33
Extremely Inconvenient
Kylie
I’ve slept with this man a number of times, and I have never once been allowed to put my hands on his bare back.
So I do. And oh my God. He’s warm through a shirt, but skin is different.
His back is enormous, two broad slabs under my palms with a hard ridge across the tops of his shoulders, and when he moves, everything under my hands moves, and I make a noise into his mouth because I want him again, exactly like this.
“What,” he says against my mouth.
“Kiss me.”
I slide my hands up to his shoulders, and he lets me.
I go back down, and he lets me do that too.
We’re standing in the middle of my room kissing, which we don’t do.
We kiss on the way to something, because something is about to happen, and this isn’t that.
This is his hands on my face and my hands going everywhere with no hurry.
I’ve looked at him a hundred times. I’ve looked at his arms for weeks like a creep.
But there’s been a shirt on him every one of those times, and now the lamp is on, and I can see everything.
He’s built thick and wide at the shoulders.
There’s a bruise the size of a hand on his hip, greening at the edges, another low on his right ribs, and a red line across his collarbone from equipment, probably.
His arms are a lot darker than his chest, which is funny.
His chest is unfairly pale. And on the left, low, is the burn.
It’s the first thing I saw and not the last thing I’m looking at, because there’s a great deal to look at.
This is deeply unfortunate for me. I can’t unsee any of it.
I have to be a functioning person on this campus, and now I know what’s under his jersey, and I’m going to have to sit next to him in a dining hall and keep my hands to myself.
I get both hands flat on his chest and push him backward toward the bed, and he goes.
We end up under my blanket with the lamp still on, because neither of us wants to be the one to get up.
He’s on his back. I’m on my side with my knee over his thigh and my head on his shoulder.
He’s got one arm under me and the other across his stomach, and he hasn’t put the shirt back on.
It’s on my floor, inside out, by my desk chair.
Now that nobody’s crying and nothing is happening, I have room to go back over the last hour.
I told him I couldn’t touch him. No, I yelled it.
He didn’t explain anything. He didn’t say it’s complicated or someday I’ll tell you.
He stood in the middle of my room, pulled his shirt over his head, dropped it on the floor, and let me look.
And then he took my wrist. He’s grabbed my wrist before.
That first Friday, he had it out of the air so fast it stung.
This was the same hand and the same wrist, and he did it carefully.
He put my palm on the worst part of him himself.
I don’t think he’s ever done that with anybody.
I could tell by the way he closed his eyes and held his breath.
It’s a burn. Up close, I’m sure of that much. Something burned him, badly, a long time ago. And when I asked if somebody did it, he said yeah, and then he said no. Both. Like the true answer is somewhere between them, and he doesn’t know where either.
Who? How? A stove, a car, a house? Was he little?
Was it a fire, or was it a person, or was it both?
Do his parents know, and if they know, how did he end up at eighteen keeping a shirt on in front of everybody like it’s a secret?
I could get it out of him. I know I could.
I could ask six questions in the right order and find the one he answers wrong and pull on it.
He said he doesn’t want to talk about it.
So I lie here with my mouth shut, which is possibly the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
I run my fingers along his skin, and he doesn’t move for a long time.
I don’t stop, because I don’t know if he’ll give me this again.
So I learn his shape and let his warmth sink into me.
He puts a hand on my cheek and runs his thumb from the corner of my mouth to my ear, and then he falls asleep.
I keep going, watching him breathe. The blanket covers most of him now, but I can see his chest, and I like that a great deal.
I lie there and look at him, because he can’t catch me.
His hair lies the way it wants to. There’s a mark on his cheekbone from Saturday going yellow-green.
His mouth looks completely different asleep, softer, unfinished.
One of his shoulders takes up about a third of my mattress.
And every time my eyes go around the whole tour, they end up back on the left side of him.
Yeah. No. I don’t touch it. I put my hand on his shoulder instead and reach over and turn off the lamp.
I wake up before him, which never happens.
He’s asleep on his back with one arm up over his head, still no shirt.
I prop myself on my elbow and look at him in daylight, and it’s a lot.
In the dark, it was warmth and shapes and my hands.
In the morning, it’s his whole chest, the line down the middle of his stomach, and the two muscles at the front of his hips that angle down into his sweats.
There’s a tan line across his biceps from a T-shirt.
There’s hair on his chest, not a lot, and I didn’t know that, and now I know that.
This man has been inside me a lot, repeatedly, with enthusiasm, and somehow lying here looking at his bare chest in the morning feels more indecent than any of that.
It feels like I’m getting away with something.
His chest rises and falls slowly. There’s a scrape on his knuckle.
I put one finger on his shoulder, and he doesn’t move, so I trace the edge of it, then the groove between his shoulder and his chest, then down his ribs.
I make it to the middle of his stomach before he says, eyes still shut, “What are you doing?”
I smile, watching him. “Studying.”
The corner of his mouth goes up, and his eyes stay closed. “Kylie.”
“You’ve been withholding information from me for weeks. I have a lot to catch up on.”
“Go back to sleep.”
“Absolutely not.”
His hand comes down off the pillow and catches mine, and for a quarter of a second, I’m back on Friday night, back to last night, waiting for him to move my hand off him.
He puts it flat on his stomach, right in the middle, with his own hand on top of it, and goes back to sleep.
I lie there with my palm going up and down on his stomach, and I have never wanted anything in my life the way I want to bite this man.
At twenty past eight, the door opens, and Tessa comes in with her backpack and a coffee and stops two steps inside. Nash opens one eye. Without thinking, I pull the blanket up over his left side, all the way to his ribs.
“Hi,” I say from under it, with my hand still on his stomach, like this is a completely normal Monday.
“Morning,” Tessa says. “I slept on Paige and Kenzie’s floor.” Her eyes go across the bed once, and she sets her coffee on her desk. “I’m going to shower.” The door shuts behind her.
Nash looks at the blanket I just pulled over him, then at me, for a second longer than he needs to.
Then he makes a sound that might be a laugh and drags his arm back over his face.
And I lie there thinking that Tessa just saw Nash Kennebeck shirtless in my bed, which means somebody besides me has seen him like this in daylight, and I have a completely unreasonable feeling about it.
Not about the burn. I covered that. About the rest of him.
I pull the blanket up further, and he pulls me closer.
We get up at nine, because he has class at ten and I have one at eleven.
He finds his shirt on my floor, turns it right side out, and pulls it on, and I’m a little sad watching him get covered.
I’m digging through my drawer for a bra when his phone buzzes on my desk, and from where I’m standing I can read it upside down. Dad.
Nash picks it up, looks at it, and declines it. Not ignores it. He declines it, with his thumb, and puts it face down on my desk.
I stand there holding a bra. That’s weird.
I met that man two days ago. He drove five hours.
He hugged Nash in a lobby in front of everybody and said something in his ear, and Nash patted his back.
He told me the shoulder pad story with his whole face lit up and shook my hand twice like I was somebody important.
And Nash just hit the red button on him at nine in the morning.
It buzzes again about ten seconds later. He picks it up, holds the button down until the screen goes black, puts the phone in his pocket, and goes back to looking for his other sock like nothing happened.
“Did you—” I start, and then I don’t. I put my bra on under my shirt the way you learn in a girls’ locker room, and I get my jeans on. His dad is calling, and he won’t pick up. Maybe it’s because I’m here. I don’t let myself think about it too much.
He sits on the end of my bed to put his shoes on. “You hungry?”
I look at him with one arm in my jacket. “Are you asking me to breakfast?”
“Yeah.”
“Together?”
He stops with his hand on his shoe and looks up. “That’s usually how asking somebody works.”
I turn around so he can’t see my face and take a very long time finding my other boot.