The Dark Space (4 page)

I knew Winnie Frederickson
not at all
, and I would have gone to her then. I would have gone to her and held her knees to her bright pink ears, and I would have licked her and sucked her and scraped my teeth against her until she had me by the hair and wasn’t letting go.

This was not theoretical. These were not imaginary circumstances. This was the truth.

The books had failed me, and so I did the only thing I could do without losing my mind.

I called her.

“It’s Cal,” he said, as though I hadn’t known before I even glanced at the phone. As though the phone hadn’t been glowing in my hand, faintly pink. “Cal Darling.”

“What do you want?”

The question seemed to stump him for a moment. The phone cooled against my palm.

So it was going to be that way, even outside the classroom. Glowing pink phones and mysterious knowledge.

I still wanted to punch him. Even more, I wanted to get my teeth into him, test them against the round bulb of his shoulder. Leave a mark on his chin.

“I thought you might need a study partner.”

I rolled my eyes, though there was no one to see, and I wasn’t capable of fooling myself. Not about this. It was too big already.

“What do you think we’ll do, tape X marks on the floor of my room and sit on them quietly for an hour?”

He was silent. Breathing.

Then, “Yeah. Yeah, that sounds pretty fuckin’ great, actually. Did you have dinner yet?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t. Where do you live? I’ll bring some of those nachos from Nick’s — the ones with cheese and olives and salsa and sour cream and every possible disgusting thing on them. You eat meat?”

It was his image in my head. His hands on my ears, my pinkened cheeks, red lips rough from kissing wrapped around his cock.

Worse, I felt his awe and satisfaction, his possessive pleasure, the hot humming depth of his elation.

You eat meat.

I didn’t look like a rat to him. I looked like a fairy, sucking his dick.

“Not usually,” I said, and the phone warmed.

There was a small pink spot deep inside my head where I felt it when he smiled.

I didn’t know how this was going to go down, and that made me jumpy as a coked-up ferret when I knocked on her door.

She was in the basement of Dahmer, which is about the worst floor of the worst dorm on campus. The building’s old, the carpet smells like bong water and stale puke, and something’s hinky with the lighting. The bulbs are always shorting out. The custodians get sick of replacing them all the time, so they figure two out of three in every overhead light fixture is acceptable.

Even if one of the two is always flickering, or buzzing, or flipping on, heating up, then going dark.

The pagan girls like Dahmer, and the peckerhead guys who show up for orientation in crewcuts and polo shirts but a week later they have ill-considered full-sleeve tattoos, swollen red and weeping.

I wondered why she didn’t have a place off campus like everybody else.

I would have, if I hadn’t been saving my money for LA. But the way I worked it out, it didn’t fucking matter if I was living with Ma and Pa, because there were six hundred places to crash when I didn’t want to see their faces.

Plus, they’ve seen everything, and they don’t give a shit. Rebellion is pointless when your dad caught you smoking a bowl in your room for the first time at age twelve and said, “Open a window, Cal, for fuck’s sake.”

I was sweating when I knocked, I remember that. I felt greasy with it, and too obvious, like my nachos were a naked ploy — which they were, I mean, both of us knew that¸ right? — but there was another layer of ploying going on that was beyond my ken.

Like, maybe she really was a fucking witch. It would explain why I’d never seen her around. Winnie Frederickson had cast some kind of spell on me, tied an invisible rope around my cock and dragged me over here.

Though you’d think if that was the case, she’d have looked happy to see me.

“Did you sign in?”

I don’t know what I expected, maybe not that she’d drop to her knees in the doorway and unzip me with her teeth, but she could’ve been answering the door for a roommate she was so distracted. She didn’t even look at me, more over my shoulder, into the hallway.

“’Course. I know the drill.”

“Because you have to. For the fire department.”

“Right. I know. Lived here my whole life?”

She looked at me then, and her expression, her eyes, something emanating from her — it made me want to fucking cry. I wished I hadn’t brought greasy nachos in a Styrofoam box, I wished I’d packed up the other half of the loaf of banana bread my mom made and butter to spread on it. Her face made me want to feed her love.

Or something.

“Okay.”

“Okay?” I took a step forward, and she turned her body to the side, as if to let me pass, but now she was looking at her feet.

“Come in,” she said and walked into her room.

I followed her, and something deep inside, in my middle, it felt like, was frantically searching for —
her
— for that thing between us. But some line had been cut, or the air in the room was wrong and diffused everything. Made me think I was just some random asshole from her class harassing her.

“I don’t really have a place you can sit.”

“I can sit on the floor, no problem.” Because the follow-up to her sentence was very obviously,
You are not sitting on the bed, bucko.

She perched on the edge of the bed. Like, on the edge. Her feet were flat on the floor, encased in those suede slippers that look more like shoes, and her knees were latched together.

Her floor had the same thin felt carpet tile that was in the hallway. It peeled up at the seams. Most people got one of those room-sized rugs to cover this kind of shit up, but not Winnie.

Although — she’d done some stuff that was interesting. There was a table by the bed, a genuine bedside table with a genuine tiny lamp on top of it, and its own tiny lampshade.

There were tchotchkes lying around like a grandma would have, but cooler. A brass kaleidoscope on a wooden stand. A plant that was actually alive, dark green leaves spidered over with white tracery and stems covered with hair as fine and white as the hair on her head.

The table, the plant, the little knick-knacks — they kind of glowed.

I gingerly sat down, my bony ass instantly cold from the concrete subfloor’s seeping chill, and looked up at her.

Her index finger traced the plaid on her flannel pajama pants.

I was at sea.

“Hey, Winnie?”

“Yeah?”

“Should I . . . go? Was this a bad time?”

“You can stay, if you want.”

If I hadn’t been watching her so closely, desperate to figure out what I’d missed, I would have left then. I would have apologized for bothering her, tried to make her laugh so there were no hard feelings, picked up my five-buck nachos and probably had a few slightly awkward but not unpleasant encounters with her in class for the rest of the term.

But when she said
if you want
in that rasp of a voice she had, her index finger, the one which had been so diligently tracing lines and squares, slid into the valley between her knees and
rubbed
.

Limited appeals, remember? So while some triangle-shaped frat guy might need a body-language lexicon just sensitive enough to pick up on a hair toss, I had been collecting the alphabet of potential willingness like I needed the language to survive a suicide mission from the time I started sprouting hairs on my dick.

I looked her all over, and she was still — perfectly still — waiting for my answer.

She was breathing through her mouth but trying to cover that up by barely parting her lips.

I got so hot, so fast, that my thoughts became intrusive. I was crawling to her on my knees, jerking down those pants, pressing my thumb over the wet spot on her panties,
sucking
the wet spot on her panties, raking my fingers over her thighs, dragging her by her waist to lie back so I could hump her, grind against her, moan and lick into her mouth.

I didn’t even want anything that fancy. If she would just let me rub myself off while we made out, hands over clothes, I could get on with my fucking life.

“I’ll stay.”

Then our eyes met, and it was like I relaxed and got all jacked up at the same time. Like I was warm and heavy, like I had twice as much blood in my body as I was supposed to.

Her eyes were such a pale blue that the only way you could distinguish them from the white part was the dark ring around the iris.

Her eyelashes translucent, rimmed with the softest coral pink, like the inside of a conch shell.

“I’ve never kissed like that.”

She said
kissed
, and my brain buzzed and flipped out like one of the lights in the hallway. “Like what?”

“Like you want to kiss me.”

“How do I want to kiss you?”

“Like it hurts. The kind that looks and sounds like it hurts.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I’ve never been kissed, that’s what I’m telling you, and how you want to kiss me plus how I feel right now—” She sank to the floor so she was facing me, and I had to make fists to keep from grabbing her. “—means there is no way it won’t hurt.”

What I remember most is the clarity of the voice inside of me telling me I couldn’t kiss her.
Not yet.
And on the heels of that voice was the pain she was talking about, squeezing my body, and then the sudden blossoming of creativity about what we
could
do unfurling.

The books were right.

Between us was everything.

“Okay,” he said.

And then again, but more like he meant it. “Okay. Here’s how it’s going to be.”

It was hard to concentrate on his voice, the meaning of the sounds his mouth made, but I found when I let my eyes blur and concentrated on the pulse inside me that I didn’t have to hear him.

I knew what he was saying without hearing him.

I’m not going to be your first kiss.
That’s what he was saying.
We have to follow the syllabus — respect the class. We have to walk through those steps, and that’s fucking weird, I don’t know how I know that, but I
know.
One step at a time, in the proper space, on the proper fucking schedule.

“But you’re here,” I said.

And I guess he heard my end of it, too.

You’re here, and we have to do something with this. We can’t sit eating nachos and not
do
something.

What neither of us thought, or said,
neither
of us, was,
I don’t know you. I’m not sure I like you.

It wasn’t that we’d set that aside. It was more that we’d tapped into something that made it irrelevant.

Dark space
, I thought, and his eyes widened.

“I don’t know what that means,” he said. “And also I’m pretty sure you didn’t say it out loud. Which is fucking freaky, actually. Should be freaky. I should be running out of the room screaming right about now.”

I shrugged. I didn’t know what it meant, either. Or why I wasn’t scared.

I just wasn’t.

This just was.

“Take off your shirt,” he told me.

I covered my mouth with my hand. I didn’t want him to see me smile, but it was so funny. Cal Darling. In my room, saying,
Take off your shirt.

“I’ll take mine off, too,” he said, and then he did. Just like that. Whipped it over his head, so I got a whiff of the smell of him, his skin and his mom’s laundry detergent and his overripe armpits, at the same time the sight of him smacked into me.

He looked like exactly what he was: a skinny college dude with a small patch of dark hair between his pecs. Skin draped over muscle draped over bone, light draped over shadow, heat gathered together and held somehow, energy that emanated from a fist-sized muscle that beat out the seconds of his life.

Awesome in the original sense of the word — Cal Darling’s bare chest, the shadow stripes of his ribs and the prow of each clavicle, the plucked turkey skin of his throat and the deep well at its hollow where energy pooled and swirled and piled up, waiting to come out his mouth.

All of that at once. It’s a wonder I didn’t pass out.

“Please,” he said, and the word was a yank, pulling my eyes to his face. “You have to.”

So I did. I crossed my arms, found a grip, lifted them over my head and let my T-shirt fall away. Unhooked my bra and dropped it, too, without his asking, because I knew what this was, and it wasn’t courtship or foreplay.

It was a vision in his head of two people swirling over a stage, connected by a single point of light.

We were going to do that, too.

Only we weren’t going to dance.

“Touch yourself,” he said, but I’d already heard him, and I was moving in sync with him before the words left his lips.

Fingertips. Only my fingertips against my mouth.

His words were my fingertips.

“I like your mouth,” he said.
Fairy mouth. Fairy girl.

Witch.

I traced along my bottom lip, corner to corner, perplexed by the drag of my own flesh against my skin and the tickle of my upper lip when my finger accidentally brushed it. Had I done this before? Was this really my mouth?

I think it was. But it was Cal’s finger.

My heart beat so loud. The lamp on the table by my bed glowed bright with syrupy light that coated my face, and it was so warm that I licked it. Licked away the light, which tasted bright as a lemon, and Cal closed his eyes.

I traced over the shapes of my face —
her cheekbones the sockets beneath her eyes the ridge of her nose the span of her forehead, her hairline, her ears
— around and around the soft curve of my ear as he talked and talked at me, naming each part, telling me nonsense, saying my name.

Winnie. Winnie, I don’t know where you came from.

Winnie, I’m not sure if you’re real.

I can feel you on my hands. I can smell you in my stomach.

You taste like clouds. Like ink. You taste like lemongrass, fuck, Winnie, I want you.