The Sound of Us

Chapter Two

What I don’t tell Maggie―and what she doesn’t know, and probably never will―is that while she’s pretending to fly around with a broom between her legs, I'm not going home to pack for vacation tomorrow. Not yet, anyway.

I find the number I'm looking for in the backlog of my phone, and call it as I get into the station wagon. The phone rings three times before a soft, liquid voice answers, “Yeah, this is Caspian, how can I help you?” 

“Hi, Cas,” I squeak.

“Junie?” He sounds surprised. “Hi baby, is everything all right?”

“Can I come over for a while?” I ask, trying to not sound too hopeful, glancing at the clock on my dashboard. It blinks 2:09 AM in ominous green numbers.

“Yeah, come on over. I just got in.”

Ten minutes later, I park behind the barn at the rear of his house, and sneak through the bushes to the side of the yard so the security cameras won’t see me. His dad is a pilot, so he travels a lot, and his mom is one of those investment bankers, so she takes frequent trips to Bora Bora with her girlfriends and leaves the house to Caspian. It’d be lonely, I think, to be in a huge house like this with nothing but the best security system money can buy, but he says he doesn’t mind. During the few times I’ve been over to his house, he’s had either the radio or TV on. I think he’s scared of silence, and when I retrieve the key from under the back porch doormat and let myself into the kitchen, silence sounds a hell of a lot better than what’s playing on the radio. I cringe.

Roman Holiday.

“Don’t tell me you’re listening to that, too,” I groan, dumping my purse down on the inlet counter.

He looks up from a bowl of leftover Chinese, and outstretches a half-eaten egg roll to me between his chopsticks. “Food?”

“Not really hungry,” I reply, tugging my hair out of its ponytail. 

His perfectly tweezed eyebrows shoot up in surprise, as if he just notices the color. "What did you do to your hair?"

"Do you like it?" I ask. 

Cas’s eyes are this crazy sort of cornflower blue that remind me of a summer sky, accented by a strong jaw and a thick head of straw-colored hair, tonight pulled back into a small ponytail with a rubber band. It's hard not to blush when he looks at me.

We’re less than a couple but more than friends. We don’t use each other. We’re just…I dunno. We just run into each other. First, it started as harmless cat-and-mouse games at house parties, a kiss here and there, but then it escalated into making out in back bedrooms as the year progressed.

So, sort of like the buddy without the fuck in it.

He tilts his head, as if gauging his words, before saying, “It looks sexy.”

My heart rises like it’s tied to a helium balloon. “Really?”

He laughs, a sound like velvet. He outstretches his hand, and when I take it he pulls me around the counter to where he's sitting. "Really," he replies, kissing my neck. It takes a lot of self-control for me to not melt into my Converses here and now. 

I lean into him, closing my eyes, so welcomed to losing myself for a while. 

“How does your bartender like it?” he asks.

My eyebrows furrow. “Geoff?” I sigh, rolling my eyes, and turn around, pressing my palms against his hard chest. He’s still wearing the clothes he must’ve went out in, a blank V-neck shirt and boot-cut jeans. “Oh, I doubt he noticed. He was flirting with another mountain man. Like he always does. Where was the party tonight?”