I Heard Animals' Voices novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: Nine Out of Ten

My mother works nights on Saturdays.

By nine o'clock that evening Derrick was standing in my kitchen, bent under the light fixture.

He read the fridge door.

"You have a magnet shaped like a pork chop," he said.

"My mother is a nurse. She thinks it's funny."

"Is it?"

"It's a very small pork chop."

The sparrow outside the window had already started in.

"I've told the pigeons," it said. "Just so you know."

I pulled the curtain across the window with one hand and took Derrick's wrist with the other.

My room was at the end of the hall, and it was smaller than I had remembered it.

There was a narrow bed, a desk, and glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling that I had stuck up at eleven.

Derrick looked up at them.

"They're not in the right places," he said.

"I was eleven."

"They're perfect."

He said it so seriously that I had to kiss him.

I kissed him slowly this time, with both hands on his face.

He made a sound low in his chest and stood very still and let me.

"Sit," I said.

He sat on the edge of the narrow bed, which creaked under him.

I stood between his knees and took his coverall zipper in my fingers, all the way up at the collar.

"No," he said, and I stopped. "I mean yes. I mean, you do it. I'd like you to do it."

"I was always going to."

I drew it down, slowly, and he watched my hands the whole way.

I pushed the coveralls off his shoulders, and he lifted his hips so I could pull them free.

He was already hard against his shorts.

I knelt on the rug.

"Tierney," he said, rough. "You don't have to..."

"I know."

"Did you eat lunch?"

"That's rule five."

"It's rule five."

"Overruled," I said, and took him in my mouth.

He said a word that I'm fairly sure was not in any rule.

His hand came down into my hair and stayed there, shaking, not guiding, only holding.

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