Ricky

by J. Boyett

  Jesse made a face. “You went and hung out with Paul after we had lunch?”

  “Yeah.” Then: “I wasn’t sure where else to go.”

  Jesse considered him. She softened and said, “You can come in,” and stepped out of the way.

  Ricky ducked his head in gratitude and went in. As he stepped through the doorway Jesse did not move completely out of the way for him but only turned and stood with her back against the doorframe, so that as he passed her the side of his body brushed against the front of hers, his bicep against the small firm cushion of her breasts inside the rough lace of her bra, the back of his hand against the denim of her jeans. His breathing got harder—was she making a pass at him? Why else had she turned like that instead of really getting out of the way, when she knew he’d have to touch her? But he told himself to play it cool.

  Her voice was behind him as he entered the living room. “Sorry about the mess.” He looked around. Was this a mess? He couldn’t be sure. It looked the same as when he’d picked her up earlier. There were some books and magazines scattered here and there, there was the coffee table with that hubcap ashtray that was overflowing plus some CD cases with bits of weed still on them. The TV was loud, it was on a commercial right now. He said to Jesse, “It’s fine to me.” Then, “You smoke?”

  She looked at the overflowing hubcap and said, “Nah, that’s my roommates’. Doesn’t really bother me, though.” Then she noticed the dirty CD cases and said, “Oh, you mean weed? Sometimes. You want some?” Then her face screwed up and she added, “You really shouldn’t, though, right? If you’re on parole?”

  “Yeah, no, you’re right.” Actually he really, really wanted to smoke out.

  But Jesse didn’t pick up on that. “Okay,” she said. Then her attitude shifted, from casual to concerned. She looked at him, and said, “Now what were you saying about your mom?”

  “I don’t know. She doesn’t want me there.”

  “That’s crazy. Of course she does.”

  “But she told me to leave.”

  “Oh.” Jesse absorbed this. “It’s a hard time for her, too.”

  “Oh, yeah, I know. It’s probably harder for her than it is for me.”

  Jesse was scandalized. “Don’t say that! That isn’t true! I can tell it isn’t.”

  Ricky shrugged, looked off to the side somewhere. “I wasn’t the greatest brother, is all.”

  “I’m sure you were a good brother.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “Look, everyone makes mistakes. You probably weren’t perfect. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have the right to, like, grieve her.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “Anyway, I know you were a good brother. Because why else would Elly have come to visit you and written you all those letters?”

  There were suddenly needles coming out of his pores and eyes. Looking down, he blinked and said, “Yeah, well. Elly was a really good sister.”

  Now that he was vulnerable, she moved in close, put her hand on his arm, and rubbed it up and down while his breathing hitched. “Huh-uh,” she said. “Bullshit. She was good, but I bet she wasn’t that good. I bet she wouldn’t have come all the way out there, or written all those letters and letters, if there hadn’t been a relationship there already. Lots of siblings would have grown apart. You must have done something to keep a hold on her.”

  His head was hot and swelling, like a cat in a microwave. He felt his eyes stinging and getting wet, it was like her hand rubbing up and down was milking the tears from him. “Yeah, well,” he said again. “We had a. . . .” He stopped, and then started again: “You know, Elly—she kind of had low self-esteem. . . .”

  Jesse kept looking at him like it hadn’t even occurred to her that he had finished; then a few seconds later she kind of shook herself and tried to rally; but only managed to say, “What?”

  “You know what I mean,” Ricky said, and then quickly had to bring his hand up to his eyes and nose. They started to leak, hot and slick on his hand.

  “Hey,” Jesse said, moving to him and wrapping her other arm around his shoulders. “Hey,” she said, sounding like she was in her element now, pulling him in closer to her. She pulled his head down to the crook of her neck and put her hand on the back of his head. “It’s okay,” she said, “it’s okay. Don’t worry. Let it all out.”

  Ricky tried to swallow the sobs but couldn’t. He sniffed hard and said something.

  “What?” asked Jesse.

  Ricky sniffed again and cleared his throat, and again asked, “Is there anybody else here?”

  Jesse stroked the back of his head and said, “No, there’s no one here. They won’t be back for a long time. Don’t worry about anyone coming in.”

  Ricky nodded, sniffed, and hooked his hands around the small of her back.

  She held him tight. In his ear she murmured, “Have you even cried yet? I bet you haven’t. I’ve had this feeling, ever since we met, like you hadn’t cried but you needed to.” Even before Elly got killed?, he wanted to ask, but wasn’t able. “The whole time, it’s like there’s been this horrible pressure built up.”

  She rubbed him some more. “Have you cried yet?” The moist heat of his breath reflected back from her shoulder onto his mouth.

  He unlocked his hands at the small of her back and spread them out, splayed the fingers and pressed his palms against her back. He moved his head, rubbing his cheek against hers. He hadn’t shaved for two days and wondered if his stubble against her soft cheek hurt her. Then he moved his head back some more and positioned it so that his mouth glided onto hers. It was a very gentle kiss—they didn’t use any tongue at all, not even a little, the way he and Elly had.

  Ricky felt so elated that she was allowing him to kiss her that it was like a hallucination. On the other hand she wasn’t being super-responsive. But he figured she was just shy.

  She pulled her mouth away from his, slowly. Reluctantly, maybe. He wanted to catch her eye but her gaze had demurely slid down and to the side, and now she stepped back and turned from him as she walked away. He held onto her waist as she went, but only sort of, he didn’t try to really grab her. She walked out of the living room and into the kitchen, and went behind a wall so that he couldn’t see her. He didn’t follow because he figured that would be rude. She called, “You want a beer?”

  He cleared his throat. “Sure,” he said.

  She came out with an opened bottle of Bud and handed it to him, then took a step back and put her hands on her hips. She stood in front of him as if they were facing each other, but her eyes stayed too low to meet his. She didn’t have a beer. He took a swallow of his, then held it towards her and said, “You want some?”

  “Oh, no,” she said, and shook her head. They stood there a little longer. Jesse shifted her weight from one leg to the other and said, “So.”

  Ricky took another swallow, a big one, and said “Yeah.” Almost half his beer was already gone.

  Jesse went into motion, walking fast across the room and picking up her car keys from the coffee table and shoving them into her pocket. Turning back towards Ricky but still not looking at him, she said, “You want to go out and get a coffee or something?”

  “But I’m already drinking a beer,” said Ricky, and this time he made himself take only a sip, and slowly, like he was savoring it.

  Now she looked up at him, and thought about him for a second. She said, “We could go to a bar instead. I could be the designated driver. Or we could go to like a coffee shop and you could get a beer and I could get a coffee.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant. I meant more, like, don’t you already have beers here?”

  “Yeah, but only that one. Or, well, there’s one more. But then that’s it.”

  Ricky looked at her, at a loss. He walked over, put his arms around her, pulled her close and moved his face towards hers.

  She ducked her head and squirmed out of his grasp, though to be nice she did hold his hand. She gave it an encouragi
ng squeeze.

  That kind squeeze set his innards caving in on themselves. Whereas a minute ago elation had turned his blood to ether, now it was clay again, and once more his head radiated a dull sickly heat. “Sorry,” he said.

  Jesse shook her head. “You don’t have to be sorry,” she reassured him. “You didn’t do anything wrong. We both just got a little carried away is all.”

  Doom was in the clayey air, they were hopelessly suspended in the dirty hard gelatin of time and space. But Ricky felt like he ought to try something at least, mainly out of something like duty. So he said, “I liked doing that. Liked, you know, kissing you.”

  Jesse nodded and kept holding his hand. “Let’s just, you know, take it slow. Okay? I mean, you’ve been through a lot here lately. Getting out of jail, and then, I mean, you’re grieving. And to tell the truth it’s kind of a rough time for me, too. . . . I mean, it doesn’t compare with what you’re going through, but still. I just broke up with Paul not too long ago. And plus there’s all this boring shit going on with work that I won’t even tell you about. . . . But, you know. I care about you, and everything. And I want to help, and everything.”

  Ricky hung his head. What she said about caring about him was probably even true. That didn’t make it any less humiliating.

  Jesse let go of his hand, but kept standing in front of him. Now that she’d defused the whole kissing thing, leaving the apartment must have struck her as less urgent. She made no move towards the door, and even said, “Do you want to watch TV or something?”

  “Yeah, sure,” said Ricky, grateful and a little excited that they would at least be staying in the privacy of her home. Though part of him knew better, his malfunctioning instincts assured him that there was no way this blaring feeling within him, this urge, could possibly really not be reciprocated. It didn’t make sense. The energy field was too strong and loud, the idea that it was all in his head was terrifying.

  Jesse walked around looking for the remote. Ricky sat on the couch in front of the TV to wait for her. Finally she found the remote, joined him. It was just like the other day with Elly. “Do you want the remote?” asked Jesse, holding it towards him, but he shook his head. So she turned back to the screen and punched in some combination of numbers and they settled in to watch some show.

  One of the weirdest things about coming home from jail was how many TV shows were foreign to Ricky now. This thing Jesse had turned it to was completely new to him—he hadn’t even seen any commercials for it. Now he tried to catch up. He and Jesse sat through it silently, embarrassed during the laugh tracks.

  The commercials came on and they looked at each other, grimacing in friendly desperation. Then Jesse looked back at the TV, and Ricky did too. But it was too humiliating if they didn’t talk during the commercials, even. He couldn’t bear the knowledge of how boring to her he was. Ricky asked Jesse what this TV show was about. “Oh, you mean you never heard of it?!” she exclaimed. She told him the name of it, even though he already knew that because they’d caught the opening credits, and then she talked about who the characters were and what they were doing with each other. That got them almost to the end of the commercial break, but then the topic ran out of steam. It would be too horrible to have to admit they couldn’t even maintain a commercial break’s worth of talk—then, thank God, the show came back on, finally.

  Now they were able to sit there without talking. But Ricky felt like he needed to have made some progress before the next commercial break, otherwise it would just be a repeat of before. They had to find some way to interact without having to talk to each other. During one of the laugh tracks he raised his arm and put it over her shoulders, feeling retarded and clenching himself with embarrassment—it was such a made-up, movie-style move. But Jesse didn’t fight it. When he closed his fingers over her shoulder and pulled her a bit in towards him, she let herself be moved. He even felt her breathing quickening and getting deeper, just like his was. Experimentally, he caressed her upper arm. She wasn’t touching him back yet, but that was okay. If she’d minded what he was doing, he figured she would have said something. And after all, she’d responded earlier, when he’d kissed her.

  The commercial break seemed to come out of nowhere. He turned and looked down at Jesse. She was looking up at him, her head ducked slightly, her eyes big. Ricky leaned in, made a scooping motion with his head to come up from under her slightly down-turned face and kiss her, more fully this time: he opened his mouth and gently pried hers open with his tongue, then sent his tongue in to meet hers, which shied away.

  They made out like that for two whole commercials, with just their mouths working. Once the third started Ricky was thinking that he needed to make some sort of advancement—if they weren’t moving forward then once the show started back up they would just stop. He put his hand on her belly and rubbed it back and forth as he kissed her. That change of position lent itself to that of half-twisting his body and raising himself a little, so that his head was sort of pressing down on her—the added pressure felt good. Jesse accommodated herself to the shift, scooted herself underneath him, and raised her other arm some to put her hand on his side, her left hand already on his right arm. It was working! And she’d already said that her roommates weren’t going to be back for hours. He raised his hand and cupped her breast. The rough feel of the bra through her shirt was more erotic than her bare breast would have been, since a bra was so different from any garment he’d ever worn.

  Jesse grabbed his hand and pushed it away from her breast; “Hey,” she said, voice muffled because his mouth was on hers. “Hey, let’s not go too far right now.”

  But there was no guarantee he would ever get this chance again. More, he was practically certain that Jesse would want to stop completely, once he let her slow down. He pretended she hadn’t said anything. It wouldn’t count if she didn’t say it twice, if she said it once it was just nerves. He tried to kiss her more passionately, really using his lip muscles and tongue, and he let go of Jesse’s breast to slip his hand up under her shirt and caress the skin of her belly. Now he had equal access to her breasts and her fly.

  Again Jesse surfaced, pulling her mouth away from him, and said, “I don’t think this is a good idea right now.”

  “I have a condom,” he said. He dipped his head in again, this time avoiding her mouth since she’d taken it away and he didn’t want to be rude, and putting his lips behind the flap of her ear and kissing the crease, flicking at it with his tongue. She shuddered, her whole body clenched quickly and opened again with voluptuous slowness.

  But she still acted like she didn’t want him doing that, and pushed at his shoulders again, harder this time. “Ricky,” she said, her voice getting frayed, “come on, please. Get off me.”

  He stopped, moved his face away from hers, because he was scared of really pissing her off. He said, “I just got out of prison,” and immediately felt pathetic.

  She sighed and nodded, looking rattled. “I know,” she said. “But I just sort of. . . .” She trailed off. He was still pinning her—that wasn’t his intention but for all practical purposes it was what he was doing. Jesse glanced at the TV, then smiled weakly and said, “Hey. The show’s back on.”

  Ricky got the hint. “Okay,” he said, and sat back up and reoriented his body towards the TV. Jesse did the same. It felt like a few minutes earlier he had won a huge exhilarating victory but now he had to surrender all the territory he’d gained. He did leave his arm around her shoulder, though, and she didn’t protest—that had to mean something, that she didn’t mind having his arm around her. And it had definitely turned her on to make out with him, especially when he’d been kissing her behind the ear.

  Pretty soon the show came to an end. There was another commercial break. After a few seconds’ silence, Jesse turned her head down and to the side and said, “Well, you want to do something?”

  Immediately Ricky’s dick started to get hard again. “Like what?”

  But Jesse only s
aid, “Like go out and get some food, maybe.”

  “We just had lunch not too long ago, though.”

  Jesse scratched her thigh to buy herself time to think of something better. All she could come up with was, “I could eat again.”

  Ricky shrugged, in despair—because he still had his arm around her the motion rocked her whole body. “I don’t know,” he said. He knew that if he let them leave the apartment he would have sort of taken his foot out of the door, and his chances of getting Jesse to fuck him would go way down. “I could just hang out here,” he added lamely.

  Jesse nodded, absently. There was no telling what the nod meant. She folded her hands in her lap and fidgeted her fingers, flipping them around and rubbing them against each other and watching them. Suddenly it all seemed very sad to Ricky. She was so obviously freaked out. His slim chances of fucking her didn’t seem worth making her miserable. Yet he couldn’t quite muster the strength to give up on it completely, and suggest himself that they leave; the best he could manage was to kind of plaintively ask, “Well, what do you feel like doing?”

  “I don’t know,” she said hopelessly. She sat there a few more seconds, then said, “Hang on, I might have some coupons in my room for stuff we could go do. I sort of collect shit like that.” She extricated herself from Ricky’s grip and left the room. He watched her, willing her to turn and look back at him over her shoulder, but she didn’t.

  He sat there, waiting for her, grateful again to have the TV there to camouflage his desperation. No one would have been able to tell that he was sitting there imploding—it looked like he was just watching TV.

  He listened to her rustling around in her bedroom, with the sense that he was failing a test. The idea that nothing else was going to happen between them was inconceivable. This compulsion was too blaring and blistering to be confined to his own head, it had to be out there in the universe as well, in Jesse’s head too. Besides, he knew it had felt good to her when he’d kissed her on the ear. There was something else he was supposed to be doing, but he couldn’t figure out what it was.