Oh. Come on. Ross Kendrick doesn’t like girls, and isn’t shy about it either. Coach is in no risk of winning any Oscar prizes for his acting.
“How’s your wife?” I change the subject. It’s one thing skating over the forbidden and another walking right into it. “Are you having a boy or a girl?”
“A boy.” He doesn’t sound too hot about answering the question, his tone turning sour. “She went to live with her mom. It’s complicated.”
“Okay.”
We hear a pop a few seconds later, coming from my foot.
“Ahh. You broke me,” I laugh.
“Not yet,” he mutters under his breath, but I hear it. I hear it, and suddenly I’m filled with fresh desperation to be touched by him.
“Roll your ankle. Stretch your heel.”
I bring my knee to my chest and do as I’m told. I know what view he’s getting now, when I’m in this position. My running shorts ride up and he can see my panties. White cotton.
“Feels much better. Thank you.”
“A massage for those short muscles?” he offers, his voice comically thick now. “We still have twenty minutes before school starts.”
“Sure.”
This time, he gathers my heels together, pulling my knees as far apart as he can. I’m wide open in front of him as his fingers start traveling my inner thighs. It’s a brutal stretch, but I need it.
Even so, I know he is not supposed to touch me that way at all, and that we’ve crossed a line. The invisible, red string that separates us from casually inappropriate to doing something that could land him in jail and me in therapy for a lifetime.
“Thanks,” I groan. It feels so good. The stretch. His hands. Everything.
I’m going to hell.
“Yup.”
His thumbs touch the hem of my shorts as he draws circles on my skin. One time. Two times. On the third, I know it’s not accidental. I know we’re on the brink of something. I know this is not supposed to happen.
He picks up my foot and stretches my hamstring, pinning my foot next to my head. When he leans into me, I feel his penis pressed against my groin through our clothes. It feels like it’s pulsating. My mouth goes dry.
“So your wife lives with her mom now?” I ask loudly. I don’t know why. Maybe to distract him. Maybe to distract myself. Maybe to remind both of us that she exists.
“Yeah. We’re not on the best of terms. It’s not … we’re not really together.”
He releases me from the hamstring stretch. The tips of his thumbs are touching the hem of my panties under my shorts now. He stills. I swallow hard. Close my eyes.
“Emmabelle.”
It’s the first time he doesn’t call me Penrose. I don’t answer. I don’t breathe. I hate that a part of me wants this. I hate that my panties are damp again.
“I can make this really good for you, sweetie. But you can’t tell anyone, okay?”
My words are gone. Shriveled inside my throat. I know I should say no. I want to say no. But somehow I hear myself saying yes. I want to please him.
“I’ll get into a lot of trouble if people find out. But I know you want to. And … well, I’ve been wanting to for a while.”
A beat passes without either of us saying or doing anything. His thumbs on the sides of my panties feel weird. Foreign. But also … thrilling.
Just when I think he is going to pull my shorts down and remove my panties and enter me—the way I saw in a porn movie once—he tugs both to the side. A cool breeze passes over my vagina, letting me know that it is completely exposed to him.
I pop one eye open and watch him watching me, licking his lips.
“Fuck,” he says.
“I … I’m a virgin.”
But what I’m really trying to say is that I want to keep it that way. I’m not like Persy. I don’t wanna wait until marriage before I lose my virginity, but I want it to mean something. Not to think back in a few years and remember I gave it to someone who was expecting a child with someone else.
“Yeah, I know. I’ll never hurt you, sweetie.”
And then before I know it, he is crouched down, in front of his open truck, sucking my vagina into his mouth. I’m mortified. It feels so awkward. I want to push him away, but I also don’t want to look like a crybaby, especially after how good he’s been to me. How he always pays me extra attention, massages my legs, works on my knee.
I squeeze my eyes shut and remind myself that no one is going to know.
Not Persy. Not my parents. Not Ross and Sailor, my best friends. Definitely not the other harriers. If a tree falls in the middle of the woods and no one hears it … did it actually happen?