Takers

We couldn't tie her to us, so we held hands with her, me and him. We decided to keep the blindfold on, the whole night looking like we were leading her to a birthday cake. She spent a lot of time, at first, grinning like we were. Martin was on some fantasy that I was a little jealous of her attentions and when he touched her, he grinned too, and snapped back like I had ordered him to or something. It was like that whenever he got a chance, when he thought I wasn't looking, he'd slide his fingers up and down her back and reach, his hand already cupped, toward her front. She'd perk up then, like the kitten that she was, begging to be petted, her back arched and her neck all out. Martin's face would light up like a morning glory and then he'd look at me and pull away. I'd take her hand to me when I felt the urge, on my nipple or my lips or my cock, my fingers pressed into the undersides of hers so she couldn't bend them, couldn't do anything but feel me, well, couldn't have any ideas of her own.

We propped her right up on the hood of my car in the parking lot of the town library and waited until it closed, when the men would trickle out of it, their eyes all full of paper and dust, and we asked, one by one, if anyone wanted to see her. Most said no, or didn't say anything, people don't see what they don't believe, but it was one man, whose head bent over his PDA like his neck was broken, a skinny kid with long, stringy blonde hair, who didn't even look to see if her hands were tied or not. He simply saw the situation and said "Yes." Martin lifted her shirt above her breasts, just the edges of his nails across the skin of her chest and she breathed like she was making to faint. She spread her legs apart on the hood of the car to keep from falling over. The kid, who was somewhere between seventeen and twenty-seven years old or some such, held quiet for a few seconds, his PDA at eye-level and rising to the side of his head. Martin got another look in his eye and turned toward her, stuck his tongue out and licked one of her nipples. The kid sprung a pole in his pants so quick he could've used it as a kick-stand. Martin's full of evil. It's why I asked him along.

Another one came around our way and I asked him to go ahead and have a look. This one was about our age, with a belly and a wedding band. His eyes went a little dark and he held his hand out, his eyes breaking for a nod of my approval, and raised her skirt just a little bit, leaving his fingers on her knee just a little too long. I kissed the back of her head and waited for him to leave. He kind of rocked there for a little while, his mind full of ideas and mixing them good, and he walked away quiet and business-like, to his car, which he sat in for a good while before driving off. I pulled her shirt down and nudged her off the car. She landed with her feet wide apart, slipping in the gravel before catching herself. Martin's hand went up under her skirt, though her legs snapped shut in a reflex. I could tell by the way that his face changed that she was wet. I wanted him to appreciate this, his short visit to the world of women who are actually turned on in his presence. He touched his belt briefly and took her hand again. The parking lot was drained of takers and we needed to move on.

We got surprising few looks at the grocery store. I suppose that late at night on a Tuesday you got the third-tier shift. The stocker-boys just kept to their canned peas as a woman, liquid with sex, was pulled past them by two determined men. We found no harassment in the wide-open spaces of the produce section, the fish shop and the butcher, their sections titled in wide, comfortable, italicized script, below, hard block letters to announce their absence. I walked us over to a roll of plastic bags and removed one, snapping it open as if to announce our presence. To who, I'm not sure.

I took one of those peppers, the ones that are just a little hot that curve on the end like a tongue, and told Abby to get herself off with it. We kicked her legs apart and let go of her hands. She backed into the edge of a large pile of potatoes and dipped the edge of the pepper into her pussy, then moved it forward and toyed real fast at her clit, which stood out under those fluorescents like a worm in the lettuce. She shook at her elbows and let out just a tiny moan before I stopped her. I put the pepper in the plastic bag, twisted the end tight and split her ass cheeks. She didn't know where I was going with it until it was popped in, sucked up into her and swallowed whole. She clutched a potato and went real red. Martin seemed real delighted with this and laughed like he'd found a way to suck his own asshole. Pure stinking evil, our Martin.

I took a bottle of water on the way out and explained that I'd eaten a pepper and wanted to pay for that too. Martin walked right behind me with Abby all blindfolded and her nipples up under her dress like peas fresh out of the pod, but it was the fact that I'd eaten a pepper that made this teenage girl with no part in her hair give me a dirty look.

"What kind of pepper?" she asked.

"Those short, red, curvy ones that look like backwards raindrops," I said. I figured this kind of talk would charm her a little, but she just rang it up, one Fresno pepper, large.

In the parking lot, I took her by her new tail and pulled her, and therefore, Martin too, across the street to a park. Just out of the blue of a floodlight down by some trees was a water fountain. Martin and I lifted her up by the insides of her thighs and sat her down on it, her pussy right up to the guard behind the spout. She took a little steadying, but settled finally before I pressed my thumb on the button and the water sprung up. It was cold. I could feel it where the leaks dribbled down my hand, but Abby's mouth wasn't tense like that because it was hurting her. She trembled and chattered just like she did sometimes when I fucked her, and sometimes when I walked in on her fucking herself. Martin, who'd surely never seen this kind of behavior before in a woman, wrapped his arms around her from behind and watched, a look of concern on his face. Well, it only looked like concern. It was probably just the concentrated curiosity of a baboon looking at its first soccer ball. I took her face by the cheek and watched her, her face stinging me with its beauty, all scrunched up like she was about to cry. Or sneeze. When her mouth drew open I let go of the button and watched her fall back into panting. I hit it again, punched little squirts on her like licks, each one making her back jolt, before I let the stream go and watched her come, good and hard and even groaning. Martin was fascinated. He clutched her like she was having a dangerous fit.

I pulled the pepper out by the tail, took it out of the bag and fed it to her, still up on the fountain, rubbing the seeds on her lips where I knew they'd burn. She bit and licked her lips after she was finished. They swelled up at the top of the ridge and she pouted. It was what she did best.

I was sorely tempted to declare that now would be the best time for Martin to stick his dick in her mouth, when it was all still full of pepper heat and would probably teach him some sort of lesson about people and how he is with them, but I'm just not that mean. Besides, Abby didn't know it was Martin that I took along with us, and his bitching and moaning would just plain give him away. Instead, I raised her skirt again and split her pussy lips, cold under my fingers, and let him get a good look at her. She swayed, but I pulled the collar of her shirt in my fist to hold her up. Martin stared at her and laughed quietly to himself, probably comparing what flesh God had put on his bones and how it compared to hers, all pink and smooth and elastic.

She said she was thirsty. I opened the bottle of water and held it to her mouth, tilting it just a little too high so most of it came out the sides. It went down her shirt and started to show in her sides, sticking the fabric to her.

Back in the Jeep and onto a two-lane highway, headed west and south, I told Martin to get in the tiny back seat with her and fuck her now, all out in the wind, her hair flapping in her face, her ass and her pussy exposed to everything and everybody. He jumped right back there and stripped her naked, handing me her clothes so I could put them in the storage compartment between the seats. He bent her over the seat and pulled his pants down just enough, put a condom on and pressed his knees forward between hers. From there it was just the back of Abby's thighs and Martin's ass in the rearview mirror, but for me, I was looking at the other cars timing the moment when they all realized what was going on, the short swerve and catch of their steering. I'd never had so much fun. An SUV came up close behind us and appeared to be in no hurry to pass, though I was going just five over the speed limit. I caught what looked like a male profile in the driver's seat and puffed myself up with pride.

When Martin finished and sat back down on the seat, I had a good look at Abby's pussy, all swollen and open right there in the rear view, flashes of wet reflecting in the headlights of oncoming traffic. That was it. I pulled the jeep over, put my flashers on and climbed right back there. I took her blindfold off, picked her up and hung her over the rollbar, facing the front, her feet resting on either of the front seats. Her pussy hung over the car like the missing overhead light. I pressed my face into it, smelled her sweet and salt and stuck my hand in my pants, cars whizzing past, crickets singing, the world mine, and rose on the thrill of it, Abby's big night out and mine.

The Knot and the Pull

I can feel Austin from the other side of Owen, as if he's got some crazy knot attached to my chest and Owen is capstanned between us, a spinning, accommodating bisexual cog, cock in the wheel. Austin feels like those mornings when your heart is being squeezed high in under your breastbone and you're not sure whether it's good or bad yet, not awake enough yet, or maybe you haven't made up your mind. Austin takes Owen's hand to my breast and it's unsteady, unsure, and I'm not sure which one of them is making it so. My body is expanding and contracting, the whole thing, under the gravity of the hand, and when it touches, the circuit between the three of us closes and it's a shock, but still, an undecided one.

Neither Owen nor Austin has said a word and I'm just talking to keep up a stream of background noise, or maybe I'm just drunk. Owen is waiting for me to kiss him, because, as the girl, it is my responsibility to do so. Austin leaves Owen's hand for a moment and picks up his drink. The ice is still big and solid inside of it and makes for a rocky noise rather than a tinkle. It's sweating all the same, the translucent fog on the glass forming drips under his fingertips and falling, leaving a trail of clear behind that bends as he lifts it. I take the glass from him before he puts it down and hold it to Owen's lips. He takes a sip, Austin's drips and mine sliding to the end of the glass, rolling as I hold it and diving onto his shirt. I've got the angle wrong and some of the drink slips from the edge of the glass and out over the side of Owen's mouth. I lean forward without moving the glass and drink some too, before lowering it, feeling for the edge of the table with my thumb and pushing it away. I leave my mouth there and swallow the last of my sip, a great gulp that was waiting, dammed, on Owen's face. I cover it with my mouth and suckle it off of him. He freezes while I do this. It's only when my bottom lip slips between his that I feel his shoulders relax, the heel of his hand press into my nipple, feel his exhales on the side of my nose.

Owen's body is warm and dry and feels different, the way people always do when you touch them the first time, a different distribution of weight and skin and heat. Austin, whose body I could identify in a dark lineup at the bottom of the Arctic, starts to breathe in the way I understand, and yet he's different too, as if he's had a haircut or shaved his beard or I haven't seen him in years. He's different with this capstan between us, a cute boy on my couch with the reflection of a desk lamp twisting in his eye. He's got his arms around Owen as if he's behind him on a motorcycle. He turns and accommodates him, shifts his weight around on the couch, then loosens, falls back and watches for awhile, the tips of three fingers into the center of the balance of Owen's back.

My shirt is curled in the grip of one of their fists and is pulled up, my breasts bouncing and the nipples cresting in the sudden cold. They leave the shirt in my armpits and Owen leans in again, the wool of his sweater catching and tickling my skin. Coldish and dry, as it always is with a new person, not the sweater that Austin has ever worn. Austin reaches around Owen's body and Owen makes room for it, arches back a little. Austin presses into my left breast above the nipple and curves it up to Owen's mouth. Owen's lips curl open and leave my mouth. He backs up enough for me to focus on him, see his face change at the offering before he looks up at my face again. He sits up more now, backing up a little and bending down, holding my eyes to him as long as he can as if he's bowing, and, his nose nudging Austin's thumb, presses lips to my nipple, containing the circuit again.

I'm aware that I'm frowning, that the worried frown of sex is on my face as I watch Owen, and Austin looks at me with the same worry, an exchange of looks as primal as one of smiles and yawns. Austin releases his thumb and rides down Owen's front, flips under the sweater and makes work of Owen's belt. He pulls it open and turns his hand to unlatch it, I can feel it on my stomach, and leaves the cold metal of the buckle against my belly. He's taking his time, counting on Owen's distraction to feel his entire body, commit it to muscle memory and smell. He slides Owen's jeans down and presses his cheek to his exposed ass. in the dimple at the side, the concave to Austin's convex.

Sweetness and comfort bubble into my panties, the slip of the lips apparent when my thighs twist to stay at Owen's mouth. I reach down my own front and twist the waist down, under my ass, over one knee and out of one leg. Owen wears a large, flat ring. I turn his hand down to me and rub it against me. My legs shake and the pants slide down more until they fall at my ankle, an unrecognizable lump at my heel, and then kicked out. I hadn't meant to kick them. I just had to kick. My eyes close and my mouth opens, with twitches in the corners. Austin sees this as an invitation and stands, drops his pants and socks his cock in his hand, turns my face and rubs my teeth with it. I taste it when my lips roll down, salty and smooth Austin, even here, even now, just slightly different with Owen in the room.

Austin teases my mouth, makes me leap for him, suck him down past the barrier of my teeth and lose him again. I feel his jolts and know he's cranking himself up, the tight and loose of his skin above the bulge and throttle of the meat of it. An inhale blurts in the back of my throat and I stop Owen's ring, wait for my body to settle, blink under it, saved and restoring my threshold. Austin's fingers go into my hair, tight toward the scalp and he holds my head in place. He presses index and forefinger over my bottom teeth and slides his cock in over them like rails, They too are dry and a little salty. I rest my tongue on them and press up in between, skate across his large vein. His vowels go from As to Os and he fucks only for as long as he can, practicing this tough-love brinksmanship with my tongue and cheeks.

I feel the strange arrangement of Owen's back against my ankle and against the couch. He's been watching, stroking the tip of his cock against the shin of my other leg across his lap. Austin bends over his lips and sucks in the bottom one, slips it out and sucks it lightly in again. My pussy is split, open, dripping, in the air between my thighs, locked into Owen's torso for friction. Owen's got the kind of eyes that turn down on the ends when he smiles or pants. They turn down now, his mouth agape and steaming the space in front of it. Austin pulls my right leg off of Owen's lap and pulls it, his hand cradling the thigh, to the side and down. My pussy now holds wide in front of them, steaming the air surely, like Owen's mouth. Austin removes both of Owen's arms from his front and presses them into the back of the couch. I take the one by me and hold it. Austin drops to his knees, his cock bouncing and turns his head, swallows the entire length of Owen in one swoop, the sword in the sheath. Owen trembles and catches it, holds and savors. Austin waits a beat and begins to bob.

I've never seen Austin do this, though he's confessed to having done it in the past. It's been one of those things that even as I need to think about it, my fingers trapping my clit and slipping their rails across it under the sheets, I haven't been able to. Watching it now, my boyfriend's head impaled on this man, the skin see-sawing between his lips, I can't think about anything else. If I tried to speak now, it would be like reading a word jumble phonetically. Austin too leaves his strokes to mere suggestions on himself, squeezing in between to keep himself blocked. Owen's head lolls on the couch. His lips move as if he's talking, but he's not, at least not to us. If he believes in God, I believe he's talking to Him. I steal Owen's hand from off of the back of the couch and carefully maneuver it to my pussy. I roll it, fold it and push it inside, up to his thumb. My clit stretches across the top like the bow in the twine holding the whole thing together. With caution, I touch it with my thumb.

Owen's beginning to thrust up, just little tenses in his thighs and ass at Austin's downstroke. Austin holds onto it and rides him like an Englishman rides a horse, matches it and dances along. I'm on my own rocks, trembling like I'm rolling in gravel. Owen's stomach tenses and his head straightens on his neck, puffing, puffing, puffing. I stand up and straddle his face, losing his hand for only a moment. His tongue curls out just in time and I claw at the wall behind the couch, coming, losing my footing, regaining it, coming hard and groaning against his face. I feel Austin pull at me again, open Owen up, his arms wrapping around my knees and ripping them into the crooks of his arms. Austin, I feel in vibrations on my buzzing, hypersensitive clit, light, then a pfft, then a higher hum, Austin.

Austin's hand comes up and hooks his thumb inside of my pussy, curls his fingers into the front of my pelvis and pulls me down until my face is even with Owen's. Owen kisses me absently, my funk on his lips. Austin's cock breaks in and he fucks the space in the kiss, fucks the burn and the electricity between them, holding our heads together. The pull becomes enormous and he stops, then slides slowly, little centimeters back and forth at a time until the taste and the slip-squish texture of his come fills our mouths, coats our teeth and settles under our tongues. Owen falls onto me like this exhausted and sweaty now, not dry, Austin behind him, seated, but slumped sideways onto Owen's back. And neither of them seem different anymore. They are familiar now and warm.

The Invisible Man Part 4

It's one of those nights that would make for a sweltering day, the lights on the softball field haloed and the air murky. Here on the aluminum bleachers, though, the air moves around Elise on its way to wherever air is headed for, separates around her form and shoves together again at the other end. The players are friends of Morris's. The game would normally take on a barely contained sentimentality for her, imagining him there at shortstop, still alive and waiting for the hit that never seemed to come his way, but tonight she can't concentrate on it, feels for disturbances in the wind around her, imagines that the conversation she'd had that day was with a real person, and indulges in a little self-pity, that the two people that she has the strongest relationships with are equally dubious in existence.

The shortstop scoops a slow-roller, bouncing softly across the turf. Elise should be happy for him. She decides to take a walk instead, and slides across the banded aluminum, looks over the drop and takes it. She walks to the sidewalk, the bump-bump of her feet on the grass taken up by a scratchy tap-tap of concrete. The loud clink of the ball hitting a fence hitting a fencepost rises behind her, some yells and claps from the stands, the ghost of Morris running the bases and showing her the injuries to his finger joints later at home.

"Elise," she hears, and though the voice is not Morris, it strikes her just as hard. She walks a few paces with her eyes closed. "Elise," it says again.

She looked around, but knew it was him, Damen. She was out of sight of the field, the houses grey and quiet. She answered him.

"Yes. I thought you would leave me alone tonight."

"How could I? Where would I go?"

"Where would you go? Where do you go? Anywhere! Sneak into a movie or a theme park or go watch some celebrity or something or...."

"I've done all that."

"Or catch a plane somewhere. Paris or um Thailand or something."

There is silence. She regrets the plane suggestion. She walks for a few more steps, then stops. "Which celebrities have you spied on?"

"Their lives are expensive but boring."

"What did you see, though?"

"Um. Well, Tom Cruise is gay. Ewan McGregor cheats on his wife, or did at least once, but so do most of them. Gwyneth Paltrow wears men's tightie-whities and The President jerks off to strictly Asian bondage and peeing videos."

"God, really?" Elise says, forgetting to speak without facial expressions, she grimaces.

"You asked."

"What else?"

"Elise. I don't care about anyone anymore but you."

"This is too weird. You're too weird."

"You let me kiss you."

She feels his breath, close and fast. "I don't know you," she says.

She feels lips on her again, the heat and the moisture in the air wrapped up in a solid package on her mouth. It sucks her air out too. Her belly drops, becomes heavy, but he holds her. He releases her, but doesn't leave.

"And you've... you've been all over the world?"

"Yep. War zones and everything."

"Have you been to space?"

"No."

He kisses her again, heat rising in sweat between them.

"No space?" she says, genuinely surprised.

"I want to touch you."

She's lifted and hovers down a paved path through the park. Though her feet dangle a few inches off the ground, it's not them that makes the swash and catch on the ground. She sways her arms as if walking, but giggles to herself, waves her legs too. She's placed on a short hill for dirt bikes and feels knees press between hers. They separate them and rest under her open thighs. A mysterious rise appears under her shirt and tickles up her ribs, then another. She watches her shirt rise and fall above her bra. She sees her breasts bend into a slight cone shape followed by small double dents in the skin above the material. When they move, she feels that they were kisses, the moisture evaporating. She is frozen in place, fascinated and now, inexplicably, as if this is what she'd been waiting for her whole life, pot-boiling turned on.

"Damen?"

"Yes," she hears right at her ear, though the space in front of her appears to be unoccupied.

"Do whatever you want, just don't stop okay?"

She hears him exhale with a bit of a whine. He speeds up. Her jeans are unzipped, a hand down the back of her thigh. Crickets open up around her, scratch their legs against each other. The houses beyond remain grey. His hand skirts her pussy and she bucks. His knees are removed and her jeans slide down her legs, her sandals popping off. She watches and feels moans gather in her breathing. She sees her pussy lips spread and her clit expose itself. It's bent, pushed down, popped sideways. She laughs, deep and loud. She realizes she's been laughing. She hasn't laughed in forever. She feels something warmer, softer, and watches her clit flatten. He's licking her. Her neck stretches over the dirt mound. Her hands grope in the nothing in front of her until they feel hair, the top of his head. Waves rise in her hearing. A noise breaks out of her throat and her stomach clenches, whipping forward and back. The stars blur above for a while, then return to silent twinkling. It's ridiculous. All of life is imaginary and strange.

She leans forward when she feels his knees return, and watches her pussy spread open, the bottom rim tight, feels him enter her. Her arms reach out and she feels him bending over her, his back in the crooks of her elbows. And this is the strangest thing of all. To be pressed into the ground and made love to by nothing, or just something, someone, who doesn't look like anything. And that's okay for her now, because it was never meant to be normal, any of it, anyway.

The Invisible Man Part 3

Part three and another without sex! Just one part left, I swear.

Elise knows he's there. It feels like when she was a kid, when she was sure that the adults were watching her all the time, even when they weren't in the room with her. She was sure that they had a camera on her and they in another room, checking up. She feels critiqued and discussed, but comfortable, shielded. She feels him.

The road curves in a ring around the houses in her subdivision. She reaches the point in the arc where the new homes are just starting to seed. They're only clearings now with whips of tape attached to stakes in the ground. Beyond these, the real woods, and a path through them. Most of the residents want the path blocked somehow, strung with a few whips of tape on stakes to close it off, but Elise likes to run there. She told everyone she moved to suburbia for the trees after all.

He follows her.

If Elise looks straight ahead, she won't see the plastic bags stuck in the branches above her, the piles of ashes on burnt spots in clearings, the empty soda cans with the hole poked into the center. She runs, half-squinting for the blur it gives her and listens to the bump-bump of her soles on the packed dirt, trying to listen for his. She's been working out what to do about him when she has the guts, but that would mean she'd have to really acknowledge him, and that would make her insane.

She hears a clomp that's not hers, an excuse, and stops. There is nothing more, just the sound of construction in the distance and the rush of a car or two. The word in her rises and slips out like a shiver.

"Hello?" It sounds like a shiver too.

A squirrel runs in front of her, and she lets out a little laugh. Crazy. She runs again.

She runs past the mysterious PVC piping, the large fallen tree, over the gigantic root that crosses the path about halfway out. She hears the sound of a foot on wood and stops again.

This is out of her mouth before it's thought about, like a reflex that doesn't take any advice but what the spinal column gives it. "I know you're there! You've been there for months! Who are you?"

She's mortified of teenagers, falling out from behind trees with laughter. But she's already done it.

"Who are you? You don't scare me. Just tell me who you are."

She's panting from the run. Each sentence is a chore. She decides to conserve them.

"I know. You're there."

Sweat is attracting mosquitoes and little black flies. She shakes her head and runs again, forward for a few paces, then quickly switches and runs back. She runs into what feels like flesh, but looks like nothing.

"Jesus Christ!" she yells and leaps back a few feet.

A voice comes up in front of her, panting too.

"Damen."

"Who are you?"

"I'm Damen."

"Damen who? Who the fuck are you?"

"My name. Is Damen and I'm. Sorry to scare you."

"Where? Where are you?"

"I'm... look I'm here. I swear I'm here."

"Here? WHERE?"

Elise is screaming now and she knows it. Not screaming is impossible. Damen isn't answering any questions.

"I... I look like nothing," said the voice.

"What?"

"I'm invisible."

"Damen. The invisible guy."

"Yes."

"Uh-huh."

Damen stares at her, concentrates, as if he could concentrate enough for her to see him. She's getting scared though, her eyes picking at the trees and up the path, so he talks again.

"Listen, I'm just going to touch you, so you know, okay?"

"Where are you touching me?"

She is scared. She can admit it now. The entire sentence came out in one word.

"Just your shoulder."

"Leftorright?"

"Just your right shoulder."

Elise can see, well, hear, that he's scared too. It doesn't help. She breathes deeper and holds more, waiting, and then, the fold of her t-shirt and the feel of fingers and a palm, warm, gentle. He doesn't take it away. She breathes, exhales slowly and thoroughly. She doesn't really want him to let go. He does. Something changes in her too, more than the reassurance that she's not crazy, but knowing that she really wasn't alone, all those times she thought she might not be.

"Why haven't you talked to me?" she asks.

"How could I talk to you?"

"You were there when Morris died."

"Yes."

"And when I got my job."

"Yeah."

"And you've been in my car with me."

"Yep."

"And watched me... seen me naked."

"Then too."

"Why?"

He's quiet again, and she's almost angry. This, the most obvious of questions, you'd think he'd have an answer to.

"Why?" she asks again.

"Why am I here or why am I invisible?"

"Both."

"I don't know why I'm invisible. I just am."

"Why are you here?"

"You're my entire life."

"Oh."

"Don't make me leave you. Don't make me leave you because I stepped on a tree root."

She hadn't, strangely, even thought of him leaving. It seems now that she absolutely should, but she needs him too. She realizes that her eyes have been trained on a patch of nothing in front of her, that she hasn't been looking at the trees or noticing the little black flies on her skin. She's been looking at him, not at anything else. She blinks, but she's still looking at him.

"I'm going out tonight," she says. "I'm going to think about it. I'm too freaked out to think right now, alright? I just need to be around people and think."

She walks around where she knows he is and heads back, her feet a slower and lighter bump-bump, and she's so sure that she's lost him that she begins to tear up.

An arm comes around her and pulls her back, strong, so much that her heels dangle over the ground. She feels lips, then a full mouth on her, fingers in her hair and hears his broken breathing. Time passes somewhere and he breaks it, pulls away from her mouth. He's breathing heavier. She feels him shaking too.

"Oh my God," she says.

"I've wanted to do that for so-"

"I'm going out tonight. I'll talk to you tomorrow, okay? I promise."

She walks up the path, listening for his footsteps behind her. She doesn't hear them. When she's out of his sight, her feet pick up and she runs, the woods blurring, unable to see a thing.