Uses for Boys Read Online Free Page A

round butt cheeks. My hand still snakes under his jeans, but he’s grown
     hard now, and my hand’s stuck there, not sure if it should pull away.
    Joey pushes me over and takes off my shirt, then my bra. He rubs himself against my
     leg. Beyond his shoulder centerfold girl has slipped to the floor to watch.
    Joey’s saying things, breathing heavily against the side of my face. I’m here, I imagine
     him saying. I’m here, I’m here, and it’s true. Joey’s here every day after school.
     He’s my family now. Anything’s worth this. And he teaches me things. He teaches me
     how to hold his penis at the base, tight in a fist, and move the skin up and down.
     He teaches me how to take it in my mouth without using my teeth. Joey is very experienced.
    “I’m experienced in the ways of love,” he tells me.
    I take off my shirt. Joey takes off his and we rub our chests together. My breasts
     are small and pointy, but Joey thinks they’re perfect. When he kisses me, I feel important.
     Like I’m everything to him. Sometimes everything happy bubbles up and I want to be
     chased around the house. I secretly want to run around outside in the cul-de-sac without
     my shirt on. I make jokes about Joey’s body, his skinny legs and concave chest. About
     the little red hickies I leave on his skin. He holds my wrists, says I can only be
     cured by kisses. Or he scissors his legs between mine, trying to take off my pants.
    “We’ll just lie together,” he says.
    I’m dizzy with his kisses. At my house it’s empty room after empty room and we kiss
     in every one. It’s like all I know are his lips. He has thousands of dizzying lips.
     I take off my pants and he rubs his penis against me, but I keep my legs tight together.
     Joey whispers in my ear and strokes my forehead like I’m ill. Everything is a negotiation.
     Everything moves in a series of degrees.
    “Just a little, just a bit, just the head.”
    Day after day, hour after hour.
    “If you love me,” he says.
    “If you care about me,” he says.
    “It’s not fair,” he says.
    “I love you,” he says. And I love you, I love you, I love you.
    “OK,” I say, but not because of that. Not because of what he says or how he says it.
     Not because I’m tired of waiting, or because I think I should or shouldn’t, or that
     it’s right or wrong—but because I want to. I like the way he makes me feel. I want
     to feel him. I want to feel him like that.
    I say OK and we do. And it’s not that much different than anything else we do.

 
    i belong here
    Once we find this way of fitting together, I set about finding other ways. The back
     of my knuckles cup the hollow beneath his arm. My nose, my face, I could fit whole
     armies of things in this cavity, or just my cheek, my breast.
    “What are you doing?”
    I angle my body, arm outstretched, and stuff my right breast into the warm depression
     under his arm. His ribs press against mine. I penetrate him with my breast. We’re
     boob fucking. It’s awkward and mysterious. Fulfilling.
    I rest my face against the bottom of his ribs and breathe into his narrow stomach.
     The skin stretches thin across his belly. There’s an uncomfortable pucker to his belly
     button and I put my fingers in it, pulling at the lip, until I notice the black dirt
     inside.
    My hand goes lower. The only lushness on his body is the bed of hair where his penis
     rests. I rest my cheek against his belly, turn away so he can’t see my face. I have
     this view of him: down his belly to the wrinkled sheets between his legs. This view:
     his bumpy knees and out-turned feet.
    We come unattached and I blow my cheek up full of air against his stomach. Again,
     double time, like a heartbeat.
    *   *   *
    On Fridays, my mom leaves a twenty-dollar bill and a note on the kitchen table.
    “Rinse the dishes before you put them in the dishwasher,” it says.
    Joey and I have sex in her bedroom. He brings rubbers that he steals from his brother