Super Host

by Kate Russo

  “What?” she asks, defensively.

  More questions.

  “Nothing.” He smiles, stroking her face to calm her. “Just wanted to look at you.”

  She searches his eyes for an ulterior motive. “Do you say that to every woman?”

  “Do you always ask so many questions?”

  Bollocks. Didn’t mean to say that out loud.

  He masks his frustration with a grin. Why do women always assume they want answers? Does she really want to know that he just broke into his own house, desperate, thanks to not having been laid in two years, or does she want sex? He knows which one he wants. Best to just keep kissing her.

  Intertwining his fingers with hers, he leads her along to the staircase, glancing back to make sure she wants to be led. She smiles and squeezes his hand. It’s him that’s nervous, not her. “I’ve let my daughter take over the master,” he says, but it sounds like a non sequitur. “She has more clothes.” Sorry for the lie, Mia. I do love you. So much.

  He opens the door to a bedroom that he and Eliza had always used as a guest room. They’d had sex in this bed once, he remembers, when it was far too hot to sleep on the top floor. He’d caressed his wife’s naked body with an ice cube that night. He tells himself not to think about that right now. The room is clean. Too clean. It looks like no one has slept in it for months, because no one has.

  “This isn’t your room,” she says, conspiratorially. “Statement. Not question.”

  “They’re all my rooms.” He wraps his arms around her and mentally pats himself on the back for that comeback.

  They kiss again and she guides his hand to her breast, the first thing that feels familiar. Though he knows they come in many shapes and sizes, all the best breasts feel the same to Bennett, like a ball of buffalo mozzarella wrapped in silk. Brilliant.

  She unbuttons his favorite blue-checked shirt and flings it clear across the room.

  Okay.

  He pulls her silky black top over her head. It snags momentarily on the gold chain of her necklace. Underneath is her bra made of sheer black mesh. It leaves nothing to the imagination, but that’s fine by him, he’s happy to give his overworked imagination a rest. Her abdomen is trim, but fleshy and speckled with freckles and moles. She pushes him onto the bed and he wonders, for the first time, if maybe he’s not the first customer Claire has seduced. She crawls on top of him, wrapping her legs around his. Her tongue darts back in his mouth, stabbing the insides of his cheeks. He will get an erection, he tells himself. He just needs a little more time. She sits up, straddling his legs, and pulls the strap of his belt out of the buckle. He doesn’t want her to see that he’s not, yet, up to the task, so he pulls her down again, deciding to endure that dagger tongue for a while longer. He imagined this would be more romantic, more tender. There’s no real reason that they should make love. It’s not like they’re in love, but still, he didn’t think it would be so . . . carnal. He thought, at the very least, that she’d let him lead. It is his house, after all. Plus, he did let her win the staring contest earlier.

  He fumbles with the back of her bra and manages to unlatch it. Not in one fell swoop as he’d hoped, but rather, one little plastic clasp at a time. He flings it across the room, because flinging things seems to turn her on. Taking control, he flips her over on the bed and kisses her breasts, usually the surest route to an erection.

  His mind keeps wandering to his little studio in the garden. Maybe that would have been better? He imagines himself lying on top of Claire on the hard futon, still in its couch position. He imagines it creaking under their weight. He thinks about waking up next to her, cramped and achy. He’d make her tea. He’d let her look through his fabrics. He’d sketch her with whichever one was her favorite. He wishes he’d done that; that would have been so much better. Besides, he’s a terrible liar. Lying makes his cock soft.

  He works his lips down to her waist, but looks up at her before removing her jeans. She can’t be buying all his bullshit, can she? When she smiles back at him, his heart sinks. Getting away with all these lies doesn’t feel as good as he thought it would.

  She props herself up on her elbows, looking at him, confused. “Are you alright?”

  “I’m not who you think I am,” he says, defeated, head between her legs.

  “You’re not Bennett Driscoll?”

  “No, I am.” He rests his head on her thigh.

  “This isn’t your house?”

  “It is.”

  “You don’t want to have sex with me?” She shakes her head side to side, so that her red hair falls on her nipples, resting like feathers on sand.

  “No, I do.”

  “Then you’re exactly who I think you are.”

  She shifts her legs around to the top of the bed so that the two of them are now face-to-face. She kisses him again, but this time, sweetly, slowly. “I’m sure it’s complicated,” she says. “It’s always complicated.” She runs her fingers through his hair.

  It hadn’t occurred to him, until now, just how much he wanted her to do that.

  “I don’t usually touch the women I draw.”

  “I know.” She lays her head under his, looking up at him.

  “And I don’t draw the women I touch.” He can feel his expression growing dark.

  She reaches up and caresses his cheek.

  “Twenty-five years with my wife. I never did a single drawing of her.”

  “I bet you could, though. Every last curve and nook from memory.”

  What can he say to that? She’s right, but it can’t be something she wants to hear, not while lying on her back, exposed, on his bed. Her breasts, it seems, defy gravity.

  “Will you still draw my picture?” she asks.

  “Of course,” he replies, “if you want me to.”

  He resumes kissing her, upside down, cupping her face in his hands.

  “Even if?”

  “Yes.” He saddles up beside her and pulls her into him.

  She pulls back. “I was wondering, if maybe instead of the bar, you could draw me in a bookshop?”

  He rolls on top of her. He’s hard as a rock now.

  “Can you do that?” she asks, wrapping her legs around his. “Draw something that’s not really there?”

  He nods, yes. He can do that.

  Feelings Aren’t Facts

  Theo is a jerk. Is this a feeling or a fact? Emma asks herself, her pen hovering over a small notebook, open to a blank sheet. It’s certainly true, because when you act like a jerk, you are one. She writes it down on the piece of paper to fill the page, Theo is a jerk. She thinks about ending the sentence with an exclamation point, but her therapist has encouraged her not to use inflammatory punctuation. “Is that helpful?” Dr. Gibson would ask. “Probably not,” Emma would answer. “Sometimes the most powerful tool against anxiety is empathy.” Yet another theory floated by Dr. Gibson in their last session. “Just keep that in mind, Emma. This trip to England isn’t going to be easy on Theo.”

  Sitting at the large kitchen island, she tears the perforated piece of paper from the notebook and folds it up into a square. She creases it carefully, so that all the edges line up, before dropping it into a cookie jar full of other similarly folded pieces of paper. The “fact jar” was intended to last the full month of their trip, but it’s only been a week and already it’s stuffed. Over the last several days, she’s had a lot of strong convictions, all of which she believes, wholeheartedly, are facts: Theo is a jerk. Bennett is spying on me. Charlie is selfish. Sarah is avoiding me. Monica hates me. All facts. All recorded in the fact jar. Most of Emma’s “truths” center around what she believes to be her inherent unlikability; she doesn’t like herself most of the time, so it’s natural to think that others must feel the same. It was Dr. Gibson’s idea for Emma to record and store all of her strongly held convictions while in London. This is
the first time since starting therapy that she’s taken a full month off, but Dr. Gibson thought it would be a good challenge for her. It just so happens that everything Emma doesn’t want to do sounds like a “good challenge” to Dr. Gibson. This time around, though, Emma thinks she might enjoy not having her therapist constantly nagging her about feelings versus facts, rituals versus flexibility, fears versus evidence, yeah, yeah, yeah . . .

  She wasn’t diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder until two years ago. Her symptoms aren’t typical. She doesn’t wash her hands a hundred times a day and she’s disorganized—leaves all her clothes in a pile on the floor and never makes the bed. She thinks superstitious people are stupid, like the way Rafael Nadal always has to pull on his ears and nose before every point on the tennis court. Emma suffers from a growing list of what she calls her “negative obsessions”—things she simply can’t abide. Other people might call them pet peeves, but in Emma they illicit intense fear and rage. The sight of anything that’s cracked and ripped, tearing or peeling, makes her want to scream. It’s even worse if the rip can be described as “gaping.” That makes the acid in her stomach leap straight to her throat. She’ll go out of her way to avoid anything that looks like it’s decaying, including food, rundown buildings, and even torn upholstery. She avoids most people, too, because of the gross sounds they make, their gestures, or how they smell. To Emma’s way of thinking, every human being should come with a remote control, so she can mute them, or better yet, just turn them off entirely. Because of this avoidance, she frequently feels isolated. It’s incredibly lonely when you want to murder everyone around you all the time.

  It’s also incredibly lonely when your husband abandons you in a stranger’s house for a month to take care of his selfish brother. Dr. Gibson would say: “Drug addiction is a disease, Emma.” She looks at her phone and scrolls through Theo’s texts. The last message her husband sent was earlier this morning: Wish me luck xx. That pissed her off, but she responded good luck anyway, no return kisses. His older brother, Charlie, has an appointment at Crossroads Rehabilitation Center today, which he’s only agreed to attend if Theo, and only Theo, takes him. Charlie is adamant that it’s completely unfair for him to have to make a decision about where to spend the next eight weeks of his life based on a one-hour consultation. Besides, according to Charlie, he doesn’t have a drug problem, anyway. If he goes to rehab, it’ll just be to get his family off his back. Poor Theo, Emma thinks. Charlie is playing him.

  She should get started on a new drawing this morning, but it’s difficult to focus when she’s waiting to hear from Theo. Charlie won’t check himself into Crossroads Rehabilitation, she scribbles on another piece of paper, then folds it, and stuffs it into the jar. It’s hard to work when you’re waiting to hear you’re right.

  She gazes through the kitchen window at Bennett’s studio across the garden. He’s been spying on her all morning, and all of yesterday morning, too, and the mornings before that. Ever since they arrived, this dickhead has been spying on her. She can just catch the top of his head disappearing below the studio window when she looks up.

  There were a lot of factors that went into choosing where in London to rent a house, but only one that really mattered: no shared walls. Dr. Gibson has encouraged Emma to be more flexible on this; London is, after all, a big city and very few of its residents live without at least one shared wall. “What frightens you more,” she asked, “your neighbors hearing you or you hearing them?” Emma hates the idea of both. She likes her life to be as private as possible. She feels the same about other people’s lives; if they’re exercising, watching television, or having sex, she doesn’t want to hear it. It’s grotesque, she thinks, the way other people’s lives can just seep into your own and vice versa. Everyone should live in a human version of a Tupperware box. No seepage. “Remember, Emma, avoidance is a form of compulsion,” Dr. Gibson told her. “The more you avoid your fears, the worse they’ll get.” Whatever. If Emma was going to London for a month, leaving her suburban Rhode Island house, studio, and routine behind, then she was going to have certain demands. “No shared walls” was one of them. Except for one minor concession, Bennett’s house fit the bill perfectly. The owner lives in a studio in the back garden. “You won’t know I’m here,” Bennett wrote on the listing. Bullshit.

  Hey, babe, Theo’s text pops up on her phone. Charlie doesn’t like Crossroads.

  She wants to smash her phone on the marble countertop hard enough that even Theo, miles away, will feel it. She glances out to the studio and spots Bennett drinking a cup of tea by the window, pretending to be captivated by it.

  Fuck sake, Theo, she responds.

  Alright, don’t kill the messenger, he replies.

  Theo’s so much more than the messenger. He’s the enabler, she thinks, but doesn’t text that. Instead, she writes it down on a piece of paper, Theo is an enabler.

  * * *

  ||||||||||||||||||||||||

  Emma had been starting a masters program in painting at Rhode Island School of Design when she met Theo, a photography student a year ahead of her. She fell for him on an early autumn afternoon when the air was getting chilly, but she was too stubborn to switch from flip-flops back to regular shoes. The wasps were similarly obstinate, not yet ready to give up on the idea of summer. They were sluggish and flying low to the ground that day and one of them flew between Emma’s heel and her sandal as she strode across campus. That was the end of the wasp, but it left its stinger embedded in her heel. The pain was immediate and horrendous. She sat on a nearby bench, waiting for the stinging to subside, but it wouldn’t. She had her foot propped up on her opposite knee, inspecting the sting, her thick brown ringlets flopping in front of her, when Theo sat down next to her.

  “Alright?” he asked.

  “I stepped on a fucking wasp.”

  He looked at her, startled, not expecting such strong language.

  “Sorry, it fucking hurts. Sorry.”

  He smiled at her, apparently amused at how American she was. “Want me to have a look?” he asked, cautiously, rummaging through his backpack. “I have some tweezers on my Swiss Army knife. If the stinger is still in there, maybe I can get it.” His British accent was adorable.

  When he pulled the tiny tweezers from the top of the knife, she noticed his bright green eyes. Everything about him seemed to suggest that whatever he encountered in life was an unexpected opportunity. It was charming at the time, but now, five years in, Emma admits it’s fucking annoying.

  “It’ll feel so much better, I promise. Give me your foot.”

  She cringed at the thought of the metal touching her burning heel, but reluctantly, she stretched her leg across his lap. She was thankful, at least, that she’d bothered to paint her toenails the day before.

  “Yep. I see the little bugger.” He looked up and smiled at her. “Ready?”

  “Just fucking do it,” she said, fists clenched.

  She punched her leg several times as the metal pressed against the thick skin of her heel.

  “Hold still . . . got it!” He held up the tweezers triumphantly, the tiny stinger on the end. “Better?”

  “Not really. Sorry.”

  “You probably need an antihistamine,” he said, getting up close to the sting. “Looks red and swollen.”

  She removed her leg from his lap, before the bottom of her foot could become permanently etched into his memory.

  “I can go to the chemist for you. I’m heading in that direction anyway.”

  “Really?” she asked, perplexed by his kindness.

  “I’m Theo.”

  “Emma.”

  “That’s my bike over there, Emma. I’ll be back in fifteen.”

  “Thank you. I owe you.”

  “That’s the plan,” he said with a cheeky smile.

  The next day, she repaid him with a drink. Sitting in a booth at the grad
student bar, he challenged her to go as long as she possibly could without swearing. Fourteen minutes was her best time and that was only because he had his tongue in her mouth for most of it. She remembers there being a giant tear in the cushion of the red laminate booth with the yellowish foam sticking out. She could see it clearly as she peered over Theo’s shoulder, mid-kiss. It didn’t bother her one bit.

  * * *

  ||||||||||||||||||||||||

  On the top floor of Bennett’s sprawling house, Emma sits at the small white drafting table she purchased especially for this trip. It’s set up in the master bedroom because there’s a lot of extra space on the third floor. Skylights surround the giant loft-style bedroom, a former attic, so she gets morning and afternoon light streaming down from all sides. Windows on the backside of the room face the garden, flooding the room with even more afternoon light. After laying out a large blank sheet of thick white paper on the slanted surface of the table, she opens her laptop on the unmade, king-size bed and clicks on Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, Knee Play no. 5 in her iTunes. With the computer’s remote control in hand, she sits down at the drafting table. The plastic tray attached to the bottom of the table is filled with colored pencils, one hundred and twenty to be exact, and she picks up Prussian blue, her favorite. She inspects the tip, pricking her finger to test its sharpness. She gives it a couple spins through the pencil sharpener and she’s ready. She points the remote to the computer and hits Play. The sound of an organ comes in low as a choir begins to chant:

  1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 5 6 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 5 6 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 1 2 3 4 2 3 4 . . .

  She transcribes the numbers in a calligraphy-like style, as the choir recites them.