The Space Between Us

I gave his cock another long suck before taking it in my hand and sitting back on my heels to look up at him. His brother was sprawled on the sofa next to us, idly stroking his own boner. “What do you mean, pick one?”

Chase, typical boy, put his hand over mine to rub his dick across my mouth, but I pulled away just enough that it couldn’t reach my lips. “Pick one of us, Tesla,” he repeated.

I laughed, thinking he was joking. “For what?”

“You know,” Chance said.

I looked back and forth at them. I’d never be able to see the twins as anything but two separate people ever again, and yet I couldn’t imagine them as anything but part of a unit. “I don’t want to pick just one.”

“She wants us both. I told you,” Chance said.

His brother shifted, his young, thick cock not wilting even the slightest bit. “You have to, Tesla.”

“Why?”

Chase was the firstborn brother. Nobody had told me; I could just tell. If there were decisions to be made, he was generally the first to make them. Chance was more likely to wait and see what happened. Now Chase tangled his fingers in my hair, and I tensed, thinking he meant to pull my face forward again.

“You don’t have to stop fucking us both,” he said. “Just pick one of us for public.”

“Oh.” I stroked his dick, twisting my palm around the head in the way that made him shudder. “That.”

The truth was, I didn’t really feel the need to go public. I already had the advantage of being a little exotic. I wasn’t the only girl who wore Docs or dyed her hair colors that were deemed “distracting” by the school. I wasn’t the only one with piercings or what seemed like a permanent weekly appointment with the guidance counselor. I was just different because none of them had known me their whole lives. Or because I didn’t seem to need their approval.

“Who says I want to go public?” I leaned forward to lick him, then took him in my mouth again. I closed my eyes to concentrate on the sensation of all that hot, hard flesh on my tongue.

Chance made a low noise, though it was his brother’s knob in my mouth. I slitted open my eyes to look at him, smiling around Chase’s dick as I sucked and stroked. I didn’t want to make him come like this. I wanted to fuck him first. I wanted to fuck both of them. I wanted them both sweating and groaning, working inside and against me. I wanted the spiraling crescendo of orgasm to rip through me. Basically, I wanted to get in, get on, get off, get up, get dressed and get out.

Even at the time, I was pretty sure that wasn’t the way the rest of my schoolmates operated. They were concerned about being seen together, all the accoutrements of “going out,” like class rings or hickeys. Things that marked them as belonging to someone. The thought of belonging to any one person was not only foreign to me, but more than slightly distasteful. When I thought about picking one of those Murphy boys to parade around with in front of everyone to somehow legitimize this, what we did here in the basement in secret … well, my lip curled as if I’d put my hand in something rotten.

Whatever conversation those brothers had intended to have with me, and I had no doubt they’d discussed it at length beforehand, I was able to get them to forget about it. Especially when I reached to take Chance’s dick in my fist while I sucked his brother, and when I dipped my head down low to mouth Chase’s balls.

When I lifted up the pleated plaid skirt I’d bought from the Catholic thrift store, someone’s leftover school uniform, to reveal I’d already slipped off my panties and wore only a pair of knee-high socks, it was a good guarantee both those boys would lose their powers of speech. And I didn’t need them to talk. I urged Chance to move behind me. I was on the pill, but I made them use rubbers anyway, not because I thought either of them were screwing around with anyone else, but because there was less mess to clean up after if they shot into a condom.

They hadn’t known a lot about female anatomy when we first started, but now Chance knew just where to slide his fingers, right along my already rigid clit. He filled me a little too fast, bumping me forward against his brother’s lap. Chase’s cock went down my throat too far and would’ve choked me if I hadn’t held him so firmly by the base—but by now I’d learned to anticipate Chance’s clumsiness. I liked it, actually, how eager he was to get inside me. How his hands gripped my hips hard enough to bruise, sometimes, those faint blue marks on my skin a better reminder to me of what we’d been doing than any suck mark on my neck or collarbone could’ve been.

Chance fucked into me from behind. I sucked Chase’s dick and rubbed his balls. It was all good and getting better. Faster, harder, in and out, my pussy slick and tight. Full.

I came before both of them. I think they never understood how easy it was for me; how it wasn’t their skill that got me off. Chance came next, and that was also usually the way it happened. With his brother still inside me, I peered up at Chase. He was looking down. I pressed my finger against his asshole and he exploded into my mouth with a hoarse shout that made me smile because it sounded … just a little … like my name.

“If you had to pick one,” Chance said after I’d used the tiny bathroom and come out with my face washed, mouth rinsed, hair brushed, panties replaced, “which one of us would you choose?”

Chase had already gone upstairs. Chance was the one who would wait and walk me to my car, the beat-up piece of junk that I still drove now, nine years later. Chance was the one who put his hand on the driver’s side door so I couldn’t open it, who peered down at me with a solemn look. Chance was the one who really wanted to know.

“I can’t choose,” I told him, even though I knew it was a lie. “I’m into both of you.”

“Yeah, but …”

I stood on my tiptoes to kiss him, thinking, as he probably wasn’t, that his brother’s taste still lingered on my tongue despite the rinsing. “Not into the boyfriend scene, okay? It’s all cool. Right?”

He nodded. What else could he do? He was getting regular, slightly freaky sex. Was he going to turn that down just so we could hold hands and go to football games together? Maybe homecoming, and later, the prom?

“Not my thing,” I told him, and meant it.

He didn’t move his hand even when I gave it a pointed glance. “Why not?”

I didn’t have an answer for that. I couldn’t explain to that nice boy whose mother was still way too attached to him all my reasons for not wanting what every other girl I knew seemed to want. So I didn’t give him an answer. I kissed him again, and when I pulled away he put his hands on my hips to hold me closer to him.

Later, I would break that boy’s heart and not care, because my own would have already been shattered. But we didn’t know that then. At that moment, we were sneaking kisses in the turning-cold fall air.

I thought about them now as I pulled into the parking lot of Capriotti’s Auto Sales and found a space for my car. I got out, still thinking about it. I was looking for Cap, but found Vic instead.

“Hey. What’re you still doing here? Where’s Cap?”

Vic looked tired again. The garage closed at seven, but the car lot stayed open until nine. I didn’t see Dennis, the sales guy who usually had the later shift.

Vic shrugged and yawned. “Had to send him out on a run for some parts that didn’t come in on time.”

“And Dennis?”

“Went home sick. Upchucked all over the men’s room.”

I grimaced. “Yuck.”

Vic smiled. “Yeah, well, that’s what happens when you eat someone else’s lunch and don’t bother to check how long it’s been in the fridge. Maybe next time he’ll learn.”

“Still, gross.” I tossed him my keys. “It’s the clunking again, left front end.”

Vic nodded and pocketed my keys. “Can’t do anything about it until tomorrow. You got a ride to work?”

“Cap said I could use his car. He’ll get a ride from Lyndsay or walk.”

“Cap’s letting you use his car?”

I laughed wickedly. “Bwahaha! Of course he is. He loves me.”

Vic snorted. “He’s easily manipulated.”

“Is that what you think of me?” I said with a frown. The words came out sounding catty. Snide, even. “Nice.”

Vic gave me a surprised blink before frowning himself. “Huh?”

“Never mind.” The dream had unsettled me. It wasn’t Vic’s fault, though maybe he’d prompted it by his unexpected little drive-by through my room. “Listen. What’s going on with you?”

“What? Me? Nothing. Why?” He sounded genuinely confused.

“You’re not sleeping,” I pointed out, adding, before he could jump in, “and yeah, I know. I’m not your mother. Or your wife. Old news. Your mother doesn’t live with you, and poor Elaine’s so exhausted she’d have no idea if you were in bed next to her or not. So I’m the only one who knows you’re up at all hours of the night.”

“It’s not all hours.”

“I hear you walking back and forth. I hear the floor creaking.” I paused, thinking about whether or not to mention him being in my room. “What’s going on?”

“Insomnia.”

“Uh-huh.” I gave him a narrow-eyed glance. “That doesn’t sound like you.”

Before he could defend himself or agree, my brother came into the office on a cloud of cold air and the faint smell of oil and gasoline. He stopped short at the sight of us. Then he sighed.

“Damn, he already gave you the keys, huh?”

I gave Vic another look, but the moment had passed. “Yep. No wrestling them away from me now.”

“Can’t you just hang out here and wait while I take a look at your car?” Cap asked.

“With Dennis gone I could use an extra set of hands,” Vic interjected.

He couldn’t have known, of course, about the dream I’d had. Or how it had made me feel. “Nah. Errands to run before I get to work. I promised Elaine I’d go to the store for her. Apparently we’re out of a lot of stuff.”

“Can you pick me up some stuff, too?” Cap asked.

I raised a brow. “Like what?”

“Toaster pastries. Half-and-half.”

The other brow went up. “Really? What the hell for, Captain?”

My brother winced at the use of his full first name. “Lyndsay likes it in her coffee, and I like them for snacks.”

I laughed, trying to get at him to poke his side, but he was so much bigger he fended me off without a problem. “You want me to pick up stuff for your—”

“Don’t say it,” Cap warned in a fierce enough tone to keep me from continuing. “She’s just my roommate.”

I was pretty sure that despite their every action designed to prove otherwise, Cap and Lyndsay were fucking like bunnies. No, not like bunnies. Like ninjas, all secretlike and only in the dark. I tempered my laughter. “Sure. I’ll drop it off here. Without Dennis around, it should be safe in the fridge. Hey, Cap … listen, you want to check out that new zombie flick sometime next week? The Risen, or whatever it’s called?”

“How come he gets to go and I don’t?” Vic asked, only half listening as he texted something.

“Because he’s single and you’re an old married fella with a pregnant wife at home, duh.” I turned to my brother. “You up for it?”

“Yeah, sure.” Cap shrugged his broad shoulders. I paused, deciding how deep to stick the shiv. “You don’t have to ask Lynds first?”

Too far. Cap scowled. I backed off, hands up, an apology on my face and tongue, but not really in my heart. He’d have to own up to it sometime—that he was crazy in love with his roommate and she wasn’t so far from looney for him, too, even if neither would admit it.

“I’ll pick you up tomorrow, then.”

“In my car,” Cap said, with a resigned sigh that made Vic laugh.

“Unless you fix mine sooner.” I managed to get in a poking pinch my brother could’ve easily batted away, but allowed because I was older than him.

“It’ll be fixed,” he promised.

I punched his shoulder and waved at Vic, but he was too engrossed in his phone call to pay attention. In the parking lot, I revved the Mustang’s engine a few times just to get Cap all worked up. I refrained from spinning the tires or doing a doughnut, though, just to prove I didn’t have to be a total dweeb. By the way he flipped me off as I left the lot, I figured he wasn’t that impressed.

At the grocery store I pushed my cart through the aisles and tried to remember what was on the list I’d left on the kitchen table at home. I wasn’t paying close attention to where I was going, which was why I nearly ran over a little kid who was spinning out of control in the candy section.

I recognized a tantrum in progress and meant to steer my cart past him, but stopped when I saw his mother. “Mandy?”

She turned. “Oh, my God! Tesla? Wow. Long time, huh?”

Mandy had been one of my best friends in Lancaster before my parents dropped their mutual basket and my life had spun into something else. I hadn’t seen or heard from her in years. To find her here now, with a child, was surprising—but good, I discovered, when she clung to me in a hug that left her kid staring with goggle eyes.

“You look fantastic!” She beamed, taking me in. “You haven’t changed at all. Wow.”

“You have.” I grinned, pointing at the boy now clinging to her leg. “Yours?”

She lifted him, pride all over her face. “Yep. This is Tyler. Say hi.”

Tyler buried his face in his mom’s neck. I wasn’t offended. “So … you live around here?”

“Yep. My husband and I moved here a few months ago. He’s working for the state. And I stay home with the kiddo here. How about you?”

“I work at Morningstar Mocha. You probably don’t know it.”

“Sure I do! Sure. I’ll have to stop in sometime. Are you still living with…?” She let the question trail off.

“Vic? Yeah. And his wife, Elaine. Their two kids. Cap moved out, though.”

“Oh, Cap.” Mandy laughed. “How’s Cappy doing?”

“He’s doing great. Really great.” It was hard to believe that once we’d spent almost every day blabbering each others’ ears off, and now we were reduced to chitchat in front of a display of candy bars. “Listen, stop in to the Mocha. Really. It would be great to catch up with you.”

“I’ll do that,” she said, even as I think we both knew she probably wouldn’t.

Time had passed. Life had changed. She had a husband and a kid, and I was still single. Stuff like that gets between people, even if the years hadn’t.

“I have to run. This one’s about to melt down. You take care, Tesla. So good to see you.”

“You, too.” I watched her go.

I’d never wanted what Cap and I had always called “the front door,” from that old Adam Ant song “A Place in the Country.” The front door was marriage, kids, a mortgage, a dog. But there was envy again, that funny thing. It can creep up on you without warning, hit you over the head with a snow shovel. Envy can taste like the candy you buy because you suddenly crave something sweet.

Chapter 7

Here’s a story I never told Meredith.

At the end of my junior year of high school and Cap’s eighth grade, our father walked in on our mother fucking one of her colleagues from the college where they both worked. Apparently, even in an open marriage you can still be cheating if your partner doesn’t know what you’ve been up to, because my dad promptly packed up his stuff and left without telling any of us where he’d gone. With no more Compound to retreat to in the summer, my mom decided to take a cross-country camping trip with her new lover in an ancient Volkswagen Rabbit.

While Cap and I had no problems with her new boyfriend, there was no way we were going to subject ourselves to traveling across the United States in the back of a Rabbit. My mom, who could certainly have been called a free spirit or even flighty, was nevertheless the more responsible of our parents and wasn’t about to leave us living alone even though at seventeen and fourteen we were capable of taking care of ourselves. She insisted we go with them. We insisted we didn’t want to. So I did what any red-blooded teenage kid would do when faced with what promised to be a certain kind of hell.

I ran away.

I didn’t have to go very far, and I took my brother with me. I knew how to find Vic. I hoped I could count on him. We showed up on his doorstep with little more than the clothes on our backs and a couple hundred bucks I’d pinched from my mom’s dresser.

As it turned out, I could. Cap and I moved in with Vic, who might’ve been surprised to see us but didn’t let that stop him. My mother ended up staying in California when her lover’s car broke down. She still lived there. My dad turned up in Brazil, of all places. He’d found another community like The Compound where he could live full-time while teaching English in a nearby town.

Vic had been there for me when I needed him. It had nothing to do with sex—not unless he’d fooled around with Cappy, too, and I was one hundred percent positive that had never happened. It had everything to do with the sort of guy Vic had always been.

And I envied him.

Meredith had told me I went for what I wanted. That I had to answer to nobody and could do whatever I liked. In a way, she was right. I mean, I had my job, and my responsibilities as part of Vic and Elaine’s household. I had bills and debts. But I didn’t have convictions, not really. Nobody would ever come to me when they were in trouble. Hell, I was twenty-six and still living in a basement, not because I couldn’t get out and live on my own but because staying there was easier than moving out.

Not exactly a picture of someone wild.

When I got to work, Meredith was convincing people to tell stories again. I knew it the second I walked in the front door and saw her sitting at her favorite table with her head tipped back in laughter. I knew most of the others by face, not necessarily by name, but everyone looked as if they were having a grand old time.

She waved at me. “There’s our Tesla!”

I lifted a mittened hand in response to the raised coffee cups. Meredith’s smile made the cold outside seem faraway, but I didn’t stop at her table. She was busy talking; I had to get busy working.

“What is it about her, anyway?” Darek said when I rounded the counter.

I pretended not to know what he meant. “Who? Meredith?”

“Yeah. Queen Meredith, sitting over there with her … what do you call them?”

“Subjects?” I offered, shrugging out of my coat and hanging it on the rack in the hall leading to the storage room.

Darek shook his head. “Minions.”

“That makes her sound like some sort of evil overlord.”

“Yeah. What is it about her?”

I paused, thinking. “I don’t know. She’s just … I don’t know. Sometimes you don’t, Darek.”

He made a noise instead of an answer. I looked across the room at Meredith, whose laughter had trilled to catch my attention. She ran perfectly manicured fingers through her honey-blond hair and it settled just right.

Again, envy.

With the late afternoon sun slanting through the glass, she was so beautiful it made my heart hurt. Not just pretty. Not just sexy, though she was surely that with that mouth, those eyes, that laugh. She was like something set up high on a shelf, made to be admired and adored. Coveted, but never gained.

I must’ve sighed, because Darek gave me a sympathetic look. “You’re into her.”

I slanted a glance his way but wouldn’t gaze at him full-on. “Look at her.”

“Oh, I am.” He put his hands on his hips. “She wants people to look at her.”

“Who doesn’t?” I tied the strings of my green apron tight around my waist and took a few minutes to run my fingers through my hair to stand it on end after it had been flattened by my knit cap. “I mean, don’t we all want people to notice us?”

“I guess so.”

I stared at her, then at him. “Don’t you like her?”

“I like her just fine.” He grinned. “Married ladies are my specialty. But you saw her first.”

I laughed. Darek was a lot of talk. In all the time we’d worked together I hadn’t known him to have a single fling with a married lady. “We’re just friends. She’s not … you know.”

“And you are?”

I shrugged and checked over the desserts in the case, noting which would need to be pulled later if they didn’t sell. “Sometimes. Once in a while. Discriminately.”

“How many?”

I turned. “What?”

Darek appeared way too intrigued. “How many girls?”

“This place,” I told him with just the barest sourness in my tone, “has really become, like, this hotbed of prurience.”

“Whose fault is that?” Darek asked, with a lift of his chin toward Meredith’s table.

“Pffft. You can’t blame her for everything. You’re the one grilling me on my sex life! I already told Meredith—”

“Yeah?” Again, he seemed too interested, all lolling tongue and wide eyes.

I put one fist to my mouth, the other at my cheek, and made a cranking motion. “Roll up your tongue. It wasn’t about girl-girl action.”

Darek appeared only faintly disappointed before perking up again. “Then what was it about?”

I wasn’t going to tell him about the Murphys. Dredging up that past stuff had already wreaked a bit of havoc on my brain. “None of your business. God, do I grill you about your sex life?”

“You could,” he said. “So … I’m just curious, Tesla, that’s all.”

“About my lesbian history?” I had to laugh at him, so typical male. “I had one serious girlfriend. We dated for about four months before she dumped me for a guitar player in a folk rock band who wore wife-beaters all year round and had a tattoo of the feminine symbol on her twat.”

His look said it all.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I thought, too.”

Darek made a face. “That’s it? That’s all you got?”

“Look,” I said, suddenly disgruntled. “What did you think I had? Some long and lurid inventory of lesbian dalliances I’d trot out for you like a laundry list, complete with descriptions? A ‘Desperate But Not Serious’ sort of thing going on? Who with and how many times?”

He totally failed on the Adam Ant reference. “Huh?”

I sighed. “Never mind.”

“Sorry.” Darek frowned. “I just, you know. Thought maybe it was more exciting than that.”

I sighed again, this time in exasperation. “Why?”

“Because you just seem like you’ve had an exciting life, Tesla, that’s all. Jesus. I’m sorry!”

Wild child. I touched my throat, felt the pendant in the shape of a rainbow with a star on the end. Today I wore a black shirt with a picture of the cover of the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers on the front—some dude’s crotch. Black leggings with rainbow leg warmers. Black ballet flats. I had glitter in my hair, but so what? Unconventional, maybe, but not that exciting.

“Well,” I said, “I’m really not.”

Darek looked over the front counter to the group of laughing customers. “Maybe you should tell her that.”

“Tell her what?” I frowned and wished for someone to come and order something, or for Joy to pop out of the back to yell at us. Anything to keep this conversation from continuing. “Oh, that. Well. It’s just a crush. It’s not like I haven’t had them before. They go away, Darek.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“You’ve never had a crush?” I rolled my eyes. “Please. I see how you look at that girl who comes in here, the one with the red hair.”

“Yeah, she’s hot. But it’s not a crush.”

“Whatever.” I waved a hand. “You gonna tell her you like her? Ask her out, maybe?”

“She has a boyfriend.”

“So you get it,” I told him. “It’s better just to crush in silence.”

He didn’t look happy about that, but he didn’t argue with me, either. Then finally one of Meredith’s admirers broke off from the group long enough to come up and order a slice of pie and another latte, so both of us had something to do and we didn’t have to talk anymore.

The rush helped, too, leaving both of us so busy we didn’t have time for deep and soul-searching conversations about the sad state of our love lives. By the time we’d gone through that, I figured Meredith would’ve left, but when I took a break to make the rounds of the shop, clearing away crumpled napkins and left-behind mugs, she was still sitting in her spot.