Page 84 of Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl
“Is sex in there somewhere?” she asks, reaching for me.
I grab her wrists and give her a sharp look. “No. Behave.”
It is a testament to my willpower that I’m able to peel off her thigh-highs without breaking my own rules, or that I’m able to pull her slutty panties down from under her skirt without bending her over and making her understand—acutely—how protective and possessive she makes me feel.
I somehow get her into the shower and propped against a tiled wall under the hot spray without doing anything untoward, and start soaping her soft, still-chilled skin as she stares unabashedly at the hard-on in my lounge pants. I’ve tucked my cock into the waistband, and the swollen head is just visible as it tries to peek out, and Maddie is watching it with the avaricious gaze of a Victorian opium eater.
“Why don’t you get undressed and come in here with me?” she asks in a low, dick-jolting voice. “It would be better than getting your clothes all wet.”
“You, my brat, are too drunk to have sex. And even if you weren’t, I think I might want to spank you more than I want to do anything else. What were you thinking, putting yourself in danger like that? Completely drunk on a cold night in a town you still barely know? And that’s not even touching on the Snake Pit of it all, with all the other drunk people. If Leo hadn’t found you...”
“Oh, you’rebig mad.” She sighs. “Can’t you betiny madinstead?”
I give her a forbidding look before I get the shampoo.
“It wasn’t like we planned to be unsafe, it just happened, and I really needed a drink after Veronica Balentine told me we couldn’t have sex anymore—don’t worry, I’m not going to listen—”
“When did you see Veronica Balentine?” I ask, a fresh irritation nestling inside me. I hate the idea of her ensnaring Maddie into that circle jerk of donors, candidates, and power players. Of her perverting Maddie’s hunger to get shit done into something wan and feeble and status-quo preserving. Or worse—ambitious and profitable.
“While we were trick-or-treating—she named her son after Bill Paxton, by the way—and then she told me that... that...” Maddie hiccups as I work the shampoo into her hair. “You used to be a criminal. For the environment or something.”
I freeze. Only for a second and then I continue washing her hair, my thoughts alternately sprouting and dying, all of them failing to take root.
I should have known that this would come up. I should have known that I’d need to tell her about this, explain my past, make some attempt to justify it. But if there ever was a silver lining tosex and nothing else, then this had been it—that she didn’t need to know. Not really. Why would she if she was going to leave and then we were going to be nothing?
“Yes,” I finally say, and unhook the showerhead to rinse out the shampoo. “That’s true.”
Maddie turns to look at me once I finish rinsing her hair. “Really?” she asks with wide eyes. “That’s so hot.”
I snort, replace the showerhead, and move on to the conditioner. “Okay, little criminal. Close your eyes.”
“But I don’t understand why you stopped,” she asks as I work the conditioner into her hair. “If you never got caught, why not keep going?”
I’ve never had to explain this before, which is strange to think about, but I suppose it makes sense in a way. Everyone else had been there—Sara and the other members of the Andromeda Club—and so there’d been no need to explain why it had started and why it had stopped. Everyone already knew.
“We were almost caught,” I begin as I unhook the showerhead again. “Sara and I, together. They were building a pipeline through a wetlands area south of town—the wetlands are important to the Native American community here, and it’s an incredibly biodiverse and ecologically fragile area—and we went to fuck up some construction equipment in the dark. We were careful, we always were, but someone must have seen us. The cops showed up, and we only got away by the skin of our teeth. And we realized that if we’d both been arrested, then we didn’t know what would happen to our kid afterward. We could have been pinned with enough to mean jail for a long, long time, and we knew my grandparents wouldn’t take Fern, and Sara’s parents had too many health issues to raise a little one, and so we had to stop thinking like baby activists and start thinking like the guardians of a preschooler. In a way, even though we were already parents, it was the day we became adults.”
I rinse Maddie’s hair, savoring the wet silk of it through my fingers, savoring also the way her eyes roll back as I massage her scalp, her temples, the nape of her neck. Her eyes are closed and her mouth is open by the time I’m done. I give her a final rinse, replace the showerhead, and then turn off the shower, leaving her side briefly to find a towel, and then returning to bundle her inside it.
“Wait here,” I tell her as she stands shivering a little on the mat, and then I go to her bathroom and return with her clear bag of toiletries.
And then carefully, with the slowness of someone who barely knows what they’re doing, I use Maddie’s makeup wipes to clean her face of slutty Velma makeup.
“So you stopped for Fern,” Maddie says as I tilt her face up to make sure I’ve got everything.
“We stopped for Fern,” I confirm. I find Maddie’s moisturizer and squeeze some onto my fingers. I gently start applying it to her face. “But it was always stupid. We were white kids with a mostly middle-class upbringing, and so we thought playing Robin Hood was a game, an adventure. Coming to terms with our own recklessness and our own privilege was... disorienting.” I set the moisturizer down and then pull Maddie into my bedroom and make her sit on the bed while I find clothes for her to sleep in. (Yes, she has her own pajamas, I know, but the primal pleasure of putting her in my clothes is too much to resist.)
I take an old T-shirt and sweatpants and help her pull everything on. “The hard part was that we did try to do things the right way, after,” I tell her. “When it came to those wetlands, I mean. We threw ourselves into the research the university was doing, we went to all the town halls, all the planning meetings, we went to protests and wrote to politicians and spoke to newspapers. No vandalism, no data leaking, no sabotage. Just all the things you’re supposed to do with community and science and asking your political leaders to help. And it didn’t matter. It didn’t work. They built the pipeline anyway.”
“I’m sorry,” Maddie says softly.
I smile at her, brushing some wet hair away from her jaw. “It’s okay. For a while, I let big defeats keep me from smaller wins, but the smaller wins are worth it too.”
Maddie’s mouth pulls into awatch mesmirk. “But you know what’s even more worth it?Bigwins.”
I laugh. “That’s my brat.”
Dressed in my old, baggy clothes, Maddie goes back into my bathroom to brush her teeth, and I follow. It’s confusing to brush your teeth with someone who only wants sex—it’s an act that’s bound up in the feeling of playing house, of cozy routines and small intimacies—and I fight off a wave of pained yearning as we do it.
