Emma Straub - Modern Lovers

“I don’t have anything,” Harry said, stammering. “If I wasn’t afraid to walk through the park by myself right now, I would run to a Duane Reade and buy every condom in the store just so that I would never, ever be in this particular situation again.”

“I do,” Ruby said. She reached into her bag and pulled out a condom. “In fact, I have more than one, in case this goes well. Or fast.”

Harry coughed. “Ruby,” he said. His cheeks were pink — even in the dark she could see it. That was one thing she loved about boys as pale as Harry — it was so easy to make them turn color, like a chameleon trying to blend itself into a tree.

“I know,” she said. Ruby unrolled the condom onto Harry gently. He was already convulsing when she climbed back onto him and slid him into her body.

“Oh, fuck,” he said. Harry pulled her torso down to his and kissed her. Ruby rocked back and forth, enjoying Harry’s little spasms of delight. “Oh, fuck,” he said again, and Ruby felt him come. She kissed him and gave her Kegels a squeeze, which elicited another great big moan.

“Oh, my God,” Harry said. “Did that just happen?”

Ruby laughed, and kissed him. “Um, yes. That’s why I brought more than one.”

“No,” Harry said. “I don’t mean. Well, yeah, I guess that is what I mean. But I also mean, wow.” He looked up at her with astonishment.

Ruby had slept with four people, including Harry and Dust. That was only counting actual sex. If you counted other stuff, the list was longer. But out of the four guys, only Harry had ever looked at her like this. Even with Mikhail, who she’d lost her virginity to when she was fourteen, Ruby had never felt like she was doing anything that really mattered to anyone. Jamal, who had been her second, had been an RA at her summer program, and she was pretty sure that having sex with the campers was exactly what he was not supposed to do, which didn’t seem like a great sign. Not that the boys she’d slept with hadn’t enjoyed it, or hadn’t wanted her — and she had wanted them, always, she wouldn’t have done it otherwise — but Ruby had never, until this second, felt like she was watching herself become a part of someone else’s story. She could see the whole thing: no matter what happened with Harry, even if they never slept together again, even if she got hit by a bus when they walked home, even if she moved to the North Pole and they only communicated via Santa Claus, Harry would always remember this playground, and her face, and the fact that she had agreed to be his first.

There weren’t very many differences to having gay parents, or parents of two races. It wasn’t like being raised a pagan or a Wiccan or whatever conservatives wanted their constituents to believe. No one was being indoctrinated. In fact, it was the opposite. Most of Ruby’s friends with straight parents grew up assuming they’d be straight, too, and that they’d marry someone who looked pretty much the same way they did. If you had two moms, though, or two dads, or your parents weren’t the same color, then you were born knowing that there wasn’t actually a default setting. Ruby was open to being attracted to anybody. She’d thought a lot about being a lesbian, even though she knew she was attracted to boys. Sometimes she wondered if that was just her wanting to be different from her parents, or buying into the societal pressure pushed on her by Barbie dolls or whatever. There were a few out girls at Whitman, two little baby dykes who wore bow ties and dress shoes and one pretty junior who had a girlfriend already in college, which Ruby found creepy from a purely statutory standpoint. There was one other family she knew at school with gay parents, but those kids were still in middle school, and so Ruby wasn’t about to ask them what they thought about the whole thing. She was pretty sure that she was straight, but maybe not. Maybe she’d change her mind later, who knew? Her mum had been with guys when she was a teenager, too. Her mom wouldn’t have had sex with a guy in one trillion years. Everyone was different.

Sex wasn’t a big deal. Sex was the biggest deal. “Wow yourself,” Ruby was about to say, but then there were flashlights and a voice coming through a megaphone, and she and Harry were scrambling away from each other like cockroaches when you turned on the light.

Wednesday nights were slow at Hyacinth, and so Jane and Zoe were home early. Jane was on the couch, watching something dumb, and Zoe was upstairs in bed. They were both pretending that they weren’t waiting up for Ruby to come home. Jane’s phone began to vibrate on the coffee table, and when she didn’t recognize the number, she ignored it, reaching for the remote instead. A minute later, she heard Zoe’s phone ring upstairs, and Zoe said, “What?” Her feet thumped to the floor. Jane sat up straight, suddenly at attention. She debated checking upstairs to find out what was going on, but Zoe was hurrying down before she had the chance.

“We have to go to the fucking police station,” Zoe said. She had a scarf wrapped around her hair, and it looked like she’d dozed off, with a pillow line running across her left cheek. “Ruby and Harry were fucking fucking in the fucking park. In the fucking playground!”

Jane slipped into her clogs and patted her pockets. “I have my keys. Let’s go.”

The 67th Precinct was not one of the glittering bastions of justice like on Law & Order: SVU , with computerized screens everywhere and cops with good haircuts. The floor was dirty, and the desks were messy. Jane had been there a number of times before, in the early days of Hyacinth, when they couldn’t seem to go a month without an incident of one kind or another — a stolen credit card, a break-in, a shattered window. The cops were overworked and exhausted. She nodded hello to Officer Vernon, whom she knew from his work with the neighborhood watch. Zoe was hysterical, her silver bracelets jangling like a thousand bells. Jane took her hand. “It’s going to be fine,” Jane said.

“I’m going to murder her,” Zoe said. “As soon as I know she’s okay. If Harry had been rolling around with some white girl, they would have sent him home. I am going to murder everyone .”

They stopped at the desk, and Jane peeked around the side — she could see Ruby’s legs through an open office door in the back.

“We’re here to pick up our daughter,” Jane said, pointing. “Ruby Kahn-Bennett?”

The woman at the desk nodded, and reached for the phone. They stood there for another minute, and then another female officer came clomping down the hall to get them.

“I’m Officer Claiborne Ray,” she said. “Come on back. The other parents are already here.” She beckoned for them to follow. Zoe hurried in front, as if they were walking into a Cambodian prison and she might never see Ruby again.

• • •

The office was small, and seemed even smaller, because in addition to Ruby, Harry, Elizabeth, and Andrew, there was another police officer sitting behind a desk. The guy was young, maybe twenty-five, with a smug look on his face. He was, no doubt, the one who had caught them. Jane wanted to slap him. As if he’d caught actual criminals. He’d probably been promoted from animal control and had just stopped rescuing cats from hoarders’ apartments.

Andrew was rocking back and forth in the chair, which made an irritating squeak. Elizabeth had an arm wrapped around Harry’s shoulders. Ruby was picking at her nails. They all looked up when Jane and Zoe walked in. Ruby waved, unable to force even a fake smile. Andrew shook his head and clenched his jaw.

“Come in,” Officer Ray said.

Zoe dropped quickly into the chair next to Ruby and squeezed her knee. There were no more seats, and so Jane leaned against the wall. She felt Andrew’s and Elizabeth’s angry stares boring into the side of her face so acutely that she put her hand on her cheek.