Tales of River City

by Frank Zafiro

  She waited near the front door of the diner, her jacket folded over her arm, and she slid into passenger seat of my car as if it were a well-rehearsed move.

  “Good morning,” I said, and instantly felt stupid for saying it.

  She grinned at me, though. “Good to be off work anyway,” she said.

  I pulled out of the parking lot with no idea where I was going. She took care of that. “Turn right on Birch.”

  I turned right. We drove in silence, with the exception of her giving me simple directions. Before long, we pulled into the parking lot of the Greyhouse Apartments at the foot of the Five Mile Hill.

  “My spot’s right there,” she said, pointing to number fourteen.

  “Where’s your car?”

  “It broke down.”

  “Did you take it to the shop?” I pulled in and parked.

  She nodded her head. “It’s still there. Something about the transmission.”

  I didn’t know much about cars, but I knew transmissions cost a lot to fix.

  “It’s all right, though,” she said. “I take the bus.”

  I turned off the engine and got out of the car. I considered going around and opening the door for her, but she got out on her own before I’d even shut my own door. She met me at the rear of the car.

  I hesitated, but she flashed me a smile and motioned with her head. We crossed the parking lot, went up the stairs and into her small apartment.

  It was very clean. The only dish in the sink was a single coffee mug. The place had a hint of orange in the air.

  “Nice,” I muttered, more to myself than her.

  “Thanks,” she said, draping her jacket over the high-backed chair at the breakfast bar. Then she turned and walked toward me. The glint in her eye was no longer mysterious, just hungry.

  She kissed me and all pretenses, if there had ever been any, fell away.

  I returned her kiss and pressed my body up against hers. Our breaths came quick and urgent. Our hands explored with the rough passion of a first time, each groping touch possessive and selfish. Her tongue was fiery and wet and it darted between my open lips, raking the roof of my mouth.

  She moaned as I broke away from her mouth and kissed her neck. Her moans were soft at first, then louder. The sound of her voice was a ragged purr.

  My brain had checked out and my body was on fire. We clawed at each other’s clothing until we were both naked. We staggered toward her bedroom, kissing and groping, a four-legged awkward beast. Two steps into the living room, still half a dozen away from the bedroom door, she stopped and pulled me to the floor. Her thighs found my hips and I entered her with a single deep stroke. She moaned deep in her throat.

  Steady, I said to myself, but it was no good. She pulled me deeper into her with arms and ankles, then she kissed me and her hard breasts pressed against my chest and it only took a minute of that breathless, wet passion before I let go. Molten fury poured out of me and into her and I watched her eyes widen and then close.

  We lay on the living room carpet, still in each other’s grasp. Her hands stroked my back lightly and I kissed her neck and face, finally finding her lips again. Her lips parted and drew me in for long, deep kisses. My hardness refused to go away. The slow kisses became harder and faster until she rolled over on top of me and we were thrusting and grinding again.

  The second time lasted much longer and ended much quieter than the first. I felt her come first, her whole body tightening around me. After that, she sat up and leaned back until I finished. Then she smiled at me, a sweaty, satisfied smile and brought her face next to mine. She gave me an almost chaste kiss on the corner of my mouth and then nestled down onto my chest.

  We fell asleep.

  When I woke up, it was ten in the morning. I heard her shower running. I sat up and considered joining her.

  My next thought was that I should just leave, make it a one-time thing. Avoid complications.

  In the end, I settled for leaving her a note.

  Lauren, I wrote on a small notepad with Minnie Mouse in the left hand corner smiling at me and holding a huge pencil. You were wonderful. C.

  Then I left.

  I started seeing her pretty regularly after that. Seeing her. What a quaint euphemism that is. What I should say, to be honest and true, is that I kept fucking her after that, and on a pretty regular basis.

  Things developed into a nice little routine. I saw her at the restaurant and she served me coffee and English muffins. If she asked me for a ride home, I knew that meant we were on. I’d pick her up after work outside the restaurant and drive her to her place. We’d have sex. Most of the time, I left a short while later. Once in a while, I dozed with her, lying in her bed covered with sweat and sheets. But I made sure to never stay the whole day.

  She asked me about it once. I sat up in her bed and swung my legs over the side when she reached out and took my wrist.

  “Stay?” she whispered.

  I smiled at her and leaned down to kiss her temple. “Gotta go,” I whispered back.

  “Why?”

  I didn’t answer her, but I knew the reason.

  I don’t want to give you the wrong idea about what we are.

  I kissed her temple again and stood up, looking for my clothes. Her hand was still holding my wrist. She let go and reached for my manhood, first cupping, then grabbing gently and stroking.

  “Stay,” she whispered again.

  I stayed and fucked her again, but I still left before noon.

  I kept quiet about our thing, but Gio figured it out pretty quickly. At least he waited until a morning when we were alone to ask me, “How long you been fucking her?”

  I watched her walk away, admiring the taper of her waist and curve of her ass. “What makes you say—”

  “Cut the crap, Sully,” he said. “I’m not stupid and besides, you’re about as hard to read as Green Eggs & Ham.”

  “Rules you out, then, doesn’t it?”

  “How long?”

  I shrugged. “A little while.”

  He shook his head at me. “Don’t get serious with her.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I mean it.”

  “So do I.”

  He stared at me, disbelief etched on his face.

  I raised my hands up in surrender. “Really, I’m not. It’s just sex, all right?”

  Gio nodded as if that meant everything was all right in the world. “Fine. But be smart. Use protection.”

  “Okay, Dad.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “She’s on the pill.”

  Gio pulled his head and shoulders back and gave me a look bordering on contempt. “No kidding she’s on the pill. I’m not telling you so she doesn’t get pregnant.”

  “Then what—”

  “How many people you figure you’re fucking every time you bang her?” he asked.

  “Huh?”

  He rolled his eyes at me. “You heard me. How many?”

  A flicker of anger burned in me. “She’s clean,” I grunted and took a drink of coffee.

  He nodded. “I’m sure she bathes regularly and wears pretty perfume. I’m sure she smells real nice down there. But how many people do you figure you’re fucking every time you get inside that?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe we’re exclusive.”

  Gio snorted. “Maybe you are.”

  “You saying she’s not?”

  He gave me another look that said I was the biggest dumb ass he’d ever met.

  “I guarantee you she’s not,” he said, tapping the table with his index finger for emphasis.

  “How do you guarantee something like that?”

  “You want names?” he asked.

  That stopped me cold. I took another drink of my coffee and swallowed hard. “I don’t want any names. I don’t care.”

  “You don’t care?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said. “So there’s others. So what? It’s not like I’ve got some kind of claim to her.”
r />   Gio must have seen something in my face that belied my words because he shook his head again. “You better cut loose of her, Sully. There’s plenty of pussy out there and this piece is making the rounds.”

  I didn’t answer. Instead, I thought hard about what he said. Her car never had been fixed, so what did she do on the mornings that I didn’t drive her home? What did she do on my days off?

  I never called to find out.

  I never asked.

  I didn’t figure I had the right.

  That morning, she asked for a ride home. I thought about lying to her about working overtime, but she asked while she was pouring coffee. Her breasts pressed against my triceps as she leaned forward to fill the cup. I changed my mind and took her home anyway.

  The sex was frantic that morning. I tore at her blouse as soon as we were through the door and took her there on the linoleum floor of her small kitchen, both of us still half-clothed. Afterward, the hum of the refrigerator and her heavy breathing was all I could hear. I caught my breath, and left.

  She didn’t ask me for a ride home for almost a week.

  Lauren didn’t say a word for most of that next week, serving coffee and French toast and eggs and bacon, still smiling and flirting as if we’d never been together and I’d never left her lying on the kitchen floor without so much as a word or a glance.

  Gio and Anthony were both off. I sat in a booth and drank coffee while I wrote my reports. I’d been there thirty minutes when she slipped into the booth across the table from me.

  Her eyes were red. Not the red from being tired. Her eyes were red from crying.

  She didn’t say a word for a long time. She just looked at me. I’d thought that I could be heartless when the time came, but the truth was I felt bad. It only took thirty seconds of her staring at me with her red eyes before I said I was sorry.

  She waited a moment, searching my face as if to gauge my sincerity. Then she gave a little nod, stood and went back to work.

  That morning, she didn’t ask for a ride, but I stopped by anyway. She was waiting for me and got into the car without a word. We drove to her apartment in silence, as if a spoken word would negate my apology or her acceptance of it.

  I’d like to say that I made love to her that morning. I’d like to say that the moment was something special and tender and beyond the simple physical act that we’d been doing for weeks and weeks. But the truth was, while things were more gentle and I stayed deep into the afternoon afterward, it was still just fucking.

  I didn’t love her. I wasn’t eighteen and prone to confusing lust with love. I knew it was her body and her scent and the primal way she had sex that excited me and brought me back for more. Love was when you couldn’t live without somebody. I could live without Lauren. I just didn’t want to stop fucking her.

  Still, all of the small things I noticed before we slept together never left my consciousness. The stray lock of hair she brushed into place. The light brown freckles across the bridge of her nose and on her cheeks. How she smiled with such hope, talking about going over to Seattle to attend art school. The dreamy way her eyes closed and her upper lip broke out in a sweat when she came. I liked those things. I liked them a lot. But I didn’t love them.

  She never stopped seeing other men. I figured that one out pretty easily. The signs were all there. The evidence at her apartment, though she tried hard to hide it. And there were the mornings she didn’t ask me to drive her home. I drove by her apartment a couple of those mornings and saw a different car parked in her stall both times.

  Gio was right.

  She was a whore.

  But I still wanted her.

  One morning, I lay in bed behind her, my fingers tracing the outline of her hip. The smell of sex hung over us like netting and I closed my eyes and drifted toward sleep.

  “You ever think about the future, Connor?” she asked in a thick voice.

  “Hmmmm?”

  “The future,” she said. “You ever think about it?”

  “You mean like if there’ll be flying cars and stuff like that?”

  She was quiet for a moment and I felt a small hitch in her upper body. “No,” she answered, her voice catching. “I mean...whether you’ll be alone or not.”

  A stab of fear lanced into my stomach, followed by the wallop of guilt.

  “No,” I softly lied to her. “I don’t think about that at all.”

  “I do,” she whispered back.

  I didn’t answer. I pretended I didn’t notice her gentle crying and let myself drift to sleep instead.

  “Tell you what you do,” Aaron Norris told me one morning. He’d crashed our normal three-some of Gio, Batts and me because his partner Virgil Gilliam had called in sick. I’d given up keeping Lauren a secret from either of them, but I was surprised that Norris knew it, too. I shouldn’t have been. The rumor mill works overtime at River City PD.

  “What?” I asked, not caring much what he had to say.

  “It’s simple,” he said. “You just talk her into letting you fuck her in the ass, right? Then once she lets you, just tell her that you can’t respect someone that would let you do something like that. And then you dump her.”

  “Class act,” Batts said. He shook his head, but he was smiling, too. Easy for him to take it lightly. He had Rebecca. She was something special and he was locked into her. I figured I could look high and low and the best I’d probably end up with is something half as good.

  “Hey,” Norris said, “it works.”

  “So would taking a giant crap on her chest,” Batts said, “but I wouldn’t recommend that.”

  “If the thing with fucking her in the ass doesn’t work, that’d be my next step,” Norris said, and we all laughed, even though Norris was an idiot. Lauren came and filled our cups. She pressed her chest into my triceps as she poured, and I felt guilty as hell. The silence while she topped off everyone’s coffee made it obvious we had been talking about her, which made me feel even worse yet. But she just smiled that mysterious, seductive smile, pushed that lock of hair behind her ear and walked away.

  Norris watched her go. “Nice taste, Sully.”

  I didn’t answer.

  He turned to face me and said, “No, really. She’s a hot little piece of trim.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I just nodded.

  “Well-traveled,” he added, “but hot.”

  Anger flared up in me and my hand curled into a fist under the table, but I pressed my lips together and said nothing. To avoid his eyes, I took a drink of my coffee and gave him a vague grunt.

  Conversation turned to other topics, but my mind stayed on her. Eventually Norris left and Gio followed a short time later. Batts and I sat, drinking the last of our coffee and finishing reports.

  “Sully?”

  I looked up from my burglary report. “Yeah?”

  “You getting attached to her?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not.”

  “You sure?”

  “You’re the Italian,” I said. “Remember? Us Irish are much more practical.”

  Batts let out a small snort. “Yeah, no romantics ever came out of Ireland, right?”

  “Not this one,” I told him and after that, he left it alone.

  When I finally stopped seeing her, it was nothing dramatic. I knew I’d never stop taking her home unless I stopped going to the diner. When I made the decision to break it off, that was how I did it. At my request, we started going up to Mary’s Café instead, and that was that. Gio never asked why and neither did Anthony. I was glad for that. I didn’t know if the real reason was that I didn’t want things to get any more serious than they were or if it was that I wanted them to but knew they couldn’t.

  About a month after I quit seeing her, I heard that Norris had gone home with her. Then I heard that Norris and Gilliam had both gone home with her on the same morning. I didn’t believe it, but the thought burn
ed in my gut anyway.

  When I heard she’d quit the diner a year later, I hoped that meant she was going to Seattle like she planned. It was several more months before I heard the real reason she’d quit working. She was sick, according to the rumor mill. And then came the word, barely above a whisper.

  AIDS.

  That word scared the hell out of me. I remembered Gio’s warning and felt foolish for disregarding it.

  After my first test came back negative, I started thinking about her a lot. I found out where she was being treated easily enough. Anthony’s sister was a nurse up at Sacred Heart and could find out anything medical about anybody.

  The small hospice was in the heart of the worst part of town, where the rent was cheap enough to afford a place for the dying. I prepared myself to lie to whoever ran the place and say I was her brother, but the woman in charge didn’t ask any questions. She led me up a flight of stairs and down a long, narrow hallway.

  The door to Lauren’s room stood open about a foot. I considered knocking, but in the end I just eased it open. A wiry black woman sat next to the bed, dabbing at her patient’s lips with a washcloth.

  The woman lying in bed was thin and she seemed exhausted. Splotches of dark brown or red peppered her face. Her hair was damp and slicked back away from her face, except for that one lock. Her eyes were closed and shook her head slightly.

  “Lauren, girl, you gotta eat,” the black woman at the bedside said softly. “Gotta keep up your strength.”

  The caregiver tried to spoon a thin broth into the woman’s mouth but she refused to open it. I stared at the woman in the bed and tried to find Lauren somewhere in that emaciated frame. I searched her sunken face for some vestige of the woman I remembered.

  The caregiver lowered the spoon into the bowl with a patient sigh. Then she noticed me and raised her eyebrows questioningly.

  “I’m...an old friend,” I said, trying to be quiet, but surprised at how loud my voice came out.

  “Really?” she asked, looking me up and down. “What do you want?”

  “A moment?”

  The caregiver considered, then rose and walked toward the door. “Five minutes,” she said. “That’s it. She needs her rest.”