by Mike Roberts
One day we were talking in her kitchen when she climbed up onto the counter and put her feet into the sink.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I need to shave my legs quick. Is that weird? I could go upstairs, but I just figured we were talking…”
“Oh. No, it’s fine,” I said. “Are you gonna let me watch?”
Lauren smiled crookedly as she pulled off her jeans and dropped them onto the floor. “You can watch.”
I hopped up onto the counter across the sink, as she played with the water. She tossed me a brand-new lady razor that I’d watched her buy an hour before.
“Be a sweetheart and crack that open for me.”
I nodded and did this, watching Lauren sheen her legs with a drop of lemon dish soap. The short hairs standing on end, almost invisibly, as her legs glistened. I stole glances at her thighs and the black cotton panties that I could not see through. Lauren reached out and took the razor and began trolling it up from the ankle, in long, clean swaths. She rinsed it under the faucet and smiled at how quiet this could make me.
“I’ve never seen a thing like this,” I said, smiling back at her. “I’ve never watched a girl do this before.”
“Yeah, we’ve got all kinds of secrets.” Lauren laughed, and I felt her go even slower then. Torturing me.
“It’s nice,” I said, pushing down off the counter. I walked back across the room to the table where I’d left my can of Coke. I was suddenly aware that Lauren was in control, and I didn’t know what to do with that. I had a feeling that I was supposed to resist, and so I did.
But there were other nights, too. Lauren and I closed out the bar slow-dancing to “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam” on the jukebox. With the lady bartender taking pity on us, waiting for our song to end. Lauren clasped her arms around my neck and told me it was our middle school dance. We were drunk and laughing, and she even gave me a little pop on the mouth before the song was through. And then, click, the lights went up, and Lauren skittered out the door, leaving me no choice but to follow her out into the sidewalk night.
* * *
There was a heat wave that summer that killed a homeless man and a couple elderly women. It was a heavy heat that never really lifted, not even at night. The air was thick and wet, and tasted metallic, like smog. It was that oppressive heat that makes your clothes, and even your hair, feel heavy. People got lethargic and cranky, and there was a spike in domestic crimes and traffic accidents all around the city.
One night, Cokie’s friend Patrick Serf showed up at the bar and told us about a swimming pool. We got excited and decided to go right then. Following Patrick through the downtown canyons that the businessmen deserted each night. The hot air flushed our faces as we ran the red lights. It felt good to have some movement again. It was important to go out riding bikes through the city at night sometimes.
Patrick turned down an alleyway and stopped beside a wall. “This is it,” he said, and we smiled because this wasn’t anything.
“Where?” Cokie asked.
“Over the other side.” Patrick held his bicycle steady, against the bricks, for Cokie to climb up onto the crossbar.
“Whoa,” she said, turning back with her face aglow. “It’s a bomb-ass pool.”
We locked our bikes in a knot, and helped each other over the wall, into the courtyard of some nameless luxury apartment. Buzzing around like little children, we stripped down to our underwear and tried to keep our voices low. I looked up at the silent building, wondering where all the people could be. And then I dove in.
In the water I could just barely see through the girls’ underwear and it made me happy. Lauren caught me staring and she didn’t flinch. Daring me to keep on looking.
“How do you know about this?” I turned to ask Patrick.
“I work as a bike messenger,” he said, with his feet dangling in the water. “Sometimes I deliver packages to a doctor who lives here.”
Cokie snorted. “Patrick’s not a bike messenger. He’s a marijuana courier.”
We laughed, and Patrick frowned, but good-naturedly. Something effortless that I didn’t have, and it made me like him all the more.
“What?” Cokie gleamed. “It’s true.”
He reached out and grabbed her by the calf, and she squealed and begged for mercy. There was a familiarity about the way that they behaved together, and I wondered why I’d never met Patrick Serf before.
I floated on my back and listened to the hum of unseen air-conditioning pulsing off the building. I was astonished that we could be the only ones swimming on a night like this. I waited for someone to join us, or at least kick us out, but the buzzing only added to the building’s air of quietude and sleep.
Lauren suddenly crashed her weight down on top of me, pinning me under in a game of murder. We wrestled this way, while Cokie and Patrick got out of the pool and back into their clothes. I saw them kiss once, and I could tell that they were planning their escape. They invited us to come to the next bar, but it was obvious enough where they were really headed. Lauren and I laughed childishly, as Cokie flipped us off behind her back. And then we really were alone in the big pool.
I felt the quiet tension of getting what I wanted, and I hesitated. Lauren went underwater and came up at the far end, looking back at me. I followed and it made me calm. There was nothing left but the physical need to touch. I kissed Lauren and she kissed me back. And then she pulled away, which was thrilling and confusing.
“What’s wrong?” I said, almost soundlessly.
“What if this ruins everything?”
“Ruins what? This is what I want. I thought you—”
“I do,” she said. “I do, it’s just … Cokie.”
I looked at Lauren and tried not to blink.
“I don’t want it to feel like we’ve abandoned her, or pushed her out, you know? I don’t want us to lose the thing we have right now.”
I nodded, staring at her this close. Lauren radiated something bigger than confidence, bigger than sex. There was a line we must not cross now, and I tried to understand it. I agreed with her, even. Everything would have to change after this.
We got out of the pool and we didn’t kiss again that night. We stayed up and rode around for hours, not to go home. I left Lauren at her doorstep, giddy with sleeplessness and not making sense. And then I didn’t see her again for three days.
* * *
The first day was mine. I had spent every day of the last four weeks with Lauren and Cokie, and it scared me a little. I felt like I’d lost my equilibrium. There’s something incestuous in that kind of platonic closeness: brothers and sisters left alone too long.
The second day was Lauren’s. I eventually gave up and tried to call her, but she never called me back. I didn’t really understand what was happening then. Had I rejected Lauren, or was she rejecting me? I brooded over this at work, the whole third day, until Cokie called and said to meet them out at the bar.
I felt stupid for worrying so much. Everything was fine. I thought I wanted Lauren to say something about it to me, but she didn’t. We were out in a larger group, and she seemed to float at the fringes. And maybe this was the right thing, too.
Later, after people started to leave, she slid beside me in the booth, which was nice. We began to talk, but there was tension there, and we stopped. It was in this silence that she started doing something false—pulling at my hair and telling me it was too long. She jagged her fingers through, trying to make it hurt.
“I just think you should cut it,” she said.
“I don’t wanna cut it,” I told her. “Why are you being so weird?”
“I’m not being weird,” Lauren said with a laugh. “I just wanna cut it. I’m good, too. You would like it.” She smiled at the other people around the table. “I promise.”
I looked at her and tried to figure out what this was. “All right,” I said, “If that’s what you want. I’ll take the Rachel-cut. Do you still do that one?”
“Or the George Clooney!” Cokie snarked. “God, remember how stupid the George Clooney one was?” People laughed, and Lauren smirked, and we all let it go.
But outside the bar, she tried to hold me to it. She was really going to cut my hair, she said. I didn’t know what to say to this, and finally just gave up. We said goodbye to Cokie and the kids, and we rode our bikes to Lauren’s house.
* * *
We sat in the kitchen with her roommate, drinking beer, and I really expected this to be the end of it. But Lauren tipped her can over in the sink, and smiled at me all over again. So I followed her up the stairs to the bathroom, where she set out a chair. And, all at once, as I looked at us in the mirror, I did want her to cut my hair.
“Okay,” I said. “I trust you.”
“Shut up,” she said. “You’ll be fine, I swear.”
Lauren got very serious then, as she combed through my hair with her fingers and pulled away pieces to cut. Snip, snip, pull, pull, we caught each other’s eyes in the reflection. There was something charged and intimate happening. Lauren touched my neck and pressed her chest to the back of my head as she worked. We stared at each other in the glass, without speaking, and she laughed.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“So keep cutting.”
“You just have really nice hair, you know that? It’s soft and thick,” she said, smiling at me in the mirror.
“Then why won’t you let me grow it out?”
“Just hold still.” Lauren snarled and took a big swatch off the top of my head, without hesitating. The pieces fell across my shoulders and onto the floor. The inexactness of this cut made my neck tingle. She stopped again, considering the flying hair.
“Maybe you should take your shirt off,” she said.
And I did, and that was it. The dam broke for real this time. Something beautiful and unavoidable happened, and we were suddenly kissing. Tasting lips and tongues and the smoothness of each other’s teeth. The rush of feeling in taking hold and pressing our hips together. I felt her hands and her fingers moving over me. I felt the female softness of her body give inside my grip. We pulled each other’s clothes off and tumbled around the bathroom, ending up in the tub briefly. We laughed at the stupidity of the whole thing, the waiting. Reveling in each other’s sex, and making ourselves naked. We kissed close and hushed ourselves as we really started to screw. Right there on the bathroom floor. Giving over to the wild, ineffable energy of it all. We smashed through the waiting and it released us.
Why we didn’t just go into her bedroom, I never asked. This was how it happened, and this was the only way I could imagine it now. Acting it out in secret, as her roommate cooked her dinner, one floor below. We were already a secret. This is a thing which I am following Lauren into, I thought.
* * *
That weekend Cokie went home to see her parents, and Lauren and I lay around naked in bed. Eating and fucking and watching bad movies. It is a small but infinite happiness to share a bed this way. Standing in the shower after, I would let her clean my face and wash my hair, and I began to think of Lauren brand-new. There was a swelling feeling attached to her love. If she shone it on you, it became a force of nature with the danger of swallowing you whole and making you forget. Lauren and I had a secret, and it drove everything else.
But Lauren agonized over whether or not to keep it all from Cokie. I would laugh because we talked about the whole thing like it was some shocking affair. And in a way, I guess, it was. If this was a thing I didn’t fully understand, then I didn’t need to understand it, I thought. Everything felt exactly right. Stealing kisses in the bar, or right there in Cokie’s house as she walked out of the room. We got off on our own ridiculous efforts of subterfuge and denial. All these transparent acts of holding back in public, before we’d meet up again, on a doorstep or in a park. Throwing our bikes down and kissing in the dark.
And somewhere in the middle of this, Cokie just seemed to disappear. Worse, we couldn’t even really find her. I hadn’t heard one word from the girl in almost two weeks. And that’s when Lauren decided that we finally had to tell her.
But Cokie just laughed at us. “Yeah, thanks, no shit,” she said. “I mean, did you really think I didn’t know? Jesus! I just got sick of watching you drag it out.”
“What do you mean?” Lauren asked.
“I mean, stop being such babies and assholes, and just say that you’re fucking! Who cares? I don’t care. It’s not really that interesting, you know? Fuck all you want, for all I care. But stop treating me like I’m stupid.”
Lauren didn’t say anything.
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry, Cokie.”
* * *
Sadly, everything changed after that. Everything that had been right the week before was now wrong. The sex got bad or boring, or at least less frequent. It was strained and fraught with too many strange concerns. Sex became a thing we did by rote, and then it just stopped altogether.
Lauren and I decided we should take some time apart. But the tension of this made me crazy, and I broke down after a day. Showing up at her house, where we fought and fucked, and kissed good night out on the sidewalk, as she sent me home again. I couldn’t shake this new and terrible feeling that she was ignoring me. Lauren seemed to disappear for days at a time now. When we talked at all, it was in rambling ten-minute phone calls. These bursts where we would cover everything except the thing that had happened to us. Lauren wanted to talk about Cokie. She said she needed to repair the things that we’d undone. Lauren acted cavalier about this, saying it had all been childish in the end. We’d had our fun, and now it was over. C’est la vie.
But even as I agreed with her, I knew I didn’t agree. I didn’t want to stop. I felt like Cokie had given us permission to try and make it work, even. But Lauren was adamant that this was about their relationship—Lauren and Cokie.
Right, I said, of course. And then I had no choice but to back off.
The Tomboys retreated into their friends. A whole new cast of characters, it seemed to me. These superficial, asshole kids that I hated unreasonably. All boys, too, because Lauren and Cokie didn’t seem to have any real girlfriends, outside of each other. They would invite me out, but I found it impossible to sit there listlessly, or join into their conversations about obscure bands and important DJ sets. These dudes who were always laughing but seemed to have no sense of humor at all.
Worse, Lauren was ignoring me again.
I followed her outside the bar one night, where she was smoking a cigarette alone.
“You’re smoking now?” I asked her critically.
“Not really,” she said, blowing the smoke away from me.
“It’s just sort of a disgusting habit, don’t you think?”
“Is it?” she asked, looking away.
“I just think it’s kind of sad, you know? It seems like you’re turning into all of your elitist friends.”
“You don’t even know them.”
“Yeah, I know, right. Thank god for that.”
She almost had to laugh then, putting up her hands like it was unbearable to even affect patience with me. “What do you want me to say? Does it even matter? You don’t even listen to me.”
“I am listening,” I said. “And I’m disagreeing with you.”
“You’re being insanely, abrasively arrogant. And I don’t know how to deal with you this way.”
“Good,” I said. “If we’re finally going to talk about real things, we can start with how condescending you’ve been acting toward me lately.”
Lauren sighed patiently. “Your attitude is the cause of my attitude.”
“No. That doesn’t mean anything. You’re not allowed to simply reverse the things that I say.”
“Please don’t talk down to me.”
“I’m not!”
“I can’t help the way I feel,” she said maddeningly.
This was not how I’d wanted it to go. I was losing ground and making things
worse, and I desperately wanted to reset. “I just want us to be together,” I said earnestly.
“We tried that.”
“No. But we didn’t, not really. Okay, because, see…” I stopped myself. “I think I might be in love with you. And I didn’t think I could say that, but I’ve said it.”
It hung there uncertainly as Lauren’s face softened in a way I couldn’t read.
“I just think we should try to be friends right now,” she said.
“Why are you always trying to pick a fight with me!” I shouted.
* * *
That was the end. I felt trampled and manipulated, and I was done with the whole thing. I’d let Lauren turn me into a crushing bore, and I resented her for that. It was exhausting trying to stay so goddamn angry. All I wanted now was for things to stop changing.
I went back to my own friends, where I didn’t have to try so hard. I could be sour and sarcastic and drunk, and they didn’t even care. They hardly noticed if I was more depressed or belligerent than usual, and I loved them for that.
And then, one day, near the end of the summer, I ran into Cokie on the street. We got to laughing easily, and it struck me that Cokie had not done anything to me. She was not Lauren, and I seized on this impulse to invite her over to my house for dinner. Cokie seemed charmed by the idea that I might actually try to cook, and she accepted happily.
I started drinking the cheap wine I’d bought as soon as I got home from the grocery store. I felt excited: happy to make this one dinner, happy to save this one relationship. I wanted the gesture to be a kind of apology for myself and all my bad behavior. I wanted to be able to laugh about the summer and move on.
And it was like that, too. The wine had a way of making me come unbound. I knew that I was talking too much, but I didn’t care. We sat on the couch listening to records, and I felt lucky just to talk to anyone again. Cokie said she wanted to get out of D.C., and I locked onto this idea with her. Maybe it was the city that had dragged me down, and not Lauren Pinkerton at all. I made some drunken generalizations about the kids here. Insulated. Overeducated. Underemployed. Cokie laughed, and I knew that I was rambling, but I was laughing, too.