Ashley ✓

Twenty-Three | Sėx VS. Love-Making

SOTC: This Could Be Us by Rae Surremund

"Psst, Ashley!"

"Yeah?" I answered Sienna's whisper as I sat up in my bed that evening, making out her body in the darkness. Her legs had crossed over each other on the bed as her finger traced over her thigh in a doodle.

"I need to get something off my mind," Sienna said after a pause.

I pressured the bridge of my nose with two fingers to awaken myself for another conversation with a human being. "What's troubling you?"

"I called Mustafa to get you."

The soul of my organs free-fell through the center of my being.

"While I was chilling with friends, I watched you take a drink in the living room and I sorta freaked. There's a lotta people talking about you in the school after Mustafa covered for you, thinking you're his new, um, person... and I didn't want nothing bad to happen to you, y'know? So I called Mustafa and lied that you were hammered." She sighed. "I'm glad I did cause of that thing Joshua did, but still, I must of ruined your night."

"It's fine," I whispered after taking in her words. "And I um... I actually did get hammered."

Even through the darkness, I witnessed her jaw fall. "You actually got drunk?"

I slowly nodded.

"Damn," she giggled. "Here I was, thinking you was all shy, quiet, and innocent until you threw something at Mustafa and got wasted. I'm starting to think you were a whole different person."

I think it's evident by now that the soft giggle I produced held no joy.

"I also have a very out of pocket question," Sienna said after a pause. "And if you feel uncomfortable at any point at me explaining this, please tell me to stop because I will stop, I promise."

"Okay, what is it?"

"I've never told anyone this, so this'll probably be all over the place." Sienna exhaled, slapping her thighs. "For some reason, it hasn't bothered me until now, but I went to a summer camp before school started. I met a boy there— like a cool, cute boy. We vibed really great and flirted sometimes— like not hardcore, but like subtle, y'know?"

"Okay," I told her in the don't-worry-I'm-following-the-surefire-rant way.

She resumed. "Then on the last week of the camp, we found out that we both wanted to like, lose it before Junior year. So we stole condoms from this one kid then went to the bathroom where he got one on and thrust it into me once before the janitor banged on the door and it ended. He got into me one time, and I'm not even sure if it was the full length. So have I had sex? We didn't do any role play beforehand or came or anything, but he got something in me, so that counts, right? I don't know, I thought I'd ask you and then Francesca because you're logical and stuff."

That happens when you go years without feelings.

"Yeah, you had sex," I answered after a pause. "The dictionary definition of it is penetration, and the dick did go into you, right? Maybe not all the way, but it did."

"Huh." The moonlight casted the shadow of Sienna's nodding head on the rusting cream closet. "So you're right. Yeah, you're right, I'm not a virgin, but technically I've never made love before."

I raised my eyebrows. "What do you mean?"

Sienna folded her hands together. "Well, I've had sex, but I've never made love, right?"

"But the dictionary states it's sexual intercourse. However, if it has love in it and you can have sex without love... then it's, um..." My words trailed off as I felt the burning confusion dissolve into my face in the speed of a pill to the Atlantic Ocean.

Sienna slowly said, "Or did people believe that if you had sex, you must've loved the person you were having sex with, so they must've called it that?"

"But prostitution is the oldest profession," I whispered slower than SHEIN's arrival time. "So wouldn't they have figured it out then? Or maybe it was thought in people's head before verbal language ever existed that sex was called love or love was called sex."

"Did people think before verbal language was established, though?" Sienna spoke no faster than it took Joe Biden to create a coherent sentence.

"So then do deaf people not think?"

That, ladies in gentlemen, is how two teenage girls confused themselves in their own conversation.

<><><>

Tap! Tap!

Hours later, my eyes shot open to the ceiling, and I then rolled to my right at what I can only describe as an ungodly velocity. Upon this action, I discovered Sienna snoring as she slumbered with her ass in the air (some people can't maintain a normal sleep position if doing so cured cancer) Upon deciding this wasn't a movement of her doings, I slowly turned to the window.

After nearly jumping out of my skin suit and vacuuming a gas tank of oxygen, I registered the features of the figure tapping on the window glass.

"Mustafa?" I whispered through the screen after I opened the window.

All he replied with was, "Come outside by yourself." Then he just disappeared from my sight.

<><><>

"Mustafa, what the hell?" I whisper-yelled as I came out the back door and approached him in the yard, right under a turned on lamppost. "You si—"

"I know it's midnight and I haven't shown up to school in six whole days, but I need to do something important," he swiftly interrupted me, crossing his arms.

I looked at him like he swallowed a Wuhan bat.

"Ashley, I'm serious."

I scoffed. "Mister sir, unless you have Massimo from 365 days standing right behind you, there is no reason to nearly give me cardiac arrest at two A.M!"

He paused, pressing his lips together before he said:

"There's something I need to tell you."

My brows furrowed. "If you're here to tell me that DaBaby is not actually a baby, I figured that out last night."

"Fedor and I don't have a drug dealer in the neighborhood. At all, actually," he sighed, exhaling through his nose. "And I never saw Joshua drug you at the party, I was just lying to cover it up."

Hollowness grew a shelter in my throat. "Cover what up?"

"Those noises in my car were real," he whispered. "We weren't alone that night; there was another person with us."

"I— what" I stuttered.

"I need to show you something."

Reluctantly, I followed him as he then began walking. Streets illuminated due to the lamppost sensors as we journeyed under them, each turn of a street dispersing shockwaves of panic through my every nerve. But with each echo of my shoes against the pavement, my burning thirst for answers prevailed.

Eventually, Mustafa stopped in front of a decaying cream studio apartment, one possessing a rusting roof absent of more than a couple of pieces.

"Wait here," he then ordered me as he unlocked the screen door and the rusting cream one behind it, disappearing into the darkness of the interior. One minute later, he arrived in front of me again.

Except he wasn't alone.

For secured to his hip had been an infant no more than nine months old, with jet black curls and dark eyes.

"Meet my son, Xavier," Mustafa said in a barely audible mutter.