The Edge of Never

  Camryn giggles.

  “Well, that’s a little too romantic,” she says, “but I bet you’ve had your share of romantic gestures though.”

  “I guess,” I say, honestly not really coming up with any at the moment.

  She looks at me with her head cocked to one side.

  “You’re one of those,” she says.

  “One of what?”

  “Guys that don’t like to talk about their exes.”

  “You want to know about my exes?”

  “Sure.”

  She lies down on her back, leaving her bare knees drawn up and she pats the blanket beside her.

  I lie next to her in the same position.

  “Tell me about your first love,” she says and already I feel like this isn’t a conversation we should be having but if it’s what she wants to talk about, I’ll do my best to tell her what she wants to know.

  I guess it’s only fair since she told me about hers.

  “Well,” I say, looking up at the star-filled sky, “her name was Danielle.”

  “And you loved her?” Camryn looks over at me, letting her head fall to the side.

  I keep looking at the stars.

  “Yeah, I loved her, but it wasn’t meant to be.”

  “How long were you together?”

  I’m wondering why she wants to know this; most girls I know snap into that jealousy-fueled mood-swing stuff that makes me want to cover my nuts when it comes to talking about exes.

  “Two years,” I answer. “The break-up was mutual; we started checking out other people and I guess realized we didn’t love each other as much as we thought we did.”

  “Or, you just fell out of love.”

  “No, we were never in love to begin with.”

  I look over at her this time.

  “How did you know the difference?” she asks.

  I think about it for a moment, searching her eyes just about a foot from mine. I can smell the cinnamon toothpaste she brushed with this morning when she breathes.

  “I don’t think you ever really fall out of love with someone,” I say and see a flicker of thought move through her eyes. “I think when you fall in love, like true love, it’s love for life. All the rest is just experience and delusions.”

  “I didn’t know you were so philosophical.” She grins. “I should tell you, that counts as romantic.”

  Usually, it’s her doing the blushing, but she got me this time. I try not to look at her, but that’s not so easy to pull off.

  “So, who were you ever in love with, then?” she asks.

  I straighten my legs out in front of me, crossing my ankles and locking my fingers together over my stomach. I look up at the sky and from the corner of my eye see Camryn do the same.

  “Honestly?”

  “Well yeah,” she says, “I’m just curious.”

  I stare at a bright cluster of stars and say, “Well, no one.”

  A tiny burst of air escapes her lips. “Oh please, Andrew; thought you were going to be honest?”

  “I am,” I say, glancing over, “a few times I thought I was in love, but—why are we talking about this anyway?”

  Camryn lets her head fall sideways again and she isn’t smiling anymore. She looks sort of sad.

  “I guess I was using you as my shrink again.”

  My eyes draw inward. “What do you mean?”

  She looks away; her pretty blonde braid falls away from her shoulder and onto the blanket. “Because I’m starting to think maybe I wasn’t…No, I shouldn’t say something like that.” She’s not the happy, smiling Camryn anymore that I ran out here with.

  I raise my back from the blanket and prop myself up on my elbows. I look over at her curiously. “You should say whatever you feel whenever you need to. Maybe saying it is exactly what you need.”

  She doesn’t look at me.

  “But I feel guilty even thinking it.”

  “Well, guilt is a bitch, but don’t you think if you’re thinking it in the first place that it just might be true?”

  Her head falls to the side.

  “Just say it. If after you say it and it doesn’t feel right, then deal with that, but if you hold that shit in, the uncertainty will be a bigger bitch than the guilt will be.”

  She stares up at the stars again. I do, too, just to give her some time to think about it.

  “Maybe I wasn’t ever in love with Ian,” she says. “I did love him, a lot, but if I was in love with him…I think maybe I’d still be.”

  “That’s a good observation,” I say and smile slimly, hoping she might again, too. I really hate to see her frown.

  Her face is blank, contemplative.

  “Well, what makes you believe that you were never in love with him?”

  She looks right at me, searching my face and then says, “Because when I’m with you, I don’t think about him much anymore.”

  I immediately lie back down and fix my gaze on the black sky. I could probably count all of those stars if I tried, just as a distraction, but there’s a much bigger distraction lying next to me than all the stars in the Universe could be.

  I have to stop this, and soon.

  “Well, I’m very good company,” I say with a grin lacing my voice. “And I had your little ass crawling across that bed the other night, so yeah I can see how you might be more inclined to think of my head between your legs than anything else.” I’m just trying to shift her mood back to playful, even if it means she’ll smack me for it and accuse me of breaking my like-it-never-happened promise.

  And she does smack me, right after lifting up and propping herself on her elbows like I had.

  She laughs. “Asshole!”

  I laugh louder; I’d throw my head back if it wasn’t pressed against the ground.

  Then she moves closer to my side, propped up on one elbow as she looks down at me. I can feel the softness of her hair brushing against my arm.

  “Why wouldn’t you kiss me?” she asks and it surprises me. “When you went down on me last night, you never kissed me. Why?”

  “I did kiss you.”

  “You didn’t kiss-kiss me,” she says and she’s so close to my lips that I want to kiss her now, but I don’t. “I don’t know how to feel about that—I don’t like how I feel about it, but I’m not sure how I should feel.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t feel bad, that much I do know,” I say, being as vague as I can.

  “But why?” she probes and her expression is beginning to harden.

  I give in and say, “Because kissing is very intimate.”

  She cocks her head. “So, you won’t kiss me for the same reason you won’t fuck me?”

  I’m instantly hard. I hope like hell she doesn’t notice.

  “Yes,” I say and before I have a chance to say anything else, she’s crawling on top of my lap. Shit, if she didn’t know I was as hard a rock then, she definitely knows now. Her bare knees are pressed against the blanket on each side of me and she leans over, her arms holding up her weight and I fucking die when she brushes her lips across mine.

  She looks right into my eyes and says, “I won’t try to make you sleep with me, but I want you to kiss me. Just a kiss.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  She really needs to move off my lap. Oh shit…it’s not helping that my dick is pressed between her ass cheeks right about now. If she moves just an inch backward—

  “Because I want to know what it feels like,” she whispers onto my mouth.

  My hands move up her legs and then her waist where I grip my fingers around her form. She smells so damn good. She feels amazing and all she’s doing is sitting on me. I can’t even begin to understand what she would feel like inside; the thought makes me crazy.

  Then I feel her pressing herself against me through our clothes, her little hips moving gently, just once to persuade me, and then she stops and holds herself there. I’m throbbing painfully. Her eyes search my face and my lips and all I want to do is rip off her clo
thes and bury my cock inside of her.

  She leans in and places her lips over mine, slipping her warm tongue into my reluctant mouth. My tongue moves against hers slowly, tasting it first, feeling the warm wetness of it as it begins to tangle with mine. We breathe deeply into each other’s mouths and, unable to resist her or deny her this one kiss, I grab each side of her face and press her forcefully against me, locking my lips around hers with ravenous intent. She moans into my mouth and I kiss her harder, wrapping one arm around her back and pulling the rest of her body closer.

  And then the kiss breaks. Our lips linger on one another for a long moment until she lifts away and looks down at me with an enigmatic expression I’ve never seen before, one that does something to my heart that I’ve never felt before.

  And then her face falls and the expression withers into the darkness, replaced by something confused and wounded, but she tries to hide it by smiling down at me.

  “With a kiss like that,” she says, grinning playfully as if to mask something deeper, “you’d probably never have to sleep with me.”

  I can’t help but laugh; it is kind of ridiculous, but I’ll let her believe what she wants.

  She crawls off my lap and lies beside me again, resting the back of her head in the cradle of her hands.

  “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”

  I look up at the stars with her, but I don’t see them really; she’s all I can think about and about that kiss.

  “Yeah, they are beautiful.”

  And so are you….

  “Andrew?”

  “Yeah?”

  We keep our eyes on the sky.

  “I wanted to say thank you.”

  “For what?”

  She answers after a pause: “For everything: for making me shove your clothes into that bag instead of folding them and for turning the music down in the car so it wouldn’t wake me up and for singing about raisins.” Her head falls to the side and so does mine. She looks me in the eyes and says, “And for making me feel alive.”

  A smile warms my face and I glance away and say, “Well, everybody needs help feeling alive again every once in a while.”

  “No,” she says seriously, and my gaze falls back on hers, “I didn’t say again, Andrew; for making me feel alive for the first time.”

  My heart reacts to her words and I can’t respond. But I can’t look away from her, either. Reason is screaming at me again, telling me to stop this before it’s too late, but I can’t. I’m too selfish.

  Camryn smiles gently and I return it and then we both gaze up at the stars again. The hot July night is just right with a light breeze blowing through the wide open space and not a cloud in the sky. There are thousands of crickets and frogs and a few whippoorwills singing into the night. I always did like to listen to those birds.

  The quiet is shattered suddenly by Camryn’s shrieking voice and she’s jumping up from the blanket faster than a cat from a bathtub.

  “A snake!” She’s pointing with one hand and the other is clasped over her mouth. “Andrew! It’s right there! Kill it!”

  I jump up when I see something black slithering over the foot of the blanket. I jump back quickly to keep my distance and then I go to stomp on it.

  “No-no-no-no!” she screams, waving her hands in front of her. “Don’t kill it!”

  I blink back, confused. “But you just said to kill it.”

  “Well, I didn’t mean it literally!”

  She’s still freaking out, her back slightly hunched over as if shielding the rest of her body from the snake, which is hilarious.

  I raise my hands out, palms-up. “What, you want me to pretend to kill it?” I laugh, shaking my head at how funny she is.

  “No just—there’s no way I can sleep out here now.” She grabs my arm. “Let’s just go.” She’s literally shaking and trying not to laugh and cry at the same time.

  “Alright,” I say and lean over to snatch the blanket off the grass now that the snake has moved off it. I shake it out with one hand since Camryn’s holding on for life to the other. Then I take her hand and we start to head back toward the car.

  “I hate snakes, Andrew!”

  “I can see that, babe.”

  I’m trying so hard not to laugh.

  As we’re walking across the field, she starts to pull me along a little, picking up the pace. She yelps when her almost-bare foot steps on a harmless soft mound of soil and I see we might not make it back to the car before she faints.

  “Come here,” I say, stopping her in mid-sprint. I pull her around behind me and help her onto my back, holding her straddled around my waist with her thighs in my arms.

  22

  CAMRYN WAKES ME UP the next morning adjusting her head on my lap in the front seat of the car.

  “Where are we?” she asks, rising up; the sun beams in through the car windows and pools against the inside of her door.

  “About half an hour from New Orleans,” I say, reaching behind me and rubbing a muscle loose in my back.

  We got back on the road last night after leaving the field and intended to just drive on to New Orleans, but I was so damn tired I almost fell asleep at the wheel. She had fallen asleep first. So, I pulled off the side of the road, leaned my head back and passed out. I could’ve slept more comfortably in the backseat alone, but I would rather be stiff in the morning if it meant I was next to her when I woke up.

  Speaking of stiff….

  I wipe the blur from my eyes and move around some to work out a few muscles. And to make sure my shorts are loose enough in the front that my obvious hard-on isn’t a blatant conversation piece.

  Camryn stretches and yawns and then pulls her legs up and props her bare feet on the dashboard, causing her shorts to ride up far past her thighs.

  Not a good idea first thing in the morning.

  “You must’ve been really tired,” she says, pulling her fingers through her hair to break apart the braid.

  “Yeah, if I tried to drive any longer we might’ve ended up wrapped around a tree.”

  “You’re gonna start letting me drive some, Andrew, or—”

  “Or what?” I smirk at her. “You’ll whine and lay your head on my lap and say please?”

  “It worked last night, didn’t it?”

  She has a point.

  “Look, I don’t mind if you drive.” I glance over at her and then start the engine. “I promise, after New Orleans, wherever we go, I’ll let you take the wheel for a while, OK?”

  A sweet forgiving smile lights up her face.

  I pull back onto the highway after an SUV speeds past and Camryn goes back to working her fingers through her hair. Then she starts winding the hair back into a neater braid so fast and without having to look that I can’t wrap my head around how something like that is done.

  My eyes keep trailing back to her naked legs though.

  I really need to stop doing that.

  I turn away and glance out the window beside me, back and forth between it and the windshield.

  “We need to find a laundromat soon, too,” she says, snapping the rubber band in place around the end of her hair. “I’ve run out of clean clothes.”

  I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to ‘adjust myself’ and when she starts looking down into her purse, I take it.

  “Is it true?” she asks, looking over at me with one hand in her purse.

  I move my hand away from my lap, thinking I’m getting away with it appearing to be nothing more than making my shorts more comfortable when she says, “That all guys get massive hard-ons in the mornings?”

  My eyes grow bigger in my face. I just watch out the windshield.

  “Not every morning,” I say, still trying not to look at her.

  “What, just like Tuesdays and Fridays or something?”

  I know she’s smiling, but I refuse to confirm it.

  “Is this a Tuesday or Friday?” she adds, taunting me.

  Finally, I glance over at her.

>   “It’s Friday,” I say simply.

  She lets out an aggravated breath.

  “I’m not a slut, or anything,” she says, dropping her legs from the dashboard, “and I’m sure you don’t think that since you are the one who has sort of pushed me to be more open with my sexuality and what I want….” Her voice trails. It’s as if she’s waiting for me to confirm what she just said, like she’s still worried of what I might think of her.

  I look right into her eyes. “No, I would never think you were a slut unless you went around screwing a bunch of guys, for which then I would be in jail because I would have to beat the fuck out of all of them—but no, why are you saying this?”

  She blushes and I swear her shoulders almost come up around her cheeks.

  “Well, I was just thinking…,” she’s still not sure if she wants to say it, whatever it is.

  “What did I tell you, babe? Say what’s on your mind.”

  She tilts her chin and looks at me gently. “Well, since you did something for me, I thought maybe I could do something for you.” She changes her tune fast afterwards, as if still worried what I might think. “I mean, no strings attached, of course. It’ll be like it never happened.”

  Ah, shit! Why didn’t I see that coming?

  “No,” I say instantly.

  She flinches.

  I soften my face and my voice. “I can’t let you do anything like that for me, alright?”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “I just can’t—God, I want to, you have no idea, but I just can’t.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  She’s getting seriously aggravated.

  “Wait…,” she looks at me inquiringly and turns her face at an angle, “you got some kind of ‘issue’ down there?”

  My mouth falls open. “Ummm, no?” I say with wide eyes. “Shit, I’ll pull over and show you.”

  She throws her head back and laughs and then gets serious again:

  “Well you won’t have sex with me, you won’t let me get you off and I had to force you to kiss me.”

  “You didn’t force me.”

  “You’re right,” she snaps, “I seduced it out of you.”

  “I kissed you because I wanted to,” I say. “I want to do everything with you, Camryn. Trust me! In just a few days I’ve imagined more positions with you than there are in the Kama Sutra. I’ve wanted to—.” I notice I’m white-knuckling the steering wheel.