Black Iris Read Free Page B

the stairs.
    “You’re better than me,” he called, and dammit, I paused. “You don’t care about climbing the social ladder. About playing the game. That takes guts. I wish I could be that way. I wish I didn’t care so much what people think of me.”
    Great. One of those guys who spill all their insecurities to any girl who doesn’t reject them firmly enough.
    “Sometimes I think I’m just not cut out for this,” he went on. “I don’t memorize pickup lines. I don’t know how to talk about anything except books and games, and then I don’t know how to stop talking.”
    “Maybe that’s your pickup line.”
    “It’s a pretty bad one.”
    “It got me to stop.”
    He smiled, a tremulous, sincere smile. He was really trying.
    “Look, you seem nice, Josh, but you don’t want to know me.”
    “Give yourself some credit. You’re smart, and you read, and you don’t care what anyone thinks. I would love to know you.”
    It was his voice that did it, I think. Patient, kind. One of the good-natured sheep.
    “Okay,” I said. “So, do you want to fuck?”
    His face was priceless.
    Josh didn’t move until I went up and took his big sweaty hand. Then he looked at mine with incredulity and enfolded it gently, as if afraid he might crush me, or that I’d disappear.
    Next floor up. His room. Bookshelves filled end-to-end, titles I’d have loved to browse. Rumpled bed. A kite of violet moonlight slanting across the floor. My heart skittered.
    You’re in control, I told myself.
    He led me in shyly, pawing at my dress and hair for a while until I took his face in my hands and kissed him. I willed myself to get aroused but couldn’t focus. My gaze drifted to the window, to the city lights scattered like stardust across the sky, and I imagined myself as a constellation of cells, each light-years apart. What happened to my flesh took eons to reach my brain. However solid I seemed, inside I was vast spaces of dark energy and vacuum. Josh pressed me to the wall and thrust his beery tongue into my mouth and I thought, Just get to the point. I guided him to the hem of my dress, feeling nothing. Raised my arms and let it fall like a chrysalis, and my arms kept wanting to rise, like wings.
    “You are so beautiful, Laney.”
    I kissed him to shut him up.
    God, I was high. So close to that numb semiconsciousnessI craved. The place I imagined Mom had been when she was tying the noose. If she hadn’t been such a prude, she could’ve dosed herself with little pieces of oblivion, like me.
    If she’d been more like me, she’d still be alive.
    Josh stripped down to his boxers, his erection poking out. I ran my fingertips lightly over the head and he shuddered.
    “Get a condom,” I said.
    He lowered me to a bed that smelled of sun and grass and lost summers. My head was a million miles away from this. I was thinking about the old wood chipper rusting in our garage, wondering how it’d feel if I stuck an arm inside. If the bones would snap like dry wood, skin tearing, muscle fraying, a rag doll ripping apart. Mom chose the coward’s way out. I’d have done it as messily as I could, made myself really feel something, because why not? If you know you’re going to die, what’s left to fear?
    That’s the thing. Maybe we’re not really afraid of pain. Maybe we’re afraid of how much we might like it.
    Josh kissed the inside of my thigh and I stopped him. “Put a condom on.”
    “I want to make you come first.”
    “I can’t even feel my legs.”
    His hand slid into my panties, his fingers doing something I couldn’t figure out. “This doesn’t feel good?”
    “It doesn’t feel like anything.”
    He sagged against me, cratering the bed.
    “You can fuck me,” I said matter-of-factly. “It’s okay.”
    “This feels wrong. You’re not into it.”
    “Like it matters.”
    “It does to me.” He took a deep breath. “Can I just hold you for a while?”
    Wow.
    His arms circled me and I pressed my palms to the