by C. L. Donley
“Hey,” she answered right before it went to voice mail.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” she needlessly greeted him again.
“Take it you got home alright?”
“I did.”
“Hungover?”
“Not really. I didn’t do that much drinking,” she said before a beat of silence. “You?”
“Yep. Terrible.”
“Sucks.”
“Yeah. Kind of a standard weekend for me, though. How’s Judah?” he asked.
“Good.”
“Good.”
Adam had felt all kinds of jittery butterflies all weekend, chased by stress and nausea. If her one-word answers were any indication, Jo was definitely pissed or… something. Adam decided to just launch right into it.
“Listen, if my brothers said something really crazy to you Saturday night, I just want you to know, that I will personally make sure they get smacked in the head, and I apologize.”
Jo’s heart was gonna give out at this point. He knew??
“Your brothers?” she asked.
“Yeah, the other night. I know they probably said some crazy shit to you. I’m really embarrassed about that. I know you probably think we’re fuckin’ insane.”
Jo felt like she could float away she was so light. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that she needed to cut this off. The clusterfuck sandwich was simply not sustainable.
“Well, you guys were drunk, I guess. Whatever, it’s fine.”
“No, it’s not ‘fine,’ Jo. See, we have this thing where… I had a girlfriend once. She slept with them behind my back and I had to hear it from them. So now we do this thing where we… we call it the Caitlyn Compromise.”
“I see,” Jo absent-mindedly rubbed her shoulder.
“So, we’re not just unhinged redneck pervs from Deliverance. They were testing you.”
“Testing me for what?”
“…Nothing. It was a misunderstanding.”
“Testing me to see if I’d take the bait and sleep with one of them?” she asked, horrified.
“Of course not. If you agreed to it, then they would just come find me and you’d be busted. If they actually slept with you first without telling me, then that would mean they reeeally wanted to make sure I fuckin’ hated you and never took you back.”
What the fuck??!?
Jo didn’t breathe just yet. It only explained half of last weekend’s bizarre events.
“…I see,” she said again. “Has that ever happened?”
“Once.”
Jo was turning from relieved to confused to pissed. It was one step forward, two steps back with this guy.
“You put them up to it?”
“No. I mean, I’m not gonna lie, Corey brought it up and we did talk about it. But I told them ‘no’ right off the bat,” he assured her.
“Why?”
“Because I knew you weren’t like that. I didn’t need the test.”
Hmm. Gus must’ve really committed to the fucking test then. But him giving her shivers seemed like more than just a convincing performance. And threatening women like a perved-out uncle so they don’t tell doesn’t seem to be a necessary part of it.
“So… what did they say? That I passed?”
“Well, Gus was passed out so I didn’t ask, but Corey gave you two thumbs up.”
Shit. Her mind was only half-eased by this batshit explanation. She was essentially in the same boat she was in before it.
“Uh-huh. Well, I’m glad to have passed... the ‘ho’ test. For whatever that’s worth.”
“Me too. Although part of me wishes you failed.”
“Why’s that?”
“So that it could help me stop feeling… whatever this is I’m feeling. About you.”
Jo’s lips trembled and her hands felt numb.
“What are you feeling about me?”
“Don’t pretend like you don’t know,” he said, his desire unveiled. Jo’s breath hitched.
There it was. The ooey-gooey clusterfuck center. It was back again and more intense. Silky adrenaline. Almost perfect. Almost. Dammit, Gus. He was ruining her high. He was ruining everything.
“Humor me,” she said.
“I feel… everything. I just… I don’t know. I feel it all,” he poorly elaborated, feeling inept. He was much better with actions, and she was an hour’s drive away. Unbeknownst to him, Jo found his sudden inarticulation adorable. She grinned.
“Like Feist?”
“Who?”
“A singer. It’s a song that I used to love. Nevermind.”
“Is the song about fucking you?”
Ho…lee…shit. Okay, there were some things a shitty older brother just couldn’t ruin.
Jo heard herself let out a nervous laugh. Even though she was laying down, she knew her knees were weak.
“…No, the song is not about… that.”
“Oh,” he said with flat sarcasm.
“It’s funny you say that though. You just reminded me of a dream I had about you,” she said in a low voice.
“Was it a sex dream?” he grinned.
“Yes.”
Adam sat up straight in bed.
“Really?”
“Well, technically. I mean, I guess it was you. You were a zombie.”
“I don’t fuck with zombies.”
Jo laughed, finding out something Adam Kerr was scared of.
“Well me either, but it wasn’t scary for some reason. There were a bunch of zombies that sort of came out of this… I don’t know. Crypt. And one of them was you. I don’t know how I recognized you, but I did.”
“What’s this have to do with sex?”
“Well, that’s the thing. I grabbed you and I was like, trying to make you go down on me.”
“I see,” he somehow managed to reply in a neutral tone.
“You were super light I mean… like a skin and bones zombie. And you were trying to get away. To run around and do zombie shit or whatever. And I had you by the head and I was laying down, trying to get you to focus. To stay between my legs.”
Adam didn’t even try to fight off the image of Jo’s hands on his head while he pleasured her down below. He was rock hard in seconds.
“Did you feel anything? In the dream?”
“No, but of course I was doing the most, you know how dreams are. I was like, ‘oh yeah Adam, give it to me!’”
FuuuuuuuuuuuuUUUuuck.
Did she really just fucking do that, he thought. Did she really just say his name like that?
She wanted him as much as he wanted her, he was convinced of it.
“And then what happened?” he urged.
“Are you jacking off right now?”
“Just… what the fuck happened next.”
She laughed. “Then it was like, you were coming back to life. You put one of your hands on my thigh and I could see it had become flesh again.”
Fuck.
“And one of your eyes opened and it was bright blue.”
“And then?”
“And then… I woke up. Frustrated,” she giggled, but Adam wasn’t laughing. He was in an aroused stupor. Upside down like a teenager.
“What do you think it means?” he asked.
“I’ve no idea.”
“I think I know what it means.”
“What?” she smirked.
“That you have a life-giving pussy.”
He smiled as Jo quietly giggled, the way girls do when they’re feeling more frisky than they want to admit.
“Well… that’s one way to interpret it.”
“I think it means you can bring me back to life.”
“Are you dead?” she asked.
“I didn’t think I was, but after this conversation, I’m starting to think so.”
“Why?”
“Lemme go down on you, Jo,” he said.
“…No,” she said half-heartedly.
“That was one weak-ass ‘no.’”
; “It will only lead to the cringiest, train-wreckiest dead-end in the history of dead ends.”
“But you want to.”
“…A little.”
Adam gave his cock a squeeze.
“More than a little.”
“…Okay, more than a little,” she said in more soft tones that made his cock jerk. He ran a finger up and down the tight gather of his boxers where it was bulging.
“So what should we do about it?” he asked.
“What can be done about it?”
“Plenty.”
“I have to say, this whole thing is fascinating,” Jo mused.
“What is?”
“You. Me. Humans. How people can spend a lifetime constructing a set of beliefs and principals and… precepts. And then sex comes in and just… cuts through the whole thing like a hot knife in butter.”
“I’m not compromising my beliefs right now,” he said.
“No?”
“No. I mean… it’s not ideal but… it’s not a contradiction.”
“Well. That’s a relief,” was Jo’s tepid response.
“Josie…”
“Josie? I haven’t heard that in years. My dad used to call me that,” she giggled.
“You actually knew your dad?”
“Goddammit Adam, what the fuck!”
Adam was snatched out of his heady state by her sudden venomous tone.
“What?”
“It’s embarrassing enough that you’re a fuckin’ white supremacist. I’ve swallowed a hell of a lot of pride here. Keep your shitty ass, tired ass, racist bullshit to your fuckin’ self, for five minutes!”
Holy shit. His brain was grappling as though he’d fallen into an icy river.
“Embarrassing?” he repeated.
“Yeah, motherfucker, it is embar-rass-ing! Embarrassing.”
Well, Adam thought. It looked like everything wasn’t “fine” anymore, if it ever was.
“Was it embarrassing when your Justin Timbercunt boyfriend dusted you and left you to take care of his son, while he fuckin’ stayed in school? Like a cunt? While you had to drop out?”
“As a matter of fact, it was!”
Adam sighed. “Dammit, I didn’t even mean it like that anyways. I didn’t fuckin’ know you had your dad, alright? You never bring him up. I didn’t have my dad, you know that.”
Jo started to feel sheepish but quickly suppressed it.
“Well, I suppose I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, but honestly I really don’t have to, you know that, right?”
“I don’t know how many ways I can explain to you that I’m not racist,” he muttered.
“Adam, I’m sure you mean well, but it all sounds offensive as fuck. All that shit about community and trust. How am I supposed to take that? You wanna eat my pussy and then throw me out with the rest of my kind, Adam?”
Adam scoffed. “Well… I don’t know how in the fuck you got any of that from what I said—”
“Of course, you have some secret interpretation that I’m just too narrow-minded to discern. Convenient. It’s the only logical conclusion from what you said, Adam.”
“You’re the one who’s embarrassed by me.”
“Yeah, because you’re a bigot!” Jo cried.
“I cannot fuckin’ believe this.”
“No, I can’t believe how you think you can insult me to my face and I’m just supposed to be okay with it.”
“Jo, why wouldn’t you just say, ‘it offends me when you talk like that?’”
Uh…
“To accomplish what?” Jo recovered. “I got no business talking to you anyway, it’s my own fault that I’m so fuckin’ thirsty that I’ll subject myself to anything.”
That wasn’t true and she knew it as soon as it left her mouth. She wasn’t thirsty. At all. Not until him. Her pride wouldn’t let her take it back.
“That’s… real fuckin’ hurtful Jo.”
“Sorry,” she flippantly replied.
“But you proved my point. You’re not trustworthy.”
Jo’s heartbeat doubled.
“I’m not trustworthy?”
“No. You’re bringing up shit from weeks ago. Shit you said was ‘fine.’”
“I’m a hell of a lot more trustworthy than you,” she argued.
“When have I been any less than 100% honest with you?”
“That’s because you’re crazy. Not because you’re trustworthy.”
“I thought we understood each other. I thought we were building some kind of… friendship or… relationship. I thought you of all people would tell me the truth. But you just think I’m some kind of buffoon. You don’t respect my beliefs, and you don’t respect me. At all,” Adam accused her.
“I respect some of your beliefs, Adam. I do. But not all of them. And it’s not fair for you to expect me to,” Jo pleaded.
“You think you can’t say that to me? You think I’m gonna just… freak out?”
“No, I think you’re gonna go into some explanation that I don’t care to fuckin’ hear about, like a tone-deaf racist, about how black people share DNA with fuckin’ monkeys, but you’re not racist or anything. And then I’m gonna have to go home and take a long-ass shower and cry.”
“…Take a long-ass shower?” he said. Jo didn’t fight her grin.
“…Focus, Kerr.”
“Because I make you feel dirty?”
“Would you stop?”
“Did your cunt boyfriend tell you that black lives matter?”
“Jesus, Adam,” Jo moaned, exasperated.
“Right after he pays you child support ‘whenever he can’?”
“You really hate him.”
“I do. And he hates me,” he said.
“For good reason.”
“Is that so?”
“You’re a white supremacist.”
“That’s not why he hates me,” Adam gave his head a shake and tried to stay calm,“But he can hide behind that fuckin’ reason all day, can’t he? Know what I hate? I hate that he doesn’t get as much flack from you as I do. When he’s a cunt. And I’m a good guy.”
“That’s what he thinks. You all think you’re good fucking guys.”
“He doesn’t think that. He knows he’s not. He just wants you to think it.”
“You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you Adam?” Jo rolled her eyes.
“You want me, and you can’t bitch your way out of what you feel.”
Jo shook her head. She couldn’t tell him what was going on with her without telling him what was going on with his brother.
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“Tell me to fuck off. Tell me to stop calling, stop coming around, if you think I’m so terrible. Have some respect for yourself.” Adam held his breath, waiting for Jo to do just that. Her silence could’ve been blind rage, offense, he couldn’t tell. It lasted for an hour and he braced himself.
Finally Jo sighed, speechless for a moment.
“I’m trying. I really am.”
“I don’t make it easy, do I?” he grinned.
“You do when you open your mouth.”
“Fair enough.”
Adam was quiet as Jo stayed on the line, neither of them wanting to end the conversation, it seemed. Not after they’d fought. They’d made it through a trek of the thickest jungle of their relationship— their first, and probably not their last— and held on to the lifeline. Neither of them wanted to budge. They’d fought and won. An exhilaration seeped into the silence.
“I don’t talk about my dad because he left my mom. For a white woman,” Jo sighed.
“When?”
“Four years ago.”
“Damn. That’s pretty fresh.”
“Yeah, it is. He’s never even met, Judah,” she revealed.
“If it makes you feel any better, her family probably disowned her.”
“Actually, the opposite happened.”
“Where’s this chick from?”
“O
hio. And she’s my age,” Jo added with disgust.
“She sounds like a goddamn head case.”
“She invited us to the wedding.”
“Your dad must be one hell of a piece a’ shit to attract a lunatic like that and marry her,” Adam said before he inwardly cringed. He worried that was a bit too salty.
“Five years ago, I would’ve fought you on that,” she deadpanned. Adam laughed a bit.
“You really think you’re superior to me?” she asked.
Adam sighed. “It doesn’t work like that.”
“How does it work?”
“First of all, I’m a man, and you’re a woman. So I’m already superior to you besides your race.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Don’t get me wrong, you’re a hell of a woman,” he smoothly added.
“You better than my dad?”
“We’re gonna go down the whole list of humanity, Jo?” Adam rolled his eyes.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
“Character-wise, it sounds like I win anyway. I think your dad deserves the regular respect a white man would give any man at his age. He taught you to drywall, I presume?”
“He did.”
“Then my hats off to him.”
“But you’re better than him,” Jo concluded.
“Well… I’d say his own life is the evidence.”
“Because no white man has ever done what he did?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“So what are you saying?”
“Jo, this little game doesn’t work if you’re just gonna get defensive,” he warned.
“What about Judah? You better than him?”
“Time will tell.”
“But you probably are?”
“…He’s young. He can be trained, he can be molded,” Adam answered.
“To be white?”
“He’s got white in ‘em.”
“So do most African Americans.”
“I know.”
“So, you think he would’ve had better luck, all the luck in the world… if I wasn’t his mom?” she asked.
Adam swallowed.
“I don’t know, Jo.”
“Now, you don’t know?”
“I don’t know.”
“You said you’ve always been 100% honest with me,” Jo said earnestly.