by Paula Cox
He talks for around twenty minutes as I lean against a cardboard cutout of a giant coffee mug and wait for him to finish. He complains that he truly thought he loved this woman and that she loved him, that he doesn’t understand why women are always divorcing him, and how he can’t comprehend why it’s so difficult to find true love. I nod and make all the right noises, the uh-huhs and yeahs and I knows. David tucks his thumbs into the waistband of his oversized, baggy pants, tugging at his oversized shirt. David is a tall, thin, skeletal man with dented cheeks and hollow-looking eyes, the sort of eyes that always look bruised.
When he’s done, he says, “I’ve kept you from your shift. What’s the matter with me?” He waves a hand. “Go, go, don’t let me keep you. You’d think the owner would have more sense.”
“I wanted to talk to you, actually, to ask you something.”
It’s strange, but since that night with Kade a couple of days ago, my mindset has started to shift. Subtly, sure, but shift all the same. I’ve started to think of our night together as empowering, as something I chose to do, as something I willingly participated in: just the sex, just the passion. And I’ve started to think that the fact that he left might not be such a bad thing after all. We had the best sex of our lives and that’s that. We enjoyed each other’s bodies. Maybe I’ll see him again; maybe not. But it’s more than that. Feeling empowered about Kade has made me feel empowered about other things, too, like my safety here at the Twin Peaks. If I can choose to be with a man—if I can make that decision for myself—then I ought to be able to choose to be safe here at the Twin Peaks. That’s the thing, I think. Control. I want control. I want to control how my life plays out.
“Yes?” David arches an eyebrow.
“I would like you to either hire another waitress for the early morning shift or reschedule one of the waitresses so that I’m not working alone. Look,” I say quickly, when I see that he’s about to interrupt. “It’s not safe for me to be here alone this early. Anything could happen.” I give him a quick rundown of what happened with Chester. “I realize that you need to make money, David, but you should also care about the safety of your baristas.”
I make sure to keep my voice soft and free from accusation; the last thing that will win over a perpetually-divorced man like David is accusation from a woman, I reason.
He pauses for a long time.
I say: “Plus, sometimes two cars come at the same time and I’m forced to make one of them wait, which is poor customer service. The people driving through here come for two things: quick service and a peek at some boobs. We don’t want them telling their friends: ‘The women are the Twin Peaks are fine, but the service isn’t.’”
This seems to get through to him. His pitted eyes glance up at me, and I know I’ve got him. David is a nice enough guy, but even a nice enough guy cares more about his business than his employees when he’s dealing with multiple alimonies.
“I’ll hire one more, just for your early morning shift,” he says. “I actually have a girl who’s applied a couple of times now. Expect her tomorrow morning.”
“Thanks, David.”
“Yeah, yeah,” David mutters, shaking his head. I know what he’s thinking just from the way he stuffs his hands in his pockets, like a cowed kid: Women. It’s never enough. Or maybe that’s just the creative writer in me.
Smiling to myself, happy that I am finally taking control of my life, I take off my overcoat, put on my heels, and get ready to be gawked at, winked at, blushed at, and, hopefully, tipped.
Chapter Eight
Lana
Kelly Wolfe is the most sexual woman I have ever laid my eyes on. She’s voluptuous, filling out her bikini bottom and bra with ease, big without seeming large; she fills space without overfilling it. She’s taller than me by about three inches and her hair is a rich brown which falls in loose waves down past her shoulders. She wears a silver shark-tooth-shaped pendant and heels which raise her almost to six feet. She oozes sexuality; she’s the only person I’ve ever met in real life where that phrase actually makes sense. Over the next month, we work together in the morning shift, and if we have to split tips, I still make almost as much just from how skilled Kelly is at the job.
During the lengthy quiet periods, we sit in the middle of the booth, opposite each other at a little foldout table, and she draws and I write.
It turns out Kelly is a freelance illustrator. When I ask her what she freelances for, she barks, “Whatever they pay me for, honey. Tattoos, book covers, whatever they pay me for. But as you can tell, I ain’t no runaway success, otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here with my tits almost out and my ass squeezed into this stringy horrible bikini.”
I giggle, and she tilts her head at me over the top of her pencil. “You find my suffering funny?”
“No,” I say. “I can sympathize.” I tell her about my creative writing course.
“Well, shit,” she says. She leans back in her chair and studies me for a few moments. Her face is round and gorgeous. Finally, she pushes her notepad across the table to me. “See if you can think of something for this charming fellow to say.” Then she leaves to serve a customer.
I laugh when I see what she’s drawn: a caricature of one of our regulars, a banker. The man has a deep dimple in his chin, but Kelly has given him a big ass for a chin instead. The man has bushy eyebrows which have become skunks resting above his eyes. I tap the pencil against my teeth, something which brings me back to my college course: tapping my pencil against my teeth and hoping the click-click-click will get the creative writing gears turning. Then I draw a speech bubble and write: I’ll pay for sex. Then I scratch it out and write: Can I borrow your bra, baby? . . . I’ve lost my suitcase and I need something to hold my money!
I shrug, and then go and serve a customer.
It would have seemed crazy to me before Kelly started, but I’ve actually come to enjoy working over the next month. I enjoyed it before, in its way. I still can’t deny there’s a certain thrill sitting in the booth with men looking up at me with obvious attraction. But now I really enjoy it, look-forward-to-getting-here enjoy it, just so I can see Kelly and we can mess around between customers. I learn that Kelly is fierce as well as womanly, fierce like an older sister, the older sister I never had.
One day, I’m sitting in the booth when Chester returns, showing no sign that he remembers reaching through the booth and making my stomach churn with acidic vomit, showing no sign that he remembers ever making my skin crawl with the legs of a thousand spiders. He just sits there, cap pulled low over his ears, shading his face, vest as stained and flabby as ever. “Coffee,” he grunts, and I freeze. Not just that I stand still. I feel as though ice has encased my bones and is holding me in place. The only thing that doesn’t freeze is my mouth, which falls open in disbelief. Disbelief that he would show up so nonchalantly, brazenly asking for a coffee after what he did.
Then I see Chester’s eyes go wide and look over my shoulders.
“Is something wrong?” Kelly asks, using her Friend Radar, as she calls it. She said to me once: “I know whenever one of my girls has a problem, babe. It’s like an alarm bell in my head.” Now, she says, staring down at Chester with all the weight and threat of a lioness: “This is him, isn’t it? This is the man you told me about. Oh, hello, Chester. Yes, Chester, I know what sort of man you are, what sort of little man. Oh, yes, stare at me with those big hateful eyes. Stare! Go on, keep staring at me! Better yet, get out of that car! Get out of that car and I’ll come out and meet you and we’ll see what kind of man you really are! No, I mean it!”
Chester’s cheeks tremble, anger and uncertainty dancing across his features, as he watches Kelly waving her arms and half leaning out of the booth.
“Am I not being clear?” Kelly hisses, leaning so far out of the booth now I hover my hand near her legs, ready to yank her back in. “You molested my friend, Chester, and you’ve returned to the scene of the crime, Chester, and now I’m going to slap you’re r
edder than your fat ass.” Each time she says his name, she pokes a righteous finger at him.
Chester stares at her for a few moments, and then puts his truck in reverse, backing down the road and then pulling a one-eighty and screeching away.
Kelly moves back into the booth, dusting her hands together like somebody does after a job well done, and then looks down at me, her features softening at once. “Are you okay?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say, and I mean it. I laugh. The laugh gets louder and turns almost manic, and then Kelly is laughing with me. “You were so angry,” I say, and then burst into teary laughter all over again. I stand up and mime-point a stern finger at the coffee machine, snapping, “Don’t you dare talk to my friend like that, Chester! You are evil, Chester!” Kelly grabs onto my shoulder for support as the laughter whisks us up.
After it passes, both of us dabbing at our eyes with napkins to make sure the tears haven’t ruined our makeup, we sit down at the foldout table, making sure to keep an eye out for customers.
“Seriously, though, are you okay?” she says.
I nod. “I’m fine. Thank you.”
Kelly squints at me. She has this almost magical ability to look past the face you’re presenting and see your true face underneath. It made me uncomfortable at first, but now I welcome it. It’s relieving to have somebody who knows your moods, or at least can guess at them, without you having to come outright and say it. It gets rid of a lot of awkwardness.
“What is it?” Kelly persists. “It’s something. Is it Chester?”
“No, no. It’s—him.”
“Oh—him.”
We both know who him is. I’ve probably mentioned Kade to Kelly twenty or so times, first detailing how we met and our passionate night, and then in passing.
“I guess seeing Chester brought that morning back to me.”
“And the night.” Kelly has a wicked smile on her lips.
“Yes, alright,” I say, rolling my eyes, “and the night.”
“You’re like a princess in a fairy tale,” Kelly says, scribbling something in her notepad. The notepad is full now of our Twin Peaks Comic Book, a collection of characters who drive through the Twin Peaks, with Kelly’s sketches and my captions. “Waiting for your Prince Charming to come into your life once again, to set everything straight, to make sweet, tender love to you.”
We both giggle.
“Oh, no.” Kelly grins like an in-the-know courtesan, both dirty and elegant. “You want something more than that, you sick, depraved girl?”
She slides the pad across to me. It depicts me, boobs and ass enlarged for the purposes of the illustration, leaning out of the Twin Peaks’s booth window with a handkerchief in hand, looking forlornly off into the distance. She hands me the pencil.
“And the caption.”
I don’t have to think. I write: Come back. Just one more time.
For the rest of the morning, we serve customers, giving us little chance to talk further. But the whole time I’m thinking about Kade. Chester—Kade. That was the morning, wasn’t it, when my outlook changed, when I realized I could take control, could go to bed with a man and have the best sex of my life without attaching countless strings. And yet, one string would be enough, just one—just enough to pull him back to the Twin Peaks for one more meeting.
Because Kade has been haunting me this past month. He’s there when I close my eyes and there in the back of my mind and there hovering at the peripheries of my vision. His naked, muscular body, his massive cock, the sensation of him biting on my neck, the feeling of his pectoral muscles pressed hard into my breasts.
Sometimes when I’m sitting in the booth I have to cross my legs just at the thought of him.
I want him, one more time, two more times, three more times, four . . .
Often, I mutter to myself just before sleep takes me, Mom’s shopping channel quiet through the walls: “I want him. I want him. I want him.”
Chapter Nine
Kade
Duster and I stand at the far edge of the Portland docks, next to an abandoned warehouse and on the very edge of the water, which would glisten in the late-afternoon sun if it were not for all the filth running through it making it hard to see the bottom. Duster, who still looks like that blonde-haired little kid to me, stuffs his hands in his pockets and walks to the edge.
“They’re taking their time,” he says.
The men are ranged all around us. Mountain, called Mountain ’cause he’s about the biggest bastard any of us has ever seen. Earl, with his grey hair and his chewing tobacco and his way of looking at you without really looking at you. Glover, Barge, Noname, Fowler, Copeland. All of them in the Tidal Knights leathers, all of them packing pieces, all of them waiting for this Portland shit to be over. A month, we’ve been down here now. One goddamn month and fuck all has been sorted. I hear the impatience in Duster’s voice and it takes me back, all the way back to the trailer park. He’d had the same impatience in his voice back then.
“They’ll be here,” I say, though I’m not so sure. Italians are always a risky bunch, with their rituals and their made-men horseshit, thinking that because America has collectively decided they’re cool and mysterious that they are in fact cool and mysterious. Me, I only care about their guns and business. Business is all that I give a shit about when it comes to men who don’t wear the Tidal Knights leather.
Duster spits into the water and then turns to me. “I don’t like this, Cross.”
I don’t even bother telling Duster to use my first name. We’ve been calling each other Duster and Cross for so long neither of us can remember calling each other anything else.
“Yeah, me neither,” I say. “But this is their last chance. We’ll meet. We’ll sort it.”
Duster shrugs and paces over to me, turning and looking out over the water at a cargo-leaden boat drifting out to sea. “Do you remember that book I had?”
“Goddamn, Duster.” I laugh. “You’re always desperate to go down memory lane.”
“Fuck yourself. Do you remember it?”
He’s talking about an old travel book he found almost soaked through with rain in the trailer park. He dried that thing out for days and then made sure anyone who touched it handled it gently like it was some kind of ancient document. That’s where he got the name Duster, as far as I can remember, but it might’ve been because he was damn good with bikes, too. I don’t know; it was a long time ago.
“You know I do.”
“That was the shit, man,” Duster says. “I remember when we spent a whole afternoon under one of the trailers just looking at that and thinking about all the places we’d go.”
“Was Portland in the book?” I ask.
Duster grins. “Don’t think so. We didn’t get as far as we planned, Cross.”
“Nah, but we got far enough, I reckon. You’re just getting antsy.”
He spits again. “Damn right I am. The fuck is wrong with these people?” He nods down the dock, about a half-mile, where dockworkers load and unload cargo. “I know we’ve paid them off, but damn, why are we meeting in broad daylight, and why here?”
“Their leader is a man named Manuel,” I say. “Apparently he’s sketchy, maybe ill up here.” I tap the side of my head. “That’s what they tell me, anyway. Doesn’t trust us enough to meet us at night.”
“I remember back in the park when Noah Marsh kept us waiting when we were meant to trade some porno mags with him. Do you remember? Noah Marsh, two years older than us, and we sat around in that junkyard for two hours like goddamn idiots waiting for him to show. When he didn’t, I wanted to leave it. You remember? I wanted to go home but you said, ‘Fuck that,’ and dragged me to his parents’ trailer. He came out . . .”
“Him and three of his pals. Yeah, I remember.”
“And they started in on us, and did you we stand tall, Cross? Did we stand fuckin’ tall?”
“Boss,” Scud mutters.
Scud is the third in command, a lean, taut
man who I don’t know too much about except that he gets the job done without question.
We turn and watch as the Italians drive to the waterfront in black tinted-windowed cars, four in total. The cars come to a stop and the Italians step out, dressed as usual in sleek suits with slicked-back hair and not a tattoo in sight, wearing big gold rings and chains, some of them with their shirts open and their chests on display to better show off the chains. Their leader, Manuel, is a wide man who’s always sweating, a bald shiny red head, and thick fingers which constantly worry at each other like ten wriggling worms.
He looks at me, nods, I nod back, and then he waves a hand.
We form a circle, the Tidal Knights one half, the Italians the other. Three Italians carry a crate between them into the middle of the circle.
“Thanks for coming,” Duster says, a little too loudly. He looks Manuel directly in the face. “We’ve been waiting a while, you know?”