My Best Friend, Maybe by Caela Carter

Author:Caela Carter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

Mark and I are in a pool. Some pool suspended somewhere in the universe.

The edges of my vision are flimsy.

I’m leaning against a wall, my feet on the smooth tile floor, my shoulder blades resting on the scratchy concrete. And he’s several feet away, walking toward me quickly but not getting any closer.

I’m wearing a bikini, white with red and pink cherries printed all over it like Sadie’s bedspread. It has ruffles in the angles that slash across my chest. The water laps at my breasts, the blue sagging between them and reflecting the dark freckles that dot the skin below my collarbone. My hair floats in the water in every direction, tickling my bare shoulders.

Mark moves toward me. I can’t tell what he’s wearing because all that I can see above the blue of the water is the expanse of his shoulders, the plane of his chest, the bump of his Adam’s apple as he swallows, nervous, looking right at me.

Suddenly he’s here, pressing into me, bracing my body against the wall of the pool, tilting my head back so he can kiss me, and running his hands down the length of my front. He grazes my stomach, my hips. I kiss him, and in my brain I follow the tracks of his hands, no longer feeling the water or the wall or the sun on my head, not feeling anything but the way he’s finally touching me. My face gets hot as his hands move faster. Then he yanks at the top of my suit and it comes off in his hand and—poof—disappears. I stand there topless and watch him look at me, my breasts floating in the airlike water.

“We can’t do this,” he says.

I jolt upright, sucking in oxygen and whipping my head around to get my bearings. My face is burning hot but other than that nothing is like in the dream. I’m in my cave. In bed. I’m still wearing my cutoffs and T-shirt. And Mark is not my boyfriend. I say that out loud. “Mark is not my boyfriend.”

It was so real, so vivid, that it seems impossible that he’s not. Not mine, anymore.

I lie back, pull the extra pillow over my face, and try not to think about what my church or my mom might call that dream.

How can I still be having dreams like this?

I’ve never told anyone about them, for obvious reasons, but I’ve wondered. Is this normal? Is this wrong? In all of our purity workshops, even in the sex ed classes at school, they always talked about boys having dreams like this and how that was perfectly natural, blah blah blah. But no one ever said anything about girls. And it’s not a question I can ask.

I turn over, trying at once to erase the dream from my memory and catch the last wisps of it, to hold them against my body before they disappear.

I don’t know how I’m even able to dream like this. How is it that

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.