Sheltered (4 page)

“What are you listening to?”

To his credit, he didn’t draw attention to what she’d just obviously done. He just answered, cool and casual.

“Portishead.”

Of course, she had absolutely no idea who or what that was. He could have said “bacon tastes like cheese” and it would have made the same amount of sense to her.

“Oh.”

“You like them?”

Honesty was best, she felt.

“I’ve never heard of them—but not because they’re not great, or anything. I mean, I’m sure they are. It’s just that, you know. I’ve not heard of a lot of bands.”

“There must be some music you like.”

She noticed he omitted the “you’re allowed to listen to”, and thanked him silently for it. It had been implied in her words, and was definitely implied in his, but no one had to come out and say it.

“I don’t even have a CD player,” she said, as carefully as she could. Something like a smile on her lips—though one that didn’t meet her eyes.

“You want me to make you a playlist?”

She hesitated then. There were a lot of things he could have meant, after all.

“I…uh…”

“I’ll make you a playlist,” he said, without waiting for her to fumble toward words that were probably all wrong anyway. She’d thought he meant making her a mix tape, or something like it, and now here he was messing around with the little sliver of metal in his hands.

“You want moody or uplifting?”

She answered without even thinking about it.

“Both.”

“Yeah—this one’s perfect. You’ll like this one,” he said, which just made her wonder how he knew. They’d only spoken a couple of times, and both conversations had been fraught with missteps and blunders and lots of hedging.

But the thing of it was…she had faith that he did. He understood, and the thought made her greedy for whatever songs he finally settled on.

“Are you going to…” she started, but he’d already finished with the iPod before she’d even gotten the words out. In answer to the question she hadn’t quite asked—
Are you going to actually let me have that thing?—
he passed it to her.

“Here,” he said. Just like that.

“I can’t borrow this. I can’t…I don’t even know what to do with it. I’ll break it.”

He leaned over the fence. Showed her the little wheel in the center and the buttons that made the screen light up.

“You won’t break it. Just click on this—see your name? Click again, press play. Done.”

“Are you serious?”

“It’s not as though you’re gonna run away with it. Are you?”

She tried not to laugh. Her insides felt too giddy to let something like that out.

“Doubtful.”

“And I know you’ll be real careful with it.”

“I will. Thank you. That’s really…”

She struggled to come up with the right word? Sweet? Sweet just put her right back into Hello Kitty territory again. But the fact remained—that was how he seemed. Like the sweetest person ever, in a coarse punk package.

“It’s really kind of you,” she settled on, finally.

But in response he just shrugged.
No big deal.
The nicest thing anyone had ever done for her was really no big deal at all.

* * * * *

The music started out slow. Just a thumping, distorted beat, of the kind her father would tut and try to correct the levels on his stereo over. It seemed to shiver out of the little metal rectangle in her hands, up the wires and through the earphones and into her body, where it sounded like the loudest thing in the world.

Did he always have it this loud? She couldn’t imagine how anyone could listen to a beat like that, at a volume like the one he had it at. It was too much. It drowned out her heartbeat.

And then a woman’s voice thrummed over the top, like nothing she’d ever heard before. It sounded like an echo of the beat, haunting and low and able to reach some part inside her that hadn’t previously existed.

She couldn’t breathe for a second. The screen said that the song was being sung by something called
Massive Attack
,
but that didn’t tell her anything about who this woman was or how she could make her voice sound the way it did.

And it didn’t tell her about the words either. The ones that struck like a gong in her chest and made her want to get up and pace the room. Maybe find Van’s phone number, even though she didn’t have a phone and couldn’t have called him even if she had.

This girl I knew needs some shelter. But she don’t believe anyone can help her.

She thought of Van’s eyes, so dark and wounded. Like this woman’s voice, pouring out of a stupid bit of metal at her.

I’ll stand in front of you
,
the woman sang.
I’ll take the force of the blow.

Of course it could have meant any number of things. That the woman was willing to take some sort of punishment. That the woman lived in an abusive relationship, and wanted it to continue.

But none of those were the way her mind wanted her to hear it.
Someone’s willing to stand in front of this person, and take the blow for them
.
Someone’s willing to be their champion, to help them even though it hurts to.

Of course, she immediately thought of her father saying…that thing he’d said. The one about what would happen if she, Evie, decided to run away one day. For example, all sorts of accidents could befall people, without another person to keep watch. Her mother was known for being clumsy, so really…it wouldn’t be such a surprise, to find her at the bottom of the stairs.

Though weirdly this wasn’t what she found herself thinking of, as the music wound on. It should have been, but it wasn’t. She thought about Van instead, turning to some faceless friend of his to say,
This girl I knew…

And then she had to put the thing down, turn it off, not listen. There were too many other songs on the playlist he’d made so quickly, with all sorts of telling titles. And though they tempted her, she couldn’t quite bring herself to play another.

Instead, she clicked off her lamp and buried the iPod back beneath her mattress, hand over it at all times in case something should happen in the night. Maybe it would slip out, and when her father came to wake her in the morning it would be there, on the floor. Black against beige, all full of accusation.

But there was no accusation in her head. Just those words, over and over.
This girl I knew…

She could feel sleep coming, but the song remained. It thumped through her head, without the need for things like batteries and power and earphones. It thumped through her body too, until dreams started fingering the edges of her mind.

Weird, twisting dreams about his charcoal drawings and his charcoal gaze and his mouth, like the split center of some exotic fruit.

The naked limbs she hadn’t seen moved off the page and coiled on a bed somewhere. Thighs curved and breasts rounded, everything tangling with something she couldn’t make out so distinctly.

A man
, she thought.
A man.

But even her free-flying dream-self didn’t know what a naked man looked like. Or at least, her dream-self didn’t know entirely. It just guessed some of it and filled the rest in with Calvin Klein ads she’d seen on billboards, shoulders broad and torso covered in delicious bumps, everything gray and black, gray and black.

Even though Van wouldn’t be gray and black. And he didn’t have a body like those models—she knew he didn’t. He looked big beneath his layered jerseys and t-shirts. Solid and unmovable. He had shoulders twice the size of any of those men, and the moment the subconscious thought occurred her dream turned into something different.

The charcoal lines became clearer, more distinct. Then after a moment she could make out the backs of his real hands—honey-colored and rough-knuckled—as they traced a line down over something soft on her.

My thigh
, she thought, just as he turned those sandpaper knuckles over and gave her the smoothness of his palms.

And oh God, it felt good. Better than she would have imagined, in all of her halfhearted thoughts about this sort of thing. Sometimes in her dreams the billboard guy took her out on an imaginary picnic and gave her some imaginary pecks on the cheek, but he almost never put his hands above the knee.

The dream-Van put his hands above her knees. He did more than that, in fact. He kissed her there, just at the beginnings of her thigh, and when she tried to get away he gripped her harder. Kissed in a filthier, open-mouthed sort of fashion.

It felt like heaven. It felt like hell. She wanted to tell him to stop, but her conscious self had pressed a hand to her mouth ages ago and all she could manage was a startled whimper.

He was
kissing
her
inner thighs
. She’d never even thought about kissing his lips, and yet here he was with his mouth as close to the slippery seam of her sex as she could imagine it being. And worse than that, the dream wanted him to carry on. The dream said,
He could, you know. He could kiss you there in the same way people kiss with their lips, and no one would have to know but you and me.

While back in reality her own hand found that sweet ache between her legs. Of course she didn’t go under her clothes. And though she could feel something pretty spectacular when she rubbed over that little plump shape between her legs, she didn’t press inward. Doing so was bad, it was wrong, it would send her straight to hell.

Even if Van didn’t seem to think so. He just ran a finger all the way through her soaking slit, spreading it open as he went. Exposing things she’d only ever thought of in the abstract, or while half-asleep like this. Rubbing things she never rubbed, unless she absolutely had to.

Though she knew its name.
My clit
,
she thought, in Melissa Markerson’s voice. Melissa Markerson, who’d told her in the tone of someone with a terrible secret that between girl’s legs was a little bud, and if you rubbed it, amazing things would happen.

And by amazing things she had of course meant
have an orgasm
. Like the feeling that rose in her now, unstoppable and unchecked. It began in the place her hand was pressing, in the place Van was kissing in a dream with no real form and absolutely no morals, and spread outward, warm and thick.

Then cycled back, to grab ahold of her harder.
Be dirtier, be naughtier
the dream said, and though her conscious-self couldn’t quite manage it, her sleeping-self could. Her sleeping-self produced images of Van pushing himself between her legs, all big and solid and too much.

And just as she started to panic, it murmured a series of utterly soothing things in her ear.
You’re lovely, Evie
, it said, in Van’s molten-metal voice.
You’re so lovely, and I just want to slide my cock inside you until you beg me for more.

God yeah, that did the trick. Just the word
cock
felt like enough on its own, but then the dream-Van said
beg
and
more
and suddenly she found herself rutting against the mattress. Hand pressing too hard over her now swollen sex, body thrumming with that pleasure she hardly knew.

But definitely wanted to know better. This wasn’t like before, with a bar of soap lingering just a little too long between her legs, or a faint feeling of having humped the mattress in her sleep. This was real and wet and visceral, and it wasn’t just about him.

There were other things in there too. A need. A driving need she hadn’t really considered before. It took on shape and form, walked the halls of her thoughts, slathering and hungry.

And when she wanted to turn back, not face this pleasure, it got hold of her and
made
her take it. It grabbed her by the hair, pulled her back into the steady and pounding thrusts of the person now behind her.

Though it wasn’t just a
person
. It was him, gasping in her ear and moaning how good she felt, everything still so vague somehow and yet so clear at the same time. This was what sex would feel like. She knew it. Could almost tighten her aching pussy around it, as his hands came up to fondle her breasts and his cock fucked into her harder.

Don’t stop
, she wanted to tell him, but back in reality her hand pressed more firmly over her mouth. The tension between what she should be doing and what she wanted to do warred, briefly, and then quite suddenly everything broke.

It broke so hard she didn’t quite know what to do with all of it. In the past, her orgasms had been quiet, private sorts of affairs. Not like that one word Melissa had used, or the thing people talked about in magazines she wasn’t allowed to read.

But this thing…this was the real one. She knew it was before she’d even slid out of the dream and back into reality, though once there that bright and brilliant pleasure took on a different connotation.

Suddenly it didn’t seem quite as bright and brilliant. Oh, she could still feel it all right. Her heart still raced, her body still trembled with it. When she moved, she could feel the slippery wetness it had produced, and blushed to know that
she
had done that to herself.