Wanting so closely

We’re both seventeen and white trash. Horse crazy and rough around the edges. My family is wonderful but I’m a mess. Her family is a disaster and she’s shut down. Sometimes, when the sun is beating through spreading green leaves and the river is actually running through this high Arizona desert, we go skinny dipping. Every time, she backs out. After I’m already naked. She sits on the bank, carefully not looking at me. Except through the blunt fringe of her bangs. I splash water her way and she moves before it hits. I knew even before that.
When we’re both drunk, she’ll let herself be touched. Not sexually, but at all. Faking at being passed out in her clothes, she doesn’t protest when I pull off her belt, her boots, her jeans. I stand over her, seeing her eyes move behind their lids, her throat work down a dry swallow. Seeing the muscles tense and release as she gambles that I’ll just be nice. That I’ll never call her on it. Complete the process. Unbutton her plaid shirt past the farmer’s tan. Never kiss her cheek, always browned. Never press soft against soft.
I know what I want, and that she doesn’t want to know. I know that if we weren’t in the middle of nowhere, if dyke weren’t an insult of high degree, she still wouldn’t choose it. She wants to fit in. Be something safe. Disguise the very things that make her a magnet. I maintain the charade so I can give her a safe moment of skin contact. A hug she can’t duck as I wrestle her into bed, tucking a blanket gently under her chin. I know if I linger, she’ll roll away.