Marching season is out, but the competition is only heating up.
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Section leader applications for the next marching band season at Halston University are officially open, and percussionist Bay Rodriguez wants the role.
Bay's only competition is Ca...
noun. the steps and positions that make up a marching band show.
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BAY SLEEPS WITH HER BACK turned to me.
Throughout the night she huddles into a ball on the edge of my mattress, and I feel so nervous that she'll fall off the side or slip out from the blankets that I keep restlessly waking to drape more of the duvet over her body, naked except for a baggy shirt of mine, which she tiredly crawled into after we took a shower.
In the shower, we didn't fuck or even kiss again. I think Bay has a very defined cut-off point in her physical affections: wild in bed, and then as soon as the post-orgasmic high leaves her, she's clear-headed and sharp-tongued again. The only time we touched was when she told me to turn around, holding a sudsy loofah, and scrubbed my back with an almost technical thoroughness, her fingers skimming lightly across my shoulder blades.
It was the first time that night I'd felt awkward. "What are you doing?"
"You have nice back muscles," she answered casually, "can an aesthete not observe them?"
"But you're not an aesthete," I pointed out, facing the hot spray. "Aesthetes find meaning in art and beauty; you're a self-proclaimed nihilist, so you find meaning in nothing."
Then Bay laughed and turned me around, pushing me one step back so that the showerhead washed away the soap from my skin. "When did I was a nihilist?"
"Sophomore year. At a party. You were high."
"Oh, then I was definitely lying. I lie all the time. Only angsty teenage boys who just discovered Nietzsche are nihilists." Her eyes dropped to my cock, now hanging limp, and flicked back up to my face. "Maybe I'm a hedonist."
I sucked in a breath, and met her darkened eyes.
We probably came close to colliding again just because of that little taunting smirk of hers, but I, thoroughly tapped out by our previous performance, resisted. I flicked off the water and threw her a towel as we stepped out. Pillow talk was never going to happen because by this point it was already three a.m., the party long dead, and we were both sobered up and wrung out of energy. Even if Bay didn't fall asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow, I did.
Something had shifted in my world since we fucked; something in my ground was off-kilter, or something in my sky was the wrong shade of blue. I couldn't even tell whether such a change was threatening or not, because I didn't know what exactly had changed. I wanted to speak to Bay in the morning about it, I didn't want to wake up and find her vanished like the last time she stayed over.
