Carrie Soto Is Back(11)

After that, if I didn’t have homework, I could do my own thing for an hour or so, and then I went to bed by ten so that I could be up by five-thirty to run, eat breakfast, and study strategy before getting back to the court at eight.

In the spring of ’73, when I was fifteen, my father and I set up shop at Saddlebrook in Florida so that we could play on their grass courts day after day, sharpening every single shot I had in my arsenal, preparing for my third Junior Wimbledon in July.

It was at Saddlebrook that I met Marco.



* * *



—

My father had hired me a hitter named Elena to help me work on my returns. Elena was almost twenty and had an incredible serve. I often wondered, as we played together, why she didn’t hone the rest of her game to try to play professionally. But she seemed entirely uninterested. A fact that I was exceedingly unnerved by.

Instead, every day Elena would show up, hit these incredible serves that made me think faster than I’d ever had to before, and then go on her way.

One day a few weeks in, her younger brother, Marco, came by the courts.

Marco was sixteen and over six feet tall, so he was impossible to miss as he stood outside the green chain-link fence, waiting for Elena to be done. Toward the end of our session, I found myself staring at him for the briefest of seconds. He caught my eye, and I quickly turned away.

But after that, he kept coming back to watch.

I did not know what it meant to have a crush—to feel that inexplicable pull toward another person—but by the third day that Marco showed up, I started to feel a lightness in me that was entirely new.

For weeks, Marco would come earlier and earlier to wait for Elena. Sometimes I could feel him watching me, and I would strain to stay focused on my game.

I would will myself not to look at the perfect square of Marco’s shoulders, his deep brown hair, the slight pout to his lips, the way he leaned so casually against the fence. I tried not to imagine what his hands would feel like across my back.

“Keep your eye on the ball, Carrie!” my father said to me one afternoon. “C’mon now!” He shook his head. And my heart sank, but I straightened up and finished strong.

After we were done, my father went to go book our next court time. As Elena packed up her things, Marco came onto the court and approached me.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

“I’m Marco,” he said.

“Carrie.”

“I know,” he said, smiling. “Everybody here seems to know who you are.”

Elena put her kit over her shoulder and gestured that she wanted to go. Marco told her he’d meet her at the car and turned back to me.

“I’ve wanted to talk to you for a while, but your dad is always around.”

“Oh.” For a moment, I envisioned him asking me out, and my pulse quickened so intensely that I thought I might pass out.

If he asked me out, what would I even say?

My father had told me earlier in the week to expect double sessions on my backhand and my inside-out forehand. And I’d failed—actually failed—the practice GED my tutor had given me the week before. I’d promised my father I’d study all weekend. Answering yes was entirely impossible. And yet the wish that he would ask grew stronger and stronger in my belly by the second.

“Yeah, so…” he said, but then never finished his sentence. I watched his face, desperate to know what he was thinking. I felt a heaviness, a leaded feeling in my hips. I did not even know what it was that I needed so badly from him, but I could feel how much I needed it.

Instead of saying anything further, Marco put one hand against the fence and closed the gap between us. I watched his lips as he leaned his mouth toward mine. When he finally kissed me, I did not hesitate. I kissed him back with my entire body, pressing myself against him, wanting every inch of me to touch every inch of him.

His lips were so soft and his hands felt warm as they traveled from my shoulders down my torso.

I tilted my head back as his mouth went to my neck, and I moaned quietly, forgetting everything except this boy and his hands and how they felt.

And then suddenly, we could hear the crunch of the gravel that was my father walking back up the path. Marco pulled his hands away.

It was over almost as quickly as it had begun. Marco whispered, “I’ll see you around,” and then took off just as my father came back. My father picked up his racket and stood across the court from me and started calling out the shots he wanted to do.

I hit the ball the same as I always did, but inside, I felt flushed and in possession of my first real secret. It was like opening the front door and letting fresh air into the house.

For the next month, every day after training, Marco would be there. Whenever my father and Elena weren’t around, he would kiss me in the corner of the court. I felt embarrassed by how much I looked forward to it, by how desperate I was to feel more of him, how often I thought of him when he was gone.

I felt such an insatiable need for him to touch me, a hunger for his body. It felt exactly like the hunger I felt to win. The sense that at the center of my being there was an unfillable void. There would never be enough matches to win. There would never be enough of Marco.

And it wasn’t one-sided. He seemed to need me too. I could tell in the hurried way he grabbed me, in the look on his face when I had to leave. I felt bright and shiny for maybe the first time in my life, glowing with the knowledge that I was wanted.