the deepest pits of my cringe

“I don't think I'd like it.” 

Her eyes crawl over to find yours, lids lax with the carelessness solely bestowed on the honest summer child. Her heels are burrowed into damp, glutinous mud, still weeping with the remnants of last week’s downpour. Bare feet tilt at a persistent angle, pushed by the creek's current, the only sounds your shared breathing and the babble of liquid motion over stretches of flattened stone.

“What wouldn't you like?” she drawls, her voice lancing through the balmy stillness between you. “Rich's godawful cologne suffocating you while you try to cook his dinner like a serf?” She snorts, fingers lazily drifting through kelly green blades of bristled growth.

The night before, she had insisted on you stopping by right after work while she grabbed a portable radio for your night to the drive-in. Her mother had indeed been slaving away over the stove while her stepfather, Rich, encased her from behind, barely allowing her an inch of movement in any direction. 

But there's one particular aspect that has stuck out in your mind and needled at your idle hours since. 

“He kept kissing her neck.” you finally answer, flicking an ant off of your skirt. “They were loud and wet and…and kind of off-putting.”

Alexis grunts, her agreement not needing to be articulated. But her eyes remain on you, eyebrows raised in droll challenge, irises shimmering with something that tugs at your memory.

"Is it just the thought of him kissing your neck, or being kissed on the neck in general?” she questions, her hand falling stationary.

“The thought in general.” you reply, your nose wrinkling. You've always been rather sensitive, giving your peers and family members no shortage of amusement as you twisted and flinched away from gentle pokes and teasing prods. You can't imagine that having lips where your sensation is most heightened would be anything nearing pleasant.

Quiet resumes, and you've just managed to tuck away your sensibilities enough to lay back on the grass before her words reach your ears.

“I could kiss you there. If you want. To see if you like it.”

Your chest hitches, static weighing thick and heavy over your just prone form. The implications don't need to be voiced. The potential fallout sits like a stone in your throat. 

“I…I shouldn't…” you trail off, fingers curling into your dampened palms.

“Wouldn't you rather find out now?” There's an odd sort of hunger coloring her tone, desperation tempered with a bite that almost makes you wince. “Why would you want to wait for some prick to slobber all over you just to find out you'd rather be dead?”

The word dead coming out of Alexis Getty's mouth is nearly enough to make you break into peals of laughter. She isn't made for talks of mortality, not conceivable in terms of beginning and end. You can close your eyes and imagine her laying on this creek bed at any period, at any era. The world could be in ruins, and she would still be siphoning the sunlight for all it was worth, gulping it down like a rabid scavenger aware of its closing window.

Call it familiarity. Call it something that won't go past your trachea. Either way, it's just wrong. 

You bite your lip, watching as her pupils dilate a touch at the crease in your skin. 

“It…it won't mean anything, will it?” you ask. You're not religious, exactly, but the community might as well be your temple, your family its followers, and its creed forbids aberrations. 

Her face shutters, her nostrils flaring. 

“No.” she mumbles. “It doesn't matter.” Her eyes flash with an accompanying sneer inching at her lips. 

“I'm just helping you. I've done it enough.”

Something hot and sour lances your stomach at the reminder. Girlhood is a toothy thing, blossoming in patches of damp in curves you aren't ready for, shark-infested waters you haven't managed to acclimate to, milestones so far out of your reach while others attain them with every other step. Lip gloss and mascara feel like they're trying to glue your orifices shut, making sure you can't see and you'll never be heard. It ends up leaving you sitting in front of your mirror in a daze, wondering when, or if, you'll ever feel ready. 

Alexis, on the other hand, was born ready in a way that renders you equally dizzy. She flirts and parries advances with blistering ease, caustic insults and saccharine coos intertwining into a symphony that makes your bones chill as you watch from the outskirts. She kisses and tells with identical nonchalance, detailing her exploits with brash satisfaction moderated with boredom while you stew in something nervous and slippery. 

It will be helpful, won't it? To be on the receiving end? To know what she does and how it feels good, so that you can replicate it later?

“Yeah.” you eventually murmur. “You can do it.”

Your eyes slide shut on instinct, not allowing your senses to catch up with what your mind has decided. The second darkness descends, you feel them. Plush, slightly sticky warmth grazes your skin, lighting a traction path that forks lightning around your skull. 

You remember when she first moved here, your mother all but commanding you to show her around. You had ended up on this very same creekbed, what would eventually become your ‘spot.’ She had nicked peaches from a yardside farm stand with a quick snap of her wrist, tucking them into her skirts with a wink and a smirk. 

You had watched her sink her teeth into the warmed, fuzzed flesh, overly eager to see her reaction to the fruits of your land. But then the juice had trickled, and she had slurped the tender meat until you had to focus on your own produce in order to not do something irrational. The thought of her mouth and tongue roving over the mess of sugar and fiber had stained your mind for weeks after.

Now, feeling those same motions on your heated skin, you wish that your dermis could split as easily as a peach's, that she could play audience to the deepest, wettest parts of you.

Seconds or hours pass, time stretching and morphing into a pocket of simple yet devastating pleasure that you can't bring yourself to reconcile with. Her mouth is eternal, her tongue everlasting, and all you want is to fall into the void of athanasia with her.

But eventually, she retreats, breaths puffing in moist drafts over your collarbone. A groan sits leaden in your throat at the sheen of saliva ringing her mouth, and you briefly wonder if it still carries the remnants of nectar.

She looks down at her watch, then jumps to her feet, leaving an imprint in the grass already fading.

“I have to get going.” she mutters.

“What for?” you ask, cringing at the desperation lining your tone. You know it's irrational, but you can't help but wonder if your neck wasn't up to par, if you didn't taste the way men do. You don't even know what men taste like, but a sudden, unquenchable urge wells up within you to not only match it, but better it.

“I have a date.” she answers, blase as ever. A vague silhouette takes form in your mind. Gangly limbs and calloused fingers, nicotine breath and wandering hands. 

And oh, how you ache. How you burn. It doesn't matter. It can't matter. But you can feel your teeth lengthening, whetting themselves on sleek and bitter steel.

“Have fun.” you eke out, watching the creek rush by, continuous and unfeeling. A singular stone tumbles along its current. You know that it will eventually fall out of synch, that it'll stray to the banks and find rest among its kin, too burdened to forever be held aloft. And as she makes the solitary trek back to the township proper, you know the feeling so intimately that it nearly ruins you.

—

She's in your front yard. Her body leans against her beat-up Ford Falcon, the engine idling. Her shoe arcs in drag paths through the packed dirt of your entryway, sending up plumes of sepia tinted dust. 

You open the door and go out to greet her, the words lapsing to quiet before they reach the open air. Her coming to you is a novelty, and the implication has the hairs on your arm standing on end. 

“What are you doing here?” you ask, and ‘here' could mean anything from your property to the mortal plane entirely.

“I'm gonna be gone.” she replies evenly, her hair frizzing in the steadily growing humidity. Her manner is almost frenetic, charged with prey's instinct for watchful wariness. “For a while.”

She looks as though she wants you to wail, to throw yourself down on the earth and beg. But you instead feel a hollow resolve fill your chest cavity. Something ancient and weary resting in your bone marrow knew this day would come, in the half-baked fashion of a child imagining the sun blinking out, plunging the earth into permafrost at the first mention of dissolution. A tumble from the mundane into the ephemeral.

“With the guy from…” you swallow past snarls and profanities. “From that day?” Your voice is limned with a plea so needing and insecure that you almost want her to insult you the way she did the men who lurked outside the storefront window when she bussed tables. 

She nods, chin tilting upward in defiance of a structure you aren't aware of. Her eyes meet yours, and your lips nearly form a perfect circle as the memory from before finally settles into resolution, a stubborn fold in a sheet of paper finally wormed out of its obstinance.

Your mother had taken you to a different county, wanting to show you one of the new-age centers for stray animals.

“They don't euthanize them right away.” she informed you as you made your way through corridors of steel cages and echoing yips and yowls. “They keep the majority of them for adoption.” 

You remembered that your dad had muttered something about it being a waste of tax dollars, but you thought it was rather nice, to give the rejected a second chance, or at least the hope of one. 

You had dawdled by the end of a hallway while your mother talked to one of the volunteers. Peering into the nearest cage, you were caught in your own sort of limbo.

Pressed against the bars was a Rottweiler, lips curled up in a ferocious baring of fatal teeth. But its eyes were open, bare in another fashion entirely, frantically jumping  between your face and your hand at your hip. Simultaneously asking you to touch, and daring you to try.

Alexis looks much the same way, you realize, beckoning you ever closer and promising a fitting retribution. 

Affection, or perhaps a jealous sort of pity, buoys your next words.

“Is he nice?” you reply, knowing the answer.

“No.” she says swiftly, intending it to hurt but unable to follow through. “But he wants me.” 

You let the pointed comment slide by, readjusting your blouse. 

“Well,” you try with a smile, “when you come back, I'll be here.”

A bright laugh tears from her tongue. “You make it sound like you're staying in this shithole forever.” 

“You make it sound like you'll be gone forever.” you retort, but somehow it doesn't sound as funny. 

You hold up a finger and dash into the house, fingers sliding against glass and fumbling under water before you re-emerge, tossing her a farewell token.

A peach.

Her face lifts and falls and goes every other direction in the span of a second, her limbs spasming. 

“A snack for the road.” you tell her. “And maybe a little something to remind you of home.”

She holds the fruit in her palm for a moment or two before biting into it with a savage tear.

“When I come back,” she says through a mouthful of pulp and juice, “we'll share one. We'll buy out that whole damn stand. We'll get sick of them. I promise.”

The smoke was burning their mouth more than his eyes, only on them, gaze piercing to the point of aching. Filter to the lips, inhale, hold, exhale, he told them earlier when they grabbed the cigarette from his fingers, smirk in their lips.

Bad things tasted the best. Kind of. The tobacco was bitter, but it was his, and he almost looked offended when it was held in their mouth, lighter being flicked on and off in their hand, the second one steadily placed on his lap, toying with tbe belt that wrapped neatly around his waist. Or was so, before they unbuckled it, fly open too, dark blue of his boxers out in the open, goosebumps on his skin because of the draft in the room.

"Do I have something on my face?" they teased, another drag, plum of gray smoke covering the features he almost whined upon not seeing. A crime to cover something so perfect.

They could have something soon, if they didn't stop being so beautiful. His hand, cupping the soft cheek, his lips, slightly chapped, but warm and tender as always, his tongue, licking into their mouth, tasting the smoke and tobacco and relishing in it because of course he would.

"You're perfect" he whispered, throat bobbing with a thick swallow when they smiled, skin wrinkling around the edges of their eyes, two endless pits in which he could drown, breath held forever if only it pleased them.

"You always keep telling me how bad those are for me." they hummed, taking a look at the cigarette between their fingers, black filter so wrong yet so right when they held it, flicking the ash into the ashtray right next to his thigh. One wrong move and he would hiss, a small hole burned through the material of his trousers. Thrill of the experience, pain was a factor he was slowly growing more and more okay with when it was delivered with their hand, even the sting hurting in a different way.

"But what about you, huh?"

"I don't care about me" he said, words coming out weaker than usual, no spite in his tone. The laughter died out, replaced with thick and sweet expectation that coursed through his veins like corn syrup, sticky enough for him to lick the chapped lips, almost tasting them on him already like a phantom memory.

"But what if I care about you?" they leaned backwards, head falling behind their shoulders, cloud of smoke once again obscuring his sight. His glasses were long discarded, so was his pride when they asked him to move. Not asked, not at all, not when they were so authorative. They odered. It was either that or nothing, cruel whisperes against his ear spoken only for him to hear.

His hips wiggled underneath their thighs when they sighed, all blood rushing into one place, head empty and body on autopilot, trained into submission when it came to them. What they asked, they would have, always.

"Come on, do better than that." they tutted when he thrusted upwards, clothed groin rubbing against their own, the wet patch staining his boxers, navy blue which turned even darker making them nod their head in appreciation.

"You're mean." he huffed, efforts doubled down with aim to please. Whatever they wished for, they would have.

"I know. Sorry." they hummed, the free hand gently pushing against the flesh of his lower abdomen, slowly inching higher and higher, starting at the band of his underwear and trailing the burning path up to his chest, palm pressing over the mound of muscle where heart should be, beating hard enough to escape his ribcage. Good. It would make a spot for them to curl there and stay forever, and he would die as a happy man with his everything finally perfectly close to him.

"But you're close." he laughed, nervous at the realisation.

"Just from the fact that I'm sitting on top of you, smoking your cigarettes, the ones you always refused me. Touching your skin, squeezing your–"

"Don't." was he getting flustered? Maybe. Probably, yes he was, just from the things they listed, but how could he deny that all of it felt heavenly when he dragged his dick against their core? It was sensitive, it always was whenever he was with them, all his desires and needs sacrificed at the altar of their mercy, divine generous enough to grant him the wish.

He sped up again, hands finally shooting up to hold onto their hips, skin and muscle fitting right like puzzle pieces underneath his palms, warmth seeping through the nerves and causing malfunction to his system.

"I'm so sorry. Forgive me?" teasing, of course they were, but he would forgive them for much worse transgressions that making him dry hump them like a dog in heat.

He moaned when their finger pinched the skin, mouth opened for them to lean forward and slip into it, smoke from the drag they managed to take right before making him roll his eyes. The draft in the room was not helping, he was hot enough to melt, his chest heaving when the coil began to tighten more and more, body arching right into them.

"Come for me, baby."

Like an obedient mutt, he did, muffled cry of their name against them, whole body jerking in a spasm when not only he felt himself shoot his load, cotton of the boxers soaked, but when the felt the sudden burn on his chest, the cigarette that started all of this pressed hard against the place they previously caressed and pinched. He trashed, dick twitching and pumping, sensation making him dizzy, thank everything they were both on a bed because he felt how much he shuddered.

He whined when they didn't stop, taking the initiative to finally be the one to move instead, the remnants of the filter dropped into the ashtray. They dragged themselves against him, feeling the wet spot on his crotch, more than pleased with themselves at the reaction. Both hands were then quickly put against him to steady the jerks that were wrecking through him, curses spewed through gritted teeth mixing with the creak of the bed frame.

"Shhh, handsome." they cooed, lips gently kissing the burn, soothing the raw spot with a faint blow and more pecks, trying to take this pain from his mind.

What would turn into a scar later on, placed right over his heart, looked almost like a badge of honour on the feverish skin, goosebumps all around it.