American Goth by J. D. Glass Page B

want to make because I didn’t want to hurt. Oh I knew, because I’d just been told, that sex—by myself, with another—would literally ground the overload out, but then I’d have to…
    What did I think about sex? Or rather, what did I really know about it, other than the straightforward mechanical realities involved with reproduction?
    My first girlfriend, my best friend still, even though we hadn’t spoken in a few months, she and I…well, should I, could I call what had happened between us sex? We’d met as kids when I’d started swim team with the local club.
    Her parents didn’t allow her to socialize much with the other kids on the team, but it didn’t matter— we talked anyway. Between us, we were Frankie and Sammer or even Sammy, even though in front of her parents, and later, in school, it was Fran and Samantha. Then, before either one of us really knew it, closeness became attraction, became a kiss, and then another, until finally kissing became…something different, more intense, a mutual exploration. And then we’d gone from intensity to rivalry, and back to friendship again . While Nina…she and I had barely even touched by comparison. There was, there’d been one beautiful kiss, many wonderful hugs—the usual physical exchanges made by close friends, by teammates, and I missed her, mourned her, wanted her still, kicked myself for not going home sooner, wished I’d done something, anything , differently… How different was that than being bound, as Elizabeth had put it?
    My skin felt hot under my hands. There was no denying that Fran and I had a link, because I’d always knownshe’d call before the phone rang, could always anticipate her moods, her feelings, because I felt them too, like a haze on my skin… There was magic, magic and power in sex, in the burst of energy that was the end result of—God! I finally kicked the damn sheets off in frustration and leapt out of bed.
    I paced, not content with the lack of strain in the muscles of my thighs, unsure of where, how, to hold my hands, wishing like hell that I was running laps, or swimming them, racing them, pushing my body to the limit, while I prowled the wood floors of my room, stepping so deliberately it felt as if the oak gave under my feet.
    What the hell am I doing, what the hell am I doing here? I asked myself. My days…they were spent studying with Elizabeth, while my evenings were filled with martial arts and strange meditations. I now knew several dozen ways to disable a living being, spoke of imaginary places as if they were towns another block or so down. And while I was living in a foreign country, thousands of miles from where I’d been born, I hadn’t really seen anything but the house, the shop, a few of the local historical sites…and I knew no one, absolutely no one, outside of Elizabeth and Uncle Cort. Oh. And the hounds. Great. That was lovely, simply lovely.
    I was old enough, I reminded myself, legally allowed to do all sorts of things in this country, an adult, and…I didn’t expect it, the wave that washed over me, the tide of longing that swamped my senses.
    I missed my father, though that was now a familiar feeling, but the other pangs were new, surprising almost, in their sharpness. I missed my friends. I missed the guys I’d hung out with in the neighborhood growing up, I missed Fran and even my other classmates. I missed Nina.
    I carefully put that thought away because it hurt, oh it hurt to think about her, through the throb that contracted my gut; and Fran…I wondered how she was, what she was doing. I wondered if she missed and hurt in the same way, for the same reasons.
    I wondered what it had cost her to call me, to tell me what she had heard from Nina’s father, and an awful regret ran through me that I had added insult to injury, accused her of lying.
    It had been—what, I mentally reviewed, early July?—when Fran and I had spoken last. The trip with Uncle Cort had really just started, but