C4 antho - Chamber Four

~62~ The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology
spend all night together and all of the next day and the next
and not tire of each other’s company and wasn’t that unique
and great? So much more freedom than either of them had
had growing up. The boy put the blanket down like he was
laying a bedspread and he propped himself up on one elbow
with the girl still standing and he was thinking how good she
looked with the lights of the cathedral behind her and her
soft cream legs and the spot on her back right above her buttocks
which was the only place she had allowed him to touch
freely since they had been dating these two months.
The girl lay down beside him, facing him, and she said,
“What are you thinking?” Always the same question whenever
they were close.
He wanted to say thinking of putting his hand between
her legs because his friend Travis said that’s how to get a girl
hot but instead he said just how great it would be to be with
you forever and the girl said that she’d been thinking the
same thing. And then she looked down at the cathedral, its
white lights shining up to its spires and arches, and he realized
she was thinking the M-word and he was thinking sex
and he wondered if talking about the M-word could get him
sex if he was careful. He liked this girl, he really did, but he
had a condom in his back pocket and Travis had been razzing
him for a week that it had taken him so long to score.
“Here,” the boy said. “You look cold.”
He pulled the edge of the Navajo blanket over her and
then he rolled her toward him so that she was lying comfortably
in his arms and he pulled the other end of the blanket
around him so they were like two larvae inside a cocoon. She
put his arm around her and placed it on her stomach.
“I feel so safe with you,” she said.
His hand felt like it was on fire. He had a vague idea of
what was below her navel, that there was hair and a hole and