Axis of Aaron

by Johnny B. Truant

  “Okay,” she said, shifting. “Then let’s talk it out. What are you worried about?”

  “I’m not worried. I’m just … ”

  “What concerns you? What logical puzzle are you working out?” She gave him a sarcastic grin, knowing that “worried,” though Ebon wouldn’t admit it, was much closer to the mark.

  “Well, what if you’re all worked up, and I’m not game, and … ”

  “Do you really think I can’t make you ‘game’? You’re a dude. It’s in your wiring.”

  “But what if you want to … and I’m kind of … ”

  “You mean if we’re in the middle of Disney World, and I want you to bend me over a trashcan, but you kind of just want to ride Space Mountain.”

  “Well, sure.”

  She hugged him tighter. “Believe it or not, Ebon, I can separate my feelings about you from my throbbing biological needs. I can also suppress things that need suppressing until the appropriate time.”

  “I don’t want you to have to suppress anything.”

  “If I get bored, I’ll grab one of the Disney employees.”

  Ebon laughed.

  “Okay,” she said. “I know I’m a lot to handle.”

  “In a good way.”

  “Of course. But also, a lot to handle. I talk too much; I don’t shut up about the things I should shut up about; I’m way too impulsive. I’m working on it.”

  “You’re working on it?”

  “I’m looking into getting a shrink.”

  “Really?”

  “Not that I’m messed up. Just … self-work, you know.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Your bigger concern is how I’ll spend money. I buy things without thinking.”

  That should have set off alarms on Ebon’s long-term radar, but she’d said it too bluntly to carry much malice. And besides, she was getting a shrink. To “work on it.”

  “I plan on being rich,” he told her.

  “Me too,” she said. “I don’t want to glom off my husband.”

  “Husband?”

  “You know, eventually.”

  “Sure.”

  She touched him on the cheek, and he turned to face her, rolling onto his side, head propped up on a hand.

  “Okay, E,” she said, her deep eyes mock-serious. “Cards on the table. How many people have you slept with?”

  “I don’t want to go first.”

  “What makes you think I’m even going to answer?”

  “If you don’t answer, I’m definitely not. Come on, party girl. You say what you mean, so out with it. How many?”

  “Not as many as you might think.”

  Ebon didn’t know if he liked that answer. Although, come to think of it, he didn’t really like any answer. He knew, of course, that Holly and virginity had parted ways eons ago, but that was a nugget of knowledge not unlike the truth that all processed food contained insect parts. Of course it was an inarguable fact, but that didn’t mean anyone liked thinking about it. He’d asked, and now he was going to find out. But Holly was his; he’d won her affection against all odds. The hurt that came with imagining another man’s hands on her body was a bones-deep ache.

  “Ooo-kay … ”

  “Are we counting … ”

  Ebon cut her off. “Total. All things sexual, except guys you only kissed.” The one thing he wanted less than the number itself was a detailed accounting of what had been stuck where, what had been rubbed, and what had gushed or where it landed.

  “Maybe twelve?”

  “Oh, that’s not too many,” Ebon heard himself say. But truthfully it sounded like a lot — not because it was, but because acknowledging even one other man in Holly’s bed felt like a violation.

  “And a few of those were just hand jobs or … ”

  “I don’t need specifics.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” Holly paused a moment, trying to read his face. Ebon felt deeply hurt. It was an unfair hurt (She hadn’t known him in the past, so how could he judge her?), but it was a hurt nonetheless. He felt like the moment’s intimacy had been shattered and wished very much that he’d never brought it up. This was what “looking out for problems” bought him.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  Another moment of inspection. Ebon watched the door past her shoulder, then made himself look forward, at her face.

  “Of course,” he repeated.

  “Then what about you?”

  “One,” Ebon said.

  “Seriously.”

  “One.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I am a funny guy. Aren’t you in stitches?”

  “You’ve seriously only ever been with one person.”

  “Yes.”

  She put her hand on her chest. “Please tell me it’s one other person. Not just me.” It was a strange thing to hope for, but then again, Ebon had learned to read Holly too. The emotion on her face now was one he’d rarely seen, because she didn’t seem to know it: guilt.

  “One other.”

  “Before me, you had sex with just one other girl.”

  “I could sketch you a graph.”

  “Oh. Wow. That’s … you must think I’m a total slut.”

  “I don’t think that,” he said. And he didn’t. But the gulf was a slut’s worth of wide, especially when Ebon considered that he’d also only been with that other girl one time. And that she hadn’t truly been a girl, technically speaking.

  Holly seemed unseated, her eyes flicking around the room. “Jesus, Ebon. We need to … I need to set you up with some of my friends or something. We should have some threesomes to even things out.”

  Ebon looked over, wondering if she was serious. Surely not.

  “It’s not a big deal.”

  “It is. I get why you feel intimidated now. But it’s fine. I’ll … ugh, is it insulting to say I’ll teach you?”

  Actually, right now, it sounded kind of hot. The Band-Aid of conversation had been ripped from his skin, and Ebon found he felt better. Yes, a dozen or so other men had been in places that were now private to Ebon, but her discombobulation was strangely endearing. It was like she’d crashed his car and wanted to bake him cupcakes in attrition.

  “Seriously, don’t worry about it.”

  “Oh, my God. I just can’t imagine what you must think of me.”

  “I think I lo… I think I really like you.” Ebon chanced a playful jab to deflate the room’s pressure. “In spite of your sluttiness.”

  Holly looked almost offended for a half second, then laughed.

  “Who was the girl?”

  Ebon sighed.

  “What? Long-lost partially requited love?”

  He shook his head. “Family acquaintance.”

  “The girl next door.”

  “My mom’s friend.”

  Holly stopped, her mounting enthusiasm (she’d got over her guilt) freezing in its tracks. “Really?”

  Ebon nodded.

  “When?”

  “I was sixteen. She was … late thirties? Maybe forty?”

  “Oh.” Holly looked like she wanted to say she was sorry, but it was the wrong response.

  “Was it … like … ”

  “Oh, I was really eager at the time. Quite consensual. Her name was Julia. Julia Summers. She’d been around me all my life, on and off, which, looking back, really makes the whole thing kind of twisted. I mean, she babysat for me when I was younger. She was like a second mother in a way, but she was also … how do I put this?”

  Holly waited.

  “Smoking fucking hot,” Ebon finished.

  Holly laughed, sensing a break in the tension.

  “I remember figuring that out a few years before. She had these huge boobs, but they weren’t fatty; they were just big and awesome. And they were always sort of on display — not because she was pushing them on anyone, but because there was no way they couldn’t be. Whenever she bent over, I’d try to get a peek. But because he
r boobs were so huge, none of her shirts were ever loose. But that didn’t stop me from trying to peek at her nipples.”

  “That’s hot.”

  Ebon shook his head, lost in recollection. He’d thought about Julia many times over the years, even after their almost-relationship had fizzled … after he’d got tired of trying to talk her into repeating their single bravura performance. He’d distanced himself from her after that, and she’d stopped coming around. It was best that way. On some days, he loved and desired Julia. On others, he hated her. His lackluster sexual history since hadn’t been the fault of his charisma. He’d attracted women, but pushed them all away. For years after Julia, sex had been a confusing affair, as mired with shame and betrayal as with lust and untold realms of pleasure. Only Holly, with her disarming bluntness, had been able to pierce the veil.

  “She was though,” he said. “You know how, when you’re a kid, forty seems really old? Well, on Julia, it didn’t look old at all. She was really pale, not at all tan and without any of the wrinkles that sometimes come with it.”

  “Hey,” said Holly, whose skin was a light bronze.

  “And she had those huge boobs, like big hotel pillows. But she was also kind of unstable, which, I suppose, is why we ended up where we did. She was hot and cold. She’d be angry and loud, then quiet and seductive. Even when she was around my dad, it was like she was hitting on him. I grew up watching her, seeing how she operated. Today, that kind of bipolar personality would scare me, but she always blamed it on being Irish. ‘It’s in my blood,’ she’d say with these big blue eyes. You’d forgive anything she’d just said or any lamps she’d just broken.”

  “She broke lamps?”

  “Once. And some little ceramic things, like this clown figurine. All by accident … but they were the kind of accidents that would have been prevented if she wasn’t so hot tempered.” Ebon sighed, remembering her moods for the seductions they’d been at the time. “Oh, but it was intoxicating to sixteen-year-old Ebon. You can’t imagine. I was a little bent; she’d always been my icon of what sex would look like in human form. She told my mother stories, and I sometimes overheard them. Things she did with men. I could imagine her doing them to me.”

  “Sounds like a true romance.”

  “She was magnificent, for a warped sort of woman. Tall, curvy in all the right places. Bright-red Irish head of hair, always arranged differently. I remember distinctly wondering, repeatedly, alone and in the presence of various lotions, if the carpet matched the drapes. Turns out, it did.”

  “Again, hot.”

  Ebon turned to look at Holly. She was probably just playing along, but for the first time he wondered if she was into girls. It seemed in character.

  “Anyway, one night my parents were out, and she came over to borrow something. I don’t even remember what it was, because I’m pretty sure her wanting to borrow something was bullshit. She was wearing this short dress with flowers on it, and I remember thinking it looked like she was trying too hard to be sexy. I actually remember that very specifically. ‘Why are you trying to act twenty, Julia, when you’re so hot at your actual age?’ I didn’t say that, of course, but it all seemed contrived. I didn’t have whatever she’d supposedly come to borrow, and she asked if she could use our phone. I said fine. Then afterward, she said it was good to see me, that she hadn’t seen me in a while. Somehow that became her telling me about how well I’d turned out, that I’d ‘grown into a man before her eyes.’ And then … ” He trailed off.

  “Coo coo ca choo, Mrs. Robinson,” Holly said.

  Ebon shrugged on the pillow, Holly’s hand pulling gently at his chest hairs. “I was sixteen. This was the woman I’d always fantasized about. She didn’t really need to bother with the playacting. She could have walked into the middle of the room and said, ‘Let’s fuck,’ and I’d have hopped on her.”

  “Was it good?”

  “It was … climactic.”

  “I guess that’s good.”

  “No, I mean … it’s hard to describe. I’d been wanting it for so long that I couldn’t actually enjoy the event itself. I was too busy not believing it was actually happening. Does that make sense?”

  “Sure.”

  “And I guess I was okay with that, right after, because then the pressure was off. I was all ready to settle in and enjoy myself for a second round, but she said she was tired and needed to go. So she did. But we never did it again.”

  “You only did it once?”

  Ebon nodded. “Before you, I had just the one notch on my belt. Not for lack of trying, mind you. But the thing I didn’t understand at the time — but that I’ve thought a lot, lot, lot about since — was that Julia didn’t actually care about me at all. I think she felt herself getting older and needed me to make her feel young. She needed to prove to herself that she still had what it took to seduce someone at their peak. But it was more than that too. A lot of what I took for brash confidence was more likely insecurity. She was so bold and uncensored because she was trying to convince herself that she couldn’t be hurt. That she didn’t feel pain, or anything less than total surety about herself, her body, whatever. Looking back, it seems sad.”

  “It does.” Holly’s eyes were moist, proving her words. “But not sad for her. Sad for you.”

  “I was fine. It wasn’t exactly abuse.”

  “But it was. Mental abuse. She was just … she played with you!”

  “She did. Afterward too. I spent months following her around, hoping for a repeat. I thought that if I could prove my worth to her, she’d want me again. It was hard, and it messed me up for a while. I started to think of sex as a reward for being a certain way — for serving someone and doing what they wanted. But not just a reward, an impossible reward. She fed it too, the whole time. She called me ‘baby,’ like I was a proper lover, but it was always followed by a request: ‘Baby, can you run to the store for me?’ ‘Baby, can you fix the ceiling fan?’ And I just went right along for the ride. You know the drawings of a donkey pulling a cart, enticed by a stick with a dangling carrot? I felt like that. I kept trying to be and do whatever Julia wanted, handling her chores and errands and all sorts of things, but the promise of her teasing, with lots of wiggling of tits and ass and many suggestive comments, was always out of reach.”

  “I’m sorry, Ebon.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m sorry that happened to you. I’m sorry she hurt you.”

  He nodded his thanks. “She had her own baggage. I imagine she thought it was a fair trade and didn’t think of herself as the bad guy — bad girl — at all. If anything, it let me see right through her, and like I said, that made me feel sad. Sad for her. But it went both ways, because I didn’t just want sex. She made me feel wanted too.”

  “But you were only a kid.”

  “A lonely kid. The funny thing is that at the same time Julia was messing me up, she also gave me this huge boost. You think I’m timid and quiet now? It was so much worse before. My parents were always distracted, and I had to compete with my siblings. I barely ever said a word. I couldn’t order food at a McDonald’s, I was so shy. Julia made me feel like I was worth wanting. Worth being with. And yes, it was twisted, but it was more than I’d had before, and at a time when my parents had no time for me. Just a few months earlier, my best friend, Leonard Ammas, had died in a car accident. He was hit by a drunk driver. That’s why I almost never drink.”

  “Oh.”

  “That accident hit me hard, but my parents were too busy to get me through it. Julia made me feel safe. She made me feel understood and anchored during a time of chaos.”

  Holly said nothing. Just watched him with serious green eyes as he finished speaking. Then, after Ebon realized he had nothing left to say, Holly put her hand on his arm.

  “You know, I could be your — ”

  But Holly couldn’t finish her sentence, because at that moment there was a tremendous booming outside, as if someone had fired an antique cannon or struck the
building with a wrecking ball. The floor and bed shook enough to jiggle Holly’s breasts, and a ghostly trail of dust whispered down from the ceiling.

  Ebon said, “What the hell was that?”

  “Is that really your reaction?”

  He looked at Holly, not understanding.

  “What’s going on out there?”

  “Who knows?”

  Ebon stood and crossed to the window. He glanced back as he did, and for some reason Holly looked irritated, maybe even angry. Outside, people walked by in the sunlight. Kids played on a distant playground. The building’s geography allowed an oblique view into one of the other apartments, and he could see the man who lived there sitting at a chair at a round table, sipping coffee. Nobody was looking anywhere other than at their personal business.

  “I don’t see anything,” he said.

  Ebon looked back. After a moment, Holly slithered from the sheet in a way that suggested she was summoning his return to bed, then seemed to remember she was nude and tucked the sheet demurely around herself, as if she didn’t want Ebon to mistake her gesture for an invitation to sex. She patted the pillow. Slowly, he returned.

  “What were we talking about?” he asked.

  “Julia.”

  “Oh. Hmm. Well, that conversation can be over. I guess I kind of went overboard unloading all that old baggage on you. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  Ebon slipped into bed beside her. As he did, his naked leg brushed hers, and it dawned on him just how completely nude she was. His thoughts shifted. He’d dumped his past on her, but no longer wanted to dig up old bones. What was done was done. Now he was getting horny, and Holly was the right person to be with when that happened. He slid a hand along her body from the bottom up, feeling the skin of her thigh surrender to the skin of her smooth side, with no fabric in between.

  “I hadn’t really thought about it, but I guess we all need someone to lean on,” she said. “It just so happened to be Julia for you, and it just so happened to take the form of sex.”

  “Mmm,” said Ebon, still idly stroking Holly’s side with one finger, focusing on her hip, her ass.

  “But you needed it, didn’t you?”