The Infinite Moment of Us (24 page)

it, but part of her could, especially since he clearly liked it.

“God, baby,” Charlie told her, his breath hitching. “But . . .

hold on . . .”

He gently pushed her shoulders. When her mouth left

his dick, he made a sound. He fumbled with his boxers, less

graceful and more urgent than he’d been with his jeans. He

got them all the way off, and Wren’s eyes widened at the

sight of this beautiful boy—her boy, her Charlie—naked

and hard in front of her.

He lay her down. He slipped her panties off, and he

kissed her toes. He kissed her shins, her knees, her thighs,

and when she lifted her hips, he stretched his body over

hers and eased his finger, maybe two, inside her. With his

thumb, he rubbed other places.

Wren lifted her hips higher. She pressed against him and

found his mouth with hers. His dick was hard against her

but not yet in her. How was he going to . . . ? Was she sup-

posed to . . . was there something she was supposed to do?

With his knee, he spread her legs. She gasped. She

clung to his shoulders, and the night sky was above her and

around her. The stars so bright. The
shuush
of the leaves in the trees. Warmth between her legs. Pressure. Slippery,

hard, soft—but it didn’t go in, or it didn’t feel as if it did.

“Charlie? I don’t—”

He pushed harder, and she widened her legs. She didn’t

know what she was doing, but she was willing to try.

Charlie did something with his fingers—she wasn’t

sure what—and her body acted on its own. She arched her

spine and pressed the back of her head into the blanket.

She smelled the earth, and she smelled Charlie, who thrust

into her. She cried out at a sudden sharp pain, and Charlie

stilled.

“Are you okay?” he asked, bearing his weight on his fore-

arms.

“I’m fine,” she said, wanting to be. But
ow
. He was

sweaty, and she was sweaty, and the pain took her out of

the moment, and was it gross that she was all sweaty?

She took him by his hips and pulled him back inside her.

Okay, better. Yes. It no longer hurt.

She nudged him out a little with a rock of her own hips.

In, out. In, out. It worked, it made sense, it felt really,

really—

Their rhythm fell off, and their hips kind of bumped,

and again, Wren couldn’t get it back. She worried she

was letting him down, even though she was fairly sure she

wasn’t. She worried about the fact that she was worrying,

which didn’t help, and there was a stick beneath her.
Crap
.

She fumbled beneath her.

“What’s wrong, baby?” Charlie whispered.

“Nothing, just—” She tried to ignore it. She couldn’t.

Crap
. She made a face and said, “There’s a stick. Sorry.”

He positioned himself on one hip and slipped almost all

the way out of her. She missed him. He fished beneath the

blanket, tossed something into the woods, and then came

back.

She grasped his hips, and he thrust harder. Faster. She

moved with him, and oh my God, yes. So silky. Salt from

his neck. She nibbled and licked and kissed, and small

sounds came from her, and she found that if she twined

her legs around his, she could raise her hips even higher.

Charlie groaned.

In and out, together, and she loved this boy. She was

doing it. She was having sex with Charlie, making love

to Charlie, and everything inside her expanded and con-

nected. Stars. Sky. Leaves. Moon. Two bodies moving

together.

More than.

Charlie called out her name, and he stopped thrusting,

but he stayed inside her, his muscles taut.

“Oh, baby,” he said, panting. He shifted his weight to

one elbow so he could pull back and see her. He brushed a

strand of hair from her face.

Only, no. Not yet. She moved beneath him, need-

ing more—and more and more. Desire welled inside

her. Desire and pleasure, until she felt crazy with it. She

grabbed his hips and pulled, and he thrust again and kissed

her roughly.

Was this weird? Was she being weird? He moved his

mouth to her breast, and she didn’t care if she was, because

Jesus
. He circled her nipple with his tongue before sucking and tugging.

“Charlie. God, Charlie . . .”

He switched to her other breast, and everything—

Every nerve, every cell, every particle of air around

them—

Her muscles tightened, and she turned her head to the

side as she rose one last time to meet him.

Then she let go.

Wonder, followed by a flush of embarrassment, fol-

lowed by sadness, deep and unexpected.

But why? Why sad?

Charlie pulled out of her, slowly, and lay beside her.

They faced each other. She smoothed his damp hair.

He gazed at her, and in his eyes she saw the joy and

love and gravity of what they’d shared. Her sadness ebbed,

though it didn’t completely go away. It was what it was,

and maybe sadness was part of the mix?

The joy and love were stronger, and she embraced those

truths with all of her heart and sent them back to him.
Yes
.

He gave her the sweetest of smiles. “You are amazing.”

You are, too
, she silently replied.

She rolled onto her back and stared at the sky. He did

the same, then changed his mind and did some rearrang-

ing, moving the picnic basket off the blanket, along with

the iPod and the speaker. Harry Connick Jr. was no longer

singing. The playlist had ended. Wren had no idea when.

Charlie lay back, flipping the other half of the blanket

over them to warm their sweat-cooled bodies. They linked

hands and listened to the shadowed scuttlings around them.

Cicadas sang, and tree frogs called to one another in their

funny, rasping chirps.

“I don’t want this night to end,” Wren said. She kept

her focus on the moon. “You’re still here, but I miss you

already.”

“We’ll see each other tomorrow,” he said. He squeezed

her hand. “And I
am
still here, and so are you. You’re right where you belong.”

“I know,” she said, and maybe a little of her sadness

slipped out, because Charlie pulled her to him.

“Hey,” he said. “Come here.” He wrapped his arm around

her and kissed the top of her head. “I love you, Wren.”

“I love you, too. Forever.” She looped her arms around

his waist and put her head on his chest. She could hear the

thrum of his heart, strong and constant.

c h a p t e r e i g h t e e n

July was hot and sweaty, and so were Charlie and

Wren. They were together every chance they got. They had

sex every chance they got. But while the sex was exhil-

arating—he couldn’t get enough; he wanted her all the

time—what was even better was the closeness that came

with it.

Actually, Charlie thought, it was the closeness that made

the rest of it possible.

“We’re like bunnies,” Wren said to him after making

love in P.G.’s pool house. They’d done it on an enormous

pool float shaped like a dolphin, which Wren was still lying

on. She laughed. “Can I be your bunny, honey?”

“Absolutely,” Charlie said, tossing Wren her bikini top

and scanning the floor for his swim trunks. He found them

and tugged them on. “But I think you’re more like that

dolphin: slippery when wet.”

“Charlie!” Wren exclaimed. Her cheeks turned pink,

but Charlie knew she wasn’t truly offended. “Come here,”

she said.

He lay beside her on the dolphin float, and she put her

head on his chest. Skin to skin, soul to soul.

“This feels so right,” she said, softer.

“Because it is,” he said.

The next time they made love was two days later. It was

in the middle of the day, so no ditch—too hot, too bright,

too many kids on the nearby playground—and Tessa and

P.G. were off doing their own thing, so no pool house. But

they craved each other and couldn’t keep their hands off

each other, so Charlie drove them out of the city and half-

way to South Carolina before finding a remote dirt road

that hairpinned lazily into the dense forest. They parked,

and Wren put her seat down as far as it would go. She

draped herself over it, hugging the headrest, and Charlie

took her from behind.

“God, you make me feel good,” she told him afterward.

“Baby, you are the sexiest woman in the world,” he

replied. “You know that, right?”

“And you’re the sexiest man,” she said with a giggle. She

stopped giggling and regarded him with half-lidded eyes,

drowsy and content but oddly solemn. Her seat was still

reclined, and she rolled onto her side and tucked her hands

beneath her head. Her shirt was half-unbuttoned, exposing

her bra. It was black today. So were her panties.

“You know what?” she said as the humid summer air

blanketed them in his Volvo.

“What?” he said. He’d climbed back into the driver’s

seat. The gearshift made it nearly impossible for the two

of them to snuggle. Plus, it was so hot. But he reached for

her and took her hand. Their interlocked fingers rested on

his thigh.

She bit her lip, then said, “I know you’re kidding about

. . . you know. Me being the sexiest woman in the world.”

“I’m not kidding. What are you talking about?”

“Well,” she hedged, because sometimes she still had a

difficult time accepting his compliments. “But—and don’t

laugh—you make me feel like I
am
a woman, if that makes sense.”

She said it like a confession. As if he might actual y laugh,

as if she didn’t quite believe she was a woman despite the

abundant evidence to the contrary.

But he thought he understood what she was trying to

express.

“You make me feel like a man,” he told her, and it felt

like a confession to him, too. It felt scary.

A boy and a girl having sex in a car? That was a thrill

ride, the excitement of a summer fling.

But a man and a woman making love to each other again

and again, sometimes fast and sometimes slow, from the

front, from the side, from behind, sometimes rough, but

always tender . . .

He looked at her, and she held his gaze, and he knew her

well enough to recognize the mix of hope and uncertainty

in her eyes.

Her fingers tightened around his, and he responded

with a strong squeeze. By telling him he made her feel like

a woman, Wren wasn’t just making conversation; she was

putting out a question. Not
Do you love me?
—because she knew he did. He told her so all the time, and she answered

with the same.

What, then? What was she asking?

Charlie weighed as best he could Wren’s loaded, expec-

tant energy. He turned it over in his mind. He didn’t rush,

because he took Wren’s thoughts and feelings seriously. He

took Wren seriously.

He concluded that Wren’s question assumed love was a

given but nudged timidly at something deeper.

Is this real?
she wanted to know.
How real
is
real? How real
are we?

Wren was waiting for Charlie to say something, and the

pressure to not screw up was almost unbearable.

Charlie’s thoughts went to Starrla, who once upon a

time had claimed that Charlie told her “I love you” too

often. Starrla never said it back, and one time she had said,

“Jesus, Charlie. I’m going to fuck you anyway,” which made

him feel foolish.

But sometimes Starrla had clung to him and said he was

the only good thing in her world. Other times, she smirked

at him and told him he was an idiot, that no one liked him,

that everyone laughed at him behind his back.

I hate you; don’t leave me
. That had been Starrla’s creed, and it had messed with Charlie’s mind.

With Wren, he had discovered what real love was—

and, yes, what he and Wren had
was
real. He just didn’t know how to tell her without bringing up Starrla, because

bringing up Starrla was never, ever a good idea.

Last week, as Wren lay snuggled against Charlie’s chest,

she had asked him if sex with her was better than sex with

Starrla. Charlie was boggled, because in his mind there

was no comparison. How could Wren not know that? Then

again, since it was Charlie’s mind and not hers, how could

she?

Wren interpreted his hesitation as a need to think the

question over, and she pulled away from him. Not to the

degree she did on the bad night—the night of the sexy pic-

ture, the night of their first and only fight—but she grew

distant, even when Charlie told her over and over that sex

with her was amazing and real and genuine. Intimate in a

way that it never was with Starrla.

Finally Wren said, “I just don’t like thinking of you hav-

ing sex with anyone else, period. Even if it was . . . you

know.”

So bringing up Starrla was a nonstarter, not only

because of the lingering reality of Charlie and Starrla’s

past, but also because someone—surely it was Starrla—