Trust Exercise(10)
From her seat in the house Sarah sees David, at a break in the blocking, cross from stage right to stage left very near the rear wall. He disappears in the direction of the shop. All the curtains are up in the fly space; the stage is a thrillingly vast, utilitarian maw in which the actors mill, waiting. Sarah rises quickly from her seat, tells Joelle she’s going to the bathroom. Outside the theatre doors, she hooks left to follow the hallway that leads to the shop’s outside door. As if on cue, the door opens and David steps out. It’s past six; the hallway is empty. They’re alone, for the first time since that late summer day on the college campus. The hall is empty but this emptiness is momentary; the shop door is just here, farther down is the loading-dock door that leads into stage left, the sets crew is not building yet, awaiting, as is the props crew, resolution of conflicts about the design, but any moment they’ll wander through here, through their realm.
Sarah and David have torrents of accusations they have hoarded for weeks, to unleash on each other. Now their fury deserts them. “Hey,” David says, a hot blush rising out of his polo shirt collar.
At the sight of that blush, Sarah’s own chest seems to swell and implode. Heartbreak doesn’t flow through the heart but along that frail shallow canal of the sternum.
“Hi,” Sarah says, staring at his sternum where it hides from her under his shirt. She longs to lay her head there in repose from this agonized longing.
“Where are you going?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” she says honestly.
They reenter the shop together. Its workspace takes up the full height of the building. Circular saw, band saw, splintered scrap plywood, sawdust on the floor. At its far side, a steep ladderlike staircase leads up to a mezzanine level of storage; at the back of the storage area, a door opens onto the second-floor hallway, a realm of musicians’ rehearsal rooms. Over the summer, someone has cleared out all the old flats and dismantled set pieces and other detritus and the storage mezzanine is quite empty. They pass out the door in the opposite wall and now stand in the second-floor hallway. Sarah crosses the hall to the double doors leading into the band room. These double doors are set back from the hallway a couple of feet so they form a wide, shallow alcove; she tries the double doors, which are locked. When she turns back, David catches her mouth with his, pressing her into the alcove’s corner so she feels the protruding door hinges bite into her arm. Not protected or hidden at all; back pressed into the corner, she can see the whole length of the hallway. There is only the chance that none of their classmates will wander this way. These thoughts crawl along the bottom of her mind, clear but disregarded, as she devours David’s mouth with her own. This is his power over her: not his cock or his hands but his mouth. Cock and hands are precocious enough. They belong to a fortunate, confident man, and have traveled in time for unguessable reasons to append themselves to a teenager. Unlike them his mouth is not a foreign power; it’s her own missing part. Seeing him for the first time, last year, she had stared with recognition at his mouth, at its unhandsome, simian quality, his lips slightly too wide for his narrow boy’s face. His mouth is nothing like hers because made for hers; her first time kissing him had been the first experience of her life that had exceeded expectation.
Gasping for breath, she takes his skull between her palms and fills the whorl of his ear with her tongue, because she’s learned this disables him, even more than when she struggles to take his whole cock in her mouth. Then, some indelible scruple or shame interferes with his pleasure, while her tongue in his ear makes him swoon. They’d even made this a joke, in the course of their summer: they called it his kryptonite. Now he moans, unrestrained, and literally falls to his knees, pulling Sarah down with him. With his free hand he yanks open his jeans, fumbles his thick erection through the vent in his boxers. Her clothes have no such apertures, it’s necessary to pull off her jeans entirely, at least from one leg, which means removing a boot, then her panties as well; heaving breath, they’re both tugging and yanking her clothes in the middle of the black-and-white checkerboard floor of the hallway with all the unself-conscious diligence they might have brought to stretching canvas across the wood frame of a scenery flat. Then Sarah is naked, from the toes of one foot to her waist, and the hot, slippery fit is accomplished; despite their fierce mutuality to this point, they’re both shocked to find themselves copulating in a public space of their high school, and now they bear down even more frantically, until with awful wrenchings of his face David comes, in his throes knocking Sarah’s head unexpectedly hard against the door of the band room, which is now at her back. At almost the same time they hear another door open and quickly slam shut: the door to the shop mezzanine.
They’re both trembling, their fingers useless as sausages, as they restore themselves into their clothes. They don’t exchange another word; Sarah does not even know whether their eyes meet and part as they peel off in different directions, neither going back through the shop mezzanine door. David strides toward the rear stairs that will lead to the loading dock entrance, Sarah turns the corner to the main hallway and goes down the wide central stairs, across the piazza, back through the theatre’s doors.
“Where’ve you been?” Joelle says, then starts laughing. “You bad girl.” She hands Sarah her compact, and Sarah stares at her mouth in its dusty porthole. Her lipstick is rubbed off, her lips swollen and tender-appearing, strangely large for her face, like his mouth.