An hour later, satiated with warm salty cheese, Ben lay down on the couch and let his eyelids grow heavy. When he woke up again it was too bright in the living room. Tyler was sleeping on the other side of the couch, and Bruce Willis had been replaced by a man with impossibly white teeth demonstrating the sucking power of a handheld vacuum.
Ben fumbled with the remote and turned off the TV. He staggered upstairs, feeling a little guilty that he’d left Ilona and hoping she’d still be asleep and wouldn’t notice. He managed to tuck himself back into her bed without jostling her, but when he turned onto his side she said, “Where’d you go?”
“Bathroom.”
“Liar. You smell like pizza.”
“Tyler and I were—”
“I don’t care,” Ilona said. “I know you and your boyfriend can’t be apart for more than like ten minutes anyway. Just be quiet and let me sleep some more.” She flung an arm over him and scooched forward until her hips were pressed against him. It felt good. He felt stupid for thinking she’d be mad. Ilona didn’t get mad about shit like that.
When he woke up again the sunlight was warm and full. He checked his phone. It was 10:30. He nudged Ilona, who tried to pull the covers up over her head. “What about Judy?” he whispered.
“Not home ’til later,” she said. “Doesn’t care anyway.”
He tried to fall back to sleep, but the light was too bright. He messed around with a new game on his phone. He looked at Ilona a lot. The parts he could see, anyway. Right where the comforter met the bed, there was a strip of her skin visible. Her tank top was riding up and her stomach was moving with the soft exhalations of her breath. He imagined her in really sexy lace underwear. That was kind of interesting, but her head kept getting replaced by a Victoria’s Secret model when he thought about it for too long. Figures. Ilona probably wouldn’t tolerate wearing some hot lace underwear anyway. Her boxers were dark red with old-fashioned cars on them. He recognized the pattern and thought he might have the same ones at home somewhere.
Finally he poked her in the side. “Wake up,” he said. Ilona made a noise that was somewhere between a whine and a moan. It was clearly an objection. “Let’s go get pancakes.”
She moaned again, but this time she opened her eyes. She reached across him, pressing her chest against his to push the button on his phone. “It’s too early,” she declared and flopped back on to the pillow.
“It’s 11:30. Come on, get up.”
She lifted her head again and smacked her lips together. “Ugh, it tastes like one of Judy’s cats crapped in my mouth.”
“Do you always say exactly what you’re thinking?”
“What else would I say? Some boring social bullshit so other people can feel comfortable? No thanks.”
Ben shook his head. “There’s a toothbrush for that.”
“Oh yeah.” Ilona was suddenly animated. “Like washing your mouth out with soap—a social bullshit toothbrush. Guaranteed to scrub the nice-nice from your mouth and leave only the brutal truth.”
“Maybe you should go back to sleep,” he said.
Ilona sat up and clobbered him with her pillow. She leaped with surprising agility across the piles of clothes and into the bathroom. Ben heard the sounds of water running and then her spitting. When she came back, her face was damp and there was a tiny smudge of toothpaste in the corner of her mouth. She sat cross-legged on the bed and stared down at him critically.
“What?”
“Can I try them on?”
“Try what on?” But he already knew and pushed his head back farther into the pillow.
“Your hearing things. Are they hearing aids? That sounds like something for old people.”
“That’s what they are.”
“Don’t get sour with me. So can I try them on or what?”
“No, that’s gross.”
“Why? It’s not like they were up your nose or anything. What’s gross about your ears?”
“Ear wax,” Ben said. “And they get sweaty. I don’t know. It’s just gross.”
“Hmm,” Ilona said. She squinted, her eyes glimmering with a plan. “So you need a little convincing, okay.” She moved across the bed and straddled him with her butt just above his waistline and pinned his hands down at the wrist. His heart started pounding. If she grabbed them he was going to throw her off onto the floor. He wasn’t even thinking about doing it. It was just what was going to happen. But she didn’t grab for his ears. Instead she brought her face down so that she was just an inch above him. Her toothpaste had cinnamon in it. He had never noticed her eyelashes before, which were short but fully framed her eyes. She was studying him for something. Then she leaned forward and kissed him. Softly at first, but his mouth opened up to her and his heart, which had already been pounding, seemed as if it might burst out of the confines of his rib cage.
She left his mouth and loosened the grip on his hands as she kissed her way down his chin and down the side of his neck. She took the neck of his T-shirt in between her teeth and tugged on it a little bit before kissing his chest between his collarbones and holy shit she was still going south. Her legs were over his thighs now and she was nuzzling around at his belly button and he thought he was going to die or explode or both when she licked at his left hip bone with a darting tongue and then did the same thing on the right. But then she stopped. He waited for a second and then lifted his head off the pillow. She was staring at him, a self-satisfied smile on her face.
“I’ll keep going,” she said smugly. “But first I want to try them on.”
Wordlessly, he pulled off his hearing aids and gave them to her. She could do whatever she wanted. He watched as she slipped them on. It was so weird he could hardly look. Then she was lying on his chest again, her chin digging into him. “See,” she said. “Not that big a deal.” She pulled one off and he made a grab for it. But she pulled her hand back. “Not even that waxy.”
“That’s disgusting.”
Ilona shrugged. “A lot of things are more disgusting. They are bigger and heavier than I thought they’d be, though.” She moved her jaw up and down so her ears wiggled. “And I thought I’d be all, like, supersonic with these on. But it’s just a lot of loud buzzing.”
“Because you can hear fine,” he said tersely.
“Wow, you’re really freaking out about this, huh?” She stared down at him. “It’s not that big a deal!” She said it slowly and with emphasis that, from anyone else, would have pissed him off. But he knew it wasn’t about his hearing. This was about being seen by someone—just him by himself, not the goalie or Tyler’s best friend or even the deaf kid. This was as naked as he ever got with anyone, and he wasn’t dying or falling to pieces. It was safe and completely liberating all at the same time.
“So,” she said, “you want pancakes?” He shook his head. “Huh, was there something else then?” She grinned. “French toast?” He shook his head again. “Oh, now I remember. It was this, wasn’t it?” She licked his stomach right above the waistband of his boxers and the noise that came out of his mouth was somewhere between a sigh and a moan. She was still kissing him as she tugged his boxers down. He fell back into the bed and kept falling with the warm, incredible sensations that started with Ilona’s mouth but seemed to flood into every other part of his body.
“Please don’t make any jokes about whipped cream,” he whispered daringly.
Ilona snorted, and that was all.
Chapter 29
“Talk to Ilona?” Tyler checked the ball to Ben and then took a shot that glanced off the edge of the rim. They were playing a halfhearted game of Horse in Tyler’s driveway on Sunday afternoon. Ben had lost track if he was a H-O-R or a H-O-R-S
“Nope.”
“Text her?”
“She doesn’t have a phone.”
“Huh.” Tyler contemplated this. “Is she working? Did you go by?”
“Nah, it’s kind of busy right now. I don’t know if they’d really want her to have people show up the
re, you know?”
Tyler checked the ball again, but Ben wasn’t watching and it bounced hard off his chest. “So you’re doing this on purpose?”
“Doing what?”
“Being a dick.”
“What? No! I mean, no.”
Tyler dribbled the ball in place and then looked up and sank his shot, nothing but net. “She goes down on you. You’re telling me that you like her, and then you just let it go?”
“Ilona’s not like that,” he protested.
Tyler shook his head. “Don’t be cold. You’re not cold.”
Ben dribbled, pretending to consider various angles for his shot. They were both right. Ilona wasn’t the kind of girl who wanted him to bring her flowers and hold her hand. But Tyler was right too; he wasn’t cold. He didn’t want to be cold. He wanted to care about Ilona as much as she would let him. He smiled to himself, adding this to the small but growing file of things he was sure of about himself.
He had told Tyler about the blow job while they were at IHOP. When Ilona came back from the bathroom and they were both grinning, she just rolled her eyes and sat down to her blueberry pancakes. “You two are pathetic. Did he say it was good at least?”
Tyler gave her the same smile that had gotten them real maple syrup for free from Tracy, their waitress, and said, “I think he enjoyed himself.”
“Jesus,” Ben had said, looking around nervously, as though the nearby table of senior citizens, clearly just back from church, knew exactly what they were talking about.
He checked the ball to Tyler, who bounced it back to him. This time he caught it before it smacked him in the face. “What do you care, anyway?”
“Ilona’s cool,” Tyler said. “You shouldn’t fuck it up.”
Ben took a shot and missed. “All right.”
“All right, what?”
“I’ll call her. I’ll go over there or something.”
Tyler seemed satisfied with this answer. “Good,” he said. “Better.”
That afternoon Ben drove by Broadway Gardens, but Ilona’s jeep wasn’t in the parking lot. He knew he should go by her house, but he kept circling the turnoff for her street, getting farther and farther from his destination until, bizarrely, he ended up at the mall. He pulled into a parking space and wandered into Newberry Comics, deciding he’d browse the CDs and used DVDs for a while before deciding on his next move.
He was holding a copy of Game of Thrones: Season One in his hand when two people turned down the row where he was standing. The girl had bleach-blonde streaks in her otherwise black hair, and the guy had his hair dyed a bright atomic green. They were arguing about an animation series, manga or something. The girl was wearing black-and-white checked tights underneath skintight jean shorts. She had her pinkie linked to the guy’s pinkie. There was something about that gesture of attachment that tugged at Ben.
He walked to the front of the store where they sold the body jewelry and hair dye. Then he plunked down twenty-seven dollars and forty-three cents for a bottle of fire engine red hair dye and the Game of Thrones DVD and felt that somehow he was hedging his bet.
Ben pulled right into the driveway behind Ilona’s jeep to avoid chickening out and leaving before she knew he was there. He got out of the car holding the bottle of red hair dye and feeling like he was awkwardly late for a date he didn’t know was even happening. Before he could knock on the front door, he heard voices from around the side of the house. He walked around the porch and was greeted by an unusual scene. Ilona was wearing a long green dress slit down the middle nearly to her belly button. She was wearing makeup—loads of it, all dark and glittery around her eyes, and she was perched on this tall older guy’s knee. The guy was dressed like a lumberjack in a red-and-black checked shirt. There was another guy who looked a whole lot like the first guy, taking pictures with a giant camera. He was wearing a faded black T-shirt and skinny jeans.
Ilona jumped up. “Hey,” she said. There was only that one word for him to try and gauge if she was happy or annoyed or angry by his sudden presence. It wasn’t enough to go on.
“Hey,” he said back. “I thought you’d be working.”
She crossed the porch to where he was standing. “So you stopped by hoping I wouldn’t be here?”
“No.” He was flustered already and hiding the bottle of hair dye behind his leg. “I went by Broadway and I didn’t see your car. I don’t know.”
Ilona looked amused. “These are the Calvins. That’s Harris,” she said, pointing to the lumberjack, “and this is Elwyn.”
“Oh,” said Ben, “the, um, mural guys.”
“Yeah, I’m helping them shoot some photos for their new album cover.” She put her fingers up for air quotes. “It’s not that big a deal. They’re putting it out themselves.”
“Thanks a lot,” said the lumberjack.
Ilona flipped him off. “What they’re really doing is sleeping on my couch and eating all my food.”
“So they’re fighting over the last dented can of tuna,” Ben said.
The guy with the camera threw a grin his way.
Ilona narrowed her eyes at him. “Ha, ha,” she said. “What are you doing here? If the last of the tuna’s gone, I mean.” She reached behind his back and grabbed the paper bag with the bottle in it. She looked honestly surprised when she peered inside. “You want this?” she asked.
“Maybe,” he said.
She looked pleased and pushed back on his chest with her pointer finger so that he had to walk backwards around the corner of the house. “You want to hang out?” she asked when they were out of sight of the Calvins.
“Yeah,” he said. He’d known as soon as he saw her that Tyler was right and he was right to be there.
She pushed him up against the side of the house and leaned into him. “You going to invite me over?”
“Sure,” he said. His legs felt warm. He was trying not to look at her mouth and think about where it had been.
“For dinner? With your parents?”
He hesitated. “That’s what you want to do?”
“Kind of,” she said. “I kind of want to be sure I’m not, like, the freak you’re going to keep in the closet or under your bed.”
“Under my bed?” he said grinning. Ilona scowled. “Okay,” he said. “I will invite you to dinner.”
“Plus, we need to finish that long-ass book of yours.”
“It’s almost over anyway.”
She stepped back, looking surprised. “So after all that, they’re just going to waltz up the side of Mount Doom and toss the thing in?”
“Huh,” Ben said, “you’re actually paying attention. And no, it doesn’t happen exactly like that.”
“I never said it was a bad book,” Ilona said. “So are they going to die? Like, sacrifice themselves in the fire or something? Or, wait, I bet Sam’s going to die. Like saving Frodo’s unappreciative ass somehow.”
“Do you want me to tell you?”
Ilona shrugged. “Sure, whatever.”
“They both live.”
“Really? Like, happily ever after?”
“I don’t know. More or less, I guess. Until the next demon tries to take over Middle-earth.”
“Well,” she said, “that’s not all that bad, really.”
Chapter 30
Ben was on his way over to pick up Ilona when his phone rang.
“Dude, answer your texts for once,” Tyler said when Ben picked up.
“I was in the shower.”
“Did you run without me, asshole?”
“No, I have that thing tonight,” he paused. “With Ilona . . . and my parents.”
“Oh, shit, right! Bro, are you nervous?”
“No, what could possibly go wrong with Ilona and my parents in the same room?” Tyler laughed and Ben pulled over so he could finish the conversation before he got to her house.
“Don’t sweat it. Hey, guess what I got today?”
“What?”
“A link to my roommate q
uestionnaire for BU.”
Ben was quiet. And so it began—these places they would go without each other.
“Hey, you still there?”
“Uh huh.”
“Anyway, I started answering all these questions. There’s like a million of them about how messy you are, how much you party and study, and what kind of music you like. And then at the end they ask you a bunch of stuff about other people. You know, like what kind of person you get along with. And you know what? The whole time I was thinking of you. I was basically describing you.” Tyler laughed, but it was a stiff version of his usual laugh. “Weird, right?”
Ben was grinning. He knew Tyler couldn’t see him, but it felt like the kind of grin that would make itself felt on the other side of a phone call. “Not so weird,” he said.
“Weird to think about next year though.”
“Yeah.” Ben watched a robin on the lawn of the house across the street peck furiously at the ground in search of a worm. Nature had its own laws. They talked about it in Physics: the way that everything in the universe is always becoming more disordered and losing energy. But energy could never really be gained or lost. If it was lost somewhere, it had to be gained somewhere else. “I already kind of promised Ilona I’d come back and stalk her on the weekends though. It would be a stretch, but I could probably fit you in too sometimes.”
“Oh, thanks,” Tyler said sarcastically. “I knew you first, you know.”
“I know.”
There was another little pause. “Have fun at dinner,” Tyler said. “Text me later so I know if Dan and Allison survived Hurricane Ilona.”
“I will.” Ben put down the phone. He took a deep breath and drove the rest of the way down the block to Ilona’s house. She was sitting on the edge of the porch waiting for him.
Wired Man and Other Freaks of Nature Page 21