Free Tameless by Jess Gilmore

managed to conjure up thoughts of what it would have been like if we’d fucked back when we lived in the same house. I knew she was thinking the same thing.
    “It would have been so easy,” she said. “My mom and dad never would have known.”
    “Something tells me they would have found out.”
    “Who cares?”
    I lifted my head and kissed her, holding my lips to hers for a moment. “I don’t. Not anymore.”
    “What do you mean anymore ?”
    And here it was. Confession time.
    “I always wanted you,” I said.
    Her head tilted to the side a little and the corner of her mouth crept upward into a smile. “No way.”
    “Yeah way. I’m serious.”
    “Then why didn’t—”
    “It would have been bad,” I said, cutting her off mid-sentence. “Look at what happened to me. You could have been dragged into the middle of it all. I didn’t want to do that to you.”
    Suddenly, she burst out laughing.
    “What?” I asked.
    She put her hand over her mouth and stifled the laugh long enough to tell me what had gotten her giggling.
    “My dad,” she said, and then laughed again. “Sorry.” She composed herself. “I just remember how mad he was that night you left. And the way things went down, you know? We were back inside the house and his face was red. My mom was trying to get him to calm down, but he kept ranting about how we never should have had a boy living in the same house with a teenage girl. And then…” She laughed a little more. “All of a sudden, he points, like he’s pointing in the direction you had left, and he said, ‘That kid is tameless!”
    “Tameless?”
    She nodded as she laughed. “I didn’t even know that was a word.”
    “It doesn’t sound right. Untamed, yes.”
    She said, “I actually looked it up. It’s a word. It was just so weird hearing him say it while he was in a rage. Oh God, it’s funny now. But anyway, I wasn’t exactly innocent myself, remember?”
    I did remember, and I knew exactly what she was referring to. Just after Halloween our senior year, she and some friends had managed to get a bag of weed. I was surprised when I found out. Dawn? Good girl Dawn? Smoking weed? I never would have guessed, and I might have never found out if she hadn’t let it drop out of the glove box of her car when she was reaching for the school parking tag…right in front of the rent-a-cop who watched over the lot all day.
    I’d been in the car that morning, as usual, and when the security guard saw it, we both froze. Dawn froze a little longer than I did, and I reached for it and quickly put it in my coat pocket. I knew the guy had seen it, so my plan was perfect.
    He had told me to get out of the car. I did. Dawn protested, saying it wasn’t mine. I looked at the guard and said, “She’s trying to save me from getting in more trouble.” I turned my head back to Dawn. “Not gonna work.”
    She tried again to insist that it was hers, but the guard knew me—who at school didn’t?—and there was no way he was going to believe it was hers.
    It was my first suspension. I’d had plenty of detentions, so many in fact that anything I did next would result in suspension. A bag of weed, no matter how small it was, triggered it.
    “I still can’t believe you did that,” she was saying now, and she rested her chin on my chest.
    “No big deal.”
    “It was a huge deal, and you know it.” She looked away from me, right at the wall, at nothing, and I could tell she was contemplating something. Without looking back at me, she said, “I used to blame myself.”
    “For what?”
    “Everything that happened to you after that day.”
    I pulled her closer. “Look at me.” She didn’t look. I put my hand under her chin and lifted her head. Her eyebrows were knitted tightly, like she was in pain. “You’re being ridiculous. Nothing I did was your fault.”
    “I just…I just feel like if you hadn’t gotten in trouble that day, things would have been different.”
    I shook my head back