The One Month Boyfriend (Wildwood Society)

Kat

I didn’t particularly enjoythat kiss. Not more than I’d enjoy any kiss, at least. That’s the whole point of kisses: they’re nice to do. For whatever reason, it feels good to smash your mouth against someone else’s—which is really strange if you think about it too much—and then move your faces around for a bit.

Which is what happened and why it was kind of okay, because humans are wired to think that mouth-smashing is fun. I could have mouth-smashed anyone and it would have more or less been the same amount of fun, and I’m sure I’d also still be thinking about it hours later while lying awake and staring at my ceiling.

I breathe in while counting to four, hold my breath, breathe out for six. I visualize floating down a very serene river, letting all the tension out of my feet, then my ankles, then my shins—

But then the way he groaned when I grabbed his hair like he didn’t even know he was making a noise—

“No,” I mutter out loud, to myself, because I live alone and sometimes you need to talk to yourself about your horny thoughts. Such as when someone you don’t even like tells you to get on the desk and then fits surprisingly well between your legs and kisses much better than you expected, which makes you wonder what else he does better than you might expect.

Which is… another horny thought.

Honestly, I don’t know why I’m surprised. I’m human. Humans are sexual creatures. It is very normal to have a certain number of sexual thoughts in one’s life, particularly when the most sexual contact one has had in a little over a year has been soothing but very platonic hugs from one’s best friend.

Which is all this is: I’m frustrated, he exists and is technically attractive. It doesn’t mean anything that kissing him was, like, not terrible. Or that the way he said I’ll get him to squirm was technically sort of hot. Or that I kind of wonder what would happen if I sat on my desk and told Silas to get on his knees—

“Okay, okay, fuck,” I say out loud to myself as I roll over, open my nightstand, and grab the very fancy vibrator that was my gift to myself when I moved here.

I turn it on, go to town, and when I come a little harder than usual it’s for no reason at all.

* * *

“Were they bad roses?”Anna Grace asks, lining up her swing.

“No?” I say watching the club glint in the lowering sun, her blond ponytail falling over her tan shoulder. “Yes? What makes roses bad?”

“They could be ugly,” she says. “They could be plastic, they could be poison, they could be those white roses that get painted red in Alice in Wonderland. I could see you as a Queen of Hearts type.”

She hits the golf ball and it goes soaring through the air before bouncing off the green expanse.

“Nice,” I say.

“Thank you.”

“Is a Queen of Hearts type good or bad?” I ask, because with Anna Grace, I’m genuinely not sure.

“Well, she’s obviously a misogynistic caricature, but also kind of a boss bitch,” she says, finally looking at me under her visor. I’m also wearing a visor. Our visors match. I’ve never dared come to the driving range at the Blue Ridge Country Club, where Anna Grace’s family are members, without a visor because I kind of suspect they’ll kick me out for not having the right head gear on.

“I’ve never actually walked on a man’s back or used a bird to play… cricket?”

My memory of the Disney movie is, admittedly, foggy.

“Croquet,” she says, plucking another ball from the bucket. “And wasn’t there that one time in college?”

“We don’t talk about that,” I say, and Anna Grace grins.

“So the roses themselves were fine, it was the fact of being given the roses you didn’t appreciate,” she goes on, placing the ball on the tee.

I consider this for a long moment as she lines up her shot, gives it a few practice swings, and then finally lets fly. I’ve told her everything, of course, so someone knows the story in case I suddenly go missing.

Except the kiss. I didn’t tell her about that, or that I’ve thought about it every two-point-five seconds ever since, or that I’m pretty sure I can still feel Silas’s hand on my jaw where he touched me.

“Yeah,” I say slowly as the ball hits the grass in the distance. “I didn’t realize we’d agreed to a gift-giving kind of fake relationship, and I just… it felt like he was making fun of me.”

High school wasn’t a great time in my life. Neither was middle school. Neither, actually, was elementary school, though I think preschool was all right.

Anna Grace gives me a long, considering, affectionate look.