With This Heart

  “ Ms. Abby Mae, may I have the honor of giving you your first lap dance?” he asked with a mockingly serious tone.

  I finally tilted my head up to his face. “I don’t think you can fit on my lap.”

  He quirked an eyebrow. “Is that a challenge?”

  Despite myself, I cracked a smile. I could feel my whole body shaking with a nervous energy. I hated the fact that everyone was staring at us and I had no clue what Beck would actually do. He hung his arms in the air and started shaking his hips to the beat of the music playing from someone’s iPod speakers. Everyone started clapping and egging him on. He turned around and shook his jean-clad butt in my face before I shoved him away playfully. He turned back around with a devilish grin, and in the next moment he shifted forward so that he was standing over me. I pressed back into my chair, feeling my adrenaline spike. I mashed my lips together as he stretched his legs on either side of my hips and leaned down so that his face was hovering over mine. It wasn’t what I imagined he’d do. He was practically on top of me, pinning me to my chair.

  He knew that I was squirming in my seat, so when he ground his hips down onto mine, making the entire female population of the party squeal loudly, I scowled up at him with an angry stare.

  “ Don’t like it, Abby?” he challenged, knowing that I obviously did.

  “ You aren’t even doing it right,” I answered, trying to shift my head to the side so that our lips were farther apart.

  “ Show me how you do it then,” he challenged with a threatening smirk.

  Like fucking hell.

  “ Yeah!” everyone cheered in agreement. It wasn’t their opinions that ultimately made me shift forward and push Beck back into the sand. It was the fact that Caroline would have been jumping up and down telling me to grow a pair and show Beck what I wanted. It was the fact that Lia was scowling over at us with a sour grimace. I was learning that jealousy was a pretty strong motivator.

  Beck sat back in the sand with his hands propping him up. I shifted to stand in front of him and tried to think of every lap dance scene I’d seen on TV and in movies. Obviously, I’d never given one before, but I had good rhythm and a strong goal: make Beck lose his mind. I closed my eyes and let the world slip away, thinking of Beck and what I’d do to him if there were no consequences and no casualties (my ego). I strung my hands up into my hair and slowly shifted my hips to a slow rhythm. I felt sensual and powerful in that moment as my body twisted to the left and right.

  I inched closer to him and he leaned forward to wrap his hands around my calves, slowly dragging them up and down, and warming my skin. With a gentle tug, he pulled me down onto his lap and I let my legs fall on either side of his hips. My knees dug into the sand and I dragged my hands down his chest, feeling his muscles beneath his shirt.

  My dress rode up so that the backs of my thighs were rubbing against his jeans. His hands dropped to my legs, just to the edge of the hem, pressing it up an inch higher.

  “ You’re so sexy, Abby,” he whispered, and I rounded my hips in a slow circle like I’d watched women do a dozen times before. I was drunk on adrenaline and my own boldness. My body pressed down onto him as if we were suction-cupped together. It felt so easy to move on Beck like that, rolling my hips and letting my sexual prowess shine. His hands gripped my thighs, searing his skin to mine. His thumb was so close to a dangerous goal and I wanted him to reach it.

  I could feel him responding to me, and I didn’t care that we were at a party. The bonfire danced behind him, silhouetting his body and blocking out everyone else. I felt life coursing through me, exhilaration fueling my seduction. I strung my hands into his hair and pulled his head toward mine as I continued to grind in slow circles on his lap. We’d moved past public decency long ago, but I couldn’t hear anything other than the sound of my heart thumping wildly. When his lips met mine, we kissed like we’d been starving for it. He swiped his tongue over mine and tangled his hand in my hair, gripping me against him. Our hips moved together and I was no longer in control of our lap dance.

  We were having sex with clothes on, in front of twenty people.

  “ Alright, you two! Jeez, get a freaking room!” the ring leader’s voice finally penetrated through my lust-filled haze. I pulled my mouth away from Beck’s and pressed the back of my hand to my lips to conceal my overflowing emotions: elation, embarrassment, shock, and desire. He smiled up at me with hooded eyes. His brown hair was even more unruly thanks to my fingers.

  I sat there frozen in lust.

  “ I’m not complaining, but if you don’t get off my lap soon, this might not stay so innocent.” He couldn’t even hide the amusement in his voice. He squeezed my hips once more before I pushed off his lap and plucked myself in the seat Ian had previously been occupying. Beck took my old seat without a word. I brushed off the fine layer of sand coating my knees and calves. Then I straightened the hem of my dress out and tried like hell to keep from looking up toward the rest of the group. They were already focusing on a new contestant for Drink or Dare, but the flush on my cheeks wouldn’t recede and I felt like I was on display at the zoo.

  Jason leaned forward so he could see me past Beck. “What’s a lap dance among friends , right?” His tone held a note of annoyance. Did he think I lied to him before? Beck and I were friends and we weren’t dating, so it’s not my fault that at a party I didn’t feel like recounting our complicated-as-hell status to a random surfing instructor.

  I couldn’t look at Jason or Beck throughout the remainder of the game. Beck and I just sat there in silence until everyone started clearing out. I grabbed my phone out of my purse and motioned that I would walk ahead so I could make a call. I prayed Caroline answered.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “ Oh my God, finally!” I felt the flutters of relief wash through my nervous belly when Caroline answered on the fourth ring. It was late for her, but when all you do is sleep, days don’t seem to be divided quite the same as they used to be.

  “ Hey, Abs,” she answered with a voice that sounded like it was being grated. None of her usual cheeriness was present either.

  “ Hey, did I catch you at a bad time? I could call back?” Maybe she was just tired.

  She cleared her throat and I could hear the bed rustling like she was trying to sit up a bit further. “No. It’s okay, just feeling extra crappy.”

  Usually she sugarcoated her illness. She would talk about being in the hospital like it was an extended stay in a hotel and nothing more.

  “ Is that why you haven’t been answering my calls? I don’t care if all we talk about is how shitty you feel. I miss you.”

  There was a long silence and I stared down at the sand. In the moonlight, it almost looked like snow. Warm, grainy snow.

  “ Abby, I want you to be happy and I’ve just needed some time to process everything.”

  My heart dropped.

  “ Process what?” I shouted into the phone with no regard for anyone around me. I didn’t care what they thought.

  “ Abby…They gave me a new timeline.”

  A timeline. They gave her an expiration date. As if anyone could predict the fucking future. A timeline was statistics and nothing more. It didn’t account for externalities. The fact that Caroline was the best goddamned human being I’d ever known and that she deserved longer than whatever timeline they decided to give her.

  “ How long?” I stopped walking and let my knees fall forward into sand. My butt fell back onto my heels. Snowy sand stuck to my legs, exfoliating my pale skin.

  “ Eight months.”

  Eight months of life is what Caroline had to plan for. What I had to plan for. I felt an overwhelming need to scream building within me, building in my stomach and winding up my trachea and throat, pressing into my lungs. Then, when it reached my mouth, I counted to ten. This wasn’t my illness. This wasn’t about me. Caroline needed me to be strong. She needed the best fucking eight mo
nths of her life.

  “ Can I come pick you up and take you on the rest of the road trip with us?” I asked, praying she would say yes.

  “ I don’t know when I’ll be out of the hospital, but what if when you get back we go on one. Just you and me.” That sounded like heaven. I instantly thought of all the fun places we could stay together. We could go to Hollywood and walk the star mile and find every celebrity we’d ever pined over.

  “ Sounds perfect.”

  “ Any updates for me?” she asked, and for the first time that night, I heard hope in her voice. She really was living vicariously through me.

  I shifted around to see who was still around. The party had cleared out pretty quickly, but Beck was still on the beach a few yards away. He was sitting on his butt in the sand with his arms bent around his knees. His face was angled toward the ocean. The moonlight hit each of his sharp features. He was probably making sure I didn’t get kidnapped, but I appreciated the privacy he gave me.

  I told Caroline everything about the bonfire, the kissing, and the sandbar confessions from the other day . She eagerly listened to every detail. When I admitted that she was the devil sitting on my shoulder at each moment, she cheered into the phone.

  “ You’re damn right I am. I’ve never been prouder,” she admitted, and I could hear the smile in her voice.

  “ You would have loved the surfing instructor. He was straight off Laguna Beach .”

  “ Meh. He doesn’t sound as hot as Mr. Lap Dance.”

  I burst out laughing. “I should call him that from now on.”

  Once our laughter died down, the crashing waves settled in and I just sat there on the phone with her, wondering what she was looking at in her hospital room.

  “ Once we hang up, I’ll take a picture of the ocean and text it to you.”

  “ Thanks. I’ll put it as my background,” she answered wistfully.

  “ I love you, Caroline.”

  “ I love you, too, Abs.”

  …

  “ That’s a lot of pills,” Beck mentioned as we drove out of Corpus. We’d left just after breakfast and I’d forgotten to take my medicine beforehand. My medicine bag sounded much more ominous when there was no music playing in the car, so I switched the stereo on low before I started rattling through each pill bottle.

  “ They’re for my sex change operation,” I quipped, not really wanting to get into the details of them.

  “ You’re turning into a man?” he asked, eying me skeptically from his driver’s seat. “I think you’d make a really good one. You weigh, what? A hundred pounds? Nothing says dude like chicken legs.”

  I dropped one of the bottles back into the bag and narrowed my eyes toward him. “They’re not chicken legs!”

  “ I know,” he smirked. “They’re perfect.” He’d slipped the compliment in so flawlessly that I almost missed it. “What are the pills actually for?”

  He knew about my transplant, so there was no point in harping on it even more. “I’m one of those people that grows hair on every surface of my body. Have you seen those shows on discovery channel?”

  He couldn’t hide his playful grin. “You watch too much TV, but sure, I’ll let you stick with that answer.”

  I laughed and twisted my legs under me so I could sit like a pretzel on the seat while I finished taking each pill in quick secession.

  A moment later, he hit his hand onto the steering wheel, like he’d just remembered something. “If you stop taking the pills, you could be the bearded lady at the circus.” He paused and then looked over at me with such strong hope in his eyes that I thought for a moment he was being serious. “Except if you go through the sex change operation, you’d just be a normal dude with a beard.”

  He frowned and shrugged before turning his attention back to the road.

  I didn’t stop laughing until we crossed the Corpus Christi city line.

  I thought Beck would, you know, go for it after my lap dance last night, but nothing happened after we returned to the hotel room. I was exhausted and the weight of Caroline’s prognosis flitted through my mind every time I tried to close my eyes. I tossed and turned, unable to peel the images of her sickness from my mind. Her mangled lungs, her failing liver. I knew Beck was awake as well, but he gave me the peace that I craved.

  “ Alright, lightning round,” I began, pausing to insert an awesome game-show sound effect. It, of course, wasn’t lost on Beck. He appreciated every nuance of my humor. “Which of the following was not the name of a Spice Girl: Scary, Baby, Silly, or Posh?

  “ Silly,” he answered quickly, sliding me a cocky half smile.

  “ What? C’mon, you can’t guess it that fast.”

  “ Why can’t I guess that fast if I know the answer? It’s called lighting round.”

  I crossed my arms and sat back in my seat. “Okay, let’s play Desert Island instead.”

  He winked and I pretended to be staring off through his window when actually I was just studying his features while he drove. Sometimes I had to remind myself that he was real and sitting in the same car as I was.

  “ Let’s do the TV show edition since we know you’ll have an unlimited tap to draw from,” he joked.

  My grin spread wide, “Okay three TV shows each. You go first.”

  The music hummed from the radio while I waited for his answer. We were in the middle of God knows where, following any road that our hearts desired.

  “ The complete history of SNL , LOST ,” he paused to think for a second, “and probably The Walking Dead since I’m watching it now and I want to know how it ends.”

  “ Wait. Wait!” I blurted, waving my hands up into the air. “You want to watch a show about being stuck on a desert island while being stuck on a desert island?”

  He smirked. “The irony is too good to pass up, and Kate also happens to be my dream girl.”

  It was silly, but I instantly compared myself to Kate. We didn’t have anything in common. Why couldn’t I have adorable freckles??

  “ Okay. Your turn,” he demanded eagerly.

  I nodded, stalling for time so I could make sure I wasn’t missing any of the good ones. “ The Office , Will and Grace , and Game of Thrones ,” I declared, instantly regretting my choices. “No, wait! Maybe House of Cards instead of one of those. Or Friends .”

  His laugh filled the car. “You would choose to be lost on a desert island with Michael Scott?”

  “ And Jim,” I smiled proudly, imagining my dream guy.

  We drove for another hour, heading north with no real destination in mind. I propped my feet up on the dashboard and stared at the landscape whipping by. At one point, I pulled my phone out and recorded a video through my passenger window to send to Caroline. It was just twenty seconds of dried grass and trees, but the sky was so blue and cloudy; I knew it would give her a taste of life.

  Around lunchtime we were passing through a small town when I saw a huge sign that read “Texas’ Largest Flea Market - 5 miles”.

  “ Beck, have you ever been to a flea market?” I asked, shifting my gaze toward him. He’d slipped on his Wayfarers so I couldn’t see his eyes, but there was a little bit of stubble dotting his chin. I thought if I were his girlfriend, I’d make him keep it like that. It morphed him into something even hotter, that slight shadow of facial hair.

  “ Not that I remember. I saw that sign back there too.”

  “ Could we go?” I asked, wanting to see if their claim about it being the ‘biggest in Texas’ was true.

  “ Do you think we’re ready for a flea market date? I heard that usually doesn’t come until later on in the relationship. I mean we hardly shared a lap dance last night.” How he could tease me and make me smile all in one sentence, I wasn’t sure, but I sat there staring at him like I’d been searching all of my days to encounter that very moment.
Was I supposed to comment on the fact that he was joking or that he had called it a date or that he mentioned “relationship”? I ended up not saying much of anything. I grunted awkwardly and turned toward the window, praying he couldn’t see my blushing cheeks in the glass’ reflection.

  “ That was the best lap dance I’ve ever received, by the way.” He wasn’t going to drop it.

  I didn’t shift back toward him. “How many have you had?” I asked, concentrating hard on the gravel road splashing rocks as we exited the highway.

  “ Just the one. But it was by far the best I’ve ever had,” he spoke confidently.

  I tried to hide my all-consuming smile. “Beck. Turn into the flea market.”

  “ Alright, but there’s no coming back from this experience,” he declared, turning right into an expansive parking lot.

  I know he was being silly, but his sarcasm wove around me, making it feel as though going to a flea market together actually was a big step. I shook my head clear of the thought, unbuckled my seat belt, and hopped out of the car. The sign a few miles back wasn’t bluffing-it had to be the biggest flea market in Texas. The parking lot alone could have been a small metropolis. There were trolley cars looping around the perimeter, taking people to the entrance who didn’t want to walk the half mile themselves. Beck bypassed them and started weaving through parked cars.

  “ Wait for me!” I shouted, picking up my pace so I could catch up with him. The wind whipped my hair and I turned toward the sky, noticing the dark rolling clouds blocking out the sun completely. At least the flea market was covered because the sky looked like it was going to open up any second. When I looked back down, Beck was studying me with a serious gaze— one that couldn’t be mistaken for friendship. I stuck my tongue out at him and he pretended to lasso me toward him. I played along and he pulled me into him so he could kiss my cheek.

  “ Do you think they have real lassos here?” I asked with gleaming eyes.