Free Love Invents Us by Amy Bloom

a good sport, but when we saw each other at school, I would narrow my eyes and he’d look away.
    Max circled the little ball up and down my legs on the inside of my thighs, making electric tracks on my skin. He turned me over again onto my back and pulled the blanket around his face like a babushka, to be funny, and threw it back to the end of the bed. He rubbed my arms to get rid of the goose bumps and tucked my hands under his sweater. The hair on his chest was wet.
    “You’ll warm up in a minute, sweetheart. Do you want to shut your eyes and just concentrate on what you feel?”
    He straightened out my legs and tried to pull them apart. I pressed them together and smiled to show I was sorry. I tried to relax.
    “You don’t have to do anything, baby girl. You don’t have to move, or kiss me, nothing. If you don’t like it, you let me know.”
    He put the little ball right between my legs, and I almost jumped out of the bed.
    “Jesus. What
is
that?”
    “Is that too much?” He put it down and waited.
    “Sort of. Like a shock, but it didn’t hurt. It felt weird.” I opened my eyes. I could see how excited he was, sweat rolling down his temples and his neck onto me.
    “All right,” he said.
    I lay back down, and this time he got his arm around my hips, holding me steady. He put it between my legs, without touching me; it just hovered above me, moving the air. A little breeze buzzed my pubic hair.
    “Very easy now,” he said, and he lowered it to my skin, tightening his hand on my hip. It started making muffled overdrive noises as Max circled it around like a tiny metal detector. Hard waves rolled through my legs, from the soles of my feet, burning through my shins, and then right into my center, knocking my head back. I heard Tony’s voice, before he hurt me: Oh, yeah, ba-de-boom. Let me do you like that.
    “Oh, yes,” Max whispered, a hundred times. Nothing was left of me but smoking skin, liquefying bone. My hips lifted high under Max’s hand until I slammed down on the bed, released.My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, and my legs shook so hard I knew I couldn’t walk out. I curled up deep in the covers and wouldn’t let him touch me.
    “All right?” He put it back under the bed. I certainly didn’t want to see it.
    I wouldn’t talk, and when he put his hand on my breast, I pushed it away. After a while he got up to change his wet shirt, and I went into the bathroom and saw my wide, blurred face sliding around like Jell-O on a plate.
    “Cow face,” I said to the mirror, and came out dressed, my hands fists. Max backed away. I know he wasn’t afraid I’d hurt him. He was worried I’d hate him. He was worried I wouldn’t do it again.
    “You are a fucking pervert,” I told him, and even when it took me ten minutes to undo the lock on my bike, he stayed in the house and watched me from the bedroom window. I gave him the finger, which felt like a stupid cow thing to do, but I couldn’t think of anything else that meant
I hate you
.
    It was him calling my house all weekend, but I didn’t pick up the phone and he hung up when my mother answered. On Saturday afternoon my mother called the telephone company to complain. Even when the repairman ran all over the house like a crazed hamster with his ringing belt, my mother following him from phone to phone, I sat quietly in the rec room, opening and closing the dollhouse doors until he left. My mother bought two new phones. Max mailed a letter to me the last week of school, which was stupid. He could have been arrested.
    Dearest girl
,
    Your absence and distress is killing me. Please forgive me. I didn’t play fair. All I really wanted was to have something special with you. I’m sorry that I frightened you, angered you, whatever I did, I’m sorry. I am sorry and I never saw anything so beautiful in my life. You took my breath away. Please at least have breakfast with me before school ends
.
    All my love, for as long as you’ll have