Still Eighteen (October Genre Creatives Challenge -Romance)

“I was thinking of attacking you.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“Would if I thought you could handle it.”

“I can handle anything you’ve got, cowboy,” a soft punch to his arm punctuated her acceptance, continuing the tease they had going all summer, the dance of the boastful virgins.
He grabbed her hand and pulled her across the street. She feigned resistance but followed him through an arch and into a courtyard.

Now twenty apartments, he could imagine the mansion as it must have been a hundred and fifty years ago, home to a well-to-do family, with carriages and ponies parked here instead of Citroens and Peugeots.

He veered sharply left, twisting her hand so she was forced to turn facing him. She inspected his eyes, unafraid and eager, as his other hand went around her waist and drew her forward. The air was saturated with his testosterone and her anticipation.

She moved toward him — thighs, waists, and chests, only inches from full contact. Her foot caught the edge of a cobblestone. She fell forward pushing him hard against the wall.
A hard object pressed against his spine and a three-story drainpipe split into four sections and cascaded onto the cobblestone courtyard, making more noise than line-dancing skeletons on Halloween.

The debacle proceeded in ultra-slow motion, time pausing patiently, wringing confusion, dismay, and embarrassment out of each micro-moment before moving on to the next.
A light flashed on in a third floor window. CRASH, CLATTER, BANG! A light on the second floor. Metal hitting stone, metal hitting metal. Three, four, five, six wakened tenants opened windows.

Carolyn laughed a deep-throated, double-me-over belly laugh, and she couldn’t stop. The infection spread, surrounded him, and entwined them, as he joined her, bonded forever in this ludicrous situation.

Safely outside, they turned to face each other, to see if there was any salvage from the rubble they’d left in the courtyard.

"I'm more coordinated on the dance floor."

"You'd have to be." She said with a quicksand smile that, if you looked for more than a split-second, would capture you and reel you in. As he drew closer her mouth opened and kissed him, her tongue moist and moving. Then the belly laughter, unfinished and building up pressure, resurfaced: a whale's waterspout, Yellowstone's Old Faithful, the fabled “force of mythic proportions”, and drove away all other options.

They might have been much more than friends but that nexus was gone, pieces on a medieval cobblestone courtyard. A silken thread snapped, collapsing the cobweb of a future that was not to be. Someone else would claim her heart, someone else would unbutton her blouse and gently lay her on the day bed, someone else would let her sleep late Sundays while he fed the kids, someone else would …

He wondered if he should go to her party in Virginia after all.

But he did, because it was still summer and he was still eighteen.