The Miseducation of Cameron Post Read online

  I could have spent hours just tracing my lips over her perfect skin, feeling the way certain bones made ridges and valleys, smelling her tangerine lotion, the small noises she made when I found certain, unexpectedly pleasurable areas: just below her armpit, these tiny soft hairs at the back of her neck, her collar bone, which jutted out like the thin metal rod and spokes of an umbrella’s undercarriage, her heartbeat steady and fast there.

  “You’re so soft,” Coley said at one point, like a breath. “Your skin is so soft and you’re so small.”

  “You too,” I said, which was a lame response, if true, but I was at my least articulate.

  I kept on with my exploration, tiny, tiny kisses, just grazing my lips over her breasts, her ribs, her stomach, and Coley pressed and moved against me in encouraging ways.

  I stopped at the waistband and silver button on those tiny khaki shorts. I slipped just one finger beneath the band, not far, just against the place where her hipbone pushed out, and I felt her tremble, just barely, but still.

  “You tell me when to stop,” I said.

  She breathed in big, blew it out, and said, “Not now.”

  And her saying that, just that, not now, made my want of her flutter up inside me again and again like tiny explosions from Black Cat firecrackers, one after another: just her saying that.

  I undid the button, found the metal pull of the zipper, and worked it down, the noise it made impossibly loud and definite. When it reached the end of its track, I stopped and asked, “How about now?”

  “Not now,” she said.

  Pulling off her shorts, small as they were, was more complicated than our tank tops had been, but I worked slowly, and stopped to kiss parts of her legs that I hadn’t ever had the chance to visit before. When I got the shorts all the way down to her feet, Coley shifted to help me free them. I heard her take in a breath.

  “Now?” I asked.

  She laughed a small laugh. Then she said, “No way.”

  I didn’t know exactly what I was doing, but I figured it out. I couldn’t tell if Coley assumed my expertise or if it just wasn’t that hard to gauge what she wanted, to make a move, judge her reaction, be it slight or large, and then continue from there or reassess. At first I used just my fingertips, then more of my hand, and when Coley started to move hard against me, I just kept on with what I’d started out doing originally, and explored with my mouth. I didn’t get to do this very long before her whole body tensed and her breaths came in ragged jumps and her thighs pressed together against my head and I stopped at what I hoped was the right moment. It seemed like it was. But I didn’t know what to do in the aftermath, where to put my body, what to say. I felt like maybe there were things to be said, the right things, but I didn’t know how to put those words together. Instead, I stayed where I was, rested my head on her stomach: it felt and sounded like her heart had somehow slid down into it, each beat pulsing loud and superfast in my ear.

  Eventually Coley said, “Come up here.”

  I kissed my way back up her body, just more tiny kisses.

  When I got to the pillow, she said in her sweet, quiet voice, “Wow, Cameron Post.”

  I grinned a big grin, a grin that would have embarrassed me, I know, if someone had shown me a mirror right then.

  But then Coley’s face shifted some, her features forming an uneasy sort of look, and she said, “I don’t know how to . . . I don’t know.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “No, I want to try. I just don’t have, like you had Irene and Lindsey, and I—”

  “Irene and I were twelve. We barely kissed. And Lindsey and I never got this far.”

  “But still, it was something. Isn’t she all wild?”

  “Not then,” I said. “It wasn’t like this at all, anyway.” I reached for her face and she let me kiss her, then pulled away.

  “It has to have been something like this,” she said.

  “It wasn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  Now I breathed in deep, let it out. “C’mon, Coley,” I said. “You already know why.”

  “No I don’t.”

  I said this next part with my face turned into my shoulder, looking away from her. “Because I’ve been in love with you since forever.”

  “I didn’t know that,” she said.

  “Yes you did.”

  “I did not,” she said, turning away from me and onto her side. I couldn’t tell if maybe she was crying or about to cry.

  “Coley,” I said, just barely touching her shoulder, feeling like I’d made a really big mistake. “It’s okay, I don’t even—”

  “It goes against everything,” she said, some of her voice buried in the pillow. “This is like—it’s just supposed to be silly and whatever. I don’t want to be like that.”

  “Like what?” I asked. Somehow, even after what I’d just done, what we’d done, I felt ashamed, the guilty party.

  “Like a couple of dykes,” she said.

  “What does that even mean?”

  “You know what it means.”

  “To who?”

  “How about God, for one,” she said, turning and looking at me dead on.

  I didn’t feel like I had a good answer for that. I knew that Lindsey would have, but I wasn’t sure enough to make a case.

  “Doesn’t this feel really big to you?” she asked. “I mean like too big? It’s like the more time we spend together, the harder it is to turn off.”

  “Maybe that means we’re not supposed to turn it off,” I said.

  “Maybe it means we shouldn’t have started in the first place,” Coley answered. But then, and this wasn’t what I expected, she kissed me, hard, and pretty soon after, she pushed me onto my back and covered me with her body. We kissed like this awhile, even more intensely than we had before, almost like Coley was trying to rid herself of this thing, like she could maybe just get it over and done with, forever, if she was aggressive enough, forceful enough.

  Eventually she moved her hand down my body, slowly, and she pulled her mouth away and said, “I’ll try,” with a kind of serious determination that made me smile but also made me want her to “try” all the more.

  She had made it to my stomach, her soft hair and mouth trailing my skin, making me shiver, when the room, which had felt like our own small world, cut off and entirely private, exploded with the sound of someone pounding hard on the apartment door, a sound as scary and out of place, right then, as gunshots.

  We both went rigid. Coley jerked her head. More pounding. And then Ty’s door-muffled and drunken voice, full of laughter. “Open up, girls! This is the police. We know you’re consuming alcoholic beverages.”

  Coley was off me and standing next to the bed before he had even quite finished what he was saying. “Shit, get dressed,” she said in a low but panicked voice I’d never heard from her before.

  We were fast. We didn’t have much to put on. But even still, Ty had time to work his key in the lock and open the door the few inches the chain would allow him to. “C’mon, gals” came a different guy’s voice, one that was a little louder with the door open that crack. “You passed out in there?”

  Coley threw the quilt back in place and I tried to smooth it out some.

  After the cave dark of the bedroom, even the one lamp in the living room seemed too bright, and Coley looked rumpled, her hair messy and flying with static, her face red, like she’d been up to something, and I could tell by the way she was looking at me that I appeared just as wrong.

  “Take your drink,” she said, already at the coffee table, grabbing hers, smoothing the back of her head with her other hand.

  I didn’t understand her intentions. I looked at her like the village idiot would.

  And so she looked back at me the exact way that you would look at the village idiot when she was about to ruin something or already had. “Pick up your drink so they just think we’re sloshed,” she said in the same harsh whisper voice.

  I did what she
said. I also picked up the remote and again pushed PLAY on the tape. It had rewound itself.

  Coley took big strides to the door. “We’re gonna need to see some IDs, fellas,” she said, her voice fake and bright like a talking plastic cowgirl doll. “For all we know you could be Pine Hills escapees.”

  “We are,” Ty said. “We cleared the fence and now we fucking have to pee. Open up.”

  “Then move your nose out of the way so I can shut it and undo the chain,” Coley said. And then she did just that.

  There were three of them in boots and Wranglers, shirts tucked in, gleamy belt buckles: the works. I’m sure it helped us that they were drunk, stupid drunk, their perceptions already fucked up.

  Ty motioned at Coley’s drink on his way to the bathroom, undoing his belt as he went. “I knew it was the Malibu,” he said. “I knew it.” He slammed shut the door, but not in the way you would if you were really mad, more in a drunken, accidental, closed-the-door-too-hard kind of way, and from behind it he shouted, “I trusted you to keep her on the straight and narrow, Cameron. My wrath is upon you.”

  The shortest of the three, a guy with a thick neck and small-man, big-muscle syndrome, put his arm around Coley and said, “Hey, good-lookin’. You’ve weeded up in my absence.” He squeezed her to him, and it made me clench my jaw.

  Coley kept on with the plastic voice and said, “Hey yourself, Barry. Last time I saw you, you were passed out in the back of Ty’s truck with some poor lady’s bra on your head.”

  “Sounds about right,” he said, squeezing her again and laughing a big drunken laugh. Coley laughed too, and even though it was her fake laugh, just watching her flirt—flirt in the exact same way that I had seen her do so many times before and had found charming maybe, or cute—so soon after the bedroom, after our nakedness, our quiet intensity, after the feel of her beneath me, on top of me, was pretty much unbearable.

  The other guy came over to me, stooped and smelled my drink, made a face, winked at me, and said, “Something girly, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said, looking at him, glad to have a reason not to look at Coley.

  He jerked his chin toward the TV, where Bowie and Deneuve were back at the club, dancing. “What’s this movie?”

  “It’s about vampires,” Coley answered fast for me.

  “Oh yeah?” the short guy, Barry, said. “You girls trying to scare yourselves? Good thing we showed up.”

  In the bathroom the toilet flushed, water whooshed in the sink.

  “No, it sucks,” Coley said. “We were gonna turn it off and go out.”

  Ty strode back in, the front of his hair wet and his forehead dewy, like he’d just dunked his head under the faucet. He ran his hands over his face a bunch of times, fast. “Where the hell’s ‘out’?”

  “Just out,” Coley said. “As in not here.”

  She worked her way from beneath Short Guy’s arm and came to me, reached out her hand toward me, and I thought for one split second she was going to unbelievably, amazingly, prove something about us to these guys, and I sucked in my breath as her hand grazed my tank top, just at my waistband. But all she was after was the remote, which I had shoved into my pocket without even realizing that I’d done it. It wasn’t hard to pull out, barely in there in the first place. She stopped the tape and I was still holding my breath.

  “Hey,” the guy next to me said, turning from the now- blank TV screen. “That looked interesting.”

  “It’s really not,” Coley said.

  “You girls look like you’ve been up to something,” Ty said, twisting on the tiny penlight he kept on his keychain and shining it in my eyes, making me squint.

  “You’re the one who looks like you’ve been up to something.” Coley pushed his hand and the light out of my face.

  “We have,” he said. Then he whipped the light toward the glass in Coley’s hand, lit it up funny from the side so it glowed orange-yellow. “What have you two juvenile delinquents concocted, anyway?” He grabbed her glass and took a drink from what was left and then made a face even uglier than the one made by the taller guy who had smelled mine. “What a fucking waste of my rum.”

  Barry had thoughts on this. “All you have to do is mix it with some Coke, gals. That’s the best drink you’re gonna make with rum.”

  “A piña colada is pretty damn tasty,” the taller guy said.

  “Only if you’re in the islands, mon,” Ty said, doing a bad Jamaican accent and heading into the kitchen, flicking on the light in there.

  “A piña colada is a pussy drink,” Barry said. “It’s just about what these gals have here anyway.”

  “Nah, you gotta have coconut milk,” the taller guy said, and at the same time Ty shouted something from the kitchen about how fucking much of the fucking bottle we’d downed.

  Taller Guy and Barry kept on debating the faggoty nature of fruity drinks as they meandered to the kitchen, and simultaneously Ty started in on a loudish and surprisingly well-sung chorus of “If you like piña coladas, getting caught in the rain . . .” and Coley, next to me, not looking at me but looking at the backs of the guys as they jammed up the kitchen, whispered, “You should feel my pulse right now. Thank God I did the chain, right?”

  And I thought if I opened my mouth to say something back I might shout at her like a crazy person; just shout or cry or even kiss her, something big and dramatic and something I wouldn’t be able to keep hold of once I’d started doing it. So I said nothing.

  My silence registered and she finally looked at me and said, “I think it’s okay. They don’t know anything.”

  I still didn’t talk.

  “It’s okay now, Cam.”

  Before Coley could stop me, or I could stop me, I put my fingertips on the soft skin at the side of her neck, right at the edge of her jawline, just the lightest touch in a place that only minutes before, minutes before, I had been kissing, a place right over her carotid artery. I touched her there with those cowboys in the kitchen, as likely to turn around any second and see us as not.

  Coley slapped my hand away like you would an ant, or something even worse, something that didn’t belong on your skin at all, ever. “What are you doing?” She didn’t even really whisper the words but mouthed them big and ugly so that I couldn’t mistake them.

  “I was feeling your pulse,” I said, not that quietly.

  Coley moved away from me in the direction of the kitchen but kept her head turned toward me, still just mostly mouthing her words. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “You said that I should feel it,” I said.

  “Now here, ladies, is a drink,” Barry said, turning around in the kitchen’s doorway, a glass with a newly mixed brown beverage in hand.

  “Rum and Coke?” Coley asked, taking it from him without waiting for a confirmation, downing a big swallow.

  “What’s left of my rum,” Ty shouted. “You two are a gypsy band of thieves.”

  “A duo of thieves, not a band,” Barry said. “Where the fuck did you learn to count?” He grabbed the glass back from Coley, put his mouth over the same place she had, drank half of it in one gulp.

  I thought I might pass out. My body felt jangly and sharp and uncontrollable, like chunks of glass were floating all around inside my limbs. I couldn’t be in that apartment with them for one more second.

  “You want some of this?” Barry was shaking the drink at me.

  “Nah, I’ve got to go,” I said, not looking at him or any of them. I walked to the door, slid my feet over my flip-flops, wedged the plastic divider between my big toe and its neighbor. I could hear Barry repeating to Ty and Taller Guy that I was leaving, and they all seemed very confused by this news.

  I had the door open when Ty pushed through the jam-up in the kitchen and came toward me. “Not because of us, right? We didn’t mean to drive you off.”

  I couldn’t look at his face. I couldn’t look behind him at Coley, even though she had followed him. “No,” I said to the apartment’s ugly carpeti
ng. “I got too much sun today or something. I’m supertired all of a sudden.”

  “But you’re okay other than being tired?” Ty asked, his hand on the top of the door, keeping it open, his arm sort of blocking my way out. “You seem upset.”

  “Just tired,” I said.

  “How are you getting home?”

  I had driven the Bel Air. I didn’t even know where I had left—

  “Here’s your keys,” Coley said, handing them over like she’d just conjured them up, a magic trick.

  “You sure you’re good to drive?” Ty asked, still blocking me.

  “She’s better than you, Ty,” Coley said. “Let her go home and go to bed.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m perfect.”

  “You call us when you get there,” Ty said, and then he slid his arm away and let me pass.

  I could tell somebody was watching me from the doorway as I walked down the hallway, as I started down the first flight of stairs, but I didn’t look up to see who, mostly because I needed to believe that it was Coley, but I knew better that it was probably just Ty.

  Chapter Twelve

  The next day Coley didn’t come to pick me up at Scanlan after work, and even though it made me even angrier, and sadder, I wasn’t that surprised about it. I rode my bike out to Taco John’s, and as I pulled up, I could see Jamie through the glass door, working a big mop in front of the beverage station.

  “Power Trip Troy just stopped by to check time cards and he gave us a bunch of shit to do,” Jamie said when I walked in. The place was empty. “And Brian’s already baked, so he’s annoying as fuck.”

  Brian, who had recently dyed his hair Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Green, was behind the counter, two stairs up on a step stool and doing a bad job of pouring a pillow-size plastic bag of tortilla chips into the warming machine. He had the bag lined up wrong, with the opening to the machine, and chips kept falling, two and three at a time, landing like crispy autumn leaves on the fake Spanish tile–style floor.