Tight

by Pamela Balluck

She is his cousins' cousin; he is her cousins' cousin; and they have been tight, but never before like this.

***

She is "smoking hot," he tells her, and she is stunned when he kisses the base of her neck.

"Do you know what you're doing, Jeffrey? This is me, Rachel."

"I know who you are," he tells her. "And you are mine."

"I'm old."

"You're mine."

"You're crazy," she says. "You're drunk."

"I am drunk. But, I've been waiting for this."

She whispers, "I'm old, Jeffrey. This is Rachel," she says again, turning with both hands his face to hers. "Are you serious?"

"Rachel, whose body is girl-superhero hot."

"Superheroine," she corrects him.

"Superheroine hot," he says. "And she is mine, if she'll let me."

"She," she laughs. "Seriously?"

***

Tonight, Rachel is not so drunk herself. She thinks out loud in that whisper she has gotten so good at this weekend, "This would not be happening if you were not drunk. If you were sober, you would not want this to be happening. I can't believe this is happening. Oh god. Oh my god."

Jeffrey enunciates clearly so that she can see the shapes of his mouth in her ear. "I have always wanted to fuck you."

She whispers, "Always? At Kit's wedding, you wanted to fuck me? You were, what, twenty-three, -four? Me, forty-whatever? Are you serious?"

"Stop asking."

It annoys him that she counts back only a few years, as if Kit's wedding is where they first met, as if she has only known him since he became a man who makes champagne speeches. She has not before last night ever thought of him as a man who would talk to her like this, who would stick it in her this way, and now she's filled with him, hangs onto him, but will barely move, and will barely let him move, because she's afraid to make noise, because they're in a house full of family. It is tantric. He's arrived. She has got him.

***

They are so many of them together around this house, and Jeffrey tries not to look at Rachel when her eyes alight upon him, when he can see in his periphery that her face is turned his way, unless they are both pulled into the same conversation with others, or unless Rachel is the one to approach him, which occasionally she does, always has, because he is Jeffrey, because they are tight. Now that she reads him loud and clear, she is taken up so completely with relatives, or else she is standing on her own in the water, staring at views of sails and bridges and horseshoe crabs mating at her feet, and Jeffrey wonders what she is thinking, and she feels him watching her, wondering what she's thinking, standing on the wet beach or sitting on the stone breakwater, thinking about him and how he touched her and how he might touch her again. Rachel will throw for the dog. She will stretch. She will turn and wave. She will smile. But she will not go up to him in the house when the others are away. They would not be alone for long. Always, someone is arriving. Here they are.

***

Rachel will not make a move that could lead anyone to view her as "the aggressor." She speaks low to Jeffrey on the front porch, says she has never been with anyone more than a few years younger, and she has "cougar" anxiety. "Jesus," she says, moving the bench swing to a rhythm that's turning him on. "That's a predatory term."

"You're not the predator," he reminds her. "I am."

She says, "I reach out, put my hand on your face right now, on your knee, on your arm, someone will come out that door, look out that window, or come up those steps, guaranteed."

And here Jeffrey is, hard again.

He has loved the way Rachel looks at him in the past few years, has come to show him a physical warmth and verbal affection similar to that which she shows her actual relatives, but now she is careful not to reach, does not want to be seen as the reacher. She did not ask for this. But she loves it. She didn't ask for him. But, she wants him now.

***

Jeffrey's alcohol consumption has been a topic of concern this weekend, and today he has laid off just to demonstrate that he could, but almost everyone has gone upstairs to bed, and he wants his drink. He asks Rachel if she'll join him, and she says she'll have another beer. She's had nothing stronger all day. "What's the point?" he asks her.

"I don't need vodka," she says. "Don't see why you do."

Kit says goodnight in the kitchen, heads up the stairs, and now it's just the two of them. It has been like this every night since Rachel arrived.

Again, Rachel says she'll have a fresh beer but Jeffrey talks her into joining him for a vodka. He tells her, since she's so afraid of getting caught, better it looks like he got the older woman high than the other way around. She laughs, repeats under her breath, "Older woman."

He complains that all the fizzy fruit drinks are gone and now there's nothing to mix with the vodka but the kids' grape juice. He puts ice into tumblers, and Rachel insists on watching him pour the vodka into hers and on seeing how much into his next to hers before he adds the juice. She tastes. "That's disgusting," she says, holding it away. "What a waste of vodka."

"I can't drink vodka plain."

"You might as well," she says. She is wearing a yoga camisole and low-waisted, long jammie shorts, feet slippered. "Sexy, huh?"

"You don't have to wear sexy," Jeffrey says. When Rachel walks past him into the living room, toward the couch, which somehow this visit became her designated bed, he pinches at her shorts and yanks down, but they stay put, around her hips, and she keeps walking. He says, "Drawstring?" as if a personal affront. He says, "I have wanted to pull your pants off all day. You are so tight," he tells her, remembering last night. "Why are you so tight?"

She shrugs. "I'm underused."

"Underused? Why?"

They both wonder whether he would go after her this way sober. Rachel doesn't want to be impaired—she wants to think about this, talk about this, be conscious—but here she is, anyway, biting at his lip, on their cousin's couch, straddling him. Her breasts are real in his hands. She won't go back up to his room, and she won't fuck him here, because they don't have walls. But he has got her and tells her, "You are mine."

***

They're afraid he may have woken the house, around four, when he tripped on the stairs after she whispered him awake, whisked him away up to bed.

Since 7:30 this morning people have been flying off in shifts. Jeffrey's departure is next. He woke up intoxicated, and he won't look directly at Rachel, who isn't flying out until this evening and is staring into her computer at the diningroom table in the jammies he removed from her last night—her hair is piled on top of her head—and he can't read her because of her glasses and because she is using the laptop to screen herself from eye contact, not with him, but with the others.

Cousin Mariah looks angry but smiles so hard through it, her ears appear as if they might pop off, because she doesn't want to cry through goodbyes, and because no matter what Jeffrey and Rachel may have done, she loves them. "Well, Rachel," she calls into the dining room, "did you have fun with Jeffrey this weekend?" She has given Jeffrey three syllables.

Rachel looks up from her screen, smiles big, and says, "I did!" This saves her. What more can they ask?

It is time for Jeffrey's group to leave for the airport, and Rachel steps up, front and center, to pass out heartfelt hugs, Mariah's first, and these women are still trying to pretend they haven't lost their battle with tears. They all watch Rachel as she reaches for Jeffrey last. A kiss on his mouth and a full-bodied hug in front of the others are new. She is his, and he tells her, "G'bye, Cousin Rachel."

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