Chapter 14: The Other Side

Priya went back the next chance she got, and the chance after that.

I never took her down. That was the one line I kept — that whatever she did in that basement she did on her own two feet, that I would not be the hand that walked her to it. But she’d learned the shape of the nights off me and she didn’t need my hand anymore. She worked out which Fridays the cars came. She got herself invited to sleep over. And I’d lie in my bed and know she was under me in the dark, on her knees at the sheet, and there was nothing left to do about it that I hadn’t already failed to do the first time.

She came back from the second one surer than the first. Less wrecked, more pleased with herself. She sat cross-legged on my floor with her eyes lit and told me that this time, when he knocked, she hadn’t pulled off. She’d stayed. She’d taken all of him in her mouth on purpose — swallowed him down and been proud she didn’t gag. “You said not to the first time. So I did it the second time.” Like it was a level she’d cleared. And it hadn’t been the same man either time — she made a point of telling me that, proud of knowing it, a different size, a different way of going at it; two grown strangers so far, and she could already tell one from the next in the dark. She said it was easier than she’d thought and better than she’d thought and she couldn’t see why anyone made a big thing of any of it. The fear had burned off her another notch, and nothing had come in to fill the space it left but wanting more.

Tyler she never brought up again. When his name came up from somebody else she got a look like she was trying to place a kid from a grade below her.

And then she wanted more, because there was always a more coming with Priya. I’d known that since we were nine and she dared herself off the high board while I stood on the low one working up to nothing. The sheet stopped being enough. She wanted the grown-up part, the real part, what she was sure everybody else down there was getting while she knelt at a slit in a bedsheet like a kid at a door. She wanted to go all the way.

I told her no. I told her every way I had. That the sheet was the whole point, that the sheet was what kept it safe, that you did not go around the sheet, ever, that this was the one rule — it came out of me hot and fast and frightened and she watched me say it with her head tipped, and I could see her filing my fear away as one more proof there was something worth having on the far side of it. Everything I threw up to hold her back she read as a map. I told her about the knock again, harder — that if she ever let a man go all the way she had to make him knock, make him pull out, that it wasn’t like the mouth, that a mouth can’t get you pregnant and the rest of it can. She said okay, okay, she knew, she’d make him. She said it the way you say a thing to get somebody to stop saying it.

And the whole time I drilled the knock into her, my own nights ran the other way down the same road. My father hadn’t knocked since the night the rule broke in him. The dangerous stretch of my month I still handled the careful way, the same one I was drilling into her. But the safe nights I kept for myself, and what was new — what I couldn’t have told her if I’d tried — was how I’d started to want them. Not just allow them. I’d lie there and wait for the moment he pushed all the way in and let go and stayed, filling me deep and holding himself there, and I’d keep it in after just to feel the warm weight of it, high up where the day had already made sure it couldn’t matter. I was teaching my best friend, word by careful word, to never let a man finish inside her. And on my own safe nights I lay under my own father and let him finish as deep as he could reach, and wanted it — just the feel of it, not the risk of it — and stayed safe on nothing but the count in my head.