Chapter 8
Eight
Colin
18 Years Old
“Okay, and a nonpolar covalent bond?” Colin raised his eyebrows expectantly, passing over the atoms he had configured out of Play-Doh.
“When… two atoms love each other very much and share a bed?” Scarlett grinned at him, and he tapped the table with his finger for her to get to the point. “Okay, okay. When two atoms equally share a pair of electrons.”
“And when the atoms are glued together?” Colin reached out to press the arms of the atoms—ridiculous, considering atoms didn’t have arms—together to make one double atom with two rounded balls as makeshift electrons.
“They become one, like during intercourse.” She flashed a toothy grin at him. She had been doing it the entire study session, slyly slipping in sexual references to remind him of their agreement. It wasn’t likely he would forget with the way she kept leaning over to rearrange the Play-Doh, giving him a straight shot down her shirt.
“You really want to make it to the question portion of the evening?” He took the bait, and she nodded. “Tell me what they’re called when they’re glued together.”
“A molecule?”
Colin broke into a beaming smile. “Correct. And nonpolar covalent bonds are an extremely important part of proteins because of…”
“Peptide bonds,” Scarlett finished for him. “I remember that one because of Pepto Bismol.” He had purposely used light pink Play-Doh after she mentioned that word association earlier. A quick rearrangement of some molecules and all their parts created the display for his next question.
“And how does the Pepto Bismol bond form?”
“It’s a chemical bond between the carbolic?—”
“Carboxyl,” he corrected. It wasn’t a huge mistake, so he let it slide with a wave of his hand for her to continue.
“—carboxyl group of one amino acid molecule reacting with the amino group of another amino acid molecule.” Scarlett looked deep in thought, but she was pretty much nailing what they were covering, so he kept going.
“And the reaction between the two causes what to happen?”
“A water molecule is released? Or… wait, is that right?” Scarlett massaged her temples.
“That’s right,” Colin assured her. “Last review question, and then we can talk about?—”
A sudden wailing from just beyond the front door interrupted him, and he blinked in confusion.
“Shit, I think my baby cousin is home. She was supposed to be in daycare until my aunt and uncle were off work, but…” Scarlett looked toward the door where, sure enough, the handle was jiggling, and a beefy trucker of a man wearing a flannel barged through the front door gripping an infant car seat. The wailing got louder, and the nerves in Colin’s head started to bounce off the walls of their enclosure. Not now , he scolded himself. But the chaos continued as the man who he assumed was Scarlett’s uncle made his way toward them, a now-unbuckled baby screaming and writhing in his grasp.
Colin’s head was going to explode. Or implode. He couldn’t think anymore.
“Hi, Letti. Sorry to intrude. The daycare said Lindy was sick, and?—”
There weren’t any words past the screaming that he could comprehend anymore. Nothing intelligible broke through the surface of the panic that stiffened every muscle in Colin’s body as he froze up and started to shake, pressing his hands into his ears harder. Too loud, too loud, too loud . Every receptor in his brain was shouting at him to escape, to enter fight or flight. But all his body could do was rock back and forth in his chair, his hands against his ears his only safety against the onslaught of overwhelming noise that was a battering ram to his head. A warmth seeped into his arm a moment later, and he focused on it, the piercing sound fading into the distance like an emergency vehicle siren passing by.
Colin’s eyes fluttered open to find Scarlett standing beside him on her front porch with her hands rubbing up and down his arms. “Are you okay?”
“I’m sorry.” Colin slowly unclasped his ears and grimaced. “I have really bad noise anxiety. If I don’t know a loud noise is going to happen or if it happens for an extended amount of time, I kinda shut down. I should have warned you, I just didn’t really think it would come up.”
“But are you okay?” She raised her eyebrows. “You didn’t actually answer the question.”
He backtracked in his head, realizing that she was right. Usually, people just accepted his apology as his statement of health. “I’m okay. I don’t think I can go back in there, though.”
“That’s okay. I’ll go get our stuff, and then we can sit out here. Or not, because now my uncle Marty is here, and talking about… what we were going to talk about is not a great plan if you don’t want to be murdered. He’s a big teddy bear, and normally pretty happy-go-lucky, but he can be scary if you’re on his bad side.”
“My family is all at my uncle’s birthday party at a different house. No one’s home. We could go there?” The idea of not making it to the conversation he had been building up in his head since the start of their tutoring session rubbed him wrong. He was never one to break a promise or leave something incomplete, and he was legitimately excited for a conversation for once.
“Perfect. I’ll go tell Uncle Marty.”
“Tell him I’m sorry for freaking out. I’m sure his baby is very nice.” Colin looked sheepishly down at his feet. He wasn’t entirely opposed to children, and if they weren’t so loud, their squishy arms and cheeks would be appealing. At some point, he would be that uncle who came over while the babies were asleep and rocked them for hours in a rocking chair. When Pearl and Cooper were babies, that was exactly what he had done. He couldn’t be trusted to get a baby to calm down, but he could keep them calm easily enough.
“You don’t need to apologize. Lindy is too loud for me sometimes, let alone someone with noise anxiety.” Scarlett moved toward the door, her little multicolored dangly cassette tape earrings swaying as she walked. “I’ll be right back with all our crap!”
“Awww. Look at your little hand. And, oh my God, baby handprints!” Scarlett pointed to where Cooper and Pearl’s concrete handprints from ages six months and three years old, respectively, were imprinted down the line from his own at age ten. He could still remember the shock of his parents telling him about Cooper’s imminent arrival. They had already decided that four was their cap on children after adopting Pearl, and Cooper was frequently called the “happy little accident.”
Cooper, and even Pearl, would grow up not knowing their parents to the extent that Colin did. They wouldn’t quite remember the tiny details, and a lot of their memories would be lost to the recesses of their minds. But Colin could remember the exact day they had pressed their handprints into the step. He could remember that Cooper put up a fight, and his dad took one look at Colin and knew it was too much noise, taking him to the backyard to decompress.
“Cooper was a really chubby baby. And Pearl was really screechy.” He smiled. “She still is, actually.”
“Harper used to pull my hair when I was,” Scarlett raised her fingers in air quotes, “being annoying.”
“I think it’s ingrained in older siblings to torture their younger siblings. Piper hates bugs and reptiles and whatnot, and I put a snake in her sleeping bag once because she took my last hot dog.” Colin opened the front door and heard Scarlett gasp behind him.
“You didn’t!”
“It was a garter snake. It wasn’t going to hurt her or anything. We were having fish that night that we had spent all day catching, but I fucking hate fish. The texture of it is just…” He shivered. “And then I get all freaked out by all the possible tiny little bones in the weirdly squishy yet flaky meat. Anyway, my parents knew this would be a problem because we were already away from home and I tend to like routine, so they brought me hot dogs. The snake idea wasn’t an even trade for Piper’s thievery, because she ended up screaming bloody murder, which as you can imagine was not fun for me,” he recalled. Like his body was on autopilot, he started up the flight of stairs to his bedroom, Scarlett taking his lead and following. “There’s a pretty big desk in my room we could work at.”
“I thought I only had one question left,” Scarlett whined.
“Right, but I have a billion more books on sex on my shelf in here that could explain my mental state so you’re not weirded out,” he explained.
The twinkling of laughter behind him made him look over his shoulder at her. “Colin, I’m not going to be weirded out. Just curious.”
“Curiosity killed the cat,” Colin said.
“But satisfaction brought it back,” Scarlett replied.
“You know the full proverb.” He couldn’t help the slow smirk pulling at the corners of his lips.
“I’m a cat person.” She shrugged. “I don’t like the idea of dead cats. But I can tell you’re thinking more about the word satisfaction , Colin.”
“I wasn’t trying to hide my thoughts or facial expressions. I don’t even know if I’m making the right one half the time to hide them. But you’re the one who overenunciated the word.”
“I can’t help it. We haven’t even done anything yet, and you’ve already ruined me,” Scarlett said. Colin stopped dead in his tracks, only one stair from the top. “I—er, I mean, not that we would do anything. I didn’t mean to suggest that. I just meant… I don’t know what I meant. I guess I mean you’re ruining me with knowledge or something because of all the sex books? I know nothing, and?—”
“Scarlett,” he said calmly. It was a toss-up with him on whether he should interrupt her during one of her rants because she always got flustered, and it was terribly endearing. The less self-indulgent side of him could tell her anxiety seemed to ramp up when she started to over-explain, and she had done him a favor earlier to ease his anxiety, so he figured it was his turn to offer the same courtesy. “I know what you mean. It’s okay.” He marched down to his room and swung open the door. Stepping into one of his safe spaces always made his shoulders slacken in relief, even if he hadn’t been particularly stressed. He occupied the room farthest from any of his siblings’ or his parents’—now Walker’s—rooms.
“Okay, this is exactly what I thought your room would look like.” Scarlett wandered immediately over to his desk and pointed at the object sitting on the end. “Microscope.” She pointed to the far wall. “Extensive bookshelf.” She pointed to his bed next to her, face flushed. “Where you read all your sex books.”
“And my non-sex books,” he confirmed, pulling out his desk chair for her to sit. There was only one chair in the room, so he took his position sitting on the ledge of his desk, facing her in what he hoped was a casual stance. If Scarlett was nervous, he was more so. He had zero clue what questions she would ask, and the unknowns of that made him a bit itchy and eager to lay it out in some organized form.
“Are you going to ask me the last question?” Scarlett asked.
“How are bioactive peptides beneficial?” Colin rattled off.
“They’ve been used to do a whole slew of things like lowering blood pressure and helping with infections.” She was quick to recite the answer, and he barely had a second to respond before she was jumping into her questions. “Okay, so, how many times exactly have you thought about hooking up with me?”
“Uh…” Colin screwed up his face in thought. “All time, or just in the last few days?”
“You’ve thought about it before we were lab partners?” Scarlett gasped.
“Yes.” He nodded. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s fine, I just—okay, um, we’ll say in the last few days, then.”
“Hard to tell, maybe around thirty times? I don’t really know.” Colin briefly looked at Scarlett as she shifted in her chair. He hadn’t realized that his leaning position had him staring down at her and, therefore, at the tops of her breasts. “Thirty-one.”
Scarlett’s face turned a deep shade of red before she coughed and bit into her lower lip. “Okay, and you already said you’re a virgin, but have you ever had the opportunity to hook up with someone?”
That was an easy one. “No. I’ve never kissed anyone, Scarlett. I doubt it’ll happen anytime soon. I technically had a girlfriend last year—someone from my Mathletes team—but we didn’t do anything physical. I didn’t even know we were dating until she started telling people we were. It was more of a studying relationship, and we mutually parted when she left for college. I got the impression she just wanted help on her college applications. I haven’t spoken to her once since she left.”
“Oh. That’s… strange.” Her head started to bob slowly. “I’ve kissed people, but I’ve never made it past second base. I always start overthinking, and then I can’t handle the idea of actually doing it when I’d probably embarrass myself.” She blew out a breath. “And I have no idea why I just told you that.”
“I think first times are routinely awful,” Colin said “Especially for women because of the lack of knowledge about female anatomy and false ideas about female pleasure in general. It’s all in that book I gave you.” He was trying not to seem too eager for her to read it, but he was desperate to talk to someone about the science behind it all.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have a chart of data to tell us exactly how to be good at it? Like they just hand you a form when you turn a certain age that says ‘congratulations, you have a foot fetish!’”
He cringed at the thought. Feet were of no interest to him. Socks were weird and often irritating because they stuck to his toes uncomfortably, and then he would become all too aware of his toes like he did when his hands became foreign objects. Being highly aware of his toes was decidedly unsexy. But he didn’t want to kink shame all the same. “ Do you have a foot fetish?”
“I can confidently say no. But wouldn’t it be nice if they just handed you a map of all your parts with red circles over all the important bits telling you exactly where you like to be touched and how?” She got up and started to pace the length of his room, and he watched with amusement. This girl was wildly entertaining. Everything that came out of her mouth had him hooked from minute one. The way she told stories felt as though she was pulling spooled yarn from the center instead of an open end, and the chaotic metronome of her cadence sped up and slowed down at random intervals, making him constantly wonder what she would say next and if it would match her enthusiasm. “I want someone to just stick me with a needle and my bloodwork to come back with, ‘You have a large rack that will give you back issues starting in your mid-twenties, and you’re also only into missionary sex.’ Or, ‘Gee whiz, did you realize you enjoy being whipped in bed?’”
“I assume people do the experimenting for most of their twenties till they figure it out. It would be nice to just be able to look at a chart, though, or at least have one to reference while you’re trying to figure it out,” Colin agreed. He tipped his head to the side in thought, and the more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. “I think I’m going to make one.”
“What?” Scarlett stopped dead in her tracks and whipped around to face him.
“I think it’s a good idea. I can keep track of my performance and the things I like when I get to college since I can already predict that I won’t have the opportunity to have sex with anyone until then, and hopefully someone will take interest in me enough to get that far.” He smiled good-naturedly.
Scarlett scoffed. “I’m shocked you don’t have women lining up to volunteer as tribute.”
“Things outside of extremely thought-out and planned events freak me out. And I told you that my parents were my best friends, so technically I don’t have friends anymore other than my uncle and siblings. What on Earth would make you think that I could manage to get a girl naked long enough to want me in that way?” Now he was the one scoffing.
“You’re… you know.” Her hand gestured lazily at him.
“No,” he said. “I don’t.”
“Don’t make me say it,” she groaned.
He looked over at her and scanned himself, then the room, for some sign of what the hell she was talking about, but came up empty-handed. “You’re going to have to say whatever you mean because I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You’re hot, Colin!” Scarlett practically shouted. “You’re, like, what, six-seven? And you look like you just got back from filming a porno where you play a scientist in a lab coat named Lead comma Rod, but lead is spelled like Pb on the periodic table. And, yes, in case you were wondering, Rod definitely uses his microscope to just really,” she jabbed the air with a curled hand like she was stabbing it, “get in there and see it all.”
“I’m six-two, and that was,” he paused, “weirdly specific.”
“It’s similar phrasing to what I’ve heard from at least five girls at our school.”
“Good to know that all I have to do to attract a mate is generally avoid them and be uncomfortable,” Colin said.
“Sounds about right. We also love massive red flags if you’re interested in obtaining an especially awful personality.” Scarlett was fiddling with the hem of her color-blocked sweater, and he flashed on the distinct image of her pulling it over her head.
“Thirty-two,” he whispered. “That’s probably my red flag. I’m sorry, I should just stop looking at you.” Colin patently looked away and focused on the books on his wall, scanning for anything to take his mind out of the gutter.
“Four.” Her voice was so quiet he wasn’t sure he had heard her right.
“Four what?” Colin asked.
“That’s how many times I’ve thought of you naked.” She bit her lip back, dropped her eyes to a notebook on his desk, and started fidgeting with the corner of it. “It’s not fair that you’re going to use my idea without me, you know. I want to know how to be good at it, too.”
“We could always…” His brain jumped the gun a little bit, and he blinked hard, suddenly so nervous that he could throw up.
“Figure it out together?” Scarlett continued his thought, not looking at him but meticulously straightening the pens on his desk into a line.
Colin swallowed. “Yes. We could practice and figure out what we like before college. We’d make it a science experiment, and at the end of the summer, we’d collect all our data and summarize it so that each person knows exactly what they like and how to perform for at least the other person.”
“So, what, we just… do it?” Her voice cracked, and she cleared it before restarting. “We could start slow? Work our way up to bigger stuff, then when we get there, we try different things?”
Hesitantly Colin asked, “You’re serious? Because I really can’t tell if you are or not, and I don’t want to misconstrue anything.”
“I’m serious,” she breathed. “I promise. I-I think I want this. I want to know what I like, and I don’t want to be nervous about this forever. You were patient with all the chemistry stuff, and I think I understand some of it now because of you. If I’m going to lose my virginity at some point, you seem like the safest person I can figure it all out with.”
Colin nodded, drumming his fingers on the desk. “I feel the same way,” he said, and it wasn’t because he found her attractive, it was because she was considerate and seemed more nervous than he was.
In a world where he didn’t feel safe most of the time, Scarlett felt like a warm blanket and a hot cup of tea. Coffee, actually, because unlike Scarlett, he fucking loved coffee. That was why he liked her. Scarlett was like a direct shot of caffeine to his head, and the way she kept conversations going made him feel like he didn’t have to try so hard to exist. And maybe that was how sex would be with her, too. She would fill in the social gaps where he couldn’t, and he would fill in the knowledge gaps. This could work. This could be good.
“Okay.” Scarlett nervously sat down on the end of the bed. “So, should we just start, then?”
“Right now?” he asked.
She shifted and patted the spot beside her with a shaky nod. “Right now.”