your throat, and I might slap you when you’re about to come if you’re into that. ”
“Okay…got it.”
“Ah, no, no, no way. I’m just getting started.”
“I get the idea, thanks.”
“Thank you for coming. Now get up and eat.”
I go to get out of bed, but she grabs my arm and tugs me back.
“What? Any other questions?” I ask.
“Yes. If you want to do all that to me after we eat, you have to remember that I’m the kind of girl who vomits if I do exercise without digesting first. I don’t know if you’re up for that.”
“You’re the worst.” I smile. “What do you want? I’m not going to be able to wait two hours for you to digest.”
“One, two, or whatever it takes.” She returns my smile wickedly. “You might have a filthy mouth, but when it comes to fucking like a dog, I’m the queen. Gimme my burger.”
* * *
She doesn’t wait even half an hour after she eats to get naked again.
She doesn’t ask for permission. I’m lying on the bed, next to her, pretending like we’re watching something on TV when she sits up, pulls off her clothes, takes off my pants, and climbs on top of me.
She looks at me—she looks at me like she’s daring me to say no. Like I could.
“Any requests?” she says, with one eyebrow raised.
“I want to see you get really slutty.”