These Floods Of You Are Overwhelming
"I want out, out of the burdening nightsweats, out of the rising seas
of blood
Lost in you like Saturday nights, searching the streets
with bedroom eyes
Just dying to be saved; run on, girl, run on."
-converge, "jane doe"
Ryan likes it when Summer digs her heels into his calves, when she wraps one leg around his waist, when she scratches her nails down his back hard enough to leave welts, hard enough to draw blood.
"Do you want Theresa to find out?" she asks him. A little witch hazel, because acrylic nails are never as clean as they can be, and he hisses, twists.
"Ow," he says, and ignores her question.
She caps the bottle and drops a kiss on the back of his neck. "All done," she says. He pads into the bathroom with the bottle and she thinks about her own medicine cabinet -- no medicine in there, only lipsticks and glosses and foundation and no -- shine powder and her toothbrush.
Summer's toothbrush used to sit in a cup on her sink, but Anna came over one day and told her that matter in a toilet when it's flushed, even when the top was down, can travel. She'd been brushing her teeth with a shit -- brush, and no one had told her except the girl who wasn't supposed to like her.
This kind of makes her feel bad about sleeping with someone else's boyfriend. Someone else's maybe-baby daddy.
Summer feels like an idiot even thinking the phrase "baby daddy".
"Theresa won't be home for another two hours," says Ryan. He's naked and silhouetted in the light from the bathroom. The curtains were always drawn when Summer got there. They had been drawn when Summer arrived the first time, holding a big box of pastries.
She had been halfway to Chino already before it had occurred to her that Theresa had used to work at the coffee shop where she bought the pastries, and she kept an eye out for another place to stop on her way, but there was nothing -- there was nothing in Chino. Except for some weird place with Spanish words on the outside, and Summer wasn't going to stop there.
Ryan walks closer to the bed, and Summer lays back on it and lets her thighs fall apart. Ryan is almost inexhaustible it seems, and even though Summer wouldn't fuck Seth after she found out Theresa was pregnant, she's fucking Ryan without a condom. She knows it's not smart, but he didn't reach for one the first time, and she hadn't brought any, and she's on the pill anyway, and he probably doesn't have anything contagious except semen.
They just fell into a pattern.
It's all she can think about until he pulls her ankles onto his shoulders and starts to suck on her neck. He's thrusting fast, too fast, and she can't catch her breath and she's moaning, and he knows exactly how to push her and how fast he can go because it's when she starts to cry -- her eyes water and her throat closes and she just screams and screams -- that's when she comes, that's when he should start going faster, and she didn't know it could feel like this because it never did with Seth.
Seth used to fuck her and then bring her off with his mouth and fingers.
She doesn't think she's actually coming when Ryan does this; it's just a long wave of pleasure that never crests.
The first time was awkward and weird, and she thinks back on it now with a shiver, because remembering the anticipation is kind of hot. Summer can sit in her car with the air conditioning turned all the way up and sweat from remembering.
Theresa wasn't home when she got there, and Summer wasn't even sure why she'd gone, but she'd bought pastry damn it, and she was going to make sure that her boyfriend's best friend was doing okay. She was "in loco parentis" or "in amigo parentis" or "in loco amigo" and when she said that to Ryan he said, "That means 'crazy friend'," and she said, "I didn't know you spoke Latin," and then she felt like an idiot, because obviously Spanish was derived from Latin, so when she said something in Latin, Ryan would be able to understand it.
Duh.
Ryan ate a pasty slowly, in small bites, and didn't ask about Marissa, but Summer talked about her anyway -- chattered on and on and explained why Marissa had chosen to get red nailpolish on her toes and switch from waxing her eyebrows to threading.
Finally Ryan had said, "Summer." And she stopped and stared at him and he was shredding a danish and ignoring the coffee she'd made -- okay, the coffee she'd watched him make and had measured the water for -- and he continued with, "I don't care about Marissa's toenails," and Summer had burst into tears.
Ryan waited for her to stop crying and then poured her another cup of coffee and watched her quietly and let her talk about exfoliating her heels.
Ryan likes it when Summer rubs where his back turns into his butt. Not the actual crack of his ass, but right where it starts. He gets nervous and twitchy when her hand moves lower than that; he doesn't even like it when she gives him blow jobs and rubs that piece of skin between his asshole and his balls.
Seth loved that, or she wouldn't have tried it on Ryan.
Summer's kind of surprised because she always pegged Ryan as the kind of guy who maybe swung both ways, and maybe was more than a little into Seth.
Summer doesn't have a problem with that -- she thinks it's kind of... interesting. A little sexy. Marissa would have a problem with that and Summer thought that's why Ryan never mentioned it, but now she knows better.
Ryan likes it when Summer buries her face in his neck and bites the muscles there and wraps her arms around his shoulders and holds him tightly. Summer doesn't think about what this means, because what it means is that he can arch his back up a little more and go deeper into her, and it's the deeper that matters in this position.
It was when she went over to give him a hug. It wasn't like she knelt at his feet or something -- she just bent down and squeezed his shoulders and pressed her cheek to his, and for some reason -- somehow -- someway -- some --
Ryan just turned his head enough and she turned her head enough and their mouths touched and she was going to play it off like when shit like that happened with Coop, because you don't know someone and touch someone and not accidentally miss the mark a few times, but Ryan pulled back and did that stupid annoying Ryan squinting thing and then he pressed his mouth to hers, hard, harder, and she opened her mouth because she was just in shock.
She was, and when someone hot kisses you, you're supposed to kiss them back. It's the rules.
Plus, Marissa had broken up with him.
Plus, it wasn't like Theresa was there with her belly out to here.
Plus, it wasn't like Seth was even on the same continent.
Except Tahiti wasn't a different continent -- it wasn't even a different country. It was just some stupid island somewhere that he sailed to, and Summer pulled her mouth away from Ryan's and she could feel her lip gloss all over her top lip and chin and it was gross, and she said, "I miss him too," and Ryan said, "I don't do shit because of other people," and Summer could have laughed but then he wouldn't have kissed her again, wouldn't have stood up and pulled her against him, wouldn't have lifted her up against the counter and bitten his way down and then across and then under her skirt.
His shoulders were so wide that they pushed her thighs too far apart and threw her off balance and she fell backwards and landed on the half -- full box of pastries and it cushioned her head while he licked around her thong and over her thong, and there was something -- it was hot, being licked through the satiny fabric.
"Theresa," she gasped.
"Don't call someone else's name while I'm fucking you," said Ryan, his face shiny, and Summer let her head fall back.
It isn't like she hadn't ever thought about it before. She remembers perfectly well the first time she saw Ryan and thought to herself, "Hel -- lo. Who is this with that dork?" and that she ended up with Seth must have been the universe's idea of a joke, because she'd wanted Ryan.
But no one ever stood between Coop and something she wanted, and Coop had wanted Ryan more than Summer had. Plus, it turned out that Ryan was poor and a delinquent and Summer's father would not have approved of that.
He hadn't approved of Seth anyway, so it didn't matter. And not only did it not matter, but it definitely doesn't matter because Summer doesn't plan on telling anyone about her Saturday afternoons with Ryan while Theresa is with her grandmother, or about the way Ryan sometimes cries, or about the way Summer sometimes wishes that it was her who was pregnant, living in this tiny, cozy house with Ryan.
Of course, if that was reality, they would kill each other, and the only reason they haven't yet is because they don't talk about anything except what they want and sometimes food and once Seth -- but Ryan got really quiet and his mouth turned down and Summer threw herself onto his lap and sucked on his lips and kept her stomach muscles tight and did all the work until he came and she barely felt anything at all, but she'd wanted to get that look off Ryan's face, that was all that mattered.
Ryan likes it when Summer screams, she can tell. He likes that she can't control herself and he likes that he's the one who makes her lose control. He knows, she knows, that it was never like this with Seth.
And she knows that it's never like this for him and Theresa, if they are even still sleeping together -- which she doubts, because there's an extra room in their little house, a room with the door always closed, and Summer bets that's where Theresa sleeps, not in this tiny bedroom with three pillows but only a twin bed and a lazy ceiling fan instead of an air conditioner and a bathroom with a toilet and a shower but no bathtub.
Summer is fucking observant and she sees what's going on -- and she doesn't mind. Maybe Ryan thinks she would mind. Maybe Ryan thinks she wouldn't want to fuck him unless he was still fucking Theresa.
Maybe Ryan thinks she's a big fucking idiot with no brain and no sense.
That wouldn't surprise her.
Every time Summer comes, she brings something with her, some sort of apology. She brings lobsters and pies and once she brought cookies she had baked herself during some strange spurt of bored domesticity.
She doesn't tell anyone where she's going and she doesn't invite anyone to go with her and the one time Coop asked if she wanted to hang out, she said she had stuff to do for her father, which wasn't necessarily untrue; it was just that she didn't do the stuff she was supposed to do for her father (it wasn't important anyway, and if her father couldn't take the time to really get to know the guy she was, like, totally in love with for months, then her father could do his own stupid shit).
Instead she drove out to Chino and spent three hours wrapped up with Ryan, fucking her brains out and screaming to his stucco ceiling and that stupid fan with the basket -- weave insets that never went fast enough to keep sweat from rolling down between her breasts. Her legs always got too slick to keep them around his waist, and they always ended up on the floor, the cheap carpet like glass in Summer's knees, her face buried in the soft mattress, Ryan's body curved above her.
She imagines they make quite a picture but she never imagines Theresa walking in on them. That would be too horribly real, too brutal, too... gross.
Her body is different now. It feels heavier and more sensitive and when she showers and runs her fingers over her nipples, they tighten immediately, and she can feel the wetness between her legs. It wants to gush out, it wants to overflow, and it does.
When Summer gets her period, she still goes to Ryan's house, and she sits across from him at the table. She's wearing a tampon and a thong and a short short short skirt and high high high heels. She knows she's hormonal because she feels giddy; Ryan keeps trying to look up her skirt but he's pretending he's not.
They drink coffee. She feels the blood sloshing around inside her. She wonders why, if sex makes people feel like this, everyone isn't doing it all the time.
She goes down on her knees under the table before it's even time, before they finish their coffee, before Ryan finishes his almond croissant. He puts apple butter on it, and she thinks that's disgusting, but it makes his mouth taste good, and smears some around the head of his cock and then takes it into her mouth and is careful -- careful -- ah -- ah -- ah -- teeth, and he says, "God -- you -- big -- teeth -- god -- " and she knows the back of her throat is going to hurt and be raw but it's okay because she's all the way down and licking his balls while she sucks his cock and he pulls her off by the hair and says, "Breathe," and she does, and then takes him in again, and it's his turn to scream.
Screaming isn't manly, he tells her later, scratching his chest, and she giggles, because she doesn't usually think of playfulness when she thinks about Ryan, but here it is. Playful Ryan, comes with his very own baggage. Matching dark grey, she thinks. Oh, hah, hah, metaphor.
Ryan doesn't mind her tampons and licks around her clit and sucks on her, sucks her into his mouth, sticks his tongue inside, wriggles it around.
"That's unhygienic," she tells him, but he doesn't care and says she tastes like pennies.
"You shouldn't put pennies in your mouth," she tells him while she gets dressed. "That's so icky."
"Yeah?" He lays on the bed and rubs his chest and scratches his balls and stretches under the barely -- cooler air from the fan. He glistens with sweat and gleams with bite marks. His muscles are longer and harder and Summer wonders what he does all day and all night, all week until Saturday.
She knows what he does Saturdays.