The Space Between Us Read online

  Meredith laughed, low and throaty, not the same laughter that had earlier filled the shop. This was just for me. “Because he won’t tell anyone about them. Still waters run deep and all that shit.”

  “Maybe I have still waters, too.”

  She shook her head, playful. Charming. “No, honey, you’re more like a waterfall.”

  “Because I rush a lot?” I asked with a wink.

  “Nope. A thing of natural beauty with some treasure hidden behind it. C’mon, Tesla. Tell me. The craziest thing you’ve ever done.”

  There was no trying to deny her. What Meredith wanted, she’d have, and she made me want to give it to her. “I don’t think anything I’ve done is crazy. Crazy’s like…I dunno. Putting a dead bird in your locker at school so you can bury it later. Lighting stuff on fire.”

  “Okay, not crazy. Wild, then. Free? Unique?” She paused, thinking. “Unencumbered.”

  “Ah. You mean sexual.”

  Meredith wore a huge diamond and a gold band on her left hand. She talked sometimes about her husband, but only in the vaguest of ways. I knew his name was Charlie and that he was a teacher at some fancy private school. They had no kids.

  “Yes-s-s,” Meredith hissed with glee. “Sexual. Tell me, Tesla. What’s the wildest sex thing you ever did?”

  I wasn’t surprised she wanted to know my wild sex secrets. She liked to talk about sex a lot. Well. Who doesn’t?

  “Hmmm.” I turned my mug round and round in my palms, the ceramic sliding on the tabletop. “The craziest thing, huh? I’m not sure I can beat old people porn.”

  “Did you know Sadie was married to someone else before Joe?” Meredith said quietly.

  “No. She was? Huh.” I shrugged. “Was that the craziest thing she’d done? Got divorced?”

  Meredith shook her head. “Oh. No. Her first husband died.”

  I frowned, thinking of pretty Sadie with her big belly and gorgeous husband. “Gee, that’s too bad.”

  Meredith shrugged. “It happens.”

  It wasn’t the first time I’d heard her sound a little bored by the pain of others. She liked hearing stories, but mostly only the funny or exciting ones. Sad stories didn’t melt her butter.

  I looked up to the counter, but Darek was busy flirting with one of his favorites. Nobody else was waiting. I still had time—and half a mug of chai. “Fine. Crazy things. You go first.”

  She shook her head and licked her mouth again. I couldn’t help watching her tongue move over her lips. Meredith has a mouth like Angelina Jolie. Full, soft lips. Pillowy, I think some people call them. She has a smile full of teeth, the kind you can’t help but smile back at. Meredith’s mouth is the sort that would break your heart if you saw it frowning.

  “I haven’t done anything crazy. I’m married.”

  I laughed at that. “So? Were you a virgin when you got married? Don’t married people get up to crazy shit?”

  Her eyelids lowered for a moment, as if she was remembering something. “No. Not really.”

  “You must have something crazy to tell me.” I sat back when Eric got up to help himself to a refill from the jugs on the counter next to us.

  “Tesla,” he said, and nodded at Meredith. “Hi.”

  “Hi, Eric.” She didn’t flutter her lashes or anything contrived like that. Meredith didn’t have to. “How’s tricks?”

  “Putting Houdini to shame,” Eric said, though he didn’t have quite the same easy flirting tone with Meredith that he had with me. He looked at her sort of warily, keeping his distance.

  She made sure to ogle his ass as he walked away, then turned back to me. “I would bang that man like a screen door in a hurricane.”

  “If you weren’t married.”

  “And if he didn’t look at me like he was afraid I might bite him instead of kiss him,” Meredith said with a touch of scorn.

  I looked away from where Eric was again looking at his lists. “Oh, c’mon. He didn’t.”

  Her smile lifted a bit. “He never looks at you like that.”

  “Because I’m not a moron and because I give him sugar and caffeine,” I said with a laugh. “Eric’s a good guy.”

  She shot him another glance, then dismissed him with a wave. She lifted her mug and drank, her eyes never leaving mine. She licked her mouth again.

  “I kissed a girl,” Meredith said.

  “And let me guess. You liked it?” I swallowed hot tea.

  She shrugged. “It was okay. It wasn’t much of anything, really. It was in college. We were just fooling around.”

  “To see what it was like,” I offered. I’d heard that story before, too many times.

  “Sure. Lots of people do it. You do it,” she added.

  “Sometimes.” It wasn’t something I considered crazy or wild, and obviously she didn’t, either, since she already knew about it and was still teasing me into telling something else.

  “And you like it.”

  “Well…of course.” I laughed. “I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t like it.”

  “See? That’s what I mean. You do what you want to do, what you like to do, whatever turns you on.” Meredith paused. “I admire that about you. I envy it, I guess.”

  As if she could really envy anything about me, a chick who worked in a coffee shop, drove a piece-of-shit car, didn’t even live on her own. Besides, it had been ages since I’d kissed anyone, girl or guy.

  “You don’t answer to anyone,” Meredith said.

  “Tell that to Joy.”

  “C’mon, Tesla. I see it in your eyes. You have some good stories.”

  I laughed. There was really no resisting her. I’d seen her work her wiles on everyone from other customers in the Mocha to the cop she’d talked out of giving her a ticket. Even Joy warmed to Meredith, though she always reacted afterward as if her friendliness unnerved her, and was even more impossibly horrible for hours, as if she were trying to scrub herself free of any taint of kindness.

  “I fucked brothers once. Twins.” I didn’t say this smugly or with any sense of pride, though by the way Meredith’s eyes widened, I saw she was impressed.

  “At the same time?”

  I hesitated for just the barest second. She had asked for the craziest thing, and though I personally didn’t think anything I’d ever done could qualify as crazy, clearly Meredith had her own set of standards. Well, most people do. “Yes.”

  She breathed out, long and slow. “Wow.”

  “It wasn’t—” I began, but she held up a hand. I went silent.

  “Tell me about it.”

  I hadn’t told anyone about it, ever. So why tell her, now? For no other reason than, just like the Billy Joel song, she had a way.

  “Tell me,” Meredith urged me.

  So I did.

  Chapter 2

  Chase and Chance Murphy had never been separated. I was new to the district, but everyone else had gone to school together since middle school, some even since kindergarten. The boys’ mother, the formidable Mrs. Eugene Murphy—if she had her own first name, and she must’ve, nobody ever used it—was something like a force of nature in the school, where her sons were both first-string on the basketball and soccer teams. “The twins,” she called them. She made a unit of them, not recognizing them as individuals.

  Maybe that was why it was so easy for me to fuck them both, or rather for them both to fuck me, at the same time. They were really good at sharing. I’d bet it wasn’t what their mother had ever intended for them, but then I’m pretty sure Mama Murphy hadn’t thought ahead to the years when the twins would get hair on their chins—and on their balls.

  We were all seniors, me the new kid still finding my way, Chase and Chance popular boys despite their mother being such a legendary pain in the ass. They were tall, lanky, athletic. They were completely identical, though they’d stopped dressing alike by then. Later I discovered I could tell them apart by the slight curves of their cocks. One to the left, the other right. Mirror images. They were popular, g
ood students. They’d been altar boys. They were going off to college.

  Me? I was small and wore thrift-store clothes, but unlike Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink, this only made me poor, not quirky. I had no Duckie to adore me, but at least I wasn’t all hung up on the rich boy from the other side of the tracks. No Andrew what’s-his-face for me, thank God. Unfortunately, no James Spader, either. I’d have hit Spader like the fist of an angry God back then. Hell, probably even now.

  I was smarter than the Murphy boys and just about everyone else in my class when it came to math, and their mother, determined they’d maintain their eligibility for sports teams—because sports apparently built character, something you’d never have guessed she believed, given her own unathletic state, or that of their dad, a dentist who wore thick glasses and had buckteeth that could’ve benefited from some of his own expertise—hired me to be their tutor.

  That’s right. Mama Murphy paid me to divest her darling twins of their virginity. It didn’t start out that way, of course. I mean, I had every intention of teaching them calculus. I needed the money and wasn’t afraid to insist that Mrs. Eugene Murphy pay me twice the normal rate because I’d be teaching two instead of one, even though she tried to convince me that it wasn’t the cost per individual that should count, but the total amount of time spent.

  “And since you’re teaching them both at the same time,” she had reasoned, “I should pay you the regular rate.”

  “They’re not the same person,” I’d pointed out to her, standing my ground.

  “But they’re twins!”

  I’d only raised an eyebrow, as I recall. She’d taken in my long denim skirt, the black, knee-high Doc Martens, my dyed-black hair. I guess to her I was sort of scary looking.

  “You did come highly recommended by the school guidance counselor.” She’d sounded doubtful.

  “I’ll make sure Chase and Chance pass their finals with A’s, or your money back.”

  It was done. She paid me every week. I made good on my promise.

  It didn’t start out as a fuckfest. If anything, the brothers were pains in the ass to teach. They didn’t like calculus. Worse, they didn’t care about it. They were both doing poorly enough that it was threatening their place on the school team. They still didn’t care. Calculus was for douche bags, according to the brothers Murphy.

  But like I said, I needed the money. There was no way I was going to let them get away with anything less than what I’d promised their mother. I could never have paid her back—I’d already spent everything she’d given me on clothes and books and music, the necessities of life.

  “If you learn this—” it was the first offer I made them “—I’ll blow you.”

  This stopped their stupid scribbling and wiggling around in their seats like puppies that couldn’t be made to sit. Both of them had looked up at me, eerily simultaneous. They weren’t the same person, but they did have a way of moving or saying the same thing at the same time. They were connected, no doubt about it.

  “Get the fuck out,” Chase said.

  “No fucking way,” Chance said.

  “I will blow you both,” I told them, putting my hands flat on the table and leaning over it to look them in the eye, one at a time. I can’t remember which one I looked at first. I didn’t think it mattered then, but it would. “I will make you both come so hard you see stars.”

  I would never be a teacher, had never even dreamed of it as a career, but one thing I’d learned about teaching was the effectiveness of positive reinforcement.

  That was how it started. They finished their work in record time, and, aside from a few simple mistakes, correctly. As with most things in life, getting the Murphy boys to learn calc was a matter of simple motivation. I wanted them to get A’s, and they wanted my mouth on their dicks.

  It wasn’t until they both dropped trou that I started thinking I might actually be getting the better end of the deal. I’d never thought much of Chase and Chance as boyfriend material. For one, they seemed sort of a package deal, despite my insistence to their mother they were two separate people. Two, they were a real pair of Weasleys, my very own Fred and George. Dark auburn hair with the pale skin to match, dark brown eyes. The freckles on their noses might’ve seemed a little Howdy Doody, but when Chase and Chance both pushed their jeans and briefs around their ankles, the only wooden puppet I thought about was the stiff, thick branches of their not-quite-identical cocks. I didn’t know at the time they’d never been with a girl before. All I saw was beauty.

  And I was greedy for it.

  I made them stand shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip. I got on my knees in front of them. The carpet in their parents’ finished basement was thick and soft, a perfect cushion. I took them each in a hand. I slicked them with my spit. I took the first one in my mouth, and then the other. I do remember who was first, because I was looking up at him when I did it. He was looking down.

  It was Chase, though it should’ve been his brother, since I picked him totally by chance. Later it would make a difference, but at the time I don’t think any of us cared. I slid his thick, pretty cock as far as I could into my mouth, and sucked, while I used my hand to stroke up and down his brother’s prick.

  Both of them groaned at the same time. They sounded the same. They looked the same. In another second I discovered they tasted the same, too.

  If I could’ve taken them both in my mouth at the same time, I’d have done it. As it was, they had to be satisfied with my equal but back-and-forth attention. And at the end of it, wanting to watch them both when they came, I left off the use of my lips and teeth and tongue to lean back and finish them with my hands. They shot within seconds of each other, spurting onto their flat, rippled bellies. Both of them had closed their eyes, heads bent. Mouths I would later learn were talented with kissing and licking and sucking were lax and open with their moans.

  Chase was the one who looked at me first. His hand, which had been gripping the table behind him, the one on which we’d spent hours scribbling equations, loosened its grasp and stroked along my hair. His thumb passed over my lower lip, which felt swollen and wet. He blinked slowly, as if waking from some dream he didn’t want to leave.

  “Fucking hell,” Chance had said, breaking the moment. “That was awesome.”

  That was just the first time.

  Chapter 3

  “Wow,” Meredith said when I’d finished. “That is…”

  I didn’t really want her to say crazy. It couldn’t dilute what had happened, couldn’t make it something it wasn’t, but still. I didn’t want her to say it like that.

  “Fucking supernova hot,” Meredith said.

  I flushed, heat creeping up my throat and down lower. I hadn’t told her the rest of it, but I thought I might, if she asked me. All about that long fall with the brothers Murphy, the three of us graduating from simultaneous blow jobs to cunnilingus and every combination of fucking that two cocks and a pussy can get into. It was over by Christmas.

  “It’s absolutely not what I thought you’d say,” she told me with a shake of her head. “Wow. Not at all.”

  “What did you think I’d say?” I’d finished my chai and break time was over, but I was curious exactly what she’d thought she knew about me.

  “I told you. Hidden treasures.”

  I blinked slowly under the heat of her gaze. She’d kissed a girl, sure, but what did that mean? Nothing.

  There’s never any point in flirting with straight girls, you understand. Not even the “curious” ones. Straight girls have come to the conclusion that it’s perfectly okay to make out with their bestie on the dance floor as a way to get guys’ attention, or because they’re drunk, or because it’s trendy. Straight girls know that unless you eat pussy you’re just experimenting, and even if you do go down on another girl it doesn’t mean you’re a dyke.

  I’m not a straight girl.

  I’m not a queer girl, either. I guess you could say I’m sexually fluid. Love comes in all s
hapes and flavors, and I just want to be able to taste them all. But if there’s anything I learned from working at Morningstar Mocha, where the coffee flowed like Niagara Falls and waistbands expanded just by coming within a few feet of the dessert case, it’s that wanting and having are two different things.

  “It was a long time ago.” I sounded lame.

  “Can’t have been that long ago,” she pointed out, sounding wry. “You’re barely out of high school.”

  I laughed. “Hardly. I’m twenty-six.”

  “A baby,” she said, but fondly. “An experienced baby.”

  Age didn’t mean much to me. “I have to get back to work. Darek’s giving me that desperate look that means someone’s ordered a drink he doesn’t know how to make.”

  “Tesla to the rescue. You’d better go help him then. Anyway, I need to get going. I have some things to do.” Meredith gave another of her low, sultry laughs that made the hairs on the back of my neck rise.

  We both stood at the same time. She’d been coming in here for months, but today was the first day she’d ever hugged me. For the first few seconds, standing startled in her embrace, I didn’t know what to do. She’d moved closer, and the smell of her was exotic and expensive and subtle. Her arms went around me, pulling me closer. Her sweater was soft on my skin, her hands warm on my back between my shoulder blades. We stood chest to chest and crotch to crotch for the span of half a heartbeat.

  By the time I’d relaxed into her touch, closed my eyes and breathed in the deliciousness of her, it was over, except for the lingering heat in my ear from her breath where she’d whispered a goodbye, and the tingle in my cheek where I might’ve only imagined she brushed her lips.

  “Tesla?” Eric said this from his place in front of the self-serve station, shaking me out of what must’ve been quite a show of shock. Meredith had already left the shop, the bell on the door jingling behind her. Eric cocked his head to give me the once-over. “You okay?”