by Monica Drake
Thump-thump.
He moved around her and pulled himself against her from behind, up against her tattoo, where it read, just above the curve of her ass, THE SECOND SEX. The French feminist philosopher was honored in that sweet spot, which was so wrong and exactly right.
“What can I say? I have abandonment issues. I don’t want to leave her alone.”
He said, “You’re a goddess,” and moved in closer, his clothed body warm against her naked skin.
She wiped the back of her hand against her mouth. He’d called her a goddess back before they were married, when they first met, at a smoky party in Sarah’s apartment. Goddess of Jägermeister.
When they met she had a pint of Jäger tucked into her cleavage, a cold bottle growing warm, a dark green dress cut low. She pulled out the bottle and made him beg. He was willing. She poured it into his mouth, a big joke, and sticky liquor spilled onto his Social Distortion T-shirt. MOMMY’S LITTLE MONSTER, the shirt said. Where’d that shirt go, anyway?
Now she picked up a drumstick, took a bite, and then held it over her shoulder. He bit the meat she offered. Her pale ass rubbed against his worn jeans.
He ran a hand over one of her breasts, and felt her heartbeat below, under the cage of her ribs. Her heart was faster than the electronic beat, a quick dance step. Her breasts were huge, milk-filled, white, and marked with the darkened nipples of pregnancy, the thin lines of blue veins. He loved her body, extra pounds and all. His cock rose to the occasion, a show of appreciation.
And the electronic heartbeat thumped through the floor, muffled. He whispered, “Do we need the horror flick sound track?” He rubbed his hard cock, trapped under his clothes, against her naked skin.
She said, “It helps.” She turned in Humble’s arms, soft and warm and naked, and moved against him with a comfortable frankness, more woman than girl.
Humble said, “She’s already sleeping, right?”
She dropped the chicken leg back on the platter. Humble took her hand. Her fingers were greasy. He said, “I miss you.” He missed seeing her alone, without Bella in her arms. He pulled her toward the living room, toward the couch. “What happened to that green dress?”
She said, “Green dress?”
“Goddess of Jägermeister?” he said.
“Ah. Goodwill, I think. Or Freecycle. Maybe I put it out at the curb.” She moved into his arms.
He unbuckled his pants. His belt dropped to the floor, and they flinched at the clatter. That’d wake their light-sleeping angel. He said, “Shit.”
“Shush. She’ll be fine.” Babies were supposed to sleep like babies, right? Theirs, though, slept on the alert.
Georgie and Humble moved down together, onto the couch. One of them knocked a book off a coffee table. It hit the ground with a loud smack. They froze, Georgie on her back, Humble still in his shirt, otherwise naked, leaning over her.
The house was quiet except for the heartbeat. Thump-thump. “It’s okay,” Georgie said. She reached for Hum’s shoulder.
Then Bella’s siren wail cut through the sound of the muffled, pounding heart. It was the howl of a baby crying as though newly arrived, already late to the party.
Ben worked in a cube farm on the fourth floor of the old Standard Premiums Life Assurance building. Life assurance was along the lines of life insurance, only with a British parent company, and they offered investment advice as well as insurance. He loved that set of words, “Life Assurance”—like they sold a solid pat on the back. These days the building was divided. The mortgage company where he worked occupied a floor and a half. When Ben needed to camp out in el baño he’d take the back stairs to somebody else’s floor, to a place where his big shoes wouldn’t immediately be recognized under a stall door. He’d find one of the few bathrooms located in a hallway, not embedded in the offices of a bank, a real estate broker, or a skin rejuvenation clinic.
If he used the toilet on his own floor it was a parade of feet outside the stall, a waterfall of piss and shoptalk, a chorus of Hey, how’s it going? He didn’t want to mix his stink with the guy who, for the rest of the day, sat on the other side of his cubicle, shared his lunch break, and swapped turns at the microwave.
He carried his newspaper folded in quarters and tucked inside a mortgage file, alongside somebody’s credit history, a borrower’s lifeline drawn in financial choices. Then he marched down the hall, nodded at coworkers, and checked his watch like he had a meeting.
A meeting with his bowels and his newspaper.
Ben didn’t take smoke breaks. He cruised through a week’s worth of files before Wednesday. He helped other underwriters with the mess they made out of VA loans. He deserved time away from his cube.
He found a bathroom with two urinals, one stall, and nobody in it.
He settled in, pants around his ankles and a cup of coffee on the flat square space afforded by the metal box of a toilet paper holder, then dropped the ruse mortgage file to the floor. Overhead an automated room deodorizer gave off a hiss and released the scent of sweet oranges. Ben unfolded his paper to the front page. He turned to the page behind that—world news and politics—and there she was: his college girlfriend. Hannah. His stomach lurched and gurgled, instantly sour. He recognized her smile even before he saw the headline—before he saw that she’d just been elected senator.
Well, state senator.
He’d known she was in the running. He’d seen a glimpse of her on TV at night. Mostly, he hadn’t let himself think about it. In the black-and-white AP photo, Hannah stood at the top of a short flight of metal stairs. A photographer had snapped the picture as she twisted back to wave, her head slightly ducked to accommodate the short airplane doorway. Who was she waving to? Maybe she waved to her not-so-new-anymore husband, her fans, the world. Somebody outside the picture. She wasn’t waving to Ben, where he warmed his throne. Ben was out of that picture for good.
He leaned forward in a slouch and the automatic sensor on the toilet sent a silent message; the toilet flushed, swirled, and sprayed atomized toilet water on Ben’s cold flanks.
He folded his paper back, keeping Hannah’s photo on top. He pulled the paper closer. If she’d aged, the details were lost in cheap ink. She was a natural beauty, unfettered and makeup free. Ben ran a hand over his own forehead then through his thinning-but-still-thick (as the fifteen-year-old at Kuts-R-Us assured him) head of hair.
Hannah had one of those lady politician cuts now—between short and long, girlish and womanly, conservative and liberal—but it didn’t look bad, and it wasn’t molded into a helmet of hair spray. Her skirt was square and plain. Her jacket matched. She was pretending to be a Kennedy. But her calf, above a dull shoe, raised up in a sculpted muscle, and in the line of that muscle, Ben saw she was still there, the girl he’d once screwed, hidden under the costume. She was radiant.
As far as he could surmise, she’d never had children.
He ran a finger over a shadow that hinted at the curve of her ass.
In the old days she’d cut her hair herself. She’d sit cross-legged on her bed in her dorm room and cut her pubic hair, too, with these big, cheap black-handled schoolteacher scissors. She’d cut, make a face, and say, “Yikes!” Then she’d laugh and throw a clump of pubes in the general direction of the wastebasket.
Her roommate hated her.
Ben knew a few things about Hannah. If there was one person who could stir up a sex scandal as she climbed her way into office, it was him. Maybe. It was a powerful feeling, to be in on a shared secret past.
The thought lasted one second. What did he have? He had old news about straight, white, single college kids getting it on, and one of the kids was him, back when he was skinny and sustained by the world of big ideas. He didn’t party in college. He studied, and then he fell in love.
That was all before he met Sarah, before his life found its shape.
What was the worst thing they’d done, he and Hannah, and the best—the hottest, sketchiest sex they had? She had these shee
ts, these stupid Holly Hobby sheets from St. Vincent de Paul, a church thrift store, and he remembered the way she’d wake up warm and naked next to him on a bed of pink and blue, and right away he hated himself for being such a sap. Hot sex, hot sex, hot sex, he drilled the words in his head and tried to remember.
Outside the stall door a faucet turned on. Ben listened, scanned the floor. There were no feet. Nobody had come in. It was automated, triggered by a ghost, a fly, a blip in the mechanism.
In college, if his life was set to run like a machine, he hadn’t noticed it yet.
Hannah, a star on the swim team, had the X of a Speedo permanently tanned into her back. Her ass was pale and plump. She wore earrings only when she wanted to impress somebody. Ben pulled the paper closer. She had earrings on.
His cock lifted between his legs. He shifted the paper to his left hand, to reach down with his right and tug his balls. He listened for the door. He’d stop if he heard footsteps. He could stop. Yes, he was a freak, getting hard while he sat on the shitter like a woman, but it felt good, that heat and rise. His scrotum contracted under his fingers.
He didn’t want to stop.
There was a time when he’d been walking with Hannah, and it was night. They’d gone off campus to see a band—some kind of thrash metal theatrics, all fake blood and pus. It was a band with guys named things like Flattus Maximus and Beefcake the Mighty. Jesus. Those days, he’d followed Hannah everywhere. The show had been in a warehouse district. They had to walk a ways that seemed farther after the show than on the way in, down empty side streets.
Hannah had worn these white high heels.
He ran a hand over his cock. He hated himself for pulling his pud in a public toilet. It wasn’t right, but also—big deal! His inner Puritan could buzz off. There was nobody else there. He was alone in the bathroom. He was alone almost everywhere he went, really. Why stop? He gave another tug. He paid his mortgage, he had a strong credit history. If he applied for a new loan, he’d be the easiest credit file in town. He spit on his hand, cupped it, and rubbed his damp palm over the head of his cock.
His wife was great. He loved his wife.
There wasn’t enough time in a lifetime to show Sarah all the love he had for her. There wasn’t enough safety, enough security, in an uncertain future to keep her as safe as he wanted to. Everything he did was for Sarah, and he respected her! Respect was crucial. She was gorgeous, smart, and patient. She was his twin, his body; when he looked at her, he somehow saw not some other person, but a part of himself. They were on the same page, all the time—he could trust her.
Now she marked the dates they had sex on the calendar, which was okay, until friends came over, and then it seemed a little weird. She highlighted her fertile days in yellow. She’d started using a computer program to keep track. She walked into his mind, his fantasy, and he had to push her away. This wasn’t about Sarah.
Coming back from the show, twenty years earlier, Hannah’s shoes had cut into her feet. She complained. She was drunk. She leaned on his shoulder. He was stumbling, too drunk to drive, but not so wasted to think he could drive.
He pushed her up against a loading dock. No, wait, she pulled him closer. It was her move first. When they made out, their mouths were sweet with beer and mashed together, and they fell or folded themselves down onto the cement stairs.
Her legs were so long in those white shoes she was taller than he was. He’d climbed on top of her and hitched up her skirt. No—that’s not it. She’d pushed her way on top of him. She’d been the one jerking on his fly. His black jeans. His effort to be some downtown kinda cool. His head was against a cement piling, something to keep trucks from running into that part of the loading dock. It cut into his neck. He said, “Somebody might see—” his voice broke, and Hannah laughed.
She pulled open her button-down shirt and showed him her bra, then her tits underneath. Her bra opened in front that easily, with one twist of her fingers like she was turning a key in a lock. He didn’t want to do it. He was scared. She said, “Come on, there’s nobody here. It’s dark.”
It was downtown. Public. He said, “Let’s get back.” To the dorms, he meant, that warm, safe place.
She grabbed him through his jeans and gave a squeeze that made him yip.
But that was years ago. He’d been drunk. Maybe he had it wrong. Memory is as faulty as anything. Could be he’d climbed on her. Maybe he’d undone his pants and lifted her skirt. It was his memory now. He could tell the story the way he wanted to remember it, full of the weight and curve of her boobs and the taste of her skin. Could be she was the one who said “No,” who said “Wait,” and maybe she didn’t mean it. He ran his damp hand faster over his tight rod, and then again, and he didn’t want to stop but he knew he should but why should he? He remembered how soft she’d been, and how sure of herself, and when he saw her now, in the paper, it was like she was there for him, like she hadn’t left him so long ago, like she hadn’t given the It’s-not-you-it’s-me speech, and he remembered instead an earlier evening when they first met, the way she whispered, “Come to my room,” and he closed his eyes and heard it again in his head and he couldn’t help it he shot his wad and pressed his cock down, felt the kiss of water, sent spew to lace its way through the toilet bowl and he hated himself even as he groaned, as he breathed, as he crunched the newspaper in one hand.
When he opened his eyes, he’d gone blind—all those warnings he heard as a kid, and now here it was, he was blind! The bathroom was uniformly black. He couldn’t see the stall door in front of him. He couldn’t see his own massive shoes.
No. That wasn’t it. He’d been in one place for too long. The motion sensor.
He waved the folded newspaper over his head, a gesture that fell between a command and an SOS. The lights stayed off. The toilet, that overeager red-eyed bastard, saw the wave of the paper in the dark and flushed again beneath him. He waved the paper once more. No luck. He fumbled and reached a hand out into the complete darkness, until he jammed his fingers against the stall door. He found the lock—he could reach it from where he sat—unlatched it, and pushed the door open. But the door didn’t trigger the motion sensor. either. Who’d designed this space? He sat in the dark for minutes, or maybe seconds. Either way, too long. What if the whole building had gone out? Or the whole city? Maybe it was a power shortage, or a terrorist attack, and he was on the toilet with his pants down.
It was a darkness so thick, so entirely absent of light, that Ben started to see shapes in it. He saw something yellow flickering always just to the side of his vision. He lost sense of the space, thought the walls were closer than they were, then farther away, and when he reached, he never had it right. The pitch-black room started to seem full of motion, full of space without the confines of visible walls. He could practically see molecules floating in the air. He knocked his coffee over, heard the clatter, and felt the cup hit his bare leg. Lukewarm liquid seeped into his sock. And there was that little hiss overhead again, as the air freshener gave a wheeze and crowded the dark with its scent of oranges.
That air freshener acted as a timer, triggering Ben’s guilt: Nobody should stay in the john long enough to hear a timed air freshener twice.
One shoe was soggy with coffee. He had to risk everything, to get out. He stood up and shuffled forward in the dark. He shuffled and he waved the paper. He swung the stall door open, hoping the radius of that motion would be enough to turn the lights on. The door swung open, then closed, then open again, in the dark. He stood and waved the folded-up newspaper just past the border of that stall doorway. He shuffled a tentative step forward in the pitch black, then another, and still nothing happened. His pants were around his ankles. Clearly this was going to take more commitment. He bent to grab his trousers and pull them up, and when he did, smack—fuck!—there it was, the crack of his face against porcelain, the sink. That sink was closer than he thought. Who moved the goddamn sink?
The automated faucet turned on, triggered by the swi
ng of Ben’s head as he fell to his knees. That sink mocked him—the whole bathroom could go on with or without Ben. He was nothing. The door opened. Finally the lights came on. Some big moose stood in the doorway. Blood ran rich from Ben’s nose, and he moved his nose with his hand. It clicked sideways, bone against bone, and he was instantly sick and light-headed. There was a taste of metal in the back of his throat and his eyes swelled shut even as he tried to see straight, tried to sort out two sinks or one sink, two or one, every line doubled and blurry. He blinked and squinted, and felt his head swim.
The guy who’d tripped the light just held the door open for fuck’s sake. He didn’t back out or come in, like he was waiting for a prom date that would never show. Ben clutched the folded newspaper in one hand, and there she was, the love of his life, smiling—two of her. No, one. Then two again, the lines wobbling—about to fly off in a private plane. She’d been voted into office! People loved her! He loved her. Ben loved her. He’d voted for her, too. He filled in the little red circle with such sweet, sweet care. His cock was out, limp and exposed. Humiliation, pain, love, and Hannah—it was all familiar. Before he passed out, before he fell against the tile floor and before the paramedics came, for a moment he felt so young again that it was almost all right. The taste of blood in his mouth was salty as sex. It was like he was in college, and in love, half-drunk, out on the town, heading back to the dorms with Hannah.
Arena was trapped in the Temple Everlasting of Life on Earth. She could see the world out the storefront window but was too shy to duck around the skinny guy who’d lured her in. “Are you happy with the shape of your life?” he asked. Arena nodded. She’d be happier if she could get out of there, politely.
Behind him a wall was covered with photos of the cosmos torn from magazines: black holes and the Milky Way. One read URANUS IN INFRARED. Those words made her queasy in ways she couldn’t articulate even to herself.