Midwest Monster

Of course your name wouldn’t be on the list of the dead, never your name. You would be missing, already halfway to California with Corey to hide from the man who killed all of your friends. The man who Corey saved you from. The man who was still at large, armed and dangerous, who could be looking for you to finish what he started. 

Or you would be interviewed at the scene. The camera zooming in on your crumpled face. Swollen lips and tear-glazed eyes, lit blue and red by spinning police lights. Thick, dark blood still dripping from your trembling hands. Terrified, but unharmed. The sole survivor. 

He flips open his box of cigarettes. It was full this morning. Now the few that remain rattle around with a soft, hollow sound. As with every time he’s opened this box today, he considers his lucky. As with every time he’s opened this box today, he pulls one of the other three instead. 

He can’t turn his violence on your friends. Delicious though it may be, the fantasy of outdoing Michael is only that — a fantasy. There are just too many people. People whose idea of a good time is smashing into each other until their skin is black with bruises, drunk and stoned and numb to pain, armed with pocket knives and cat-shaped brass knuckles on their keychains. If he stormed up there, the only name on the news would be his. 

A few weeks ago he convinced you to tint your windows, making them the darkest the state of Georgia allows. A little extra privacy couldn’t hurt. But there is no privacy when they’re rolled all the way down so he doesn’t die like a dog in a mall parking lot. Not that the thought hadn’t occurred to him. How long would it take to have a heat stroke in here? He wondered. He might’ve gone through with it if you weren’t so attached to this goddamn car. With his luck he’d wind up haunting the fucking thing. Your eternal passenger, forced to watch you drive Veronica and Rose and His Replacement around until your transmission finally gives out. 

But you are attached to it, and the windows are down, and Corey sits up to look around, craning his fucked up neck and looking in all the mirrors, listening for voices in the woods. 

He lights the cigarette. When he’s certain he won’t be seen, he crosses his legs, resting one ankle on the opposite knee. He hikes his pant leg up and shoves his boot and sock down halfway off his foot. The blisters surrounding the circles of seared flesh left by previous cigarettes glisten in the sun. He hovers the lit end over his milky skin, where the sparse red hair fades to nothing. Just as he’s about to press down, he hears footsteps, approaching fast. He drops his foot back to the floor, jamming his sock and his boot back on.

The footsteps slow and there’s movement in the passenger side mirror. Then you’re there, resting your arms in the open window, grinning at him.

“You gonna sit out here and smoke the whole pack? Don’t you know them things are bad for you?”

“Yeah,” he mutters. “Yeah. I think the box says something about it.”

Blood roars in his ears from the anticipation of the act you thwarted. New heat floods his cheeks, already flushed from roasting in the car. What he was doing, what he was thinking, must be written all over his face. He waits for you to snarl in disgust when you notice it. Instead you laugh, giving him The Smile. As if he deserves it after imagining slaughtering everyone you know. As if he has ever deserved it.  

The Smile doesn’t falter. You make no indication that you have any idea what you interrupted. You just offer him a bottle of water, apologizing for its temperature. 

“I’m so glad I found you. Is your phone dead? I tried calling and texting you but it wouldn’t go through.”

He pulls his phone from his pocket. It’s relatively fully charged, 78%. The problem is displayed on the screen next to the battery life. A big, bold letter E. Emergency Service Only. 

“Well, shit! I was starting to get worried. I looked all over for you, but I should’ve come to the car first.” You reach out to put your hand on his face, swiping sweat off his cheek with your thumb. “I’m sorry. I love you.”

Corey looks into your eyes. You missed him like you said you would. When your calls went unanswered, you were worried. All those people it was so good to see, everyone who hugged you and kissed you and complained that it’s been too long since they saw you. You should’ve been hanging out with them, but you weren’t. You were looking everywhere for him.

“I love you too,” he says.

You lean into the window and press your lips against his. He softens like warm wax, and your kiss reshapes him, just a little.

“Ready to go back up there?”

Corey nods slowly. The danger of being recognized hasn’t gone anywhere, but with his jealousy appeased, he’s at least less of a threat to the other party goers. He can endure a few more hours. For you.

On the way back up to the house you grab his arm and drape it over your shoulders. “Come here,” you say. “I’m not leaving your side for the rest of the night.” 

Corey clamps his arm around you and pulls you as close to him as he can.

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The jog down to the car isn’t long, but it’s plenty of time to feel like a complete idiot. Bringing Corey was such a stupid, obvious mistake. You knew he wasn’t ready for a situation with this many people. After Rose let the cat out of the bag, you tried to be neutral about it. Avoid making him feel rejected by telling him you want him there, that you’ll be thinking about him all night if he stays home. Avoid making him feel pressured by telling him you understand that it’s a big step and that he didn’t have to come if he was uncomfortable with the idea. You never imagined he would actually agree to be here. 

Does he think because he met Veronica, he has to say yes every time now? You wish you’d discouraged him, insisted that he spend some quality time with a toaster that needed rewiring or something instead. Bringing him here could be setting a dangerous precedent. 

You can’t go back in time, and you can’t take him home yet. Technically you can leave whenever you want. It’s just that there are certain expectations. Gordon might not be set on a number yet. Now is not the time to disappoint him. All you can do is take care of Corey until there’s an inconspicuous time get him out of here.  You sit as near to him as you can, encouraging him to lean over the arm of his lawn chair to rest his head on your shoulder. When you introduce him to Gordon you relinquish your hold on him just long enough for a brief handshake before you lock your fingers back between Corey’s where they belong. You find quiet moments as often as you can, lagging behind the group or pulling him into a corner to check in.

“Do you need anything?” You rotate in his arms to give him a real hug, squeezing him until he flexes and returns the pressure. “Just like, two more hours.” You cup his face in your hands and study him. “How does your skin feel? I don’t think you burned. You look a little tan, but not burnt.” You kiss the tip of his nose.

It seems like it works, making him the least agitated he’s been all day. Not not agitated, but improved enough that he doesn’t disappear on you again.

Of course, keeping Corey so close makes you feel better too. Even as he broods by your side, you’re proud to be here with him.  Showing him off feels good. You want everyone to see you wrapped up in a beautiful boy’s arms, finally safe in a reciprocal relationship. You play it up even more when you cross paths with the dude who tried to talk to you earlier, still lurking around but unwilling to approach when you’re glued to the boyfriend he insulted. So much for being a real man. 

“Are you thirsty?” You hand Corey the water you’re sipping. “Not much longer now.” You tousle his hair. “I can’t wait to get you home.” You slide your hand into his back pocket and covertly grab his ass.  

The food finally comes off the smoker. You and Corey lumber through the line as a two headed hybrid with six limbs. He only unstitches his arms from your waist when you arrive at the plates. After dinner the crowd dwindles, shifting the center of the party. A few stragglers stay outside to tend the fire, but most of the remaining guests migrate into the house. The first phase of the day is over. Everyone who had to leave early has gone home, and no one who had to come later is here yet. 

Veronica, Drew, and a handful of other friends cluster around the kitchen table, shooting the shit. You wish this was the kind of gathering you had brought Corey to in the first place. Something cozy and mellow, with a stripped down guest list. An environment where he could gradually start to feel like himself, give everyone a taste of that signature Carpenter charm. It’s also the prefect time to make your exit. Though you know Corey would come to enjoy the atmosphere under different circumstances, it’s been a rough day, and you don’t have time to linger. Another phase could begin at any second, a new influx of people spiking his anxiety and clogging the driveway so you can’t escape. You watch for another quiet moment and find it when the conversation splinters, everyone else busy talking across each other. 

“Hey,” you purr in Corey’s ear. “Wanna get out of here?”

For what might be the first time all day, one corner of his mouth lifts before the other side joins it and his eyes crinkle at the corners. He gives you a genuine smile.  

----------------------------------------------------

All evening Corey tucks himself into the protective circle of your arms, and all evening you hold him there.He hides himself behind your hair, speaks in grunts and sentence fragments like he does at work, doing his best to erase himself so all that’s left is a silhouette. Not Corey Cunningham, not Corey Carpenter, just Your Boyfriend. A faceless entity. No details to learn or remember except for one thing – you're his.

Obscured by your affection, he watches. If there’s going to be trouble he wants to see it coming, and there is trouble. He sees Veronica and Rose talking, literally behind your back, standing on the deck while he sits with you by the fire. They’re disagreeing about something. He can’t hear them, and they’re too far away to see well, but Corey can guess what they’re saying. Veronica gestures in your direction, the smear of her blurry lips flattening into a disapproving line. Rose shakes her head and brings her hand over her heart. Veronica crosses her arms, posture defensive. Rose looks over again while Veronica talks. When she’s finished, Rose shrugs, unbothered or unconvinced. The conversation doesn’t last long, and they don’t come to an agreement. Rose just threads her arm through Veronica’s and pulls her inside. 

He fucking knew it. Veronica is a massive threat, and something needs to be done about it before she ruins everything. But the threat Veronica poses lies in wait in the murky darkness of the future. Tonight, there’s someone else Corey needs to do something about. A guy you haven’t introduced him to, or interacted with at all as far as he knows, but who drifts into whatever space you’re in, trying to look like he’s not looking. He can tell you’re uncomfortable about it, pulling him closer every time you notice this guy in your vicinity. 

Corey doesn’t know who he is — he doesn’t match your description of Hurley or Orin, and there’s no way you would neglect to mention that either of them was here —  but it barely matters. Whether he’s another ex, a current or former friend, or a stranger, he’s upsetting you. He did something, and he deserves to be one with the dirt. Every time you pull Corey closer, the hard handle of the knife in your shorts presses into his leg to tempt him. He remembers the size of the blade, how it went through the cardboard with no resistance, how it felt when you put the tip of it to his throat. It would be so easy to slip it out of your pocket without you noticing. 

He resists. Too many witnesses. 

If Corey can’t do what he really wants to do, he’ll settle for a good fight. It’s been forever since he bruised his knuckles on some asshole’s smug face, since he heard bones crunch, since he took a hit that should’ve put him down for good, and seen the fear in his opponent’s eyes when he got back up. With all the anti-police tattoos he’s seen tonight, surely a little fist fight can stay between friends. All he needs is for the guy to provoke him. The bastard’s too cowardly to do it though, and Corey is too cowardly to go ahead and fuck him up anyway. 

For now. 

As the party drags on and the comfort of having you so close wears off, he cares less and less about looking like the aggressor. No one else can feel the way you tense up when you realize that guy is around. If they could, they wouldn’t question him at all. Sitting at the kitchen table, Corey can see him in the living room, looking into the kitchen at you. You haven’t spotted him yet. Corey wants to get up and go show that piece of shit what’s what before you do, but he’s stuck at the table, chained to his chair by Veronica’s judgement, strangling at the end of his leash.

Just as he’s about to suffocate, he feels the soft flutter of your fingers on his ear, tucking a stray curl behind as you lean in to whisper. “Hey. Wanna get out of here?”

Corey can’t believe his ears. Relief pushes fresh air into his lungs, making him almost giddy.  

“Yeah?” He asks.

“Yeah. I’m gonna go to the bathroom, then say my goodbyes, and then we’ll be free.”

“Okay,” he says, his relief deflated slightly. 

He wishes there were no extra steps, that you could just stand up from the table, announce your intention to leave, and take him home. His capacity for self control is so exhausted that even five more minutes is a risk. He struggles not to get up to follow you. He could stand outside the bathroom and keep guard, or even come in with you, facing the wall and covering his ears to give you privacy. He really shouldn’t be alone with these people. 

He stays seated, holding his breath as he watches you go. You walk straight through the living room, and still you don’t notice that guy. He sees you, Corey knows he does, but you breeze past him and down the hall towards the bathroom. You’re only gone for a few seconds before you pop back into view. You make eye contact with Corey and mouth I have to go upstairs, pointing at yourself before pointing up. You disappear again.

Corey’s blood boils. His leg bounces. He clenches his fist until his nails dig little red crescents into his palm. He feels like he could burst from his own skin, bones cracking and elongating as his rage turns him into something completely unrecognizable. His eyes dart back and forth between Veronica and the guy. The seconds stretch on for hours. A new group of people enter the house, shouting hellos, causing a flurry of hugs and high fives in the living room. Corey loses track of the guy, searching desperately between the limbs of the new arrivals and the old guests. When the activity settles down, he’s gone. 

---------------------------------------------------

You try to be quick, for Corey’s sake. Your poor baby. He’s been tormented enough, and you’re beyond ready to get him home and reward him. But the bathroom on the first floor is locked, and no one answers when you knock. Annoyed, you head upstairs. The main bathroom up there is locked too. Someone inside calls out, “Gonna be a while!” A second voice giggles behind the door. Great. 

A house this big has to have more than two bathrooms. You rack your brain. The bedroom you texted Corey from, what feels like a lifetime ago now. You assumed it had two closets, but maybe one of the doors in there was a bathroom. You practically sprint down the hallway. The first door you open reveals a walk-in closet, as you expected. Empty of clothes, containing only the skeleton of an expensive custom organization system. You sigh and try again. Before you even open the second door all the way, you see a shower with the curtain pulled halfway across. Thank fucking god.

You come out of the bathroom, still buttoning your shorts with dripping fingers, to find the bedroom door blocked. The dickhead who tried to talk to you earlier stands in your way, leering.

“Taking your pants off already?” He says. “Damn, girl. I was just trying to get your number so you know who to call when you ditch that clingy little bitch you brought with you.”

You freeze, shocked by his audacity. The nerve. How dare he call Corey a clingy bitch, when he’s the one who’s been following you all night, waiting for you to be alone to shoot his second, even more pitiful shot. 

The surprise only lasts a second before it transforms into an icy anger you didn’t think you’d ever feel again. The rational part of you tells you to give him a fake number, to tell him to fuck off, to do anything you can to get him to go away without putting your hands on him. Too bad that part of you is tiny and detached, watching what unfolds like a movie instead of seeing through your eyes. You unclip the knife from your pocket. You don’t have to think about it, your hand just knows where it is. Your thumbnail slots easily into the groove on the blade.  It’s time to make sure this creep never follows a girl around a party again. 

But before you can flip the blade out of the handle, Corey is there, his face appearing over the guy’s shoulder, eyes dark and jaw set. He grabs the guy’s wrist with one massive hand and hooks the other in the guy’s collar, dragging him backwards out of the doorway. The guy stumbles and Corey lets go, allowing him to fall on his ass. He scrambles to stand and tries to run away, but Corey grabs him by the shoulders and slams him into the wall so hard the framed photos of Gordon’s cousins hung all down the hallway rattle and go crooked. His feet dangle slightly off the floor.

The thump brings you back to your senses. 

“That’s enough, baby,” you say, tucking the knife back into your pocket and taking a few steps closer. “Let him go.”

He doesn’t listen. The guy whimpers and claws at Corey’s thick wrists to no avail. A wet spot begins to bloom on the front of the guy's pants.

“Corey! That’s enough!”

He leans in, putting more pressure on the guy’s shoulders, upper lip curled in a snarl. For a second you think you’re going to have to get in between them to make it stop. Then Corey lets go. The guy slides down the wall to the floor. 

You grab Corey’s arm and sprint down the hallway, dragging him behind you. You descend the stairs so fast you stumble, but you recover your footing and burst out the front door. Hand in hand, you race over the massive yard, gaining speed until you reach your car.

You put a sympathetic hand on his thigh when the tight turns in the narrow country lanes don’t call for both of them to grip the wheel. When you brought the bonfire up a few days after Rose spilled the beans, you told him you knew the party was exactly the kind of thing he despised, that you weren’t going to ask him to come. Your intentions were to just tell him you had to go, and let him make his own choice to ask to come if he wanted. He was relieved, and thankful that you weren’t going to make him say no directly. Until you delivered your Final Smash. I’ve already accepted I’ll just have to miss you the whole time. Game fucking over. Corey misses you constantly when you’re not around. He feels pathetic, but he misses you when you’re in the next room. He assumed you’d miss him if he was gone forever, and hopes you miss him during the three days apart you maintain less and less consistently. He never dreamed that you would miss him for one single day, surrounded by other people. He texted Will the moment you left the room, before he could come to his senses. 

Eventually he gives up on DJ duties, turning the radio off to focus on the rumble of the road and the rattle and slosh of the coolers weighing down the trunk. He fights the urge to ask you how many people will be there, a third time. You haven’t given him an answer he can work with. Not that many people during the day, just all the employees and their partners or whoever their guests are. That doesn’t sound like not that many people to Corey. That sounds like a lot of fucking people. He can think of at least six of your coworkers by name, plus your boss and his wife and at least one kid. He’s never around that many people at once. He runs his errands at midnight to make sure he’s never around that many people. When it gets closer to sunset, we build the fire up bigger, and that’s when everybody shows up. Everybody! How many people is everybody? On top of the everybody already there.

When you arrive there are several cars and trucks parked in the grass away from the house. He doesn’t recognize Veronica’s Jetta among them. He isn’t sure if that makes him feel better or worse. She may be the harbinger of his demise, but she’s also one of the only people who will be here that he’s met. On this night, if not any other, she’s an enemy he might prefer to keep closer. He wishes he knew what Rose drives. 

“We can sit here for a minute if you want,” you tell him as you put the car in park. “As long as you need to.”

Corey is deeply grateful for the way you try to anticipate his needs, but no amount of sitting in the car will prepare him for what he's about to endure. 

“Let’s just go,” he says.

You hold his hand as you walk across the yard. You stop at the top of the step to give him a kiss before you let yourself in the front door. The entrance to the house is insane, the whole foyer open to a loft above. A drippy chandelier dangles down in the center. The massive first floor is empty, except for a commotion in the kitchen. Several people all lean against the kitchen counter in a big circle, talking and laughing, already a couple beers in. You recruit a few helpers to carry your coolers to the back yard. So many of them come out to your car that Corey ends up empty handed. He doesn’t know what else to do, so he stays close to your heels like a shadow, right behind you as you make your rounds to say hi to everyone, present Drew with your contributions for the barbecue, and finally settle in a lawn chair in front of the unlit pile of wood set to become tonight’s fire.

He pulls another chair as close as he can to yours, so your toes and elbows touch. He can’t help but bounce his leg, even as he worries it makes him more conspicuous. He knows he sticks out like a sore thumb among all these cool people. They’re all dressed like they got a memo he missed, in black shorts that used to be pants and black band shirts that used to have sleeves. Corey feels out of place and overdressed. He should’ve asked you to pick his outfit or something. Now everyone he meets tonight will remember him as the guy who was dressed like he was at work. Even his boots are wrong, Red Wings when everyone else is in Docs and Timbs and cowboy boots. 

More people arrive, entering the backyard in small groups. A couple of guys lumber onto the back porch with big speakers on stands. Veronica appears with three beers in hand, announcing herself with the same lilting “Hey y’all!” as she did at Krelborn’s. Corey wouldn’t trust the bottle she holds out to him if she hadn’t popped the cap right in front of him, but now that she’s here, he does feel a small sense of relief. She wanders away when Shelly comes into the yard. You wave from where you’re seated and Corey’s thankful you don’t make him choose between sitting by himself and trying to fit into that conversation. He doesn’t remember her from the pub until you mention it. Then a hazy vision of her setting water in front of him surfaces. You look like you could use that, she said. A burst of static erupts from the speakers, causing everyone around to jump. A man sticks his head out the window and shouts “Sorry, y’all!” Then music flows from the speakers, starting small but growing quickly as the man inside adjusts the volume.

“Country music?” Corey asks, leaning even closer into you.

“Don’t judge,” you say. You sound like you have to defend country music often.

“Never. I’m just surprised. Just cause everybody here is…” He shrugs. You know what he means.

“Well you are in Georgia. Rednecks and punks have a lot of overlap around here.” You gesture around the yard, indicating everyone in attendance. “There’s even a whole country-slash-punk crossover genre I should introduce you to.”

“I’ve listened to country music, some. My dad liked Merle Haggard. I found some of his tapes, when I found the ring.”

For some reason Daddy is the one thing from his past Corey tells you about without hesitation, even as anxious as he is right now. He just finds himself spontaneously telling you the few other facts he knows about his father. He informed you that the ring had been Dad’s the first time you laced your fingers with his in the flickering light of the grocery store late at night, telling you how he hadn’t taken it off since he found it, but that he did have to move it from his middle finger to his pinky at some point. Last time you said something about wanting another tattoo, he confessed his desire for one of a duck like Daddy had.

“That’s so awesome. Merle is one of the all time greats. I love hearing Dad Facts.” 

Veronica and Shelly drag more plastic chairs over. People join and leave your little group so quickly it makes Corey dizzy. Rose sits next to him and tells him she’s glad he decided to come. Her girlfriend and Shelly’s boyfriend both pass through. One of them is Jesse and one of them is Bobby, but he doesn’t know which is which. Someone you introduce as your first sewing customer shows him all the patches you attached to their vest. Current and former coworkers appear to wrap their arms around your waist and smack their lips against your face before vanishing again. It makes his stomach sour. Do they all have to fucking hug you? He feels a little better when you give your chair up to a new addition to the circle and perch on his knees instead, draping an arm around his shoulders and fluffing his hair. He’s reluctant to let you go when your old seat is free again. 

In time the circle is reduced to just you, Corey, and Veronica. In front of him, several partygoers attempt to get the fire started. They aren’t using enough kindling, and it isn’t getting enough airflow when they set the big log on top, so they just keep snuffing out the whole thing. He could help, but he’s already spoken to multiple years worth of people this afternoon, and he knows the end is nowhere in sight.

A long chord organ chord pours out of the speakers, met by a cheer from all corners of the yard. You hold your hands out to Veronica and start singing. She takes them, singing back to you, a huge grin on her face. The lyrics you belt into each other’s faces are about a pair of high school friends. It irks Corey how long she’s been in your life, that if you had to choose between them, she has a massive amount of seniority in her favor. She’s been through everything with you. He’s just another thing you’ll get through with her help.

The instrumental picks up and you pull Veronica out of her chair to dance. The song isn’t just about high school friends. The song is about two women murdering one of their exes. It didn’t take them long to decide that Earl had to die!, you and Veronica and all the other guests shout. You hook your elbow with hers and the two of you skip circles around each other like children, gleefully detailing poisoning a man’s dinner and wrapping his corpse in plastic. The case goes cold, the women start a business together, and they don’t lose any sleep at night after they toss the body in a lake. 

The man in the song was a violent abuser. He beat his wife, so she killed him. Corey can relate to the protagonists. People like that are vermin to be exterminated. Everyone he killed on purpose had beaten him, verbally if not physically. The last time Momma slapped him she didn’t leave a mark, but other times she had. Fucking Doug had knocked the air out of his lungs on the Allen’s front lawn. Corey’s blood still boils knowing he doesn’t know the half of what that shit stain put Allyson through. So he enjoyed the killing. It was fun. Even more fun than the song makes it sound. Under other circumstances this might be a new favorite of his, prompting him to ask you for  recommendations of similar songs, a playlist of jaunty tunes about the consequences of being scum. There’s just one problem — Veronica.

Could be it’s only his imagination, being on the run so long causing his already weak ability to trust to rot and wither past the point of no return. But he swears as she sings, she makes meaningful eye contact with him. Over your shoulder her glare says Watch your step, motherfucker. This song could easily be about you. It doesn’t matter that all of the lives he ended were Earls. People who had to die for what they’d done to others. Because he knows she’ll think what he’s done is worse. Stabbing someone with a corkscrew or a kitchen knife is worse. Setting someone on fire is worse. Poisoning someone isn’t that bad. Stomping someone’s skull in and driving over their corpse is much, much worse. He generated just as much evil as he extinguished, and should Veronica ever find out, it won’t take her long to decide that Corey has to die too.

The only reason he’s here right now is because you said you would miss him if he wasn’t. How could that possibly be true? Your friends love you so much, and you have so many of them. What do you need him for? The yard and the house are full of people more eligible than him, people who understand your hobbies better than he ever could, who know how to act at parties, who aren’t endangering your life and their own every moment they spend with you. You’re all Corey has in the entire world. When Veronica sprinkles the poison over his food, you’ll have him replaced with one of those assholes who lined up to hug you before his body is even cold.

He wishes again that there was a way to have you all to himself. If he was all you had then it would be fair. He could mean to you what you mean to him. You would have no choice but to miss him. You and Veronica are still dancing, shrieking the lyrics to another crowd pleaser he’s never heard before. The day is scorching. It already feels like he’s burning through the sunscreen you smeared all over him before the drive out here, and you’re dancing, with only a rag that barely qualifies as a tank top to cover your sports bra, skin sparkly with sweat, 10 feet in front of him. That is what he should be focusing on. Not doing mental inventory of the weapons he’s seen so far — a pile of sharp grilling utensils next to the smoker, shovel, rake, and pitchfork lying in the grass beside the idiots who still can’t get the fire to light right, the knife he gave you, clipped to your pocket as you swing the hips he’s trying so hard to think about instead. 

Corey’s major concern earlier in the afternoon had been someone recognizing him for something he had done before. If he doesn’t get the fuck out of here right now, he fears he’ll do something new for people to recognize him for. 

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The fifteen minutes Corey was gone to smoke the night he met V was nothing. He is the king of the long smoke break. His face is so expressive, sometimes you feel like you’re eavesdropping on his thoughts, but if you’re ever left wondering what kind of mood he’s in, all you have to do is time his absence. 

The bonfire is such an event, you can barely believe he agreed to come. When he whispers in your ear that he’s going to step away to smoke, despite the fact that he is already outside and a respectful distance from everyone but you, you know he’s going to be gone for a long time. 

You have another beer. A joint is miraculously placed between your fingers and you take two puffs before you hold it out for someone, anyone else to take. Your sense of time warps, and you wish you looked at the clock when he left. You keep thinking you’ll give him five more minutes, until you notice how much the sun has moved. He’s definitely been gone too long. You drop your eyes from the sky to scan the yard, making sure he isn’t just sitting off to the side in the shadows of the trees, or stuck talking to some verbose asshole and waiting for you to come save him. You don’t see him anywhere.

“Haven’t seen Corey in a minute,” Veronica says, following your gaze. 

“Yeah…” You send him a text.

To give him time to text you back, you go get water out of one of the many coolers on the deck. You grab two bottles and dry them with paper towels from the snack table, sliding a bowl of watermelon cubes out of your way.

“Hey, cutie,” says a man pouring Doritos onto a paper plate.

You ignore him.

“Hey! I’m talking to you,” he says, waving orange dusted fingers in your face. 

“I have a boyfriend.” You don’t look at the man as you drop the wet paper towels into the garbage bag tied to the deck rail.

“Yeah, I saw you with that guy earlier. He looks like a whimp. Don’t you wanna be with a real man?”

“Sure, I do!” You say, in a fake chipper tone, finally looking at him. “But you know, I just don’t see any around here.” You tuck the water bottles under one arm and stomp off the deck before he can say anything else.

Corey still hasn’t answered, so you send him another message as you walk back to Veronica.

“Ugh, some sleazeball tried to talk to me,” you tell her, bumping the backrest of her chair with your stomach.

“Are you good?” She asks, looking back and up at you.

“I’m okay. Be better if I knew where my boyfriend was. I’m gonna go look for him. If you see him, tell him to text me.”

“You got it,” she says. 

You start in the front yard. As you walk past the front porch, three overlapping voices call your name. On the swing you can make out three familiar faces. You wave and keep walking but they beckon you, chanting “Come here! Come here!”, and pretending to fish for you. You feel pulled in the opposite direction, down and over the wide yard, but you allow yourself to be caught and reeled in. You do “Hi” and “How are you?”, but when one of them asks what you’ve been up to lately, you cut the long hello short as gracefully as you can.

“Are you gonna be here all night? I would really love to catch up later! I’m actually looking for someone right now, though.” You start to slowly back away as you speak. 

“Aw, okay.” “Hope you find them!” “Good luck!” 

When you turn away from the porch, you see a pod of people coming up the slope from the direction of the cars. You wave to them, and they wave to you, and you hope that’s that. But a guy you recognize and a girl you don’t wander off the driveway to intercept your path.

“Hey! I have a sewing question!” He declares as he jogs towards you. 

“How can I help?” You smile your customer service smile, feeling obligated not to piss off a potential customer.

“I’m thinking about buying a machine to try to make some of my own clothes. Do you have any suggestions or advice or anything?” He asks.

“No, I’m sorry. I hadn’t even like, totally decided I wanted a sewing machine when I bought mine. I didn’t do any research or anything, it was just an expensive machine that was basically new and dirt cheap at an estate sale. And it’s not designed that great, I don’t know if I would’ve bought it if I read reviews first. I had to have my boyfriend clean it out once when it jammed.”

“Damn. Okay. Thanks anyway, dude.” He holds out his hand and you allow him to do some kind of secret fist bump handshake to you. 

“Yeah, you’re welcome. Sorry I can’t be more help. But speaking of my boyfriend, I’m looking for him right now. Did you see a guy that’s like 5’9”, broad shoulders, curly, shaggy brown hair down there? He’s got like, Midwest Emo vibes, kinda?”

“Can’t say I did.”

“Alright,” you sigh, “Good luck with your sewing if I don’t see you later.”

If he didn’t spot Corey down by the cars, there’s no reason to walk all the way down there, so you cut across the yard toward the pond and the gazebo instead, looking over your shoulder to the cars at the edge of the yard anyway, just in case.

A few people sit in lawn chairs under the scattered trees. Thankfully none of them call out to you. There are no bodies on the benches around the koi pond, but there are silhouettes in the gazebo. As you approach, you can tell none of the shapes belong to Corey. Instead, it’s Gordon and his family. You recognize his wife from other work events. You’ve never met the person on the other side of Gordon, but you recognize her too. A young woman in her late teens or early twenties, who looks like someone put a girl filter on Gordon’s senior photo. There’s no one else in the world who’s daughter she could be. Despite how excited you are to finally meet her, you try to back away before you’re spotted. You can talk to them after you find Corey.

"Hey you!" Gordon says from the shadows. Shit.

"Hey!” You climb the two little steps to join them under the pointed roof. 

"Got another customer complaint about you."

You feel like the air has been knocked out of you. Another? What was the first one? What could you have possibly done that was complaint worthy? A weak "huh?" is all you manage.

"Yeah, this lady said she was looking for a record for her little sister, she wanted a recommendation based on a list of bands she knew her sister liked." 

"I thought that went well?" You remember the interaction now. It had been a lot of fun, the kind of day where you really appreciate how cool your job is. You can't possibly imagine what she would've had to complain about. 

"Well, so did she! She called the store and went on and on, talked my ear off about how her sister loved your suggestion so much that they're going to see the band you recommended in Orlando next month. She said you're a genius, and it was great how you didn't judge her for not knowing anything." 

"Wait," you said, concerned and confused, "so what was the complaint?" 

"That you're too fucking good at your job, and I'm gonna have to give you a raise. Oh shit, did I say that was her complaint? Sorry, I meant my complaint."

You exhale sharply, ending in a huffy little laugh. All you can think to say is “How much?”

“We’ll talk about it next week.”

"You're such a dick, Dad. You actually had her scared," his daughter chides.

“Have you met my lovely daughter, Dani?” Gordon asks. 

“Hi, Dani.” You wave and introduce yourself. 

“Do you have someone for us to meet tonight too? That elusive boyfriend of yours, maybe?” Gordon wants to know.  

“He’s here, but you’re right about him being elusive,” you say with a forced chuckle. “I’m looking for him right now.”

“Well, don’t let us keep you. But bring him to meet me when you get a chance.”

“Sure thing, Boss.” 

Once you’re away from the gazebo, you walk as fast as you can towards the house, not even really processing that you’re getting a raise. Gordon’s joke wouldn’t bother you normally, you know your boss is one of those nice assholes. When he doesn’t make jokes at your expense is when you need to worry. Taking it the wrong way rattles you. Corey still hasn’t texted, so you try calling him. It goes straight to voicemail. Goddamnit. 

You vault the concrete stairs up to the porch and swing open the front door, getting blasted in the face by the music pouring through the speakers in the ceiling throughout the first floor. The sun is sinking lower in the sky, and the crowd has grown a lot. You get stuck in a traffic jam in the sitting room, pinned on all sides by the bare limbs of strangers. Through the open French doors you can see someone finally got the fire to burn tall and strong, and a new supply of logs has arrived in the back of Harker’s goofy white pickup truck. For a second you feel like you should give up on searching the house for him and go through those French doors to where Corey’s surely tending the fire, finding a way to be useful like he loves to do. Your little arsonist. 

Something clicks into place for the first time. The story about his neighbor’s garage. Was that another coded confession? Are the “bullet holes” in his shoulder actually burn scars? Was he stabbed in retaliation for a fire? Did he set a fire in retaliation for being stabbed?  

Finally somebody gets out of the way, and the tangle of bodies you’re trapped in spits you out. You stumble over your own heavy feet, taking several bumbling steps away from the doors, and away from that train of thought. Later tonight you can match up all the evidence like you have with your other theories, trying to find the situation that seems most likely. For now, it will only distract you, when you need to focus searching the house. Maybe he found an unlocked bedroom to hide in, or maybe, against the odds, he made a new friend and they’re holed up somewhere discussing fuel pumps or something. 

You kind of remember the layout of the house from last year’s bonfire and the holiday dinner in December. You head towards the kitchen, and get tangled up again before you can even cross the threshold. As you pass through the kitchen on your way to the garage, a girl standing in front of the fridge mistakes that for your destination, and yanks the door open wide for you, blocking the exit. When she realizes her mistake, she swings the fridge door closed harder than she meant to and it slams closed. She squeaks out an apology, face turning bright red, and you assure her there’s nothing to be embarrassed about as you edge past her. In the garage, five or six people stand in a circle, pocket knives poised to puncture horizontal beer cans in their hands. They offer for you to join them in their impending shotgun, but you decline and duck back into the house.

You cut through the dining room and run up the stairs. The second floor is comparatively much more quiet, even with the big hole looking down to the first floor. Soft voices guide you out to the huge balcony that floats over the portico below. The people on the chairs and benches outside are all strangers. They ignore you. When you come back in to the loft you spot Veronica with a couple of people across the opening to the foyer below, racking pool balls. 

“Wanna get in on this?” She asks, removing the plastic triangle from the balls and hanging it back on the wall.

“No, thanks. I still have bruises healing on my ass from how hard you kicked it last time. And I’m still — “

“Looking for Corey? You haven’t found him yet?”

“No! I keep getting sucked into conversations and shit. Have you seen him?” You don’t like the desperate edge in your voice. 

“No.”

Fuck. If she hasn’t seen him, then he probably didn’t help get the fire going. You’re starting to worry he might’ve wandered down one of the trails into the trees and lost his way or something. You excuse yourself and Veronica wishes you luck, twisting chalk onto the end of a pool cue. You wander down the long hallway that branches off the loft. Unlocked bedroom, empty. Locked door you remember leading to a bathroom. You knock and the voice that calls back “Occupied!” is too light to be him, not enough grit. Another empty unlocked bedroom. A couple of locked doors, and a third bedroom at the end of the hall where you stop to send him another text.

You barrel back down the stairs, checking the rest of the first floor as quickly as you can, just glancing into the open doors of another bathroom and an office where someone cuts lines on the glass topped desk. The last room to check is the laundry room where several people sit on the counter over the washer and dryer, Rose and Jesse squeezed in with them. 

“Hello my love!” Rose exclaims and hops down from her perch to wrap her arms around you. It only takes one sentence for you to tell that she is very drunk. 

“Have you seen Corey?” You ask without much hope.

“When we got here, yeah!” She nods. 

“Have you seen him since then?” You always hate when you see a drunk girl’s less-drunk friends be condescending to her, so you do your best to keep the anxiety and irritation out of your voice. 

“Noooo.” She shakes her head. The long, low sound she makes reminds you of a dove. 

“That dude we met with you earlier? We saw him again after that,” Jesse says.

“Oh, yeah!” Rose confirms.

“Where!? When!?” 

“We had to get bug spray out of Jesse’s truck before we went for a hike. He was laying all the way back in your car. I wanted to wave but he looked like he wanted to be left alone.”

“How long ago?” 

Rose looks to Jesse.

“Like, 20 minutes ago?” 

“Fuck, I’m so stupid,” you mutter. That should’ve been the first place you looked, somewhere hidden and familiar he could retreat to. You should’ve been more thorough than just asking someone and taking a quick glance. If Corey’s been reclining in the car this whole time, he would’ve been practically invisible unless you passed right by the windows.

“You're not stupid. You're so smart,” Rose corrects. “Do you want me to come with you to get him?”

“No, I need to go by myself. You stay here. And drink some water.” You offer her one of the bottles you’re still carrying around.

“I got her,” Jesse says and indicates a half full bottle she pinches between her knees. 

The drive home Wednesday night was quiet, just the road noise and the local college radio station turned low. Corey slumped against the passenger window with glazed eyes. When you glanced over at him, it seemed like he was barely there. You cursed yourself for thinking he could handle the hotbox, feeling bad because you knew it probably made his anxiety worse instead of better, and annoyed because you needed to talk to him about this birthday bullshit, but he was already going to be bummed out from the comedown. How hard would it have been for you to suggest snuffing out the joint as soon as you started to notice Corey getting wobbly? Of course not passing it to him wasn’t enough when the entire car was one swirling cloud. 

When you got home he was even clingier than normal, stalking you through your apartment with hunched shoulders until you sat on the couch and patted your thighs, beckoning him to come lay his head in your lap. 

That was when the floodgates opened. He must've been even worse off than you had thought, he didn't seem to have come down much at all yet. He was confused about why it was so different from last time, and reassurances that it was normal did nothing to quell his building panic. Despite your best effort to get him to resist, he followed the paranoia all the way down the rabbit hole, worrying that the joint was spiked, that Veronica had mixed something else with the weed, that she hated him, that he’d feel weird for the rest of his life. 

“Will you still love me if I feel this weird forever?” He asked, like he’d already been devastated by the answer.

“You’re not going to feel weird forever, Corey.” 

“But would you love me if I did?”

“I’d love you no matter what.” 

“No, you wouldn’t,” he insisted with tears in his eyes.

Like the night you watched The Lobster, you suddenly felt like you weren't really talking about him being stoned forever. Self-inflicted, you thought, and your annoyance settled into guilt.  

You swept your hand over his forehead, brushing his curls back. “I would.”  

You finally convinced him that he'd feel better if he took a shower. When he got out, you were lying in bed on your back, staring up at the ceiling. How had you let yourself make it this far without knowing his birthday? How could you miss such a big gap in your basic knowledge of him? And the date had come and gone since you met him! Did he say something and you just forgot? Are you a terrible girlfriend? 

Corey came into the room in his boxers, his skin still hot and pink, his hair towel dried. He curled up next to you with his head on your chest, and before you could say anything to him at all, he was asleep.

It feels like a rain cloud following you around. It's only been a couple days, but the window is closing, the problem edging closer and closer to being something you have to just let go. And you've considered letting it go. You're not mad at him, he doesn't seem to even realize you didn't know, and now you do know. The weak, sad version of you that stayed with Orin so long, that took forever to break things off with Hurley, certainly would have left it alone. But that feels like a regression. There just hasn't been a good time to bring it up yet. 

And now isn't a good time either. You've established a precedent, beginning all those weeks ago when he came to fix your sewing machine – you let him work in silence. If either of you speaks, it's always him who initiates, explaining what he’s doing, asking you to reposition the flashlight, giving you instructions for a task that requires more delicate fingers than his. It must be more than 100 degrees in the car, but the sweat that beads your forehead isn’t from the heat.

In front of you, Corey’s already securing the radio cage back into the dash, wordlessly reaching between the seats for you to hand him the screws one by one. The humidity turns his hair into a frizzy halo all around his head. You know he’s no angel, but his presence in your life feels like such a blessing, and while you might not be angry, the conversation will still be a confrontation. You’re terrified of pushing him away, scaring him off, like taking a step too quickly towards a backyard deer you want to eat out of your hand. If you’re not careful he’ll startle, bolting back into the woods, and you’ll be left standing there alone with a handful of wasted oats. He snaps the last piece of your dashboard into place, then rotates to look at you.

“Moment of truth,” he says. “Keys?”

You hand him your keys and he cranks the engine. Blue-green digits appear on the display. He clicks the radio’s power button and the speakers hum lowly with static. He spins the knob back and forth and the volume rises and falls. He presses a few of the other buttons, making sure the functions of all the rainbow wires he twisted together are present and accounted for, then he sets your clock and station presets for you.

"All good," he announces. 

"Yay!" You exclaim. "It's so nice to have her back to her original glory. I can't wait to start buying tapes from work. Thank you so much, Corey." You lean forward over the center console to give him a gentle, lingering kiss.

"No problem." He clears his throat.

"How did you find it anyway?" 

"I had some alerts set on parts websites. I almost had it a couple times but I kept losing it. Auction ending while I was at work, shit like that. I had to fight for this one. Like, I got in a bidding fight for it." 

You sense an opening. It’s not a good one, but you take it before you can change your mind. “I guess Madame Veronica was right,” you say. 

“What do you mean?” Corey asks.

“The shit she said about Aries. They like a challenge and fight for their loved ones or whatever.” 

He just looks at you and shakes his head no.

“Do you remember that conversation at all?” You ask. “You were pretty far gone.”

“It’s all fuzzy. She complimented Dad’s ring. I got a sandwich. The bathroom was really clean.” He shrugs.

Fuck, you think, somehow both disappointed and relieved. If he doesn’t remember then maybe… Maybe it actually would be okay to just let it go. Maybe it isn’t regression. The old you avoided conflict for your own sake, because you didn’t want to make yourself feel bad. But this isn’t that. This is a conflict you want to avoid for Corey’s sake. Do you really need to ask him why he didn’t tell you his birthday? The only people who don’t get excited about their birthday are people who were never celebrated enough, and people who wish they were never born in the first place. The implication makes your heart ache. What could you gain from the conversation that you don’t already know? Why hurt him needlessly? 

“Yeah. I’m so sorry about that. When you have a higher tolerance you don’t realize how much it can fuck somebody else up if they don’t have a tolerance at all. You don’t remember what happened when we got home either?” 

He shakes his head again. That settles it. If he doesn’t know how badly he spiraled, his overall impression of the night is probably pretty good, right? Why soil what little he remembers with a question that will feel like an accusation, no matter how much you insist it’s not? 

“Well, what happened?” 

“I got you to take a shower to sober up, but you didn’t sober up at all, you just rolled straight out of the shower and into bed. Out like a light.” 

Corey chuckles and it makes you giggle. Your giggle makes him laugh harder. His wide, dimpled smile floods you with affection. You crane over the center console to kiss him again, turning his laughter into a buzzing sound inside his face. The commercial block on the radio ends and the station identifies itself over the sparkling acoustic guitar of a late 90’s bubblegum pop hit. The song is cheesy, but the sentiment resonates. Would you love him, no matter what? I would.

You kiss him until the song ends. His face is damp and shiny when you pull away. 

“Let’s go inside,” you say. “It’s way too fucking hot out here.” 

Not long after you go inside, the sky turns a menacing gray, any trace of the sun blotted out. You hear distant thunder like a giant’s stomach rumbling, just as fat raindrops start to splash against the windows. You turn off all the lights in favor of a hoard of candles and the glow of the TV. Corey lays on the couch and you tangle yourself in his legs, settling in to play Smash Bros until your thumbs go numb. You’re extremely impressed with how good he’s gotten, and how quickly, but you’re far too competitive to allow the student to surpass the master, his every skill increase prompting one for you too. Almost every match goes into sudden death. When you can’t take another tie, you blow out all the candles and drag him off to bed.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Corey wasn’t completely honest with you about what he remembers from Wednesday night. He didn’t quite lie, but he left something out, more of an impression than a memory. The impression that Veronica is a severe threat, well beyond the level of any other person in his life. 

The impression that she’s more dangerous than Phil and Joanna, who don’t understand the internet and have helped him enough to be implicated should anything happen, more dangerous than his boss Will, who only pays half of his employees the way the government requires him to and would have to answer for all the taxes he and Corey haven’t paid. The impression that she’s more dangerous than even you, the person most sure of the good inside him, but with the most information to damn him, and the best chance of convincing a DA that he manipulated you into protecting him, blinding you with gifts and acts of service. The impression that Veronica could, would, and will destroy everything he's worked so hard for. It's only a matter of when. 

That timer has been ticking since the first fateful day at the library, but the countdown has accelerated now, and will only keep getting faster, without the gravity of a looming first meeting weighing it down. He felt pressured to say yes to Veronica's joint without the reasonable protest of pot being illegal, and he senses he'll feel pressured to say yes to more and more social outings without the reasonable protest of not liking new people. But she's not new anymore, you'll say, batting your pretty puppy eyes. And Corey will have no choice but to follow you to his own undoing. 

In the dark he pulls you closer, wishing desperately that there was a way to have you all to himself. 

Corey’s intuition that meeting Veronica had broken the barrier between your time with him and the rest of your social calendar proves true two weeks later. He’s in the kitchen, cleaning up the dinner dishes when he hears you answer a phone call. He freezes in place, fork resting against the half-scraped plate he holds over the trash can.

“No, I’m not busy… Right now? Yeah I can… Yeah, he’s here… Okay, I’ll offer those suggestions, haha… Alright, see you in 15. Love you!” 

He’s still standing hunched over the garbage, paused mid-scrape when you come into the kitchen. 

“Are you okay?” You ask, noticing his unnatural posture.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he says, resuming his task and trying not to panic. “Who were you talking to?”

“Rose. She needs some pants hemmed and she wanted to know if she could bring them by tonight. I told her it was okay, she said she understands if you just wanna stay in a different room while she’s here. I have to mark where the hem should be while she’s wearing the pants, but that should only take like 10 minutes.” 

Corey puts the dishes in the sink, very careful not to set them down with too much force, despite the fact that he wants to shatter them on the ground. “That’s fine,” he says.

“Are you sure? I can call her back and tell her to come a different time, or I can run over to her house instead and you can stay here, or sit in the car?”

He weighs his options. There was something you said once. Veronica is a pill, but Rose’s name suits her well. Which means that the consequences of refusing to meet or engage with her are probably minimal, that he can put off the inevitable for a day when he’s more prepared. That is, unless it gets back to Veronica that he avoided Rose. She would certainly think that reflected badly on him. And Rose allegedly being a sweetheart also means she could be an asset, a second sympathetic voice in chorus with yours. Veronica hearing that he agreed to meet her, having her vouch for him… This could be the one time meeting a new person is a good idea. If he never has to be in a position like this again, it would be too fucking soon. 

“It’s fine,” he affirms.

You come around the island to wrap your arms around him, smooching him all over his face. “Thank you, baby,” you murmur in his ear between kisses. 

Baby. The word dissolves his bones, turning him into a puddle at your feet. It’s only the second time you’ve ever called him that, and this time it isn’t mocking like it was when he struggled to hit the bong. This time you mean it. God, he is so fucked. No matter what happens from now on, he’s doomed, he’s damned, he’s absolutely, completely, irreparably fucked. But being torn apart by police dogs, giving the existing bullet hole in his window 1000 new friends in a shootout that he’s destined to lose, even life without parole would be worth it to hear you call him baby.  Stupid, lovesick bastard. 

When Rose arrives, Corey is sitting at the dining room table. 

“Hi, Corey! How are you tonight?” She asks like they're old friends. Her arms are loaded with fabric.

“Uh…Okay, and you?” He responds, caught off guard by just how different she already seems from Veronica. 

“I’m great! I’m so stoked for these pants to finally be the right length. Our girl over here is like a wizard, my clothes always come out so good when she fixes them.”

“Oh, stop,” you say, coming into the room with the step stool from the kitchen. 

"No, she's right. You always do a good job," he agrees. 

Rose goes down the hall to the bathroom, changes into one of the pairs of pants, and comes out to stand on the step stool. The three of you chat while you orbit around her feet with a pin cushion on your wrist, then she hops down to repeat the process. Corey’s shocked to find he enjoys the conversation. Even as it drains him to have his facade of normality tested like this, Rose is a soothing presence and he finds a sort of ease. It’s been so long since he’s done it, it takes him a minute to realize — this is what making a new friend feels like. Of course, any sense of calm Corey feels can only ever be short lived.

"Are you joining us for the bonfire, Corey?" Rose looks over her shoulder to address him as you pin the final pair of pants.

“What bonfire?” he asks. 

“We haven’t talked about it yet,” you say.

“Oh! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to spring it on you." She looks between you, apologetic frown on her face.

“No, don’t worry about it.”

“What bonfire?” Corey asks again. 

“The annual Plymouth Records Summer Solstice bonfire,” you explain. “The store is closed that day and we all have a big party at the owner Gordon’s parents’ house. Is it his parents or maybe his aunt and uncle..?”  

“I think it’s his uncle,” Rose says.

“Right, it’s Gordon’s uncle’s house and it’s a big mansion on a bunch of acres in the middle of nowhere, and like, everybody in the scene comes and we just celebrate the longest day of the year.”

“It’s always a great time. This year Drew’s renting a smoker and everyone else is bringing meat and veggies for it! Who doesn’t love barbecue?”

Corey does love barbecue, but there is no food on Earth delicious enough to make him excited for a party in a mansion with all of your coworkers and God knows who else. He can see it now, one person stumbling up to him, insisting they know each other from somewhere. Another overhearing and joining in the guessing game. He does look awfully familiar. Everyone in the whole house studying his face and whispering suggestions into each other’s ears until a blood curdling scream cuts through all the noise and 100 fingers point at him. That’s the guy that killed that kid! He didn’t just kill a kid, he killed his own mother! How convenient to have a violent mob descend on him at a bonfire. All they’ll need to do is find a stake. 

Rose leaves to change again. 

“I’m sorry, Corey,” you say. “I didn’t want to present it to you like that.”

“Can we talk about it later?” 

“Of course.”

A door down the hallway opens. Rose returns in the outfit she came in, and hands you the pants you’d pinned, folded into a neat stack. The vibe is awkward now. She doesn’t stick around.

“Well, y’all have a good night. It was nice to meet you, Corey.”  

“You too,” he says. 

“Have you ever gone anywhere with him?” Veronica asks as you arrive at the gates.

The sound of the vendors’ radios playing music over tinny speakers - Contemporary Christian, Grunge, Trap, Mariachi - floats to you from beyond the chain link fence. A gentle gust of wind brings you the smells of barbecue and fried food.

“The grocery store?” you supply. “The library?”

“Okay, those absolutely do not count.”

“Then I guess I haven’t. People make him nervous.”

The three of you enter the market. It’s laid out like a maze, but you have it memorized from years of traversing the cramped and crowded aisles. Your feet carry you instinctively towards the tables and stalls you know have the most interesting items and the best prices. Your friends keep step beside you.

“So if you never go anywhere, what do you do all the time?” Rose asks.

“That’s what I wanna know!” Veronica adds.

“We hang out, I dunno. We watch movies, we play video games, I’ve been teaching him some stuff in the kitchen when I cook for us…” You trail off, realizing that nothing you could say about your time with Corey would make it sound interesting to someone who isn’t there, who hasn’t experienced him like you get to. “You know, it’s not about what we do. It’s about spending time together.”

“The dick must be out of this world,” Veronica responds.

“Oh my god,” you say.

“V!” Rose chides at the same time.

“ For your information the dick is stellar ,” you hiss. “But so is his personality,” you continue, returning to your normal volume. “I genuinely just like to hang out with him, no matter what we’re doing.”

You peruse a few stalls without saying anything to each other except Wow! Look at this! and Oof, prices just aren’t what they used to be . But Veronica isn’t giving up that easily.

“For real though, don’t you ever get bored?” She demands, rummaging through a bin of vintage happy meal toys.

“Nope,” you dismiss her.

“But don’t you want to spend time with him like, at places? And events?” Rose asks.

“Of course I do! But my relationships have had some boundary problems in the past, if you hadn’t noticed. I’m trying to respect his limits.”

“All I know is if I hadn’t seen him that one time, my belief in him would be limited,” Veronica jokes. “Like that boyfriend who ‘went to another school’ in seventh grade.”

“Fuck you!” You say, cringing but laughing, remembering the boy you made up out of pieces of pro skaters and bass players to feel cool. “I promise you’ll get to meet him ASAP if you never bring that up again.”

“Deal!” Veronica says, setting a tiny Betty Spaghetty back into the box in front of her and sticking out her hand. You clasp it in your own and shake it vigorously.

When you get home Corey is sprawled out asleep on the couch in his boxers, the crocheted blanket you keep in the living room hanging off of him. Last night when he woke you up he seemed exhausted. Though he ravished you with kisses, you could feel his limbs getting heavy on him and you gently coaxed him to slow down and go to sleep. This morning when you woke you slipped from his arms and got ready, thinking the thing with the knife must’ve been a particularly vivid dream, or the confused invention of a mind still half asleep. Until you went to kiss Corey goodbye and saw it there on the nightstand, folded up, handle glittering under the lamp that never got turned off. Your lips on his skin roused him and he insisted on getting out of bed and walking you to the door. You told him he should stay comfortable, go back to sleep, but he refused. As he kissed you goodbye, he put the knife in your purse to make sure you had it. Then, it seems, he passed back out on the couch.  

You know he needs the rest, and you're not exactly eager to hold up your end of the deal with Veronica, so you do your best not to disturb him, every sound feeling impossibly loud in your small apartment. He finally wakes up in the early afternoon. You’re in the dining room doing some hand sewing tasks with headphones on when he shuffles in. You don’t realize he’s there until he’s behind you, plucking the buds from your ears. You jump up from your chair and spin around in surprise. 

“Jesus, Corey!” You scold. “That’s the kind of shit that’ll make me use that knife on you! Or a fucking seam ripper.” You brandish the tool in your hand at him, then set it on the table. Corey smirks.

“How was the market?” He opens his arms to receive you for a hug. 

“Pretty good. I’ve got some cool stuff to show you later. Veronica was kinda on one though.”

“About what?” he asks the top of your head.

“About meeting you.” You say it like an admission of guilt. And you do feel guilty, because you already know what his reaction will be, before he groans and deflates in your arms, before he pulls back to look at you with a pained expression, before he asks his question. 

“What does she wanna meet me so bad for? I’m nothin’ special.”

“Corey. You are something special. I wanna show you off! And she’s my best friend. It’s honestly kinda weird that she hasn’t met you yet. I want to hang out with my two favorite people, together .”

He groans your name. You put your hands on his cheeks and rub his temples with your thumbs, trying to encourage him to relax his sour face. It doesn't work.

"Look, I know of a couple of restaurants that are super quiet during the week, we can grab dinner somewhere where we'll be the only people, and it'll be so chill." 

“Why can’t she meet me here?” He asks like a petulant child.

“If you really want me to, I'll convince her and we can all have a nice night in. But she thinks it’s weird that we never go anywhere, and it’ll make a better first impression on her if we hang out somewhere else.”

Corey looks into your eyes for a moment, seeming to search for something. It’s not clear if he finds what he’s looking for or gives up, but his lids flutter closed and he sighs.

“Somewhere really quiet?”

“Yes, I already know exactly where. There’s a pub that we all like that’s always totally dead on weekdays. It’s super cozy and the food is really good.”

He rests his forehead on yours in defeat. “Okay.”

In the evening you text Veronica.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

It’s Wednesday. Corey goes home to his own apartment after work. He showers in his little phone booth shower, the tiny bathroom filling with dense steam. He shaves his face, careful not to fuck it up with trembling hands. Towel wrapped around his hips, he digs through his clothes, unsure of what to wear. He has to force himself to complete one step of the getting ready process at a time, stuffing his phone in his pillow case to quell the urge to text you and ask to change the plan. Dread boils in his stomach. He lights a cigarette, and then another one, drinking them more than smoking them in his desperation. When he’s feeling as ready as he thinks he ever will, he climbs on his motorcycle and speeds to your apartment, rolling through stop signs and accelerating at yellow lights, trying to compress the ride as much as possible. His tires cut a deep groove in the gravel of your driveway as he screeches to a halt in his usual spot.

“Bathroom!” He hears you call as he lets himself into your apartment and takes off his shoes.

He walks into the bathroom and sees you sitting on the counter. Your hair is wet and held back with a headband. You’re dressed in nothing but the largest t-shirt Corey has ever seen. You look away from the mirror where you’re doing your makeup and give him The Smile, but it barely dents his anxiety. He gives you a quick peck on the lips and when he pulls away he walks to the other end of the bathroom, stalking back and forth like a predator in a too-small cage. 

“You’re awfully early,” you say, digging in your makeup bag.

“I just wanted to spend some time with you alone.”

“Aww, Corey. It's gonna go great,” you assure his reflection as you do your eyeliner. “You don’t need to be nervous. Veronica is gonna love you. I don’t know how anyone could meet you and not love you.”

“You’re biased,” he replies miserably. 

The pacing is just making him more anxious, so he leans against the wall next to you while you finish your makeup and blow dry your hair.

He follows you when you go into your bedroom. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he looks at the floor while you get dressed. Despite having sex, showering together, and sleeping tangled in each other’s limbs with every inch of your bare skin sticking to his, he still feels like there’s moments when he’s not supposed to look. You don’t seem to think anything of it, but it just feels respectful to avert his eyes while you shimmy into your underwear. He hears a zipper going up and your bare feet enter his line of sight. Your toenails are painted the color of dried blood. 

You squeeze his chin with your thumb and pointer finger, encouraging him to look up at you. Corey's only ever seen you dressed up to go out from a distance, or at the end of the night when your makeup has been reduced to a smattering of colorless glitter and you've long ago pulled your sweat-damp hair into a bun. He's a wretched bundle of nerves – he's not sure he's been this anxious since the first day of his manslaughter trial – but even so, he’s taken by seeing you like this, fresh and up close, for the first time. He doesn’t know fashion words but he can tell you’re doing something, and doing it well. For one flickering second he’s glad this is happening, feeling stupid for not joining you out before now. He wants so badly to see you in your element, looking like a model and doing the violent dance you described the first time he noticed bruises on you that he hadn’t left with his mouth. 

As you lean in to kiss him, soft and warm and tacky with tinted balm, Corey wishes he had the power to stop time. To freeze this moment, avoid all the hazards of being asked unanswerable questions or the waitress being so sure she’s seen him somewhere before, to remain safely trapped in your sticky kiss for all eternity like a bug fossilized in amber. No such luck. You pull away and bring your thumb up from his chin to wipe the transferred makeup off his bottom lip. 

“I love you,” Corey says, fearing in his gut it’s the last time he’ll ever get to say it.

“I love you, too,” you reply, and it’s even scarier that it might be the last time you ever say it back.

When you pull up to the pub Corey recognizes it. He’s been here, watching you, parked in the shadows down the street. He’s seen you laugh and toss your hair, silhouetted in the window under the neon Krelborn’s sign, pregaming for a big night, and watched you struggle to sit up straight when you came back hours later to satiate your munchies. 

You parallel park behind an idling Volkswagen Jetta. He waits for you to turn the car off, but you don’t. Instead, the Jetta goes dark and silent. The driver steps out of their car and opens the rear door of yours.

“Good evening, y’all!” Veronica lilts as she slides into the backseat.

“Hello, hello!” You sing back, twisting in your seat to face her. “Veronica Hand, this is Corey Carpenter. Corey, Veronica.”

Veronica leans forward between the seats and offers her hand to him. “So nice to finally meet you!”

“It’s nice to meet you, too,” he says, shaking her outstretched hand. Corey tries to smile a nice, normal smile. He’s acutely aware of his body language, feeling Veronica’s eyes, knowing she’s assessing him already. 

On the drive here he’d asked you if she was interested in true crime. You shrugged and said just the normal amount, as if there was one. When you wanted to know why he asked, he reminded you of what you said the first night he came over. It’s just my friend checking in. She’s nervous about you coming over, 'cause you could be a serial killer or something. You assured him it was a bad joke, and that texting to check in standard even if your date’s vibes are in no way serial killer-y. You quoted one of the films from the teen drama-comedy night you arranged last week, though he couldn’t remember which one. That’s just like, the rules of feminism! You said.

Somehow the conversation failed to make him feel any better, any less like he would be under a microscope every second he was in Veronica’s sight.

“I know you’re nervous so I brought a little something to make the night more fun for everyone,” she’s saying, pulling a small, flat, silver box out of her purse. She pops it open and removes a single hand-rolled cigarette. It’s made with such skill it takes Corey a second to realize it’s a joint, it’s so different from the ones he refused in high school. 

He looks to you and you return his gaze.

“Do you want to?” You ask. 

He scans your face, conflicted. He had a lot of fun smoking with you, but that was in the safety of your apartment. No strangers. And no chance of being seen by the cops.

“We won’t get in trouble?”

You and Veronica both laugh. It stings his already raw nerves.

“The county decriminalized it a couple years ago,” you inform him. “Plus, this neighborhood is super chill. That’s why we’re here.”

“Yeah, this place is a well kept secret, so don’t go spilling the beans.” Veronica points at him. 

Corey forces a little chuckle.

“Okay,” he says, feeling helpless. Being steered towards saying yes makes him realize he wants to say no. He really can’t afford to lower his guard tonight, not even a little bit, not even for one second, but his only reasonable protest was deflated by decriminalization. What other reason could he give to reject Veronica’s hospitality? He’s learned the hard way how poorly that goes over down here, making enemies by accident at work. His only option is to acquiesce. 

Veronica lights the joint and takes a drag, then holds it out between the front seats. You take it from her. The three of you pass it around and the inside of the car clouds. Corey takes it every time it’s offered, despite already starting to feel the way he felt the other night. After a few more rounds you hesitate to pass it to him.

“You doing okay, lightweight?” You ask him.

“Yeah,” he says. “Terrific.” 

If he’s terrific, it’s in the original way of the word – full of terror. He’s sweating and his tongue feels like it’s the size of a hockey puck. His heart beats against his ribs like it’s trying to escape. His stomach turns like it’s being wrung out by invisible hands. You study him for a moment, then pass the joint back to Veronica instead of him, cracking a window. The tiny current of cool, fresh air feels glorious, but it’s not good enough. The car seems to be getting smaller and smaller, like he bit into a cookie that said Eat Me.

Once the joint has burned down too short to hold, Veronica places the roach back in her cigarette case and slips out of the car. You roll the window back up and turn the key. Corey tries and fails to open his door, clawing at it, on the verge of a panic attack.

“Hey,” you say in a soothing voice, putting your hand on his thigh. “If you’re feeling sick, or freaking out, that’s normal. You just went a little overboard. A hotbox is a lot for your second time. Just breathe. It’ll pass in like, 10 minutes.” You lean in and give him a kiss on the cheek. 

Corey’s head pounds. His fingers tingle and he can still feel your lips, like your kiss left a chemical burn. He tries to ask to go home, but he can only produce a barely audible croak, and you’re already closing your door and joining Veronica on the sidewalk. He opens the car door and nearly falls out, struggling to get his footing under Veronica’s baleful eye. He suddenly feels very sure that she’s onto him, that she knows everything about him already. If he lies to her she’ll catch him red-handed, and she’ll tell you everything. She’s going to be a problem , he thinks. 

Veronica leads the way into the pub, to a booth in the back corner. The interior looks like it was put together with a $15 budget. The tables, booths, and chairs, all mismatched and clearly salvaged, cracks in the leather patched over with green tape, rest directly on the plywood subfloor, which has been painted a powdery-looking black. Above the bar, the beer list is written on a chalkboard in cramped, messy handwriting. A single speaker on a shelf weakly broadcasts a song with beautiful, sparkling guitars, and vocals like the singer is being attacked. Corey thinks he might like it under different circumstances, but right now the juxtaposition only serves to set him even more on edge. 

Mercifully the restaurant is almost empty. The only other people are the employees, a couple near the door with their heads together, and a solitary man at the end of the bar with a pint of dark beer in front of him. You and Veronica make small talk. You lace your fingers with Corey’s under the table, and he tries to focus on the sensation of your small, warm hand in his palm while he waits to come down a little. 

A girl brings menus and a glass of water to the table. She greets you and Veronica by name and sets the cup in front of Corey.

“You look like you need that,” she says. 

“Thank you,” he rasps. 

You and Veronica order your drinks and an appetizer. The waitress didn’t give him a straw, so Corey lifts his glass to his lips with a shaky hand and chugs. Then he gets paranoid about having bad manners and sets the glass down, blotting his lips with his hand. Veronica looks at him with raised brows. 

“Cool ring,” she says.

“Thanks.”  

“Pretty unique. Looks vintage.”

“Uh, it was my dad’s.” Corey can’t help but think of the teen movie marathon again, imagining Veronica’s interest as plastic, and as soon as he’s out of earshot she’ll whisper to you that it’s the ugliest effing ring I’ve ever seen . When he blinks his eyelids feel like sandpaper. It’s so fucking hot in here. Has it been 10 minutes yet? 

“Veronica loves vintage jewelry,” you say. “She found some really cool shit at the flea market the other day. There was this Victorian bracelet the seller didn’t even realize was super rare.”

“Yeah, I almost felt bad about how little I paid. Almost.”

“Almost,” you echo, nodding.

Corey finishes his water, drinking more slowly. He can feel it sloshing unpleasantly inside him every time he moves, but he’s never been thirstier in his life.  The waitress delivers him another glass with the appetizer. 

“How long have you lived here?” 

“Year and a half,” Corey feels his mouth say. 

It’s like his brain has been split in two. He isn’t paying attention, the vibrations of the very molecules he’s made of are so loud he can’t focus on anything but that and the washed out, crackling sound of the speaker. Yet he’s giving coherent responses, answering Veronica’s questions before they even register. 

And Veronica asks him a lot of questions. Veronica bombards him with questions.

“Where are you from?”

 He already told you Illinois, so he has to be honest, and when she asks for the name of the town, the part of his brain doing the talking is relieved he wasn’t stupid enough to tell you that too. He just says it’s rural and small, not the kind of place people have heard of. It’s not a lie. No one would have heard of it, if it wasn’t for Michael. Still, it’s a risky move. She lets him get away with it. 

“Do you like it here?”

“It’s better than home.”

“Where do you work?” He tries to be vague but she weasels the name of the shop out of him, saying “Oh, where? There aren’t any VW dealerships in town and my current guy always complains when I come in.” 

Maybe it’s not the car they’re complaining about , half of Corey’s mind thinks.

“How long have you been a mechanic?” “How did you start working on cars?” “Did you go to college?” “Why only for two years?” “What did you plan to major in?” “What made you interested in that?”

When his food is set on the table, the sick feeling he’s been battling since the third time the joint was placed between his fingers is immediately replaced with gnawing hunger. He devours his own meal in record time, all concern about manners gone, before he starts stealing your fries, sliding them one by one off your plate in an attempt to be sneaky. You catch him almost right away, but you just laugh and put your plate where it’s easier for him to reach. Veronica finally lets up when she and Corey both have their mouths full. 

While she’s still eating he starts to feel all the water he drank, and he’s pleased to have an excuse to ask you to let him out of the booth before she can start up again.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

You crane your neck to watch your boyfriend’s broad back disappear around the corner towards the bathroom. “What are you doing?” You ask as soon as he’s gone.

“Trying to get to know your boyfriend.”

“Why are you asking him a bunch of shit I’ve already told you?”

“I’m making sure his story’s consistent.”

“And why are you doing that, Detective?” You’re frustrated. The night hasn’t been terrible, but it hasn’t gone how you hoped at all. You wanted Veronica and Corey to hang out, not play Interrogation. You know she’s not endearing herself to him by acting this way.

“I don’t know.” Veronica picks at the label on the glass bottle in front of her. “He was so resistant to meet me, I wanna be sure he isn’t hiding anything.”

You heave a sigh. “I really appreciate that you’re worried about me, V. You’ve seen me through more relationship bullshit than you should have had to. But Corey doesn’t have any of the red flags that Hurley and Orin did. You can’t make him guilty by association.”

“I’m not! I’m making him suspicious by association.” She laughs. “But I’ll chill.”

“Thank you.”

Over her shoulder you see Corey leave the bathroom and slip out the front door, already pulling his cigarettes out of his pocket

“What do you think though?”

“I haven’t gotten enough from him to really know. He’s pretty… terse.”

“Thinks a lot but doesn’t say much. Remember when I said that was his vibe?”

“Yeah, back when he was just Mr. Library.”

“Also I think we greened him out a little.”

“Oops,” Veronica says with a grimace.

You wait five, ten, fifteen minutes for Corey to come back inside. Veronica remarks on how long he’s been gone, and you’re just about to stand up to go find him when he comes back through the door.

“So,” she prompts as he settles into the booth, on the outside this time. “What’s your sign?”

“Seriously?” You ask with a snort.

“What? I don’t believe in it that much, I just think it’s fun,” she defends.

“I don’t know my sign,” Corey says.

Veronica looks to you, silently asking if you can fill in the gap.

“Um… I don’t know either, I never remember which dates are what.” The statement is true enough, but you’re using it as a cover. A more honest reply would be I don’t know Corey’s birthday . What the fuck? How are you just now realizing you don’t know his fucking birthday? You sink into the booth.

“Well, when were you born?” Veronica asks.

“April 18th,” Corey says. If he realizes this is the first time you’ve heard that date, he makes no indication.

“Ah. An Aries.”

“What does that mean?”

“Aries is the ram. Named after the god of War, ruled by the planet Mars. Aries can be aggressive, impulsive, quick to explosive anger, impatient. They love instant gratification and dangerous situations.”

“Wow, super insightful,” you say sarcastically, rolling your eyes. You want out of this conversation, out of this restaurant, now . You don’t want to process that this is how you found out a major piece of information about the man you’ve been dating for months with an audience. “That’s why I don’t fuck with it. It’s always just a list of mean adjectives.”

Corey tries to take your hand under the table, but you keep your fingers curled under so he can’t slip his between them. You’re not sure if you’re mad at him or not, if you should be mad at him or not.

“There’s positives too! Aries are really passionate. They love a challenge. And they’ll fight like hell on behalf of their loved ones,” Veronica offers.

“Good to know,” you say with finality.

The waitress, your friend Shelly, approaches the table. She looks between the three of you with curiosity, sensing the vibe has changed. “Dessert?” She asks.

“Yes, please,” Corey says.

She lists options, cakes and pies provided by a bakery down the street. Corey asks for a slice of chocolate cake.

“To go, please,” you add.

Veronica shoots you a look across the table.

“Just tired.” You shrug, trying to seem casual.

He goes to the kitchen and spreads all his supplies on the island. One bouquet of roses to give you and one to tear apart for the petals, a bottle of wine that he hopes is good for as much as he paid for it, a salad kit, a frozen lasagna from the take and bake section of the fancy grocery store, a big long loaf of Italian bread, a pack of tea lights, a carton of raspberry sorbet, a real vase so you can stop putting the flowers he gets you in containers you fish out of the recycling. 

Your oven groans like it’s haunted as it preheats. Corey darts around your kitchen, starting and stopping different tasks, feeling scattered. He places the wine and the sorbet in the freezer. He fills the vase with water and dissolves the plant food, but forgets to put the flowers in it. He grabs a small bowl from the cupboard, then abandons it on the counter. He pulls all the petals off a single rose, then remembers a story you told him.

“One time a roommate I had put a bottle of wine in the freezer and forgot about it. I guess because hard liquor doesn’t freeze, she thought it would be okay. But wine is way too low in alcohol content for that. It expanded when it froze and the fucking bottle exploded on me when I opened the freezer. Scared the shit out of me!” You laughed and shook your head. “Our freezer was sticky and full of broken glass the rest of the time we lived there.”

Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck. He opens the freezer apprehensively, squeezing his eyes closed in case of projectiles. The wine is still liquid and the bottle is still intact. Close call. He breathes deeply and tries to organize his thoughts. One thing at a time. The oven chimes. Lasagna first, then. He reads the instructions a third time and notices something new. TIP: it says next to a little drawing of a lightbulb. Place a cookie sheet under the lasagna pan to catch any sauce or cheese that bubbles over. He finds a cookie sheet and puts the lasagna on it, then slides the whole thing in the oven. 

The rest of his preparations go more smoothly. He follows a recipe he bookmarked last night to make garlic bread. He finds a giant mixing bowl and fills it with ice for the wine, like fancy restaurants always do it in the movies. He does his best to clean off your dining table. Usually when the two of you sit here to eat, you just shove all the shit that accumulates over the week to the side. But you know what’s on the table and Corey doesn’t, so he awkwardly stacks things instead, placing the piles all at one end so there’s room for the set up he envisions. 

He needs something to protect the table from the heat of the lasagna pan. You don’t have any kitchen towels in the drawer where you usually keep them, so he goes into your bedroom. He’s gone with you downstairs to your building's laundry room before, so he knows you have a two hamper system, but he can’t remember which is for clean and which is for dirty. He reaches into one and just pulls out whatever’s on top to do a smell test. It’s a wadded up pair of tights and it definitely came out of the dirty laundry. He just intended to sniff them for hamper identification, so he’s not sure how he winds up sitting on the edge of the bed with the crotch of the tights pressed firmly over his nose and mouth, inhaling as deeply as he did the other night to get stoned on your shotgunned smoke. The smell of you lingering on the nylon couldn’t be more beautiful. 

Since the first night he woke up in the hospital Corey has sometimes struggled to believe things are real. Everything in his life seems so much like a bad dream. Even being in your apartment, cooking you dinner, Corey felt like he was on an empty sitcom set, no cast, no crew, no studio audience. Putting on a show with nobody watching. But you, your physical body, left an imprint on these tights that proves you exist, made out of bones and electricity and meat. Gloriously alive. A unique trace of you, so rare a dog or a DNA panel could follow it back to you and only you, out of eight billion other people. The most precious substance on Earth.  

Corey's breath hitches and he pulls the tights away in surprise when he realizes his cock has gotten all the way hard. He feels like a creep, getting aroused by your stuff when you don't even know he's there, and he still hasn't gotten completely over the Pavlovian way he feels shame when he's horny. When he's with you, you distract him, so beautiful and brazen that you make it feel right. But he hasn't been able to do it alone without feeling bad about it since the night of that first kiss. He pulls his phone from his pocket. There are still several minutes left on the timer for the lasagna and almost everything else is finished.

Maybe it's okay... It's not any worse than following you around, really. He pulls his pants and his underwear down to his knees and scoots back on the bed a little. He brings the tights back over his face with one hand and wraps the other around himself. His intention as he starts slowly stroking is just to tease a little, save the rest for the main event with you after dinner. His hand doesn’t get the memo. He tries to slow down and only speeds up, tries to loosen his grip only to squeeze himself a little harder. 

He wants to resist it, but it occurs to him again that this is kind of creepy. Except now the thought doesn't feel as bad. It kinda feels good. What would happen if you came home early for some reason? What would you think, seeing him, in your apartment without your knowledge, practically eating your undergarments in his attempt to inhale the smell of your pussy, touching himself on your bed? The mental image of your face as you realize your boyfriend is a total fucking pervert is so clear, he looks over his shoulder to make sure you aren’t really there. He can imagine the shock in your eyes, the confusion, the fear. Fuck. 

Then the shame rears its head and he retreats from the thought like jerking back from a hot surface, scrambling to think of something else. He comes up with a brilliant idea. He shakes the tights out until they uncoil from the ball he’d squeezed them into and the legs hang limply, then he slides one leg over his slippery, throbbing cock. He bunches the extra length up against his pelvis, drawing himself deeper into the tights, pinching and wrapping the fabric until he’s sheathed in it like a condom. The texture is scratchy but not unpleasant. Corey leans back on one arm, propping himself up on his elbow, getting his hips into it. He brings the toe of the other leg to his face, knowing your smell lingers there too. He pants hard, and it only takes one, two, three gulping breaths for him to get there. Hot, sticky cum seeps out of the nylon.

His arm under him gives out and he lies flat on his back, the soiled tights sticking to him as he softens. He only gets a second to relax before the timer for the lasagna goes off and brings him back to earth. Corey rushes to clean himself off and shove the tights deep into the hamper he now knows is dirty laundry. He sprints through washing his hands, alarm still blaring, and finally yanks the lasagna out of the oven 3 minutes past time. It’s a little dark but it should be fine. Hopefully.

He digs a kitchen towel out of the clean hamper. He smooths it flat on the dining table and sets the lasagna in the middle. He brings in the salad and the garlic bread, trying multiple placements to see what looks best. He feels so out of his depth, but he’s determined to do a good job. He googles table setting diagrams and does the best he can with your mismatched thrift store dishes. 

He’s doing the last few steps, sprinkling rose petals in a path from your front door to the dining room with one hand, scrolling through the playlists you’ve made him with the other when he hears your car crunch the gravel outside. Corey rushes to the dining room, slipping on his sock feet and gut checking himself on one of the dining chairs. Wincing, he hides where you won’t see him from the door, and presses play on a song just as the lock turns.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

As you stand at your front door preparing to insert your key into the lock, you hear a thump and then a very faint groan come from inside. What the fuck was that? You unlock the door as noisily as possible and swing it open very slowly. The last thing you want is to surprise an intruder. You peak inside hesitantly. It smells good. Why does it smell good? Just as you start to fear something way freakier than a simple robbery, you notice the song playing over your speakers.

Whenever I’m alone with you… You make me feel like I am whole again. Wasn’t Corey just saying he had been listening to Jack Off Jill at your suggestion? You step inside and finally see the rose petals scattering the floor and the warm glow of candle light coming from the dining room. That cheesy motherfucker, you think as butterflies fill your guts. You smile and bite your lip in spite of yourself.

“Where are you, you big sap?” You call out.

“Follow the petals!” He shouts back.

You follow the petal trail into the dining room and see him standing at the head of the dining table, beaming above all his hard work. Your mouth hangs open in shock as you take in all the details. More rose petals surround the table, on top of which you see a dozen roses in a gorgeous crystal vase, a delicious looking dinner and -

“Are those proper two course place settings?” You laugh.

“My attempt,” Corey says sheepishly.

You come around the table and grab his face in your hands. “This is so…” you trail off, opting to kiss him instead of finishing your thought. It conveys what you mean much more eloquently anyway. When you release him he pulls a chair out for you.

“Thank you, sir,” you say. His face instantly turns bright red and he clears his throat.

Corey piles salad on your plate and pours you a glass of wine. The two of you eat and try to talk through your giggles. You knew he had a romantic side, but this is something else. Somehow you feel even more giddy than when you first met him, even more like a silly middle schooler writing Mrs. Corey Carpenter all over your notebook. You watch his every movement. Could it be possible he’s becoming even more of a babe? Or is it just because you love him?

God, that’s a scary thought. You’ve been suppressing it violently every time you have it. It just seems so fast, you haven't been “official” for very long at all. But trying to shove it down the past few days has made you feel like a cartoon character on a sinking ship, plugging holes with every finger and every toe just for more to appear and the water to keep rising. He smiles at you, all long teeth and crinkled eyes, and the boat capsizes. You love him, you love him, you love him. And now that you admit it to yourself, you have to admit it to him too. 

Before you can say anything, he stands.

“Ready for dessert?” Corey asks.

“There’s dessert?”

“Of course,” he says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “Stay here.” He stacks all the dinner dishes onto the cookie sheet and takes it to the kitchen. You idly wonder if he’s ever had a job as a busboy. You try to guess what desert is by the sounds you hear him making in the kitchen. Something refrigerated, or maybe frozen. That doesn’t narrow it down very much.

He returns with a bowl heaped with scoops of something the color of blood, two spoons sticking out. He sets it on the table and scoots his chair closer to yours before sitting down. You take a hesitant bite. Raspberry. It’s delicious. You devour the bowl together without speaking, just watching each other.

“Corey…” You finally break the silence. “This was really special.”

“Oh, uh... It’s nothing.” He shrugs.

“It’s a lot more than nothing. You put a lot of hard work into this and it was really cool. No one I’ve dated has ever gone out of their way for me like that before.” In the short time you’ve known him, he’s done more for you than Orin did for your entire three years together. He looks at you like you’re God. He cares if you cum. He listens.

“How is that possible?” He asks. You snort at the question.

“I thought that was just how it was.” You say, shaking your head. “Corey I… I love you.”

Before you realize what’s happening he’s out of his chair, pulling you up from yours into a tight embrace, pressing you against him like he wants to fuse your bodies together. You squeeze him back and you can’t fight the goofy smile you break into.

“I love you too,” he says back, voice strangled with emotion. He releases you just enough that he can look at your face. “I’ll never treat you like they did. I’ll never hurt you. I’ll never walk away from you, unless you tell me to leave.” You look into his eyes. He looks so intense in the candle light, lit almost like the villain in a black and white movie. To your own astonishment, you completely believe him.

“I have one more thing planned,” he says after a long pause. He leads you to the living room. You sit on the couch. Corey turns on the tv and connects his phone. You see the name of the movie he’s casting and can’t help but laugh.

“The Lobster?” You say, incredulous.

“You said it was your favorite romcom,” he says.

“That was a joke!” You say, scrunching your face to keep from dissolving into hysterics. “I do really like that movie but it’s a dark comedy. It’s not a date movie… Unless you’re on a pretty fucked up date.”

“You’re on a date with me.” He smirks at you. 

“Okay.” You laugh, pleasantly surprised by his little self-deprecating joke. You pat the couch next to you. He puts his arm around you when he sits down and you nuzzle against him as he presses play. 

“So,” you say as the end credits roll. “Do you think he did it?”

“What?” Corey asks

“Do you think he went through with blinding himself?” You turn to face him.

“Of course. He doesn’t have another option.”

“I mean, there’s no obvious second option, but he could’ve figured something else out. It’s a hard thing to do, to hurt yourself like that. Your sense of self-preservation would get in the way, force you to consider something else, right?”

“No.” He says, with startling conviction. “All other options would lead to death, or something even worse than death. They say they turn you into an animal to give you a second chance, but that’s bullshit. If you’re still yourself inside the animal, that’s a prison. A punishment. If you lose yourself, then becoming an animal is no different from dying. It’s easy to hurt yourself when prison and death are the only other options.”

“But blinding yourself in unsterile conditions with imprecise tools is so dangerous, he might just be committing suicide anyway.”

“Yeah. If he doesn’t do it, he’ll probably die. If he does do it, he might die. But if he does it, at least he tried. Wouldn’t you try?” Corey rests his forearms on his thighs and looks at you with dark, serious eyes. It doesn’t feel like you’re talking about the movie anymore. 

“I would try harder to come up with another plan. If they’re both blind, how will they accomplish anything? Why, after all the shit he’s been through, is he still so willing to hold onto the old system? He’s just gonna give up his whole rebellious thing? No. He should stay sighted and fight to change things.”

“You don’t think he tried hard enough to come up with another plan? He thought of everything. He… He probably thought of a hundred more plans than just what they showed us. He only saw one way out. He did it.” Corey leans back onto the couch, watching your face. 

You look back at him, trying to process what seems like a coded confession. What part of his past is he alluding to? Did he inflict the wounds that scarred him on himself? The thought has never occurred to you. For a long time, your working theory was that it was drug related, a deal gone wrong or something. Corey’s quiet, no frills life would make sense for a recovering addict. But he shows no hesitation to drink, and he’d never smoked pot or seen a bong before the other day, didn’t recognize the sensation of being stoned. 

So then, maybe a robbery? You could see him on either side of that equation. Being young and stupid, making a bad choice and paying the price, or at any age, having an attempt to defend his home go poorly. The other prevailing option was someone’s jealous ex. He’s never had a girlfriend, but all it would take is being in the vicinity of someone with a sufficiently jealous, sufficiently violent former partner. If an abusive asshole decided Corey was a threat... Maybe that was what he meant when he said he was cursed?

No. Self-inflicted. It echoes in your head. What had he said when you'd asked him about it? I was stabbed. Passive voice, almost no information. Your eyes burn thinking about it. Corey just looks at you. 

“Yeah…” you say hesitantly. “Maybe he did do it.” 

----------------------------------------------------------------------

It’s the first night Corey has slept alone in days and days. After he made you dinner, he stayed the night. When he got off work the next day he popped by his apartment to get clean clothes, several outfits worth, and he hadn’t been back since. But tonight after work he came home to his little garage and the studio above it to work on his tinkering. It was a struggle to pull himself away, so many days in a row just made him want more time with you, like someone lost at sea drinking salt water when they're already dehydrated. He knows you feel the same way, quietly giving him permission to violate your three days a week rule, implicitly asking him to stay another night, and another. Eventually he had to come home. 

Some parts he’s been waiting on have finally come in, so he stays in the garage late, until he realizes he’s drifting to sleep with a soldering iron in his hand. The idea of dying in a fire caused by the iron dropping out of his hand to the wooden workbench doesn’t thrill him like it used to, so he climbs the stairs and crawls under the stained, secondhand covers on his stained, secondhand mattress. 

Like he always does when he’s in bed alone these days, he imagines he’s not. He lays there on his side and pretends he’s curled around you instead of his lumpy pillow. His descent into sleep is fitful, plagued by half-conscious dreams and hypnic jerking. 

Corey’s not himself, his body doesn’t belong to him. He’s taller, thicker, stiffer than usual. He looks down at his hands and he’s missing two fingers, not wearing his ring. I’m Michael, he realizes with awe. He’s outside Laurie and Allyson’s house, and he can hear a commotion going on inside. He turns the knob on the side door and is pleasantly surprised it’s unlocked. He’s going to kill Laurie. After all this time, the bitch is finally gonna bite it.

He steps into the foyer and Laurie isn’t there. He is. The real him. Corey that stabbed himself, bleeding out on the floor. Allyson crouches over him, wailing.

Don’t go! Please Corey, don’t go! Don’t leave me!

He wants to go to her, and he's next to her, just like that, like he teleported. I’m not going anywhere! I’m right here, I didn’t leave!

She turns to face him and screams at the top of her lungs, face contorting in terror. Except she isn’t Allyson at all. It’s you. It’s you and he’s Michael Myers, and the knife he stabbed himself with is right there on the floor, and you both spot it at the same time. You’re faster than him, rising to your feet and lunging for it, but Michael is so much bigger than you, he makes it first.

You stomp on his hand without hesitation. He’s amazed and aroused by your decisive brutality, but he can’t feel the pain at all. He wraps Michael’s massive fingers around your foot and yanks your leg from under you. You slam to the ground, your shirt soaking up dying-Corey’s blood like a sponge. He picks up the knife. You scramble backwards on your hands and feet like a crab, but the blood makes you slide and fall. In one stride, he’s standing over you. You roll away towards the front door, pulling yourself up by the handle and throwing it open. Corey-Michael follows you, desperate to break into a run to catch you as you sprint away, but unable to do more than walk with wide strides. He tries to call your name but his mouth won’t work.

The streets of Haddonfield narrow, the houses shrink and warp. The road is carpeted now and lined on either side not with homes, but with bookshelves. The library. He approaches the aisle where he first saw you, where you trapped him to ask about your sewing machine. He rounds the corner, knowing you’ll be there, that mischievous grin on your face. He raises the knife. You turn to face him and he brings the knife down. A thin red line rapidly widens on your cheek, and another across your chest. Your eyes glaze over with betrayed tears. He raises the knife and brings it down again. This time it penetrates your chest and Michael-Corey feels the tip glance off one of your ribs as the blade buries itself to the hilt.

He stabs you repeatedly, sinking in, sliding out. 10 times. 30 times. More times than he stabbed his mother. More times than he stabbed everyone else, combined. He keeps going, long after you’re dead, until the blade gets stuck in your sternum and the knife handle breaks off, and you slide from his grasp to the floor. All the books on the shelves on either side are coated with a fine mist of your blood. 

He throws the broken handle down the aisle, then sinks to his knees beside you on the ground. He cradles your head in his hands and cries. His hands with all his fingers, signet ring back on his pinky, white scar across one palm. He’s himself, survivor-Corey, hiding-from-the-police-Corey, your-loving-boyfriend-Corey. He wails your name. 

Don’t go! Please don’t leave me! I’m so sorry, please don’t go!

Corey wakes up in a cold sweat. He checks his phone. 4am. He’s been asleep less than two hours, but that's gonna have to be good enough. He tosses on a light jacket, shoves his feet into his boots and goes downstairs. In the corner of the garage is a large toolbox. He unlocks it and opens the lid. It’s full of junk, rusted nails and bent wrenches. He pinches the sides and lifts, pulling the false bottom compartment up and out, setting it on the workbench. He places his hand in the now empty box and pushes on one side. A second false bottom flips up out of the way. On the real bottom of the box is Corey’s little collection of weapons.

Pocket knives of different sizes and designs, a Buck 120 hunting knife in its leather sheath, a brass knuckle, a snub-nose .38 revolver not much different from the one Laurie shot him with, and a box of bullets. Things he’s bought or stolen or found. Things he knows it’s tempting fate for him to have, but they make him feel… Not safer, but perhaps more prepared. 

He takes out a knife and flicks it open. It’s the biggest folding blade in the box, more than an inch longer and twice as wide as the toothpick knife Corey carries every day. For a split second, he’s tempted to test the sharpness on himself. Instead, he turns to a cardboard box on the table top and stabs it. The blade glides through as if the corrugated walls of the box are nothing but air. Perfect.

He reassembles his hiding spot and tucks the knife safely into the inside pocket of his jacket.  

----------------------------------------------------------------------

You wake to pressure on the bed, the mattress sinking beside you. You open your eyes a sliver and see a silhouette next to you, ever so slightly darker than the surrounding nothingness. You’re barely conscious but you’d know that shape anywhere.

“Corey?” You croak.

“Hey,” he whispers. “Sorry to wake you.”

“Mmm,” you reply, too sleepy for real words. You scoot away from him and pat the bed next to you.

He shifts to lie down in the space you made, and pulls you into him. He’s so warm and soft and safe, you’re already almost asleep again. He puts his hand under your chin and lifts your face.

“Don’t go back to sleep. I need to talk to you,” he says softly, and plants a gentle kiss on your lips.

“Hmmm?” You ask.

“Come on, I need you awake enough to talk to.” He slides his hand along your jaw from your chin to your ear and back, stroking your cheek with his thumb. His words move through your brain thickly, like molasses. “It’s important,” he says.

You fight hard to rouse yourself. It’s important. Corey warns you to shield your eyes, then he reaches over and turns on your bedside lamp. The amber light stimulates you enough to prop yourself up on your arm and look at him. His eyes are red with deep shadows underneath.

“What’s going on? Is everything okay?” You put a concerned hand on his chest.

“Yeah, everything’s fine.”

“What time is it?”

“4:30. There’s something I want you to have.” He reaches into his jacket and pulls something out of the interior pocket. You hold your hand out and he places it in your palm. A pocket knife.

“What..?” You start to ask.

“I want you to be able to protect yourself. You’re so important to me, I need some insurance that you’re safe. I know you’re capable, but you don’t always have a baseball bat. Promise me you’ll keep it with you and you’ll use it on anyone you have to,” he says. 

You sit up and examine the knife in your hand. The handle is made of a rich, dark wood, with something shimmery inlaid. Mother of pearl maybe. The blade has a little groove for one handed opening. You slip your thumbnail into it and pop the blade out. The edge glints in the lamp light. It’s a beautiful knife. 

“Okay. I promise.”

“I‘m serious,” he says. “Promise you’ll use it against anyone you need to. Even me.”

“Corey, I… Why would I need to use it against you?”

“You won’t. But just promise me that if you did, you would.” The prospect is ridiculous to you, but he looks dead serious.

“I promise.”

He grabs your hand, holding the still open knife, and angles it so you’re pointing it at him, the tip grazing the skin of his chest made visible by the two unbuttoned buttons of his henley shirt.

“Promise me.”

“Corey…” you protest. You try to pull away, you don’t want to hurt him by accident. But the strength of his grip stops you. Your heart races. You’re scared, but the fear is oddly arousing. “I promise.”

“That’s three times you promised.” He lets go of your hand. 

A sick impulse comes to you. Without thinking about it, you raise the knife, angling it upward so the tip presses against the soft underside of his chin instead of his chest. He breaks into a wide smile. You apply the tiniest amount of pressure and he raises his chin just a little to get away. You follow him with it, pressing it into his stubbly skin enough to make him pull away again. Then you realize what you’re doing. Horrified, you pull away and fold the blade back inside the handle.

You can’t even begin to apologize before he’s kissing you like his life depends on it.

“Eggs?” You ask when he hands them to you.

“Fresh eggs. Free range. Laid just in the last couple days. I uh.. I know the chickens that laid them.”

You giggle at the expression. “You know the chickens? Are they close personal friends of yours?” 

“No,” he says, laughing too. “I just help out on the farm where they live sometimes.”

“Well, thank you. That's really cool. I can’t wait to eat these. Send my regards to the girls,” you joke, placing them in the fridge.

The task he’s assigned himself tonight is oiling all the hinges and tightening all the knobs on your cabinet doors. Something you could easily do yourself, but he’s come to the point where he's scraping for projects, and he's more than happy to take care of it for you. He gets started while you fill an old peanut butter container with water for your flowers. They spill lazily over the wide mouth of the jar as you place it in the center of your kitchen island, a posture you mimic as you lean against the edge and watch him work.

“You do have a vase,” Corey says when he gets to the cabinet under the sink. He sets down his screwdriver and pulls something out. A glittery object that caught his eye deep in the shadows. 

“I do?” You ask, confused.

He holds up a glass vessel, 10 inches tall, with a big belly bottom that tapers into a narrow tube towards the top.

“Corey!” You snort. He can tell you think he’s joking, but he doesn’t understand why. He looks at you blankly, trying to get it, and watches your face change as the realization dawns on you. “Oh! You really don’t know?”

“It’s not a vase?” He asks, turning it around in his hands. “It is weird that it has a hole in it, I guess.” He puts the tip of his pinky in the opening in the vessel’s belly.

“It’s a bong, Corey. A water pipe. For smoking. It’s just missing a couple pieces.”

“Don’t you only smoke cigarettes sometimes at bars?” Corey asks, still not fully grasping the concept.

“I don’t smoke tobacco out of it,” you say slowly. 

“Oh…” he breathes, eyes widening in recognition. Corey had some inkling that there were different kinds of pipes people use for smoking weed, but he’d never seen one before now. At the parties he snuck out to in high school everyone had just smoked joints. 

He’s always been curious, but when Momma was still alive he had been too worried about how she would react if she found out, her bloodhound nose easily defeating paltry pieces of gum and spritzes of cologne. Since he’s been on the run it hasn’t seemed like a good idea to seek out drugs. He's thought about it often, especially on cold nights with a stiff neck, sleeping on the floor of an abandoned house and wishing he hadn’t survived. He thought about things far more destructive than marijuana. But he’d never bought drugs before and an interaction with an undercover cop seemed like way too big of a risk. 

“Do you smoke a lot?” He asks

“Not so much lately.” You shrug. “I think I still have some though.”

“Could we…? Do you have the missing pieces?”

“Yeah, if you’re sure you want to,” you say, face shifting from surprised to amused. Corey nods. “Okay. That needs to be washed because it’s been under the sink for a while.”

He turns to the sink and runs the water while you go into your bedroom. He hears you opening drawers and clinking glass objects while he washes the bong, using a sponge on the outside and a bottle brush on the inside, unsure of how thorough he should be.

“Put like, two inches of cool water in the bottom and meet me in here,” you instruct, standing in the archway with your hands full.

In the living room you’re lighting candles. On the coffee table he sees an ashtray, a little canister full of weed, two glass objects he assumes are the missing pieces, and another container. 

“I didn’t realize it was so involved,” he says. 

“It’s what you make it. I want you to have a good first time,” you say. 

You move to your sound system. You start to put a record on the turntable but change your mind, pulling something up on your phone instead. Gentle indie music fills the room. Corey sets the bong on the coffee table and sits down on the couch while you draw the curtains and turn on a lamp. He’s excited and a little nervous. 

He likes drinking well enough. His only experience being out at a bar is the Halloween party at Velkovsky’s, which ended badly, but he’d had a good time before he bumped into Mrs. Allen. Other than that he’d had a beer here and there, getting buzzed extremely quickly thanks to his practically non-existent tolerance. And there have been a couple nights with you since he started sleeping over, the two of you sitting at your dining table with a bottle of sweet white wine, getting progressively worse at Scrabble. He likes the numb feeling, everything happening without really happening. Pot can’t be that different, right?

You pop the top off the mystery container and Corey sees it’s filled with metal teeth. He watches as you break apart a little ball from the canister, a “nug” you call it, and lay it over the teeth. Your fingers work delicately but deliberately. You put the lid back on and hand it to him.

“Twist,” you say. He does as he’s told. You put one of the glass pieces in the hole in the side of the pipe, then reach out to take the grinder back. As you open it he realizes it has multiple chambers that unscrew independently, a nice design thing he appreciates. You pinch a little pile of shreds out of the chamber, dropping them into the other glass piece, which looks like a tiny goblet with a handle. 

“This is the bowl,” you tell him. “To hit the bong, you gotta start with the bowl in the downstem.” You drop the bowl into the hole in the side of the bong, then pick the whole thing up with your left hand. You explain the process of lighting the bowl, inhaling, and clearing the bong. 

“That sounds easy enough,” Corey says. 

“It’s deceptive. It’s not like cigarettes,” you say. Then you take a hit to demonstrate. “Breathe deep, with the bottom of your lungs.” Your voice sounds dark and warped around the smoke. Then you release a huge plume toward the ceiling. 

You hold the bong out to Corey and he accepts it.

“I should probably light it for you, your first time,” you say, holding up the lighter.

Corey nods his head. He closes his eyes and tries to empty his lungs completely. Then he leans down to put his lips on the bong, looking up at you through his eyelashes as you flick the lighter. Everything goes well until he pulls the bowl to clear the pipe. He panics immediately, coughing and putting the bong on the table still filled with swirling smoke. He coughs so hard tears come to his eyes. You look at him with a combination of pity and mirth.

“What the fuck!?” He chokes, wiping his eyes.

“It’s deceptive!” You say, suppressing a laugh. “Are you okay?” 

He looks at you with a dark expression, embarrassed and slightly betrayed. 

“Poor baby,” you pout.

Poor Baby. His breath hitches. Even hearing it sarcastically, the pet name strikes him hard. Twice as hard as the other week when you called him sir. Since he’s been in the south the occasional old lady has called him some term of endearment in a grandmotherly way. It always flusters him, the way these women so casually dole out maternal affection, something his own mother wielded like a weapon. But no one has ever, ever called him baby like that. He’s grateful that the coughing fit gives him an excuse for being so red.

“There is a way that might be easier,” you coo. “You can get it second hand.” 

Corey clenches his jaw. He doesn’t know what you mean, but you seem to want him to guess. You sit there patiently. 

“Show me,” he finally says.

Grabbing the pipe from the coffee table, you take a much bigger hit than before. He’s astounded at the apparent capacity of your lungs. You hold it in as you lean closer to him. When the tips of your noses almost touch you say one word in your growly smoke-filtered voice.

“Inhale.”

Then you blow the smoke into his face in a long, even stream.

Corey inhales and fills his lungs, breathing to the bottom like you told him to. He closes his eyes  and hears you taking another massive hit as he exhales. You lean back into him, so close that your lips brush his on the second syllable.

“Inhale.”

Corey parts his lips and you breathe into his mouth. You keep your face close to his as he exhales. Then you kiss him, once, twice before pulling away. 

“How do you feel?”

“Uh…” He feels very flustered but he doesn’t think it has much to do with the weed. “Normal?”

“Give it a couple minutes,” you say, nodding. Then, sort of suddenly, “There’s so much you haven’t done, isn’t there?”

Ostensibly it’s a question, but you know Corey well enough to know it’s a statement of fact. Of course there’s a lot he has done, things that most people never will. Most people will never look evil in the eye. Most people will never commit a murder, on accident or on purpose, much less 10 of them. Most people will never meet a beautiful girl while they live in hiding, waiting every day for the other shoe to drop. But none of it’s the kind of thing you can put on your resume. He's painfully aware of how sheltered he was for most of his life. 

“You’re a strange man, Corey Carpenter,” you say. The sound of his fake name from your lips stings, but your tone soothes him. The way you say you’re strange, it might as well mean I love you.  

Corey swallows hard. His mouth is dry and his tongue feels huge. Why is his mouth so dry? His lips stick together. “Can I have something to drink?” He asks hoarsely. 

“Cotton mouth huh?” You say, patting his knee. “It’s working.” 

You go into the kitchen and Corey hears you making two glasses of water. It seems like you’re gone forever, like each second lasts a year, like the world is in slo-mo. His heart rages against his ribcage. His head feels like a helium balloon, floating up and bumping against the tall historic ceilings, so far away even the string is out of reach. He thinks about calling your name, and feels like it takes several business days for his mouth to actually follow through. 

You pad in from the kitchen with the waters. You’ve been gone for 90 seconds. He calls your name just as you come into view, and he feels like he’s done a magic trick.

“How do you feel?” You ask again, handing him his glass.

“Weird,” he says.

“Good weird, or bad weird?”

“I can’t tell.” He looks at you for guidance. “I think I can feel my skin more than usual.”

“Congratulations!” You exclaim. “You’re stoned!”

You sit down behind him on the couch. He tries to turn to face you, but you grab him by the shoulders and turn him back around. You gently scratch his back with both hands.

“How does that feel?”

He doesn’t respond verbally, he’s too absorbed in the sensations. He writhes around, trying to get whatever park of his back is currently under your nails closer to you. When you move one hand up his neck to his scalp, he leans so far into your touch that he falls backwards against you. You bring your face down to his, keeping your hand in his hair. You look into his half lidded eyes. 

“This is cool,” he says, and giggles. His nerves are electrified, your nails on his scalp sending tingles radiating through his whole body. He looks down to check because he could swear he’s hovering six inches above the couch. He feels so immaterial that he’s surprised he doesn’t phase right through you. “I’m a ghost,” he whispers.

You cackle. “You’re a ghost, Corey?”

“Yeah,” he says, laughing too. He tries to fight off a full blown laughing fit. What’s even so funny? He’s not sure. His thoughts feel like they have to swim to get to him. If he doesn’t focus hard enough, they drift away. He sits up and turns to face you.

“What do you feel like you want to do? Is the music okay? Do you need anything?” You ask. 

He considers. He had forgotten all about the music until you mentioned it, but now he’s falling into it, absorbed in waves by the guitar riffs. He picks up his glass and only means to take a sip, but finds himself chugging. He looks around the apartment, glowing warm from the lamp and the candles, and he looks at your face, soft and dreamlike in the light. He can feel himself grinning stupidly, but he can’t wipe the smile off his face. Your questions swim hard to get to him.

“The music… feels nice. Like I’m inside it,” he says.

“I love that feeling! But if you really wanna feel inside it, you need something fuzzier than this,” you say, scrolling through your playlists. 

“Fuzzy?” He asks. You put a finger up. Hold on a second.

A new song starts playing. It is instantly cacophonous. It sounds like it was made by bees. It is fuzzy, that’s the perfect word for it. It feels like it’s massaging his brain. Even the singer’s voice is raspy and more like an instrument. He can’t understand the lyrics at all, but the vocals evoke a strong feeling anyway. The sound wraps around him like a warm blanket. 

You grab the remote and turn the music up a little bit, swaying along serenely. Corey feels hypnotized watching you, your movements like a pendulum swinging in front of his eyes. You are so gorgeous, and you look so happy. He impulsively reaches out to touch your face. You nuzzle into his hand, and he feels like his heart stops beating.

He wishes the moment could last forever, but a new song comes on and it’s much faster than the last one. You spring off the couch and throw yourself around the living room, dancing with abandon.

Corey hasn’t danced in over a year, not since the Halloween party. He has not so much as tapped his foot, even with all the new music he’s enjoyed at your suggestion. Every time he wants to do something with you he did with Allyson he feels hesitant. He’s still avoided giving you a ride on his bike, and he hasn’t met anyone else in your life, although he suspects he can’t hold off on meeting Veronica much longer. But he feels so warm and tingly right now, and you’re having so much fun. He jumps up and joins you.

The two of you circle each other like sharks. You lunge forward and grab his hands, pulling him close to you, then pushing him away. He lets you swing him all around the living room. You spin under his arm and then into it so your back is pressed against him with his arm around your waist. You and Corey bounce and sway as a unit, sensing and anticipating each other’s movements. He feels you give into your impulse to grind on him and it makes his knees weak. The way you wiggle your hips back against him is torturous. A pained little noise escapes despite his efforts to stay quiet as he wills himself not to get hard. It’s a losing battle. Oh my god. He’s not sure if he thinks it or says it, but you press against him one more time, harder and slower, before spinning back out of his arm.

He’s not gonna let you get away that easily, using his hold on your hand to pull you back to him, and wrapping his other arm around your waist. Your giggle comes out like a squeal. You look up at him with wide, starry eyes. Another new song begins. He’s not sure why, but Corey feels like it’s the kind of song that would play at prom. He didn’t go to his prom, he didn’t go to any school dances. Momma never would’ve allowed it, so he just didn’t ask. Slow dancing is pretty intuitive though. He keeps you clasped against him tightly as the two of you rotate slowly in the candle light.

You sigh contentedly into his shoulder and press your hips against him. Every sensation feels amplified, and the softness of your belly against him through his jeans is insane. He puts his face in your hair and grinds against you, reveling in your smell as his breathing gets heavier. Nothing exists except you and the music. He wants to be inside you. With his cock, yes, as deep as he can get it, but also with his soul. He doesn’t have much, but he would give you everything. He wants to say I love you despite knowing it’s too soon. It would be okay if you didn’t say it back, if you just needed time. But he wouldn’t be able to take it if it scared you away, so he keeps quiet.

“Corey,” you say, ending his trance. “Tell me something fucked up about you.”

“What do you mean?” He asks, suddenly nervous.

“I don’t know. Something that follows you from your childhood, or… Something you think about a lot even though you know you shouldn’t. Something you hesitate to tell people, or that you’ve never told anyone.” You pull away slightly and meet his eyes, searching.

“Oh, I…” he starts then trails off. He looks away. What is he supposed to say to that? There’s no shortage of fucked up things about him, no end to the things he hesitates to tell people. 

“You’re safe with me, Corey,” you coax him. 

He knows you think you mean it, that you would accept him for a petty criminal record, a weird kink, an ugly divorce. Even if he told you his whole life story, he believes that you would hold his hand, right up until… Well, he’s not sure where the boundary is. Jeremy? The homeless man? Luring Doug to Michael, the first time he ended a life completely intentionally?

Not knowing the boundary isn’t as scary as the questions. He might say something well within the safe zone, but anything he says at all could lead you to ask questions. Questions the internet would happily supply the answers to even if Corey didn't. Questions with answers that would bring you well outside your limits, wherever they are. Finding out just who exactly has been sleeping in your bed would certainly mean the end of the relationship, and probably the end of Corey’s life too. 

He looks back to you and then, up through the fog, he thinks of something he can tell you. A story that stands on its own, a story that you can’t google. 

“When I was twelve,” he starts, “I found a lighter in the seat on the school bus.” The events play like a movie in his head, and he’s transported back to an autumn when he had just a tiny bit of freedom. Momma had burned all the bridges at her old job and her new one wouldn’t give her her preferred schedule yet. She hated when Corey would be home alone for any amount of time after school. But being a single mom trying to keep food on the table meant that for a few months she didn’t have the option of getting off in time to be home when he got there, temporarily granting him the luxury of being a latchkey kid.

“I put it in my backpack and kept it on me all day at school. I just kept thinking about it, like I could feel it in there, waiting. When I got home I knew I had a couple of hours alone. I spent it burning stuff. Pieces of cardboard from the garbage or whatever. I thought it was so cool how the fire could just… completely erase things. I wanted to watch something bigger disappear. 

“My neighbors across the street had a car up on blocks. It didn’t have an engine. It had been sitting there for as long as I could remember. One of the windows was rolled down, or maybe just missing, so it was full of trash and leaves. I waited til nobody was looking and I lit a piece of cardboard and dropped it in. Then I ran home and watched it from my bedroom window.

“It was awesome. All the shit inside caught so fast, then the seats, then the frame. You wouldn’t think metal would turn to ash and float away, but it does. Cars are paper thin. I cut through them with a torch at work all the time. 

“The fire got really fucking big. A lot bigger than I expected. I thought when the car burnt out, the fire would disappear, like it did with a cereal box. But the grass was super dry. It spread across the yard and caught my neighbor’s garage. I ... I didn’t call 911 because I was scared they would know it was me. Eventually someone else called, but the garage was gone by the time the fire department came.”

Corey basks in the rapt look in your eyes as he tells his story, still holding you close and swaying slightly. It feels so good to just be honest with you about something. Not to have to tiptoe around his secret. He can’t believe the way you eat it up.

“Then what?” You ask, awed. 

“I don’t know. They never found out it was me.”

“Holy shit. You could’ve burned down the whole neighborhood, you little arsonist!” You poke him in the chest and laugh. "I should've known you were a firebug, Mr. Lights His Cigs with Matches."

“Guilty,” Corey says. Guiltier than you know. “What about you? Are you gonna tell me something fucked up about you?”

You pull out of his arms slightly, not to get away, but to bring him with you to the couch. He sits down with you, one arm still around your waist. You hit the bong. As you exhale you gesture to offer him more, but he’s still plenty stoned and he wants to focus on whatever you’re about to say.

“I didn’t tell you the whole story,” you say.

Corey is confused until he realizes you’re presenting your arm to him. The Carrie tattoo. He runs his fingers over it. With his sense heightened, he feels like he can read it like braille. He thinks back to the night the two of you watched Carrie. How you had unknowingly validated him. How he hoped you could find a way to feel your feelings about Carrie, about him. 

“There was this guy. He used to be hot shit in the music scene here. I think at one point he was in… four different bands? I knew we had all these mutual friends, and I saw him around all the time. I mean, he was almost impossible to avoid. And he was cute, and he was talented. I thought that maybe he and I could really be something. But we just didn’t click like I hoped we would. Not like I click with you.

“I kept going on dates with him, even though I wasn’t feeling it. I wanted to feel it, or … I don’t know. It makes less sense the longer ago it happened. I guess he never picked up on the fact that I was pulling away. He was gone on tour a lot and I kinda hoped he would just get distracted and forget about me. But he didn’t. Even after I spelled it out for him, he still acted like we were together. I had to start avoiding shows his bands played, certain bars I knew he liked. I would still see him everywhere though. He would put his arm around me, try to make plans with me, whatever. He just wouldn’t take no for an answer, for months. It was so bad Veronica would physically get in between us so he would leave me alone.”

Corey clenches his jaw. He remembers the way Doug disrespected Allyson in front of him. Doug had treated Corey like shit too, threatening him when he arrived on the scene after the accident with Jeremy, making Corey’s handcuffs too tight. He deserved what he got just for that. But the thing Corey really couldn’t take was the way Doug pretended to be interested in Allyson, to care for her, while making her visibly uncomfortable. The way Doug acted like he owned her, like she owed him something, like she was too stupid to make her own choices. That was why Doug had to die. And as you talk, Corey silently promises that if he ever sees the guy from this story, he’ll have to die too. 

“So on Halloween we did a bar crawl, everybody from work. And we all dressed up like Stephen King characters. I was Carrie and Veronica was Wendy from The Shining. Have you ever seen it?”

“No.”

“Okay, well, Veronica was a character that carries around a baseball bat for part of the film. And she went to the bathroom and she had me hold her bat.” You pause, making a sour face.

“Oh my god… I just realized. He must have seen that I was with people and waited. I thought the timing was a coincidence, but maybe it wasn’t. He was shit-faced, but I guess he wasn’t too far gone to realize he could only get near me when she and Rose left. That fucking asshole!

“Anyway, Veronica went to the bathroom and he came up behind me and put his hand on my stomach and tried to dance with me. And I just got so fucking angry… I broke his nose and three fingers.”

“You beat him with the bat?” Corey asks, trying not to sound too excited. You look at him with narrowed eyes, like you’re trying to figure something out. He looks down, not wanting to give himself away. 

“I didn’t beat him, exactly. When he put his hand on me I just kinda…” You grab the three middle fingers on one of Corey’s hands. He looks back up, meeting your eyes, and holds his breath. You bend his fingers sideways, gently but firmly. First it’s a nice stretch, then it hurts. He doesn’t react. He trusts you not to actually break his fingers, but he almost feels like he would let you if you wanted to. You hold his fingers at that unnatural angle for a long moment. Then you let go.

“Like that. But harder, and faster. I didn’t think they would break so easy or that it would fuck up his tendons and stuff, but I was tipsy and full of adrenaline and I just… Did it. And then I hit him in the face with the bat, once. Once was enough.

“I was dressed like Carrie, and it felt kind of supernatural the way my instincts just took over so I could defend myself. I didn’t know I had that in me. I got the tattoo so I would never forget.”

Corey is completely smitten. He takes your hands, pressing his palms into yours, knowing you’ve both felt the vibration of someone else’s bones breaking. His impression of you as a huntress was more correct than he could’ve ever hoped. You’re genuinely dangerous. 

The thought makes him woozy. He knows how precarious a life is, how simply one can end. He knows too, the consequences when a life does not end, progressing unnaturally past the expiration date. How everyone is always teetering, balanced on the edge of a knife. And how much more precarious your life has become since he entered it.

He did the wrong thing. He’s done nothing but the wrong thing since he was too fucking stupid to keep his eyes on the ground the first time he saw you. He did the wrong thing every time he noticed you getting more attached to him and didn’t walk away. He did the wrong thing every time he kissed you, every time he texted you good morning. Last night he let the last chance to do the right thing slip away. 

All Corey knows how to make is bad choices. He was never going to do the right thing. He didn’t realize it at the time, but he made the last wrong choice as he made the first one. From the moment he saw you, he was always going to pick the option that kept him close to you. Selfish asshole. And now he’s earned a title: boyfriend. He can’t help but be proud of it. 10 years after all his peers, he’s finally hit a milestone he never thought he’d reach. Ugly, white trash, psycho Michael Myers copycat killer Corey Cunningham has a girlfriend. 

Allyson should have been his first girlfriend. He’d wanted that more than anything. That isn’t true though, is it? He’d wanted her more than almost anything. There were things he wanted more. Revenge. Power. Seeing the fear in his victims eyes as the tables turned against them. Hadn’t he chosen those things over her? And it had gotten her killed. He shivers, trying not to imagine Allyson’s corpse, or yours, ashen, punctured all over with knife wounds. With a fresh start in a new place, he won’t make that choice again. Probably.  

Corey feels smug, gloating glee. He feels paralyzing fear. He feels gnawing, rending guilt, and the tiniest wisp of hope. Back and forth, smiling and frowning into your hair in the gloom of the bedroom. Crying. Laughing. Spiraling. He didn’t do the right thing, but he can go for second best. He can do everything in his power to protect you from his past, and he can be a good boy and learn to control his temper so there’s nothing in the future that requires hiding. He’s not sure if he can do it. Last night he’d been preoccupied, but in the gloom this morning he fights the urge to destroy the unfaithful ex you mentioned. God help him if someone disrespects you in front of him. But he has to try. For you. 

He drifts halfway back to sleep, exhausted by the turmoil, slipping partially into fucked up dreams before waking back up and repeating the cycle. Hours pass. The sun comes the rest of the way up and filters through the curtains. Turning the room from black to dark blue to gray. Finally, you stir in his arms, rousing him from another round of semiconscious shame. You roll over to face him.

“Hey,” you say quietly, giving him a groggy little smile. 

“Hey,” he says.

You kiss him softly, then tuck your head under his chin, pressing in more tightly against him.  The tension in his muscles releases. He stops spiraling. His past misdeeds, the danger he’s putting you in, all the peripheral bullshit dissolves. For now what matters is that you’re here. You’re alive and you’re his girlfriend and you’re naked and you’re so close to him it feels like you’re trying to crawl into his ribcage. Nothing could spoil this moment. He kisses the top of your head. 

Corey’s hands roam your skin, drawing circles. When he gets too high up on your neck, he hears you wince a little and he pulls back in concern.

“Sorry about the hickies,” he says.

“Don’t be,” you murmur against his chest. “I like them.”

“You do?” 

“Mmm. I’ll have to wear more makeup than I usually do for a couple days, but I like knowing they’re there even if no one else does. I’ll be carrying you around with me all the time.” 

The sentiment is so sweet, it takes him by surprise. He chuckles and clears his throat.

“Last night you said, ‘I haven’t done this very many times.’ What does that mean?” You ask.

“Oh uh… I’ve been with a couple girls but only a couple. Never anyone more than once.” He hesitates, embarrassed. “You um… You’re my first actual girlfriend.”

You pull out of his arms and sit up, facing him. “What?” He flinches, but your voice is tender. “Corey, how is that possible? A sweetheart like you?”

He rolls onto his back and looks up at the ceiling. “I just…Nothing ever lasted long enough to get there. Something always went bad before I could…” He lets the sentence hang there, unfinished. 

“Like what?” You put your hand on his stomach. The gentle warmth and light weight are soothing, but he struggles to come up with a way to tell you that won’t give him away. He sits up and takes your hands.

“I can’t explain. It’s like... It's like I’m cursed.” He says finally.

“Well, I intend to break that curse.” You bring his hand to your lips and brush his knuckles against them.  “In fact, I think I know a spell that breaks curses.”

“Oh yeah?” He asks, apprehensive but amused.

“Yeah.” You say. You rise to your knees and swing one leg over his so you’re straddling his lap. “But it only works if the person reciting it is panting and moaning.”

He’s still not used to someone being so forward with him, and Corey can feel his face flushing instantly, even as his semi-stiff morning wood hardens completely. You hover over him, your labia barely brushing his shaft. Just that much contact makes a little moan escape his lips and he drops his head to your chest. You put your hands on the back of his neck and squeeze your tits together with your arms, the softness pressing in on him. He nuzzles you, using his nose to slip deeper between your breasts. He wants to lose himself in you so bad. 

You lower yourself a little and wiggle so his cock slips between your lips. The warmth and wetness make his cock even harder, almost too hard. You slide yourself up the shaft, then back down, just once, slowly.

“Corey,” you huff, “I need it.”

The sound of your voice and the request combined make his breath catch. He pulls his head from your cleavage and looks up at your face. “How?” He whispers.

You slide one hand from the back of his neck up to his cheek. “However you want.”

What he wants is just to feel you around him, to admire you and be close to you. He reaches down with one hand and guides himself to your entrance, rubbing a circle around it before gliding in. You arch your back over the arm still wrapped around you and hum deeply. He pulls his hand out and you take him all the way. He shudders and groans, clamping his arms tight around your waist and holding you down.

“Don’t move,” he says, then he feels like he sounded too harsh. “Please,” he adds more softly.

He drops his head back to your chest and basks in the hot, soft hug of your cunt. You play with his hair and kiss his head. Corey wishes this could be his whole life. No more abuse, no more hiding, no more guilt or fear. Just your affection and the way you feel around him. But you start to get antsy, squirming and squeezing your pussy around him slightly. His hips move a little too. He can’t stay still if you don’t. 

“Whatever you’re doing is cheating.” His muffled voice tells your tits. 

“I can’t help it,” you whine. “You feel too good.”

He raises his head again and looks into your eyes. You give him The Smile. He thrusts up into you automatically. Holy shit. 

“You’re so fucking pretty,” he says.

“You’re so pretty,” you reply, starting to ride him.

He chuckles nervously at your compliment, and his laughter turns to moans as you move your hips back and forth. He slides his hands down from your waist to your hips and digs his fingers into your soft flesh, keeping his eyes on your face. 

You run your hands over his clavicles and pecs, and he can’t believe how smooth and gentle your palms feel. You take him by surprise when you brush lightly over his nipples, the sensation equal parts extremely foreign and extremely welcome. 

“Ugh, these shoulders,” you say, bringing your hands back up his chest and down his arms slightly. 

“My… my shoulders?” He asks, starting to struggle to talk. 

“Mhm.” You nod your head in time with the rolling of your hips. “So broad… so strong… so freckled…Your body is gorgeous, Corey.” 

No one has ever complimented him that way. Being wanted and admired by you threatens to overwhelm him and he uses his grip on your hips to slow your riding down. You whine and try to speed back up but he holds you firmly until you quit fighting. Wrapping his arms back around your waist, he brings his feet closer to him.

“Hold onto me,” he says, and you lace your fingers together behind his neck. He leans back then rocks forward, putting you on your back, with him on his knees above you. Somehow he stays inside you through the maneuver. You encircle his waist with your legs. He slides his cock almost all the way out of you, then slowly sinks back in. You both shudder.

Corey kisses you all over your face, fucking you as slowly and gently as he can manage, groaning with his lips against your face as he tries to last. You bring your hands down from his neck, sliding all the way down his arms to his wrists. Your fingers barely wrap halfway around. You let out a little moan every time he thrusts in, getting louder and louder. It doesn’t take long for him to get close, even as slowly as he’s going. You feel so good he can barely believe you’re real.

As if on cue, you bury the fingers of one hand in his curls. “I’m gonna cum, Corey,” you say, voice breathy.

“Yeah?” He grunts. 

“Yeah,” you say. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” You rock your hips under him, ruining his efforts to keep the pace from getting faster. He pulls his wrist from the hand that’s still holding it and weaves his fingers between yours as he matches your speed. You look at him with so much reverence it hurts. Then you squeeze your eyes closed and let out a high pitched mewl as you cum all over his cock. He loses himself, cumming with you, completing a few final thrusts as he empties his load deep in your pussy. 

Out of breath and satisfied, he pulls out and lays down next to you. You roll onto your side to face him and kiss the tip of his nose. For once his thoughts are still and he feels completely content. 

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You spend a magnificently lazy Sunday with Corey. Your boyfriend. This has always been your favorite part of a relationship, the moment it finally becomes, but it’s never been this perfect before. He’s beautiful, he’s sweet, he’s smart, he’s strange, he’s made you cum so hard you saw stars three times in 12 hours. All of that is more than enough, more than you had ever dared ask for from a partner. But it isn’t everything. There’s something you struggle to put your finger on, a je ne sais quoi. Corey just… fits you, complements you, like you’re two halves of a matching set, reunited. Whatever was missing, whatever you’ve been searching for all this time, Corey has in spades. 

That evening you’re laying on the couch with him. He’s leaning back against the armrest and you’re nestled between his legs, resting your face and hands on his stomach. Somehow you’ve both wound up shirtless. Beneath your cheek he makes an excellent pillow, thin but deliciously soft layer of fat insulating rock hard muscle underneath. The fuzzy trail of auburn hair leading from his belly button down into the waistband of his jeans tickles the skin on your chest. You’re so infatuated you feel drunk. 

But when he gets up to go to the bathroom, leaving you alone for a moment, you sober abruptly. That tendency for infatuation is what gets you in trouble, and on some level you know that. If you hadn’t been so infatuated with Hurley to begin with, you never would’ve lingered in his life so long, trying to get it back. If you hadn’t been so infatuated with Orin, you would’ve realized that he’d been cheating practically since the beginning. Corey’s not like them, you trust that. But you don’t trust yourself. You like him so much you feel like you could drown in it and you desperately need a way to stay in control.

He comes out of the bathroom and goes to lay back down, but you stop him, leaving him to awkwardly perch on the edge of the couch.

“I’m so glad we made it official,” you say, taking his hands.

“Me too,” he says, breaking into a wide grin.

“And I’m really excited to see what the future holds,” you continue.

“So am I.” He squeezes your hands and scoots closer to you. 

“But um…I don’t want to lose track of myself. I don’t think we should spend too much time together.” Corey’s eyebrows pinch. He opens his mouth and then closes it. “I just wanna like… I want us to keep our own lives, you know? I want to go out with my friends, and I want to have evenings where I just veg out on the couch, and I have my mending…”

“Okay…” He looks confused. 

“Um… I want you here, I don’t want you to think I don’t, I do. I’m so excited to be your girlfriend. But I think we should agree to have like, three nights apart a week. Is that okay?”

“If that’s what you want.” Corey says. He chews his bottom lip. It kills you that this is obviously hurting him.

“It’s not you,” you say, rubbing his big knuckles with your thumbs. “It’s just… I’m cursed too.”

Monday morning you pull a mock neck top from your closet, but it doesn’t come up nearly high enough to hide everything. You’re late to work because of how much time it takes blending foundation over the purple splotches Corey covered you in, trying to get your neck and face to match. 

Of course your ruse does not fool Veronica. When she gets there in the afternoon she notices right away. “Hello, foundation!” She says. “What are you trying to cover up under there?”

“Why do I have to be covering something up? Can’t I just want to wear more makeup some days than others?”

“No!” She laughs. “I’ve literally never seen you wear this much makeup in my life.”

Mondays are always slow, so the store is completely devoid of customers. Rose overhears the conversation and wanders over. 

“Can you believe her?” You ask Rose, indicating Veronica.

“You really do look different today,” Rose says. 

You sigh dramatically, but really you’re excited to show off. “Fine, I’ll show you.” You look out the window to make sure no customers are coming, then you stick three fingers in the collar of your shirt and pull it down. They both gasp and raise their eyebrows.

“Jesus Christ! Was he trying to devour you?” Veronica says.

“Something like that,” you reply. You can’t help but smile as you pat your collar back into place. “Isn’t that what boyfriends do?”

“Boyfriend!” Rose exclaims. 

“We had the talk Saturday night.”

“That’s so exciting!” Rose trills. Veronica seems less stoked.

“What’s up with you, sourpuss? You were pushing me to take the next step.” 

“Yeah,” Veronica says, “I said let him fuck you, not maul you.” 

“Tomato, To-mah-to.” You shrug. They both laugh but Veronica’s smile doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

When you get home your apartment feels empty. You wish Corey was coming to hang out. You unlock your phone and pull up your text conversation with him, thumb hovering to type. It would be so easy to ask him to come over when he gets off work, you know he would say yes. But you were the one to ask for alone time, and it was a good instinct, no matter how badly you want to defy it. You stand in your bedroom door and toss your phone onto your bed. Out of sight, out of mind. Then you put a record on, cranking the volume, and sit down at the dining table in front of your sewing machine. You’ve got shit to do. 

You hunch over a massively full skirt that needs to be taken up a couple inches, fucking with the way you fold the new hem until it lies flat and smooth, handing yourself pins from a bundle you hold between your teeth. You get halfway around before side A of the record ends. For side B you switch to reinforcing the inner thighs of a pair of pants that have started to wear thin. You do a task for the length of a side for several albums before you realize it’s dinner time and you’re starving. 

There’s leftover pizza from last night. By some miracle not all of it had fallen into the bottomless pit of Corey’s stomach. He reminds you of a dog your parents rescued when you were a kid. Her previous owners had starved her, and she was weird about food for the rest of her life. He hasn’t gotten much larger, but Corey seems much denser now than when you first met him. Like he started made out of pine and now he’s solid oak. 

God, do you wish he was here right now. While the pizza is in your toaster oven you go get your phone. Your most recent notification is a text from him from an hour ago.

It’s such a simple text but it floods your heart with affection.

After you reply to Corey, you scroll through your conversations until you find Veronica. You’re annoyed about how she reacted to the news that you’re in a relationship now. As the toaster oven timer dings you hit send. 

You curl up on the couch with your pizza and a can of cider. Since she’s already skeptical you know you can’t tell her the real story. She won’t take kindly to his jealousy, or the fact that he showed up to surprise you and then left without saying anything. 

Despite the angry expression, you know the emoji is her white flag. Sure enough another message comes through, and then another.

You stand on the slab of concrete that constitutes your back porch with him while he smokes a cigarette. He lets it dangle with the cherry facing the ground and you lean in to take a drag from it, pressing your lips to his palm and looking up to keep eye contact with him. You let the smoke out in a perfect ring that expands and floats towards him, framing his stunned face. 

He accidentally-on-purpose lets slip that he can do a wheelie on his motorcycle. Of course you have to see it. As terrifying as the idea of Corey doing something so dangerous is, it thrills you that he’s not scared, that he’s skillful (or stupid) enough to feel safe taking that risk. He puts his helmet on and you kiss his nose for luck before he flips his visor down. You stand on the gravel drive of your apartment building in just your socks, biting your thumb with anxiety as Corey rides down to one end of the street. He revs his engine, showing off, before starting towards you. With no hesitation he pops his front tire off the ground. He leans back further, and further, getting much more vertical than you expected. You can’t tell if you’re giggling or screaming. He maintains the wheelie all the way to the other end of the street. When he pulls back into the driveway you rush into his arms before he can even get his helmet off. 

Sometimes, in the mornings, you notice his hard cock pressed against your back and you want nothing more than to wake him up by grinding on it. You have to extract yourself from his arms, coiled around you and heavy with sleep. One particular morning you wake to find your top has rolled down in the night and one tit is completely out. Corey’s already awake and you know he’s seen it. You quiver thinking about him staring at your body while you slept. Did he touch you? Broad, strong hand cupping and squeezing, thumb brushing your nipple, while you were unaware? He’s a good boy, you know he would never… But you get wet imagining that he did. 

On nights he doesn’t stay over, you touch yourself to thoughts of him. Picturing what might happen if you got the courage to thrust your hips backwards against his morning wood. Or if he woke up to find both breasts popped out of your camisole. If you rolled your shirt down yourself after he fell asleep to make sure he had something to look at in the morning. Could he resist? You slide your sweatpants and underwear off, wishing your hands were his. If you made a move, which Corey would you get?  Sweet, awkward Corey, turning bright red when he feels how wet you are for him. Aggressive, confident Corey, laughing and making you taste yourself on his fingers. You rub your clit furiously, imagining how pretty his cock must be, how it would feel stuffing you full. You cram your fist in your mouth so your neighbors won’t hear you calling out his name when he’s not even there.

Yet as badly as you want him, you’re not sure you’re ready to cross that line with him. Not just sex, but making things more permanent, more real. You’ve never had a problem keeping casual sex casual, but you feel, almost fear, that with Corey it would mean something. You’ve been single so long and so tepid about dating, you can’t quite imagine yourself in a relationship. Not having sex keeps him at a comfortable distance. You can tell yourself you’re not falling for him, that even though you've been sickeningly infatuated with him since the moment you saw him, what's happening between you is just a thing, as long as he’s never been inside you.  

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Corey holds your bare feet in his lap. Today’s cultural education assignment is iconic music videos. This morning he could count on one hand the number of music videos he’d ever really seen. Now that number has nearly tripled. The next video you pull up has a warning before it, making you click a button saying you’re an adult. He only has to wonder why it could possibly have that warning for a few seconds. Grimy images of raw meat and butchered animals flash on the screen between shots of naked women.  

He tries to follow the lyrics and realizes the song is very explicitly about sex. Heat rises to his face from under his collar. You press your toes into his thigh rhythmically, in time with the beat that reminds Corey of a train chugging down the tracks, dangerously close to his slowly thickening cock. He tries to keep his eyes on the screen. You slide your right foot up higher on his leg and he grabs your ankle, still refusing to look at you. 

You wiggle your ankle free from his hand and put both feet on the back of the couch behind him instead. The skirt you’re wearing was already barely covering your panties, but with your legs up they’re totally exposed. He steals a glance out of the corner of his eye. He can see the outline of your lips through the fabric. He clears his throat. He wasn’t sure if you were teasing him on purpose, but the smile that cracks your face at the sound confirms it. The man singing in the music video is blindfolded and handcuffed to the ceiling. Corey’s now fully erect dick strains against his pants.

“They played this video on TV?” He asks you, voice coming out creaky.

“Heavily censored,” you say. “Do you know anything about the Manson Family murders?”

“Not really,” Corey says, turning in your direction and desperately trying to keep his eyes on your face, even as you pull your knees closer to your chest. 

Murders. A topic Corey can’t seem to escape. He always thought that Haddonfield was uniquely obsessed with death because of Michael, but since he left he’s realized people are like that everywhere. But with your Carrie tattoo, your soft spot for maligned creatures, and the way you hunted him down at the library, you’re the one person in the world he might actually want to hear say something about murder.

“In 1969, a cult killed a pregnant actress and three of her friends in her home in Beverly Hills. They totally botched it, they made a huge mess and they all got caught super quickly. But they used her blood to write on the walls. This album was recorded in that house like, a little more than 20 years later.” You put one foot on his shoulder and drag your toes lightly down his arm. 

He grabs your ankle again. He knows you’re playing a game with him, but he doesn’t know the rules. Do you want him to give in to you? To use your ankle in his hand to spread your legs open and place himself between them, pressing his face or the bulge in his pants against the crease in your underwear? He would do so in a heartbeat if you asked him to, but he’s scared to make the move without a clearer invitation. Or do you want him to resist you? 

“What did they write?” Corey asks, releasing your ankle.

“One word,” you say, placing your foot extremely deliberately on his boner and pressing down. “Pig.”

In spite of himself, Corey rocks his hips, pressing his cock against your foot. With surprising swiftness you bring your other foot down from the back of the couch, planting it underneath you, and pushing yourself up. You slip the foot in his lap over the outside of his thigh and end up straddling him. He looks up at you in awe for a second before you slam your lips into his, kissing him aggressively, violently, grinding down on him. Invitation received. 

He kisses you back, wrapping his arms around your waist. The way you feel rubbing against him, even through all those layers, is indescribable. His heart pounds. His breathing quickens. He has wanted you so badly since the first night you kissed, but he’s held himself back, letting you determine the pace of things, his respect for you and fear of pushing you away giving him strength when the curve of your neck or the touch of your hand makes him weak. 

Corey presses up against you as you grind down. The sound you make is the most gorgeous thing he’s ever heard. He swipes his tongue across your bottom lip. You open your mouth more and he slips his tongue in. You put your hands on his chest, digging your fingertips in, using his collarbones like handles. With the way you suck on his tongue he can’t help but imagine how you might suck something else, a first he longs to share with you. 

As if you read his mind, you start to slide backwards, sinking off his lap and towards the floor. He lets go of you, holding his hands out of your way as you rub your face on his chest and stomach on the way down. Corey expects you to kneel, parting his legs, pulling on his zipper. He swallows hard, anticipation building. But you never quite do what Corey expects, do you?

When you’re fully clear of his legs you stand, and back away from him, moving around the coffee table, a strange look on your face. He reaches out for you, and you let him clasp your hand for just a second before taking one more step back, out of his range. Confused and slightly hurt, he scoots to the edge of the couch and reaches for you again, with both hands this time. What are you doing? Did he take it too far? Wouldn’t you be saying something if he did? 

He holds your hands in his hands and opens his mouth to check in, but you take another step backwards, slipping out of his grasp again. You give him The Smile. Then you turn around and walk away. The Smile. Corey understands the rules of the game now. He springs from the couch and takes two long strides towards you, closing the distance almost completely. 

You quicken your pace to stay out of his grasp, and he quickens his to keep you in it. You jog into the kitchen, your movements hidden for a moment behind the wall. When he can see you again you’re on the other side of the kitchen island from him. You’re both still for a moment, each trying to determine which direction the other will go in. You break at the same time, but you successfully fake him out, making him take the long way around the island. You screech with laughter as you scamper away.

He’s faster than you and catches up to you as you go through the archway that separates the kitchen and the dining room. His speed doesn’t make up for your cunning, and you whip one of the dining chairs out from under the table and slide it in his direction without stopping. The obstacle slows him down just enough for him to whiff when he reaches out to grab you. You squeal at the near miss. He turns to go the other way around the dining table and comes within inches of catching you again in the other doorway. You change directions as you round the corner, tucking yourself into the book shelf that leans against the wall. Corey has too much momentum to respond to your maneuver, and loses precious time running back in the direction of the living room.

He looks behind him and you’re gone. He skids to a stop and smiles in spite of himself. You little vixen. He creeps back into the kitchen, peeking around the corner first. No sign of you. On tiptoe like a Scooby Doo character, he makes his way around the wall towards the dining room, certain you must be on the other side. You’re not there either. What the fuck? Corey thinks. Then he hears a door opening in the hallway. 

He follows the sound. The only problem is that he doesn’t know which door it was, he couldn’t tell from the dining room. He stands in the middle of the hallway, thinking. He heard a door open. He didn’t hear a door close. From where he stands, the bedroom and bathroom doors both look completely shut. He turns and strides back up the hallway to the closet. The door is ajar. He’s got you now.

Corey flings the door open, prepared to hear you shriek in playful surprise. There’s no sound. He squints into the darkness and doesn’t see you. Hmmm. He reaches into the closet for the light switch on the wall and you grab his hand, appearing in the doorway.

He grunts and jerks back in surprise. You howl with laughter as you pull him into your arms. 

“You should have seen your face!” You taunt him. 

He can’t help but laugh with you, feeling that same excitement he felt in the library, floored by the way you played him up until the last second. He wonders again if you could survive an encounter with Michael. Then he feels guilty. Despite everything, Corey still harbors a fondness for Michael, his crooked mentor, a man so beautifully, perfectly free from what others thought about him. But he’d kill Michael with his bare hands before he’d ever let your survival be a question. He tightens his arms around you protectively.

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“So! Have you done it yet?”

“Oh my god, Veronica, are we in high school?” You ask, taking a sip of your drink. Your favorite bartender is working tonight, and they made it extra strong. You’re gonna have to pace yourself and leave a big tip.

“You’re taking so long it seems like you are,” she teases.

“I think you have it backwards. I fucked way sooner than this in high school.”

“Wait, who did you fuck in high school?” Veronica leans forward on her bar stool. “How did I not know this?”

“You don’t remember Matthew, he was a senior when we were juniors? Played trombone?”

“Oh yeah!” Veronica’s eyes light up in recognition. “I remember you guys dating. He was cool. I didn’t know you fucked him though!”

You nod your head. “I snuck him in through my window like, 4 days after our first date.”

“You little harlot!” Veronica says, laughing. “So what’s the hold up with Corey?”

You think about the other day watching music videos with him. How you’d teased him, testing him, testing yourself. How you’d walked right up to the line, and been desperate to cross it, but you couldn’t quite make it there. You can’t explain it to Veronica. You can’t explain it to yourself. 

“We’re just going at our own pace,” you say finally, shrugging.

“A snail’s pace,” Veronica says. 

You blow a raspberry at her as you hop off your bar stool. You hold your hand out to her and she deposits a pair of foam ear plugs. The first band of the night is your favorite local act, and you wanna stand right up front against the stage. 

Outside the bar between bands, you lean against the wall, sharing a cigarette with Veronica. Neither of you really smokes, but sometimes after a couple of drinks a little nicotine buzz is nice. A couple of dudes approach. They’re both extremely standard issue punk dudes, from the rolled back brim of the shorter one’s baseball cap, down to the giant fiend skull tattoo on the taller one’s shin. 

“Can we get a light?” The shorter of the two asks. Veronica hands over her lighter. They light their cigarettes, and the taller one pockets it.

“I saw that,” Veronica says, poking Tall in the center of his chest, then making a gimme motion with her hand. 

“Oh sorry, bad habit,” he says, fishing the lighter back out. You don’t make eye contact with either of them, hoping they won’t feel invited to talk as they smoke. No such luck.

“Did you like the band that just played?” The shorter one asks.

“Yeah, we come out to see them all the time,” Veronica responds.

“Oh really?” They say in unison, then look at each other. “Nice,” Short adds.

“We’re actually in the touring band. We play third tonight,” Tall says.

You tune the conversation out. Veronica gets caught up flirting. She forgets to take the cigarette back from you so you finish it. You gather that the short one was assigned to you, he keeps looking over at you expectantly, saying “So…” You don’t engage. You just tap the burning end of the cigarette, now little more than a nub, against the bottom of your shoe and toss it into the trash can behind him. 

Something catches your eye across the street. In the darkness under the portico of a closed bank, you think you see someone standing with their arms crossed. You know it’s crazy, but the silhouette feels so familiar. The slope of the shoulders, the cloud of hair. There’s no way it’s Corey, but you feel like you know it is. You strain your eyes scanning for details. You glance at all the vehicles parked on the sides of the street, but you don’t see his motorcycle.

“What are you looking at?” Short asks, leaning over your shoulder to follow your gaze. 

“Nothing,” you mutter. “Just thinking about something.”

He opens his mouth to say something else, but you hear the next act taking the stage and turn away from him. You grab Veronica’s wrist to get her attention and you tilt your head towards the door.

“We’re going back inside now, nice to meet you!” Veronica says to Tall. You drag her away from them before they can say anything else. As you go through the door you look back at the bank, but you can’t see anything anymore. 

“Let’s leave after this band!” You shout into Veronica’s ear. 

“I wanted to see that guy’s band! He said they’re third!” She shouts back

“They’re gonna try to talk to us more!” You give her a pout that you hope conveys how you would rather eat glass than be stuck ignoring the shorter guy again. She rolls her eyes and you know you got through to her.

In the taxi home you call Corey. It goes to voicemail.

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“Hey! Show was lame, we left after two bands. It is… 10:33 right now. If you get this before 11:30 you should come over. If not, I’ll talk to you tomorrow…Okay. Bye.”

He gets your message at a gas station. After what he saw, he planned to ride all night, but he forgot to fuel up after work. He was tempted to keep going until he ran out, allowing himself to be stranded somewhere. But he knew the havoc that would wreak on his engine so, with some reluctance, he pulled into a station.

Who the fuck was that guy? When you’re out with Veronica is that what you do? Talk to guys? He’s watched you go home alone several times, followed your cab to make sure you were okay. But he’s never seen inside any of the places that you go, the bar windows are always blacked out or too foggy to see through. He feels stupid, gullible, impotent. The thought of going back to the bar and fucking that guy up crosses his mind. 

He flexes his hands, trying not to remember how it feels to knock out a tooth or crack a cheekbone. Doing his best to push away the images in his head of skin splitting, blood pouring. Yet even as he seethes, glowing green with envy, he’d rather lose you to some asshole than to his own destructive nature. He could never forgive himself if you got caught up in his bullshit like that. Like she did, he tries not to think.

He wants to ignore you. To act like he didn’t get the voicemail until the morning. But as he waits to turn out of the parking lot, he thinks about your voice. Didn’t you sound warm when you said “you should come over”? Didn’t you pause a long time before you said goodbye, like there was something else you wanted to add? With a sigh he turns out of the lot and rides toward your apartment.

When he gets there he bangs on the door. He doesn’t mean to knock so hard, but he’s so wound up. He practically falls inside when it swings open.

“Corey!” You exclaim in surprise. He brushes past you and paces around the living room. You stand there watching him for a moment. Then you take a step to interfere with the path of his pacing, cutting him off between the coffee table and the couch. “Hey! What’s going on?”

He turns and goes back the other way. “The show was lame, huh?” He says in a gruff voice. 

“Yeah. I mean, the hometown boys were good, they always are. But I didn’t wanna stick around for the touring acts. Are you okay? What’s going on?” You follow him around the living room with your gaze. When he gets close to you, you step in front of him again. “Corey?”

He starts to turn away from you, then stops. He hovers, hesitating, stuck between walking away and turning back to face you. Wanting to ask but not wanting to know. Afraid to out himself as following you.

“What are we?” He finally asks, looking at you in his peripheral vision. You try to put your hand on his face but he flinches away, finally deciding to turn and resume pacing. 

“I don’t know,” you say quietly.

“Am I your boyfriend?” He asks, facing away from you.

“I… Do you want to be?”

A dark chuckle bubbles from his lips. “Are you talking to anyone else?”

“Not at all!”

“What about tonight?” Fuck it, he thinks. Might as well.

“Tonight?” You sound genuinely confused. Then you remember. “Oh… I thought I saw you! Across the street at the bank! What were you doing over there?”

“I wanted to surprise you.” He comes up with the lie as it leaves his mouth, chickening out of confessing at the last second. “To come to a show, finally join you on a night out. But then I saw you talking to that guy…”

You laugh out loud. It feels worse than if you’d slapped him in the face. He spins around to face you, angry and wounded. He opens his mouth to speak again but you cut him off.

“Corey, I was doing my best to get away from that guy. Veronica was flirting with his friend. They thought they could have one each, but I barely said a word to him. I made Veronica fucking leave early because I knew he was gonna try to talk to me again, and I didn’t even wanna have to let him down easy. I just wanted to see you.” You come to him and put a hand on his chest. He lets you touch him this time, but he still doesn’t look you in the eye. He wants to believe you so bad.

“How do I know?”

“I offered to keep the shampoo you like in my shower, Corey. You sleep in my bed like, three nights a week.” He finally looks at you. Your face holds a mix of emotions he can’t quiet parse. Pleading and amusement and… understanding? “I know that maybe doesn’t help. I lived with someone who was unfaithful. His shower was full of my shit. But I promise you, there isn’t anyone else. I only want you.”

He takes your face in his hands. “Tell me again.”

“I only want you, Corey. Just you.” 

Your face still sandwiched between his palms, he pulls you in to kiss you. He doesn’t understand how he’s feeling. He’s a bow, fully drawn, straining to let go and make the shot. He shakes from the adrenaline he has no use for.

“Am I your boyfriend?” He asks again. The sound of his own voice surprises him. He sounds needy, almost like he’s begging. It’s embarrassing but it’s honest. He is needy. He needs to hear you say it. Twice isn’t enough. “Am I yours?”

“You’re mine. You’re mine and I’m yours.”

Without thinking, he takes your bottom lip between his teeth and bites you gently. Your hand on his chest turns into a fist, grasping his shirt, and you make a small humming sound. Your reaction spurs Corey on, and he kisses and nibbles you ravenously.

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You know it’s fucked up to enjoy Corey’s jealousy. You shouldn’t get any pleasure from someone else being upset, especially not the precious, volatile man you find yourself falling for. Can you even rightly say you care for someone if you find joy in emotions that bring them pain? And it doesn’t escape your notice that his jealousy is a huge red flag. He shouldn’t feel so possessive of you, least of all before you’d officially agreed to be exclusive. 

Still, it makes you swoon. It plays to your hard little cheated heart to be wanted so badly, wanted by someone you want too. Hearing him beg to be yours, you sense on some level it’s a demand as much as it’s a plea. It unlocks something inside you. It makes you feel wild. A heady combination of powerful and powerless. 

“What’s the hold up with Corey?” Veronica had asked. You didn’t have a satisfactory answer. Not for her and not really for yourself. You couldn’t put a name to the why . Some nebulous insecurity, a fear of being the second choice again, something cowering that you wouldn’t admit to yourself that you harbored. It doesn’t matter anymore. When it comes out of your mouth it becomes true. You’re mine and I’m yours. No more apprehension. You’re ready.

When he bites your lip, it’s such a surprise, you grab his shirt and a little groan escapes. You instantly feel a hot rush of wetness as your clit starts to throb. His hands move from your face to your waist, squeezing you and pulling you in as he kisses you, more voracious than you’ve ever seen him. You’re more than happy to let him eat you alive. You kiss back eagerly, using your fist full of his shirt to hold him close, closer.

He takes a step forward, keeping you pressed against him, but pushing you. He backs you across the living room to the couch, never taking his lips off you for more than a second, moving from your mouth to your jaw to your throat. His teeth scrape you tenderly and he presses his tongue against you like he wants to taste your blood through your skin. You feel the bright sting of hickies forming.

The couch hits the ditches of your knees and takes your feet out from under you. You squeal as you fall and Corey chuckles against your collar bone, coming down with you, landing on his knees with one leg between yours. He pushes that thigh forward, shoving your dress up around your hips. You accept his invitation, grinding into him, hard. With his hands he drops the straps of your dress off yours shoulders and the bodice slides down to reveal your tits. 

He cups them, just like you imagined, squeezing the softness, brushing your nipples with his thumbs. His hands are so warm and your nipples are so sensitive, you could drown in the flood it causes. He moves his mouth from your throat blossoming red and purple, back to your lips. You moan into his kiss. One of your hands runs through his hair, raking his scalp with your nails. Your other pushes his shirt up and explores his chest and back, enjoying his skin and gripping him for leverage to assist your aggressive grinding. You feel his cock on your leg through his pants and try to position yourself so your thigh rubs against it. You know you’re successful by the way he whimpers your name.

Corey’s whining sends a new wave of arousal crashing over you. Both of your hands fly to the waistband of his jeans. You need him out of these pants, now . You yank them off his hips and his boner pops over the top, his boxers stuck to the head in the center of a giant wet spot. You try to wrap your fingers around his shaft but he catches your hand and pins it next to your head.

“Not yet,” he breathes in your ear, sending a pleasant shiver down your spine. Then he backs off completely, letting go of you and standing up. Your hands follow him, trying to bring him back, but he’s just out of your grasp. He hurriedly takes off his shoes, his jeans, then his flannel and t-shirt, leaving him in just his boxers. You drink in the sight of him, his broad shoulders flecked with freckles, his scars, the little patch of red hair between his pecs, his flushed face. God, he’s gorgeous, you think as your pussy clenches. 

He sinks to his knees. You sit up and slide forward on the couch, planting one foot on either side of him. He looks up at you, his brown eyes full of wonder. He takes the hem of your dress in his hands and you raise your arms over your head, allowing him to pull it off you. He presses his face to your chest, chin nestled between your breasts.

“I haven’t done this very many times,” he whispers hoarsely. 

You drop your head so your mouth is right next to his ear. “We can fix that,” you purr. He smiles against your skin before going back to devouring you, placing open mouth kisses on your face, your shoulders, your chest, your tits. You use your legs to keep him pinned to you and drag your nails up and down his back, leaving long red welts. His fingertips dig into your thighs. He mumbles something through his kisses. 

“What?” You ask, pushing him away just enough to be understood.

“Can I touch you?” He drags a finger along your inner thigh to show you what he means. His pupils are enormous. 

You nod enthusiastically. “Please.” You lift your hips off the couch and Corey peels your panties off you, dropping them to the floor. Your clit aches, you need him to touch you so badly. But you’re still not prepared for when he does. The dry spell has been long, and you’re not sure you’ve ever been with anyone you liked as much as you like Corey. He places his whole hand over your vulva. Just the sensation of his skin against yours makes you gasp and sigh. He spreads his fingers, spreading you apart with them, opening you up. The cold air hits your exposed wetness and makes you shiver. Then he slips a finger between your lips.

“Holy shit,” he groans, feeling the way you’re drenched for him. He slides his finger up and down, all the way from your hole to the top of your slit a few times before landing on your swollen clit. He rubs you with a skill that makes you suspicious of his claim to be inexperienced. “Is this good?” He asks, fingertip circling.

Is this good? You almost laugh at the question. As if the way you’re practically sobbing isn’t enough for him to know. “It’s so good,” you manage to squeak out. You’re getting close, breathing heavier and heavier as the pleasure builds up in the space behind your clit. 

You lean forward, pressing your forehead against his, both hands in his hair. You can’t help yourself, you pull it a little as you writhe against his hand, and he seems to like it. You pull harder, trying to confirm and distract yourself, delaying your orgasm just a little longer. But the sound he makes when you yank on his curls, guttural and whiny at the same time, does you in. You moan his name as you cum, head thrown back, thighs involuntarily clamping closed on his hand, whole body shaking. 

You keep his hand pinned for a few seconds after you cum. You look into each other’s eyes. Corey looks so awestruck you can’t help but giggle. The instant you let go of his hand he’s pushing you, guiding you to lay on your back as he climbs onto the couch, kissing you ferociously. Still in his precum soaked boxers, he lines himself up and rubs his cock against you through the fabric. It feels good but it frustrates you. You need to feel his skin, you need to feel him inside you. 

When he moves his lips away from yours to take a breath you put a hand on his chest, preventing him from leaning back down. “Fuck me, Corey,” you say. Your voice echoes his from earlier, that combination of begging and commanding. 

“Yeah?” He asks breathlessly.

You nod your head and reach down with the hand not on his chest to pull his boxers down. He leans back and lets you sit up so you can remove them more easily. You finally get your first glimpse of his cock. It’s just as pretty as the rest of him, pink and glistening, perfectly proportioned as if carved by an artist, gently curving back towards stomach. His reddish brown pubes are curly and luxuriously dense like the hair on his head. You let out a little sound of appreciation. You can see it get to him, embarrassing him at first, then giving him confidence. He smiles a cocky little smile.

He moves his hips so the head of his cock just brushes your sensitive labia before sliding between them. He rubs his length up and down on the outside. It feels incredible. The soft slickness of his shaft is glorious, but waiting is agonizing. Just as you're about to ask again, getting desperate, he slips it in. Both of you moan at the sensation. He pauses with just the tip inside, then sinks all the way into you. He’s the perfect size, stretching you just right, hitting the depth you love. Like you were made for each other. 

Corey thrusts slowly, looking down at you with his eyebrows pinched together. You can tell from his facial expression that he won’t last long, but the way he’s made to hit that spot, you know you won’t either. You let your hands wander his body before coming together, fingers laced behind his head. You pull him down to kiss you. Kissing makes him thrust faster and you wind your legs around him to keep him from slipping out in his haste.

“You feel so good, Corey,” You moan in his ear. He grunts and tries to reply but it comes out unintelligible. His pink face looks almost pained. He slows his pace back down, but he increases the force of each thrust, resting more of his weight on you. He’s not the biggest man in the world, but he’s so heavy. You feel like if he wanted to he could squish you like a bug. He pounds you into the couch. Oh, fuck. Your mind goes blank, no thoughts at all, just the sensation of him hammering, right there. It’s too good to resist. You cum again, grabbing his biceps on either side of you and digging your nails in, thrashing underneath him and crying out.

Then suddenly there’s nothing inside you, and with a whimper from Corey, you feel something hot and wet land on your stomach. He collapses on top of you, panting. You hold each other for a few minutes, bodies weak and tingling from how hard you came.

“Sorry I pulled out without warning you,” he groans. “I didn’t know what you’d be okay with and I didn’t have time to ask.”

“Thank you. I appreciate that you thought about that,” you tell him. It’s a small thing, just basic respect really, but something so lacking in other people you’ve been with that it touches you. “I’m on the pill though, so you can finish wherever you want. Next time.” Next time.  

So far you’ve mostly tried to avoid touching him. He seems to get so flustered when you do. You can tell he must be touch starved, and to be honest, you are too. The brief hugs you sometimes get from your coworkers don’t do much to fill your needs. You often find yourself sitting on your hands to avoid reaching out to Corey. Every time he comes over it’s harder not to. 

You bite your lip, thinking about all the ways you could touch him and how overwhelmed he would be. You think about his hands, strong and deft from his work, pinky always sporting that ring, and the way that, despite having a dirty job, his nails are always clean. Now you’re the one blushing. Trying not to imagine anything too intense while he’s right there and the temptation to jump on him is overwhelming.

“Turn the water on?” He asks. His voice startles you from your reverie. You reach over and turn the faucet on. “Okay, off. No more leaks.” He slowly extracts himself from the cabinet and stands. You smile at him and he smiles back. For the first time since you met him, he doesn’t hesitate or look embarrassed to smile, he just does it. It makes your heart pound in your chest so hard you feel like he must be able to hear it.

“Now I’m gonna replace the aerator,” he says, digging in a bag from the hardware store he’d brought with him. You watch him silently as he completes the simple process of removing the old aerator and attaching the new one. It takes him less than a minute.

“I think I coulda done that,” you say in a joking tone.

“Yeah, you could,” he says, shrugging. He washes his hands, then reaches over you to dry them on the towel hanging from the rack on the wall. The proximity is too much to handle. As he drops the towel you catch his left hand in both of yours. You look up into his face for his reaction. He looks back at you uncertainly, lips pursed and eyes searching. But he doesn’t pull away.

You rotate his hand so it’s palm up. You spread his fingers wide. You put one hand underneath his, and use the fingertips on the other to trace the lines where his hand bends. He lets out a little shuddering breath. You look at the big, long scar across the center of his palm, ghostly white. The scar tissue feels thick and knobby as you trace it with your nail. You look from the scar on his palm to the scar on his neck. This is the closest you’ve ever been to it. Still holding his left hand in your right, you grab his chin lightly with your left hand and tilt his head back. He swallows hard, Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat.

“Is this okay?” You whisper, scared the full volume of your voice might overwhelm him. He doesn’t answer. “Is it okay?” You ask again.

“Yes,” he whimpers.

You lean closer to look at the scar. He’s scruffy like he hasn’t shaved in a day or two, but no little golden orange hairs protrude from the warped skin in this spot. You try to imagine the wound that could have caused it. It must have been severe. You don’t understand how he could even survive something like that, a thought that makes your eyes burn. You lower his chin and slide your hand up to cup his cheek. His eyes are squeezed closed. You start to pull away, worrying you’ve gone too far, but his free hand shoots up and grabs you, keeping your palm pressed to his prickly cheek.

“Corey,” you exhale. He makes a small noise in acknowledgement and opens his eyes. His eyelashes are wet and his cheeks are flushed red. You tilt towards him so your forehead touches the bridge of his nose. The two of you stay like that for a long moment, both trying to process this new intimacy.

Then he turns his head and leans forward, angling his jaw towards you so your lips are almost touching. Time swells and slows as you wait for him to close the gap. It’s agony, and it’s ecstasy. You can feel your pulse in your whole body. Finally the distance closes, and you kiss him. 

The kiss is chaste, mouths closed, touching lightly. But his lips are so soft and warm, and you’ve wanted this so badly, you feel a hot flush between your legs. He tightens his grip on your hand on his face. 

You want so much more from him. You want to devour him. This boy who is so soft despite something so violent happening to him. You still don’t know what, and at this moment you don’t know if you could bear to. All you want is to make him a part of you so that some of his pain might be diluted. And some of yours too. You stay still as a stone, not daring to kiss him with more passion unless he invites it. God, do you wish he would invite it. 

Instead he pulls away. He drops your hands and steps back from you, clearing his throat like he did under the sink. His nervous tell.

“Corey?” 

“I, uh… I just…” He furrows his brow in frustration. “Nobody has… I haven’t…” He looks at you pleadingly.

“First time in a long time?” You prompt, trying to sound gentle.

“Yeah, and since…” he trails off. 

You nod. You don’t understand completely, but you understand enough. “Me too,” you say quietly.

He looks at you with gratitude in his eyes. He smiles a shy little smile and steps close to you again, so close his hips are against your knees, thighs pressing your calves into the cabinet. You spread your legs apart a little and he falls between them. You think he’s going to kiss you again, but instead he wraps his arms around you and buries his face in your neck. You return his embrace, arms encircling his shoulders. One hand finds his hair and you twist a little ringlet around your finger.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

When Corey leaves your place, he’s still a little shaky. In his miserable little existence, no one ever touches him on purpose. He has so little experience with tenderness, he’s unsure how to receive it. No one has ever touched his scars. It was overwhelming. It was terrifying. It was exhilarating. As he zips through town back to his shitty little studio apartment, all those messy feelings consolidate into something simple. Desire for you.

Corey’s experience is extremely limited. So much so that he can remember every detail of every incident. His mother’s fear of having someone take her baby boy away had ruined his hopes of dating anyone seriously all through high school, but there were times he’d snuck out to parties at classmate’s houses. A girl from English, or Gym might be there, might be intrigued by the quiet guy from school. Maybe she would make out with him in her parents’ car. 

It happened with Tessa, junior year, and she passed him a note in the hallway the next day. At lunch, instead of the cafeteria they went to the gym and hid under the bleachers. They messed around but Corey was too nervous to really enjoy it. Then she asked him if they could hang out outside of school sometime. 

Corey knew how that would end. Momma’s reaction when Lauren had come over to do school work in 9th grade had been awful. He didn’t even want to imagine what she would do if he hung out with a girl without an academic excuse. So as badly as it hurt, he pretended not to be interested in her anymore. He just stared at the back of her head while they read Hamlet and thought I’m sorry, Tessa over and over again. 

During his stint at Haddonfield Community College there was Leigh. He’d see her around the building sometimes, sitting together in the cafeteria while he ate the shitty little lunch Momma had packed him. He’d been to her apartment to hook up once when he arrived at Public Speaking to find it canceled. The prof had some kind of emergency. It was hours before his next class and he certainly didn’t want to go home. Leigh found him after she was done for the day and invited him to come hang out with her. Corey never heard from her again after Halloween 2019. 

Then there was his one night with Allyson.

That night was the first time Corey had felt like sex was fun. Like he could crave someone and mean it, rather than just fulfilling a biological imperative. Like his mind and his heart and his cock could all agree. He expected that he’d never feel that way again. 

But now his veins buzz under his skin, still full of your electricity. He’d held back when he was kissing you, letting fear and grief mingle with his growing appetite, only to immediately regret it. It takes all his strength not to turn his bike around and go back to you.

As he unlocks his door, there’s already a wet spot on his pants. He enters the apartment and kicks the door closed, hands preoccupied with undoing his belt. He tugs his pants and underwear off as he slips out of his shoes, leaving it all in a pile by the door. He grips himself and shudders, imagining your hand instead. Sprawling on his mattress on the floor, Corey desperately fucks his hand. Waves of pleasure roll over him and he whimpers your name into the dark apartment. He puts his free hand on the back of his head where you had rested yours earlier, and pulls a fistful of his own hair. His breath catches in his chest, quiet little grunts escaping his lips. He calls out to you again as he cums, hot strings of ejaculate spraying onto the shirt he was too hurried to take off and covering his hand. It’s been so long since he came and didn’t feel embarrassed by his own needs, all he can do is lay there spent, picturing your face.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

The morning after your first kiss with Corey you’re still flustered. You brush your teeth and admire the clean, smooth flow of the water thanks to the new aerator he installed. You hadn’t thought such a small thing would make a big difference, but he was right, it did.

You relive the sensations in your head. The stubble on his cheek under your hand. The heat of his lips. You sigh dreamily and practically float out to your car.

You open the store without Veronica today, so you have time to collect yourself before she reads you and demands all the details. Of course, when she arrives three hours later, you still haven’t come down. Every moment not spent helping a customer has been consumed by thoughts of him. You haven’t agreed on another time to hang out yet, and it gives you a pang to wonder how long it will be until you get to kiss him again. Kiss him harder and deeper. How long until he finds his footing and isn’t so overwhelmed by touch. You feel like if you fucked him now, it would kill him.

“You had a good night last night,” Veronica says as soon as she sees you.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Your protests mean nothing because you can’t keep your dopey smile off your face.

“Sure you don’t.”

Your phone vibrates in your pocket. You pull it out and see a text from Corey.

No question mark, no please. A command. You turn to face the window and see his broad shoulders and curly hair in silhouette against the midday light. He has his back to you. Your jaw drops in surprise.

Veronica looks from your face, to your phone, to the window. “Is that him!?” She hisses. You say nothing, you just tilt your phone towards her so she can see the text. “Well stop just standing there! Go outside!” She chides giddily.

“Clock me out. I’m taking my break early,” you say in a small voice. You stuff your phone back into your pocket and head for the door.

Corey looks up when he hears the bell on the door jingle. The brightness outside hurts your eyes and you scrunch up your face. But through your squint you see him smile at you. A hungry smile you’ve never seen on his face before. Without saying anything to you he sweeps you into his arms and kisses you, hard. 

You swoon, melting into him, kissing back. He squeezes you tighter. One arm around your waist, the other aligned with your spine, hand holding the back of your head. He dips you down, like in a movie, so you’re almost parallel to the ground. You wrap your arms around his neck for stability, though you feel confident he won’t drop you. He kisses one cheek, then the other, then your lips again, mouth slightly open. You relish your first small taste of him and you feel a creeping warmth between your legs. Out here on the sidewalk in front of God and all your coworkers watching through the window, your pussy is soaked. He kisses you one more time, more softly, before standing you back upright.

You look at him in disbelief. This is not the timid Corey you kissed gingerly in the bathroom yesterday evening. Just a few hours ago you felt like having sex with this boy would kill him. Now you feel like it might kill you . And you would die happy. 

“Hi,” he says, almost nonchalant.

“Hi,” you laugh.

“Are you busy?”

“No, I took my break to come out here. I have an hour. What’s up?

“I have the day off and I didn’t want to wait to kiss you again,” he says in a gruff voice. You try to keep a cool exterior but a giggle emerges against your will. Corey looks at you with that hungry look again.

“Scoundrel,” you tease, and he seems pleased by it. “Want lunch?”

The two of you cross the street to the cafe and get sandwiches and Italian sodas. Corey suggests eating in the privacy of your car, and you oblige. As you eat, you watch him. He seems so different from the shy boy from your previous interactions.

“You’re so weird,” you say to him. “Like a whole different person from yesterday. Who are you?”

He doesn’t answer, he just smirks at you from around his straw, draining his soda.

You reach across the center console to touch him, wanting to watch his reaction to casual contact, see him blush or hear him clear his throat. Instead he grabs your wrist with a gentle grasp. He rotates your hand so it’s palm up and spreads your fingers, mirroring the way you looked at his hand yesterday. He shows no signs of being nervous or overwhelmed.

“I didn’t know you had a tattoo,” he says, rubbing the pale smoothness of the inside of your arm. 

Outside the car winter is slipping away. 15 minutes of spring before the sweltering south Georgia summer starts. You realize Corey’s only ever seen you covered up, in long sleeves and jeans or tights. 

“You think I only have one?” You quip. He raises an eyebrow.

“Tell me about this one.”

“It’s Carrie,” you say simply.

“Carrie?”

“Yeah, Carrie White. From Stephen King’s Carrie.” You watch his face, waiting for a look of recognition, but none comes. “Wait, you don’t know about Carrie?”

He shakes his head.

“Well we have to watch it! It was a book first, and there’s three film versions, but we’ll start with the one from ’76, cause it’s the like, definitive version. It’s a horror story about a girl who gets psychic powers when she gets her first period.”

“Is that scary?” He asks, looking up from the tattoo to your face.

“It’s scary for her,” you explain. You return his gaze. His eyes look like two pools of honey in the sunlight coming through the windows. “There’s a lot more going on than that, but you’ll just have to wait until we watch it.”

“Tonight?” He asks.

“Tonight.”

When you walk back into work, five minutes late because it was so hard to make yourself stop kissing him when he had you pressed against the door of your car in the gentle warmth of the sun, Veronica starts clapping. She leads your coworkers in a round of applause. A few customers join in, hesitant and confused. You bow and curtsey sarcastically as you walk through the store and clock back in.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Corey leans against your car and watches you walk back to the store. He catches himself leering at you, getting absorbed in the swivel of your hips as you traverse the parking lot, the way your skirt swishes. He feels good. Actually good. Not good until he gets home and has to deal with Momma, not good until someone rolls their window down to yell fucking psycho! at him. Just good. 

He kills time waiting for you to get off work by fiddling with an antique radio in the garage under his apartment, then he stops at the grocery store to buy you a bouquet of flowers on his way to your apartment. He’s leaning against his motorcycle in your drive, cradling the flowers in the crook of his arm when you get home from work. He makes eye contact with you through the windshield. You make an exaggerated shocked face that makes him chuckle.

“Pour moi!?” You squeal as you walk around the front of the car. Corey wraps you in the best hug he can without crushing your gift and kisses your cheek. “You are becoming quite the romance novel hero, sir.”

His face burns hearing that. His confident spell doesn’t insulate him completely, and the words romance and sir hit like a blast from a double barrel shotgun. He clears his throat.

You don’t have a vase for your flowers, so you trim the stems and wash out an old jar while Corey monitors a bag of popcorn in the microwave. When the popping slows he pulls the bag and follows you into the living room. 

The two of you haven’t watched a movie together yet, and it feels like a big milestone. He’s never watched a movie with a girl at all, never pretended to yawn so he had an excuse to put his arm around her. But you don’t make him need to pretend to yawn. When you sit down on the couch  you sit so close to him the only comfortable place for his arm is your shoulders.

As you settle against him, he suddenly feels extremely apprehensive, all the gaiety from earlier in the day evaporating. He hasn’t watched a horror movie since The Thing with Jeremy the night of the accident. He remembers clearly how he had been surprised the movie scared him, the way unease had crept into his chest and refused to leave. A powerful omen for the rest of the night, and the rest of his life. Despite all the things he’s seen and done in the intervening years, he’s not sure he’ll have any more nerve watching this. 

And what if…?  There’s no conclusion to the thought. Corey isn’t afraid of anything specific, he just wants you to be safe, and watching a horror movie with him seems very dangerous.

“Are you ready?” You ask, turning to look at him.

“Y-yeah,” he says. He tries to arrange his face into a look of confidence, but you don’t seem to buy it.

“Okay…” You turn back to the TV. “Subtitles?”

“Uh, sure, if you want them.” His heart races and he can feel color coming to his cheeks. He shouldn’t be doing this. He shouldn’t be here. Accepting an invitation into your life was a mistake. Showing up to your job today, being seen by your coworkers, a horrible decision made by thinking with the wrong head. What if someone recognized him and told you who he was? Watching you navigate the settings menu to turn captions on, each button click feels like a timer counting down. He can still leave, he can still come up with an excuse to go home, he can still break your heart before either of you get too attached, break it so bad you’ll never ever call him again. 

But now you’re pressing play, dropping a piece of popcorn into your mouth. It’s too late.

He holds his breath as the first moments of the movie unravel on screen. You rotate to look at him again, a confused and concerned look on your face. He smiles at you weakly. You smile back, but it isn’t The Smile, it’s small and tight and suspicious. Your eyes search his face a second longer before you turn back to the movie. He exhales, trying not to let the breath audibly shudder. 

In spite of himself, Corey becomes engrossed almost immediately. He doesn’t relax, jumping when the lights burst in the locker room on screen, earning him another brief, questioning look from you, but he does settle into the story and the sense of dread he feels. 

Every moment of torment Carrie experiences feels like it cuts him and pours salt in the wounds. When Mrs. White is on screen he grits his teeth hard enough to hurt. As Carrie and Tommy dance, Corey’s eyes burn. He wants to turn the movie off, to pretend he can’t predict what’s coming. But he doesn’t move or say anything to you. He keeps his eyes glued to the screen as the bucket falls and the massacre ensues. He sees himself bringing vengeance on Haddonfield. The students trapped in the gym burning alive the way he had burned Terry Tramer. Every knife plunged into Margaret White’s torso vibrating in his hand, remembering how it felt to kill his own mother. Carrie falling down the stairs, stabbed and betrayed, feels exactly like crashing over the bannister when Laurie shot him. 

As the credits roll and you stir beside him, Corey is still reliving that Halloween night. His emotions swing wildly. Rage. Grief. Disgust. Joy. Sweat beads his forehead and a single tear rolls down his cheek. You turn to face him and slide away to see him better. He doesn’t notice you. His gaze stays on the TV, where the credits end and the playback menu returns, not really seeing any of it. His eyes look almost black.

“Corey?” You whisper, reaching out to wipe the tear from his cheek. When your thumb makes contact with his skin his eyes shoot to your face. He looks at you without seeing you either for a breath. Then he softens, returning to your living room, taking in your scared face and feeling your hand still touching him gingerly. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. No. Uh, the movie…” He stammers. He wants to tell you. He’s desperate to come clean about everything. Tell you the whole sad, violent story of his life. The words bubble up and he almost lets them out. I killed someone on accident. Then I killed nine more people on purpose. It was almost 10 more, but I didn’t die. You love Carrie, can you love me? But he chokes on it. “The movie really resonated with me.”

“Do you wanna talk about it?” You ask.

“Tell me why you got the tattoo,” he says instead of answering.

“Oh! Uh… I really identify with her. She goes through all that shit and she just wants to feel like she belongs. And then she finally gets a chance and everyone else ruins it for their own bullshit. They back her into a corner. She’s like an animal in a trap. She does what she has to do. It sucks so bad, nothing that happens to her had to happen. But what she did to them did have to.”

Corey hangs on your words. He can’t believe his ears. 

“Nothing as serious as what happens to her has ever happened to me but… I’ve been too nice before. It doesn’t work. I got her to remind me to do what I have to do.”

“I love that,” he says, reaching for your arm so he can examine the tattoo again. It’s an abstraction of Carrie, and in a way so is he. He’s flooded with warped validation. She does what she has to do. And so did I. Corey hasn’t ever felt bad about most of the people whose deaths he caused. He felt bad about Jeremy, certainly. A little bad about Ronald, he was an okay stepdad, and Corey had been on the fence about killing him before Terry did it for him. And he felt horrible about Allyson. But he’s never felt a solitary second of grief for Terry, or Dr. Mathis, or any of those fucks, and especially not about Momma. They all got what they fucking deserved. 

In his heart, he desperately wanted to be a good boy. His whole life, he tried so fucking hard. But nobody else ever tried at all. Why should they get away with making everybody else fucking miserable?

“You’re so fucking special, you should never let anybody push you around.” Corey leans down to plant a kiss on the tattoo.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

It has been a wild 24 hours with Corey. You’ve been hanging out with him for a little over two weeks, but you feel like in the last day you’ve gone through more with him than in the previous 14 combined. He is so fucking weird. You don’t know how to process his behavior at all. But you like it. You like him and you can’t deny it, even as you struggle to get a read on him. And he thinks you’re special. 

You want to know everything about him, to crawl inside him and take a look around. Last night you thought you couldn’t bear to know how he got his scars, but now that knowledge feels supremely urgent.

“Tell me about this,” you say, tracing the area of his scar on your own neck. 

His face turns to stone. “I… was stabbed,” he says quietly. 

Your eyes immediately flood with tears and you look up at the ceiling to keep them from falling. “Can I ask how? Or… by who?” Your voice is barely a whisper.

Corey doesn’t answer. Instead he shrugs out of his flannel, and takes off the henley he wears underneath. You watch in confusion. Then you see. Two little puckered ovals of scar tissue just below his left clavicle. He takes your hand and puts it on his chest, so your fingertips rest on the scars. You rub them, feeling how different the texture is from the unblemished skin around them.

“Gunshots?” You ask, voice strained. 

He still doesn’t say anything. You search his face for an answer. He takes your hand again and brings it to the nape of his neck. You have to scoot closer to him to reach. He directs your hand up and down, fingers just barely brushing along his spine. More scars, tiny ones, almost imperceptible by touch.

“Are you scared?” He asks.

“Of what?”

“Of me.”

“Not at all. I’m sad that that happened to you, whatever it was. But I’m happy you survived it. And that I found you.”

His cold expression changes. Corey smiles. You can’t help but smile back. You’re not sure who starts first, but both of you laugh. Giggles turn into chuckles, turn into cackles. Heaving laughter shakes your whole body. You and Corey cling to each other, hysterical. You try to stop, biting your lip and taking big, measured breaths, but when you look at his ecstatic face, eyes crinkled and cheeks dimpled, you start again. Your abs cramp and tears stream down your face. 

Finally you settle down. Chests rising in unison, exhausted, foreheads on each other’s shoulders. Your lips line up with the scars he didn’t confirm are bullet holes. You kiss them tenderly, then turn your face towards his and kiss his cheek. 

“I’m happy you found me, too,” he says. He pulls you closer, practically into his lap, and hugs you tightly. 

Corey stays the night. You don’t mean to ask him to, but when he starts to move towards the door it slips out.

“I don’t want you to go.”

He sits in the bathroom and watches you do your nightly routine. You kick him out to change into a camisole and sweatpants, and you show him some of the other tattoos decorating your bare arms. When he crawls into bed with you he takes his shirt back off but keeps his pants on. You want to stay up talking to him, but he falls asleep before you, wrapped around you in big spoon position. When his breathing slows and he stops responding, you smile and drift off to sleep yourself.

The last time you had seen him was at the end of that summer, after spending the majority of the long, hot days with him. Sometimes with other friends, sometimes alone. Swimming in Lover's Lake. Smoking weed in his bedroom, taking shrooms in the woods. Sitting in the van with your bare feet on his dashboard while he made a quick deal to fund the rentals for a horror movie marathon. Sneaking him into your house while your mother was at aerobics class to play Atari with you in the basement. Laying on a beach towel, hair full of lemon juice and peroxide, basking in the sun on Gareth's driveway during band practice. A couple days before you had to leave for school, you hung out with Eddie for the last time, for who knew how long. Part of you worried it might be the last time ever, your fear of change gnawing at you, so you showed up at the trailer before he was even awake and spent the entire day with him, trying to make it perfect, doing all the you-and-Eddie things. 

Standing on your porch at the end of the night, Eddie jammed his hands into his pockets and shuffled his feet.

"Why do you gotta have dreams and shit, man? Going off to Chicago to be a hotshot and leaving your poor old buddy Munsie Edson in this fuckin’ dump," he said, referring to himself by the silly spoonerist nickname you gave him three years prior. 

"Maybe if poor old Munsie had done a book report or a worksheet now and then, he could be coming with me." 

You punched his shoulder playfully and he reached up and grabbed your wrist.

"Eddie, what are you -?" You'd started to ask, but before you could get your whole question out, he pulled you to him and kissed you. It was startling. It was chaste. It was brief. But it was also amazing, his warm plush lips sending a shockwave through your entire body. You would’ve slumped to the concrete if he hadn’t wound his other arm around your waist, the hand that grabbed your wrist still encircling it like a bracelet, surely able to feel the acceleration of your pulse. 

He pulled back and opened his mouth to say something else to you, brown eyes glistening under the porch light, just as your father opened the front door. 

“Ahem,” he cleared his throat. “It’s 11:01. You’re late.”

“Nope. I’ve been standing here since 10:55, Dad. Or is the porch not considered part of the house?” You glared at him through the screen door.

He said your name in a warning tone, but you waved him away.

“What are you gonna do? Ground me for two days before I leave?”

“Five more minutes. Or I’m calling the police to report a trespasser,” Dad said before ducking back into the dark living room and closing the front door.

“He’s standing right on the other side of the door, isn’t he?” Eddie asked.

“Probably,” you confirmed.

“Well… Call me when you get to Chicago. Good luck up there. Don’t forget about me.” He gave you a sad smile. You knew that wasn’t what he was originally going to say, but you didn’t feel comfortable pushing him to share, separated from your father by only the mesh of the screen door and two inches of wood. 

“I’m sorry, who are you?” you said instead. 

Eddie scoffed and rolled his eyes, then made his way down your front porch steps, heading towards his van, parked down the street to hide his presence from your parents, not that it had worked.

“Hey, wait!” you called after him. He stopped and turned to face you. “You better fuckin’ graduate this year. If you’re not in Chicago with me next fall, I’m gonna kick your ass.”

Eddie snapped his feet together, coming to attention. He raised a stiff hand to his forehead in a salute, before flipping you off and blowing a raspberry.

“Asshole!” You shouted. 

“That’s your favorite thing about me, Valley Girl!” he returned over his shoulder. Then he got in his van and drove away, music blaring. 

You stayed on the porch, hand to your lips. That damn nickname. You’d tried to get him to watch the movie with you so many times when it came out last year, thinking maybe if he saw it he would take the hint. He never agreed to get tickets or rent it, but he teased you relentlessly about how much you liked the movie, not knowing you liked it because it reminded you of you and him. You stood there until Eddie’s tail lights were gone and you couldn’t hear the squealing of guitars through his open windows anymore. 

You didn’t forget about Eddie, as if that was even a possibility. You called him a couple times a week, in the evenings when you needed a break from homework. You asked him once what he had intended to say that night on the porch, but all he'd given you was an unconvincing uh, I don't remember . You missed him desperately, and were intent on staying close to him. Then midterms came and you had to spend every waking moment studying, or reading, or writing 5,000 words about how Kant was a piece of shit. Things didn’t slow down as much as you hoped after midterms and you were embarrassed about how long it took you to call Eddie again, so you kept putting it off, getting more embarrassed every day. You knew it was stupid, and you knew he’d forgive you…eventually. 

You couldn’t make yourself do it. Couldn’t hold the receiver to your ear and hear his hurt as he told you the exact number of days since the last time you called him. Couldn’t listen to him explain his latest DnD campaign and picture him squatting on his chair like a gargoyle in a holey Mercyful Fate t-shirt. Couldn’t let his velvety voice and the faint sound of him plucking his unplugged guitar wash over you and make you tingly the way it always did, not when you’d been hooking up with a reedy-sounding philosophy major for two weeks.

That last thing played a bigger part than you would admit to yourself. Hindsight would soon make it excruciatingly obvious, but at the time you refused to feel the icky mixed feelings. Eddie had kissed you and then had some kind of declaration interrupted. There was really only one thing he could have wanted to say. Something you'd been hoping to hear him say forever. But he hadn't fuckin' graduated. He was in Hawkins and you were in Chicago, and he missed his chance to ask you to wait for him. You felt like you should move on, onto someone nearby, someone who understood college life. There was no shortage of punks and metalheads and other types of men your parents wouldn't approve of at the university. They were funny, smart, creative, and handsome, all things they had in common with him. Yet when you held them up against him, they paled in comparison every time. How could you ever give any of these guys a real chance with Eddie fucking Munson in your ear?

Your parents took you skiing for Christmas. You went to Florida with your girlfriends for spring break. At the end of your freshman year you were exhausted, completely over the whole college thing. It was a bad choice, a choice that ultimately led you to consider dropping out, but at the time it seemed like a good idea to take classes all summer and get your credits as quickly as humanly possible. You hadn't been back to Hawkins since you left in September of '84. 

By the spring of '86 you were officially classified as a junior, and one more summer of classes could’ve gotten you your diploma in three years instead of four. Even that felt way too long. As soon as you first thought about dropping out you knew in your heart you were going to, but you weren’t ready to admit it to yourself quite yet. You decided to take the summer off. Go home. Lie in your childhood bed in your underwear under the ceiling fan, eating popsicles all day. See if three months of relaxing could convince you to come back and earn that stupid fucking BFA.

On the last Sunday of the semester you plopped into the armchair next to the phone in the fourth floor common room. Finals made the place a ghost town, it was the first time you hadn’t had to wait to use the phone all semester. When you tried to think Eddie's number to yourself, it felt wrong, like maybe you had transposed it in your mind somehow, but your muscles remembered. You dialed the number effortlessly, the other side ringing before you even fully realized what your fingers were doing. 

“Munson residence,” a haggard voice with a Kentucky lilt answered.

“Hi, Uncle Wayne,” you said.

“Well, I’ll be damned. She lives.” 

While Eddie took it to much greater extremes than Wayne, there was no doubting where he got his biting sarcasm from.  

“She sure does. How have you been?”

“Same as ever I guess, ‘cept I’m shift supervisor at the plant now. How’s school?”

“That’s great, Wayne! School… Sucks, if I’m honest. But I’m coming home for the summer in a couple of days. That’s why I called. To see if Eddie –”

You stopped short, the screen door on the trailer banging closed over the phone. 

“Oh, sorry," you heard Eddie say. "I didn’t know you were on the phone.” 

God, it was good to hear his voice, even tiny and talking to someone else. Your heart hammered against your ribs and a smile spread involuntarily across your face. You really should have called him before now.

“That’s okay, kid. It’s for you.” 

Wayne said something to Eddie you couldn’t make out, then the telltale shuffling sounds of the phone being handed over gave way to Eddie’s voice, bigger, directed at you.

“So you remembered how a telephone works,” he said. Fucking Munson sarcasm. 

“I think so! Can you hear me? Am I doing it right?”

“Yeah, I can hear you, you traitorous wench. Midterms are so much work, Eddie. I promise I’ll call you the second they’re over. Been taking those midterms for 15 months?”

You sighed. “Go ahead. Let it all out, I deserve it. And I want it out of your system by Friday night.”

“What’s Friday night?”

“I’m coming home for the summer. I’ll be back Friday afternoon.”  

“You will?” He said, a boyish hopefulness in his tone. Then he corrected course, voice deepening in an affectation of apathy. “Well, Friday is the last Hellfire night of the year. I actually have plans all weekend already.”

You knew from your time as a member that Hellfire wasn’t allowed to run later than 8:30, and there was no fucking way Eddie Munson was calling it a night on Friday before 1am on Saturday. Planning his weekend was also very unlike Eddie… Unless there was someone he was going out of his way for. Was he bluffing, or did he have a girlfriend? If he was seeing someone, you had no room to be jealous, and no one to blame but yourself. 

“Oh. Well, we have the whole summer, if you ever have an afternoon to kill or something,” you said, trying not to sound deflated. You made your bed, you had to lie in it. 

“Yeah, we’ll probably run into each other eventually.”

“For sure.”

An awkward silence fell, Eddie so quiet on his end of the line that you wondered if he didn’t hang up. There was no dial tone, but you couldn’t hear anything at all. Just as you were about to say his name, you heard him inhale, deeply.

“Uh, you know… We play The Hideout on Tuesday nights now.”

“A weekly gig!?” You squealed, forgetting the weirdness of the conversation for a moment in your excitement. “That’s so great, Munsie.” 

“What the fuck did you just call me?” He said, barking a laugh. 

“Munsie fuckin’ Edson! I still think of you by that name all the time.”

“You think of me all the time, huh?”

“Fuck yeah,” you said, probably too earnestly. “I really have been busy, but I’ve also been embarrassed. I took so long to call you back, and…” And I thought I'd get over you if we stopped talking, but I still haven't.

“And what?”

“It’s just… Not all it’s cracked up to be, here. Chicago is great but I never get to see it because I’m always in a fuckin’ classroom or the library or something. I think I might drop out.” That was the first time you’d said it out loud.

“Oh, so I gotta graduate high school but you don’t gotta graduate college?”

“Yeah, ‘cause high school’s the –.” 

“Bare fuckin’ minimum.” He finished your sentence with you, and you both laughed. 

“Well I’ll have to come by The Hideout on a Tuesday. Weekly gig! So sick.” 

 "Thanks, Valley Girl,” he said.

The first Tuesday you were back in Hawkins, you got dressed up in something low cut and headed to The Hideout. On your way out the door you’d gotten into an argument with your father. He wanted you home by 11, your old curfew. You looked at him and laughed. I’ll be home when I get home, you told him. When you arrived the size of the crowd surprised you. A couple of bands from Indy were playing too, traveling to dives around Indiana, and apparently they were dragging quite the caravan of fans behind them. You wound up standing with your ass pressed against a pool table, way further from the stage than you had hoped, but your heels gave you enough lift for an okay view. 

When Eddie walked onto the stage he took your breath away. In the almost two years since you’d seen him, he hadn’t gotten any taller, but he’d come into his height, lost all his gangliness, gained muscle you never expected to see on him. His hair was the longest it had ever been, loose spirals hanging down over his shoulders, and his bare arms were decorated with several tattoos that were new to you. Under the harsh stage lights you could see stubble in the shape of a goatee. The Eddie you’d known couldn’t grow facial hair at all. This Eddie was a man . And this Eddie could fucking shred. He’d always been good at guitar, but you’d never seen his fingers move so quickly over the fretboard, never seen him trust himself so much as a performer. Just like on the phone, you felt the weight of how fuckin’ stupid you’d been not to call him. Jesus Christ, he was dreamy. 

When their blistering set came to an end you tried like hell to battle the crowd and get to him, but The Hideout simply wasn’t meant to have that many people inside it. By the time you got to the stage Eddie and the rest of Corroded Coffin were nowhere to be seen. You went out the loading door next to the stage and saw his van backed up to the building, but the doors were closed and the lights inside were off. You didn’t see Jeff or Gareth or anyone you recognized around, so you dug in your purse for a stick of gum and a pen. Popping the candy in your mouth, you scribbled on the wrapper – Munsie! Great show tonight. Sorry I missed you after. ♥️ Valley Girl – and tucked it under his windshield wiper. 

The next Monday afternoon you were sprawled on the couch half-watching TV when the phone rang one single ring. Eddie's old trick to avoid talking to your parents when he called. You sprang off the couch and seized the receiver, calling him back so fast your fingers blurred.

“Jesus, were you sittin’ on top of the phone?” He answered

“No! I just know I’m like, on probation with regards to phone calls,” you replied. “What’s up?”

“I got your little parking ticket. Why didn’t I see you?” You struggled to interpret his tone. Was he amused? Annoyed?

"The crowd kept me towards the back all night. By the time I got anywhere near the stage, I couldn't find you."

"That crowd was kinda crazy, huh? Biggest we’ve ever played for. But it probably won’t be like that again. Usually if they book a touring band the crowd is like, even smaller than normal. If that’s fuckin’ possible.” He chuckled as he spoke. A good sign. 

“Oh, so if I come again tomorrow I’ll get a private show?” You asked.

“You just might, Valley Girl.”

"Then I'll definitely be there," you said. Then you remembered something. "Oh hey, uh– How much for a quarter ounce?"

"When have you ever had to pay for grass from me, Sweetheart?" Hmm. Sweetheart. Was that condescending? Or genuine?

"Never, but I just thought since uh –"

"It's still free," Eddie cut you off. "But only if you hang out with me after the show. We can get burgers or something, maybe drive out to the lake." 

"Okay. For sure."

“Good. If you don’t, it’s a hundred bucks.”

“A hundred for a quarter!?” You tried to sound scandalized, but you couldn’t help but laugh, relieved to hear him tell a joke.

“Damn, that is pretty expensive, huh? Guess you better make sure it stays free,” he said, laughing too. 

You spent the next 27 hours after getting off the phone with him overthinking. Last week you had the upper hand, the element of surprise. He may or may not have been anticipating you showing up, but he obviously wasn’t planning for it. Now he knew you were coming to this one, and had the same 27 hours to prepare. It was comforting that he wanted you to hang out afterwards badly enough to come up with a silly threat, and a very pleasant surprise that your weed would still be free. That probably – hopefully – meant he didn’t have a girlfriend. But there were those moments when you didn’t know how to take him. How mad was he? How hard would it be to earn his trust again? 

Arriving at The Hideout you thought you might really be in for a private show. Eddie’s van and Jeff’s faded red El Camino were in the parking lot with only one other car. Inside was totally empty, except for the bartender resting his face on his fist, leaning over a book. If you hadn’t seen him turn a page, you might’ve thought he was asleep. The stage was all set up with Gareth’s drums and Eddie’s big black Fender amp covered in homemade stickers, but the Corroded Coffin boys were nowhere to be seen. 

You situated yourself at the opposite end of the bar from the bartender, struggling to tuck the skirt of your short dress underneath you. He slowly finished the page he was reading, then flipped the book facedown on the bar top. You were watching him fill a glass with Pabst Blue Ribbon for you when you felt a tap on your left shoulder. On instinct you looked to your right, where Eddie stood just behind you, in a Misfits t-shirt with the sleeves chopped off, armholes cut enormous, unlit cigarette hanging from his lips. 

“You didn’t really think you’d get me with that, did you?” 

“It has been like two years."

"Which is only like, half as long as you spent training me to never fuckin' fall for that!" 

The bartender brought your beer over, placing the glass on a square napkin. “Pabst,” he said as he sat it down. You tried to pay him but Eddie put his hand over yours.

"She's with the band, man," He said. The bartender nodded and walked away, so you folded the money in your hand and dropped it in the tip jar instead. “Since when do you drink PBR? I thought it was carbonated cat piss ?”

“Oh it is. I’ve just become numb to how vile it is at this point. You look good, Munsie. Not so scrawny anymore.” You reached out and squeezed his forearm. “The long hair works for you.”

He smirked, cheek dimpling on one side. 

“You look good too. Course you were always the prettiest girl in Hawkins, so…” He shrugged and took your glass from you, tucking his cig behind his ear before stealing a big sip. Your cheeks burned and your stomach flooded with butterflies.

“Oh, for sure,” you said, rolling your eyes. 

Then Gareth appeared next to Eddie. He greeted you warmly before dragging Eddie away for soundcheck. 

You didn’t get a private show. Not long after soundcheck people began to trickle in, thankfully nowhere near as many as the week before, but a decent crowd. It could have been your imagination, but their set felt even more face melting than last week, not like just Eddie was showing off, although he definitely was, but like they all had gotten better somehow in just the last seven days. This time it was easy to approach the stage after they finished, and Eddie put you to work wrapping cords into coils and packing them into a crate. 

“Is there anything else you want me to help with?” You asked when you finished. 

“Nope. You’ve helped a ton, Valley Girl. Carry that out there and you can just hang in the van until we’re all packed.” He held out his keys and you shifted the crate to one hip to take them, but when you tried to grab them he moved them out of your reach. You glared at him witheringly and he handed you the keys for real, laughing. And you laughed too because it was so stupid and normal, like it had always been before. He still trusted you with his keys! An honor few others could boast of.  

You put the crate of cords in the back before sliding into the passenger seat and starting the engine, bracing yourself for how loud you knew the radio was about to be. It wasn’t much longer than five minutes until you heard Eddie tell his bandmates goodbye as he closed the cargo doors. He climbed in on his side, now sporting a denim vest with rough cut arm holes to match the ones on his shirt underneath. 

The streets of Hawkins were practically deserted as the van rolled through town towards the lake. Eddie regaled you with the tale of the last Hellfire campaign, only pausing to order burgers and milkshakes in a drive thru, telling you about the new freshmen he mentored and training Gareth to take over as DM and club president. 

“Wait, why is Gareth taking over?” you asked.

“I’m 21 now. They kick you out of school if you’re 21,” Eddie said solemnly. Then his whole demeanor changed. “Not that that matters to me, because I’m fuckin’ graduating!”

“You are!?” 

“Fuck yeah, I am!”

“Oh my god, I’m so proud of you! I knew you could fuckin’ do it!” You reached across the center console to squeeze his thigh, and he dropped a hand off the steering wheel to rest on  yours. 

When you got to Lover’s Lake, Eddie parked in the woods with the back of the van pointed towards the water. He opened the doors and spread a blanket on the part of the floor not occupied by amps and instruments, a somewhat comfortable place for the two of you to sit side by side and enjoy the view. The moon shone brightly on the rippling surface of the lake and the soft amber glow of the interior lights of the van spilled out onto the grass.

Eddie produced an expertly rolled joint from his old metal lunch box and handed it to you, flicking the lighter for you as you held it between your lips. The night air felt oddly still as you looked into his big brown eyes and took the first drag. The evening had gone surprisingly smoothly so far, so much like those last few days before you left in ‘84, almost as if no time had passed at all. 

“Excuse me! That was definitely a third puff with no pass,” you scolded Eddie when he started hogging the joint. 

“Oh, really?” he said, taking another long drag.

“Yes, really! You dick!” You slapped at him playfully. 

“Come and take it from me then.”

You reached for the joint and Eddie held it out of your reach, just like he had with the keys. You huffed at him and tried again. He put it in his mouth and curled away from you, holding his vest over himself like a curtain as he took another drag.

“Five! Five puffs! That’s a major party foul, Munson!” 

When he turned back to you he was fighting a smile. He snorted half a laugh and smoke spilled from his nose like he was a dragon. 

“Okay, Smaug ,” you said, making him snort out another puff of smoke. 

Then he reached out with the hand not holding the joint to touch your face. He gently squeezed your cheeks and your mouth fell slightly open. Eddie leaned in, blowing smoke into your lungs. You inhaled deeply, and as your chest filled with air, your loins filled with blood, your clit suddenly echoing your heartbeat. 

“Happy now, Sweetheart?” He asked with a wolfish grin. 

“No! You owe me at least one more.”

Eddie gave you another breath, and then another after that. Then he handed you the joint and you shotgunned your smoke to him. Your lips brushed, lingered, and stuck together as you shared the smoke, walking right up to it, but never crossing the line into an actual kiss. 

“So,” Eddie said when the joint had burned down too small even for the roach clip he’d dug out of his pocket. “The ceremony’s on Saturday. I have an extra ticket if you wanna come.”

“Of course I wanna come! I wouldn’t miss it for the world, Munsie.”

“You can sit next to Wayne. I’m sure he’ll be glad to see you.”

“I’ll be glad to see him too,” you said. “You know he gave me shit when I called?”

“Good,” Eddie chuckled, putting a hand on your head and ruffling your hair.  

You reached over and ruffled his back, running your fingers through the length and gently untangling a knot you caught near the ends. Neither of you spoke for a minute, looking at the reflection of the moon on the water through the trees, each thinking your own stoned thoughts. If you were going to make a move, you needed to do it now, and it needed to be bold, something that let him know how badly you really wanted him, how sorry you were. You let the cannabis cloud in your brain carry your inhibitions away.

“You know…” you said. Eddie looked at you with raised eyebrows. 

You slipped out of the back of the van over the bumper and took a step away. 

“You deserve a really good graduation present,” you told him.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. I think I have just the thing in mind.” 

You took a couple more paces away from Eddie and the van, heels sinking into the soft earth slightly as you walked. 

"What are you doing?" He asked. 

You didn't answer, you just turned to face him and reached under your dress. He watched you with a curious expression that quickly turned to shock and then undisguised lust as he realized you were pulling your underwear down. You maneuvered them over your boots and stepped out of them. Then you came forward, walking back towards the van with the garment hanging from your finger by one leg hole. You got close to Eddie, thighs pressing against his knees. Gathering the denim of his vest in the hand not holding your underwear, you opened that side away from his body, and tucked your panties into his interior pocket. 

"Jesus, shit. Is that what you've been learning in Chicago, Valley Girl?" His voice was breathless and his eyes were wide. 

"Among other things," you replied, grabbing the other lapel of his vest with your free hand and pulling him closer. 

He leaned his forehead against yours and put his hands on your hips, taking a deep breath. You stayed like that for a moment, then Eddie's hands moved, sliding from your hips to the small of your back, down over your ass, slipping under the hem of your dress to grab two naked handfuls. He kneaded and squeezed and pulled you apart, making you hum.

"What class do they teach that in, hmm?" He growled. "Is that why you didn't fuckin' call me? You were too busy studying other guys?"

Embarrassed heat flushed more places than just your face. 

"Eddie, I'm sorry."

"You think you can just stuff your panties in my pocket and all is forgiven?" 

"I hoped it would be a start." 

"What else are you gonna do to make it up to me?"  

Eddie parted his legs and pulled you between them, the increased proximity making the tips of your noses touch. You felt hot arousal ooze out of you and quickly cool in the breeze off the lake. With your eyes cast down, you could see that the moment was having the same effect on him.

"Whatever it takes," you whispered.

You couldn’t say who initiated it, but you were kissing him then, eager, and getting more so, the release of years of tension making you sloppy. You released his vest in favor of wrapping your arms around his neck. Your pussy wept between your legs as the kiss deepened and you sucked his plush bottom lip into your mouth. Eddie brought his right hand from your ass down the back of your thigh, to the front and then the inside, wedging it between your legs. 

“Can I?” He asked into your mouth.

“I want you to, so bad.”  

The hand between your legs came up to cup your vulva, big enough to more than cover the whole thing. He rubbed the outside, back and forth, without parting your lips. You twisted slightly so your side was pressed against his chest instead of your front, your bare ass on his left thigh, to give him a better angle. After what felt like 100 years of teasing, he finally let one finger separate you, then two, sliding wetly. But the teasing had only just begun. He found your clit and ghosted his fingers over it, tracing barely-there circles that drove you insane. 

“Go inside,” you whimpered.

“You want me inside you?” 

“Please, Eddie.” 

“How many other guys have you had inside you?” He asked as he plunged his middle finger in, all the way to his palm. Your knees nearly buckled, but Eddie held you up, and you brought your arms around his waist for more stability, slithering under his vest.

“It doesn’t matter,” you groaned. 

“How many?” He asked again, adding his ring finger and making you gasp.

“Four! But I always wished they were you.”

“Don’t try to flatter me.”

“Eddie, I’m – I’m n – not,” you struggled to say as he found the right spot. “Oh my god, right there.”

You pressed your face to his chest to muffle the moans you were struggling to keep quiet, keenly aware that there might be other people in the woods around the lake. He smelled so good, smokey and sweaty from being on stage, with a familiar woody cologne scent underneath. He shifted subtly, not grinding against you, just pressing himself into your hip. 

“It’s not flattery,” you said again, trying to compose yourself while still riding his fingers, heel of his hand rhythmically bumping your clit. “That’s – That’s why I couldn’t… I couldn’t call you because I – I was trying to get o – over you. Oh my god, Eddie, fuck!” 

“I thought you stopped because you were already over me,” he said. The insecurity in his words was totally at odds with the confidence the movements of his hand exuded, fingers curling right where you needed them as if he was born with the knowledge. 

“Not… Not at all. I was up – upset that you didn’t ask me… Fuck . Ask me to wait for you, or – or – or be your girlfriend. I’m so close!” 

You turned your face back to his chest, biting the fabric of his t-shirt in a futile attempt to quiet yourself. Eddie groaned your name against your ear and shifted his pelvis against you again, his cock feeling as hard as a rock through his jeans, and that was your undoing. You came hard, legs shaking violently, pussy gushing around his fingers. He kept going until you couldn’t take it anymore, putting your hand flat on his forearm and pushing him away. He dragged his hand over your thigh as he removed it, leaving a sticky wet trail. 

“Holy shit, Valley Girl,” he huffed and kissed the top of your head as you slumped against him, one arm still draped around his waist.

“That fuckin’ movie…” you said weakly.

“You wanted me to watch it because it reminded you of us.” 

“How do you know that?” You willed your legs to regrow their bones so you could stand on your own and look at him. 

“I watched it. When you had midterms. I knew you were workin' really hard, I thought it would make you smile if I finally watched it.” He shook his head and let out a sad little chuckle.

“Oh no. Oh, Eddie, I’m so sorry. I felt so bad about not calling you back right away, I didn’t want to face you being hurt by how long I took and it fuckin’ snowballed. And there was this guy who was interested in me, and when I asked you what you wanted to say that night on the porch you said you didn’t remember, so I thought you changed your mind about me…”

“I just didn’t wanna hold you back. I didn’t fuckin’ graduate, I didn’t wanna make you the sexy, cool college girl with the shitty high school boyfriend. You deserved better, but I… I wanted my cake and to eat it too. Like, I just hoped that you would wait even though I didn’t say anything. I hated thinking of you with some preppy douchebag with a fuckin’ sweater tied around his shoulders.”

“Ew, gag me! I would never! Swear to God, all the guys I went out with were total freaks.” You put your right hand over your heart to indicate the seriousness of your vow and Eddie laughed. 

“As freaky as me?” He asked.

“Not as anything as you, Munsie.” 

" Fuck, dude," he sighed, pulling you back into a hug. “I should’ve just said what I wanted to say on your porch, huh? Saved us both the trouble.”

“Why don’t you just say it now?”

“Well…” He leaned back to look at your face. He tilted his head and grinned an evil grin. “Are you done making it up to me yet?”

“No," you said. You put your hand on his thigh right next to where his jeans were stretched taut over his cock, kneading the muscle, dangerously close. "I don't think I'll be done for a long time. Maybe never." 

Eddie groaned and dropped his head back, exposing the gorgeous column of his neck, almost glowing in the moonlight. You pressed your tongue flat against the base of this throat, pulling the collar of his shirt down with the hand not teasing him, and licked all the way up to his ear, swirling your tongue along the seashell of cartilage before biting his earlobe gently. 

“Ugh, I oughta send the guy who taught you that flowers,” he said with a weak laugh.

“A girl taught me that,” you whispered, mouth still right next to his ear.   

“Jesus Christ." 

You kissed along his jaw, in awe of his skin up close, ghostly pale but still somehow faintly freckled, and surprisingly soft. You had spent two years picturing him, and you had not been doing him justice. When you made it to his lips they were warm and parted, waiting for you. This time the kiss was less hurried, less wild, but no less passionate. As you melted into his lips, you slowly rotated until you were facing away from him, ass in his lap, leaning and twisting back to keep kissing him. You swayed and swiveled your hips, giving him a silent lap dance. His hands came from behind you to rest on your hips, grab your thighs, rub your stomach, cup your tits over your dress until you guided them down inside the neckline. The rings on his left hand were so cold against your nipples.

"I wanna feel you so bad, Baby," Eddie groaned behind you. 

"Feel? Or fill?" You asked.

"Fuuuuck. Both. But I was too stupid to bring a condom. I didn't think this… I didn't think it would go like this."

"Well, I was really hoping it would," you reassured him with a giggle. “There's one in my bag.”

He stretched to where you’d left your purse on top of an amp, and handed it to you. You fished the little foil packet out of the safety of a zippered pocket and heard Eddie unbuckle his belt. God, what a sexy sound, a sound you would play in your memory when you thought of him for days afterwards. You turned around to watch as he stood up just enough to pull his pants and underwear down together. 

Seeing his cock for the first time blew your mind. While the two of you danced around each other, you'd both sometimes seen other people. You hadn't gone any further than closed mouth makeouts until you got to college, but he had, and you heard the rumors that Eddie the Freak was a big boy . You had dismissed them, not because you thought they were implausible, but because you wanted to find out for yourself without expectations. Now you were finding the rumors gloriously true. He was certainly above average, and he somehow managed to have a dick as beautifully sculpted as the rest of him. 

"Wow," you whispered as you rolled the condom down his length.

He laughed a deep, huffy laugh. "Wow, what, Valley Girl?" 

“ All of you is so pretty.” You wrapped your hand around his cock and stroked it slowly. Eddie sighed heavily and pressed his hips up into your hand.

“You think I’m pretty?” 

“Duh, have you seen yourself?”

“Yeah,” he laughed again. “But I’ve also seen you. I, mmm, I wasn’t joking when I said you were the p – prettiest girl in Hawkins.”

“Shut up,” you said, leaning in to kiss him. 

As you sucked on his tongue and squeezed his cock, you moved to climb into his lap, hiking your dress with your free hand and planting one knee beside him on the van’s bumper. Before you could bring the other leg up and straddle him fully, he was gently pushing you away.

“Wait. Can you go back to how you were earlier? Uh, facing away from me?” He asked.

“Okay, Munsie,” you said, bringing your leg down from the bumper and turning around. 

Eddie spread his legs wide and brought you between them. You leaned forward, arching your back. You felt his cold rings again as he pushed your dress up to the small of your back, and pulled you even closer, his cock bumping against your naked ass. He lined himself up, but waited for you to give the go ahead to push inside. When he did you slammed your hand over your mouth, trying desperately to stay quiet, once again remembering there might be other people nearby. He was stretching you so much, you couldn’t believe you were actually able to take it. 

You kept your eyes pinched closed and took deep breaths through your nose as you began slowly rocking your hips, your ass dragging against the smooth skin of his thighs and stomach. Eddie's hands resumed their wandering, squeezing, groping, massaging everywhere he could reach. You looked over your shoulder at him, a massive misstep in your quest to stay quiet. The sight of him with faintly pink cheeks, slack jaw, and tense brows was one to behold, causing you to clench and have to compress a pornographic moan into a mere whimper. 

His hands came to your hips to encourage you to speed up. As you complied with his urging, you angled yourself differently and suddenly he was there , hitting a spot you didn’t even know you had, so deep it was like he was touching your soul. You grabbed his hand and brought it to your mouth, biting down on the web between his thumb and pointer finger. 

“ Fuck ,” he panted, curling his fingers into your cheek, grabbing you as you bit him. 

You hummed through your teeth around his hand, and he used his grip on you to pull you back, leaning against him with your head tilted back onto his shoulder. Eddie planted his free hand firmly just above your pubic mound, making sure you didn’t slide off his lap, and the pressure amplified all the sensations of him being inside. He tucked his chin to his chest to press his lips against your forehead, kissing you and moaning quietly against your skin. It was all starting to overwhelm you, starting to be too much, way, way too much. Then Eddie groaned your name and you lost yourself, forgetting all about anyone else who might be on the lake, crying into his hand over your mouth. 

“ Shit, shit, shit, ” he chanted as your orgasm triggered his. 

You stilled other than the lingering convulsions from cumming so hard, but Eddie wrapped his arms around your waist in a tight hug and flexed his hips to keep fucking you until he was so overstimulated it hurt, whimpering as he finally relaxed under you. You attempted to lean forward to let him slip out, but his arms around your waist kept you in place. 

“Wait,” he said breathlessly. “Will you be my girlfriend?”

You laughed and intentionally squeezed around his cock, making him inhale sharply.

“I’d be honored.”

Eddie drove you back to The Hideout to collect your car. You stayed in the front seat of the van with him a long time, not wanting the night to end, leaning over to kiss him just one more time . He took the smallest ring he was wearing and slid it down the length of each of your fingers, deciding where it fit best. You tried to give it back and he made a comically exaggerated sad face. 

“You’re breaking up with me already?” He whined, working hard to sound pathetic. 

“Of course not!” You reassured him with a laugh.

“Then you better keep that. If you’re my girl, you gotta wear my rings.”

“Okay, Munsie. I’d be happy to wear it.”

When you finally did get in your car, you stopped to admire the ring at every stoplight, beaming with pride to finally be Eddie Munson’s girlfriend. 

On Saturday morning you dressed nicely, did your makeup, and slid on Eddie’s ring before driving to the high school. You found Wayne, the two Corroded Coffin members not graduating that day, and the three freshman Eddie told you about in the parking lot, before you climbed to your seats in the bleachers around the football field. When Principal Higgins leaned into the microphone and called Edward David Munson , your little group exploded into cheers, applause, and whistles. Eddie didn’t flip Higgins off like he’d so often promised to do, but he did stick his tongue out as the photographer snapped the picture of them shaking hands.  

A week later you finally got Eddie and your parents to agree to dinner together so they could see what he was really like instead of judging him for his leather and chains. He appeared on your front porch with a bouquet of flowers for your mother and a bottle of whiskey for your father. He didn't manage to completely charm them, but they accepted the relationship enough that he could come in through the front door instead of the sneaking you’d done two summers prior.