“My God, what is with the third degree?”
“I'm just concerned.”
Emily sighed. “Did you call for any reason other than to complain about Dad and give me the third degree?”
“Well, excuse me for my concern.” There was silence, then Barbara said more brightly, “So, do you have a date tonight?”
“No.”
“Any nice young men on the horizon?”
“Maybe.”
“Oh, tell me. Tell me.” Emily knew that was her mother's way of trying to connect, but if they went down that avenue, the discussion always ended up on Emily's lack of appropriate suitors.
“It's just somebody I've got my eye on.” She wasn't going to tell her it was Travis Roberts. Her mother had called him an asshole, but she didn't really know him. Emily had no idea why her mother had formed such a low opinion of Travis. Sure, he could be pushy and he had a little ego thing going on, but he'd only grown more appealing to Emily as they worked together. The day they shot the flood story, she felt something click. He wasn't like most of the guys she dated. He was older. Serious. Mysterious. Employed.
The only problem was he didn't show much interest in her, a reaction she didn't often experience.
Maybe it was good to move slowly. She'd been thinking about her life since that day she ran into Beth at Whole Foods. Maybe Travis was more than a one-night stand. Maybe she needed to take a long-term approach with him.
“It's nobody,” she said to her mother.
“Did I ever tell you how your father and I met?”
“You were working as a waitress.”
“That's right, but did I ever tell you what he did?”
Emily didn't want to hear some long ago love story of her parents, but she decided to giver her mother five more minutes. She put her on speaker and began to wiggle into jeans and a T-shirt.
“One of the other waitresses came up to me and said, ‘That guy over there paid for a drink, but he wanted you to bring it to him.’ He was so shy. I didn't think I'd like him because he seemed so, oh, I don't know, normal, with his wire-framed glasses and his wool sweater. He'd been coming in for weeks before he finally got up enough nerve to ask me out.”
Emily could hear a little affection creeping into her mother's voice, and she sat down on the end of her bed to listen.
“So, what happened?”
“Well, I took the drink over and set it on the table. He was so nervous. It was really cute. He asked if I'd go out with him, and I told him that I didn't date customers, so he said he'd never come back in my restaurant again if I'd go out with him.”
That made Emily smile.
“Anyway, I didn't really want to go out with him, but he said he'd take me to any restaurant I wanted to go to in Austin. I was pretty poor back then, so that sounded like a good offer. I figured if I didn't like him at least I'd get a good meal out of the deal.”
“So, what happened?”
“Well, he turned out to be charming. And I never went out with anybody else again. And the rest, as they say, is history.”
“That's a nice story.”
“I suppose the moral of the story is that sometimes the less glamorous man can be the right man.”
So there it was, the life lesson. Nothing could ever be just a good story.
“Look, Barbara,” Emily said, “I gotta go.”
On her way out, Emily stopped to close her laptop. Before she powered down, she scrolled through the tiny photos of men she had tagged as possibilities on a dating website. She had told herself that it had been only curiosity that made her sign up, that it had nothing to do with her looming twenty-seventh birthday or her ten-year reunion.
She'd taken the chemistry test to help with matches. There were questions she'd never really asked herself. How much money did she need a guy to make? What religion did she prefer? Smoking or non? Did she have a political preference? Should he be athletic? Well-read? Artistic? Should he like music? What about traveling? Should he love animals? Would she date someone divorced? A man with children? Should he want to get married? To have children with her? It had taken Emily three attempts to finish the quiz and submit her preferences.
Then there was the other side of the equation. The part that required considerably more introspection than Emily liked. What did she have to offer a man? She wasn't financially solid. She didn't have an interesting career or even much education. She wasn't particularly cultured, unless you counted current music. She liked to eat but didn't really cook. Sure she was fun and spontaneous, but what man wants his wife bartending until two in the morning? On paper, she didn't have much to offer, and she'd had to resist the urge to fudge her profile.
Her matches were intriguing, although Emily suspected that a number of them had stretched the truth. The ones with flat abs drew her attention, but she made herself delete those immediately. No more ego trips. She clicked through the profiles, deleting any that said they had a four-wheeler or guns. She deleted any that seemed religious. She made a point of staying away from musicians since they tended to eat your food, sleep over, then vanish. She didn't particularly like bald guys, but a lot of them seemed to make up for their lack of hair with a whole lot of money. It would be great to go on a date with a guy who didn't look to her when it came time to buy a second round of drinks.
Maybe her mother had a point. Maybe sometimes the less glamorous man could be the right man. Perhaps it was time that she took a hard look at herself. What did she have to keep a man interested outside of the bedroom? What would make her a good mate? So far, she hadn't been able to commit to hardly anything. Why would a serious guy take a chance on her?
Emily was cowed by the prospect of connecting through such an artificial, screened arrangement, so she had read a few blogs with tips for successful online dating. One woman wrote that she always took a camera photo of a new date and texted the picture and the guy's info to a couple of friends. That way he knew he was identified, and she could relax and enjoy herself without being paranoid.
That one gave Emily pause. She had spent years dragging random men through her bed. Never once had she considered that what she was doing was dangerous. Never once had anything untoward happened to her. Was she just lucky?
She hadn't contacted any of her matches yet. She just couldn't bring herself to take that step. She'd received an invitation to the Austin Singles Roundup! Apparently, it was a meet-and-greet where people mingled and sized each other up. She envisioned this as a refined method of barhopping, where you swam in a concentrated pool of prospects. There seemed to be plenty of fish in the ocean, but after taking her chemistry test, Emily felt like a minnow.
Travis
AS USUAL, Emo's had a slamming band playing. During a break, the massive speakers blared Devo and everybody piled out on the dance floor cracking an imaginary whip. Travis doubted if any of the bar crowd was old enough to remember the early 80s.
He was nursing his third beer when he spotted Emily in the pulsing crowd. She was with a group flinging themselves around like high school kids. Maybe some of them were.
Her friends laughed and tumbled toward the bar, knocking into each other. They ordered and the bartender handed them clear plastic cups of iced yellowish liquid, probably vodka and Red Bull.
Like magnetism, Emily's eyes fell on his. She waved, and he lifted a few fingers her direction. The music cranked up again. She came toward him. Bass vibrated the bar under his fingertips.
“Hi!” she shouted as she shoved through people lined up at the bar.
“Hi.”
“Are you following me?” She leaned into him. He could feel the heat coming off of her.
“Maybe.”
She bit her bottom lip and something stirred in him.
“You like the band? Aren't they totally awesome?” Her T-shirt hugged her curves. Jeans rode low on her hips.
“Yeah, awesome.”
He swirled beer around in his bottle and wished for a cigarette, anything to take his m
ind off the sections of sweaty hair stuck along her neck.
“Oh my God, you've got to come over to my house and see some of my photographs.”
She was persistent. He had to give her that.
“Okay. When?”
“How about now? We're all just getting ready to go hang at my place. I'll show you my shots.”
“A party at your house?”
“Sure. Come on over. I'll give you the address.”
He handed her a pen. Emily shoved up his sleeve and wrote her address on the inside of his arm.
“You could have just written that on a napkin.”
“What fun would that be?” She flung her hair over her shoulder and bounced away into the crowd.
Emily's friends were basically the same people Travis had hung out with in his twenties. The longhaired musicians went straight for the CDs and started fighting over what to play. The pale, thin vegan girl and her overly stoned boyfriend sat in the swing on the porch all night. There was the obligatory loud guy trying to impress two fashion victim girls with his shirt. The front pictured George Bush Sr. with the thought bubble, “I should have pulled out.”
People came and went, the party swelling, getting loud and hot enough inside to push people out to the porch. At other times, the gathering would ebb until only a few people were scattered around listening to music. A debate raged on possible bands for future Austin City Limits and South by Southwest festivals.
Travis sauntered into the kitchen to grab a beer from a cooler. Outside the back door, two girls were perched on the top step, their outlines grainy through the screen door. One was crying while the other comforted her. The only thing missing was someone puking in the bushes in the side yard.
Twenty-something gatherings could be so weird when you passed thirty. His conversations at parties were typically more elevated than which beer had the most foam. Of course, if he drank enough beer he might regress.
But the thing that really marked you as an older dude was low-party endurance. About two he started to fade. He sat in the swing with Emily, trying to hang in. He suppressed a yawn.
“So, are you ever going to show me your photos or not?” he chided.
“Oh, I forgot. Stay right here.” She was back in a moment with her MacBook. When she opened her photography file, Travis was suddenly awake. She'd captured gutter punks crawling out of dumpsters, some of them piled together sleeping in an alley. She had a series of action shots from a Hacky Sack game in the park. A couple of girls panhandled with a mangy mutt in front of a pet store. They had scored a bag of dog food far too large for them to carry.
“Impressive.”
She smiled. “Thank you. Now, I'm going to show you something that I promised I wouldn't show anybody.” She giggled, clearly more than a beer past her limit.
“Okay.”
She clicked around on her laptop until she found the right image. The girl in the picture was hollow-eyed and haunting, a tattoo raking her face, her stomach nearly concave. She looked young and vulnerable and sexy and strange. Emily had shot her slightly overexposed, as if the girl were caught unawares, startled by the flash.
He turned the screen for a full-on study.
“This is an incredible shot. We have to use this one.”
“Oh, sorry. No can do. I can't use any of this, girl. I promised her.” She twisted her mouth in a contemplative way. “She's a strange little thing.”
“We have to use this image. Get her permission.”
“She'd never give it. She doesn't like to be photographed.”
Suddenly, ZZ Top blared from the house.
“That's it, I'm pissed,” she said. “Here, hold this.” She passed the laptop to him and stomped over to her open front door.
“Guys,” she yelled inside. His eyes followed the curve of her back under her tight shirt. “Guys!”
The music stopped.
“I hate to tell you this, but you know the drill,” she said. “You don't have to go home…” They joined her in finishing the old bartender adage, “But you can't stay here!”
“That's right! Closing time. Vamoose. Chop. Chop. Get the hell out!” she said.
A few minutes later, the last of the late night partiers spilled out onto the front porch.
“Hey, man. Have a good one,” one said as he walked off into the night.
“Yeah, see ya, man,” Travis said. Emily crossed her arms and watched them disappear.
“That go for me too?” Travis asked her.
She smiled that crooked smile. “What? Am I running you off too?”
“Yeah.”
She leaned against the doorframe. “Um, well. That depends.”
“On what?”
“On you.”
It was his turn to make a move. Travis ambled over to her, his eyes wandering down her neck, over her breasts and then lower to where skin peeked from the crevice between her shirt and jeans. She wasn't shy. She just stood there and let him look. He liked her confidence. Lust surged through him.
“Take off your bra.”
She reached up under her shirt, unhooked her bra and pulled it out a sleeve. Her breasts fell heavy and full against the thin fabric.
“Anything else you'd like?”
“I'll see what I can think of,” he said. He leaned in for the kiss, his hands cupping her, her nipples alert to his touch.
She tasted like honey beer. He walked her backward into the house. He pressed her into the sofa and kissed her, feeling her sharp little teeth, her warm willing tongue. Travis wedged himself between her legs and pressed. She ground against him until the metal buttons on their jeans caught. It caused them to laugh and broke their momentum.
“Come on,” she said and took his hand.
He let himself be led to a back room where a queen-sized bed was still unmade from the previous night.
“Didn't your mother ever teach you to make up your bed?”
She laughed again. “What? And waste time on that when I could be doing this?”
She stripped off her jeans in one quick motion. She slid her tongue into his mouth and pulled him into cool, rumpled sheets. She ran her fingernails through his hair, and chills tingled his shoulders.
He pushed her away, shed his jeans and kicked them to the floor. He flung his shirt on a chair.
When their flesh met it was like smooth fire.
Her breasts were soft as clouds, her nipples like velvet. He ran his tongue over her, in her mouth, along her salty neck, over the silky skin of her stomach, down in the heat between her legs. She swam in the sheets, breathless, quivering under him.
She pulled him up, and when he pushed inside her, he was rushed with pleasure so intense he had to concentrate to hold back. He pulled out and focused on her. He wasn't going to disappoint. They fucked for half an hour, hard and physical, like a competition.
Afterward, spent and proud of himself, Travis gathered his things and left Emily drowsy and content, her cheeks flushed, her hair sinuous across a pillow.
Emily
THE LAST time she had been with Lorelei was the day they went to that nasty apartment to retrieve her backpack. Lorelei had been sick and weird, had yelled at Emily in the car, then jumped out and stomped away. Emily hadn't heard from her in weeks, and then suddenly, out of the nowhere, Lorelei was on the phone, in crazy good spirits, asking if Emily would like to meet some of her friends. She promised to give her a feel for real street life, to show Emily things to photograph.
Emily found her talking with an older girl on the front steps of University Baptist. They were laughing, watching three guys kicking around a Hacky Sack. Lorelei wore a ratty plaid schoolgirl skirt with ripped black tights and a flouncy blouse Emily hadn't seen before.
“I like your new look,” Emily said to ease into things.
Lorelei looked down at herself, and Emily could see she'd decided to be casual about the compliment.
“It's amazing what you can get from the library lost and found,” the girl replied
.
Emily just nodded. Did she really dress from lost and found boxes?
“This is Fiona,” Lorelei said. “This is Emily.”
“Hey,” Emily said. “You're the friend who rescued Lorelei's backpack. That was cool.”
“Right on,” the girl said. “So a bunch of us are going over to this guy's house. He's got an old PlayStation 2. Wanna come?”
Emily hated dating gamers, so watching a bunch of juvenile guys yelling at a television had no appeal. But if she didn't go along she could forget about an afternoon with Lorelei and friends.
“This isn't going to be another skanky drug den like that Lawrence dude's place is it? Because I really don't feel like getting pierced or watching some snake digest a rat,” Emily said.
“Ha,” Fiona laughed. “That's funny. No. It's Mook's mom's place. She's cool. There's nothing going on there.”
“Mook has a home?”
She shrugged. “A lot of us have homes, just not like, good ones with a warm bed where good ol’ mom and pop are waiting up for us with milk and cookies.”
Emily had never envisioned Drag kids as having any sort of home life. But it was reasonable that a few of them had families simply unable to care for them or parents who were plain ol’ disinterested.
Within a couple of blocks they met with a familiar group of guys—Mook, Minion and Freestyle. Mook recognized Emily.
“What's she doing here?”
“She's with me,” Lorelei said. “She's chill.”
“I don't think so,” he said.
Fiona interceded. “Oh, come on, Mook. You're bringing those idiots, so why can't my friends come? Betsy won't care.”
He thought about it, then said, “No pictures, photo girl.”
“No pictures,” Emily promised.
“Well, let's go then,” he said impatiently, as if his time were a most valuable commodity. He took off down the street. Freestyle let his skateboard clatter to the sidewalk. He stepped on and pushed off, his wheels making a zipper sound. Minion carried a guitar.
The girls followed. Fiona stopped to gaze in store windows, but the boys plowed ahead.
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