I'm Back

“Can I kiss you?”

I blink once, twice, then one more time at Catarina Campbell’s wide, toothy smile looking up at me. Her tiny hands shift impatiently on my hips, and we move to the side to let someone wiggle by. Outside the space between us, the DJ is still spinning the tables, and the crush of partygoers hasn’t budged from the dance floor. Two girls to my right accidentally slosh their drinks on each other. How could no one have heard her? She fairly shouted it into my ear. Suddenly, I want to go around the room, shaking people’s shoulders, Did you hear that? Did you hear what she just asked me?

Instead, I spot a door on the other end of the room and look back at her. She watches me, waiting. Has she always been waiting and I simply never knew or stopped to consider? I swallow. “Can we go somewhere else?”

Catarina winks and nods, unaware of the warring factions inside my head, and takes my hand as she weaves us in and out of the crowd, dodging drinks and people. We pass a couple on the couch, a couple against the wall, friends chatting at the open bar. Not one of them has noticed us and said something, or barred the door, or pinched me. I’m not dreaming this time. My heart zooms up to my throat and lodges itself there for the remainder of the evening.

The door opens onto a screen porch overlooking the back yard, but there’s nothing to see but the top of her dark head that bobs up and down as she laughs and pulls me to a single wicker chair in the corner. My limbs are loose and limber and flail everywhere when I flop down on the chair. Eyes widen as she looms above me, grinning, and swings a brown leg over my own pair to make herself comfortable on my lap. She weighs nothing, but I feel every press of skin and clothing against me. My mouth has sealed itself shut, but I don’t need it because I imagine that my face is saying everything that needs to be said.

Hands cupping my face, she murmurs something I can’t quite catch because my ears have stopped working. The techno-trance filters through the walls in a muffled series of thump thump thumps, matching the rhythm in my chest. What am I stalling for? My breaths start to come out shallow and quick. This is a joke. She doesn’t want me, just another warm body. This is going to end like all the other parties and late nights, like all the other times where I’ve danced with her and talked to her and brushed my fingers over the bare patch of skin above her pants that her shirt didn’t cover, and ultimately crawled back to my dorm room alone because I couldn’t bring myself to go one step further and—

Catarina leans forward and kisses my inner monologue away.