Chapter Text
“Hey Eddie,” During a lull in the conversation, Chrissy picks at a loose thread as she lies belly-down on the top of her bed.
“Mmhm?” He’s got something in his mouth.
“Does touching yourself relieve your stress?”
She hears him spit and cough. “Shit. Uh…” something clunks on the other end. “Yeah it does.” He laughs with tempered humor. “Whyyy?”
Chrissy presses her hot face into her pillow. “I was thinking about what you said. You offered to… walk me through it.”
“I remember. Vividly. Yeah I said that.” he states, like he’s also convincing himself.
“Well, see, it’s just that… I’ve never… I mean it’s not like I don’t understand… it , but I’m not…”
“Cunningham. Take a breath.” Eddie demonstrated by inhaling into the phone.
Chrissy rolled onto her back, and stared up at the white lace frills on the half-canopy above her. Light from her bedroom lamp filtered through the eyelets in the fabric landing in a dappled pattern on Chrissy’s bare thighs. “Sorry, Eddie.”
“Look, Christine, it was a dumb suggestion. I don’t want you to be uncomfortable or any-”
“No!” Chrissy swallowed her nerves. They tasted saccharine sweet. “I want you to tell me. Tell me how.”
There was no response on the other side of the phone. “Eddie?” Chrissy whispered.
“Fuuck, Chris.” he whispered back. There was movement on his end.
Chrissy lay motionless, anticipation sitting thick in her throat. “If you’re uncomfortable…”
Eddie chuckled in what certainly sounded like discomfort. “Not exactly the word I would use to describe my current… ah, state of being, no.” More movement through the phone. “But not far off..” he said under his breath.
Chrissy was caught between wanting to end the conversation before she was sure her body would combust, and desperately wanting it to continue. She winced as her voice cracked. “Will you tell me how, Eddie?”
His breath huffed through the phone. “I can do that… fuck. Yeah I can do that.”
Chrissy smiled as his voice had dropped an octave. “What should I do?”
“Ok. You’re gonna need to tell me exactly what you’re doing as you’re doing it, K?”
“Mhm.”
“Ok. Ok, ok. Lie on your back, k, and…” Eddie cleared his throat. “You got the phone in your left hand?”
“Oh, no.” Chrissy put the warm plastic landline in her other hand. “Ok now I do.”
“Ok good.” She could hear Eddie smile through his words. “Run your hand down your body and tell me what you feel, Prom Queen.”
Chrissy’s mouth filled with saliva and the cotton of her pajamas seemed stiff and constricting. She drew her hand up to her clavicle, then gently smoothed her palm down her chest, over her right breast, down the angle of her ribcage and over her stomach.
“Chrissy…” Eddie’s breathy voice prodded. “What. Are you feeling?”
She closed her eyes. It was easy to remain clinical when she described her own body, detached was better than destructive, but somehow hearing Eddie ask to know how her body felt to her, made her want to be honest. “My collarbones. My right… my boob. Now my stomach.”
“Shit. I mean, good. Ok. Do it again, this time, tell me how it feels, Chrissy. Not just what.”
Chrissy did it again, more slowly. This time her skin erupted in time bumps, goose flesh on her chest and stomach, her nipple pebbled as it caught on her fingers, her stomach twitching reflexively. “It feels good Eddie, I'm getting goosebumps.”
“Good job, sweet girl. Keep going.”
Being told she was good felt like fingers pressing into sore muscles, like a forbidden thought she was told she could now believe. That this desire was the right thing to chase after. That her pleasure was approved of. She was ok.
She whined involuntarily.
Eddie made another choking sound. “What are you wearing? Fuck… thats cliched.”
“Just my sleep shorts.” She nudged the waistband with her fingertips.
“Ok take them off.”
She wiggled the blue and white shorts down her legs with one hand, flipping them off the edge of the mattress with one french-tipped toe. “Ah there off.”
Eddie’s voice became layered with more grit. “Use your fingertips, drift them over your thighs.”
Chrissy did as she was told, drawing looping patterns over the peach fuzz on her pale limbs. The skin rippled in response, hairs on end. She exhaled, the muscles in her shoulders and calves relaxing.
“Sounds like it feels good?” The boy on the phone’s throat seemed like it was constricted.
“Yeah it does, Eddie.”
“Now we make it even better,” there was a motion through the line. “One finger, that’s all. Stroke yourself.” He stated.
Chrissy ignited. Her chest was on fire, like when she had gotten too high and nearly given up on weed, the panicked thought that somehow her heart would collapse from inexperience.“You mean, there ?”
Eddie's breath through the line mimicked her pulse in her ears. “Yes sweetheart.”
Eye stinging arousal flooded through her body. “Ah… ok” Her spine felt like it was fusing together, the vertebrae compressing as she hovered her middle finger through the blonde curls between her hip bones. Her labia parted as she went, breath catching on the overload of sensation.
“Talk to me, Chrissy.” Eddie moaned, more of a request than an instruction.
Pressing more confidently now, Chrissy pulled her finger up through her sex. Sticky, warm, viscous. It’s new and unsettling. Like the sliced flesh of a honeydew, like salivation from thirst. An ancient kind of hunger.
“It’s wet.” If she had been less enthralled she would have blushed at the vulnerable timbre of her voice.
“Fucking shit.” Eddie’s voice was a good distance from the phone, a whiny tinge to it.
Chrissy continued to stroke herself, as he went quiet on the other end. “That’s good right?” she squeaked.
“Yeah baby, so good.” he seemed distracted, but sounded emphatic.
“Ah ah Eddie.” The blonde let the phone drop to nestle along her clavicle. Her tongue pressed to the roof of her mouth against the porcelain divots of the backs of her teeth. She reached more into herself each time, a sweet and sour throbbing building in her stomach.
“Ok now add another finger, and add a little more pressure. It feels best nearest the top.”
She obeyed, licking her dry lips, her saliva cooler than the skin of her face. As the pads of her finger passed over a firm nub between her lower lips she squeezed her eyes shut. It almost hurts, in the way that too-loud music hurts, a sense overpowered.
“Oh god Eddie,” she gasped. She feels like an exposed copper wire, she feels like she’s doing something bad, but it’s fine because no one can see. Her reactions are unconscious, her movements devoid of self scrutiny. "It's... a lot."
“Good girl, Chrissy.” Eddie is panting over the phone. The articulation of each word seems forced. He becomes clearer for a moment and says “Chris, you've come before though, right?”
Devoid of all embarrassment, excitement prickles the bottoms of her feet and the tips of her fingers. Chrissy’s hand is working herself quicker, the sting of sweat finally pushing through her pores. “I don't think so…” she huffs, the little holes in the phone’s mouthpiece collecting her breaths condensation.
“Jesus christ, ok.” Eddie smiles in his voice again, a pained, awed edge to it. “You would know if you did.”
Chrissy whimpers like she’s crying, but she doesn’t sob like this when she cries. She likes that it is pleasure that coaxes these frantic noises from her.
“Fuck, Chrissy, you sound insane.” Eddie is farther from the phone again, but she can hear if breathing. He sounds pleased, proud, amazed.
She feels a scalding tear burn across her temple. “Eddie it’s… I need, I need…” She can’t imagine what. Her calloused heel is dragging through the fitted sheet, untucking it.
“I know, I know baby, press a little harder. You can add another finger, make them flat, and rub yourself.” He pants.
He’s called her baby twice now. She knows the sheets below her are damp from those words. Eyes watering with the heat of her body, the near painful edge of expectation coiled in her lower back, Chrissy groans. It’s not delicate, it's guttural and her teeth are bared.
“Shit. Eddie. Holy. Shit.” She says as her body reflexively pulses.
“Good?” he hisses.
“Yesss... Oh my god” she keens. Internal muscles she didn’t conceptualize as being hers to control, clench and release.
“Eddie, Eddie.” She thinks she’s said his name a hundred times tonight. “I think..” She knows this painful pleasure has been building but she doesn't think it can continue, she knows there is a completion. Cheer, track, neither made her throat constrict, or gasp for air this way, her lungs fully expanding only when she remembered to tell them to.
Eddie must have his mouth right on the phone, static punctuating his words. “Yes Chrissy, be a good girl. Come for me.”
White hot, achingly-good, she comes. Her eyes roll back as her fingers cramp, rubbing at herself in rhythm with her inner walls, her shaking thighs, her hitching breath. “Eeedddiiee.”
“Holy shit-” The boy on the other end cuts off his words with a grunt.
She whines when she opens her eyes, mouth full of fuzzy saliva, vision blurry around the edges. White noise in her ears, damp skin against fabric and her and Eddie intaking oxygen the only sound in the room.
“Eddie?” She can barely hear herself.
“I’m here.” He breathes.
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There is dead air for a long moment. Radio silence. She isn’t thinking. For the first time in months. She is fully within her body. She fits there snuggly, comfortable. It just made her feel a shocking amount of pleasure. She is grateful.
The phone knocks her jaw and she stretches, the flannel of her pillow sticking to the nape of her damp neck.
On the phone she hears, what she knows from experience, is the trailer door jiggling as a key is forced in the lock. Eddie swears, and the phone must drop as Chrissy hears a skull-jarring clunk.
“Shit…” She hears rustles and then a breathless, “night Chrissy.”
The line goes dead.
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Chrissy has never felt so alive. She wants to take root in the bed.
Fully living. Vegetation in the process of blooming.
Pulling up the comforter, she switches off her lamp. Sated, and safe, for the first time this week Chrissy’s eyelids droop on their own.
Whole. Clean despite the slick and sweat. Organic.
Sleep descends like a soft rain.