I did the perfume like AK47 told me, putting some on my neck and the insides of my wrists, not too much, since some people didn’t like loud smells. Especially spies. Being quiet and hidden about things is not a very Viking thing to do. You should be brave and stand up to your enemies face-to-face.
“Except there are no enemies here,” AK47 said. “Unless you count Gert.”
People are always telling women and girls what to do, AK47 said. And people were always telling me what to do too.
“I’ll be back in a few hours,” I told Gert. “AK47 and I are having girl time.”
He was lying on the couch, not listening. He put up his hand and gave me a thumbs-up.
“Sounds awful. Tell her I say hello.”
I said I would and he did not ask any more questions. He had been working on an e-mail he was going to send to Dean Horowitz, who said that he was allowed back to school, but would need to take summer school classes to make up for the ones he stopped going to.
When I got in the car AK47 looked at me and smiled and said, “You did good on the lipstick, Zee,” and then licked her finger and rubbed my face where some of the lipstick had gotten smudged.
* * *
We drove to the hotel. It was not very fancy, but it was also not like the hotel near our apartment, which AK47 said is where men bring women to have sex with them for money. The hotel was a Holiday Inn and when we were going in we walked by people holding briefcases and talking about banks.
Marxy and Pearl were waiting in the lobby of the hotel. Marxy was wearing a shirt and tie with Batman on it. He waved at me and I waved at him. Pearl was already talking to the woman at the front desk and AK47 went there to talk too.
“Are you all going to be staying in the room?” the woman at the front desk said.
AK47 handed over her credit card and said, “What’s it to you?”
The woman was looking at me and Marxy. I wondered if she knew what we were going to do. I went over to Marxy and gave him a kiss on the cheek. I got on tiptoes until I was off the ground, since he was taller than me. My lipstick left a picture of my mouth on his cheek.
“I love you, Zelda,” he said. “Go then dang.”
“I love you, Marxy,” I said, and held on to his hand.
“It’s extra for double occupancy,” the desk woman said.
AK47 gave her THE LOOK and the woman at the desk swiped the credit card in the machine. AK47 put her hands on her hips. The credit card machine beeped.
“Here are some keys,” the desk woman said, handing over plastic cards.
When AK47 got the keys, she gave the woman one last mean look before we all walked down the hallway.
The carpet was brown and orange and had shapes that were like arrows, with other shapes that were colored green and looked like cactuses. The arrows were a good omen because they looked like Tiwaz, the rune for Tyr, who is a god that lives in the sky.
“You look very beautiful,” Marxy said.
He put his big hand around my hand and we held them together like that, like they were praying together, just like the Bon Jovi song where he sang about living on a prayer. We held hands and lived on the prayer of our hands all the way up to the fourth floor. AK47 and Pearl had also gotten a room, across the hall.
They would stay there in case we needed them.
“Let’s take a look-see,” Pearl said, putting one of the plastic cards into the door. A green light beeped and we went inside.
There was one bed and curtains that were white and you could see through, and an alarm clock on a table next to the bed. Pearl took a bottle of water from her bag and put it on the table beside the bed. She also took out a few other things, containers and also a package of napkins that were wet, in case we needed to clean up “any messes.”
“What messes?” I said. The hotel room was very clean and we would not be eating in it.
AK47 and Pearl looked at each other and then Pearl said, “Just in case.”
“We’ll be right across the hall,” AK47 said. “Okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
“I am trusting you with my son, Zelda,” Pearl said, giving me a hug.
“You can trust me.”
“Do you know about safe sex?”
“Everything and then some,” AK47 said. “Condoms. The moves. Everything. Boom.”
Pearl nodded. “Marxy also knows everything there is to know. And you know things will have to go step by step?” Pearl asked me. “He has been going through the steps today.”
“I don’t even need the paper with them written down,” Marxy said, pulling on his Batman tie.
“I think we don’t need the paper either,” I said. “I think we will know what to do.”
“He might need to take his time, so don’t get frustrated. Things might not go as fast for him as you’d like.”
For other people it is not very romantic, having a list of things to do. People are supposed to have sex “naturally,” meaning without having to think. But because Marxy isn’t good at not-thinking, he needs to be really sure about what he is doing before he does it.
This was one of the deal-breakers for the sex: that Marxy would need to go slow and I wasn’t allowed to get mad if he needed to stop and go back to steps that made him comfortable. That was fine because I liked to use steps when I did new things too, and I had my own steps. For example, I wanted to kiss a lot before having sex, and before having sex he had to put on the condom.
AK47 hugged me. “Are you ready for this? You can always not do it. It’s no pressure.”
“I want to do this,” I said. “I want to have sex like an adult and be legendary.”
Marxy’s mother came over and held my face in her hand. Then she kissed the top of my head and told me I was a good egg.
I was going to achieve another part of my legend. We were finally going to have sex, like normal people who are in love do.
* * *
When the door closed we stood across from each other. We were each holding a condom. The condom in my hand was blue. His condom was red.
“Hi,” he said.
I said, “Are you ready to have sex?”
“I think we should kiss,” he said. “That always comes first.”
The hotel room smelled like the little cardboard tree that Gert hung from the mirror inside his car. The bed had a white sheet that was like a trampoline when I sat down on it.
“Do you want the lights off?” I asked.
In porno videos people are always having sex with the lights on, but one of the things that I knew from being home when Gert had sex with people was that he liked to have sex with the lights off.
“How will we see what’s happening?” Marxy asked, and I told him maybe for the first part we should only keep one of the smaller lights on, to make things more romantic.
I had looked at Marxy’s list of ORDER OF THINGS TO DO WHEN HAVING SEX before coming into the hotel room. Marxy had it on the bedside table and kept looking at it.
“We take off our clothes,” Marxy said. “That’s what comes next.”
“Okay,” I said. “Can we stop saying what we’re going to do before we do it?”
Marxy tried to unbutton his shirt. His fingers were having trouble with the buttons, which were small. My shirt was easy to take off, and I did it myself, even though in the movies the man takes off the woman’s shirt almost every time.
Marxy’s breathing was getting faster. He was stuck on one button.
I started to take off my pants. “No,” Marxy said. “My shirt still has to come off.”
“Do you want me to help you?”
He shook his head and held out his hand for me to stop. “The man takes off his shirt and then his own pants. Okay?”
It was taking a long time for him to get the buttons undone. I remembered what Pearl said and to have patience. I sat down on the bed and bounced a few times. The wallpaper had flowers on it, and someone had stuck chewing gum to the bottom of the bedside table.
/> “Gross,” I said.
Marxy looked at me and I told him it was the gum, not him, that was gross. “You’re very sexy, Marxy,” I told him. “Are you sure you don’t need help?”
“I said I can do it,” he shouted. “Stop asking.”
Finally he undid the buttons and put his shirt over the chair by the window. Marxy had lines where his arms stopped being tanned. He had small brown birthmarks on his stomach and tiny brown hairs around his nipples.
Next he started taking off his pants, which he had even more trouble with than his shirt. He got one leg out and had to put his hand on the wall to stop himself from falling over. It was very unsexy, because he forgot to take off his shoes first and the pant leg got stuck.
“You have to take off your shoes first,” I said.
“I know that,” he said. “You can start taking off your pants now too.”
I tried to take off my pants slowly, so that our pants could be off at the same time, but ended up taking them off faster. I sat down and waited. I wanted to continue looking sexy, but it takes a lot of effort to hold sexy poses, so I decided I would wait until he had his pants off before getting into the sexy pose again.
Finally Marxy had to sit down on the ground so that he could get his one leg out of his pants. Then he stood up and I could smell that his deodorant wasn’t working very well.
I was wearing the fancy underwear that I had bought. Then I stood and stepped with one leg and turned and showed him the pose I had been practicing in my room, after my push-ups, in front of the mirror. The porno women did this in pictures to look sexy, and so did models who wore underwear.
“Hello, stud,” I said.
Marxy raised his eyebrows. “We already said hello. And why are you standing like that?”
“Do you like what you see?”
“I like you, Zelda.”
“What about these?”
Trying to keep the sexy pose, I pulled the underwear and they made a snapping sound.
Marxy’s eyebrows wiggled. “They are okay.”
“Just okay?”
“Can we kiss? We should kiss. We should kiss before we do anything else.”
I felt crappy that he did not like the underwear so much, and that the sexy pose made his eyebrows go up. But this was one of the things about Marxy that AK47 told me would happen: he would not be like the men in the movies. I would have to accept that about Marxy. I started to wonder about Hendo, and then felt bad thinking about someone who was not Marxy, while kissing Marxy.
“Okay,” I said, taking his hand.
We kissed again. Marxy put his tongue in my mouth and moved it around. I told him to not be so angry with it and to move it around less.
“Go slower,” I said.
He kept doing things that made it hard for us to move in the same way. When I went to put my arms around his neck, he moved his head away from me, and when he moved forward toward me so I could put my arms around his neck, he moved too much and we hit our teeth.
“Ouch,” he said, putting his hand to his mouth.
“I think I bit my lip,” I said. Marxy did not look very happy. I told him to not panic. “Let’s try to kiss again,” I said, and this time the kiss went much better.
The bed bounced underneath us. He put his hand on my leg and I touched his cheek, very gently. His cheek was smooth and warm. His hand on my leg made me shiver, even though it was hot instead of cold.
“Okay,” he said. “I think it’s time to have sex. We need to take off our underwear now.”
He was wearing loose boxer shorts and pulled them off his legs and put them beside the bed. I took off my underwear in a slow sexy way until we were naked on the bed.
It was the first time I had seen Marxy naked. He had some hair on his stomach, near his belly button, and his ribs poked out and moved up and down when he breathed.
“You are very handsome,” I said, since I knew that people liked to be complimented when they have sex. I told him I could help him put the condom on.
“No. Let me do it,” he said.
“Make sure you don’t break it,” I said.
I thought of practicing with AK47 and saw that Marxy wasn’t holding it correctly. He did not pinch the condom on the edge and was trying to rip it right down the middle. Then he went to use his teeth.
“Stop!” I said. “You don’t use your teeth. Ever.” I asked him to give me the condom to open, since I didn’t want him to open it the wrong way.
He didn’t want to.
“I know how to do it,” he said.
Finally he got the wrapper off and then he tried to put it on. It was a Trojan condom, with a warrior’s helmet on the front. He started trying to put it on and had it upside down, and then did not pinch it properly. He had said he practiced with condoms, so I didn’t know why he was so bad at it.
“Did you use a carrot to practice?” I said. “Because you have to hold it up and see where the ring part is before putting it on.”
“Can you please stop talking, Zelda?” Marxy yelled.
“A cucumber works too, for practice,” I said. “But a cucumber is bigger than a penis usually is, and bigger than your penis too.”
I sat on the bed and watched him. The condom wasn’t going on at first, and I wasn’t feeling like I wanted to have sex anymore. I didn’t like being yelled at.
“Okay,” he said, putting the condom on. “I’m ready.”
“I didn’t like when you yelled at me,” I said, “and got angry about the condom. And I don’t like that we are saying what we do and going through steps. Sex is where we make our own rules.”
He shook his head and held it in his hands and said, “This is going bad,” and when I tried to tell him it was okay, he said it wasn’t okay.
I tried to kiss his face but he was turning to the side, so that his ear was by my eyes and his hair was in my face.
“Okay,” he said, and we went onto the bed and he put himself on top of me.
I couldn’t breathe easily, because his stomach was on my stomach pushing the air out. Marxy sat on me once when we were wrestling and I forgot how heavy he was.
I asked if he could get up off of me, so that he wasn’t so heavy. “I can’t breathe very well.”
“This is the way that we do it first,” he said. His face turned to me and I could smell his mouth, which was hot and made me feel like I was being trapped in a room.
He put his hands next to me and looked down. His face became red.
“What?” I asked him.
“Nothing.”
I tried to hold his face. “Marxy, what’s going on?”
He got off me and I saw the condom was falling off. “It’s not working like it should.”
“We can just kiss,” I said. “And start from the beginning.”
He balled up his fists and pressed them together until the knuckles cracked. “I don’t want to have to start from the beginning.”
I sat up. “Stop yelling.”
He took out another condom from his bag. “This isn’t working,” he said again, turning so that he was not facing me. “This isn’t working.”
“Is it on?”
He was trying to rip open the condom package.
“Marxy? Is it ribbed? Because mine is ribbed and it feels better.”
“Stop talking.”
It was getting cold from the air-conditioning in the room so I put my shirt back on. I waited for him to get the condom on. I was watching him hold his penis. When he turned around the condom wasn’t properly stretched out. It looked like a silly thing hanging from his penis, and even though I didn’t mean to I laughed.
“Are you laughing at me?” he said.
“Sorry,” I said. “You just said you practiced a lot but then did everything wrong. We could get carrots from room service. I can show you how to do it.”
He took the condom off with a loud snap and threw it on the ground and said we weren’t going to have sex anymore. “I don’t like the way you’
re being mean,” he said.
“I’m not being mean. But you said you practiced and then didn’t know what to do and didn’t want me to help. If you didn’t know, you should have told me.”
He crossed his arms and said he wasn’t turned on anymore and that nothing was sexy. “I want to leave,” he said. “I want to go home.” Then he went to pick up his phone and I got to it first. “Give it. I’m supposed to call when I want to leave.”
I held the phone away from him and jumped on the other side of the bed. “Grown adults don’t call their mothers during sex,” I said.
“We’re not having sex,” he said. “We’re finished and you’re being a shit-heel villain, Zelda.”
“And you’re being a baby. Fine. Take it.” And I threw the phone onto the bed between us and told him I had to go pee and to do whatever he wanted.
* * *
I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. My makeup had smeared. I wiped my face and heard some of the Grendels, coming from the other side of the shower curtain, where they liked to hide.
“Shut up,” I told them, taking a deep breath.
The Grendels like when things screw up and people get hurt, and I knew I had hurt Marxy. There was a knock at the bathroom door and AK47’s voice asked if I was okay.
When I came out, Marxy’s mother was in the room and helping him get dressed. She held his shirt up for his arms to slip through.
“It’s okay,” Pearl said. “Just put this on.”
“Are you leaving?” I said.
AK47 took my arm. “You probably want to put on some pants,” she said, and I realized I was still naked and didn’t feel sexy anymore, just stupid. She handed me my underwear and I put them on. “What happened?”
“He was getting angry and was having trouble with the condoms and I wanted to help. He didn’t want help and couldn’t get it on properly. And it looked silly and so I laughed and—”
Pearl told me to be quiet, holding Marxy’s pants for him to step into and pulling them up to Marxy’s stomach. “You can button it yourself,” she said. Then she took some Kleenex and picked up the condoms and stretched them out. “Not broken,” she said. “So there’s that.”
When We Were Vikings Page 18