Tear You Apart by Megan Hart

wall with his hands in his pockets and one leg crossed over the other. He stands up straight when I come through the doorway. His smile tweaks my own.
    “Bonjour,” I say, and more words come, slipping out with a flavor of garlic butter and red wine. “La première fois que je t’ai vu, j’ai eu un coup de foudre.”
    “Merci,” Will says. “Jacques Cousteau. Escargot. Marcel Marceau.”
    We look at modern art together, sometimes in silence, sometimes with commentary. Mostly with sideways glances and a few stifled giggles.
    “It’s pretentious,” I say finally, in front of an exhibit that stretches from floor to ceiling. It consists entirely of graph paper on which the artist has traced the lines. “It’s not even a pattern. He just traced the boxes. I did that in the sixth grade. Nobody called it art.”
    “Maybe that’s the difference. What someone else calls it.” Will rocks on his heels a few times, hands in his back pockets. “Maybe it’s not art unless someone else says so.”
    “Art,” I say seriously, “should make you feel something.”
    Will is quiet for a second or two before he looks at me with another quirking grin. “This makes you feel angry.”
    He’s right. It’s not what I meant, but he’s right, and I give him a little bow that makes the world spin a bit. Laughing, he takes me by the elbow again. Down a corridor into another room.
    This one is completely black inside, no lights except the film shining against the far wall. Black-and-white, it features a man standing in front of a barn. As we watch, the barn’s front wall comes off in slow motion, but the empty window frame is positioned so that it falls completely over him. It’s a parody or an homage to an old Buster Keaton movie, I think; I can’t quite tell which one. Over and over the front of the barn falls, the man’s expression never changing. Over and over, from different angles and distances.
    Over and over.
    Eventually the film cycles through to the beginning again. Will and I stand in the corner, the darkest spot. We blend into the shadows, and the way the light from the movie reflects off the polished walls and floor, we are almost impossible to see unless you’re looking for us. I know this because an older man in a pink polo shirt unselfconsciously picks his nose while he watches the film, and he’s only about two feet from me.
    I shudder with disgust and bury my face against Will’s shoulder to stifle my choking laughter. His arm slips around my waist, pulling me closer. Hip to hip. His thumb moves back and forth against the inner skin of my wrist, held close to my side. Slow, slow strokes. He doesn’t look at me.
    This small touch, this tender stroke of his flesh on mine, should not be enough to make me shake, but oh, it feels so good, so good I tremble from it. The shush-shush of his breathing presses pinpricks of light into my vision. Like sparklers, the lights arch and fade. My eyelids flutter.
    Will leans closer. His lips brush my earlobe. His breath pushes at a few stray tendrils of my hair.
    “I want to rub the head of my cock back and forth over your clit until you’re dripping wet for me.” He breathes these words against my ear. I can’t move. “Back and forth, so slow it makes you crazy. I want to tease you until you beg me to fuck you.”
    The shudder of my breath echoes the rattle-tap of the projector noises. I turn my head the tiniest bit toward him. My lips barely move when I say, “I. Don’t. Beg.”
    He takes my hand and puts it on the front of his jeans. On his cock, thick and hard beneath the denim. As slowly as he’s done everything else, Will rubs my palm back and forth over his erection, down low enough to curl my fingers around the bulge of his balls. Then up along the ridge.
    Up. Down. Just...a little...faster...
    His breath catches. In the faint glow from the movie in front of us, his eyes are wide, pupils dilated and dark. His lips are slightly parted, the lower one moist from