7. Taylor #2
The truth is stupid. The truth is painfully ordinary.
The truth is that I’ve kissed boys at parties and in dorm rooms and once in the back of a car that smelled like old fast food.
The truth is that I’ve even kissed a girl a time or two in a closet and under a blanket.
The truth is that I have let hands wander and then moved them away.
The truth is that I have wanted until the pressure of someone else wanting too made my body lock up like a door.
“I haven’t done this,” I say simply.
The sentence falls between us like a glass shattering. His face goes blank. Like a door closing. He moves, not completely off me, but he straightens his elbows so that there is a humiliating space between us that there wasn’t before.
I rush to fill the silence because I can’t stand it. “I mean, not nothing. I’m not—” I stop, because I have no idea how to make this sound less childish. “I’ve done some things.”
His jaw flexes. “Taylor.”
The softness in his voice is worse than anger. I push myself up on my elbows. “Don’t do that.”
His eyes sharpen. “Do what?”
“Look at me like I just told you I have a disease.”
“I am not.”
“You are.”
“I am looking at you like a twenty-year-old girl just told me she has never had sex while she’s underneath me in my bed.”
My face burns. “Well, when you say it like that, it sounds bad.”
“It is bad,” he says. I flinch before I can stop myself. His expression tightens. “That is not what I mean.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“Taylor.”
“No, it’s fine.” I sit all the way up, yanking my dress down over my bare thighs. My hands shake, and I hate that too. “I get it. You thought I was some sophisticated woman who walks into bars and goes home with older men all the time, and now I’ve ruined the fantasy.”
“The fantasy?” His voice goes very low.
“Yes.”
He laughs once, without humor. “You think that is what this is?”
“I don’t know what this is.”
“Clearly,” he cuts back, and it’s worse than true. It’s mean.
I stand. Too fast. The room sways. “I’m not a child. I know what I want.”
His eyes hold mine. “Do you?”
“Yes.”
“What do you want?”
I open my mouth. Nothing comes out.
Because I know what I want in pieces. I want his mouth on mine again.
I want him to stop looking so far away. I want to be the girl I was ten minutes ago, bold and funny and drunk on being wanted.
I want him to touch me like he did before he knew.
I want him to understand without making me explain.
I want to tell him everything and spend the whole night just talking about it.
I want too many things, and some of them contradict each other. Mikhail sees that too. His face shifts, and for the first time tonight, he looks almost gentle. I hate that most of all.
“You are angry because you are embarrassed,” he says.
“Thank you, Freud.”
“You are embarrassed because you think this changes how I see you.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” he says. My face burns when he says it, and my lips tighten. He lifts his hand slowly and touches my chin, tilting my face higher. “I thought you understood more than you did,” he says. “That is my mistake.”
“I’m not pure. Before you start getting weird about it.”
His mouth twitches. “I wouldn’t dare.”
“I mean it. I hate the virgin thing. I hate all of it. I hate that it sounds like a condition. I hate that people act like it means something about who you are. I hate that now you know and can’t unknow it.”
The words come too fast. I want to stop, but I can’t. “And I hate that I told you because now there’s this whole thing in the room, and you’re going to be noble about it, and I’m going to feel rejected even though I know that’s insane because I’m the one who ruined it.”
Mikhail’s thumb moves once along my chin. “You have not ruined anything,” he says. I laugh, but it’s too close to a sob. His brow furrows, and something passes over his face. “And I’m not noble.”
“Then stop acting like you are.”
“You want me to prove I am not?”
The question is quiet. Dangerous. I should say no.
Every reasonable part of me says no. But there is an unreasonable part of me now, and it has been getting louder all night.
It’s the part that crossed the bar. The part that got into his car.
The part that looked into the dark interior and decided the scariest option was also the one I wanted most.
I lift my chin. “Maybe.”
For a few seconds, neither of us says anything. Then he steps away from me and drags both hands through his hair. The movement is sharp, frustrated, almost violent. Not at me. At himself. “I should send you home,” he says.
My stomach drops.
“I know,” I say. He looks at me. I hate how small my voice sounds. I clear my throat and try again. “I know you should.”
“But you don’t want me to be noble. So you want me to bring you back to my bed and take your virginity while you are drunk, right? That is the kind of man you want as your first?”
“I just don’t want to go,” I say. His eyes close briefly. The room feels too quiet. “I’m not asking you to…” My face burns so hot I almost lose the sentence. “I’m not asking you to finish what we started.”
His eyes open. Finish. His mouth twitches like he’s trying very hard not to smile.
“Do not laugh,” I warn.
“I am not laughing.”
“You’re thinking about it.”
“Yes,” he says. I glare at him. He looks at me for a second longer, and something in his expression eases. “Then what?”
I look at his tie hanging open around his neck, careful not to look too closely at the blood beneath his collar.
“I want you to kiss me again,” I say. His eyes darken. “And I want to sleep with you.”
“In my bed.”
I glance at the bed. The sheets are rumpled from where I was just lying beneath him.
One of my shoes is on the floor. The other is missing.
My tights and panties are tangled beside the bed.
My whole body remembers his weight above me, his knee between mine, his mouth at my throat. I look back at him. “Yes.”
His jaw tightens. “If I stay in this room,” he says, “I will want you. If I kiss you, I will want more. If I touch you, I will remember how close I was to taking what you were not ready to give.”
My mouth goes dry. “I was ready,” I say, but even I hear the uncertainty in it.
His eyes sharpen, not unkindly. “You were willing,” he says. “That is not always the same thing.”
I hate how true it is, and I hate that he could see through me before I could. I wanted to be ready. If I wasn’t ready with a man like him, will I ever be? Have I built it up so much I’ll always be a virgin? I push back the tears pricking at the corners of my eyes. “I feel stupid,” I whisper.
His face changes. “You are not stupid,” he says. His voice is low. Hard. Almost angry. I stare at his chest because his face is too much. “You are young,” he says. “You are drunk. You are far from home. You are trying to prove something to yourself with a man who is not safe enough for that.”
I look up. The words should scare me. They do scare me. But the thing that scares me most is not that he says he is unsafe. It’s that I believe him and still don’t move away.
“If you’re not safe,” I say, “why are you stopping?”
His eyes hold mine. For a moment, he says nothing. Then, quietly, “There are worse ways to be dangerous.”
“Oh,” I say, even though I don’t understand.
Mikhail lets go of my face and steps around me. He picks up my missing shoe from beside the bed. He sets it beside the other one, then walks to the small table near the window and pours water into a glass. The sight is so absurdly domestic that I almost laugh again.
When he brings it to me, I take it without arguing and drink half the glass, even though at this point in the night it feels like I’ve had a gallon of water under his watchful eye.
“This is very weird,” I say. “I don’t usually do this. Going to strangers’ houses. Mansions. Whatever this is.”
“I know.”
“How?”
“You are bad at pretending.”
I lower the glass. “You keep saying that.”
“You keep pretending.”
Fair. Annoying, but fair.
I set the glass down and wrap my arms around myself.
Now that his hands are not on me, I become aware of everything else.
My dress has ridden up too high. My tights and underwear are on the floor.
My long, straight, dirty-blond hair and bangs are probably a disaster.
My mouth feels swollen. My skin feels marked everywhere he kissed me, even where he didn’t leave marks.
Mikhail’s gaze tracks the movement of my arms. He walks to a dresser, opens a drawer, and pulls out a folded white shirt.
Of course, even his shirt looks expensive.
Crisp, soft, probably worth more than my luggage.
He holds it out to me. “Bathroom is there,” he says, nodding toward a door. “You can change out of your dress.”
When I take it, our fingers brush. That tiny touch goes through the room like a match strike. Mikhail pulls his hand back first.
Victory, I think stupidly.