The Space Between Us Read online

  Meredith laughed, low and throaty, not the same laughter that had earlier filled the shop. This was just for me. “Because he won’t tell anyone about them. Still waters run deep and all that shit.”

  “Maybe I have still waters, too.”

  She shook her head, playful. Charming. “No, honey, you’re more like a waterfall.”

  “Because I rush a lot?” I asked with a wink.

  “Nope. A thing of natural beauty with some treasure hidden behind it. C’mon, Tesla. Tell me. The craziest thing you’ve ever done.”

  There was no trying to deny her. What Meredith wanted, she’d have, and she made me want to give it to her. “I don’t think anything I’ve done is crazy. Crazy’s like…I dunno. Putting a dead bird in your locker at school so you can bury it later. Lighting stuff on fire.”

  “Okay, not crazy. Wild, then. Free? Unique?” She paused, thinking. “Unencumbered.”

  “Ah. You mean sexual.”

  Meredith wore a huge diamond and a gold band on her left hand. She talked sometimes about her husband, but only in the vaguest of ways. I knew his name was Charlie and that he was a teacher at some fancy private school. They had no kids.

  “Yes-s-s,” Meredith hissed with glee. “Sexual. Tell me, Tesla. What’s the wildest sex thing you ever did?”

  I wasn’t surprised she wanted to know my wild sex secrets. She liked to talk about sex a lot. Well. Who doesn’t?

  “Hmmm.” I turned my mug round and round in my palms, the ceramic sliding on the tabletop. “The craziest thing, huh? I’m not sure I can beat old people porn.”

  “Did you know Sadie was married to someone else before Joe?” Meredith said quietly.

  “No. She was? Huh.” I shrugged. “Was that the craziest thing she’d done? Got divorced?”

  Meredith shook her head. “Oh. No. Her first husband died.”

  I frowned, thinking of pretty Sadie with her big belly and gorgeous husband. “Gee, that’s too bad.”

  Meredith shrugged. “It happens.”

  It wasn’t the first time I’d heard her sound a little bored by the pain of others. She liked hearing stories, but mostly only the funny or exciting ones. Sad stories didn’t melt her butter.

  I looked up to the counter, but Darek was busy flirting with one of his favorites. Nobody else was waiting. I still had time—and half a mug of chai. “Fine. Crazy things. You go first.”

  She shook her head and licked her mouth again. I couldn’t help watching her tongue move over her lips. Meredith has a mouth like Angelina Jolie. Full, soft lips. Pillowy, I think some people call them. She has a smile full of teeth, the kind you can’t help but smile back at. Meredith’s mouth is the sort that would break your heart if you saw it frowning.

  “I haven’t done anything crazy. I’m married.”

  I laughed at that. “So? Were you a virgin when you got married? Don’t married people get up to crazy shit?”

  Her eyelids lowered for a moment, as if she was remembering something. “No. Not really.”

  “You must have something crazy to tell me.” I sat back when Eric got up to help himself to a refill from the jugs on the counter next to us.

  “Tesla,” he said, and nodded at Meredith. “Hi.”

  “Hi, Eric.” She didn’t flutter her lashes or anything contrived like that. Meredith didn’t have to. “How’s tricks?”

  “Putting Houdini to shame,” Eric said, though he didn’t have quite the same easy flirting tone with Meredith that he had with me. He looked at her sort of warily, keeping his distance.

  She made sure to ogle his ass as he walked away, then turned back to me. “I would bang that man like a screen door in a hurricane.”

  “If you weren’t married.”

  “And if he didn’t look at me like he was afraid I might bite him instead of kiss him,” Meredith said with a touch of scorn.

  I looked away from where Eric was again looking at his lists. “Oh, c’mon. He didn’t.”

  Her smile lifted a bit. “He never looks at you like that.”

  “Because I’m not a moron and because I give him sugar and caffeine,” I said with a laugh. “Eric’s a good guy.”

  She shot him another glance, then dismissed him with a wave. She lifted her mug and drank, her eyes never leaving mine. She licked her mouth again.

  “I kissed a girl,” Meredith said.

  “And let me guess. You liked it?” I swallowed hot tea.

  She shrugged. “It was okay. It wasn’t much of anything, really. It was in college. We were just fooling around.”

  “To see what it was like,” I offered. I’d heard that story before, too many times.

  “Sure. Lots of people do it. You do it,” she added.

  “Sometimes.” It wasn’t something I considered crazy or wild, and obviously she didn’t, either, since she already knew about it and was still teasing me into telling something else.

  “And you like it.”

  “Well…of course.” I laughed. “I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t like it.”

  “See? That’s what I mean. You do what you want to do, what you like to do, whatever turns you on.” Meredith paused. “I admire that about you. I envy it, I guess.”

  As if she could really envy anything about me, a chick who worked in a coffee shop, drove a piece-of-shit car, didn’t even live on her own. Besides, it had been ages since I’d kissed anyone, girl or guy.

  “You don’t answer to anyone,” Meredith said.

  “Tell that to Joy.”

  “C’mon, Tesla. I see it in your eyes. You have some good stories.”

  I laughed. There was really no resisting her. I’d seen her work her wiles on everyone from other customers in the Mocha to the cop she’d talked out of giving her a ticket. Even Joy warmed to Meredith, though she always reacted afterward as if her friendliness unnerved her, and was even more impossibly horrible for hours, as if she were trying to scrub herself free of any taint of kindness.

  “I fucked brothers once. Twins.” I didn’t say this smugly or with any sense of pride, though by the way Meredith’s eyes widened, I saw she was impressed.

  “At the same time?”

  I hesitated for just the barest second. She had asked for the craziest thing, and though I personally didn’t think anything I’d ever done could qualify as crazy, clearly Meredith had her own set of standards. Well, most people do. “Yes.”

  She breathed out, long and slow. “Wow.”

  “It wasn’t—” I began, but she held up a hand. I went silent.

  “Tell me about it.”

  I hadn’t told anyone about it, ever. So why tell her, now? For no other reason than, just like the Billy Joel song, she had a way.

  “Tell me,” Meredith urged me.

  So I did.

  Chapter 2

  Chase and Chance Murphy had never been separated. I was new to the district, but everyone else had gone to school together since middle school, some even since kindergarten. The boys’ mother, the formidable Mrs. Eugene Murphy—if she had her own first name, and she must’ve, nobody ever used it—was something like a force of nature in the school, where her sons were both first-string on the basketball and soccer teams. “The twins,” she called them. She made a unit of them, not recognizing them as individuals.

  Maybe that was why it was so easy for me to fuck them both, or rather for them both to fuck me, at the same time. They were really good at sharing. I’d bet it wasn’t what their mother had ever intended for them, but then I’m pretty sure Mama Murphy hadn’t thought ahead to the years when the twins would get hair on their chins—and on their balls.

  We were all seniors, me the new kid still finding my way, Chase and Chance popular boys despite their mother being such a legendary pain in the ass. They were tall, lanky, athletic. They were completely identical, though they’d stopped dressing alike by then. Later I discovered I could tell them apart by the slight curves of their cocks. One to the left, the other right. Mirror images. They were popular, g