| |
After an hour with Jane Eyre, in which things are beginning to look better for her because she finally has a decent job at a place called Thornfield Hall, I close the book and go into the kitchen to check out the supplies.
There’s tomato paste and a big can of parmesan cheese and a six pack of soda. I grab my coin purse and walk to the market, about six blocks away. The air is clear and fresh and the San Gabriel Mountains look as if you could walk to Mt. Wilson in about half an hour. It’s an amazing day for the Los Angeles basin, where the air is usually heavy and gray and leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
As I walk into the market I notice a red Honda Civic parked alone, back by a light pole. It seems like I’ve noticed it before. But why would I? I’m sure I don’t know anyone with a little red Civic like that.
Inside I pick up two ready-made pizza crust things, pepperoni, fresh mushrooms, sliced black olives, and mozzarella cheese. Tyler likes anchovies but, as much as I want to be unselfish, I can’t bring myself to buy them. They’re so slimy.
––––––––
As I’m turning the corner to Tyler’s house I get a glimpse of a red Honda zipping past. There’s no reason for me to feel creepy. There must be about a million red Honda Civics running around the San Gabriel Valley. For some reason, though, it gives me an eerie feeling, and I quicken my pace to get to Tyler’s. Once inside, I check to be sure all the doors are locked, then I check the windows. As I’m checking the lock on the corner window in the living room, I see a small red car way down at the end of the block. I don’t know if it’s the one I saw earlier or not. It could be. Or it could all be only my imagination.
After I put the groceries away I pour a soda into an ice-filled glass and take Jane Eyre back to Tyler’s room. I fluff up his pillows and stretch out on his bed. His room has a pleasant scent—essence of Tyler. I sink into his pillows, happy to be here, and take up where I left off in my reading.
Jane Eyre is secretly in love with this weird guy, Mr. Rochester. It seems as if he loves her, too, but she doesn’t know it. As I read, I realize that Jane Eyre and I have some things in common. For one thing, she has no mother or father. And her childhood was awful, living with an aunt and cousins who were so mean to her it’s a wonder she lived through it. She didn’t have anyone in her life like Grams, either, so she never found a safe place, like I did.
Besides being an orphan, and then later being in love, Jane Eyre also expressed herself creatively. She did it with painting, and I do it with writing.
It’s easier to pay attention to the book now that I realize that Jane Eyre and I are kind of alike. I’d still rather be reading Angela’s Ashes, but this isn’t as bad as it seemed at first.
I’m still reading when I hear Tyler’s car turn the corner. It’s funny, isn’t it, how you can always tell the sound of the car that the person you love drives?
I jump up from the bed and smooth the spread, run brush my teeth, and am waiting on the back porch by the time Tyler parks his car at the end of the driveway.
“Hey, Curly,” he says, bouncing up the steps and giving me a big bear hug.
“Hey, Green Jeans,” I say, nuzzling my face in his chest.
“I got stuff for pizza,” 1 tell him, leading him into the kitchen.
“Are you cleared with your gramma for the weekend?”
“She thinks I’m at Amber’s.”
“Cool,” he says, giving me that meltdown smile of his.
I open the refrigerator and take out the pepperoni and mozzarella cheese, then turn the knob on the oven to start it preheating. Tyler reaches past me and turns the knob to the off position.
I turn it back on.
“The oven’s got to preheat,” I tell him.
“I’m preheated,” he says, turning the knob back off. He pulls me close to him and kisses me long and hard.
“I’ve been thinking of this all afternoon,” he says. “Waiting on customers, watering plants, carrying orders to the truck, all afternoon, every step I’ve been thinking ‘Lauren’s at my house, waiting for me. Lauren’s there.’”
“Don’t you want pizza?” I ask.
“There’s something else I want more,” he says, then kisses me again. His lips are soft and warm. Our tongues tease at each other’s lips and I lean into him, feeling the warmth of his body under the roughness of his overalls. He holds me closer, kisses me harder, then takes my hand and leads me to his bedroom.
I get a kind of scared feeling. Ever since our phone call, when we sort of argued about sex, neither of us has brought up the subject. I hope Tyler doesn’t think I’m ready to do it all just because I’m spending the weekend with him.
Tyler’s bedroom is nearly dark, except for the subdued glow of the Mickey Mouse night-light that is always on in the adjoining bathroom. He lies down, crossways, on his bed and gently pulls me down beside him.
“We should talk,” I tell him.
“Ummmm, later,” he whispers, turning to face me.
He unbuttons my blouse, kissing each newly exposed space as he does so.
“Tyler, I. . .”
He unbuttons the waist of his overalls and guides my hand inside, to his “friend,” as he calls it. Feeling how excited he is gets me even more excited. But we’ve got to talk. I know we’ve got to talk.
“Really, Ty . . . ”
“Really, yourself,” he whispers, undoing my bra and gently caressing my breasts. “You are so amazingly beautiful.”
“I don’t want to do it,” I say.
“Do what? . . . This?” he asks, kissing me lightly on the sensitive part of my neck.
“No. You know,” I tell him, breathing fast now. “IT! I don’t want to do IT.”
He slips his hand inside my pants and finds his way to the wetness between my legs.
“Your body says you want to do it,” he whispers.
“But I don’t,” I say.
“Let’s just see what happens,” he says, moving his hand slowly around my most sensitive parts. “Let’s just take all our clothes off . . . We won’t do anything you don’t want to do, but let’s get close. We’ve never had all our clothes off together.”
All of the time he is telling me this he is moving, his hands on me, mouth grazing my skin for punctuation, hips thrusting his friend against my hand, and I’m sinking into the feeling, the sensation, the thrill of Tyler.
He slips my blouse and bra off and I unbutton my jeans. He pulls off his overalls and shirt and tosses them on the floor. He pulls my jeans off and starts to take my underpants off.
“No,” I tell him.
He takes his own underwear off then and is totally nude. He rolls over on top of me. We are both breathing strong and heavy, in unison. He tries again to slip my underpants off.
“No,” I whisper.
“Please. Please,” he says. “I promise I’ll stay outside.”
“No,” I tell him, feeling him strong against me, only the light fabric of my panties between us. I want so much to be as close as I can get, to feel him inside me, I know it would happen if I didn’t hold back with that one light barrier.
We kiss, strong. I give him the little bitey kisses he likes around his ears and neck. He moves his hands lower, against my butt, and holds me close to him. He thrusts, easy and slow, rubbing with his “friend” against my secret places, then thrusts harder, faster, until he groans in what sounds like pain but I now know is pleasure. Seconds later, I, too, cry out with pleasure. Our breathing slows, and we lie quiet in the near darkness of the room.
“I love you so much, Lauren,” he tells me. “You’re all I’ve ever wanted and I didn’t even know it until that day at the nursery.”
“I got so scared when I thought you were mad at me. I don’t know how I’d go on if you ever stopped loving me,” I whisper.
“I won’t. I won’t ever stop. I just want the whole thing. I’m almost eighteen and I’m still a virgin and I want the whole thing.”
“But, aren’t you happy right now?”
“Yes,” he says. “But I could be happier. I could make you happier.”
“I couldn’t be happier than right now,” I tell him, snuggling even closer.
We doze for a while, then, about midnight, I wake to the sound of the shower in Tyler’s bathroom. I turn over and close my eyes, half-remembering a dream of a man and a child, running.
“Awake?”
Tyler is standing over me, a giant bath towel wrapped around him.
“Almost,” I say, still trying to see the dream.
“Pizza-time,” he says, grinning.
“Now?” I mumble.
“Wakie-wakie,” he says, laughing.
He leaves the room and I hear him shuffling around in the kitchen. I take a quick shower and put on my sweatpants and sweater, then join him. He hands me a soda and I open the tomato paste and spread it over the pizza shell, while he slices the mozzarella into paper-thin pieces.
When the pizza is cooked we put everything on a tray and take it into the family room where they have a TV with a giant screen. We watch “Psycho” while we munch out. At first it’s kind of fun, but then that Norman Bates guy is such a creep that I lose my appetite. And then, when the woman’s stabbed in the shower—that’s got to be one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen in a movie.
While the movie’s rewinding we sit snuggled up, talking about school and Harper’s class.
“I’ll be right back,” Tyler says, jumping up as if he’s just remembered something.
When he comes back he’s dressed in his mother’s robe, with a blanket wrapped around him, pretending to be Norman Bates.
––––––––
“Not funny,” I say, even though I’m laughing.
“Let me show you to your room,” he says.
“Stop!” I say, laughing harder, trying to pull the blanket off him.
A sudden sound at the window makes us both freeze in silence.
“What was that?” I whisper, the tingle of adrenaline reaching my fingertips.
Tyler puts a finger to his lips to silence me, then tiptoes to the window and pulls the drape back just a crack. He stands there for a long time, then pulls the drape back farther for a broader view. I walk over to stand beside him.
“Nothing he says—a branch and our Psycho-crazed imaginations.”
“Look at that,” I whisper, pointing toward the street.
A small car, parked at the end of the block, starts up and drives past the house and around the corner, all with its lights off.
“What about it?” Tyler says.
“Why would they try to sneak by with their lights off?”
“Sneak by?” Tyler grins. “They just forgot to turn them on, that’s all.”
“No, there’s this car that I keep seeing. Sometimes I think someone is following me, and watching me.”
“‘Psycho’ has got you spooked.”
“Maybe,” I say. But in my heart I know it was that Honda. And I know my spooky feeling is from something more real than a movie.