“Keep your eye on the ball, Carrie!” my father said to me one afternoon. “C’mon now!” He shook his head. And my heart sank, but I straightened up and finished strong.
After we were done, my father went to go book our next court time. As Elena packed up her things, Marco came onto the court and approached me.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
“I’m Marco,” he said.
“Carrie.”
“I know,” he said, smiling. “Everybody here seems to know who you are.”
Elena put her kit over her shoulder and gestured that she wanted to go. Marco told her he’d meet her at the car and turned back to me.
“I’ve wanted to talk to you for a while, but your dad is always around.”
“Oh.” For a moment, I envisioned him asking me out, and my pulse quickened so intensely that I thought I might pass out.
If he asked me out, what would I even say?
My father had told me earlier in the week to expect double sessions on my backhand and my inside-out forehand. And I’d failed—actually failed—the practice GED my tutor had given me the week before. I’d promised my father I’d study all weekend. Answering yes was entirely impossible. And yet the wish that he would ask grew stronger and stronger in my belly by the second.
“Yeah, so…” he said, but then never finished his sentence. I watched his face, desperate to know what he was thinking. I felt a heaviness, a leaded feeling in my hips. I did not even know what it was that I needed so badly from him, but I could feel how much I needed it.
Instead of saying anything further, Marco put one hand against the fence and closed the gap between us. I watched his lips as he leaned his mouth toward mine. When he finally kissed me, I did not hesitate. I kissed him back with my entire body, pressing myself against him, wanting every inch of me to touch every inch of him.
His lips were so soft and his hands felt warm as they traveled from my shoulders down my torso.
I tilted my head back as his mouth went to my neck, and I moaned quietly, forgetting everything except this boy and his hands and how they felt.
And then suddenly, we could hear the crunch of the gravel that was my father walking back up the path. Marco pulled his hands away.
It was over almost as quickly as it had begun. Marco whispered, “I’ll see you around,” and then took off just as my father came back. My father picked up his racket and stood across the court from me and started calling out the shots he wanted to do.
I hit the ball the same as I always did, but inside, I felt flushed and in possession of my first real secret. It was like opening the front door and letting fresh air into the house.
For the next month, every day after training, Marco would be there. Whenever my father and Elena weren’t around, he would kiss me in the corner of the court. I felt embarrassed by how much I looked forward to it, by how desperate I was to feel more of him, how often I thought of him when he was gone.
I felt such an insatiable need for him to touch me, a hunger for his body. It felt exactly like the hunger I felt to win. The sense that at the center of my being there was an unfillable void. There would never be enough matches to win. There would never be enough of Marco.
And it wasn’t one-sided. He seemed to need me too. I could tell in the hurried way he grabbed me, in the look on his face when I had to leave. I felt bright and shiny for maybe the first time in my life, glowing with the knowledge that I was wanted.
I’m stunned at what Marco and I got away with in those small pockets of time that spring in Florida, just how far things went. Eventually, we found our way to the back of his parents’ old sedan, parked in the far corner of the parking lot.
Marco opened up a whole slice of the world for me, a whole new thing my body could do. And I felt consumed by it. I could torture my body all day—making my muscles so tired that my whole body felt heavy. And then in just a few minutes, Marco could lighten every limb, loosen my chest.
“Are you my boyfriend?” I asked him one afternoon in June, pulling my shirt down and fixing my hair. The start of Junior Wimbledon was only two short weeks away.
“I don’t think so,” Marco said. “We don’t hang out or anything.”
“Well, maybe we could,” I said. “After the tournament. It’s in a couple weeks, and when it’s over, I could convince my dad we should come back here.”
“I don’t want you to come back here just for me,” Marco said as he kissed me on the lips. When he pulled away, he was smiling. I loved his smile—the way his dimples were barely there but I was close enough to see them.