All she sees is gangly limbs when she looks in the mirror. Long, spindly, knobby knees and elbows like benign growths in her arms and legs. She doesn’t like to compare herself to other girls, she knows it’s a futile effort—it’s not their problem she feels like her body’s strange. She can pull her hair up and put on makeup her brother shoplifts for her, but she always feels like she’s dressing up for a play. It’s pantomime, the makeup and the dresses and skirts and making an effort to style her long, limp hair.
There’s some wave to it when she actually uses conditioner over Dean’s eighteen-in-one body wash, but complimentary conditioner is basically watered down glue and she doesn’t see the point in buying two massive jugs of strawberry-scented shampoo and conditioner at the nearest dollar store. It’s just another thing to tote around when they have to leave at a moment’s notice. It’s another luxury that feels unearned.
She loops a lock of her hair around her finger, pale from a sunless winter spent hunkered down in a cheap motel room near Bemidji. Her tank top sticks to her skin where her hair is laying lifeless against her back and shoulders and for a minute it almost feels like the dead of August, sweating in the backseat of the Impala.
The smudged mirror doesn’t reflect back her expressionless face, just a smear of color where it should be haloed by slightly dark, damp hair. She should be happy.
An hour ago Dean’s hands were all over her, his mouth on her jaw, her body splayed on top of his like some kind of horrifying insectile mating ritual. She still feels his touch all over her body, the heat of where their skin had made contact burning like he’d dragged a hot spoon across her flesh. She was the one to crawl into his lap, kiss him in just the way he’d taught her when she was in middle school, and undo the fly of his jeans. It was a plan she’d been playing out over and over again in her head before tonight.
She didn’t really want it. She thinks she did though.
She absolutely did.
Her gangly arms cross over her chest, flat, not like the girls she sees him drool over. There are bruises from accidents, from hunting practice, from Dean’s fingers running from her shoulders down to her wrists, and she has no idea how she’ll explain the hickey on the side of her neck if Dad comes home early.
She shifts her weight from one foot to the other, and she debates going back out again. The door was unlocked when she got in the shower, a wordless invitation for Dean to follow, but he hadn’t taken it. She thinks sense got the better of him, that he left to clear his head after what they’d done. It wasn’t supposed to go this far, not really.
Some sick part of her asks if she would have let Dad do what Dean had. She pictures his big hands grabbing her arms, his massive body pinning her to the bed, there’s no sense of balance in her vision of their coupling. No give, only take. No hands carding through hair, no failed dirty talk dismissed with breathy laughing, no sense of comfort in the person she was sharing her pleasure with. It’s fucked up, but Dean loves her. He really loves her, who she is, even if the way he shows it isn’t perfect. She goes cold at the knowledge that Dad wouldn’t have cuddled up beside her, thrown a sweaty arm over her waist and told her she was perfect. It makes her sick even imagining what it would have been like with Dad.
It could only ever be Dean. Nobody else could know every part of her and still tell her that she’s perfect.
There’s no high school sweethearts for her, no summer flings, it’s just her and Dean in tiny motel rooms with no friends or boundaries to stop them from mapping each other’s bodies. They could sculpt each other out of clay by now, make perfect recreations just by touch alone. Dean can touch her body with a familiarity he doesn’t even permit for himself, despite how often she catches him masturbating. He has never skated his hands down his chest, grabbed his pectorals and dug his nails in just to feel the flesh cave underneath his grasp. Dean makes her feel raw in a way she would never allow with anyone else.
One day she might be sitting at a table with her normal friends who are comfortable with their bodies, who have shared those bodies with boyfriends and husbands, maybe girlfriends once or twice in college, and she’ll have to dance around the fact that she was sixteen the first time she got eaten out and the first tongue that ever tasted her from the inside belonged to her brother.