I go from thinking I should put peanut butter on the grocery list to hard as fuck in less than a second. In my kitchen. With my daughter’s Critters of the Outback lunchbox in front of me.
Charlie: I really am sorry about today.I shoot a glance toward the living room, where my mom is reading her book, then quietly put my phone in my pocket and go upstairs, to my own bedroom. The second I lock the door I’ve already got my dick out, my hand wrapped around the base.
I snap a picture and send it to Charlie.
Me: I forgive you.
Charlie: Good ;)I pull up her picture again, conjure up a scene from last week: us standing in her bathroom, right where the picture was taken, her braced against the counter. I watched her face in the mirror as she came so hard her eyes rolled, and that’s what I’m thinking about ninety seconds later when I come without ever taking off my pants.
Then I clean up, start some laundry, and google how to hide naked pictures on your phone, because I don’t want anyone finding this, but like hell am I deleting it.“We’re going where?” I ask, pulling my milkshake straw out of my mouth.
“The skinny-dipping hole,” Charlie says, like I know what she’s talking about.
It’s Friday night. When I got home from work, my mom informed me that she was taking care of Rusty, and my job was to go make myself presentable because Charlie would be there at six.
Miraculously, she was on time. Well, five minutes late, but for Charlie, that counts.
“There’s a skinny-dipping hole?” I ask.
“Yeah, it’s down past where Washtub Road crosses Pony Creek, right before you get to the mountain,” she says. “There’s a dirt road right after that, and if it’s rained recently there’s a couple of streams you have to ford but it’s a great spot. The field hockey team used to go there all the time.”
She’s saying all this like I know what she’s talking about, and I don’t. I absolutely don’t, and I thought I knew every secret nook and holler in Sprucevale.
“Field hockey? You mean in high school?” I ask, still trying to catch up.
“Was I on another field hockey team?”
“Did you go skinny-dipping?”
“Of course, it’s the skinny-dipping hole. That’s what we did after we won games, we’d get Becca’s older sister to buy us some box wine and we’d come down here,” she says, like it’s common knowledge.
It is not. If I’d known that the whole field hockey team was routinely getting naked and drunk together, I’d probably have masturbated to different fantasies in high school.
“You’re telling me that while we were in high school a bunch of girls were getting drunk and naked together,” I say, just to make sure I’m crystal clear on what I was missing.
“I only ever went with the field hockey team,” she says. “But I thought everyone knew about it.”
“Definitely not,” I say, still staring at her. “Are you kidding? If I’d known that it would have changed everything about my entire high school experience. I’d have skipped school to live at the skinny-dipping hole if I’d known that a team of girls was getting naked together there on the regular.”
“Honey didn’t put out?” she laughs, naming my on-again-off-again-on-again high school girlfriend. We’d get together for a few weeks, break up over something stupid, she’d hang all over some guy to make me jealous, I’d steal her a rose from the grocery store, we’d get back together. Repeat ad nauseam.
“If you want to know about my sex life in high school, you can just ask,” I tease.
“Oh, I know that she once asked Paula Peterson if you could get pregnant from swallowing semen,” Charlie says. “I drew my own conclusions from that.”
I grimace at the window as we go around a curve in the road, because even though this is all long-gone history, I don’t love talking about other women with Charlie. Especially because we were already best friends at the time — half my breakups with Honey were over the fact that I refused to stop being friends with Charlie — even though Charlie was dating Steve Fisher, who was on the football team and drove a very large truck.
It just feels wrong, like I’m comparing her to them. There’s no comparison. She’s the sun and any other girl disappears in her daylight.
We cross a wooden bridge, and two hundred feet later, Charlie slows and turns onto a rough unpaved road that’s clearly not been maintained since at least 1990. Branches scrape my window, and I slurp my milkshake again, ignoring the gnawing suspicion that we’re not supposed to be here.
Sure enough, in another few hundred feet there’s a NO TRESPASSING sign. I point to it with my straw as we bounce by.