The Space Between Us

“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, good students. They’d been altar boys. They were going off to college.

Me? I was small and wore thrift-store clothes, but unlike Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink, this only made me poor, not quirky. I had no Duckie to adore me, but at least I wasn’t all hung up on the rich boy from the other side of the tracks. No Andrew what’s-his-face for me, thank God. Unfortunately, no James Spader, either. I’d have hit Spader like the fist of an angry God back then. Hell, probably even now.

I was smarter than the Murphy boys and just about everyone else in my class when it came to math, and their mother, determined they’d maintain their eligibility for sports teams—because sports apparently built character, something you’d never have guessed she believed, given her own unathletic state, or that of their dad, a dentist who wore thick glasses and had buckteeth that could’ve benefited from some of his own expertise—hired me to be their tutor.

That’s right. Mama Murphy paid me to divest her darling twins of their virginity. It didn’t start out that way, of course. I mean, I had every intention of teaching them calculus. I needed the money and wasn’t afraid to insist that Mrs. Eugene Murphy pay me twice the normal rate because I’d be teaching two instead of one, even though she tried to convince me that it wasn’t the cost per individual that should count, but the total amount of time spent.

“And since you’re teaching them both at the same time,” she had reasoned, “I should pay you the regular rate.”

“They’re not the same person,” I’d pointed out to her, standing my ground.

“But they’re twins!”

I’d only raised an eyebrow, as I recall. She’d taken in my long denim skirt, the black, knee-high Doc Martens, my dyed-black hair. I guess to her I was sort of scary looking.

“You did come highly recommended by the school guidance counselor.” She’d sounded doubtful.

“I’ll make sure Chase and Chance pass their finals with A’s, or your money back.”

It was done. She paid me every week. I made good on my promise.

It didn’t start out as a fuckfest. If anything, the brothers were pains in the ass to teach. They didn’t like calculus. Worse, they didn’t care about it. They were both doing poorly enough that it was threatening their place on the school team. They still didn’t care. Calculus was for douche bags, according to the brothers Murphy.

But like I said, I needed the money. There was no way I was going to let them get away with anything less than what I’d promised their mother. I could never have paid her back—I’d already spent everything she’d given me on clothes and books and music, the necessities of life.

“If you learn this—” it was the first offer I made them “—I’ll blow you.”

This stopped their stupid scribbling and wiggling around in their seats like puppies that couldn’t be made to sit. Both of them had looked up at me, eerily simultaneous. They weren’t the same person, but they did have a way of moving or saying the same thing at the same time. They were connected, no doubt about it.

“Get the fuck out,” Chase said.

“No fucking way,” Chance said.

“I will blow you both,” I told them, putting my hands flat on the table and leaning over it to look them in the eye, one at a time. I can’t remember which one I looked at first. I didn’t think it mattered then, but it would. “I will make you both come so hard you see stars.”