Sudden Bro

There’s that crossover moment in the sauna when your pores turn on like faucets. One second you’re dry, the next your skin is a thousand open spigots. Your toes are sweating. Your wrists are sweating. The insides of your knees, your earlobes. You try to think back to the exact moment when you started to sweat but you can’t, and it reminds you of that time last year with Danielle when you started coming without even realizing it—honestly, it took you completely by surprise—and she was slapping at your chest yelling Pull out asshole! and you did but by then it was too late.

Prior to that you used to like to play chicken with each other. She’d wrap her legs around you and drill her heels into the small of your back and whisper Are you about to come? right up against your ear, at first because she didn’t trust you and later because she just liked to talk a little dirty. And you’d say, Are you? And if she said no you’d say me neither or sometimes you’d have to say, Yeah I think so, and then you’d whip apart like a spring lock in reverse and it was all no harm no foul.

After awhile she stopped asking and you never had any trouble, but even if she’d asked this time, even one millisecond beforehand, you’re pretty sure you would’ve said no, because you were in your groove and felt like you could’ve gone on forever or at least five, six minutes longer.

She wasn’t on the pill because she was on her dad’s insurance and didn’t want him to find out his baby girl was getting fucked, especially not by you, who were not even in Honors English. So there were a couple tense weeks when you were both waiting without really acknowledging it, and the waiting got so awkward that you pretty much stopped hanging out or even talking.  And then after a month or so, when it seemed like long enough, you went up to her in the hall outside the cafeteria and said, “Hey, is it all good?” She smiled and shook her bangs out of her eyes in that way of hers and said, “Yeah, it’s all good.”

What you felt immediately was relief, but later when you thought back to the conversation, you had a sense that something about the way she said it’s all good suggested it was not, actually, all good. But you don’t know. You’ll probably never know. If there was a thing, she made it go away. If it was nothing it was nothing.