“Okay. Give it a little juice.” David sounded serious. His hand was on mine. “You don’t need to squeeze it that hard, come on.”
“I’m not sure this is a good idea.”
“Let yourself go. Stop overthinking it.”
“Like this?”
“Hey, hey, hey! Hold on! Not so hard.”
“See? I don’t know what I’m doing.”
David sighed and pressed his forehead against my shoulder.
“Please, Margot. Driving a car is much harder.” I felt his breath on my shoulder. “This is just a bicycle with an engine.”
The sun was beating down on the long, deserted road where we had stopped. David was wearing a backpack holding everything we needed for the beach, but we’d never get there if I didn’t get a grip because clearly I was going to be the one to drive there.
I hit the accelerator again, this time more gently. David let go of my hand and dropped his to my thigh.
“Okay. You’re getting there.”
We moved slowly. My white Converse were still grazing the ground.
“Lift up your feet,” he told me.
“Put on your helmet,” I told him.
“You know it’s not mandatory here? That’s why they give you these shitty ones.”
“Put on your helmet,” I insisted, accelerating a little more.
“Lift up your feet.”
I saw his shadow put on his helmet, and then his hand returned to my thigh, gently squeezing to soothe me. Fuck. My horniness hadn’t gone away after all.
“Good, good, good. Lift up your feet and accelerate.”
I lifted my feet; I accelerated. David clutched my short black romper.
“Margot, take it easy…”
“Look, look! I’m doing it all on my own! David! I’m driving! Ay, ay. A curve. There’s a curve up there.”
I slammed on the front brake, and David smacked into my back.
“Sorry!” I yelled.
“Use both brakes, Margot, we’re gonna get killed.”
“Sorry, sorry.”
I accelerated again.
“Okay. Follow the road. You don’t have to turn for another five kilometers,” he said, looking at his phone.
I juddered over a pothole. I whimpered.
“I wanna stop, I wanna stop! I’m scared.”
“Don’t brake, Margot.”
I braked with the front wheel again, and David was hurled against my body once more.
“Ah, ah, ah,” I moaned.
“Come on, girl, don’t lose your nerve.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
I accelerated. I saw a pebble. I braked badly again. David’s chest ended up crushed against my back.
“Margot, please.”
“Ah! Ah! Ah! There’s a car coming behind us!”
“So they’ll pass us. You stick to the right, and that’s it, but stop making those sounds, please.”
“Ah! Ahhh! David, David, I hate this.”
A car passed us, and I braked again. David smashed into me again. I braked. He smashed. I heard him groan.
“Sorry, sorry!”
“Margot, are you doing this on purpose?”
“What? No! I’m super overwhelmed!”
A bigger motorcycle passed us with a dude without a helmet. He yelled something, and I braked.
“What’s happening? Why did he yell?”
“Margot, please, because he’s an idiot. Stop braking.”
“Can I stop?”
“No, but seriously, accelerate. Just accelerate.”
His mouth was pressed against my shoulder. I glanced back, confused.
“David…are you getting sick? Am I that bad? Should I stop?”
I braked.
“Margot!” he yelled.
“I know, I know. Sorry.”
“Do you know why you’re saying sorry?”
“For slamming on the brakes,” I answered, confused. “What…what’s going on with you? I don’t get it.”
“Every time you brake, my dick thumps against your ass, Margot. And fucking hell, girl, I respect you, but I’m not made of stone.”
I stared straight ahead, freaked out. A little angel, sitting formally on my shoulder, asked me to brake as gently as possible. The devil, with my sister Candela’s face, God knows why, squeezed my fingers against the brake again.
“Go ahead and keep braking.” I heard him laugh. “But don’t worry, the thing you feel is my phone in my pocket.”
“What pocket? It’s in your hand!”
“My phone,” he insisted. “You keep braking like this, when we get there, I’m going to need a cigarette afterward.”
I bit my lip, hiding my smile.
“I’m watching you, you minx.”
And I would swear he was getting used to it, slamming into my butt again.
Kamari Beach was pretty crowded, but we had gotten up early and found a couple of free beach chairs. David was apathetic about this kind of “summering.” He wanted us to go to Red Beach, which was much more hippy-ish; he wanted us to go to a supermarket, grab some snacks and drinks, and spend the day lying there, swimming and diving with goggles that he showed me proudly. We played rock, paper, scissors, and…everyone knows I have a gift for that game. I won and decided it would be better to start with something more “commercial.” Now that we had started ticking off the to-do list he had written back when he didn’t know he was coming with me, I was afraid he would say it was topless time. At least I’d have an excuse there: too many people.
“What?”
“I like it.”
“That’s just because of the beating I gave you on the way here,” I said sarcastically as I tugged my bikini bottom back in place.
He rolled up his red bathing suit and smiled slyly.
He passed over two hotel towels, which we spread over our chairs, always watching the other’s movements. Then he handed over the spray bottle of sunscreen. I spread it over my arms, my neckline, my tummy, my legs on the front and back, my butt, and…I asked him again to put it on my back. He was looking at me.
“You’re getting really silly, eh…” I warned him jokingly.
“Has Filippo seen you in that bikini?” he asked me, grabbing the sunscreen and spraying it on my back.
“Yes.”
“It drives him crazy, right?”
“Nothing drives Filippo crazy.”
“What a boring dude,” he muttered.
“It’s just a bikini.”
David rubbed my cream into his chest. I looked, I admit it. I looked harder when he went for his belly, where the line of hair disappeared into his bathing suit.
“Has Idoia seen you in that bathing suit?” I shot back.
“She’s seen me naked, which is better.”
“Hey! Wait, what’s going on here?”
“During that little ride on the motorcycle, you gave me an excuse for the whole day.” He raised his palms, defending himself. “Only you know what’s going on with you. If…you find that this”—he patted his chest and his belly and finally discreetly grabbed his crotch—“makes you very nervous, I’ll turn around.”
Excuse me. Did he just grab his Lambrusco right in front of me? I blinked to try to get the image out of my head.
“You’re an idiot,” I said.
David moved the loungers, strategically positioning them so our bodies were in the sun but our heads were in the shade, and flopped down to read. He was holding a well-thumbed book, and I had forgotten my magazines and my book in the hotel, so I leaned over to snoop at the title because, I admit, a dude reading had the same effect on me as one with a baby. It made me drool.
“The Color of Milk.” I read on the cover.
“Uh-huh.” He nodded. “You seem surprised. What’d you think? That I’d whip out a Playboy?”
“What’s it about?” I asked.
“It’s about a girl who…wait…no spoilers so all I’ll tell you is she has a really hard road in life. We think we’ve found a way to be more free, but we end up being even more enslaved than before.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Sounds sad.”
“Less sad than that motorcycle ride left me,” he muttered and then looked at me slyly.
“Read me a little,” I asked.
“Come here… Put some sunscreen on my back. I can’t reach. But use my stuff. That shit is cold, and it makes my skin crawl.”
He took out his bottle, and I sighed. Here I was thinking I was done with touching him…I squirted a little into my hand and then spread it on a broad, unblemished back, just a couple of small moles here and there, which created a beautiful constellation on his cinnamon skin. David flipped through the pages of the book until he came across a specific passage and began to read aloud:
“‘But at other times your memory will keep things you would rather never know again and no matter how hard you try to get them out of your head…they come back.’”
He turned and looked at me over his shoulder as I rubbed his back.
“So true,” I said.
“What do you wish you had never known, Margot?”
How far my cowardice goes popped into my head, but it was a pretty novel thought. I’d have to mull it over for a few more weeks to really parse the idea.
“Nothing in particular,” I said. “I still have a lot to learn.”
“Well, knowledge doesn’t free us. It just makes us more aware of our own limitations.”
“How do you go from grabbing your package so crudely to philosophizing like that, David?”
“It’s innate. I have a talent…”
I stopped his hand when he tried to grab his package again.
“Let’s go in the water.” I tugged on him.
“What about our stuff?” he asked.
“Excuse me,” I said in English to a woman in her seventies who was playing Sudoku in the chair next to us. “Would you mind keeping an eye on our stuff while we go for a dip?”
“Of course!” She smiled at me. “Would you like to leave your bag under my chair?”
“Thanks so much!”
I put everything valuable in my bag and slid it under the lady’s chair.
“We’ll be quick.”
“No rush. I’m planning on spending the whole day right here.”
I don’t know why David and I held hands as we ran to the sea. Maybe because Kamari Beach was a pebble beach. They were small and round but stones after all. It would have been easy to trip or hurt ourselves…or at least that was a good excuse, I don’t know. We let go when the first small gentle wave, hardly even worth calling a wave, hit our knees. The sea was a perfect temperature, not too cold or too hot. My nipples got hard when they touched the water as I pulled my hair back. When I looked for David, I found him suddenly pressed against my back, grabbing my waist. We smiled at each other.
“Let me take a photo when we get out,” he said to me. “Filippo has to see this.”
“Okay, quit laughing at me.”
“At you?” He turned me around. “I’m laughing at him, who nothing drives crazy.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I know what this is all about. You’re trying to raise my self-esteem.”
“Me? No way! It’s no good if someone on the outside raises your self-esteem. It has to happen inside.” He pointed to his chest. “Like when I tried on those jeans you made me buy and I saw the ass they gave me.”
“They probably need to be confiscated for the good of humanity.”
“Seriously, let me take a picture of you later. You have to see yourself the way I see you.”
We waded further into the water until it was up to our necks. I let myself be rocked there, with my arms open and my eyes closed. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so…detached from everything that pulled me. For years I had always traveled with my laptop, and even on my trips with Filippo, I would make time to read emails, return calls, and review Excel documents. But here, nothing. I couldn’t say I felt relaxed exactly, but at least my head had stopped being an asylum for that nest of anxieties with no beginning and no end.
“Look at those two…” I heard David say.
I bobbed back up. About twenty meters away, a couple was kissing…but they were kissing how you kiss when you’re the kind of horny that will only be solved by fucking. I couldn’t take my eyes off them once I spotted them.
“Fuck…”
“Do you think they’re fucking?”
I looked at David. A few drops of water were running down his neck. He looked like a snack.
“Well…” I looked back at the couple and saw they were moving, I don’t know if it was because of the waves or because of what we couldn’t see under the water. “I would say so.”
“Have you ever done that?”
“In the ocean? Yeah. It’s not that great. It stings.”
“So you do like doing it in weird places, eh?”
“The ocean isn’t a weird place. It’s weird that you’ve never done it there.”
“Once I did it on the stairs of a metro station.”
I turned to look at him again, stunned.
“On the stairs of the metro?”
“Yes.” He nodded. “The last train of the night, a corner where there was unquenchable horniness and no cameras.”
“Wasn’t it uncomfortable?”
“Well, I sleep on a sofa bed. The metro stairs felt like the lap of luxury. What about you? The weirdest place…”
“The Italian Embassy.”
“This girl, so fancy.” He smiled. “And did you like it?”
“Not really. I don’t like having to hurry.”
“How do you like it?” David came round in front of me and looked at my mouth.
“What about you?”
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
I never thought a boy like David would look at my mouth that way. And I definitely didn’t think I would feel butterflies when I discovered him looking at me like that.
“Hey, angel…” I warned him. “You’re getting pretty riled up.”
“Riled up? We’re getting down with that plan of yours to start a ‘wild loop.’ We’ve been soooo good that even your mother would approve of this trip.”
“My mother would commit hara-kiri if she saw me with a boy like you.” I regretted it as soon as I said it. “I mean…like this, like a bad boy.”
“A bad boy? I’m not David the sweet anymore?”
I raised an eyebrow.
“I know what’s happening to you,” I said.
“What’s happening to me?”
“How long have you gone without sex?”
“Without sex or without sleeping with a girl?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I masturbate sometimes. You should try it.”
“We’re getting a little intimate, aren’t we?”
“We should probably stop, right?” he played around.
“Well, yes. We’re friends.”
“You’ve never fucked a friend?”
“Who said anything about fucking?” I was shocked.
“No one. If you’d prefer, you could blow me.”
I let out a cackle, and he joined in. We howled with laughter like two idiots.
“I’m not going to blow you, not in a million years,” I added.
“Your loss.” He shrugged.
This all seemed hilarious to me.
“Is yours skinny? I hate skinny cocks.”
“Before you start making predictions…why don’t you try it for yourself?”
“Because it’s one thing to judge a play and another to get on the pitch yourself.”
“Oh, okay, okay. I get it. This is like a podcast.”
“Yes.” I smiled, looking into his eyes.
“Well, mine is normal, darling.” And a smile appeared on his face that melted the poles a little more. “And if you want more information, it’s been three weeks since the last time I had sex. When Idoia dumped me, we had just been to her house to fuck like animals.”
“Do you do it that badly?”
“Terribly.” He smiled. “They cry and everything when they come. Now it’s my turn to ask, right?”
“You’re not going to ask me what my nether regions are like.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I’d rather ask if you touched yourself last night.”
“What kind of question is that, you monster?”
“You asked me what my cock was like, and I even offered you the chance to take it for a test drive, but you didn’t want to. Come on, answer. Did you touch yourself?”
I smiled as an answer.
“I bet you touched yourself thinking about having a threesome with me and a stranger.”
My jaw dropped wider and wider, and then I burst into giggles.
“You’re shameless!”
“They’re shameless.” He pointed at the couple who were really going at it now. “You shouldn’t feast in front of hungry people.”
“On the way back, you’d better drive. I don’t know if I’ll be able to brake less, and it obviously puts you in a bad way.”
“That damn brake,” he teased.
“I’m going to get out. I can see a waiter walking among the chairs, and I want a beer. You coming?”
“Um…order one for me, I’ll be right out.”
I did a couple of strokes toward the shore before I stopped. I hesitated. I waved at him, and when he looked at me, I confirmed that David was getting cuter every day.
“I was just thinking maybe you need that crazy night out more than me,” I pointed out.
“Well, then we better organize it.”