Juliet Has a Gun

“Are you sure this is okay?”

 

“Yeah, why wouldn’t it be?”

 

“I don’t know, you seem kinda, uh,” as his voiced fizzled out, his eyes scanned my body before meeting mine again.

 

“Yeah, I’m fine. It’s fine, just kiss me,” I smirked, biting the corner of my lip as I did so. His hand snaked up to my cheek, his thumb drawing little circles on the corner of my lip. I watched his eyes flicker closed as he moved in, not too fast, not too slow. Just right, I guess.

 

When his lips landed on mine, my brain short-circuited. I didn’t know what was happening or what I should be doing. All I knew was the slimy feeling of his lips squished up against mine. It gave me the same feeling as I got when I changed clothes in the middle school locker room. The feeling of sweaty fabric sticking to my vulnerable figure as I fumbled for my jeans, trying to hurry off to my next class.

Gym class was always followed by health class, for some godforsaken reason. That class was shoved into an old storage closet turned classroom, which didn’t help control the smell. It was at the end of the upper hall too, where the 8^th graders had class. We walked up to the room together as a class, stepping on each other’s toes as we tried to stay together. Some of us puffed out our chests, acted like the big kids on the floor. Others hid behind a bold friend who walked into the classroom as if it were nothing new.

 

The teacher, Mr. Harr, was the middle school basketball coach. He was a tall, pudgy guy whose face glowed bright red when the refs make an undesirable call. We took our seats, scrambling to sit next to friends or peers or whoever we felt would take some of the edge off, like Harr’s cigarettes did when he slipped out to “use the bathroom”.

 

Once we settled enough for Harr to start, he’d sigh and push himself out of the office chair that was balancing atop three and a half wheels. Harr lumbered over to the smart board, pointing his long finger at the title of the PowerPoint slide. “STDs” it read in big, bolded letters. The class shifted in their seats as the lesson started.

 

Mr. Harr prattled on about chlamydia and syphilis, and soon I found myself zoning out, drawing little vines at the corner of the handout he’d given us. They descended into the notes, wrapping around the word “intercourse” as if to squeeze the life out of it. I’d never even held hands with someone. To me, sex was out of the question, out of my realm of possibility, so why did I have to learn about it?

 

“Excuse me,” Harr bellowed, the class falling silent.

 

I looked up from my art, locking eyes with him. “Me?”

 

“Yeah, you. Pay attention.” He paused, as if to examine me. “You’ll need to know this stuff one day,” he said before turning back to the board.

 

“Yes sir.” I felt my throat close. My hands covered up the vines and that word I didn’t want to think about anymore.

The feeling of his lips pressing further into mine grounded me, bringing me back to the task at hand. I was at his apartment, kissing him on his cheap couch or merely sitting there as he kissed me. As the shock settled, I opened my mouth a bit. I couldn’t feel my lips and I wanted to run my tongue over them to see if they were still there. For him, this was an invitation. Before my tongue could find them, a foreign body broke in and invaded my being.

 

His tongue was curious, but there was no innocence behind it. It was attacking me, creeping along the walls of my cheeks only to jump out and joust with my own tongue. I hesitated in the face of this beast before heeding the words my father told me when I was 14 and he allowed me to walk home from school alone for the first time: “If someone on the street catches you and you can’t run, you gotta fight,” he said. “Elbow his ribs, kick him in the balls, poke his eyes out, anything. Just give ‘em hell.”

 

And so, I did. I stuck my tongue out and thrusted it so far into his mouth that I thought he might choke on it. He responded by moving a hand to the back of my head, sinking deeper into the kiss. My tongue found its way to the inside of his lips. He tasted like pesto, like the chicken he ate at the restaurant. I hated that restaurant; it tried too hard to be fancy with its splotchy paintings and dimmed faux chandeliers. I moved my tongue along the sides of his cheeks, my shoulders bunching inwards at the sensation.

 

It was slick and gritty all at once. It was weird, a type of awkwardness I rarely had to feel. It was like being a tween and going to that one PG-13 film you begged your mom to take you to when you were 12. Feeling all mighty and grown, you’re knocked on your a*s when the characters start to kiss and it keeps going until their shirts are on the floor and your mom’s arm is frozen in front of her, debating on shielding your eyes or letting the scene play out.

For me, that movie was The Fault in Our Stars. I’d read the book beforehand, letting its artsy words and themes mold me into what I thought was a girl who was mature for her age. At least, that’s what my mom’s friends all said. Those were the words I’d reveled in when I understood the metaphor about cigarettes and death after seeing a post on Tumblr. I felt like a real woman when my friend told me her mom wouldn’t let her read it because it was for older girls, but my mom picked it off the shelf without a second thought when I had asked for it.

 

In the middle of the book, the two lovers have a go at it while on a trip to Germany or Amsterdam or wherever. This was the first time the words on the page were completely foreign to me. As much as I stumbled through some of the complexities throughout the book, I’d always been able to convince myself I knew exactly what it all meant. But as the paragraphs went from artistic metaphors of death to lines about tangled oxygen wires and body parts, I was lost. In the end, I ignored the part about the couple in bed, convincing myself it was some kind of metaphor about love and growing closer. To me, it was nothing, gave me no feelings one way or the other, so I thought nothing of it. Until I saw it, plastered on the giant screen in a theater full of girls my age and their mothers who were only there because it was a fleeting moment their growing girls would let them spend together.

 

The actors’ beauty marks and belly buttons were center screen, tainting the room in flesh-colored light. I saw my mother’s arm twitch at her side, slide out in front of her out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t care; I was too entranced by the lead actress’s pink bra and the way she leaned into her costar’s chest.

 

My mom’s constant shifting unnerved me. I looked around to see other girls squirming in their seats too, hiding their eyes or trying to look anywhere but at the scene or their moms’ faces. I saw other girls try to peek around their mothers’ fingers, wanting to soak up every pixel on the screen. I tried to look at my mom, but she looked away, focusing on the seat in front of her.

 

There, I learned that I’m supposed to feel something, some kind of shame for whatever’s going on. As the scene faded into another, the other girls peaked through the cracks of their fingers and their mother’s shoulders dropped with silent sighs. Strangely, I felt myself stiffen up. I felt embarrassed, but not like the other women in the theater. I didn’t feel that shame. Instead, I felt the shame of not knowing what the scene meant or why it was so taboo, and all at once I became an alien species because of it.

As the kiss continued, I felt his tongue start to relax, its curiosity fading away as it became familiar with me. His breaths turned into panting as the oxygen deprivation seemed to catch up to him. After what felt like hours, he pulled away from me, gasping for air as he leaned back into the couch. I leaned back too, hoping the gap in the cushions would swallow me up.

 

“That was great,” he panted, his chest heaving up and down as he spoke. I answered with a hum.

 

He placed one hand on top of mine and the other on my back. He pulled me closer to him until I was in his lap, cradled in his arms. He looked down at me, his eyes sparkling like a character straight out of a trashy romance novel. I stared into them, taking in their deep green color. They’re like emeralds I thought, pulling lines out of thin air. Glistening emerald orbs or whatever else they say.

 

I thought about eyes, orbs, and s****y romance novels as he dove back in.

The first time I’d read smut had been an accident. An honest to God mistake. With a cover full of flowers and a cheesy rom-com title, I thought it was just any other book. With an inconspicuous synopsis and a $5 price tag, I tossed it in my basket alongside all the others.

 

Nothing was amiss when I opened the book either. It started out totally normal, girl meets guy, they hate each other, then they fall in love. It was simple, and I liked that. Until the kiss scene spanned more than a few sentences and turned into something else entirely as the paragraphs grew into pages.

 

Soon I realized what it was. This was “it.” The thing my friends used to boast about in the locker room before soccer practice. The thing couples did at parties when I watched them stumble up the stairs and into a bedroom. It was the devil’s tango. Knocking boots. A home run. Shagging. Screwing. Making love. Sex.

 

I stopped reading, staring at the pages in front of me. I was like a boy who searched up b***s on the family computer, but without the awkward talk with parents after they found the search history. I felt nervous and guilty, but I was left with a sort of nagging curiosity to see how this scene played out.

 

I’d looked up b***s and the like before. When you’re a teenager whose only heard rumors and urban legends about the ultimate sin, you get curious. One of my old friends in high school, Stella, used to tell me I was a lesbian because I was still a virgin and didn’t want to get laid. So, like any rational person, I loaded up a Google tab and searched for b***s. I felt nothing. Then I looked up guys without their shirts on because I liked guys, I knew that. But I felt nothing. To me, it was just a guy with his shirt off, nothing more. No fantasies or hormones or anything. I kept going, diving deeper and deeper but nothing I saw stirred up any kind of feeling in me other than mild disgust or indifference.

 

But this book, it was different. It was new information that I’d never gotten with my juvenile Google searches. It was the information I’d been lacking for years, the missing sentence to the locker room stories or the joke behind the snide comments about couples stumbling upstairs. I was getting a first-hand look at what it was supposed to feel like, what was supposed to be going through my head, how my body should move when the time came. If the time came.

 

I read every word of that scene, studied it almost. After a day of classes and midterms, my sleep-deprived brain came up with the idea to make note cards of it, as if it were a test. I laughed at this, then at the sounds the characters made, then at the cheesy descriptions of this act of love, and finally at the irony of me, a 20-year-old virgin, reading smut for the first time. I laughed so hard tears started streaming down my face.

 

My roommate came back from her night class to find me knee deep in my hysterics, cackling over a book. She tried asking about it, but I couldn’t explain myself through my coughing and choked breaths. Nor did I want to. I just held up the book, to which she lovingly rolled her eyes before grabbing her bath towel and leaving me alone.

The kiss ended as abruptly as it started, and I couldn’t help but breathe a small sigh of relief. He pulled away breathless, his tongue poking out between his lips as he stared at me. My thighs clenched as he held the gaze, longer than before. I tried to smile, and he must have believed it enough because his shoulders fell down from his chin.

 

“Can we keep going?” he asked. “Try something else?”

 

I froze. A cold wave of ice seized every vein and muscle fiber in me. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. I nodded my head, my body now on autopilot.

 

“Yeah. Keep going,” I said through strained breaths. He began sucking and nibbling at the sensitive skin on my neck, starting a descending trail toward my chest. It was like he was following some invisible line down my body, a line that had been drawn once before by someone else.

“What’s wrong?” Theo asked, letting go of my hips as he moved his lips off my chest. I shivered at chill from the loss of contact, reaching up to feel the sore spot on my neck.

 

“Nothing’s wrong.”

 

“I don’t believe you.”

 

“What’s not to believe?”

 

“You’re doing that thing,” he said, waving his hand in the air at me. “That little twitching thing.”

 

“What are you talking about?”

 

“Jules, we’ve been together for months. You do that little twitch thing when your uncomfortable.”

 

“It’s nothing.”

 

“Your shoulders are stiff too. It’s like you’re holding your breath.”

 

“No, I’m not. It’s fine,” I said, dropping my shoulders.

 

“Do you want to stop?”

 

I paused. Yes, everything in me screamed. All my hairs were standing on end, prickly heat running over me. I felt my body inch away from Theo.

 

“Okay,” he breathed, my silence shouting the answer loud and clear. He spun his legs over the side of the bed, reaching down to pick his shirt up off the floor. He tugged at the bottom hole, slipping it over his head.

 

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m sorry I just, I can’t do it.”

 

Theo bit his lip, staring at the bed for a moment. His gaze was so heated I thought he might burn a hole through the sheets.

 

“Is it me?”

 

“What?”

 

“Is it me? Did I do something wrong?” The question seemed to choke him. He cleared his throat before looking at me.

 

“No,” I fumbled, my mind and words tumbling over each other. “No, not at all. It’s me. All me. It’s totally my fault.”

 

“Yeah, right.”

 

“No, it is, I swear it’s me, I,” I paused, the words getting stuck to my tongue like a mouse cornered into a glue trap. I shuddered before speaking again. “I, uh, I don’t want to have sex.”

 

“What.” Theo blurted out, squeezing his palm as he recognized the disgust painted on my face. “Am I so gross that you can’t even stand the thought of it? Am I really that bad? Wait, no, don’t answer that. I don’t want to know.” He stood up from the bed, shaking his head as he turned to leave.

 

“No, no that’s not what I meant. It’s not just you. I don’t want have sex, like, at all.”

 

“What?” he repeated as he turned back to look at me.

 

“I don’t feel it, I guess. Like, it doesn’t really interest me? I don’t know.” I clenched my teeth, feeling the pinpricks of tears in the corner of my eyes. I knew what was happening before it did. 

 

“So you don’t want to have sex with anybody?”

 

“No.” I closed my eyes, finally saying it out loud.

 

“It’s not just me?”

 

“No.”

 

“Thank God,” he let out with a breathy laugh. “I thought you thought I was so hideous you couldn’t even stand the thought of touching me anymore.”

 

I laughed at this, a wet laugh brimming with emotion. Theo smiled at this, his face softening at the sound. With my laughter came the inevitable tears and shuddering breaths I’d been holding in. Theo moved to sit on the bed next to me, rubbing my knuckles as I pulled his comforter to cover my face.

 

“I’m guessing this is it then.” I said at last, my breath catching in my throat.

 

“Don’t say that.”

 

“But it’s the truth.”

 

He paused, looking down at his hands, and the silence gave us both an answer once again.

 

“I just, I do like you, okay? A lot. And I’ve really enjoyed our time together but for me, this is, this is a, uh…” his voice fell off as he tried to find the right words to say.

 

“Dealbreaker?”

 

“Yeah, I guess that’s the word. I don’t like the sound of it though,” he paused again. “I’m really sorry Jules,” he apologized, his voice getting scratchy.

 

“Yeah, I’m sorry too.” I said it back.

 

Theo scooped me up into a hug as I sobbed into his chest. I took in the last breaths of his cologne; Juliette has a Gun by Romano Ricci. Theo held me tight as he laid his head on top of mine. I like to think he was hanging on to the last threads of our relationship. I know I was.

He pulled away slowly, letting his lips linger for a moment. This time he was no longer looking into my eyes but instead at the rest of my body.

 

“Let’s do more,” he said, insisted.

 

I nodded. My words had left me long ago.

 

“Good, good, okay,” he mumbled to himself as he stood up, towering over me. “I’ll be right back.”

 

This time, I didn’t nod. I sat still as he walked away, grappling with what I had just agreed to within the confines of his rock-hard couch cushions.

 

My hands began to shake as I pulled at my fingers. I felt sick, nausea sitting at the bottom of my gut much like it did after a long night of drinking. I wished I had the buzz to go along with it.

One night after a Halloween Party my junior year of college, I swore off Apple Brandy and random dudes at parties forever.

 

Tyler held Rose up as we stumbled back to our dorm, making sure her neon leg warmers didn’t get caught in the bushes surrounding the parking lot. Rose held my hand, pulling me along behind them. I like to think she didn’t want me to get lost, but she her hands were probably getting cold. 

 

Tumbling up the stairs to our 4^th-floor room felt like I was trapped in a dryer spin cycle on high heat. I’d sweated through my bright pink leggings hours ago, but the aqua shorts over top hid most of the damage. I don’t think I would’ve made it back up the stairs if it wasn’t for Tyler and Rose. I couldn’t take my eyes off the two of them huddled together, Tyler holding onto her like it was what he was made to do. My stomach gurgled as I watched them, something beginning to burn deep inside. I blamed it on the ginger ale that was on its way back up.

 

At the top of the stairs, I let go of Rose’s hand and stumbled towards the bathroom door.

 

“Jules, where’re you going?”

 

“Bathroom. I’m good.”

 

“Sure?”

 

“Yeah. Don’t lock the door.”

 

“’Kay.”

 

I toppled into the bathroom door, letting it swing in against my weight. The lights flickered on as I fell into the first stall, my knees scraping against the moist tiles. I barely had my head in the toilet before I started heaving. Everything from that night came back up. The apple brandy. The little pumpkin donuts I’d scarfed down at the party. Specks of glitter from my hair that Rose and I spent an hour trying to get to stick while she was setting me up with Tyler’s friend who’d be at the party. The vape smoke that same guy blew in my face as he pulled my hips closer to him. The electricity running through me as I pushed him away. The words I’d swallowed as he called me a prude. The shame I felt as he stormed away.

 

When it was all finally out of me, I reached up and flushed it, slumping against the stall as the water swirled around. I stared at the brick wall in front of me, connecting the little dots and cracks through the white paint. The lines and dots blurred together into little shapes, like triangles and halos and faces. Rose was right, he was cute. She’d said good things about him too. He was drunk; we both were. It was my fault anyway. I couldn’t bring myself to press my lips to his any longer. I didn’t like the feeling or the thought of what would come afterward.

 

Laughter from the hallway rang through the crack in the bathroom door. I shook my head, letting the dots and lines fade back into the brickwork. I pushed myself off the floor, wiping my hands on my shorts. I bumped my shoulder into the stall door, letting it bang against the brick as I made my way out.

 

The hallway went on forever, twisting and turning a million times. I did my best to stay upright as I weaved back and forth until I found the door covered in fake blood and spider webs. Rose always went all out for Halloween. It was her favorite holiday. I went along with it, but I hated Halloween. I never saw the point in dressing up.

 

As gentle as I could be while swaying and trying to make my hands work right, I cracked open the bedroom door.

 

I always hated the streetlight that lit up half of our room every night. Before we moved the room around, it made it impossible to sleep, which wasn’t helped by my monthly bouts of insomnia. Now it created a stream of light down the middle of the room, a sort of barrier between Rose’s world and mine.

 

I hated that streetlight even more that night. The yellow light coated the bed, shining on Rose curled up against Tyler’s side, the two of them fast asleep. I swear I could see a smile across Tyler’s face. I tell myself it’s fake now, will myself into believing it was a figment of my drunk imagination, but it’s hard to deny. I’d seen the soft curve of his lips a billion times since he met Rose.

 

My shoulder’s tensed as I watched them sleep, inspecting them as their chests rose and fell in tandem. The saliva in my mouth stared to build up. It tasted bitter. I wanted to spit. I wanted to scream. I wanted to run away. But I couldn’t. Instead, I kicked my shoes off and fell into bed. My rainbow headband slipped down into my eyes, blocking my vision, though I swear I could still see the outlines of the lovers next to me. I tugged at the headband, ripping strands of hair out as I pulled it off. The crown of my head stung where the hairs had been stripped away. I scratched at it so hard I was afraid I’d draw blood. The stinging sensation shifted down and I then realized the corners of my eyes were pricking.

 

Am I really not feeling it? Or do I just not know what it feels like?

 

Maybe I haven’t met the right guy yet.

 

I’ll try again, it’ll work out.

 

What’s wrong with me?

 

I gasped for breath, my hand flying up to my mouth to lessen the noise. I tried to hold back the sobs as I looked for any signs I’d woken up the others. I saw nothing, other than their arms clinging to each other as if they’d run away. I laid there and stared at them, planning out every detail of a life I knew I’d never have.

 

That night, I fell asleep dreaming about warm embraces and naked bodies with salty tear tracks lining my cheeks.

He came back into the living room a few moments later, holding something down by his leg. The lamp light reflected off the object, a trojan logo flashing at me. My arm wrapped around my stomach as it churned at the sight. He sat down next to me, his cologne taking over the air. He’d put way too much on, just now. I was suffocating.

 

“You ready?” he asked, looking me up and down, stopping below my face.

 

“Let me use the bathroom real quick, then I’ll be good.”

 

“Okay. It’s down the hall to the left.” He sounded a bit peeved, but I couldn’t tell if that was my imagination or not.

 

I grabbed my purse off the side table. He smiled at me as I walked past, but all I could see was the look in his eyes. He looked entranced. Hungry.

 

I stopped in the middle of the hallway, caught between the bathroom door beside me and the back door in the kitchen at the end of the hall. I shifted forward on my feet, my body willing me towards the exit, but I couldn’t leave. I had to do this. There was no other way forward. I opened the bathroom door, blowing out a puff of air as I closed it behind me.

 

Author's Note

Any feedback you have is great!

Reviews

[emipoemi]

This story was an honest-to-goodness ride! The back and forth was genius and brilliantly executed. The transitions between sections were top-notch and intriguingly engaging as you built the story through flash backs and present action. Two main points of critique. 1. Careful with tenses. Because this story is so long, it's a little harder to pinpoint exact examples but I know a lot of these issues I'm about to enumerate appear in the health class section (not all, but the majority). You have it all in past, so make sure you keep it all in past (the present tense in a past backdrop can occur and one particular occasion I recall is Harr's red face when the refs "make" a call does adhere to the "constant variable" factor that allows for present in the past, but your set up in this occasion doesn't support the reason to use the present). Careful with typos. Some sequences missing words or letters in words. Careful with hyphen splices. Some words should in fact be hyphenated (honest-to-God being one of them). When in doubt: if it's an adjective, it's hyphenated (that's usually the rule of thumb). Careful with repetitive phrases - add more meat to the action instead. Like You paint the health class sequence rather minimalistically - a lot of this story is minimalistic, but that one section in particular is to a fault. Primarily because we're not given any details as to whether Jules is in 8th Grade. The "where the 8 Graders had class" (or however that line went) didn't seem matter-of-fact but rather the class in question, because of its nature and location, was in the 8 Grader part of the school building (this adds to my add more meat to the action, don't just tell it, add a little more to make us want to tag along - because you have talent and this is overall brilliant to brush over details just to get to the main point.). Use these moments to paint more of the situation without necessarily repeating "class", "hall" etc. (I know "class" was one, can't recall the rest, but the point is to build from the base, not repeat what the readers know or can infer. If it's implied, we don't need anymore for clarification. We're smart that way). 2. The progression of this story is so superb, I really have not much to say about it except that the one factor that's missing is maybe not who the guy is, though I wonder whether that's necessary given the the statement of "swearing off random guys", however, on the other hand, there's the statement of conviction that she's going to do it, which sets up the whole sequence of the present. I guess there's not enough set up for the ending? Set up her finally wanting to. What was she trying to prove? For you seem to be trying to connect her decision to her tearing her hair out. What then are we supposed to believe happens when she goes into the unnamed guy's bathroom? Where's the echo there? As the only echo I can think of is her in the dorm where she spews out her drunken sick. So, maybe if there's a little more added to the minimalistic approach to set this up - frankly, I don't want to lead towards you tampering too much with this as it's absolutely amazing, and it pains me that I can't actually highlight specifics on here to really show what I'm talking about (sometimes that helps me see the bigger picture clearer). But that's the aspect that really threw me off at the end. You maneuvering so well throughout the story only to have it end relatively anticlimactic because there's no real vantage to an interpretation of the ending given the progression of the story. Something bigger is missing - not too spoon-feedy; not too revealing of the meaning - just a more apparent trail of breadcrumbs to follow into an interpretation of our own. Whatever that may be. But overall, holy mole! Well freaking done! This was a ride of a read!