Page 73 of Making the Save

“That was…” she breathed, and I waited, wondering what she was going to say about the experience. Earth-shattering? The best orgasm she’d ever had? Maybe she’d just thank me for being awesome at oral sex?

“A lot of cum,” she finished, and I laughed so hard it hurt.

The water went from kind of warm to icy. I shut it off as fast as I could and pulled a towel off the rack to carefully dry her body.

She seemed a million miles away and my brain was sex-erased so we didn’t need to fill the silence, but then, like the fairy princess she was, her whole face lit up. “Oh my god,” she said, eyes wide. “I’m not a virgin anymore!”

She did a fist pump like she’d scored a goal in overtime and it was so funny and sweet coming from her it actually destroyed me.

I shook my head. “You’re still a virgin.”

“Nuh, uh,” she said with a little pout. “There was blood and everything.”

“We didn’t have sex, Syd,” I explained. “This here, in the shower, was just some messing around.”

“But before. The blood!”

“Still a virgin. I was barely inside of you.”

“Virginity is a construct anyway,” she said.

I wasn’t going to argue with her, but it seemed pretty binary to me. You had sex, or you didn’t. And my girl Tink, didn’t actually have sex.

“Trust me, you’ll know when you’re not a virgin anymore.”

“So, does this mean we’re going to do it again?”

And that, I thought, was a very good question, because right now, I didn’t have a fucking clue what came next.

14

Sydney

The melody was almost perfect. The chord progression… A minor, D minor, G7…

“I like that one,” Wyatt said from the porch where he was measuring planks to finish the far side of the porch. “Not that I know anything, but that was good.”

I made a note of the chord change in my notebook and played it from the beginning.

“Yeah, I like that too,” I said.

“You know what it reminds me of?” Wyatt asked. He ran the saw for a second, sending sawdust up into the air and it fell down on his shoulders and in his beard. Lumberjack Wyatt. “The last summer nights before school starts. When you’re excited for school to start but you also don’t want summer to end.”

The word he was looking for was bittersweet, and that was exactly what I was going for. The minor chords were magic that way. I smiled and ran it through again, adding some of the lyrics I’d been playing with.

I’m just a paper doll. Fold me up and put me away.

Where you left me I could not stay.

I couldfeelWyatt listening and it reminded me of those early days when performing was a drug I could not get enough of. It was me and the fans and nothing else mattered. Here in this clearing, it was that times a thousand. So sweet and pure.

The last chord echoed around the porch and Wyatt clapped. “God, Syd. That’s a great fucking song.”

“Well, it’s half a song. But thank you.”

“You’re right about it being different from your other stuff.”

I rested my cheek on the curve of my guitar and watched him as he measured and cut, measured and cut. So steady and methodical.