44 Chapters About 4 Men: A Memoir (5 page)

All my virginal fifteen-year-old brain could comprehend were the words
worry
,
sex
, and
love
.

Ohmygod.

I had to clutch the sides of the desk to keep from falling out of it.

We were going to have sex. In a few
hours
. And, if the tiny stick-person illustrations scrawled on the back of Knight’s note were any indication, it was going to involve props.

I’d worn a skirt to school that day, Journal. I never wore skirts, but I wanted Lance to see my new mid-calf, steel-toed black leather Grinders. They weighed a ton and cost more, but I thought that maybe, just maybe, if I could prove to him that I wasn’t just another Dr. Martens-wearing poser, Lance would finally realize that we were, in fact, soul mates, and then he’d whisk me away from the clutches of Ronald McKnight. Lance was six foot three and filled out in all the right places, so on paper, at least, it seemed like it would be a fair fight.

Unfortunately, my plan backfired.

In reality, Lance was far less interested in bucking up to Knight than he was in bucking
under
him, if you know what I mean.

So, rather than securing the bad boy of my dreams and my freedom from “Skeletor the skinhead,” the only thing I managed to accomplish with those two-hundred-dollar boots and that short plaid skirt fastened on the side with safety pins was pouring gasoline on Knight’s already raging libido and crumbling self-control.

Just as I’d expected, when the final bell rang, Knight was waiting for me outside. I saw him before he saw me, and I watched his expression morph from murderous to salacious the instant our eyes locked. His mouth kicked up on one side in an appreciative, hungry sneer as his eyes slid down the length of my body at a glacial pace, sending chills down my spine along with them. The next thing I knew, hard arms were around my waist, a hard mouth was seeking entrance to my own, and a particularly hard and frighteningly large bulge was being pressed into my belly.

Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God…

Adrenaline exploded through my bloodstream. My pulse sounded like a raging river in my ears, and the only thing I could hear over the white noise was my consciousness screaming,
Fight or flight! Fight or flight!

The noise fell away, however, when Knight whispered in my ear, “Did you read my note?”

I swallowed hard and nodded, unable to remember how words worked.

Please don’t ask me if I love you back.
Please don’t make me talk about it. I just want to get this over with.

The sooner he ravaged me, the sooner I could limp home and get on with listening to The Cure’s
Disintegration
album on repeat while crying and rocking myself in the fetal position.

Knight pulled away just enough so that we were forest green to crystalline blue. Whenever he looked at me like that the paralysis was so strong I couldn’t even blink. Breathing required conscious effort.

“I meant it.”

Gulp.

Before I could formulate a response that wouldn’t get me dismembered, Knight stripped me of my backpack and slung it over his shoulder. While Knight carrying my stuff was nothing new, on that particular day, it felt more like he was using it as collateral. With one eager meaty hand, he steered me all the way to the grassy area just behind the student parking lot where the ten-foot-tall monster truck he’d pieced together from scrap parts was lurched up onto a massive boulder, looming over the Civics and Escorts below, as if our classmates were even capable of being more intimidated by him.

Every day, Knight would escort me to that mobile monument of testosterone, and every day, I’d watch with pleading eyes as, one by one, the kids with whom I’d laughed and passed notes with just hours before cast their eyes downward and turned away.

I was on my own, and that cursed day was no exception.

Knight’s pornographic declaration of love burned a hole in my pocket and my mind as we rode in an awkward silence to Peggy’s house. In the past few weeks, our little make-out sessions had graduated into him going down on me any chance he got, so my introduction to sex had been surprisingly pleasant. Pleasant? Shit, it had been phenomenal. Turned out Knight loved eating pussy almost as much as he loved, um…well, he didn’t really love anything, except for me, if you could believe the angry all-caps scribble that was ticking like a time bomb in my pocket.

It seemed Knight had a sixth sense when it came to pouncing when my guard was down. For two weeks, I’d been the star of the cunnilingus after-school special, and not once had he made me think that he expected anything in return, which was good because that was exactly what he’d been getting. Although I hadn’t even seen it, I was scared shitless of the one-eyed monster living inside Knight’s jeans. Every time we made out, that thing would swell so much that it would manage to escape the waistband of his impossibly tight 501s, extend up into his fitted T-shirt, and crawl halfway up his washboard abs before all was said and done. I had zero experience with peni, but I was great with visual-spatial reasoning, and there was no way that D was going to fit in my V (or my M or A or between my nonexistent Ts).

We’d crossed Peggy’s splintering rotten threshold a hundred times before, but on that eerily warm December day, the last day before winter break, I knew going in that part of me was never going to come back out.

Knight disappeared into the kitchen for a split second while I loitered on the four-by-four patch of parquet that Peggy liked to call
the
foi-yay
. Just beyond it was the living room, home to all things brown and itchy, and beyond that was the entrance to the kitchen where I could hear Knight banging around.

Instead of grabbing a beer and settling into Peggy’s Brillo Pad of a couch, per my usual, I simply stood, petrified, on the parquet, not knowing where to go or what to do. Before I could formulate an escape plan, Knight reemerged from the kitchen, looking all too pleased with himself. He stalked toward me in bare feet—
when did he take his boots off?
—grabbed my hand without saying a word, and led me up the sagging, squeaking stairs to Colton’s old bedroom.

I’d only been up there once before, but it was exactly the way I remembered it—sparsely furnished, impersonal, and sad. Colton never stayed long enough to decorate, and Peggy was either too depressed or absent to bother. The tiny wooden furniture looked as though it’d come out of a 1950s era dollhouse and been glazed with carcinogens.

Knight dropped my hand once we reached our destination and turned to face me. “Do you trust me?”

Fuck no!

I swallowed hard, straightened my posture, and forced myself to meet his gaze. “I want to.”

Holding Knight’s stare was never easy, but at that moment, it felt like I was peering down both barrels of a shotgun. Like a hunter, he had been grooming me and biding his time for months, separating me from the herd and chipping away at my defenses. Now, here I was, serving myself up to him like a prized fucking hen.

It wasn’t even that I didn’t want to have sex with Knight. I didn’t want to have sex—at least, not yet, not when I could still count the number of times I’d gotten my period without taking off both boots. Not before my boobs had even come in. (Good thing I didn’t wait for that milestone!)

I wasn’t ready, but I was a realist. And on some level, I knew that the chickens had come home to roost. I’d sealed my fate the day I let that unexpectedly soft blond buzzcut disappear between my legs. Now, it was time to pay the piper.

Knight lowered those cobalt crosshairs from my face and sent them coursing over the length of my trembling body. His mouth and fingers soon followed, deftly taking with them the safety pins from my skirt, which soon became a tartan heap on the matted carpet. Resigning myself to my fate, I took a deep breath and slipped off my Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt and heavily padded bra, adding them to the growing pile of clothes on the floor.

Knight’s mouth roved leisurely back up my torso, stopping to pluck and nip at each tight pearl pink nipple he encountered along the way. Without my permission, my hands found their way to his velveteen scalp, as usual. I couldn’t help myself. Knight’s head was the softest thing I’d ever felt, and lately, I’d seemed to be finding excuses to touch it more and more.

How could someone whom my eyes found to be so terrifying also feel like cashmere to my fingertips, taste like spearmint on my tongue, and smell like freshly laundered cotton and warm musk? When I took my head and eyes out of the equation, the rest of my senses would come alive whenever we touched.

By the time I finally tasted Knight’s wintery breath, he’d worked me into such a wanton lather of need that I’d forgotten I still had on my underwear. That is, until I felt his thick fingers slip between my hips and the thin strip of cotton covering them. Instead of sliding them down my thighs and continuing his unhurried seduction, however, Knight set the tone for what was to come by grasping both sides of my purple panties and stretching them to their breaking point. I released a tiny gasp of surprise, which was immediately followed by a much louder one when Knight then brought the crotch of my shredded panties to his mouth and slowly ran his tongue over the slick puddle of moisture he’d found there. He made unwavering eye contact with me as he savored the proof of my desire, and then he reclaimed my mouth with his own. Only this time, when he kissed me, he tasted like sex, and I was horrified to discover that I fucking loved it.

Still fully clothed, Knight guided me to sit on the edge of Colton’s bed. I watched in confusion as he began taking items out of his pockets and placing them on the dusty nightstand beside us—a lighter, a pack of cigarettes, his keys, a pack of gum. From his back pockets, he removed his wallet and then a pair of handcuffs, followed by
another
pair of handcuffs.

The fuck?

Flashing me a wicked grin as the second set of steel bracelets hit the table, Knight reached behind his back once more. (Those tight Levis were like a clown car of sin!) He retrieved a clear plastic bear filled with honey from his waistband.

I don’t know if it was the thought of what he was about to do with those implements or the shocked expression on my face, but for the first time since we’d met, I saw Knight smile. Sure, I’d witnessed the corners of his mouth curl upward on more than one occasion, but it was always more of a sneer, smirk, or snarl. This was dazzling. His usually frosty eyes crinkled warmly at the edges, and his lips parted, revealing teeth so perfect that he could have been the spokesmodel for Winterfresh gum (especially considering how much of it he gnawed through a day). Combined with all those freckles, that smile gave me a peek at the seventeen-year-old boy hiding under Knight’s armor. And he was actually really cute.

While I sat and contemplated this strange new attraction I was developing to someone whom, moments ago, I considered to be more my captor than my boyfriend, Knight tore off his plain white T-shirt and 501s with the grace of a jungle cat. Without his shirt, I could now see the head of his angry massive erection protruding at least two inches above the top of his boxers, the elastic waistband straining to keep the heavy weapon holstered against his abdomen.

My brief, uneventful life flashed before my eyes.
So, this is how it all ends
, I thought.
Bludgeoned to death by a skinhead’s penis in my ex-boyfriend’s childhood bedroom. And I never even got to meet Billy Idol.

Although I should have been panic-stricken, I think the impending pain was so abstract that I couldn’t even wrap my head around it. I simply had no idea what was coming, so the only choice I had was to live in the present, which, at that point, was still a pretty nice place to be.

Taking his first weapon of choice—the stainless steel handcuffs—in one hand, Knight guided me onto my back on the center of the bed. Blanketing me with his hard body, he fluidly spread my legs apart with his own. His carefree smile had already been replaced by something wicked, predatory. Knight made searing eye contact with me until our puffy, swollen lips were reconnected. Instinctively, my hands sought his warm, fuzzy head as he began to drag his
other
head through my saturated folds.