Impulse Control

Katya used to have a mind like an oyster—it used to filter out the dumb things she thought about saying. She’d been polite and great with people, especially adults, who were amused at the preteen who spoke like a politician. But with the accident came the socially detrimental tendency to blurt every single damn thing she thought of, while leaving her completely incapable of doing anything but make things worse in the aftermath. Her parents tried to keep her at home, but she had never been a genius and her parents weren’t any great shakes either, so home schooling was out of the question.

One thing that could be said about Katya was that she was amusing. That’s why she had any friends at all; it tends to be alienating when someone gets told that they smell, that they breathe like over-sexed bulls, or the bubbling of their snot is just too irritating to be borne.

She had three friends and two hanger-ons, two people who wanted to be like her but couldn’t quite get the courage to tell the world to fuck off. Eventually they would get over it and just be her friends. The thing with Katya’s friends was that they loved being around her more than she loved being around them, and she couldn’t help letting them know it.

Katya was medium height and long-waisted, with curly brown hair and dark blue eyes, skin that burned and never tanned, and broad shoulders that could put Atlas to shame. Simply put, she was not beautiful but she was extremely attractive, until she opened her mouth.

Again, not her fault. It wasn’t a constant thing, but it was frequent, and it didn’t need to be constant as long as it was inconvenient. The words always exploded out of her at the worst times.

She didn’t remember the accident. It happened when she was twelve, and there were few visible scars, but the concussion had been a fierce one and the car had been totaled. Doctors figured she must have been driving the lamppost, because while her mom was thrown out and saved that way, Katya had to be torch-cut out of the car, and to look at the photos, it was more than a miracle she was alive.

Guilt was the word for her mother’s feelings towards her—it certainly wasn’t love. Love makes people shout. Guilt makes people use baby voices even when the person they’re talking to is turning eighteen in a month. Obviously Katya shared her feelings with her overbearing parent, but guilt is a powerful thing, and her mom was a powerful woman. The two together was just terrifying, so although to appearances Katya seemed to have her mother in the palm of her hand, Katya dared not deny her mother any attempt to make up for something that had happened almost six years ago.

“This place smells like fish and vomit,” she said. “Did you eat the rest of the tuna? Mom said you need to fit into your homecoming dress.”

Her sister threw her a furious look, and momentarily forgot about the dozens of people surrounding them and weaving around them to get to the rest of the party. “Would you just shut the hell up for once?”

Katya also had a jealous younger sister. Marina hadn’t been in an accident that made her a public embarrassment. This was why she was jealous, although now she was pretty much just infuriated that her parents had made her drag along her horrible bitch of a spoiled older sister as if she was babysitting her. They had probably been right in their reasoning: Katya was better than a chaperone and a pit-bull rolled into one superbitch. Marina was something of a slut—it came from her craving for attention, her therapist told her.

No, she had responded to her therapist. It comes from my senile, Tourettes-x-10-ridden loon of a sister.

Marina drew in a deep breath. “Just…go find something to drink. Please?”

Katya wasn’t a bitch by nature but by accident, so she didn’t begrudge her sister her desire to escape from her. Her parents might use Katya more as a deterrent than a daughter, but that didn’t mean she had to play that part.

She grabbed a Coke from the cooler, fishing it out from amidst cans of Natty Lite and Budweiser, and perched herself on the counter.

“Mind movin’ that fat ass?” a stumbling, baseball cap-wearing drunk demanded. He was wearing a pink Lacoste polo that was stained with spilled beer.

“That color’s not at all flattering on you. And do those sunglasses make you feel special?” She nodded at the ones he had perched on the bill of his cap. He was nonplussed.

“Say, you gonna move or not?”

“Not.” Katya sipped her drink and looked away from him deliberately. He snatched her soda and sauntered off cockily as if he’d killed burglar with his bare hands. Sighing heavily, she shifted and dropped down to the kitchen floor, ignoring the surging of bodies and ripping another can out of the mounds of ice. Someone fell into her back and her hand came up bloody. “Well thanks, shithead.”

“Pardon?”

She faced her injurer and had to cock her head back to take in everything. The guy was tall, with a tan face, a black buzz-cut, and crazy-blue irises.

“Our children would have beautiful eyes.” She was too used to herself to get easily embarrassed, but all the same she felt it was time to move away from his presence before she got herself into trouble. Her hand began to sting.

“Well I’m not really interested in testing that out right now,” he said, a half-smile of confusion forming. He raised an eyebrow when she started to turn. “What, you proposition me and then run away?”

“If you don’t want to give me babies it’s just as well that I don’t really want to touch you anyway, so I’d rather move on, now,” she said. She sipped her Coke and slid through the crowd, leaving the tall guy with the buzz-cut propping his hip on the counter with his arms crossed as he watched her leave with an odd expression on his face.

She somehow found herself out on the balcony by the time she’d finished the soda. She told the couple making out on the bench out there that they sounded like an old man drowning on his own spit, and they briskly escaped her, tossing glares of astonishment back before vanishing. Sometimes, and she kept this secret, she gave reign to her mouth and took advantage of her problem. It could always be explained away that way.

High school students were scattered all across the back yard of this house and into the line of the woods right behind.

Marina found her around midnight, after Katya had been dozing for a good half-hour. She shook her awake without even an attempt at gentleness and hissed, “That was Uther you were talking to. You don’t just talk to Uther, and you definitely don’t tell Uther you want to have his babies.”

“He sounds like a pretentious fuck. Did he give himself that name?”

“No, his English teacher did.”

Katya tapped her bottom lip thoughtfully with the pop-top she’d broken off in the typical fashion—she discovered that her one true love’s first name started with a Y, and she decided that it was just as well. “That means fuck-all to me.”

“Then why ask the question?” Marina demanded, forced into being almost as blunt and unfiltered as her sister.

“To be sarcastic.”

“Sarcasm is way to subtle for you,” her sister muttered. She grabbed onto Katya with a sigh. “Alright, we should go. There’s no way I’m getting any closer to Terrance with you here tonight.”

With a shrug, Katya left her empty can on the balcony and followed her sister through the dark bedroom and out into the rowdy hall, but no sooner had they reached the top of the crowded stairs than another hand closed over her other wrist.

“You’re hard to find. Good at avoidance?”

She turned into Uther’s crazy gaze. “Not so much. I’m actually really bad at it.”

Marina stopped tugging on her arm and all but gaped at the tall high-school celebrity. Katya, in the meantime, shook her arms loose of both of them. “What do you want?”

“Is it wrong that I want to get to know you?”

“Yes. People don’t want to get to know me. They stick by me, they stand me, but that’s not the same as getting to know me now.” Very few people could bear a sustained conversation with her. If they weren’t with her from the beginning, before the accident, they simply weren’t with her.

“What about knowing you in the biblical sense?”

Marina squeaked, but her sister only shrugged. “That’s unlikely as well. I have to leave with my slutty sister because I’m ruining her game.” The blond younger sister now made a strangled noise and kicked Katya in the ankle.

“We’re leaving,” she hissed.

“Just what I was telling him,” Katya assured her.

“We don’t often let her out into public,” Marina apologized to him with a snide tone for Katya’s benefit. “She’s the family embarrassment.”

“More like the family guilt trip. My mom nearly killed me when I was twelve,” she said for Uther’s benefit. He raised one thick eyebrow and regained his grip on her wrist.

“Would you mind leaving her here just for a short while? You can go find who you’re looking for, if it makes it better.”

Marina looked about to protest, and then stomped down and away from them. Uther put a hand on Katya’s hip and steered her into a quieter alcove, by a window. It was either fortunate or unfortunate for Katya that they passed by a boy at another window, leaning out with a cigarette or something in one hand. Katya could smell the vanilla and her eyes were drawn to the boy’s multi-colored Mohawk. It reminded her of cake, everything did, so of course she leaned in and took a big sniff, and when the guy turned shocked eyes on her she said, “I wanted to smell you.”

Uther yanked her away and into that other alcove and it took her a few moments to realize he was hiding some really hard laughter.

“Stop snickering. What do you want?”

“I kind of just want to listen to you talk.”

Katya narrowed her eyes. “I am not a spectacle. Go watch a movie, they’re full of interesting characters.”

He apparently heard the disparaging note in her voice. “You don’t like movies?”

“I hate actors.”

“As people?”

“As carbon-based life forms,” she said, finally irritated of her own volition instead of just sounding irritated. Uther backed her further into the curtains so that they were right next to the open window, with the cackling sounds of drunken high-school girls mingling with the wheedling tones of the males.

“So tell me about this accident.”

“Why?” Katya actually did find him attractive, but one advantage of having no form of impulse control was that the little things that annoyed her subconsciously bubbled to the surface immediately upon appearance—she didn’t need Freud’s dreams to tell her the things another person’s mind might try to hide from them. So Uther’s pushy attitude and nontraditional approach, no doubt born from the nontraditional brain problems she had, were more readily available than the typical surface lust she of course felt for him as an attractive specimen of the human race.

“Why so prickly?” Uther countered. His body pinned her against the wall, and while she may not have had control of her mouth, she certainly had control of her body and they both knew that if she wanted him not to touch her, she would have shoved him away. Katya didn’t. The very fact that she fascinated him fascinated her. What kind of guy was this that wasn’t offended or embarrassed by her? Oh, he certainly would be. Everyone eventually was. But most people never let it get to the point where she mortified them more than once.

“I’m not, I just say the first thing I think of.”

“Sounds freeing.”

“It’s not.”

He was warm and he was making it difficult for her to breathe, not to mention forcing her to crane her head back uncomfortably. “Are you going to let me use my lungs?”

“What were you planning on using them for?”

Katya had to wait a beat to get the next sentence out, which was a rare occurrence and implied that she was actually thinking it through. “Staying alive?”

Uther smiled widely, his face creasing into numerous dimples with the creaky quality that made her think he didn’t smile often. He pulled back an inch or two at the most, giving her room to draw breath and drop her chin a little, but not far enough away that she still didn’t feel every plane of his body.

“I think you may have terrified my sister off.”

“Because she’s not coming back? Good.”

“Do you know my sister?”

“No. I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t care,” he said with a slight shake of his head.

“Hm, I don’t know if I believe that.” And it was actually just a quip, not a result of her lack of any ability to be clever—clever implies planning. Katya hadn’t been able to plan her words for six years. Was this flirting?

“So, the accident?”

Katya shrugged, accidentally sliding her forearms against his hips in a way that suggested to him that he should move closer. She rested her head against the wall.

“I was twelve. My mom ran into a lamppost, she got thrown, I didn’t. I got my head slammed into the gear shaft and then slammed backwards by the airbag. The paramedics had to cut me out of the car.” She told more of the story than she needed to. “It made my mom pretend like she loves me.”

“Hm, I guess I need to mimic you for that, then.”

“Mommy doesn’t love Uther?”

Both of his hands settled on her hips and she stiffened a little. He didn’t move them away. “No, mommy doesn’t love Uther.” He said this distractedly, and his gaze seemed vaguely focused on her forehead and then her ear and then he was looking down between them, most likely at her cleavage, which was enhanced by the fact that her breasts was smashed against his chest.

“What’s your real name?”

“Pendragon.” His face was in shadow but his eyes caught some of the light from the back porch coming in through the window, and she liked the creepy look of him just then.

“That’s not very clever,” she said, irritated once again.

“My awkward little friend, I’m not trying to be. I’m just filling in the spaces and silences between me meeting you and me kissing you.”

“We just met,” she blurted.

“That’s why I’m dragging it out. Otherwise you might think I just like you because you’re hot.”

“I’m not hot. I’m interesting,” she replied, using the description that had been used countless times to define her.

“You are that. You smell good, too.”

“You smell like illegal substances.” He had definitely been of or around the marijuana smokers.

“Care to partake? You seemed to like the cloves our multi-colored friend over there was smoking,” he rasped.

“I kind of want to pet you,” she mused, referring to his buzz cut, although she realized what other way he might take it. Uther pretended to follow her gaze, looking up comically.

“I’m going to take that as it was meant. Go ahead.”

She was a little hesitant on actually following through, lifting her hands slowly and stopping just short of actually touching him. Uther slid his hands up her sides and then along the bare flesh of her raised arms before tugging them down so that both of her hands fell in his short, stiff hair. Katya ran her fingers through it and thought it felt like velvet being rubbed the wrong way. Her arms were covered in goosebumps and her elbows were resting on the warmth of his chest. She tugged his head so he was forced to look down and then she did something that was incredibly embarrassing even for her, although it felt right. She rubbed her cheek against his hair.

He nudged her arms so that they went around his neck and he moved his legs so that hers were between his. Uther lifted his head, not losing contact with the skin of her cheek until his mouth was on her. It was a slippery, sucking kind of kiss, and she felt his teeth touch hers before he ran his tongue against her lips and then slid it into her mouth. One of his arms encircled her waist and pulled her up against him while the other grasped her bottom and squeezed. He stumbled back a step when she decided to start kissing him back.

Uther’s grip on her bottom tightened as his other hand slid up her back to tangle in her hair. He lapped his tongue out of her mouth to leave a cold trail of saliva along her jaw-line and then down her neck, where he pressed his lips and sucked slightly before moving back to her mouth, wetter than ever. Because she figured he was a little drunk, it seemed she could experiment without fear of reprisals. This time, she got her tongue in his mouth first, and just when she thought she couldn’t open her mouth any wider, he pushed her back against the wall and kissed her more forcefully than ever, never moving his hand from her ass.

And that’s how Marina found them after who knows how long. Katya jerked back from Uther to see her sister gaping at them in something close to horror.

“Time to go?” Katya asked, sucking in air. Uther’s ragged breathing in her ear almost drowned out her sister’s response.

“…y-yes?”

He groaned and finally detached his hands to prop himself against the wall with his elbows, keeping her caged between them. “Don’t leave,” he said against her ear, so quietly that Marina couldn’t hear him.

She didn’t reply, instead asking, “What time is it?” She peeked at her sister over Uther’s shoulder.

Marina was still just staring at her until Katya managed to lift her arm around him and tap her wrist with her other hand. It was a strange sort of embrace. Uther dropped his hands gradually, first clasping her face between them, then dropping to her shoulders, sliding down to her elbows and then transferring to her waist before he momentarily hooked his thumbs in her pockets and leaned into her one more time.

“It’s, um, almost one,” came Marina’s tiny voice. Katya looked Uther straight in his strange-colored eyes as he shifted his grip on her, and neither of them spoke.

“Alright.”

Slowly, outwardly hesitant but actually quite deliberate, she took his face in her hands and, with eyes open and still looking directly into his, rose on tiptoes and kissed him. It didn’t deepen, but with absolutely no space between them she could tell that he liked the feel of her. The thumbs in her pockets pulled their crotches more snugly together for a moment. Then she just as slowly and deliberately released him. It was a moment before he loosened the cage he’d made with his body. Before he did, he also touched her face, smoothing his thumb over her brow, along the curve of her cheek and then over the corner of her lips while he cupped the back of her neck with his left hand.

“I work at Sam’s. Come in and visit me on Tuesdays.” Uther didn’t kiss her again, but he smelled her, tucking his face into the crook of her neck before dropping one hand completely and letting her pull away.

She wouldn’t visit—she wasn’t a social person and her family didn’t like letting her loose—but that was okay. He’d be taking things into his own hands, and she would embarrass him and then let him.

A/N: I’ll probably edit this to make the things she says more outrageous…I actually kind of like this.