Brad

The attraction between us must have been magnetic, and if I weren’t so young and naive I would have known how to harness it or at least would have known it for what it was.

You were good looking like a sunset, blinding and obvious, the precursor to making bad decisions in the dark.

We were both on the track team and you had asked if I wanted to hang out after practice. I didn’t think much of it. You were dating this girl, Maggie, who was in your grade. She had a twin and they both looked like they had little invisible binder clips perpetually pinching their noses. We weren’t friends so I don’t know what we talked about as you drove down the highway. You parked in one of the big parking lots, blending in with any other car, and we rolled the windows up. We passed a joint back and forth, the paper melting on the smooth, slick underside of my lip. My throat felt dry and I could feel tiny flecks of ash tickling the roof of my mouth.

“Didn’t you used to have blue hair?”

“Yeah.”

“You used to dress really weird.”

I shrugged. I didn’t know that I dressed “weird.” I didn’t really care.

We got out of the car, that glorified tin can, when the smoke calmed down and wandered into the nearby Applebee’s. We sat at our table, still in our track sweats, eating over-fried mozzarella sticks and burgers covered with toppings, masking the meat. We slurped down sodas with our salted fingers, cubed crystals dissipating into the carbonation, and ate without abandon. Stoned out of my mind, I was blinded by the greens of your eyes.

After that, I don’t think we were friends but we certainly weren’t “not” friends.

One day you texted me. You picked me up in your old Mercedes. Your skin was smoother than marble, creamy and tanned like a caramel, hair fried and lightened by the summer sun. We must have had off that week from track practice because we were restless, energy in that car confined like tiny bubbles in a can of seltzer. You pulled into the parking lot of an abandoned tennis court. I’d lived in this town most of my life and never known it existed.

The tension in the air was palpable, amplified by being back in that tin can.

“Do you want to smoke?”

“Sure.”

We didn’t smoke. You cupped my chin in your hand. You had hands the size of a man’s, assertive and confident. Then you pulled my face close to yours and kissed me.

“Don’t you have a girlfriend?” I asked, cooly. I looked at you with what I’d hoped was a sultry, sexy look.

You just smirked at me and gave me a genuinely sultry, sexy look, leaning back in the driver’s seat, then shrugged. “It’s not your concern.”

And it wasn’t. Whatever shred of hesitation I’d had evaporated the more I looked at your face, feeling the heat between our bodies. I leaned over and kissed you. You pulled the seat down and got into the back of the car. You took your shirt off and I saw a giant sun, etched between your shoulder blades, beckoning me to join you.

Afterwards, you rolled down the back window by hand. I lay on your bare chest, running my fingers up and down the peaks and valleys. You stroked my hair. We didn’t look at each other or talk.

You drove me back home and dropped me off. We didn’t kiss goodbye and I didn’t look back, but I turned around secretly and watched your car drive away from behind the safety of my closed door.