Page 121 of Problematic Summer Romance

“It will.” His fingers slide down. Draw messy circles around my clit.

“T-try me.”

His exhale sounds like a snarl. “It’ll terrify you.”

“It won’t.” I grind against the heel of his hand, feeling like I’m contained by him this way, not a person but a beam of raw nerve endings, reduced to the places where he strums me and fills me.

“I would put a baby in you.”

I’m coming, again. Dropping from a great height. I arch my back as the pleasure quivers through me, Conor’s teeth grazing the side of my breast. As I ease down, he allows himself to suck on my left nipple, hard. It’s a small, short-lived indulgence.

“You’re not going to let yourself come, are you?” I breathe out, words tangled between gasps.

He’s trembling. An exposed wire, pulled taut. Still, he shakes his head.

When I climb off him, his cock looks to be in pain, but I’m too angry to care about it. I limp to the bathroom, desperately trying to walk straight and pretend like what happened didn’t knock meover. The ceiling light is white, suddenly harsh, and the second the door closes behind me I stagger forward, elbows on the marble counter.

I just came more times than I could reliably say. I took and took and took—and yet I feel empty. More hollow than a drum. Like something cracked, and my insides spilled out.

I start cleaning up. My underwear is too drenched to put back on, so I leave it by the sink, next to a transparent case. There is a razor inside, not electric, not even a safety one—an old-school, straight razor. Ablade. Like he just time-traveled into this century to bring penicillin back to his era. “Get the fuck over yourself, Conor,” I grit out, rolling my eyes. But in the case there’s something else, too. A vaguely familiar pattern, a shape that nags at me.

I reach out. Open it.

Find a cute, plaid scrunchie.

Mycute, plaid scrunchie.

The one I last had in Edinburgh. In Conor’s hotel room.

Time stops. Restarts, counterclockwise. I slide the scrunchie around my wrist, grab a warm washcloth, and return to the gentle glow of the bedside lamp.

Conor hasn’t pulled up his pants, but he’s speaking on the phone, giving hushed instructions that I can hear but not understand. Still naked, I kneel next to him to clean him up.

His hand snatches my wrist.

“I have to go,” he says into the phone, abruptly ending the call.

His eyes linger on the washcloth, then flicker to me. “No.”

I tilt my head backward. Stare up at him. “Really? What are you going to do withthat, Conor?”

He doesn’t reply, but tucks himself back into his sweats.

Whatever. Screw him. I stand, dropping the washcloth. That’swhen he notices the fabric at my wrist. It was just a matter of time, since I’m wearing nothing else.

“I meant to…return it,” he says.

“Thank you for watching over my fifty-cent hair tie for the last three years.”

He blinks, vacant. “Is that how much one costs?”

“How interesting. Someone who can list every single factor that led to the 1987 Black Monday crash has no idea about the cost of a scrunchie,” I jab, venomous.

“No need to involve Alan Greenspan.” But then he admits, “You know why I kept it.”

Of course I know. And yet, something is changing. Maybe it’s his lingering gaze as I knot my hair on top of my head. Maybe his tone. Maybe the way he made me lose control while holding on to his for dear life. Whatever it may be, it unlocks something inside me.

A realization: the space between Conor and me is not the fluid, breachable entity I believed it to be, but solid. Uncrossable. I’ve only been fooling myself. There was never a chance for us. There is only the rest of my life.Withouthim.

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