“They’re not ice-cold. Sorry,” he said as he took a deep swallow from his own bottle.
“That’s okay,” she answered. She tucked her naked feet beneath her bootie and snuggled down into the sofa, all her nerves on edge.
They sat quietly for a moment and then Raffie set his beer down on the coffee table. It wasn’t really a coffee table, Maddie noticed. It was really just a small wooden box. He looked off into the distance for a second and took a deep breath, then he turned to her and took her bottle away from her, setting it alongside his on the box. He turned back to her and looked her full in the eyes, and Maddie knew the truth: sex was really going to happen. With this much older, incredibly hot, incredibly romantic guy.
And it frightened her a little. She wanted so badly to just let the experience happen to her, but words started blubbering out of her mouth as he laid her back against the sofa. “Raffie,” she whispered, as he kissed the side of her neck, “do you like romance movies?” He propped himself atop her and one of his hands found her belt. “Because,” she said, “because you are like one. You’re like something straight out of a storybook.” He didn’t answer right away, instead nuzzling deep into the delicate parts of her throat and hastening his machinations with her belt.
“That’s funny,” he said, pausing to kiss her gently, “because to me it feels like you’re the one who has come out of a fairy tale.” He teased the zipper on her jeans into its lowest position as he lifted his chin to look into her eyes. “I’ve never had anyone understand me the way you do. I’ve never had anyone get me the way that you do.” Maddie raised her hips a little so he could slide her blue jeans down more easily. “You are the only woman I’ve ever met who has been right there on the page with me,” he said as he slipped his hand inside the front of her panties.
She took a deep breath and tried to go with the flow.
♥♥♥
The sex had been good, she thought. It was hard to tell; she was so caught up in the experience of being with someone new that she hadn’t even really noticed what the actual sex felt like.
The kissing had been nice. The touching was sometimes exhilarating. His fingers seemed to know how to press her body in just the right ways. But as it had all moved forward, she’d become so nervous. She stopped feeling the touches and instead felt her own inadequacies. When his pants came off, she pretended she knew the right way to touch a man, but it was really just pretending. The pretending had worked fairly well, she thought, but she wasn’t positive. He had seemed pleased with her actions, but he could have been acting.
Her nervousness about her manual abilities had prompted her to push toward sex quickly rather than dither about with more foreplay. He had been happy to oblige, she thought, but now in the darkness of the little house, she wondered if she had made a mistake. She wished he had stayed awake to talk with her, but he’d fallen asleep almost instantly. She felt icky. She wished she’d have resisted the sex entirely. It was just so hard to know what to do sometimes.
She flipped and turned fitfully on the sofa which she now understood was also Raffie’s only bed. She’d come to discover that there was no bedroom at all; there was only the small den, a tiny kitchen, and a mind-bogglingly small bathroom which she hadn’t used yet, although she’d noticed it through the hanging-bead doorway as the two of them had finished up the sex and laid down for bed.
Raffie snored in the darkness next to her, and despite the gentle warm breeze coming through the open windows, Maddie’s mind wouldn’t rest. She was squashed up against the backrest of the couch and she didn’t know how much longer she could bear to be pressed there; she so, so wanted to get up, get dressed, and sneak back over to her own air-conditioned and comfy bedroom. She wanted to slip into a t-shirt and boxer shorts and nuzzle her face into her own sweet pillow. She longed to smell the scents of her own safe room, but instead she was here, watching the scarves hanging in the window move with the breeze. Her new lover was sleeping entirely naked, wrapped in a thin sheet.
She decided to extricate herself from the couch and from Raffie’s leg, which was thrown atop her. His leg was heavy. Gently she lifted it and set it aside. She twisted herself out from under the sleeping remainder of him and fell quietly to the floor, catlike. She stretched her arm out to try to reach her panties because she was loathe to stand up naked in front of Raffie’s open windows, even though she was pretty sure it was past midnight. He didn’t have any clocks in the room that she could see—no VCR clock, nothing. And besides, midnight really wasn’t that late in a college town. Somebody could drive up to one of those other little houses, and if that happened while Maddie stood naked in Raffie’s living room, she’d be mortified.
After wriggling into her panties she put Raffie’s shirt on. All she wanted to do was find something to drink and then go to the bathroom, and she didn’t want to go through the trouble of tying herself into the kerchief shirt to do that. Besides, Raffie’s shirt was long enough so that if she was spotted through a window, she wouldn’t feel scandalous.
She passed through the beaded door-hanging into the tiny kitchen. She noted again the entry to the miniscule bathroom, but her thirst was greater than her need to pee, so she proceeded into the kitchen first. It was a narrow little room with a small length of countertop along one side, and a sink, stove, and fridge crammed against the back wall.
She went to the fridge and opened it but the light did not come on inside. A distinct scent wafted out of it, and Maddie knew that scent: it was the smell of a refrigerator that hasn’t been switched on in a while. It was a smell of plastic and warm refrigeration coils. But she did see two small coolers on the shelves inside the fridge. Curious, she swung the door entirely open and leaned into the fridge to nudge one of the cooler lids aside. It contained more of the beers that she and Raffie had drunk earlier that night, and a good bit of ice as well. She slid the top of the cooler back into place and looked inside the second cooler. It was empty.
I guess his landlord is a cheapskate and won’t get the fridge fixed? What a jerk, she thought. She flipped the refrigerator door shut and turned to the cabinets, her mind reeling from the idea of trying to live without a fridge. What does he eat? she wondered as she opened a cabinet. It was filled with normal things: boxes of crackers, bags of trail mix. She pondered this for a moment and realized that if you avoided eggs, butter, milk, and meat, you probably could make do with a cooler full of ice for the rare occasion you decided to keep something for a day or two. You’d just have to eat everything you cooked because there’d be no place for leftovers.
Maddie turned her attention to a clear glass pitcher full of water that was on the countertop next to a few glasses that were turned upside down on a dishtowel. I’d still need a working fridge, she thought as she poured herself a glass. I couldn’t go without cold sodas for very long.
She finished her glass of water in several satisfying gulps and then turned her attention to the bathroom door. It looked welcoming enough but she was skeptical. Guys rarely kept their bathrooms clean. She looked down at her bare feet and wished she had put her socks on. She stood for a moment debating whether to go back and get them or not, and then decided she’d just tiptoe and try not to get too much floor funk on her feet.
The bathroom was surprisingly clean. The shower was clean and there was a towel tossed neatly over the towel rail. The moonlight streaming through the open window shone on the toilet lid—which was closed. The sink was clean of clutter: no messy soaps melting on the side, no razor scum all over the rim of the sink. “Huh,” she said out loud. Not too many guys kept their bathrooms so tidy.
She opened the toilet lid as she turned to peep out the window, which was adjacent to the toilet. The security lights from her own duplex buildings twinkled through the shadows of the trees. She hovered over the toilet seat out of habit—one should avoid sitting on toilets not belonging to oneself—and gaily tinkled away, pleased with herself for pointing her stream forward a little onto the porcelain instead of
into the water. She liked a silent tinkle; the sound of her own liquid splashing in the bowl made her a little self-conscious. She certainly didn’t want Raffie rousing in the den to the sound of her urine cascading into the bowl. She glanced around looking for toilet paper and found none. She bobbed up and down a few times to shake the last drops from her body and then took a deep breath and pulled up her panties. She hated having to pull up her panties onto wet.
As she turned and folded the toilet seat shut, she wondered if she should flush. She always flushed at home, but she dreaded flushing here. After a sigh, she reached out for the flush-handle and gave it a shove. Better he wakes up to the sound of a flush than to have him come in here for his morning pee and find the bowl full of yellow, she thought. How gross and unladylike would that be?
The flusher gave no response. With a sigh, she reached over and gave it a good twist. There was still no response, just the sound of the mechanisms inside the tank rubbing against each other. She waggled the flusher up and down, then tried pressing it gently, then forcefully, then chanting a quiet little prayer to it. It just wouldn’t flush.
She stood up straight and looked down at it.
Well, it’s a good thing I didn’t go #2 in here, isn’t it? she thought to herself with a disgusted little frown. This rent-house is a pit. The fridge doesn’t work, the toilet barely works. She peered at herself in the bathroom mirror in the dark. Even the mirror was old, the edges of it worn to shades of brown that didn’t reflect anything anymore.
That’s it, she thought. I like this guy, but I don’t like these sleeping arrangements and I have class tomorrow. Forget this. She crept back into the den-slash-bedroom and found her jeans. She slipped them over her hips and zipped them. She stood for a moment in deliberation about the shirt; she was comfortable in Raffie’s shirt and didn’t feel like lacing the kerchief shirt around her ribs. She didn’t want to creep back through the garden in the open-backed shirt because she’d been scratched up enough the first time. She left Raffie’s shirt on and sat down to pull her boots on.
Moments later she was crouching and ducking through the hole in the fence. She emerged into her own duplex gravel lot and sighed a little breath of relief. I just am not ready to spend the whole night with him, she thought as she crossed the yard to her door.
Maybe if his toilet had flushed, she decided as she walked down the hallway to her own bathroom. Karla was still out for the night, and Maddie had the place to herself. The bathroom was so comforting and welcoming. She shook off her clothes and twiddled with little items on the countertop. She turned to the shower and started the water.
As she waited for the spray to warm up, she thought back on her evening and grew increasingly displeased with Raffie’s house. It had at first seemed so charming, but after scratching the surface of it and discovering the barely functional kitchen and bathroom along with the absence of a bedroom, the dreamy hippie décor had lost some of its appeal. She wasn’t a total snob, but she did want a guy with a little money, and the fact that he’d not only chosen such a tiny place to live but also apparently chosen to live with such poor facilities made her a little nervous.
But still, I slept with him and then sneaked away like it didn’t mean anything to me, she thought, stepping into the bathtub. She ran her hair under the spray and let the hot water envelop her, rinsing all traces of him from her body. But it was too late now, and part of her didn’t even care, and a larger part of her was heeding the call to go to bed, and so she did, retreating to her room and falling into a contemplative and only somewhat restless sleep.
Chapter 7
Despite her vague misgivings, magical feelings swept in the next day when Maddie gave Karla the blow-by-blow account of the date. Karla listened, rapt, with only occasional outbursts and questions. Maddie didn’t bother to describe the shortcomings of Raffie’s place, because as she told the tale, those shortcomings didn’t seem to matter anymore.
The magic continued when Raffie dropped in with a bunch of bananas mid-afternoon. They sat on the pink sofa and laughed and made monkey noises and had a blast. She’d told him that she needed to read Othello and wasn’t looking forward to it, so he volunteered to read passages to her. She laid on the floor and gazed up at the ceiling while the words washed over her, and she thought of Nick. He had wanted to be the one doing this with her, but she just knew he would have forced her to read along instead of letting her just relax and absorb.
A couple of nights later, Maddie and Raff drove out to one of the local government buildings in the middle of the night and Raff led her up a long, grand flight of concrete steps. Halfway to the top, they’d stopped. He took off his backpack, unzipped it, and produced a bottle of wine, a blanket, and a little portable radio that he tuned to a classical music station. She was pleased to see that it wasn’t Othello he’d brought this time; she was so tired of it. Instead he’d brought a small, battered copy of Leaves of Grass.
He read poetry to Maddie that night. It was sentimental and touching. Well, the idea of having poetry read to her was sentimental and touching. The actual poetry was just as dull as Shakespeare had been to her, so she didn’t listen to a word of it, instead just saying “wow” now and then and rubbing Raffie’s knee.
All was magic and romance, except that Maddie always had to drive, because it had come to light that Raffie did not have a car. He believed they were poisonous to the environment. It was a bummer, because Maddie liked to drink now and then, too. So far in their relationship, Maddie always got to have one glass of wine, and Raff got to finish the bottle. He finished the bottle that night and she stuffed Leaves of Grass back into his bag and led him to the car.
It won’t be like this forever, Maddie reminded herself. After we’ve known each other longer, I’ll let him drive my car and I’ll be able to get tipsy now and then.
Mid-morning on Friday, a full week after the movie date, Maddie heard a knock at the door. She felt a little annoyance; she was preparing to meet Nick so that he could review the rough draft of her new paper and she still had a few pages left to write. Time was of the essence. She knew the guest was either a neighbor or Raffie. Raff never phoned. He preferred to just show up, saying that phone calls were too impersonal. She hoped it was neither; maybe it would be the mailman dropping off a package, and then she could refocus on her paper in peace.
She rushed down the hallway to the door, going up on her tiptoes to peep through the spyhole. It was Raffie after all. He stood there, and he looked grim.
She’d spent the evening at his house again last night—but like always, as soon as he’d fallen asleep, she’d slipped away. Perhaps he was getting fed up with her leaving that way. That had to be it. What else could it be? She fell away from the door and ran her hand through her hair, feeling frustrated. Then she turned the latch and let him in.
“I’m so sorry I left last night,” she said as she stood back to let him pass. “I just wanted to come home because I have this paper to write. I know that’s probably horrible, that I never stay at your place,” she continued, casting her eyes across the polished hardwood floor, searching for the right thing to say and wishing he hadn’t chosen this morning to complain. She had work to do.
Raffie moved past her into the den and sat down in the big black chair. There was no romantic greeting, no caress, nothing. It was very unusual. Maddie turned, closing the door behind her, and said, “Again, I’m really sorry.”
He sat still for a moment, then leaned forward, elbows on knees, and dropped his face into his hands. Maddie quietly moved to the sofa, unsure of what to do. A dozen possibilities rang through her mind. She could reach out and touch him poignantly. She could perch in his lap and kiss him passionately. She could sit on the floor by him and put her head on his knees. She could get powerful and tell him that she didn’t have time for him this morning. What she actually did was sit silently and wait for him to speak.
“Something incredible could happen to me, but it could make me lose you,” he finall
y said, raking his fingers through his hair.
“What? That doesn’t make any sense,” she said, surprised. She wondered if this conversation was going to take very long.
“What if I just tripped out and left town for a while?” he asked. When he lifted his head the look in his eyes was tortured. They didn’t look like shining gold; they looked tarnished.
Maddie hesitated. “You’re going out of town?” she asked, confused. A tight feeling of frustration gripped her chest. She thought of the clock, her paper, and Nick. She was in no mood for one of Raffie’s suspenseful conversational games. “People go out of town all the time,” she said.
“This is more. Brian and Courtney are going out to Telluride,” he said, lifting his eyes to meet hers. She had no idea what he was talking about. “And they’ve asked me to go with them.” He nodded his head up and down, less in a gesture of assent than in a gesture of quiet agony. His eyes met hers again.
“What, Telluride?” she asked, dumbfounded. “Telluride is a place, right? Are you saying you want to go to Telluride?” She thought of her Works Cited page and wondered where her guidelines sheet was.
“It’s for a big festival, a big folk-music festival that they hold every year. It’s really a chance of a lifetime event,” he explained, slipping from the black chair and walking a few feet across the den on his knees, until he was close to her, clasping her hands in his. “I feel uncomfortable leaving you when our love is just budding.”
The irritation in her stomach surged. The tightness in her chest was replaced by a feeling of heartburn.
Peace of Her Heart Page 6