Johnny Read online

  My stomach tightened.

  More mumbling as they seemed to struggle. Were they fighting? Or were they...?

  “Goddamnit!” my mother yelled. “Goddamnit, you bastard!” The bed slammed against the wall.

  A picture formed in my mind—a horrible, detestable picture—of what might be happening in there!

  I only hesitated for a moment, and then my hand was on that doorknob—

  “Oh, God, yes, Jack. Oh, yes!” My mother’s cries were an orgasmic roar. My hand lifted off the knob, a mind of its own. “Oh, God, Jack, I hate you—oh, yes! You fucking asshole!”

  Confused, a little stunned, I stepped away. Turned. And I left.

  I tried desperately to put the picture out of my mind. And I wasn’t sure if I was repulsed at having caught my parents in the act.

  Or if I was confused as to how this particular act had started out tonight; confused about how it had started out so...violently?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ~ Cheating ~

  -1-

  Johnny and I were lying on a thermal blanket, staring up at gargantuan spruces and pines that stretched upwards forever, touching heaven itself. We were on a hill, “Our Hill,” in a set of woods only a mile out from where we stayed. As kids, we used to cycle here all the time when we’d wanted privacy. Today was one of those days.

  Our spot was secluded, hidden behind a few outcroppings, off the beaten path.

  “So how’s it going with ‘Nicohhhhle?’” I made the Nicole come out as an extended sing-song sound of several syllables which screamed of derision and of the fact that I hated her. Just hated her!

  Johnny looked at me for what felt like years. Do those eyes dig so far into Nicole’s soul when you look at her? I wondered. Or...when you lie on top of her, when you touch her? I forced myself to keep an indifferent face, looking up at the canopy hiding the sky.

  “Nicohhhhle?”

  I tried not to smile, but my lips betrayed me.

  “Yeah, Nicohhhhle!”

  He laughed, and even his laugh had changed. His voice had grown deeper. Hearing it made my body ache.

  “Fine.” He turned his head and looked back up at the sky.

  “Just fine?”

  A pause. “Yeah, it’s...fine.” He sounded a little irritated. I was afraid to ask why, in case it was because I was asking about her and I shouldn’t.

  “You guys done it already?”

  He cleared his throat.

  I dreaded his answer, and felt the blood pool at my legs. Thank goodness I was lying down.

  The time that passed until he answered felt like a chasm of years.

  “Maybe,” he said, emotionless. “What’s it to you?”

  “C’mon, it’s cool. You can tell me.” No, you can’t.

  “I’m not gonna talk to you about my and Nicole’s sex life.”

  Sex life! Oh, God! I cleared my throat. “So you have done it.”

  “No comment! Why is this so important to you? She’s just a girl.”

  “Just...humor me.”

  “No.”

  “C’mon, Johnny! Tell me!”

  “No, I won’t tell you. I wanna change the subject now.”

  “Have you at least...y’know...?” I couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “What—fingered her?”

  “GOD! Johnny!” I slapped his chest on a reflex! “At least make it sound more romantic!”

  His laughter echoed in the trees and sent a bird cawing in response. “This is precisely why I won’t tell you about what she and I have done. Because you’re such a prude about this stuff!”

  But I’m changing. It’s all new to me...but...

  “Fine.” It wasn’t fine, but what was I supposed to do?

  Leaves rustled. Wind blew.

  “Have you ever...walked in on...your parents?” I ventured, changing the subject.

  “No, have you?” He was incredibly cool about the topic.

  I didn’t respond. My mind went to the other night, to the shriek, the crash, the wailing. The violence...

  Johnny noticed. He got up on one elbow, and like a whisper of the wind, he said, “Hey, you OK? What’s up?”

  He laid his hand on mine, and it was like pressing an On button to a faucet. My chin trembled, my eyes watered.

  Johnny lifted me off my back. He held me until my tears had wet his collar completely. He rocked me back and forth and stroked my hair. He rubbed my back and said, “Shhh, shhh. It’s OK, Cat. It’s OK. I’m here.”

  My arms squeezed his torso like a closing wrench. And I thought to myself, And have you done this with Nicole as well?

  The thought perturbed me more than if he’d had sex with her.

  -2-

  I knew deep down that spending time with Johnny in those woods was probably the equivalent of having him cheat on Nicole. But I didn’t care. I never stopped him from hanging out with her, and he and I mostly hung out after school when he wasn’t playing soccer, or a bit on the weekends when he wasn’t out with his dad at the docks. Sometimes we’d bring his sister Daniela along and she collected pine cones or tried to identify different types of mushrooms and tell us which ones were poisonous or not.

  There was a small brook from where Johnny and I were sitting today, about thirty feet away. Daniela sat on a rock throwing stones into the water.

  Spring was on its way, and even though there were still splotches of snow that hadn’t melted under the trees, small sprigs of tiny white and yellow flowers had started to sprout in the parts where the sun managed to break through the thick canopy.

  “How’s it going at home?” Johnny asked me. It had been a few weeks since that night with my parents.

  “It’s...OK...at the moment.”

  Johnny clenched his teeth. He’d become colder toward my father since we started talking about this stuff.

  “Johnny, I don’t want you to hate my dad. He’s just...he’s just going through stuff, I guess.” The lie felt cold on my lips.

  Johnny cleared his throat. “Danny, don’t lean in so far!” Daniela leaned away, but stayed on her rock. Then, to me, he said, “I don’t hate your dad, but I have to admit that that’s only because he’s your dad. A man who hits a woman...well...”

  I picked a twig up from the ground, threw it aimlessly.

  “He needs help,” Johnny said. “If you let me—”

  “No!” I stared at him in fear. We’d had this conversation many times before. “Please, Johnny—”

  “Relax.” He put his hand up to calm me down. “DANNY, NOT SO CLOSE!”

  “Relax,” he repeated. “I haven’t told my dad anything like you asked me to. But do you think he doesn’t know something’s up? Your folks never come by anymore, Cat. Do you think my dad hasn’t noticed? He hasn’t come by your place himself because he thinks whatever it is will settle itself out. But from what you tell me...”

  He didn’t need to finish.

  But I didn’t want to believe it either.

  I didn’t want to believe that we’d hit a Point of No Return, and that things would never again be as they were before without intervention.

  Walking back home, Danny holding her brother’s hand and swinging his arm as she walked, she said, “Are you guys boyfriend and girlfriend?” The question was posed so innocently that it disarmed me completely.

  Johnny, however, looked irate. He’d been looking irate all day, like something was on his mind, a deep frown furrowing his brow.

  He said nothing.

  “Well, are you?” She looked up at her brother, then at me.

  Johnny ignored her.

  My eyes flicked back and forth from him to her. “Uhm, no, no, we’re not, Danny. We’re...just friends.”

  “Michelle says you’re boyfriend and girlfriend. She says she can tell. Why aren’t you guys boyfriend and girlfriend?”

  Johnny said nothing.

  “Well...” I stammered, struggling for an answer, “because...we’re...such good friends and—”

>   “Danny, stop asking stupid questions! We just aren’t, OK!” It was the first time I’d heard Johnny raise his voice to his sister.

  She let go of his hand rudely. “Fine! I was just axking!” She held mine more firmly, and snuggled up to my leg as we walked.

  A moment later, she smiled at me, all forgotten for her.

  But Johnny and I said not a word more to each other until we got home.

  He barely even said goodbye to me.

  -3-

  In some vague way I could accept that sex had resolved whatever problem my parents had been faced with that night, but the whole context of that night repulsed me.

  I hadn’t seen Johnny for a little over a week, ever since that fiasco with Daniela, and his answers to my texts had been slow in coming—sometimes taking even hours!

  I missed him now, and the ache was deep and burning. It had been over four months since he and Nicole had started dating. And what base do people get to after four months? Could they be sleeping together? At sixteen!?

  The thought horrified me, not so much because they were sixteen (you don’t consider these things when you’re so young), but because somewhere deep inside me I had just “always known” (or at least hoped) that the first time I’d have sex, it would be with Johnny.

  And his first time, would be with me...

  Could it be that he hasn’t come by because they finally did the deed? And was it romantic, as it probably guaranteed would be with Johnny Abreu? He probably even laid out flowers for her, I bet. Maybe even a bed with rose-petals on it...

  I felt caustic food at my throat.

  I texted him, tried to make it light and cool like the friends we were supposed to be. Hey, do I smell or what?

  His answer was instantaneous today. No, you don’t. Things just hectic on this side

  Uhuh?

  Uhuh

  He “sounded” down. Tell me, I wrote.

  I can’t

  Since when can’t you tell me stuff? We’re sposed 2 b BFFs, remember?

  Yeah, I remember

  His laconic answers weren’t doing much for my self-esteem. In fact, they were downright slaughtering it. The thought of Nicole making similar sounds to what my mother had made the other night was equally as repulsive to me, and yet maybe that’s what was happening right now. Maybe she was with him this very moment and he was texting me with her in his arms!

  I decided to stop texting him.

  It felt like my head was full of cotton. I even felt my throat getting sore. I had no girlfriends at school that I could talk to like I did with Johnny, and no one to talk to about him, or about my crap at home.

  Nothing.

  I was alone, in the fullest sense of the word.

  Completely, and utterly alone.

  Until Johnny was at my window.

  -4-

  I jumped off my bed! “What the hell are you doing here!” I half-whispered, half-shouted. (I had graduated from “eff” to “hell” at sixteen-and-a-half.)

  Johnny grinned. His grin was so deadly gorgeous that—what with the contrast between his black curly hair and his perfect white teeth, and then the glow of his moonlit eyes—I felt that sudden tightening of all my muscles and a pulling of my skin.

  “I came to visit you.”

  “How did you get up here?” My dad had long-since removed the trellis that Johnny had once climbed up so eagerly.

  “Drainpipe.”

  “Christ, Johnny, get in here! You’ll break your neck!”

  I moved over to help him in and every touch of his sinewy forearm, plus the scent of whatever-the-hell he was wearing, made the pores of my skin start dancing, and sent my stomach up into my lungs. The reaction scared me. It was dizzying, like a feral drug that takes over your mind and senses.

  “You OK?” Johnny asked as he got inside. He was taller than me now, which is saying something, because I was a good five-seven already by that age.

  “Yeah, uhm, I’m fine. What the hell are you doing here?” I whispered. He had a naughty smirk on his face. I could feel the heat rising in my cheeks, so I turned to hide them from him. Luckily my room was dark. I’d turned off the light after sending him my last text. But the moon was up high, and its fullness made Johnny’s skin glow like something out of a fairytale.

  “I wanted to see you.”

  “Oh.” My heart fluttered, and I struggled to swallow.

  The next thing he said stopped all time for me.

  Because it wasn’t what was said, but how.

  He said my name.

  “Cat.”

  His voice was throaty. And yet it wasn’t the words that clobbered me like a gauntlet, it was the idea that came to me on a carrier wave of virgin lust that I knew we were both experiencing.

  I was barely able to answer him, my back still turned, my hands now shaking. “Y—yes?”

  I didn’t so much hear him move, as felt him nearer to me, even before any perceptible heat from his body warmed my back.

  And then his hands were on my shoulders. And I knew. I knew.

  “Why now?” I said. “Why now? What about Nicole—”

  “Over.”

  We stood there, in tableau, waiting, his hands clasped firmly around my shoulders. Not moving.

  I felt the tips of his fingers tremor so slightly. He was as nervous as I was.

  “I see. How long?”

  “Tonight.”

  I was angry at his response! He broke up with that...urgh!...and then came over to my place instantly afterwards! Or did she break up with him?

  The venom of my emotions tinted my tone. “And now you come to my bedroom, expecting...”

  “I don’t expect anything, Cat.”

  There it was again, my name, like a whisper in a tornado. Cat, Cat, Cat. If only he knew how much that name disarmed me when said by him.

  “And if I’d known there’d be any hope between us, I would have ended it ages ago with her. But you never...”

  I never gave you a chance, I knew.

  It would be a theme between me and him that would one day cut deep, so deep.

  “I know,” I said. “Why now?”

  “I couldn’t wait for you to give me a chance anymore. I...like...you. I always have. I had to take a risk. And I’m a one-girl guy. So it was either Nicole or you. I took a risk.”

  “It won’t be the same, Johnny. I’m...different now. We’re not kids anymore. I...” I have feelings for you, I didn’t say. I...am blindly and lustily completely bonkers for you. I didn’t say that either!

  “I know you are. And I don’t... I don’t need...that...with you, Cat.” Oh, God, whispering my name like that! “I...I can wait.”

  I moved my hands to his, covered them. And I took a step back so that my back touched his chest. When my butt touched him...there...I stiffened.

  This is all so new. Oh, God, I have no idea what I’m doing!

  But I knew I loved him. I’d loved him for the better part of a year. And I’d loved him as a friend for over a decade.

  My hands tightened over his.

  When he slid them out from my grasp, eased them down my sides and around to my belly, then up, just to below where I’d get uncomfortable; and when his lips and tongue touched my right earlobe, softly, gently, with the sound of pit-smack-pit...

  ...I was his.

  -5-

  We kissed in bed, easy tongues touching and caressing, learning of each other, testing, feeling, stroking, joining, understanding.

  Sometimes I’d think of...that girl!...and I’d stiffen, and Johnny would sense it and move away, giving me time to get used to it, to his hands, his lips. And then, after a few minutes, I’d sigh, and remember that that girl wasn’t here! But I was, under him, my hand on his chest, breathing him in, the lightest scent of male sweat and cologne, his aftershave. (Johnny started shaving early.) And then my lips would blindly seek his again, my eyes closed.

  He held me by the shoulders with his left hand, while his right slid and explored. Bu
t he never went too far. He stroked my hips, sometimes just the edge of my butt, and lightly covered my thigh. Eventually, I actively sought his hand on my butt. I wanted it there, and maybe, maybe, one day...

  But not now. Now he’s just kissing me, letting me feel the burst of blood to my breasts, the throb below, a throb which will go away on its own, but which of itself is like a drug, keeping me high in the clouds, no problems, nothing, no fights, no arguments.

  All will be well.

  I was, of course, drunk with teenage love.

  “You’ve become a pro,” I said after an hour or so.

  His cheeks blushed, and I felt again that sudden pang of jealousy for this...Nicole! So I dropped it.

  I pecked him on the lips, and then I made him hold me.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ~ The Docks ~

  -1-

  Dad was not happy. But then again, dad was not happy about much of anything these days.

  It wasn’t easy to hide my new romance with Johnny. What teenage girl can ever hide this kind of stuff? We think we’re so good at it, and yet, it’s written all over our faces and our daydreaming eyes.

  I didn’t come out and tell him, of course. Johnny and I hid it from both my parents initially, the first few days. It’s as if we had both sensed dad’s upcoming disagreement with it, and yet had no reason to believe this was the case!

  But we were right.

  Mom was the first one to ask me. She was wiping some dishes in the kitchen and I went in to get some juice. Just before I stepped out, she said, “Cathy, when were you planning on telling your father and me about you and Johnny?”

  The juice bottle stopped at my lips, and there was nothing I could say.

  They sat us down that night at the dinner table. But there was no dinner. Only me, Johnny, my mom, my dad, and his beer.

  And the ticking grandfather clock.

  Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.

  The table creaked, my seat creaked, the clock ticked.

  And finally my dad, at the head of the table, spoke.

  “There will be no sex until she is eighteen, Johnny.”