Damage - A. M. Jenkins [36]
She’s just standing there in the middle of the room, and you notice for the first time how thin her shoulders are. She’s always seemed so much bigger than life—but this moment, when she’s not posing or smiling or bossing people around, she actually looks quite small.
“Yeah,” you tell her. “I know what you mean.” You want to add something else—only you don’t know what. Comfort her in some way, maybe—only you don’t know how. Get up? Walk all the way over there and hug her?
“You’ve been here a long time,” she says, and when she turns to look at you her eyes are clear and blank, like a doll’s eyes. “You’d better be going home.”
She means it.
She busies herself as you get dressed; she tidies up dresser, straightens the chair, without a word she hands you one of your shoes that somehow ended up behind closet door.
On the front porch, she seems almost fragile—maybe because her makeup’s mostly worn off, which makes look a lot younger. You give her a good-bye kiss. She pup with it at first, then pulls away the way a little kid away from putting medicine on a stinging scrape. You’d like to tell her that anytime she wants to talk, you’ll there—but she’s already going inside.
She’s shut the door before you even step off the porch.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
You keep thinking about her all the way home, through the evening. There is definitely a tender little edge of hurt peeking out from underneath Heather’s shining exterior. You’ve always known it’s there, somewhere way underneath. You recognize it because you’ve got one, yourself.
Heather doesn’t wait for you after practice the next day. And when you call her in the evening, her phone rings and rings until you realize she’s either not home she turned it off.
Around nine-thirty she finally answers. Mom’s heading off to bed; she gives you the evil eye to remind you keep it down and not stay up too late.
You take the cordless and hole up in your room. “it’s me,” you begin, real low—but Heather slaps you right away with brightness and chatter, acting like nothing unusual happened yesterday.
She hardly even pauses for breath: She just got home from shopping with Melissa—a new Contempo opened up in Fort Worth, which she doesn’t expect you to excited about, but you should be, and they had the soft opening this week before the grand opening on Saturday, and she and Melissa were finally able to get some real clothes.
She describes what real clothes are. You wait for chance to talk about something more important—exactly what, you have no idea. You figure it’ll come to you when Heather lets up. She’ll have to let up in a minute; nobody could keep this up for long.
Heather can. Just when she seems to be running out of steam, she says she hasn’t finished her homework; she’s got to go; sorry to keep you up late, see you tomorrow!
And then the dial tone is buzzing in your ear.
That night you toss and turn. Not like those nights when you used to wake and lie there with your mind crusted over by a dull wish that everything would just go blank—no, this is sleeplessness with a purpose. Something about you and Heather is lacking, it’s missing a connection. It’s missing something, only you don’t know what to do about it.
You keep thinking about her description of her first time. One more item in the long list of things you fail at that, quite often, you “just keep going” with Heather. She’s never seemed to mind—in fact, she’s always encouraged it—but now you see that she’s done everything your benefit, sexually; Heather gives, gives, gives—you’ve been eager to receive, receive, receive.
Next opportunity, you decide, you’re going to more for her. You’re going to take your own sweet time with Heather Mackenzie. You won’t hurry or rush the count. You’ll tease her the way she always teases you—Heather’s the one who forgets everything but being touched.
Here’s the play: You’ll start out with kissing that will gradually move lower and blur into touching, and you’ll listen to her breathing—or the way she holds her breath—that,