Page 56 of Wrap Around
One eyebrow raises, but her expression is entirely unreadable. She huffs when I take too long to continue. "Well, don't stop there! This is better than reality TV. How exactly was he holding you?"
My face burns. "He had a hand here," I put my free hand at the base of my neck. "And the other one was… I don't know. Everywhere? But it ended up sort of on my leg."
"Your leg?" She looks confused now.
"Like, here," I say, lifting my leg off the couch enough to gesture to the back of my thigh.
Her mouth gapes open. "My, my…" she takes a sip of her wine, flustered. I seal my lips shut and pretend to watch Addy for a minute. She's laying inside the toy basket, on her back with her legs over the edge, kicking her little feet and singing to herself.
Tentatively cutting my eyes over to Lily, she's watching me very intently, waiting, no doubt, for whatever I'm holding back.
"Silas Isaac Caldwell…"
I scoff a laugh at her tone. "Ma'am?"
"You might as well just tell me the rest, because we both know I will annoy you until you confess it on your last dying breath. If you ever want whatever happened to happen again, you better spill it."
"Fine." I look pointedly into my now half empty glass of wine and refuse to make eye contact. "He pushed me against the wall, kissed me so hard my lip started bleeding, and grinded on me until…"
"Until?"
"Well, you know—" I gesture vaguely and wonder if it's possible for my face to get any hotter or if I'm about to stroke out.
"Silas! You damn well know I don't know shit!"
"Know shit!" Addy parrots in her tiny, squeaky voice from inside the toy basket, feet straight up in the air.
Lily points. "That was your fault."
"Mmmhmm."
Lily gestures for me to get on with the telling of the things.
"We both…finished?"
I raise my eyebrows, wondering just how much she still doesn't know. We've definitely talked about how woefully uninformed we were before, and I told her about the time Gideon and I accidentally watched porn on one of the school computers and how it absolutely confirmed that I was not interested in doing that with a woman. I wouldn't tell her what it was we saw, so she said she was going to do her own research. The next day she said, "I don't think I'm interested in that," and that was it. I'd assume she knows a bit more than she did when she got pregnant at barely seventeen, but it's not like I've asked. We're recovering from religious repression, and that shit doesn't just heal overnight. However interested in sex we might be, it's still not easy to talk about in this much detail.
Lily gasps when she gets it. "Oh.Oh!" I should probably get her some eye drops or something, because it cannot be healthy to go this long without blinking. "Well damn. Go big brother," she mutters under her breath. Then she makes a face and shudders. "I'm almost afraid to ask what happened this weekend, but I desperately need to know and will not be able to eat, sleep, or live without knowing."
I bark out a laugh. "I don't think I can handle telling you in as much detail, so you're going to have to deal with me being a bit more vague."
She scrunches her nose. "Ugh.Fine. Whatever. Spill!"
"Gideon walked in on me in a state of undress. It made him angry for some reason."
"Because you're an evil, slutty temptress, duh," she deadpans.
I give her a pointed, but begrudgingly amused, look. "Well, he reacted pretty similarly as before, only there were significantly less clothes and he…"
I must wince or something, because Lily suddenly looks concerned. "Did he hurt you?"
"No, nothing like that. I mean, it did hurt, but it's not like I didn't want him to do it. I definitely encouraged him."
She seems to pick up on my meaning. "But...Wasn't that your–"
"First time? Yeah."
Lily's my best friend. We're a bit repressed, but we have talked about stuff here and there. She's tried to encourage me to go out and experiment discreetly, and I've mentioned the same to her. But Lily hasn't felt interested, and the few times I went looking, I just didn't feel right about it.
