Brewster by Mark Slouka Page A

do with it.”
    The woman came into the room, wiping her hands on a rag. “We gotta split, Mike.” She looked at us. “Listen, you kids want to stay?”
    T HEY WERE GONE in ten minutes. They didn’t care that we weren’t a couple, or that they’d just met us. It was cool either way, come or go, leave or stay, one of us or both. A quick, disorganized little whirlwind—“Yeah, it’s a drag we have to go into the city … Go, you can get dressed in the car … You want to bring the turtle, bring it”—and they had the rats in a cage and the cage in the car with the kids—the little girl walking up the hill naked dragging a long striped towel, the boy carrying a turtle ahead of himself like an offering—had flashed a quick peace sign through the window and split.
    We just stood there in the quiet, listening to the car bumping down the dirt.
    “I can’t believe they’d do that,” Tina said. “That’s just so cool.”
    I could feel her there next to me—her hair, her sun-brown neck, the hollows below her hip bones just above her jeans. I could feel my stomach, tight against my belt.
    She turned and started back down to the cabin. “What do you want to do? Man, I am so high.”
    “I should probably take off,” I said. Something in me was shaking like those leaves you sometimes see spinning like crazy when nothing around them is moving. She was barefoot, stepping down carefully from rock to rock. When she swayed, reaching out to steady herself against a tree, her hip, like it had turned liquid, kept going till it brushed the bark.
    I tried again: “It’s just that it’s late and all and—”
    We’d reached the bottom. It was going to rain—the swallows were everywhere, flashing white, dipping, banking over the water.
    “So what do we do now?” she said, turning to look at me.
    I couldn’t speak. Somewhere in the woods, a thousand tiny frogs were screaming at once. A fat bumblebee, drunk on pollen, bumped twice into the screen over the window and buzzed away.
    “You want to go skinny-dipping?”
    “I—”
    She took a step toward me, beaten, beautiful, the look on her face somewhere between a smile and a dare. “Would that cool you off, you think?”
    “I don’t—”
    “Is that what you want?” She reached behind her back, breathing through her mouth now, and the halter fell to the ground. “How about this—this what you want?” And she was in my arms, the heat of her coming through my t-shirt, her hips pressed against mine, her lips, her nose, the freckles on her cheek right there, right there. And she had me by the hand and was pulling me toward the door.
    It was a blur, a haze—the tangled sheets, the way she moved, the smell of cedar and damp and her hair falling over my face—all of it unbelievable even as it was happening. She did everything—I didn’t even know I was naked and she was over me, her thighs pressed against my hips, and I felt her reach under and back, her breasts spreading against my chest, and suddenly I’d broken in, was sliding up into that clutching warmth, and I just lay there—too young, too scared, to know what to do, knowing this thing was happening, feeling her moving over me but terrified that nothing would happen, that something was wrong with me. And then I felt it: a stirring, a fullness rising up in me like a wall, irresistibly, shamefully, and she sat up, feeling it too now, slowing, then slowing some more, whispering “Come on, give it to me then,” and blind to the world now, desperate, I clawed higher and broke in her like a wave, then again, and again, and heard her laugh, surprised, then ride it down into stillness.
    She was still moving, breathing hard, holding my face in her hands. “I guess it’s been a while, huh?” She pulled back, flushed, to look at my face, and stopped. “Oh, no, you’re kidding,” she said.
    I couldn’t speak.
    “Oh, my God,” she said, putting her hand over her mouth. “Baby, I had no idea that—”
    I’d