Ilona’s house was dark when they finally pulled into the rutted driveway a little before two. Ben started to follow Tyler toward the leather sectional, but Ilona caught him by the arm instead. “You don’t mind if I borrow him for the evening, do you?”
“Do what you gotta do,” Tyler said, walking toward the kitchen. Ilona’s hand was warm on Ben’s arm, and he followed her up the dark stairs toward her bedroom. She didn’t bother with the lights. He tried to ignore the feline hiss and subsequent thump of four feet hitting the ground when they flopped down onto Ilona’s bed. There was a momentary nervous twitch in his stomach. What did she expect him to do exactly? With Ilona he was never sure what the limits were.
He worried for about two more seconds and then she started nuzzling his neck again. Was it her lips or her tongue? He wasn’t sure, but something was flicking at his earlobe and the sensation was something he could feel everywhere. Then she was scraping his thighs, up and down on either side of his dick, which was threatening to burst the seams of his pants. God, he wanted out of those pants. And then Ilona, as though she could read his mind, twisted the button on the front and helped him wiggle out of his jeans. As he did so, his hand brushed her thigh. It was smooth and taut and she was not wearing pants either.
“Are you wearing boxers?”
“You want me to take them off?” she asked.
“No!” he said. “I mean . . .”
But Ilona was already laughing at him. She rolled onto her back, and he could see the outline of her with the yellow light from the streetlamp coming in between the two massive pine trees outside her window. He pulled her back toward him, and she rolled so she was on top of him, staring down, her lips now level with his chin. “You really are a head case, you know that, right?”
“I thought you didn’t like head cases?”
“Mmm,” she said and leaned over so she was nuzzling in his ear again and whispered, “You’re my kind of head case.”
He didn’t know how it happened. One minute they were kissing and her hands were rubbing up and down his body. His hands were under her shirt, mapping the contours of her shoulder blades and venturing around to cup her small breasts. He had one hand on her thigh, stroking where he imagined the tattoo was, when her breathing changed in his ear. There was a small sound, like a dolphin clicking, and then another that was identical and he realized suddenly that her hand, hooked on the waistband of his boxer shorts, wasn’t moving any longer. And that her mouth planted on his earlobe, was actually just that—planted there. She was snoring.
He would have laughed out loud. He thought for a second of waking her up just to give her some shit about it. But then he just opened his mouth in a silent laugh for the benefit of the shark-shaped water stain on her ceiling.
Ilona wasn’t very heavy, and her breath against his neck was soft and sweet. After a few more minutes she started drooling on his neck, which was neither soft nor sweet, and he pushed her gently to one side. She grumbled something and then pulled part of the comforter up over her legs. He was half in and half out of the blanket, and he shifted around, trying to decide if he was really going to sleep there or not. He settled back into the pillow, trying to ignore the apparent lack of a pillowcase. The pillow was an old one, and his head sank deep until he could feel the mattress against the back of his skull, the two sides of the pillow puffing up around him like horse blinders. He was replaying the events of the night—all of it: the dancing, taking off his hearing aids, seeing Tyler paraded around the dance floor like a roast pig at a luau, and the strange salty-sweet feeling of Ilona’s mouth against his. He touched his lips, which were still burning a little from vigorous use. All these thoughts and images cycled round and round in his brain until he entered a trancelike state that was something close to sleep.
Suddenly, though he was unsure of how much time had passed, his eyes flicked open, alert in a way they hadn’t been before. The sky was still dark and the streetlights still blazed orange through the huge six-paned glass windows. He went downstairs to find Tyler.
He was awake, the large flat screen showing one of the Die Hard movies, and eating from a family-sized bag of Cheetos. Ben stood behind the couch as though he needed to be asked to sit down.
“They had Cheetos here? In the kitchen?”
“Uh-uh,” Tyler said, pausing to lick his cheese-dust fingers clean. “I walked to the Sev.”
“Can’t sleep?”
“Nah, not like usual. I think it’s whatever I took. I’m really hopped up.” He smiled as one of the bad guys took a two-by-four in the face from Bruce Willis. “He’s kicking ass now,” he added and pointed with his chin at the open space on the couch.
Ben stepped over the back of the couch and slid down on the soft leather. Tyler passed him the bag of Cheetos without looking over. As soon as he smelled the fake cheese, his stomach let out a huge rumble.
Tyler snickered. “Work up an appetite?”
“Not really.”
“Hmm?” Tyler raised his eyebrows in disbelief.
“We didn’t really do much,”
“Ilona’s cool,” Tyler said.
“Yeah, she’s good. I mean, she’s a good friend. What if we fuck that up?” His mind started to race, jumping ahead to a future without Ilona. He liked who he was when he was with her.
Tyler shrugged. “What if you make it even better?” His eyes never left the TV as he spoke.
Ben considered this as he pulled out a particularly long and skinny Cheeto with a strange protrusion on the top. It reminded him of Judy for some reason, but he didn’t say anything to Tyler. He didn’t really know if Tyler would get it, and right now he wanted them to be on the same page.
Tyler waved his hand over, beckoning for the bag of Cheetos. On the screen a gunfight was erupting and people were falling backwards and getting shot in that weird late-nineties style where it looked like they just passed out with holes in their chests. “You know her pretty well, though, right?”
It took Ben a second to realize he was talking about Ilona and not Judy. “I guess so, yeah.”
“And she knows you.” This wasn’t a question. Tyler shook the bag around as though the really good Cheetos were going to surface from the mix of crumbs and dust. “No one knows me like that,” he said without looking up from the bag. It seemed like maybe Ben should argue with him, but he wasn’t sure what to say. “Except you.” He popped a handful of cheese crumbs into his mouth and wiped his hand on his jeans. “I don’t think anyone else ever will.”
There was silence. How should he respond? It was a compliment but also a sad self-deprecating statement. “You don’t know that,” he said uneasily.
But Tyler just kept munching on the crumbs. To anyone else, he would have looked unconcerned and easy sitting there on the couch. But there was one line across his forehead that Ben had never noticed before and a twinge of distracted worry in his eyes, even as they seemed focused on the movie.
“Hey!” Tyler said suddenly. “Let’s order pizza.”
“From where? It’s four in the morning.”
“Shit.”
Ben bounced up from his seat and opened Ilona’s freezer and there, hidden behind a bag of ice, stacked up on each other like Holy Bibles, was a neat pile of frozen pizzas. “Oh my God,” he said softly. His mouth began to water before he could tear open the cardboard box.
“This summer’s going to be epic,” Tyler called out from the couch.
Ben nodded even though Tyler couldn’t see him. He was trying to figure out which buttons on the perfectly clean oven to press to turn it on. It would be an epic summer. Their last summer before college or whatever came in September. Ben gazed over at Tyler as the oven began to click and hum to life. How many times had they been up like this after a night of partying? How many more times like this would there be? Would he ever be like Julie Snow—done with high school, ready to move on? If he really looked closely, he could see that maybe the tide, slack for so long, had finally turned and begun to ebb.
An hour later, satiated with warm salty cheese, Ben lay down on the couch and let his eyelids grow heavy. When he woke up again it was too bright in the living room. Tyler was sleeping on the other side of the couch, and Bruce Willis had been replaced by a man with impossibly white teeth demonstrating the sucking power of a handheld vacuum.
Ben fumbled with the remote and turned off the TV. He staggered upstairs, feeling a little guilty that he’d left Ilona and hoping she’d still be asleep and wouldn’t notice. He managed to tuck himself back into her bed without jostling her, but when he turned onto his side she said, “Where’d you go?”
“Bathroom.”
“Liar. You smell like pizza.”
“Tyler and I were—”
“I don’t care,” Ilona said. “I know you and your boyfriend can’t be apart for more than like ten minutes anyway. Just be quiet and let me sleep some more.” She flung an arm over him and scooched forward until her hips were pressed against him. It felt good. He felt stupid for thinking she’d be mad. Ilona didn’t get mad about shit like that.
When he woke up again the sunlight was warm and full. He checked his phone. It was 10:30. He nudged Ilona, who tried to pull the covers up over her head. “What about Judy?” he whispered.
“Not home ’til later,” she said. “Doesn’t care anyway.”
He tried to fall back to sleep, but the light was too bright. He messed around with a new game on his phone. He looked at Ilona a lot. The parts he could see, anyway. Right where the comforter met the bed, there was a strip of her skin visible. Her tank top was riding up and her stomach was moving with the soft exhalations of her breath. He imagined her in really sexy lace underwear. That was kind of interesting, but her head kept getting replaced by a Victoria’s Secret model when he thought about it for too long. Figures. Ilona probably wouldn’t tolerate wearing some hot lace underwear anyway. Her boxers were dark red with old-fashioned cars on them. He recognized the pattern and thought he might have the same ones at home somewhere.
Finally he poked her in the side. “Wake up,” he said. Ilona made a noise that was somewhere between a whine and a moan. It was clearly an objection. “Let’s go get pancakes.”
She moaned again, but this time she opened her eyes. She reached across him, pressing her chest against his to push the button on his phone. “It’s too early,” she declared and flopped back on to the pillow.
“It’s 11:30. Come on, get up.”
She lifted her head again and smacked her lips together. “Ugh, it tastes like one of Judy’s cats crapped in my mouth.”
“Do you always say exactly what you’re thinking?”
“What else would I say? Some boring social bullshit so other people can feel comfortable? No thanks.”
Ben shook his head. “There’s a toothbrush for that.”
“Oh yeah.” Ilona was suddenly animated. “Like washing your mouth out with soap—a social bullshit toothbrush. Guaranteed to scrub the nice-nice from your mouth and leave only the brutal truth.”
“Maybe you should go back to sleep,” he said.
Ilona sat up and clobbered him with her pillow. She leaped with surprising agility across the piles of clothes and into the bathroom. Ben heard the sounds of water running and then her spitting. When she came back, her face was damp and there was a tiny smudge of toothpaste in the corner of her mouth. She sat cross-legged on the bed and stared down at him critically.
“What?”
“Can I try them on?”
“Try what on?” But he already knew and pushed his head back farther into the pillow.
“Your hearing things. Are they hearing aids? That sounds like something for old people.”
“That’s what they are.”
“Don’t get sour with me. So can I try them on or what?”
“No, that’s gross.”
“Why? It’s not like they were up your nose or anything. What’s gross about your ears?”
“Ear wax,” Ben said. “And they get sweaty. I don’t know. It’s just gross.”
“Hmm,” Ilona said. She squinted, her eyes glimmering with a plan. “So you need a little convincing, okay.” She moved across the bed and straddled him with her butt just above his waistline and pinned his hands down at the wrist. His heart started pounding. If she grabbed them he was going to throw her off onto the floor. He wasn’t even thinking about doing it. It was just what was going to happen. But she didn’t grab for his ears. Instead she brought her face down so that she was just an inch above him. Her toothpaste had cinnamon in it. He had never noticed her eyelashes before, which were short but fully framed her eyes. She was studying him for something. Then she leaned forward and kissed him. Softly at first, but his mouth opened up to her and his heart, which had already been pounding, seemed as if it might burst out of the confines of his rib cage.
She left his mouth and loosened the grip on his hands as she kissed her way down his chin and down the side of his neck. She took the neck of his T-shirt in between her teeth and tugged on it a little bit before kissing his chest between his collarbones and holy shit she was still going south. Her legs were over his thighs now and she was nuzzling around at his belly button and he thought he was going to die or explode or both when she licked at his left hip bone with a darting tongue and then did the same thing on the right. But then she stopped. He waited for a second and then lifted his head off the pillow. She was staring at him, a self-satisfied smile on her face.
“I’ll keep going,” she said smugly. “But first I want to try them on.”
Wordlessly, he pulled off his hearing aids and gave them to her. She could do whatever she wanted. He watched as she slipped them on. It was so weird he could hardly look. Then she was lying on his chest again, her chin digging into him. “See,” she said. “Not that big a deal.” She pulled one off and he made a grab for it. But she pulled her hand back. “Not even that waxy.”
“That’s disgusting.”
Ilona shrugged. “A lot of things are more disgusting. They are bigger and heavier than I thought they’d be, though.” She moved her jaw up and down so her ears wiggled. “And I thought I’d be all, like, supersonic with these on. But it’s just a lot of loud buzzing.”
“Because you can hear fine,” he said tersely.
“Wow, you’re really freaking out about this, huh?” She stared down at him. “It’s not that big a deal!” She said it slowly and with emphasis that, from anyone else, would have pissed him off. But he knew it wasn’t about his hearing. This was about being seen by someone—just him by himself, not the goalie or Tyler’s best friend or even the deaf kid. This was as naked as he ever got with anyone, and he wasn’t dying or falling to pieces. It was safe and completely liberating all at the same time.
“So,” she said, “you want pancakes?” He shook his head. “Huh, was there something else then?” She grinned. “French toast?” He shook his head again. “Oh, now I remember. It was this, wasn’t it?” She licked his stomach right above the waistband of his boxers and the noise that came out of his mouth was somewhere between a sigh and a moan. She was still kissing him as she tugged his boxers down. He fell back into the bed and kept falling with the warm, incredible sensations that started with Ilona’s mouth but seemed to flood into every other part of his body.
“Please don’t make any jokes about whipped cream,” he whispered daringly.
Ilona snorted, and that was all.