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Roads on her Face #6: Jim’s Place
I followed him anyway, afraid of his drunkenness but willing to take the chance for his love.
I knew when he got this way it was a toss-up- he could be caring, he could listen to a child’s small day of stories, or he could tell you to shut your mouth and get him another beer. He could be one, then the other, too, so being around him was balancing a plate on your head- an expensive plate, one someone else had paid for. The rocks crunched beneath army boots, and the heartbeat in my head muffled my own quiet footsteps. The hot desiccated desert radiated reflections of bare mountains around the little valley, bounced rays off the broken windshields of the junkyard. Green oxidized pieces of glass and rusted metal littered the pale silt dirt, dirt made dirtier with human shedding. This place was far as you could go down a dirt road, away from the people who hated my dad, away from the evils of society and the government and disease-ridden cities. He told us about the government, and how they’d screwed him in Vietnam. I heard vague references to Agent Orange, and how his bones hurt at night until he had to drink it away.
The man who owned this place weighed five hundred pounds- as much one of the half-ton trucks wrecked in piles on the yard. Jim would heave his mass out of the blue van with the lift on the side, and the specially-made seat so that he could press himself against the steering wheel and still drive. Everywhere he went a sour smell followed, the smell of sweat and milk and too many doughnuts. When he would come to check on us, maybe once a month, he would sit in one of the backseats we had pulled from one of the junked cars for him. His throne- with its broken seatbelts still dangling. Sometimes my brothers would dare each other to smell it after he had gone, collapsing in disgusted giggles when they discovered that the smell of his gargantuan ass lingered there, for hours. I smelled it once, and was sick in one of the creosote bushes. I imagined what it would be like to smell like that. Would you know it, or would it encroach on your senses slowly, so that you never knew? I guessed his wife didn’t care anymore.
Jim kept a travel trailer on the junkyard lot, a nice one with a generator and a TV. We were too far from anything to have running water, and we used kerosene lamps at night in our own small trailer, and propane for our stove and refrigerator. In the swelling heat, we marched the mile to Jim’s trailer. I felt the beads of sweat drop down my spine, pulling my hat low over my eyes to stop them from burning. I was silent, thinking maybe he had forgotten about me.
“You all right, kid?” He turned then, and I saw the sweat in his beard and behind his sunglasses. He hadn’t forgotten.
I nodded, and focused on my feet, one in front of the other, leaning in to the heat as if it was cotton. It was probably 120 degrees today, at least. You learned to take things only a second at a time, out here, because to think of more than one was unbearable. Exist, only exist, until the cool blessed sigh of night descended, with its myriad stars, the smells of the flowers that could only open at night. They just existed too.
Finally the trailer loomed above us, impossibly large to a little girl whose family of six lived in one half its size. It was unlocked, and we walked in to heat that felt twice as bad as outside, stifling and stale.
He came back and sat across from me, popping open a beer he’d pulled from the propane-powered fridge. “Nice, eh?” I nodded again at him, not wanting to talk and spoil his mood.
He sank back in his chair, taking off his hat and glasses, and we waited for the air to cool together, waited for things to be bearable.
“I’m gonna start the generator, and get the AC going. Turn on the radio.” He was always short with words, but I was thankful that he wasn’t yelling. I scooted delicately back into one of the plush La-Z- Boys, careful that my dirty pants didn’t soil the clean fabric. I turned the radio to the only station we could get out here, far from transmitters or repeaters. It was news all day; and sometimes old shows like The Green Hornet and The Lone Ranger. When those came on, we sat around, rapt, the way kids in the 50s must have when those first came out. The generator flapped into life, and I momentarily thought of my mom and siblings listening to it in the heat, dreaming of air conditioning. Its first hot breath licked the side of my face, prurient and vile.
I watched him from the corner of my eye, and something struck me as I did. His face was unlined, boyish from a new haircut, aged only by the beard. His eyes flicked up to catch mine, and suddenly I was sorry for him.
Roads on Her Face #7: Love in Heaven
Oregon in the summertime is how I imagine heaven must be. The lush life surrounding you seems like decadence after the bare bones of the desert. Up north, the rain covers the bones with green skin and fur and everything is softened and curved, like a woman’s body. We got books from the library on edible plants and berries to make sure we wouldn’t die. Wherever we traveled, the library was always on the list of places we needed to scope out. It was the library that taught me to use a computer, because neither of my parents knew how. I spent hours sometimes playing Oregon Trail, where someone always died on the way out West, or Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?—Carmen’s footsteps dark and pixelated across the screen as she somehow always evaded capture.
We had the old Airstream, the one now parked and rusting behind my mother’s house in New Mexico. It was the newest, nicest trailer we ever owned, sold for cheap by an older Canadian couple whose wandering days were over. Mom had bought it, the time before the time that Dad was gone for good. She could have seen then that she was capable on her own, that she had the wits and the strength to do much better on her own than she ever did with him. He was holding her back, maybe because her success would highlight his failure as a parent or as a human being. But she didn’t, and our hiatus from the inexorable pull of his angry gravity wasn’t long enough.
I forget how we came to hear about the job. Dad must have met someone when we were camped out at Jim’s Place, 40 miles on a dirt road out in the desert outside of Bouse, Arizona. That was a place we returned more than once, another repetitive rest stop when the rest of our options had worn thin or fallen through for one reason or another – usually, “another” with my father’s stamp on it. We didn’t have computers or a phone, much less electricity, so the only way to contact us was usually to send mail addressed “General Delivery” to the approximate location where we had last been heard from. I wonder belatedly how many letters disappeared into the realm of unread mail, followed us just a little too slowly. And if any of those letters could have changed the road we were on. Because anything could change the road, at any time. The road was constantly in a state of flux, a rapidly rolling path littered with side streets, pitfalls, and supposed shortcuts. You never knew what was around that next hairpin curve, and that right there was much of the draw. One thing I learned quickly, is that you just never know anything.
The job was perfect for us, really. Mom and Dad were campground hosts at a forested campground on the Clackamas River outside of Estacada, in the northern part of the state just southeast of Portland. They had to stay for the summer, that was the deal. There were a few campground sites they were supposed to collect fees for, clean up, keep the bathrooms in working order, and in return we had beautiful riverside spot to park the trailer, forests full of trails, all the strawberries and thimbleberries you could eat. There was sour grass, blackberries, salads made from dandelion greens, blueberries, gooseberries, nettle tea. With all this food right out the back door, who needed to buy groceries? We had the usual food stamps, of course, but us kids would come home regularly stained berry-colored from our foraging. It wasn’t that we were hungry, we delighted in the abundance and imagined we could live out in the forest on our own forever. In the desert, you would most likely die. And the water! Our dry eyes and bodies soaked up the sight and feel of the cold, clear Clackamas. If we waded in our legs would immediately go numb, but we road inner tubes down to the whirlpool-bend in the river where it smacked up against a sheer rock face. If you climbed the face, you could look down into the crystalline flow and make out the shadowy shapes of giant catfish, reminders of an age when there were things out there that would eat you.
I think my brothers and I all fell in love that summer, falling for city girls and boys camping for the weekend and running with the “wild kids.” We must have seemed so strange to them, those pink-scrubbed kids with dads with jobs and moms who had a washing machine and conveniences like babysitters.
I fell in love with Randy, who must have been 19 or 20. I was probably 11. I never had time for the childish boys, who always seemed so…childish. I am a watcher, a watcher of people and their actions and an observer and cataloger. Randy reminded me of a Montana boy in a book I’d read, who wore Wranglers and a ball cap and worked on ranches in the summer. He smelled of cologne and he made my heart flutter. I never talked to him, but I yearned for some imaginary future with him in rolling fields surrounded by horses and log cabins. I watched him talking with my parents out by the campfire for a few nights, and I hid behind the screen of the Airstream and thought about what it would be like to have a real life. So this was love, this constant pang in your chest for something you could never have. This growing, this expanding into lobes of your body you hadn’t known existed. I brushed my waist-length hair at night and thought of him. He was gone in a few days, but I never forgot him. That summer marked a quiet shift in me, one where I began slowly emerging from my close little shell, from the place behind my eyes where I only watched. I started to feel the presence of the people around me, to dream of things I had only read about.
Pussy On Fire
D’Avina was feeing Doritos to the kitten. The kitten looked at her like she was batshit, but she daintily picked them up and crunch, crunch, crunch. The kitten’s face was orange but she was supposed to be grey.
“I always just feed her chips, ya know, like, cuz she like likes them,” D’Avina was twirling her greasy blonde hair vacuously round and round her hot pink manicure. She popped her gum like a champ. I was 9 years old and I knew this one would always be one shat short of a full pantsload. She must have been about 20, which seemed pretty old to me to be feeding chips to cats. I mean, I’d never had a cat but I was pretty sure I’d seen cat food at the store and it wasn’t in the same aisle as the chips.
Kitty Kitty finished her dinner and came to sit in my lap. She was a pretty smart kitty. I petted her and she purred and went to sleep. She had a tiny perfect face like a stuffed cat I’d had a few years back. That was before my brother had used it in the reenactment of a fiery car crash he’d seen on Dukes of Hazzard. (Not the General Lee, it never burned).
“You like Kitty don’t you sweetie? Well maybe when you’re big like me and you have a big strong man like Darrel he might buy you one for your birthday like Darrel did me. He’s just so sweet.” D’Avina popped her gum and got that faraway look in her eye. Wait, that was already there. Never mind.
Darrel was a big, ugly thug of a truck driver. He wore a belt buckle the size of Texas and had hair like a black fir tree. He wore a plaid shirt most of the time, and he had a mean look in his eye that made me avoid him the way I did my aunt that smelled like throw-up, but only when she was drinking sherry. Her name was Sherry.
“Uh huh,” I said because I’d been taught not to backtalk grown-ups unless I wanted a swift kick. Who wants one of those? All I knew was I hoped I never had a Darrel.
“Oh, there he is now!” D’Avina smiled her sticky lipgloss smile and showed her missing tooth. I always wondered what happened to it. Maybe a cavity.
I took Darrel’s big roaring truck noise outside as my cue to skedaddle. I’d be back that night to see if I could coax Kitty Kitty into coming outside to play with me. I had a ball of hair she might be interested in. My brother wasn’t anymore after I’d tied it to his shoe and told him to run because a spider was chasing him. I had about 3 good days of belly laughs out of that particular game. I still giggle every now and then when I remember the sheer terror in his round bulging eyes as that hair spider stayed exactly 5 inches away from him no matter how fast he ran. Man, I guess I was an asshole at 9.
About 10 pm when it was dark I snuck out of our Airstream trailer and slid through the dark like a ninja in pajamas. Darrel and D’Avina had a fire outside, and before I even got close enough to see them I heard Darrel yelling. He always sounded like a bullhorn, especially after he’d pounded enough Schlitz.
“You fuckin’ lil bitch!” He said, and tossed a beer can into the dark almost on my head. It was close enough to smell the piss-smell of the cheap brew. D’Avina wasn’t smiling now. She was turned mostly away from him and was staring out into the night. She did a lot of staring with those big blue cow-eyes. Kitty Kitty wasn’t into the yelling, I could tell. She cowered under D’Avina’s camp chair. She glared at Darrel like she wanted to kill him. I got to know her well over the next 18 years so I can safely say if she’d had a knife she’d have slit him dickhair to armpit in a second. If that cat had thumbs she would have ruled the world.”You listen to me you little CUNT!” Darrel spit, stumbling toward D’Avina. I didn’t move a muscle. I was good at ninja-ing and the nighttime never scared me. As long as it was dark I was safe.
Kitty Kitty hissed from under the chair, and D’Avina just cowered into a little ball like she knew what was coming. I don’t think she did this time, though, and Darrel snatched Kitty Kitty from under the chair and just chucked her right into the fire. I was already frozen but my breath stopped as she shrieked. She jumped so high she might have been a bird flying off into the night. D’Avina started sobbing and ran into their trailer, slamming the screen door after her, and Darrel took off after her like a drunk raging bull.Kitty Kitty found me in the dark, because cats can see better even than me. She had a couple of burns and no whiskers, but she was mostly ok. She was pissed off, though, and she growled her little growl the whole time as I cradled her in my arms and took her home with me. She slept with me that night, and next day Darrel and D’Avina were goners. They’d packed up and taken off in the night, and nothing could have made me happier. Me and Kitty Kitty always growled at dudes like that, from that point on.
Fifty Shades of Grey- if you read those books, read this
Excellent commentary by writer Roxanne Gay on the big “Twilight for adults” kink erotica Fifty Shades of Grey series- THIS is why I didn’t like them, THIS is the problem with these control-centered heroes of “romantic fantasy” genre books:
Have you read any of the three books in this series? What did you think of the way BDSM was portrayed? How did you feel about the male lead, Christian Grey? What does this say about our current views on sexuality, if anything?
Roads on Her Face #5: The Cah, 800, and Whut?
We were living in a station wagon again, all six of us. I must have been around 9 or ten. We’d rolled into Quartzsite, Arizona late the night before after a few weeks out in the desert. Quartzsite is like a yard sale on crack, crammed with what seems like miles of old snowbirds selling shit, and tables creaking under the weight of rocks. They sell a lot of rocks out there, also whirly-gig wind-catchers, plastic Chinese toys, and badly-painted southwestern ceramics. People with 1/18 Navajo blood from an ancestor in the 1800s who raped an Indian sell jewelry as “authentic Native American” for ten times what it’s worth. The place has a pall over it, a dust-colored veil that smells of desperation. Casual visitors can’t see it, instead seeing a place full of great deals and gems, but we were hardly casual visitors. It was a winter deal-making place for Dad, a place to rest and make some money selling guns, working for a month for someone, or wheeling and dealing the way he did. He wasn’t particularly outgoing, but he had a quiet powerful way of making people do what he wanted them to do. It wasn’t the smooth salesman gig, something darker like maybe he’d rough you up if you didn’t pay him what he wanted. We went to school in Quartzsite, once. The school had just opened and was full of desert rats like us, and maybe some of the grandkids of snowbirds. We weren’t the only ones getting the free lunch, this time, or the only ones with worn clothing and messy hair. They fed us that vile peanut butter pre-mixed with grape jam on limp white bread every day, until we finally couldn’t choke it down any longer and just went hungry at lunchtime.
We were all sitting and waiting for Dad, as usual, in the dirt parking lot of some junk salesman. He had a lot of cars parked around a trailer with clapboard wings added on. Us kids cracked the door to the station wagon and tried not to move, sweating and sticking to the seats anyway. The sun beat down already, though it was early in spring. The heat would soon drive the snowbirds north, scattering them toward the coast or back to whatever cool hole they burrowed into up north. I stared up into the pale blue sky, powdered with the heat and the reflection of the barren dirt below. The only escape from the forced closeness of our little nuclear family (nuclear, because we as electrons were always rubbing too close, too close and explosions were so near the surface) was to mentally distance oneself. I almost always put a book between myself and our too-real reality. Thousands of books later, I would sometimes confuse what I had been reading with what had actually occurred at certain times in the past. When we were stranded on the side of the road because our latest rust-heap had broken down, I was actually riding a dragon over some far misty mountain, or was deep in the drama playing out between Nancy Drew and her totally hetero female friend George.
I was daydreaming, projecting far out into the hemisphere as near to cold space as I dared, so I missed the actual final transaction. I saw instead, Dad coming back to the car with a grin beneath his beard and jangling keys in his hand.
“Load up, kids. Let’s get everything out of this piece and put it in our new van,” he said, waving over his shoulder to the stocky bald guy behind him who was sighting down the barrel of a big handgun, one Dad had recently had tucked into his waistband. Behind the guy was a blue and white-striped Dodge van, the kind with the big white fiberglass bubble on top circa maybe 1970. It didn’t look like much, but it looked like it had a hell of a lot more room than the station wagon. And it looked like it could pull a trailer, so we could only hope that the next wheeling-dealing result would be a trailer with a stove, beds, and maybe even room to haul some bikes.
Dad was almost gleeful, coming off his deal high. “You should have heard that fucker,” he was telling Mom. He mimicked the guy’s heavy Boston accent, which we had heard snippets of as the two men had talked. “I offered him the car and 600 bucks for the van, which is worth twice that. He was like, ‘whut, the cah, 800, and whut? You ain’t foolin’ me.’ So I threw in the Smith and Wesson.” He grinned because that had been his plan all along.
As soon as my brothers heard this, they collapsed into giggles, gleeful too as they pulled all of our belongings out of the car and began piling them together. The van was something new, and maybe it meant something good. Plus, none of us had ever heard a Boston accent that we could remember. “The cah, 800, and whut?” Rowdy laughed as he poked Reno, who took up the refrain. “And whut? And whut?” Dad cuffed his boys on the back of their tow-heads. “That’s right, boys, who’s the man huh? Your dad knows what he’s doing.”
Off near the chain-link fence, the Boston guy scratched his head and watched us move. Transferring our belongings took 20 minutes, at the most, because we were good. He stood and watched us as we rolled away, never looking back.
Chapter 3: The VIP Room
WARNING- GRAPHIC CONTENT. Avoid reading this story if you are under 18 and/or are offended by graphic sex, drug use, threesomes, lesbians, or strippers.
In the car, we sped back to the house on the freeway with the wheels spinning steadily beneath us, the sky darkening until the blue glow of the night sky following the sleeping sun was the only color, along with the red lights blurring by as we passed them. Mike ground his ass into the seat, hands clenching on the wheel was he watched us, his dick straining against the fabric of his tan trousers. Where the tip rose, a small wet spot dampened the fabric, darkening and spreading slowly.
I was in the front seat, with it leaned back as far as it would go in the cramped little Z. Dorian was on me, pushing herself between Mike and I as far as she could. Her top was pushed down off of one shoulder, her heavy breast exposed with its dark, lush nipple. She was kissing me all over, my shoulder, my neck, down the tops of my breasts. My hand reached to the weight of her breast, her hand reached down the front of my unbuttoned jeans.
“Mmm,” she breathed in my ear, tongue tracing wet and hot along the outside edges of my ear. My skin lit up, tracers of nerve endings shooting down toward my clit, my own hips grinding slowly in response. My breath came heavier and faster.
“Oh, baby, you girls are so hot,” Mike was biting his lip, glancing back and forth from us to the road. “I can’t concentrate, I’m going to have to pull over.” The car already began to slow.
“No,” said Dorian, pulling back from my neck to glare at him. “Let’s go to the house.”
“We’re almost there, Mike,” I stood up for her. “Let’s not get caught out here on the road.” I reached to console him, tracing my finger from his jaw down the front of his white linen shirt. The smell of his cologne, heated by his racing pulse, rose from his skin followed by the sharper smell of his sweat. He was practically ready to shoot his load. I smiled at him, laughing softly under my breath. It had been quite a while since I’d seen him so turned on. Maybe it was that I was actually into it this time, not just a half-assed participant.
I whispered in her ear, watching Mike with seductive eyes, “I don’t know if I can make it either. You have my pants soaking wet.” She laughed, whispering that too. She tasted of rum and sugar, her tongue insistent in my mouth. She circled her hand in my pants, avoiding touching the most sensitive skin, the skin that was begging her to touch it. She ground her hand down into my pelvis bone, the blunt pain making me ache even more for a gentle touch.
“OH, god!” Mike was caressing my ass, his hand wedged under the back of my jeans. “Almost there, girls, I’m almost there.” I think he meant he was almost to our driveway. I grabbed Dorian’s hand and tugged it over my shoulder and led it to my breast, and her fingers found my nipple immediately, rolling and pinching it between her thumb and forefinger. I felt like I was about to come apart by the time I felt the crunch of gravel under the tires and sat up to see the lights of our house behind the mesquite trees. Dorian groaned as I pushed her gently to sit up. I grasped her hand, tracing circles in her palm. “Are you ready? We’re here. I’m so ready to fuck you,” I told her, low-voiced and watching Mike’s reaction. I was afraid we were going to crash, the headlights jerking crazily against the desert landscape, Mike barely glancing out the window and correcting sharply when he began to swerve. To my relief, the car finally stopped and Mike practically flew out the door to come around to our side and help us out. Dorian still tried to stay between me and him, pressing her big tits and groin into me and her butt back into him to keep the distance. He grabbed her by the hair, pulling her head back and driving his tongue into her ear like a tool. She gasped and winced as her hair pulled, her arms jerking up away from where they’d been buried below my waistband. I dropped to my knees in the gravel, ignoring the pain from the rocks. I quickly pulled her loose pants down over her hips, exposing her lack of panties and more smooth brown skin. Her back arched over the side of the car and she moaned as my lips found the wet gush from her pussy.
Mike barely kept her from sliding down to join me on the gravel, pulling her up hard and reaching down to pull me up too. “Come on!” Mike hurried to the front door, kicking the car’s door closed and unlocking the door in a blur of speed. He was about to fuck the shit out of something or someone.
We made it as far as the recessed living room, which was spread with thick shag rugs in a deep blood-red color. I hit the floor first, and Mike ripped my pants off as Dorian removed my shirt and bra.
Mike’s cock was nearly ceramic, hard enough to break glass. I could feel him nearly cum as I wrapped one hand around it and slid two fingers of my other hand into Dorian’s waiting lips. She rocked her hips slowly, grinding my hand into the floor and against the nub of her clit. Mike pushed her to the side and entered me, while holding her face with both of his hands and kissing her violently. Her hands rose to his neck and she choked him as he kissed her, their struggle making his eyes wild and the vein stand out at his temple. I could tell the lack of air to his brain made him even hotter, her resistance fueling his fire. Four, five pumps into me and then he pushed her down to the floor next to me and rammed into her, my juices on his dick easing the way. Wide-eyed, she turned her head to me and pulled me against her as he fucked her, kissing me deeply as if she were pretending that I was the one doing it. When he blew his load all over her back, she slid down to rest between my legs and sucked gently at my clit until I came, moaning, my fingers twisted in her hair. We fucked again, after that, and twice more in the hot tub before the fingers of dawn lit the eastern sky.
Vacate
And the first glimpse of Caribbean blue, the glassy-walled world of brilliant fishes,
She trailed tiny pink paper umbrellas, spewed grey clouds of exhaust above notice
From careless piña coladas, from carnival-bright aorta-painted smokestacks.
And the music blared over the quizzical sighs of dolphins as they tried to leap high enough
To peer through portholes at strange pink whales beached beside buffets of beef and beer.
In Mo’ Bay the natives glared from windowless shacks and broken porches
White faces pressed against sweaty taxi windows stared back shameless.
The jungle pressed close, the vines twisted up toward opportunity, and
Why-can’t-they-just-get-a-real-job. Why-can’t-they-just-go-away.
Time Travel
Art, Burning Man 2007
Photo by P. Alanna Roethle
This time-traveling, it tires me. I am never quite sure when I am, or whether I am moving forward or backward. The lines are drawn most darkly when I have lost something or someone that I tried to anchor to, though I was most aware in this process that it was fruitless and had gone about fastening myself temporarily anyway. We are not allowed anchors in this torrent of time. I am saddened when I am in the middle of joy or pleasure, knowing that it will be only the blink of an eye when I am looking back on this joy from somewhere far away. Standing in five-year-old shoes, I can recall quite clearly fast-forwarding in my head to age 30, and thinking – hmm, so this is it. Yes, this is just as I thought it would be. Yes, it is almost as if I have been here before. In my barefoot 30s, I look ahead to 60 and the losses and the pain I will have seen by then. I look backward, from my future self, and wish for these years that today I might call “now.” I am never stable, never living as much in the now as I would like. It is impossible, because I am never sure where I am.
I have been visited recently, by disconcerting dreams, presences, whatever you feel safe calling them. The medical profession calls it sleep paralysis, hallucinations, night terrors. I like to think I know better. I know that I don’t know everything, and that we can’t explain scientifically everything that occurs. I know that I see things, sometimes, and that I feel very specifically about these things without having a rational explanation. I have dreamed of future places, and later visited them. I have watched from afar, from above and from below.
This thing, lately. It is a buzzing presence that calls my name, off to the right of my vision. I see it in the gap between asleep and awake, the place that I always recognize and that I can use to control my dreams if I so choose. Often in that place I am distracted by things that are not of me, nor of my imagination. There are other THINGS there that I do not recognize. This one, it has called my name. The other afternoon, when I was drifting in that in-between place (though oddly I could still see everything in the room) it began dragging me out of myself, rocking me, and I felt myself start to disconnect and release. I did not feel pain or fear, and was calm. I also knew instantly that this is not what I wanted, and I pulled myself back. I can’t explain or talk to anyone about this. I am too practical, I understand that it is not believable if you have not experienced it yourself. I marvel at these astral projectors, lucid dreamers, OBE seekers – why would you want to leave this body? We leave so quickly anyway. I do not want to test that silver thread that anchors us to reality.
Chapter Two: The VIP Room
WARNING- GRAPHIC CONTENT. Avoid reading this story if you are under 18 and/or are offended by graphic sex, drug use, threesomes, lesbians, or strippers.
So I texted her the next Friday at work, asking if she wanted to go to a club. My phone chirped as I was talking to a patient, her response waiting under my desk. I pushed the forms across the desk for the guy to fill out and grabbed for my phone, excited.
When? It wasn’t no. She couldn’t hate me, even though she’d barely talked to me when we’d gone for beers. I hadn’t exactly told Mike the whole story; I’d bribed one of the other girls at work who knew her to ask her to come with us for happy hour. I didn’t know how she felt about me since we hadn’t talked much. A few gruff, short questions from her, and she’d given her number to me and another girl to let her know when we were going out again. Nothing specific, no sure signs that she wanted me to call her.
Any day you want to go. She texted back right away.
How bout 2morrow?
I’ll call you right after work. This was the first time I’d been excited in a while. One other thing.
?
Here was the kicker.
Here was the kicker.
My husband wants 2 cum. I stuck my phone back under the desk, drumming my fingers and glancing nervously around the office. She’d either never talk to me again or it would work out. It was taking a big chance. I wouldn’t want details of Mike’s and my marriage spread around the office. I didn’t know her well enough to trust her. It took a long time to get an answer, and I started to chew my nails. I watched Elysa, the friend who’d invited Dorian out for drinks. I was waiting for her to get a text, outing me and asking why her crazy work friend she’d just met was proposing weird shit over the phone.
My phone beeped again. I picked it up.
Sure. Whatever. I let out the breath I’d been holding. It wasn’t going to be hard at all.
It wasn’t. We went to a club in the city, 45 minutes away from home, hoping we wouldn’t run into anyone we knew. It wasn’t that likely. The place we went was near the border and most of the clientele was from the other side. They stared at us, the way strangers stare at pretty girls, but that was all. Dorian was dressed up and wore some thick musky perfume, laced with an overtone of lilacs. It walked a line somewhere between man and woman, like the clothes she picked that night. All black, of course, pinstripe pants and a tight black tank top, her sleeve tattoos exposed, hair curly and loosed from its usual ponytail, black eyeliner ringing her eyes and a silver choker with a goddess symbol completing the look. Later I knew it was flattery to see her that dressed up. She didn’t do it for just anyone. Introducing herself to Mike when we picked her up, she was brusque, her voice low.
“Nice to meet you,” she said, shaking his hand quickly and watching me. He nodded at her, grinning at the cleavage bulging from the top of her shirt.
“I’m…I’m sorry that was rude,” I started, embarrassed. I had been too busy looking at her to remember Mike. He nudged me, smiling over the back of the driver’s seat at her. I guessed she wasn’t too fat for him. The ride to the club was silent, the music too loud to talk and all of us on edge. The nature of the tension in the car was as yet undetermined. Was it sex? Was it a wish for escape from this strange situation? When we arrived at the club we all walked in a few feet apart from each other, not breaking the self-imposed bubbles of space around each of us, giving the others time to process what was going to happen. Mike asked us what we wanted to drink, and strolled off to get a round, leaving us to talk.
We didn’t talk much, a few words, turning to watch the dance floor, an electricity between us. She moved closer to stand next to me at the table we’d picked, far back in the corner where it was dark. Mike stood at the bar, glancing back to see how things were going as he waited for drinks.
“How long you been married?” she asked, looking back at him. “You look pretty young to be married.”
“I’m 23. I got married when I was 19.” I smiled at her, liking the gleam of her white teeth against her skin. She glowed all over, a candle beneath her skin, contrasting starkly with the darkness of her clothes and hair.
“Anyone tell you that’s too young?” She smiled again. This was the first time I’d really seen her smile, and she was more beautiful then. She wasn’t pretty, like me. Some people wouldn’t have looked twice at her, missing the subtlety of her beauty. She was striking, exotic.
“I guess. It got me out of Missouri.”
“That’s where the accent was from. I knew you weren’t Texan, and you’re no Mexican either. That’s so cute, downhome country girl.” She laughed then, short barks of air.
“Shut up. It’s not that bad is it?” I didn’t think I had much of an accent.
“Miss-ou-reh?” Her laugh was contagious.
Just then Mike ruined it and came back with the drinks. She stopped laughing, but stayed close enough to me that I could smell her musk. Mike slipped in between us, handing over her rum and coke and me my standard 7 and 7. He slid a hand to both of our backs. “You girls ready to party?”
She was ready to party. She got drunk, quickly and obviously. Her speech slurred and she swayed on her feet. I wondered fleetingly if she had a drinking problem. I think she was getting drunk because she knew she’d have to deal with Mike, and she’d had a hard enough time with men in the past. She got touchy, reaching out to trace the small of my back as she talked, leaning on me, and finally asked me to dance.
Mike leered from the edge of the dance floor as she led me slowly out to the center of the swaying dark people, grinding and dipping to the reggaeton thudding in the warm depths of the bar. She pulled me close, the alcohol on her breath reminding me strangely of my father. Her breath on my cheek sent a shiver down my back. She was making me feel different. Not like myself.
She whispered into my ear. “When we gonna get out of here?” My spine tingled when her lips brushed my earlobe. I turned to whisper in hers but her lips were in the way, soft and insistent. I didn’t see Mike watching, forgetting he was there. Our bodies fit together perfectly, her curves to mine. With the girls Mike brought home I was usually the aggressor, since I was the wife and because the third party of a threesome never really knows her place. Dorian and I were going to be hard to figure out. We were meeting in the middle.
“We can go anytime you want,” I breathed, my body on fire from the kiss. I led her by the hand toward the door. Mike was already holding it open for us.
