Another Goddamn Teenage Love Story

“So? Did you fuck her?”

High school can suck my dick. I inhale the last drag of my cigarette and stub it out in the grass. “Dude, is that really all you care about?”

“Well, yeah.” Brad’s already lighting up another. He stares at me expectantly, eyebrows raised, subtly grinding his teeth.

I rip up a few handfuls of grass and let them slide through my fingers. The breeze carries them a few inches to the left. “She blew me and I fingered her a little. Happy?”

“What, no details?” Half of Brad’s lip twitches up in a smirk.

“Jesus, get your own chicks, man. This ain’t your business.” I slap my pack of Marbs against my palm just for something to do while Brad rolls his eyes and huffs. I catch his mouth opening for a retort and stand up quickly, bag over my shoulder. “I gotta head home.”

“Whatever. I’m late for practice.” Brad swings his gym duffle over his shoulder and heads for the weight room without another world. I watch him leave for a few seconds, contemplating my choice in friends. I guess I quit the team for a reason.

I take a moment to light another cig before I make my way to the gravel parking lot. I hold the smoke in my lungs for four steps, exhale for four steps, and inhale again for another four. I’m a few feet from my truck when I hear tiny running footsteps approaching from behind.

“Jesse! Hey, Jesse!”

The fuck..? I shuffle around, promptly drop the cigarette, and crush it under my boot. That little Goth girl from English is rushing towards me, trembling slightly in her black heels, neon red curls whipping across her face. I half-raise a hand I greeting, set my bag down, and walk forward, meeting her in the center of the parking lot. “Er, Laura, right?” Oh shit, no, that’s my mother’s name.

“Lily.”

“Right, sorry. What’s up?” I stick my thumbs in my pockets and study her. She’s such a tiny thing, short and a little too thin, and when she tucks her hair behind her heavily pierced ear and drops her gaze to her shoes, she could barely pass for fourteen. She bites her lip and looks up at me through mile long eyelashes, thick with mascara. Her eyes are an almost supernatural green. I swallow and notice my palms sweating where they’re resting on against my jeans.

“We’re partners for that Tennyson paper. Remember?”

“Oh, yeah, that.”

“Well, um, it’s due in three days, so…”

I slam my eyes shut and throw my head back. “Fuck. Of course it is.” I rake a hand down my face and exhale into it loudly. When I look down at her again, her cheeks are almost as red as her hair, and her lower lip is trembling ever-so slightly. “Shit, I’m sorry,” I rush out, “I don’t mean to be a dick about this. It’s just—I’m not having the best week, ya know?”

She chuckles short and humorlessly. “Yeah, me neither.”

We’re silent for a few seconds while I take note that her eyes aren’t actually a solid green—there’s some blue and hazel in there too—before I realize that this is when I’m supposed to tell her my availability or offer to write a specific part or something. “Do you want to come over?” I ask, but it happens to come out like, dyawantcomovr?

She squints a little, tilting her head to one side. “Sorry?”

I cough into my elbow and pretend to clear my throat. “Do um, do you want to come over? So we can work on the paper?”

“Now?”

“Uh, yeah. Unless you’re busy or something.”

Lily’s knuckles whiten on her bag strap and she twists the bottom of one of her curls. “Sure. Yeah, that’d be great, actually. But I’ll need a ride home though. If that’s okay.”

It should make me uncomfortable, how fucking shy she is, but it’s endearing somehow, almost refreshing. Goths are supposed to be all dark and sullen (sort of like my bitch sister if she wore all black), not sweetly fragile and, well, pretty. “That’s fine. I can take you home.”

A faint smile touches her lipstick-stained mouth, and she raises a pierced eyebrow. The implications of what I said punch me in the gut at the same moment I find myself wondering how many other parts of her are pierced as well. She ignores the comment though and gestures to my truck. “This your car?”

***

Lily sucks in a huge gasp when I start navigating the long, curving road to the ranch, passing the sign that reads Sullivan Stables ~ Partnering with The Kentucky Horse Farm. “Whoa, hold up. This is where you live?”

“Yeah?”

“Wait, wait—your family breeds racehorses?”

“Yep. And we train them, and race them, and sell them.”

“Oh my god.” Lily’s eyes widen and her fallen-open mouth is tilted upward in the mimic of a grin.

I chuckle at her childlike wonder. “You can meet some of the horses, if you want, before we start the paper.”

Her squeal of YES baffles me again—what the fuck kind of Goth is this girl? My mouth opens before I can find the restraint to hold back the comment. “So are you like, Goth?”

The light in her eyes vanishes, and she’s instantly back to the shy little thing who could barely make eye contact. She turns to stare out the window and I feel like a complete asshole when her answer is so quiet in contrast to her previous excitement. “Honestly? Bright colors just don’t look that great on me.” She can’t possibly be serious, but her eyes are far too sad to be sarcastic. I want to tell her that she’s one of those girls who would look beautiful in anything, hell, even covered in horse shit, but I’m thankfully able to put a damn lid on that one.

We don’t talk anymore until we pull up to the front of the house. Lily’s jaw drops in the same fashion that every other potential friend’s does when it fully registers how wealthy my family is—if the fountain in the center of the circular driveway and the four pillars that boarder the front double doors don’t give enough away, the barn that’s only slightly smaller than the house, the race-track, the arenas and round-pens, the pastures in which about twenty pure-bred racehorses graze, the tennis court, the pool and the hot tub spell it out explicitly enough.

“Well, shit.” Lily climbs out of the truck slowly, taking very short, light steps, as if the ground is breakable. “Nice place.”

“I guess so. You want to see the horses?” I lead Lily around the back of the house to the nearest paddock where Persephone is nursing one of her fouls, and the other is galloping after a rabbit, which bounds off into the underbrush before he can reach it.

“Are those… are those babies?”

“Yeah, about four months old. You can pet them if you want.” I lift the latch to the gate, and Lily follows me in tentatively, her arms crossed over her chest and her hair falling over her face, hiding her eyes. The nursing foul raises its head and trots over. He shakes out his mane and reaches his nose forward—an explicit request to be petted. Lily flattens her palm and strokes his muzzle. Her eyes flutter closed and she inhales like this is a sacred act, her forehead crinkles vanishing and lips parting.

“What’s its name?” Lily’s voice is barely an octave above a whisper. She shuffles to the side to reach up and scratch at the foul’s withers and stroke her other hand over his neck.

“Hades.”

“The god of the underworld?”

“Yeah; his mom’s name is Persephone, so Ruby—my sister—thought it’d be cute. Dad has a thing about naming all our horses after pagan gods. The Greek ones are his favorite.”

“Huh. That’s kind of awesome.” Lily withdraws her hands from Hades, causing him to nudge her with his nose, incredulous that she dares to stop the massage. “Do you know a lot about mythology then?”

“Not really. I just pick up on some of what Dad and Ruby talk about.”

Lily chuckles, but there’s much more humor in it than back when we were in the school parking lot. “You’re not much of a literature person, are you?”

“Not even a little.”

“I guess this means I’ll have to write most of the paper.” She sighs mock-dramatically.

“To be honest, you probably will.”

“Oh god, please tell me you at least read the poem.”

“I did! Something about some chick being trapped in a tower and swooning over Sir Lancelot?”

“Well, that’s the gist of it at least…” Lily frowns, but there’s a ghost of a smirk underneath. “You have a computer?”

***

My bedroom is big, like, really fucking big. I have half of the fourth floor to myself, with three doors leading off of the king-size bed in the center—one to the walk-in closet, one to the bathroom, and one to the study (which is currently filled with gaming systems and a small desk shoved against the wall). Unlike the rest of the house, Lily doesn’t comment on it, but I notice her wide eyes scanning every inch.

I grab my laptop, English textbook, and a printed out copy of The Lady of Shalott, and we sit on the floor, backs propped up against the foot of the bed, the laptop resting between us, our shoulders touching and elbows bumping every so often. Working with Lily is astonishingly easy—with any other girl I’d be constantly shifting and sweating, unable to focus on anything but my dick hard and trapped in my jeans. My dick is definitely hard and trapped, but when what Lily says goes in one ear, it actually stays in my head rather than drifting out the other.

“What’s up with the endless descriptions of Lancelot? It goes on for four fucking stanzas. He’s handsome, we get it, Jesus.”

“It’s not just that he’s handsome though.” Lily’s cheeks are flushed and her eyes are wide as a doll’s in her eagerness to explain. “It’s that this is the first time Elaine is truly seeing what beauty is. She’s caught glimpses of it before, but for her, Lancelot represents all that’s extraordinary in the outside world—everything that she’ll never have in her imprisonment. Tennyson is using all that description to show that to the reader, rather than just straight up saying it.”

“You’ve really thought a lot about this, huh?”

“Yeah, I guess. I just—I kind of understand Elaine’s situation, ya know?” The brightness of Lily’s cheeks changes then—the glowing excitement replaced with her signature shyness. She bites her lip hard and lowers her eyes.

“What do you mean?”

“Just…” She squeezes her eyes closed and breathes in and out deep and loudly. “I get what it feels like to be trapped outside looking in. Or, well, inside looking out.”

I wait for her to continue. When she doesn’t, I stare at her until she finally meets my eyes. Her smile is tight and strained, but it’s there. “You want to know a secret?”

“Sure.”

“I’m not Goth. My mom passed away two years ago, and I just never stopped wearing black. But still, not many people want to talk to you if you look all dark and sullen most of the time.”

I know I should say something like I’m sorry, or That’s awful, or even I understand, but once again I find myself blurting out the absolute worst thing to say. “But if you’re not Goth, what’s with all the piercings?”

Lily giggles. Thank all the Greek gods, she giggles, and I don’t have to feel more like a douche than I already do. “One for every time I wanted to do something stupid to take the pain away, but didn’t,” she explains. “Badges of honor for being stronger than my sadness.”

“Jesus Christ, Lily, you’re—you’re incredible. You’re a goddamn warrior.”

“Nah. I’m just creative with how I cope with shit.”

We transition back to the paper as though that whole conversation never happened. We take turns typing as the other dictates, and with each completed page, she leans into my side just a little more.

“Okay, hold the fuck up for a sec—she kills herself in the end? She just fucking kills herself for some dude?”

Lily purses her lips and tilts her head to the side. “I think it’s more than that. She didn’t just kill herself because she couldn’t be with some guy she thought was hot… it was that she got a taste of what it felt like to truly love, and she realized that a life without love, hell, without companionship or even just human contact, wasn’t a life worth living.”

I snort. “Well, shit, that’s probably the most disgustingly romantic crap I’ve ever heard.”

“Yeah, but think about it—what if you were in that position? Is watching the world through just a reflection any kind of life at all?”

“It’s better than being dead! If it were me, I’d try to break the curse or something, put up a fight, not just lie down and quit.”

“But what if the curse was unbreakable?”

“You ain’t making this easy for me, girl.”

“Exactly! The choice isn’t supposed to be easy for Elaine. That’s what makes it a tragedy.”

I have no idea why—this conversation certainly doesn’t warrant it—but I can’t keep the grin from my face. “Such a melancholy idea. You’re no fun!”

“Since when is homework supposed to be fun?”

It’s as though my body acts of its own accord, like the link between my limbs and my mind have been severed when I cup one of her cheeks in my palm. “Since I get to do it with you.”

All the air is wrenched from my lungs when she kisses me—it’s all sucked from my chest and then breathed back in as we feed off each other’s hunger. Lily slides her arms around my neck and I place my hands on her lower back, gently guiding her to climb into my lap. I find myself thinking that I’ve never felt this way before, that I’ve just been whisked away into one of those goddamn teenage romance novels that Ruby still gushes over at 23. Six hours ago I’d have lost my shit laughing if someone had told me that I’d be holding Lily Kennedy tight to my chest and gasping into her mouth later today, but low-and-fucking-behold.

“I don’t do one night stands,” Lily whispers against me.

“Me neither,” I lie.

“But I think, maybe—”

“Hey.” I pull back gently and tuck a strand of neon red curls behind her pierced ear. “Who said it’d just be one night?”

As I slip an arm under her knees and another under her neck, carrying her to the bed, I briefly wonder what Brad will think—hell, what that girl whose name I can’t even remember will think—when I’m seen tomorrow bypassing the football field without a single glance, my finger’s interlaced with Lily’s. Damn, first he quits the football team and now he’s dating the Goth? Whatever; high school can suck my dick.