Summer's Lovers
A long, boring drive to San Diego and their meeting with the comic book company. Zach drives too safely - like somebody's grandfather -- and Seth kicks the seat in front of him like the six year old he clearly still is. Exasperated with them both, Summer has hot, steamy sex inside her head. Frankly it's the best place she's ever done it. Her partners are generous, her orgasms plentiful. It's just a pity it isn't real.
Cars and trees and billboards go by like images in a dream, as Summer gives in to her thoughts. It's easy to tune out discussions of story arcs and picture Zach kissing the arch of her spine as it bends. She ignores the argument of Heat Vision vs X-ray and spandex costumes over rubber, concentrating instead on the imagined vision of Seth's heated stare.
She imagines it happens with just the smallest movement. She feels powerful in the costume, the way a real superhero might. The power to cloud men's minds. She pulls Seth just a little bit closer as he poses her. His curls are soft under her fingers, his mouth warm and mobile as he licks her the way she taught him all those months ago, before everything changed. Before he left her for real, not just in his heart.
Or maybe it's Zach. He is her boyfriend, after all. She pictures his sweet smile and the combination of well-trained smoothness from years of etiquette lessons, and the awkwardness he can't totally shake. He'd be pressed up against her, stroking her breasts with those long fingers of his, treating her like something precious. More than she deserves, and if she's honest, more than she's prepared to accept.
Most likely, it would be both of them, her personal geek patrol. She still doesn't know why she wants them. It doesn't do her credibility any good at all, but the thought of both of their attentions on her is making her squirm. Zach warm and hard behind her while Seth kneels. That cheerful voice encouraging Seth to go on. "Look how much she loves this, man," he'd say. One thing they both have in common, these sons of lawyers and politicians, is that they can talk.
"Why don't we move this to the bed, guys. We'll be more comfortable," the fantasy Summer tells them. It sounds like a line from a porn movie - not that she's supposed to have seen any - but it's true. She's been standing up in those black patent fuck-me boots for an hour, and her legs are starting to shake. It doesn't dawn on her until later that even in fantasy, the reality of fashion's sacrifice comes into play.
Not for the first time, she's glad that she's a girl and can hide what she's feeling. "I was trying to decide between the pink and the beige Jimmy Choo's", she says, when Seth asks why she's been so quiet. She squeezes her thighs together the way she taught herself as a girl, and brings herself off. It's always worked for her. Seth and Zach's loyalties may be divided, but hers aren't. She can be her own best friend.
Seth's hyperactive antics aren't so much endearing as enraging, and she'd like to change his coffees and sodas to decaf herbal tea before he drives her fucking nuts. It's all she can do to stop herself from throwing the hotel phone at him the last time he knocks on the door. She's not a rock star, or a famous debutante, so hotel destruction wouldn't be looked upon as a favorable affectation.
If Seth is six, then Zach is sixty. He practically puts a broom between the two of them so they aren't tempted to do more than he's prepared for in the lush hotel bed. Or maybe so she isn't tempted. He doesn't seem to have very strong urges, at least where Summer is concerned.
His admission of virginity isn't as much of a surprise as it should be. She's kind enough to nod encouragingly when he says that he'd "really like it to be with her, when the time is right." They both know it never will be.
The meeting, when it finally happens, is a bust. She'd always known it would be. No legitimate publisher would take a bunch of squabbling teenagers seriously. He might have bought Seth and Zach's idea, but she was sure it would be co-opted. The novelty of such a young creator overtaken by the more experienced hands at the company. Seth would have hated that.
Not that she should give a shit what Cohen thinks. He deserves the bus ride home alone. She's not going to think about what it might have been like if they'd all acted out her fantasy, and she certainly isn't going to tell them about it later and hope the three of them can laugh, and work it all out.
They both want to give her everything. Or maybe they want to want that. The equation is as difficult to solve as third period Trig. There's Seth and Summer, Summer and Zach, Seth and Zach and Summer, Seth and Zach, and always, Seth and Ryan underneath it all.
When she's being introspective, which isn't often, because it takes time away from shoes and school, and is fairly pointless anyway, she wonders why she isn't enough for anyone. She thinks maybe it all goes back to her mother, the first person who left her. Her therapist can say "She didn't leave you, Summer, she left your father" all he wants, but it doesn't change things. It isn't any different from Seth running away because of Chino. Gone is gone.
"Your mother was very conflicted," her dad told her once. She knows conflicted. If her life were a novel, that would be the main theme, and people would be dissecting it in English Lit classes all over the country. She doesn't need a super-hero costume to know they're all wearing disguises.