Tear You Apart (9 page)

“Merci,”
Will says. “Jacques Cousteau. Escargot. Marcel Marceau.”

We look at modern art together, sometimes in silence, sometimes with commentary. Mostly with sideways glances and a few stifled giggles.

“It’s pretentious,” I say finally, in front of an exhibit that stretches from floor to ceiling. It consists entirely of graph paper on which the artist has traced the lines. “It’s not even a pattern. He just traced the boxes. I did that in the sixth grade. Nobody called it art.”

“Maybe that’s the difference. What someone else calls it.” Will rocks on his heels a few times, hands in his back pockets. “Maybe it’s not art unless someone else says so.”

“Art,” I say seriously, “should make you
feel
something.”

Will is quiet for a second or two before he looks at me with another quirking grin. “This makes you
feel
angry.”

He’s right. It’s not what I meant, but he’s right, and I give him a little bow that makes the world spin a bit. Laughing, he takes me by the elbow again. Down a corridor into another room.

This one is completely black inside, no lights except the film shining against the far wall. Black-and-white, it features a man standing in front of a barn. As we watch, the barn’s front wall comes off in slow motion, but the empty window frame is positioned so that it falls completely over him. It’s a parody or an homage to an old Buster Keaton movie, I think; I can’t quite tell which one. Over and over the front of the barn falls, the man’s expression never changing. Over and over, from different angles and distances.

Over and over.

Eventually the film cycles through to the beginning again. Will and I stand in the corner, the darkest spot. We blend into the shadows, and the way the light from the movie reflects off the polished walls and floor, we are almost impossible to see unless you’re looking for us. I know this because an older man in a pink polo shirt unselfconsciously picks his nose while he watches the film, and he’s only about two feet from me.

I shudder with disgust and bury my face against Will’s shoulder to stifle my choking laughter. His arm slips around my waist, pulling me closer. Hip to hip. His thumb moves back and forth against the inner skin of my wrist, held close to my side. Slow, slow strokes. He doesn’t look at me.

This small touch, this tender stroke of his flesh on mine, should not be enough to make me shake, but oh, it feels so good, so good I tremble from it. The
shush-shush
of his breathing presses pinpricks of light into my vision. Like sparklers, the lights arch and fade. My eyelids flutter.

Will leans closer. His lips brush my earlobe. His breath pushes at a few stray tendrils of my hair.

“I want to rub the head of my cock back and forth over your clit until you’re dripping wet for me.” He breathes these words against my ear. I can’t move. “Back and forth, so slow it makes you crazy. I want to tease you until you beg me to fuck you.”

The shudder of my breath echoes the rattle-tap of the projector noises. I turn my head the tiniest bit toward him. My lips barely move when I say, “I. Don’t. Beg.”

He takes my hand and puts it on the front of his jeans. On his cock, thick and hard beneath the denim. As slowly as he’s done everything else, Will rubs my palm back and forth over his erection, down low enough to curl my fingers around the bulge of his balls. Then up along the ridge.

Up. Down. Just...a little...faster...

His breath catches. In the faint glow from the movie in front of us, his eyes are wide, pupils dilated and dark. His lips are slightly parted, the lower one moist from the swipe of his tongue. The urge to kiss him is like some hungry, furious thing, and it’s eating me alive.

A clatter of schoolchildren tumbles into the room, all of them loud and laughing. Pushing and shoving. Will straightens and lets go of my hand. We move deliberately apart, still standing so close I can still feel the heat of his shoulder on mine.

Saying nothing, we leave the room. We leave the museum. We get in a cab and sit without speaking as the tension between us rises and twists, coiling tighter. We ride the elevator to his apartment with hardly a glance between us. Barely a word. And when we get in the door, I push him in front of me, against the wall, hard enough to rattle the pictures in their frames. I kick the front door closed.

Then I get on my knees while my hands, sure-fingered and without fumbling, yank open his belt. The button and zipper. His straining cock pushes at the front of his briefs and he’s in my fist before he even has a chance to make a sound.

I use one knee to nudge his legs farther apart as I pull his jeans down to his thighs. His briefs, too. He’s mostly naked for me in half a minute. That beautiful cock pulses against my palm as I skim my hand upward, barely brushing the head. Will’s hips push forward, and I grip his shaft, keeping him in place. He looks down at me, his gaze dark.

I don’t say a word, but he puts his palms flat against the wall on either side of him. Looking up at him, our eyes locked, I open my mouth, let my hot breath seep out over his hotter flesh. He shivers. I brush his prick against my cheek, soft, so soft, the tip of it not quite close enough to press inside my lips. Down a little lower, I breathe against him as my hand works his cock.

I mouth his inner thigh, tasting salt. His skin is pale here, dusted with fine hairs lighter than the coarser hair between his legs. I nuzzle him. I press my teeth to his flesh, nipping hard enough to make him cry out. And still his hands don’t move from their place on the wall.

When I run my tongue along the underside of his cock, stopping just before I reach the tiny divot at that head, Will lets out a long, tortured groan. His eyes are closed, his head bent so that his hair falls over his forehead. He shakes again when I let him feel my teeth against him, and when I move my hand up and down, then up a little higher to graze his cockhead. But when his hips pump again, I go still.

Small, quick and flicking flutters of my tongue tease him. My hand moves. Again, I slide my tongue up his cock from the base to just below the head, then up a little higher to let the wet, hot cavern of my mouth hover over the tip. Slick fluid gathers there, leaking. Again, I go still.

Will shudders. His eyes open, looking down at me looking up. He licks his lips and blinks. I do nothing.

“Please,” he says at last. “Please...”

At last I engulf him, take him down the back of my throat. I taste him, slippery and a little sweeter than I expected. Greedy, I suck him hard, concentrating on the head while my hand, slick with my saliva, strokes his shaft. My other hand slips between my legs, rubbing and rubbing at my clit through my lace panties. I am wet. I am dripping for him. In fact, my cunt is already clenching when he at last slides his fingers into the back of my hair and anchors them there, pulling just hard enough to make me gasp.

I fuck him with my mouth and tongue, my teeth. My clit is so swollen I don’t need to dip inside my panties. Even this indirect pressure is almost too much. I’m coming in long, rippling waves.

And...there are colors.

I taste and smell voices; certain words have color. My brain is wired to connect my senses in a way that most people can’t begin to understand, but until now I’ve never had it happen during orgasm. The pleasure washes over me in shimmering bands of rainbow light and golden stars, and I’m filled not only with the ecstasy of climax but with the wonder of this new sensation.

Will’s groan brings me back to my delicious task. I let my jaw go slack to take him deeper. I let him fuck my mouth however he wants. Sweat drips from his face onto mine, one drop, and I smile around his cock. Then I’m coming again, unable to think of anything but this desire. His taste.

He whispers my name. His fingers twist and tangle in my hair. “Shit,” he says, “oh, shit this feels so good...I’m gonna come.”

I appreciate the warning, but when he makes like he’s going to pull out, I don’t let him. He cries out again, wordless. Desperate. His taste floods me, and I take everything he gives me, sucking hard until he’s spent and softening in my mouth. I swallow. I stand. I wipe the corners of my mouth.

Will slumps against the wall, his hair damp with sweat. His mouth lax. Eyes half-lidded. I lean in to kiss him at the corner of his mouth, first one side, then the other. Then, sweetly, fully on his mouth. His tongue probes me, and the thought of him tasting himself in me sends another slow ripple of pleasure through me.

“I told you,” I murmur directly into his ear, “I don’t beg.”

Chapter Fourteen

I was five or six years old when I discovered the world was different for me than for most everyone else. My mom’s younger brother, Archie, had married a woman I was supposed to call Aunt Dot. That part was fine. Aunt Dot was young and pretty and eager to let everyone know her opinion about everything, from how to make Thanksgiving Day stuffing to whether or not little girls like me should be allowed to sit with everyone else for the meal. Aunt Dot seemed to think kids should sit alone, but since I was the only grandchild at the time, nobody else was in favor of that. Dot, I overheard my mom saying, sure liked to talk.

And that was the problem.

I was too young to understand that what Aunt Dot was saying might rub the other grown-ups the wrong way. For me, it wasn’t her words that mattered, but her voice. Fortunately for me, most people’s voices, including my own, taste like clear, cold water. Like nothing. My grandma’s voice tasted and smelled like apple pie. My mom’s is flavored faintly of cinnamon, but without odor. Aunt Dot’s voice tasted like sour lemon candy and smelled of mold.

It tasted so bad I recoiled the first time she greeted me, which might’ve had a lot to do with why she didn’t like me. I put my hand over my mouth and nose. When she leaned in close, talking, her breath smelled of minty gum, totally pleasant, but I coughed on the stench of her voice.

“She stinks,” I complained to my mom without any tact. “Tastes bad, too!”

Embarrassed, my mother scolded me thoroughly, though later I heard her telling my other aunt that Dot might not smell bad at all, but yes. She sure did stink. It was my grandma who took the time to come find me in the backyard, where I’d been banished until dinnertime. Bundled in my heavy winter coat, I was doing my best to swing on the tire swing, but I hadn’t been able to shove my bulk through the hole in the center.

“To me,” Grammy said, “she kind of smells like Swiss cheese. Now, I like a nice piece of Swiss now and again, sure. On a nice ham sandwich. But too much of it just gives me a stomachache.”

I scuffed my boot on the hard ground. No snow had fallen, but everything was frozen. “I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings.”

“I know you didn’t, sweetheart. Come here.” Grammy hugged me close and kissed the top of my head. “But you know that nobody else can smell how she sounds, don’t you?”

It was, literally, as though she’d tugged the pull chain of a lightbulb in a dark room. The glare of understanding made me blink. I thought of the times my mom had laughed at my descriptions or dismissed my comparisons of food to sound. My dad, too. Kids in school.

“But you do, Grammy?”

She nodded, solemn. “Ever since I was a little girl. But not everybody does, honey. And they’re going to think you’re strange if you say anything about it. So...well. Do the best you can, Bethie. With Aunt Dot. Okay?”

“It’s so bad,” I told her. “When she laughs, my teeth hurt like they’re going to fall out, that’s how yucky it is.”

Grammy laughed hard at that, covering her face. “Oh, my. Well. Certainly don’t tell her that. Tell you what. I’ll give you some peppermint candy, okay? You can suck on one of those. That usually works for me.”

It was a trick that turned out to work for me, too. I’d taken up the habit of never being without a small package of hard candy—in all different flavors. Peppermint masked only some tastes and smells. Butterscotch was better for others. When I discovered sour apple Jolly Ranchers, it was like the heavens opened up and angels sang. That stuff covers up
everything.
I learned to keep quiet about the way voices smelled and tasted and looked, or the way some words had color.

It wasn’t until the ninth grade that I learned there was a name for what I had. Mr. Braverman, my science teacher, was a stickler for class rules. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-three or so, impossibly old to a fifteen-year-old. He had thick, messy hair the color of milk chocolate and wore glasses that often slid down the bridge of his nose. He favored oxford shirts in pastels, paired with corduroy pants and thick leather belts. He wore the shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, and his forearms, the muscles there, the dark hair, distracted me in class. So did his voice, which smelled and tasted like warm, oozing caramel.

The girl who sat next to me, on the other hand, sounded like an old tuna sandwich. I had no other problems with her—we weren’t friends, but she was nice enough. Sitting next to her, though, made me nauseous. I used Grammy’s trick of sucking on hard candy, but this caused trouble in two ways. First, one piece of candy was never enough to get through class next to her when she was talking—which was a lot, because she’d been assigned as my study partner for every review session. Second, Mr. Braverman did not allow candy in his classroom. And Mr. Braverman, as I’ve said, was a stickler for the rules.

I wasn’t quite aware of my sexuality enough at that point to understand what fascinated me so about his forearms, but I did like him as a teacher. He made life science easy to understand, and more importantly, fun—even though he was strict. Looking back, I think it was because he was so young, because he wanted to be sure he could handle all of us. It was his first year teaching. He wanted to get it right.

Anyway, I was smart enough to keep my candy habit a secret from my teachers, most of whom, like Mr. Braverman, didn’t approve of it. But his was the only class in which I really needed it. Of course, he caught me. Of course he was angry and forbade me to do it again.

Of course, I did.

I’ve never been a rule breaker by nature, and I wasn’t deliberately flaunting Mr. Braverman’s rules. I just wanted to keep myself from throwing up all over the desk every day. Still, as subtle as I tried to be, it wasn’t enough.

He gave me detention.

I’d taken Grammy’s other advice to heart, too. Not to talk about my strangeness, so people didn’t think I was weird. It hadn’t always been easy—for one thing, I couldn’t always be sure what was different for me than other people until I experienced it and noticed they didn’t. For another, it can be more difficult to hide ecstasy than revulsion, and while I got used to not recoiling in disgust when someone’s voice reeked of sweaty armpits, I wasn’t always able to keep myself from reacting to the sparks of golden light or sparkling stars that often appeared at random in conjunction with certain colors or shapes or faces.

I didn’t tell Mr. Braverman why I needed to keep sucking on peppermints in his class. But even after getting detention, I kept doing it. And of course, he caught me at it again. He was angrier than he’d been before, and I understand why. I was making him look bad. He yelled and slammed a book on the desk. The class grew quiet, sort of scared. I’m sure most of them were confused.

He gave me detention again, this time for a week. For the first three days, I was under the stern eye of Mrs. Fields, who taught Latin. But the last two days, Mr. Braverman had detention duty. Four to six after school. And on the last day, that final Friday, when I’m sure we were both straining toward the weekend and he was probably regretting not assigning me only two days, he and I were the only ones in the room.

I’d finished all my homework, and I wasn’t allowed to read for pleasure, so I’d settled for writing letters in my notebook. My best friend, Andrea, and I had composed a code for passing notes, not a very complicated or even a very good one. We simply wrote nonsense sentences in which the first letter of every word made up the message. We’d gotten so good at it we could string the words together almost as fast as if we’d been writing the sentence itself. I busied myself with telling Andrea about my latest crush on a senior on the wrestling team. She thought it was the grossest sport ever. I couldn’t explain to her that the color of his eyes made me feel all swimmy inside.

“Heaven indicates sunshine, never around my evergreen. Iguanas see big rivers inside another noodle,”
I wrote.
“Affordable nirvana designates illicit leverage on verifiable editions, horrifying irate matrons.”

Caught up in my woe-filled confession, I didn’t think much about the scratch of pen on paper. It smelled of ink to me, and that was fine. But from outside came the low, dull roar of someone cutting the grass, and that noise tasted like microwave burritos. The last time I ate them, I got food poisoning. Without thinking about it, not paying attention, I slipped a mint from my pocket and into my mouth. I didn’t even look to see if Mr. Braverman was watching, which of course, he was.

I almost choked on the mint when my teacher slammed the flat of his palm on my desk, making my pen skid across the page. I yelped and backed up in my seat, but the desks in this room were attached to the chairs, and I couldn’t move more than an inch or so. Mr. Braverman looked furious.

He leaned very, very close. “What the hell is your problem?”

As far as curse words went, it was far from the worst I’d ever heard. Still, coming from a teacher, it was pretty bad. The anger in his voice turned his sweet caramel into something more like scalded milk. Not a terrible smell, but not as delicious as caramel, either.

“I’m sorry—”

He slapped the desk again. “I asked around, Elisabeth. None of your other teachers have such a problem with you. So. Why me?”

I shook my head, trying not to cry. I wanted him to back away, but he kept leaning closer. “I’m sorry, Mr. Braverman, I just...it’s the smell!”

He blinked and retreated half an inch. “The smell of what?”

I’d said too much, but couldn’t stop now. I didn’t look him in the eye. “Just give me another day’s detention.”

“I don’t want to give you detention, Elisabeth. You’re a good student. You’re doing well in my class. I just...” He straightened and pushed his glasses up on his nose. “You can’t eat candy in class, that’s all. I could see if it were medically necessary or something, like if you were diabetic. But you’re not.”

“No.” I shook my head.

“The smell of what?” he asked again, softer this time. “The chemicals from the lab?”

“No.” I chewed my lower lip. “It’s the sound of Theresa’s voice. It...it smells like bad tuna. The only way to really ignore it is to suck on peppermint candy.”

For what seemed like forever, he said nothing. “When Theresa talks, you...smell something? You don’t hear it?”

“I hear it,” I said miserably. “But I smell and taste it, too.”

“Do you smell and taste everything you hear?”

I shook my head again. “No. Mostly voices, but not all of them. And not when they’re singing to music.”

“A cappella?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t sing in the chorus.”

My lip curled, just a little, and I shuddered. “No. Even if the voices are good, it’s like...well, it would be like if you really like pizza. You might like it with mushrooms or pineapple or pepperoni and onions, right, but you wouldn’t necessarily like it with chocolate pudding and green beans and candy corn.”

“I don’t like candy corn at all,” Mr. Braverman said kindly, and I burst into tears.

He handed me tissues from the box on his desk and watched me carefully as I sobbed into my hands. He didn’t say much. It seems to me now that probably Mr. Braverman wasn’t quite sure what to do with a semihysterical teenage girl. That, more than my seeming defiance, or the rowdy boys in the back of the class, was probably the most eye-opening experience of his maiden year teaching. He did a decent job with me, though, patting my shoulder sort of awkwardly and not trying to soothe me with lame phrases. Maybe he’d had sisters.

“I’m a freak,” I said in a tortured whisper after a minute or so. “I’m sorry, Mr. Braverman, but if I don’t eat the candy while I’m sitting next to her, I’m going to barf.”

“We don’t want that, for sure.”

I risked a look at him. “I’m sorry. I like your class. I wasn’t trying to be a pain.”

He let his butt rest on the edge of the desk across from mine. “You’re not a freak, Elisabeth. But I can’t believe nobody’s ever talked to you about this before.”

Grammy had. My parents knew. My brother knew. We just never talked about it.

“Let me show you something. Come here.” He beckoned me into his small office, a closet, really, tucked into the back of the room. Floor-to-ceiling shelves overflowed with books and lab supplies. He pulled a thick volume from a shelf and settled it on the desk, flipping through the pages. He tapped one. “Look.”

That was the first time I saw the word
synesthesia.
“A neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second.”
I read the definition. I looked at him.

“It’s a neurological condition. Probably genetic,” he offered.

I thought of my grandmother. “I inherited it?”

“Yes. Most likely.” Mr. Braverman motioned for me to move closer until we stood shoulder to shoulder in the cramped space. “Look, Elisabeth. Here are charts and lists of all the different ways the people in this book manifest their different...well, I hate to say symptoms, because that makes it sound like a disease. And it’s not, really.”

I wiped my nose with a tissue and leaned over the book, then looked at him. This close I could see that behind the glasses, he had pale blue eyes framed by thick black lashes. Suddenly, I felt swimmier than my senior varsity wrestler crush had ever made me. Small gold sparkles like stars flashed and twinkled along the arches of his eyebrows before they faded. I focused on his arm, leaning on the desk beside me. That was no help.

“This person lists tasting shapes.” I laughed a little. “Weird.”

I ran my fingertip down the columns, skimming the information. Mr. Braverman tapped on a photograph. Underneath it was a small chart showing what colors corresponded to which numbers. That person also saw letters as having personalities and gender—
A
was feminine, for example. I couldn’t grasp that.

On the next page, I started to read aloud. “‘Mary Sheeran says the colors are like watching fireworks, alternating bursts of pattern and light that expand and contract along with the rhythm of music.’”

I knew just what that was like, though mine was connected with facial features. The curve of brow or jaw, the lift of a smile. “For Mary, alcohol intensifies the experience, as does sexual activity. She says during or-orgasm...”