A 90's Friday Night Lights meets Fifty Shades, only the town is the sadomasochist and the two young lovers their pawns.
July Elizabeth Edwards is stuck in the existence her pretentious, rural East Texas town has allotted her. A shift in social statu...
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His car door shut us in together, and he started the ignition to turn the air on. We sat for a long moment in what felt like chasing the calm. We just... hung out for a few minutes, listening to each other breathe.
He looked over at me and stared for an extended beat. "How's your foot?"
I smiled, and looked down at it. "It's probably fine."
"Let me see it."
There was something demanding in his voice. A desire to comply came over me.
And then, as if we had always been this way, as if I had sat in his car a million times, I turned toward him in my seat and gently placed my leg across his lap. A corner of his mouth drifted up uncontrollably as he surveyed what had been placed in his care. He leaned in and began to lift one side of the bandage carefully. "I assume you have plenty more of these in there." I smiled and nodded for him to continue. He peeled the gauze patch off and grimaced. "It's a pretty big gash."
"Not as big as the one on your knee." It came out of me softly and childlike.
"No." He smiled in agreement, almost flattered. "Not as big as the one on my knee." He left my leg in his lap and rested a hand on my knee, occasionally tracing it with his fingertips. We stayed in that collective moment that felt euphoric after what we had been through or not been through together.
How could the simple act of being together as if we were allowed to be, or as if we were together, feel just as good as the other thing we had done? It was the strangest thing. One I hadn't realized I missed or needed.
He tilted his head in thought. "Still, do you think you should have been running around, climbing all over the pool deck, and diving off boards on a foot you potentially fractured?"
"Thought I may have fractured, but the swelling went down." We were both still smiling even though the speed of our voices and the tone of our conversation were working their way back to normal. We had to. My break would be over soon.
That, and I knew he was getting to the very tall pink elephant currently on the last leg of his rotation.
"I bumped into Spencer, and your friend, or arch enemy, Court."
