Chapter Six

Week Two

 

Afterward, I lay curled under Rodney's covers, my heart pounding in my ears. Rodney's forehead rested against the nape of my neck, his breath heavy against my shoulder.

It's not a big deal, I told myself.

But my heart didn't slow. My body ached to turn into Rodney, to burrow into him and lose myself. His hand rested at my bare hip, a gentle reminder that we were both, incomprehensibly, naked.

But it's not a big deal. It's just sex. Guys don't care about sex.

Rodney's nose grazed my shoulder, and I had to fight to keep my body from arching into him. Ugh. Maybe Athena was right. Maybe girls weren't capable of detachment.

That wasn't the only thing that hadn't gone as expected. I'd read the books; I'd sat through the lectures. I knew sex wasn't supposed to be good for girls in the beginning. I was supposed to be in pain; I was supposed to fake it.

But for a little while, my body had taken over, responding to Rodney like a part of me had always been waiting to be close to him, clothes and reservations stripped away.

My cheeks burned. I hadn't had to fake anything.

Rodney's teeth tugged gently at my earlobe. His voice was low in my ear. "I'm trying to think of something eloquent to say. At the risk of sounding like a Neanderthal, I think I'm going to go with whoa."

I squeezed my eyes shut. Only Rodney could start with "eloquent" and end with "whoa." I should follow his tone. I should keep this light.

His arms squeezed around me. My back pressed against his chest, and I fought to breathe. I should be clear that I didn't mean to start anything serious.

Too late.

I smiled and turned to face him. I waited to respond until I was sure I had control of my voice. "Was that a complaint?"

"No," Rodney said. "Never." He bit his lip, looking into my eyes.

My heart hammered harder. No big deal, I thought. No big deal. No big deal.

Rodney nuzzled his nose against mine.

And that's when the front door opened downstairs.

Rodney leapt off the bed and pulled on his boxers. I turned away from the flash of naked Rodney flesh and curled up tighter, torn between the need to dress and the desire to stay covered.

Rodney saved me by tossing my clothes at me one piece at a time. Bra. Underwear. Shirt. Jeans. All landed one by one atop the comforter, and as Rodney jumped into his own pants and shirt, I scrambled under the blanket, wiggling into my clothes like a sixth-grader dressing out for gym class.

Keys hit a table downstairs. Rodney finished dressing and smiled sheepishly at me. His hair stuck up funny in the back. Minutes ago, my fingers had been knotting it.

"Brush your hair," I said. I crawled out of the bed and started to smooth the covers, but stopped with them halfway on. Rodney never made the bed. That would be suspicious.

I dashed to the bathroom across the hall before anyone could come up the stairs. I looked at myself in the mirror. My hair looked normal enough, but I felt disheveled. My body felt sticky, but a shower would have to wait.

I flushed the empty toilet and ran the sink. As I was reaching for the door to leave, the stairs creaked outside. "Rodney?" his mom called.

"Hey, Mom," Rodney called back. To his credit, he sounded totally normal. I was the spaz who couldn't deal.

But I also couldn't avoid her forever, so I opened the door.

Rodney's mom smiled at me as I stepped out of the bathroom. I tried to smile back, even though I was pretty sure I had sex written across my forehead in permanent marker. "Are you staying for dinner?" she asked.

I couldn't maintain normal for that long. And I really needed a shower. "Not tonight," I told her. "I need to get home."

"I'll drive you," Rodney said.

"Come right back," his mom said. "I've already ordered a pizza." Then she walked past me to her bedroom, like nothing was out of the ordinary.

I guess to her, nothing was.

Rodney grinned at me and tossed me my backpack. "Come on," he said. "Let's go."

In the car on the way to my house, Rodney sighed. "You're being quiet again."

My chest felt like I was wearing one of those lead vests for x-rays. It weighed so heavily on me I could barely breathe. I wasn't stupid; I knew having sex once didn't automatically mean I was pregnant. But if I was, then I'd just tricked him into it, and if I wasn't, then we'd need to do this again. How would I explain to him that I hadn't been on birth control the first time? If I told him the whole truth now, he'd think I only wanted him for his sperm—that it didn't mean anything to me.

My chest tightened. It wasn't supposed to mean anything to me. Was it?

Rodney gave me an alarmed look; I still hadn't answered him.

"Maybe I'm becoming a quiet person," I said.

He laughed. "Right. That'll happen."

"You never know."

He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. "Seriously, though, are we okay?"

"Yeah, of course," I said. But from the way he chewed on his lip, I wasn't totally sure he believed me.

For the rest of the ride we were both quiet people, Rodney smiling to himself, and me sinking lower and lower in my seat. Something about the way that he smiled made me uneasy. Did sex mean something to him? Did he think we were together now? I wanted to ask, but I waited, thinking any minute now he would bring it up.

But we reached my house in silence, because apparently we could have sex, but we still couldn't talk about it. And in addition to sticky, I now felt sick to my stomach.

 

I walked into my house with even steps, trying to look normal. I'd been hoping to sneak upstairs to the shower, but Mom stood in the living room, two inch fabric squares scattered all over the furniture. Mom had tacked a blanket-sized piece of felt above the front windows and was studiously pinning the tiny fabric squares into place, starting with a burst of oranges and reds in the center.

Thankfully, her eyes were clear of puffiness—she'd taken refuge in distraction. On a normal day, I would have been relieved. Sometimes it took her weeks to find the desire to do anything.

Today, though, relief wasn't in my vocabulary. I stayed in the corner of the living room, as far from her as possible. I could smell Rodney's skin on mine, and I didn't want her to catch a whiff. I pretended to look over her quilt. "Sunset?" I asked.

Mom stood back and squinted. "It's supposed to be."

Her reference photo peeked out from beneath a pile of blue squares. It was a photo I took last year in the redwoods, the sun reflecting over the ocean and casting a glow through the clouds above.

"That's a hard one," I said.

"I know," Mom said. "But if I get it right, it's going to be beautiful."

I nodded. She'd picked it as a challenge, then—a powerful distraction. That might buy me some time, but for what? To find out I'd tricked my best friend into getting me pregnant? To have the awkward conversation with him about how I wanted to be?

My stomach turned. "I'm going to take a shower," I said. "Have you had dinner?"

Mom looked at the clock, and then shook her head as if to clear it. "Dinner. Right."

"Is there anything in the freezer?"

"Pot pie," Mom said. "Would you throw it in the oven?"

"Sure," I said. "That'll give me time to shower before dinner."

Mom was already shuffling the red and orange squares around, unpinning and repinning. If I did have sex written across my forehead, she hadn't looked at me to notice.

I pulled the pie out of the freezer and shoved it in the oven, then shut myself in the bathroom. I balled up my clothes and wrenched on the water, jumping in the shower and letting the water pour over me.

It's not a big deal, I told myself. Surely Rodney didn't think it was, either. I was just imagining things. I was such a cliché, a stupid girl assigning meaning where there was none.

Hot water saturated my hair. I stood still, hiding my face beneath the stream, letting the afternoon wash off of me. And I couldn't help but wonder if Rodney was doing the same.

 

At midnight, my phone beeped. I climbed out of bed to grab it and found a text from Rodney: you okay?

I wanted to crawl under my pillow. Rodney was more than amazing. It was bad enough that I'd misled a guy into thinking I was on birth control when I wasn't. Did I have to do that to Rodney?

Sure, I replied. You?

Miss you.

I shoved the phone under my blankets and buried my face in my hands, but my phone chirped again. I had to look.

Come out on your roof?

The room seemed to tilt off-kilter. It's only Rodney, I told myself. But that didn't stop my skin from tingling.

I opened my window and popped out the screen. As I climbed across the garage roof, Rodney's head appeared at the other end. He climbed from our garbage can onto the roof of Dad's shed, and then onto the shingles with me. I sat at the edge of the eaves with my feet dangling in front of the garage door.

"Hey," I said.

He settled down next to me, close enough that our knees touched. "Hey," he said. "Are we okay?"

My stomach dropped. Keep it light. I whacked him in the shoulder with the back of my hand. "You already asked me that. Twice. Did you come all the way over here just to ask me again?"

Rodney rubbed his hands together. "I don't know. I just wanted to make sure you weren't . . . regretting anything."

He couldn't use the S word, either.

The cold night air made my skin break out in goose bumps. "Of course not," I said. Another lie, though only a partial one. It wasn't the sex I regretted, exactly. It was more that I should have been honest with him, first.

But now, the last thing I wanted was for things to be awkward. I put my hand on his knee. He relaxed and wrapped his arm around my shoulders.

His body felt warm against mine, drawing me nearer. I scooted over until we were right next to each other. Rodney bent down and kissed me on the temple. I leaned into his sweatshirt, breathing him in, and my body melted into him reflexively.

Had he always smelled so good?

Rodney sounded relieved. "So we're okay?"

"Yeah," I said. "Unless your mom wised up."

Rodney laughed. "Ha. Thankfully, no. I think we made some kind of a record getting dressed that fast."

Rodney pressed his face against my cheek, nibbling on my ear. His breath grew deeper, faster, and my body responded in kind, drawn to him as if by a magnet.

I resisted, pulling away.

Rodney's gaze flicked from one of my eyes to the other, as if searching for something. "Talk to me?" he asked.

"Okay," I said. "Okay." But if I told him the whole truth, he might be the one pulling away from me. For a horrible moment, I thought about going to a clinic, and asking for Plan B.

No. I'd be evicting possible fetuses from my womb even while Mom pined after a child. I wouldn't do that. I couldn't.

"I'm scared," I said. "I don't want things to change."

Rodney looked up at the few stars you could see over the city lights—no constellations, just isolated dots on the dark sky. "Not all change is bad."

I couldn't breathe. "I like things the way they are. Don't you?"

Rodney's face turned serious. "I guess that depends on what things you mean."

My stomach sunk. "Us," I said. "I didn't mean to mess anything up."

Rodney must have seen my panic. He leaned back, forcing a smile. "Hey," Rodney said. "I'm fine with us if you are."

But he wouldn't be if I told him why I'd come on to him like that. "Fine with us as what?" I asked. Saying the words "just friends" to him right now might spark exactly the kind of change I was trying to avoid.

Rodney sighed. "Look, Penny. I can't read your mind. So tell me what you want, and it's yours, okay?"

Hadn't I already said that I wanted things to stay the same? "Since when am I the only one who gets to decide?"

He squeezed my shoulder. "Since you're the one freaking out about it."

Oh, right. Here I was, spazzing out again. So much for keeping it light.

I made myself smile. "I'm not the one climbing onto your roof, needing answers in the middle of the night."

He held up a hand, leaving the other arm around me. "Who said I need answers?"

But he did, and I could tell from his sheepish smile he knew it. Rodney pushed my hair back over my ear, and kissed my forehead. "Look, I'm not complaining. This is good. Better than good. Nothing has to change."

Rodney was quiet then, but he didn't pull away. He stayed there, with his breath in my ear and his arm around my waist, just looking out at the streetlights and the suburban haze that blocked most of the stars. I nuzzled into his neck and breathed him in. His collar smelled like the leaves in the park, and I wanted to freeze that moment and live in it, just the way it was, forever.

But Rodney pulled me closer, his fingertips running down my back and resting on my hips. My body ached, and my mouth moved reflexively against his throat. He moaned softly, and I could feel the vibrations of his voice against my lips.

For a moment, all I wanted was to invite him in. We could slip through the window and curl up in my bed, and no one would know about it but us. I wanted it in a way that had nothing to do with getting pregnant. But if going to bed together was a thing that Rodney and I were going to do on a regular basis, then we were either in a serious relationship, or seriously screwed up.

I leaned back on my hands. Gravel from the shingles dug into my palms, and I concentrated on the sting.

Things clearly had changed. What if there was no going back? Did that mean that I was destined to lose him? Was I repeating my mom's history, even as I tried to avoid it?

Ugh. I rubbed my forehead. When had my life become such a drama?

I looked up at Rodney, and found him watching me. "I better go," he said.

He looked worried again. And all I wanted was to pull him inside and prove to him that everything was okay between us. But if sex was a part of the problem, it couldn't also be the solution.

"Okay," I said. And Rodney scooted off the roof and onto the shed.

I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to stay warm. When we'd made out last summer, it was hard and fast and fun. We'd laughed and teased each other, and started whenever we wanted and stopped when one of us got laughing too hard. Which, now that I thought about it, was always, always me.

But now things felt serious. Heavy. Was it just the sex that changed things? Or was it something more?

Rodney stood on the roof of Dad's shed. He put one hand down, ready to hop off, but seemed to think better of it and stood back up, looking at me. "Penny," he said.

My skin tingled, as if it knew what was coming even before I did. "Yeah?"

Rodney looked at me and the light from the street lamps lit up his face. "You're the best."

The whole roof seemed to tilt. I hugged my knees to my chest, trying to maintain my balance. And that's when I knew for sure, the thing I'd been trying not to know.

Rodney was in love with me.

And for the first time in our friendship, I was completely unworthy of it.