Sarah Eberhardt
No Angels
When I kiss Jordan she tastes like the shore, salt and sunlight. Strong hands
shoved through my hair, always in control, the way she controls her skateboard,
her surfboard. I know my hands have paint on them from repainting the carousel
but it seems irrelevant; I am sliding my hands up her back, under her shirt,
leaving traces of white intermingled with the fine blue lines of her tattoos.
We're leaning against a lamppost in the rear of the parking lot, plainly visible
to anyone who might be looking, though it's two A.M. and onlookers are unlikely.
She bites my lip, hard, and I know she's about five minutes away from shoving me
into the backseat of her car and diving in on top of me. She pulls away a
fraction of an inch and looks up at me, teeth still touching my bottom lip.
"You know," she tells me, declarative instead of interrogative, eyes laughing but serious at the same time. Before I would have asked, "I know what?" but I've learned what she means by now, three weeks after she pulled me behind the games booth and gave me that look. "You know." I should pull away but she presses against me, nips at my neck. I can feel the curve of her lips against my skin, moving down. My head falls back, helpless, and she is seventeen and I am twenty-three and my hands are in her hair and I can feel her teeth against my ribs and it is the chirp of my cellphone that brings me back to myself, air leaving my lungs in a rush.
Jordan pulls back immediately, running her fingers through her dark hair and shaking it back over her shoulders in a swift graceful movement. Her lips are redder than usual but she leans back against her car, smirking, self-contained and collected. My shirt is halfway open, teethmarks down my chest, and I am breathing hard. "Hello?"
"Sam! Where are you? You were supposed to be here an hour ago." Music and laughter
is loud in the background. Damn. The party.
"I had to close up tonight." I try to steady my breathing. "Sorry. I'll be home soon."
"Okay." Nina is mollified. "We're all at Dean's."
"I'll catch a shower and swing by." Jordan is looking at me through her
eyelashes and my stomach is clenching, visceral. I want you,
I think, and just like that she mouths back at me I know.
I can't think straight. "See you soon."
"See you. I love you, babe." Nina's voice is low, seductive, but I hardly notice.
"I love you too." I'm staring into Jordan's eyes and she's laughing at me. When I hang up she's on me again, nails digging into my back. "Jordan –"
She laughs into my ear, barely a whisper. "You know."
"I love her," I tell Jordan, but my hands are under her shirt again, body proving me a liar. She doesn't bother to contradict me, just yanks me into the shadows beneath the trees at the edge of the parking lot, shoves me against the trunk of her car.
She bites my lip again, hard this time; I can taste blood on the inside, flowing onto my tongue. I try to say her name but she's sliding against me again, dropping slowly to her knees, scraping her teeth against my chest and belly, unbuttoning my jeans. I am twisting her hair between my fingers and my head is thrown back and I only say her name once, explosively, the word wrenched from me several minutes later. She sits back on her heels, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, grins at me with the smugness of the cat that ate the canary. My hands are shaking, but when she rises to her feet she's steady. She digs her car keys out of her pocket, moves past me to unlock the door. I'm still leaning against the trunk when the engine purrs to life; she ducks out of the car and pulls me off, pushes me against my Jeep, parked next to her Audi. Her body arches up against mine and I inhale sharply, almost moaning. "Want it a lot, do we?" I can see the flash of her grin in the shadows. "Curfew calls for me. Girlfriend calls for you." She kisses me and my fingers dig into her hips hard enough to leave bruises, but when she leans away I let her go and she steps back, smile still playing across her lips. "Tomorrow night, beautiful."
"Jordan -- " I can never seem to finish a sentence when she's around. I love Nina,
I tell myself. Nina.
Jordan looks at me, takes a sudden step forward, leans up and bites my lip hard.
I can taste myself in her mouth, on her tongue. "You know," she tells me,
forcefully this time. Before I can say anything she's in her car, pulling out,
weaving too fast through the parking lot. I know.
I've suspected ever since I met her six weeks ago at work. I've known, with the kind of inevitable knowledge that's programmed into your bones, ever since three weeks ago, that first time she pulled me behind a games booth at the carnival, when she kissed me hard and bit me harder. I know I want this girl to the exclusion of everything else. I want this girl like I've never wanted anything else in my life.
It's a good ten minutes before my hands stop shaking. I drive straight to Dean's,
skipping the shower. "I didn't want to waste any time," I tell Nina,
wrapping one arm around her shoulder, and she smiles up at me, tries to fix
the tangle that Jordan's fingers have made of my hair. Jordan never wears perfume,
but I can feel her on my skin, something I don't want to wash away.
I can still taste her -- and myself -- in my mouth and I can hardly
stand to lose it, but Nina might taste it too, and suspect. I grab a shot glass
and slam back some vodka, grimacing. At the end of the night Nina kisses me,
gently, and I try to kiss her back with something approaching passion.
She touches my lip with concern. "What happened?"
I run my thumb over my lower lip; swollen, but not bleeding anymore.
"Whacked my head when I was biting my lip. Just stupid me."
"Sam, silly boy." Nina cups both hands under my chin. "You're never stupid."
Yes, yes I am, I want to tell her, prodded by guilt, but I don't.
"'Night, babe," she tells me, kissing my lower lip softly.
I'm not sure if she wants me to invite her over to spend the night, but I think of the trail of bite marks Jordan left down my stomach, so I don't. "'Night."
I work maintenance on the rides and tonight she's working the concession booth.
Her jeans are riding low on her hips and her work-issued shirt is a little too
short and the looks she flashes me when I go by are enough to make my blood run
hot. She flirts with the pimply fifteen-year-old helping her in the booth and
convinces him to look after things for a bit while she goes to the bathroom;
when she walks into the darkness at the edges of the carnival I catch her around
the waist and push her into the shed we keep our tools in. She never says my name w
hen we're together, and periodically I wonder if it's because she's been with so
many people it's hard to remember. I don't know if she's with other people now,
don't know if she has a boyfriend she goes home to every night. Right now in the
darkness of the shed I wonder but I don't care; her skin smells like cotton
candy and she has yanked my shirt off and is working at my belt buckle. It's my
turn now, though, and I push her against the work bench -- the lights are filtering
in through the cracks around the door, enough for me to tell where we are.
Nina likes me to move slowly, from breasts to belly to between her legs, but
Jordan is shoving me down fast, the way she likes to move on me. I nip at
her stomach and she shivers reflexively, fingers tightening in my hair; I
slide my hands up her sides to curve my thumbs against her breasts as I
bite at the snap of her jeans, as she did to me last night, and I can feel
her laughter in the fluttering of her ribs. When I pull her jeans past her
hips she shivers once and goes still, muscles tense. She tips her head back
and I can see the perfect line of her throat, backlit by the flickering
multicolored lights coming around the doorframe. Red, yellow, blue, green,
sliding across her skin as she moves against my mouth, her back curving in a
graceful arch. She doesn't make a sound at the end, just moves in one long
shudder, pulling my hair tight and then releasing it, muscles going slack.
I kiss my way back up to her mouth, slide her underwear and jeans back over her hips. She smiles against my lips,
and I know that smile, the smug grin she always gets afterwards. "You've been gone
fifteen minutes," I murmur.
She loops one arm around my neck, flicks her tongue against my ear. There's a half-laugh in her voice as she zips up her jeans, pulls down her shirt. "Well worth the ride." "Was it?" I'm teasing her. "I think you've got paint on your hands."
Even in the dark her grin is unmistakable. "You know."
It isn't until she's out the door that I realize I'd barely thought of Nina at all.
"You're fucking the underage cotton candy girl?" Kim's voice is incredulous. "You've got to be kidding me."
"Not yet!" I yelp, then think about the implications of 'yet' and stop short, even as the vision of Jordan naked forms in my mind's eye. The wind off the ocean is salty and reminds me all too clearly of her mouth.
Kim whaps me over the head, none too gently. "Are you out of your mind?
What on earth makes you think this is a good idea?"
"It's not. I know it's not." In spite of myself I glare at her; her blue eyes meet mine evenly. "I just can't help it."
"That's a crappy excuse." She's facing me now, toes dug into the sand and hands on her hips. Light from the sunset is glinting like fire off her sandy hair and her face is outraged, stubborn. "You can always help it. You just don't want to."
I study her, my best friend with her hair bleached light by the sun, muscles tense under tanned skin. We've known each other fifteen years and I know that, eventually, she will understand. It's not that she's amoral, despite the fact that I have always played the role of the straight-arrow, the voice of reason in our escapades.
"What about Nina?"
I close my eyes; I have no answer for her. When Kim speaks again, her voice is softer. "Do you love Jordan, then?"
"No." It's true, I think. This is lust, savage and simple. No, not simple. But not love. "I just can't help it." When I open my eyes, Kim is looking down at her feet, kicking the sand. "I don't know what's wrong with me."
"You know I'm friends with Nina." She sits down suddenly and draws her knees up to her chest. "This isn't fair to her."
"I still love her--" It's a lie, though, and I know it's a lie. It's written all over my face; but she's still looking at the sand and I can't tell if she believes me.
"You have to stop, Sam." Kim looks up, meets my eyes levelly. "If you really love Nina, you have to stop. Promise me."
"You're right." I break away from her gaze to stare out at the horizon. The foam as the waves break is almost impossible to see in the rapidly dimming light. "I promise."
The promise lasts till the end of the night; closing time. I'm trying to go through the nightly equipment check as fast as I can but she's packing up the booth with the quick efficiency she always has and it's a lost cause. I almost get to my jeep in time, grease still covering my hands, but I hear her steps behind me. "Hey, kid, what's the hurry?"
I'm practically shrinking back against the side of the car, hands balled into fists --
will not touch her will not touch her -- but she's got that predatory smile
and walks right up to me, body almost touching mine. "You're thinking of her,
aren't you?"
"Jordan, she's my girlfriend, I made a promise and I'm going to keep it."
I try to stare her down but she lowers her eyelashes and I'm losing this battle.
She's got that ironic smile playing across her lips -- she knows she's chasing
the seductive look and she knows that it's working.
Then abruptly she opens her eyes fully, steps back, raises her eyebrows in
a look that's almost concession, defeat. "All right; I accept that decision."
I almost can't believe it was that easy -- till she steps in again,
close but not touching me at all. "It's been fun," she says, and rises onto her
tiptoes, and kisses my cheek, feather-light. It is the only place she is
touching me but my whole body is aware of her, aware of her breath and
the scent of her skin and the warmth of her muscles and it is too much,
all too much, and even as she moves back my arms go around her, hard.
I'm kissing her and turning to press her against the car and she is
writhing up against me and I do not care, cannot care; my blood is
rushing loud in my ears, but not quite loud enough to drown out the
sound of her laugh against my mouth.
I don't see her for two days straight -- her day off and then mine -- and I can hardly stand it. "I never see you anymore," Nina says with a half-smile; she's not clingy, not insecure, but I know she does miss me. We're in her apartment, washing the dishes from breakfast; she scrubs the skillet we made pancakes on, soap foaming up around her wrists. She tucks her hair behind her ear absentmindedly, leaving a couple bubbles behind, iridescent gleams against the blond strands. Reflexively I lean over and kiss her ear, lips brushing over the foam. There's something ironic going on here, soap to wash out my mouth, punishment for my filthy thoughts. She turns to smile at me, that sweet smile. "Why don't we go to the beach for the day? It'll be fun."
So we do. Nina is slender in her blue bikini and I can see several guys eyeing her up
and down appreciatively, but I can't care. I rub sunscreen onto her back and she
smiles at me again, uncomplicated, as far away from Jordan's smirk as possible.
I think about that smirk again and the look that goes with it, dark-eyed with dirty-minded
promises. The first time we met we'd bantered back and forth, something about sexual
favors, and I'd laughed and told her to get her mind out of the gutter. She'd
shot that smirk at me for the first time. "Kid, I live in the gutter."
"What're you thinking about?" Nina is raised up on one elbow, looking at me curiously; I'm on my stomach, ostensibly reading a book, but I realize I've been staring at the same page for at least fifteen minutes. I can't even remember what's on it.
"I'm hot," I say. "Let's go swim."
The water is cold for July and cools down my ardor fast. Nina treads water and I swim in circles around her, lolling in the water, lazy. She laughs at me, tells me I look like a seal, and I chase her and we wrestle. We're both laughing and sputtering and she's got her arms round my neck and her legs round my waist and then I see Jordan over her shoulder and my body roars to life again. Nina giggles in surprise and winds her legs tighter around me and I cannot tear my gaze away from Jordan in a red bikini, hair slicked back as she dives through waves, chasing a brown-haired guy. He turns, catches her, picks her up. They kiss and I almost gasp at the feeling tearing through my stomach, a snarl of jealousy that I have never felt with anyone else. It's primal and vicious and I cannot stop watching them, even when Nina wriggles round and sees them too. She laughs again. "Giving you any ideas?"
I break the speed limit driving back to her apartment and we're still salty, still wet when we fall onto her bed and she makes small sounds of protest but I don't care, don't pay attention; it is fast and hard and nothing like the gentle love we're used to making. I twist my fingers in her hair, bury my face in her shoulder. With my eyes closed tight she could have dark hair, brown eyes, a mocking smile. I bite my lip to stop myself from sinking my teeth into her neck.
I am gasping, almost crying, at the end, and even when I come it still isn't enough.
She is making quiet sounds that sound at first like sobs and I think
oh god no I never meant to hurt you but when I lift myself off her to lean on my
elbows I see that she is laughing. "Sam!" She pulls me down to kiss me, rolls me
onto my back and smiles down at me. "Not bad." I almost feel sick; I'm still
wanting Jordan, still wanting those dark eyes and black hair, still wanting someone whose laugh isn't happy. Still wanting someone who'll bite back. Nina's saying something in an entreating tone but I roll out of bed, scramble into my clothes, and all but run for the door.
I fall asleep without meaning to in the early evening and dream about her. About how I first saw her, leaning against the fence that surrounds the carousel, facing away from me. She was wearing one of those shirts that ties behind the neck and meets again across the lower back, leaving shoulders and upper back bare. At first I thought the shifting shadows on her skin were a trick of the light, but when I came closer I saw them. Long-feathered wings, tattooed over her shoulders with blue-black ink. She was wearing baggy jeans and red Converse sneakers, skater-girl clothes, and she had one foot on a skateboard, rolling it back and forth. When she turned I saw she had dark eyes, straight black hair falling smoothly to chin length; a face that was neither cute nor beautiful, but compelling all the same. She pushed off with one foot and skated away, lithe and skilled. I thought she was anywhere between a mature fifteen to a young twenty-five; there was something in the way she moved that bespoke of confidence, an unshakable composure.
She came to work at the carnival the next night. My boss handed her off to me, said
I should show her around. She told me her name was Jordan. The tips of her tattooed
wings were just visible beneath the hem of her shirt and I had to make an effort
to yank my gaze away and meet her eyes, glittering with unholy promises.
No angel, this one. Trouble, trouble,
sang a little voice in the back of my head, and I tripped over my words.
I dream that I am watching her again, her back to me, when she turns around. "Charlotte, Elizabeth, Maggie." Her voice is playful, taunting. "You like it."
"What?"
She's wearing rollerblades in the dream and she pushes off the rail, moves in a
smooth circle around me, close enough to touch. "The possibilities. What's it
like to kiss her? How does she smile?" Her own slight smile slides away, and
she stops her circling, looks up at me. Her voice is almost a whisper and her
words are stretched out, slow. "How does she move?"
How does she move? How does she move under you? Charlotte was lanky with a
Southern drawl, tired of her boyfriend, seventeen years old when I was fourteen. Lazy
hours in her parents' bed taught me most of what I know. "You learn very well," she
told me once in a half-gasp, half-laugh. "Better than my boyfriend." She just laughed
when I told her indignantly that I wouldn't cheat on someone like she was. "You will.
No one is always faithful." "I won't," I told her, but when I met a pair of green eyes across a bookshelf in the library a month later, I was kissing the mouth of that green-eyed girl – I learned her name was Elizabeth afterwards – within an hour. "Told you so," Charlotte said, grinning, and, "It's been nice. Have fun."
Elizabeth led to Maggie -- met in a coffee shop on a lonely Sunday afternoon when I'd been with Elizabeth three years and she was out of town. Someone told Elizabeth and she spent a tearful night shouting at me, finally throwing my CDs at me and kicking me out.
Maggie never found out about Nina, who I started kissing just shy of my three-year anniversary with Maggie, when I was twenty-one and college was coming to a close. We had an amicable breakup; she was going to California and I was going back to the east coast to get a summer job along the Jersey shore. Nina came with me. She was the sweetest girl I'd ever been with, and the only thing I ever lied to her about was Maggie. I was so sure that I would always be with this girl.
I come awake slowly, eyes watching the ceiling but still seeing Nina. I look at her, all tanned skin and golden hair; laughing blue eyes, forever legs. I know, in a faraway abstracted way, that this girl is beautiful. But all I see when I close my eyes is a smaller, darker girl with a dirty smirk and a wicked laugh; and I only really feel alive when I'm with her, almost living on my nerve ends, all too fast and too rough and the only thing that matters. I'm not in love with her; I'm alive with her, drunk on her.
I don't have work tonight but I can't bear not to see her. Nina and I have a casual unspoken agreement to eat dinner together most nights, but she's left a message on my voicemail telling me she's going to a movie on the mainland with some people and is going to stay with one of her friends for the night. I am almost painfully grateful.
At nine p.m.. the carnival is in full swing, teenagers moving from rides to arcade booths and back again, with the occasional parents making their way through with younger kids whose bedtimes are pushed back in honor of vacation. Jordan is working the concession booth again, selling cotton candy and making eyes at several boys leaning mock-casually against surrounding booths. Jealousy is twisting through my stomach again, totally irrational. One of the boys starts toward her and I hadn't meant to talk to her tonight but I find myself in front of the concession booth anyway, looking at her with something uncomfortably approaching desperation. "Ah," she says, and hands me a cone of cotton candy; I find myself handing money back to her. She says something to the other two people working the stand with her and leaves, elaborately unconcerned, heading towards the outskirts of the carnival, this time to the second carousel, the one shut down temporarily for repairs. I don't know how casual I am in following her, finding it almost impossible to control my stride.
"You miss work this badly?" She's laughing at me. The simple fact of her
presence makes me conscious of little else, and I drop the cotton candy
by accident; her swift skater's reflexes lets her snag it out of the air.
She clicks her tongue at me; "Careless, careless," and takes a bite of
the fluffy pink spun-sugar creation, bits of it darkening and leaving
traces on her lips. Fucking the cotton candy girl is all I can think,
Kim's voice echoing in my ears, and I grab Jordan and swing her around,
press her against the guardrail, kissing her hard. She tastes like sticky
sugar, her tongue tracing its way into my mouth, and there is no way in hell
that I could stop this even if I wanted to. We're in the deepest shadows,
as far away as we can be from the bustle of activity, and my hands close
on her shoulders and pull her down to the grass with me. She laughs,
surprised for once. I roll sideways beneath the carousel, still holding her,
over and over until we're fully under it and I'm lying on top of her.
I pull back for a second, propping myself on my elbows, letting her
make this decision. Her hands are gripping my waist, thumbs hooked
under the waistband of my boxers, and I can hear that wicked smile
in her voice when she slides her hands up my back and pulls me down to
whisper "You know," in my ear before her fingers start working expertly at my belt. I work one hand down between our bodies to unzip her jeans but our fingers keep tangling and she pushes me aside. I'm desperate for this and she knows it; I can almost feel the battle she's waging in herself, her own want for this against the temptation to slow down, to make me beg for it. She knows I'll beg for it.
She starts wriggling herself out of her pants before she's finished undoing
my jeans and I close my eyes in despair. "Jesus, Jordan. Please." Her laugh
is a little breathless as she gets fully out of her jeans and goes to work on mine.
"Like that, yes?" she says in my ear as she slides my jeans and boxers over my hips. I'm just about incapable of speech and instead kiss her hard, nipping at her lower lip, maneuvering myself on my elbows. "Wait, wait," she says, breath hot against my ear, and fishes her wallet out, hands me a condom. "Girl scout motto: be prepared."
I pull back a little -- there's space enough for me to sit up -- to rip it open, giving us a little breathing space. "I thought that was the boy scout motto."
"Mm. Boy scouts, girl scouts...I doubt either of them do this." In a single swift motion she snags the condom from my hand, puts it in her mouth, and goes down on me. I throw my head back so hard it hits part of the carousel framework and I see stars. "Jesus Christ, Jordan!"
She comes back up, touches my head gingerly. "Sorry." For a second, there is real seriousness in her eyes. Then she grins again and pulls me down.
Sex with Jordan is like nothing I have ever experienced, not even with Charlotte, who knew some moves that almost drove me crazy. There's something about the stretch of her muscles and the heat of her skin that makes me drunk, thrown into some other state of consciousness as she bites the skin right below my jaw. At some point she arches back, both hands above her head, and I shift and pin her wrists with one hand; when she flexes against them she can barely move, and something about the hitch in her breath lets me know that she's never liked this quite so much as she does right now. It's such a rush of power, watching her dark eyes flutter open and closed, face tense with the concentration of not letting a sound escape. When I release her wrists she combs her fingers through my hair, twisting and pulling just a little.
I can feel the familiar tension building in her, and as her toes curl and her back
arches she lets out a moan and "God, Sam," she says against my mouth,
and that's what makes me come, that acknowledgment that it's me she's with, me
and not some random other guy, not some stranger.
Afterwards we stay pressed together for a time, and the smile she gives me isn't quite her usual smirk; it's happier than that, clearer than that, even though she does look a little smug.
The sounds of the carnival sound so alien, like they don't belong in this little
space we have created.
Finally she says, "They're probably looking for me," and so I roll off her and fish around
for my clothes. Getting dressed while lying horizontal isn't the easiest nor the most
graceful thing to accomplish, but as usual Jordan does so in a smooth easy slide,
grinning at me all the while. I've barely gotten my boxers back on and she's fully
dressed. She kisses me once more and wriggles away, rolling back out under the
edge of the carousel and flipping to her feet. I watch her sneakers jog away
and then I fall flat on my back, still breathless. Staring up at the rusty
underside of the carousel, I feel dizzy, and suddenly lonely.
©2008 by Sarah Eberhardt
