A splash. Ripples spread like dust catching sunlight. The water swallows you whole. Like a mouth gaping, the wetness slides around you in an embrace. Toes skim the murky bottom. A fish brushes your leg with its scales. Pounding footsteps on the worn wooden dock and hoots of laughter. He joins you in the lake’s depths. You accidentally find the current from the underground spring. Goosebumps rise on your shivering body in this pocket of cold. Will it pull you down? Suddenly, he grabs your ankle and tugs. The water slides around you with his arms. Dunking you beneath the surface he parts your lips with his tongue. Water rushes inside. He leaves you sputtering towards the sunlight with drops stuck to your eyelashes. You flutter them until you can see that no one saw, the water around you is calm. The lake will keep your secrets, but the water is always seeping in.

In your memory of this day you are pulling the canoe up onto the rocks of the island in the middle of the lake in an old peach-colored bikini, one you remember keeping until you were 25. You are thin, your arms sinewy, and your long legs bend at sharp angles.

He calls your name. Fourteen-year-old you smiles wide and runs up the rocks to reach his side, like an overeager puppy. As you come up to him, he swings around and grabs you. The sun is shining in your eyes and you can’t see his face. But he kisses your eyelids and says how badly he wants you. It’s a hot summer day, mid-August on the pond and the two of you planned a canoe ride. You paddled out to the middle of the lake and docked at an island that couldn’t be seen completely from the shoreline and set up a couple of towels to lie on in the sun while listening to music from the mini speaker he brought with him.

You spend time rolling around and kissing lazily, your bodies intertwined in patches of sun beneath branches of rustling leaves before he tells you he needs your mouth. You don’t understand what he means for a second. You want to close your eyes and keep staring up at the sky pretending it’s just the two of you estranged on some tropical island somewhere in the middle of the ocean. You don’t know if you want to do what he is asking you to. What if it tastes bad? What if you do it wrong? What if someone sees you? You can’t ask any of these questions because your mind is out of your control and your mouth doesn’t seem to be working. You sit there staring until he grabs your hand and places it between his legs. You grab on and he groans softly.

“See what you do to me.”

You nod, trying to smile. He tells you not to be afraid. It’s the safest way for you to be together. But there is no tenderness in your encounter. He asks one more time if you can do this for him. You nod and sort of ask what to do because you have never watched porn or talked about oral sex before with anyone and you aren’t sure what the first step is. You thought you’d be in the dark in a bedroom on an annoyingly squeaky mattress somewhere safe, but you find yourself under the glaring sun, light bouncing off the lapping water. You aren’t sure you really want to see everything clear as day.

He wraps his arms around you while standing up on the towels. You had placed them in a small clearing under the trees with high blueberry bushes rising all around you. Fuzzy bumble bees buzz lazily from blossom to blossom. You kiss some more. He is sloppy, but you find you like it. His tongue is more forceful than before, pushing its way around your mouth like it is trying to take root. He pulls away and tells you to mimic his tongue when you go down there. At this point it’s clear you aren’t going to turn back so you kneel with him on the towels, the balls of your feet touch pine needles. He unties his lime green bathing suit. The color bothers you. He is nineteen and still wearing the colors a 10-year-old boy would pick out at the store. He sits there on the towel and holds himself in his hands. His arm reaches up and grabs the back of your neck pulling you down to him.

“Remember, no teeth.”

His hand rests on your head, you keep your eyes open looking at one stretch of black curly hair near his groin. Your knees start to hurt and you look to the sky. The leaves blur up and down in your line of sight. Suddenly, he moans and pulls his dick out of your mouth while grabbing the skin around the top. White seeps through his fingers. He smiles, so you wipe at the corner of your mouth and smile too. He tells you how sexy you looked down there with your lips wrapped around his cock. You get up to wash your mouth and hands in the lake. He pulls his suit awkwardly back up with one hand and walks to the bank and drops everything into the water letting out a stream of piss with it. You stare at his bare ass. He laughs on his way back telling you not to swim in the water because who knows if his sperm is waiting to swim up inside you. You know he’s full of shit, but stay out of the water the rest of the afternoon, baking in the sun.

You make it back around dinnertime and no one asks you what you did out there on the island all day. Maybe they figured daylight would keep you on your best behavior. Or maybe they underestimated the power of being alone out there, unsupervised. This was the day the pattern became established. It takes years for you to finally realize he will never actually appreciate your body. For a long time you blame him, but sometimes you wonder if it’s because you are the one who didn’t appreciate your own body in the first place.