Sweet Seduction

by Anthology

  I strummed, picking out songs I’d play on Tuesday. Hummed along.

  She opened her mouth and began to say something. Closed it. Opened it again. “You are the most infuriatingly confusing person I have ever met, Tyler.”

  “Then you have lived a sheltered life.”

  “Quit saying that! You act like I’m some sort of princess and you’re this rebel bad guy who’s lived a shit life while I’m in my little tower being pampered.”

  I just smirked.

  “And you can think that all you want, Frown, if it makes you feel superior. If it gives you some sort of comfort or a cushion between the truth and what you fear.”

  “Fear?” I snorted. “What fear?”

  “Fear of letting someone in. Fear of letting someone say you’re hot, or try to get to know you better.”

  “Sticking your hands on my ass on the rooftop was your way of getting to know me better.”

  “No, it was my way of overcoming my fear.”

  Huh.

  “What fear?”

  She shook her head. “You don’t get to know more about me than I know about you.”

  We were playing the Show Me Yours I’ll Show You Mine game, only with feelings instead of cocks and pussies.

  “One question.”

  “I’ve already asked it.”

  “You’ve asked a bunch of questions, Maggie. Which one?”

  “What are you afraid if?”

  “Spiders.”

  “What else?”

  I strummed. “That was your one question. Mine is this: why is it so important for you to know all this stuff about me?”

  She just shrugged.

  “Fuck and forget,” I muttered.

  “Why do you keep saying that?”

  “Because that’s what you really wanted, and you’re pissed you didn’t get what you wanted, Princess.”

  “I wanted someone who wouldn’t hurt me,” she rasped.

  A cold little animal woke up at the back of my head, right where the knot of bone and muscle rests. It moved, a stealthy little beast, and made my spine straighten. Maggie had just upped the ante in this truth session and I swallowed, barely able to think. Whatever higher-order function I was supposed to have just disappeared with the part of me that believed the world was a trustworthy place.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t that guy.”

  Her nostrils flared.

  Wrong answer again.

  She cranked up the radio and breathed so carefully I could count with her. Four beats to inhale, four beats to exhale.

  I’d said the wrong thing for her.

  I’d said the only thing I could say that would keep her from getting too close and not hurt her too much. If I told her the truth—the real, visceral truth—then I’d just be a target for pain transfer. She could put it all on me and get out her demons and she’d be left refreshed and fine and I’d be fucked.

  Minus the fun.

  A few handfuls of gummy bears and a quart of water later, I needed to pee.

  Maggie stopped at a small rest area. I was in and out in under two minutes, quietly climbing into the passenger seat. She was eating gummy bears like she was in a post-apocalyptic movie and she’d just offered me up as tribute in exchange for a bag of them.

  We sped off. She said nothing.

  The next hour passed in a blur of water, more gummy bears, and most of the soundtrack to Dr. Zhivago. No idea whose CD that was.

  “I need to pee,” I announced.

  “Again? No.”

  “No? What do you mean, no?”

  “No.”

  “You look like Grumpy Cat when you say no.”

  “I do not.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Do not.”

  “Do so.”

  My stomach made a sound that can best be described as the portal to hell opening up and belching. Maggie actually swerved while driving seventy-eight miles per hour.

  “What was that?”

  “My stomach.”

  Something in my gut shifted.

  “Oh, shit,” I said, breaking out into a sweat. “I need a bathroom. NOW.”

  Chapter Six

  Maggie

  I had become a self-contained box full of all the feels. All of them. Every single feeling in the universe had telescoped and concentrated, living behind my rib cage, under my eyelids, in the newly-emerging wrinkles around my eyes.

  He made no sense. This man made zero sense. I reached down to the bag of gummy bears and shoved a handful in my mouth, then rooted in the bag for the chips Lena had packed. If I was going to pig out on road food, I’d do it right.

  Two more miles and the rest area appeared. Tyler could not get out of the car and into the bathroom fast enough. Guy must have a bladder the size of a walnut.

  It gave me a few minutes of peace to think.

  What kind of mindfuck was he initiating here? Trying to get me to reveal more about myself while he stayed tight as a ship’s hull. And not the Titanic. I’d already told him too much about me, and for what? There was no hope of a relationship here. Tyler wasn’t into me. He was playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse that suddenly put me on edge more than I already was.

  Bzzz.

  Lena.

  “Hey! How’s everything.”

  “We’re high on gummy bears and good cookies.”

  “Awww, that’s sweet.” Lena’s voice dropped. “How’s Tyler?”

  “He’s on his second bathroom break in twenty minutes.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “He’s an asshole,” I said flatly.

  “Oooo, then at least he’s interesting. You can always work with asshole, but you can’t fix boring.”

  “Please don’t ever become an obituary writer.”

  “I should know. I just left boring.” Lena’s ex was an accountant who spent an extraordinary amount of his free time carefully cataloging everything he did. Fitness, food, home improvement, finances—if there was an app or a spreadsheet, Tom used it. The breaking point came when he created a spreadsheet that tracked their sex life and compared it to sex surveys and national norms, pointing out that he was being cheated out of .7 blowjobs per month and 1.1 episodes of intercourse.

  She left. She explored. She found she was more attracted to women than men, though for a time she thought she was more gender fluid. I didn’t ask much about her sex life and she normally didn’t poke her nose into mine. Until now.

  “Tom wasn’t boring. A bit...obsessive with detail and data, but—”

  “He was boring, Maggie. Worse than boring. He expected me to join him in his boringness and made it all about my failings when I didn’t. That’s when you leave.”

  I’d learned a long time ago to keep my mouth shut about Tom, because Lena had broken up with him twice before and if you tell someone the truth about their ex, and they get back together, guess who they hate?

  You. The common enemy.

  I do know how to keep my mouth shut. Tyler’s not the only one.

  “Just checking in,” Lena said. “You getting along?”

  “He’s about as talkative as a stuffed Smurf.”

  “You drink enough and the stuffed animals start to talk.”

  “Shut up, Lena.”

  “I love you too.” She got off the phone and I stared at the little glass screen, shaking my head. A few moments of silence, of aloneness, were what I needed.

  On the outside, this trip was simple: help a guy who needed to get to L.A. so the band could get its first national concert.

  On the inside, this was a series of small clusterfucks that added up to—what? There didn’t seem to be an end game here. A goal. A resolution. I was tumbling through space with my emotions in a wire cage, rolling over and over as bits and pieces fell through the holes and I tried not to get bruised along the way.

  I’d spent seven years living life like that. Well, five. The first two years I’d spent simply tying to stop the never-ending images and physical sensation
s of reliving my attack.

  That took every ounce of energy I had.

  Tyler came walking back to the car, looking a little odd. Pale. Oh, no. Was he getting sick? I couldn’t drive the rest of the way with a puking guy in my car.

  “You okay?” I asked as he buckled up.

  “Sure.”

  “If you’re not, we can—”

  “I’m fine. Drive. You drive the next hour and then I’ll take the next shit—er, shift.”

  I gave him a questioning look that he ignored, but he climbed in, buckled up and I pulled away. As I got back on the interstate, Tyler began to breathe meditatively, his eyes like bullets aimed for the horizon, his nose twitching with each inbreath, holding, then nostrils flaring on the outbreath. After ten breaths I was more relaxed, even though I wasn’t doing the breathing.

  “You seem—”

  “I’m fine.” He closed his eyes.

  And then a sound like a rusty gate creaking open came out of...him.

  Being a polite midwestern woman, I ignored it. Maybe Tyler had some GI thing he was too embarrassed to talk about. We had more than enough tension between us; I wasn’t about to bring up his digestive issues. He continued his slow breathing and reached for a bottled water and a fistful of gummy bears.

  For the next twenty minutes I watched him out of the corner of my eye as he fed one after the other at regular intervals into his mouth, little bears going to their gustatory deaths.

  I kept eating them too. I couldn’t help myself. Sugar free, guilt free, and they tasted just as good as the real thing. Who knew?

  And then that sound emerged, like a robot being crushed in the gates of hell.

  His eyes flew open.

  “I need a bathroom!” Panic bloomed in those normally closed-off eyes. It was an odd thing of beauty.

  We passed a giant green highway sign. “Twenty-two miles to the next rest area,” I said sweetly.

  “I can read.”

  And then the car filled with the bad breath of Hades. I flinched and very, very slowly moved my hand to the window button. Tyler beat me to his, lowering the window fast but not saying a word, his jaw clenched.

  I bit my lip to make sure I didn’t laugh. Poor guy. Whatever he was going through was mortifying. I’d be embarrassed if I were him, and we were trapped in a car together. For whatever reason, I felt less self-conscious. It might be petty, but to see him vulnerable and in a predicament made me feel more secure.

  I’m not above admitting that.

  He winced, and a sheen of sweat broke on on his face. A dawning sense that not only was something very wrong with him, but it might be contagious, began to seep in to my bones.

  “Tyler, I think we need to get you to a doctor.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “But—”

  “Just drive. I’m not missing this concert.”

  Tyler

  I was not going to have my bowels open up like this. Talk about vulnerability. Some kind of evil settled into my gut and was painstakingly turning a firehose against the lining of my intestines.

  I hadn’t experienced anything like this since I was thirteen and Dad got a bunch of bad canned chicken from the food pantry two blocks over. We’d been wiped out for three days.

  This was worse.

  Pockets of gas moved around inside me like Tetris pieces. Worse: we could both hear them, like groans from the sarlacc pit.

  Keeping a poker face through this was as hard as controlling the, uh...output.

  If I just breathed in through my nose, and out through my mouth, I’d—

  The sarlacc spoke.

  “God, Tyler, I think you’ve got some kind of stomach bug and—”

  Then Mordor spoke back.

  Maggie looked down at her belly in disbelief. “What? I don’t—” Her words cut off with a facial expression I knew all too well.

  She pressed down hard on the accelerator.

  How many miles before that next rest stop?

  I didn’t think that anything could make this drive worse. I should have known better. In my life, just when you think nothing more can happen—it can. And does.

  And it’s always worse than you’d imagined.

  We dispensed with decorum and both rolled our windows down all the way. The stench was—

  She farted.

  I started giggling. Haven’t giggled since I was eleven.

  Her face was as red as parts of her hair.

  “I—uh—”

  And then I farted, too.

  “Oh, God,” she muttered.

  You lose all pretense of social norms when you start farting uncontrollably in front of someone. It’s the kind of thing politeness can’t even cover up. It’s like my drunk Dad at a big family gathering. Everyone can ignore old Titus over there, but after a while you have to acknowledge that he pissed in your spider plant, stole your bottle of Percocets from the medicine chest in the back bathroom and left empty beer bottles in random bushes outside your house before passing out on your front lawn and waking up to the automatic sprinklers.

  Farts in a small car are just like that.

  “Sorry.”

  “Quit giggling.”

  “Can’t—” Gasp. Fart. “Help it.”

  “Are we sick? What happened?” She began white knuckling it as her belly made a series of sounds like coal cars creaking along on train tracks so rusted they needed to be sand blasted.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Now we both have it.”

  “You sure you have it?” I asked, snickering.

  Her stomach answered for her, and then she broke out in a sweat.

  “Sweet mother of God, what is this?” She hit eighty-two miles per hour and moved into the fast lane.

  Pretty soon she was doing the meditative breathing, too.

  Ten minutes later she pulled over and we both sprinted for our respective bathrooms. My butt cheeks opened up and the gates of Mordor were unleashed. I felt like I was sending hundreds of dwarves and hobbits to their deaths. I had the uncomfortable feeling that my ass was the Eye of Sauron for a few moments there.

  The evil my body poured forth into that poor, innocent toilet was just cruel.

  Wave after wave, cramp after cramp, and as I sat there, a prisoner to my bowels, I realized that there wasn’t exactly a wall of self-consciousness between us anymore.

  We both wandered back to the car, shuffling like something out of a zombie movie. Maggie’s head was down, tapping away on her phone.

  “You calling Lena?” I asked.

  “Why would I call Lena?”

  “Maybe her cookies did this?”

  Maggie looked offended at the thought.

  “I’ve eaten Lena’s cookies loads of times and they were fine.”

  My stomach rawr-ed in answer, the sound like thunder fading off in the distance. I sprinted back to the bathroom and left her hanging.

  By the time I came back, she was leaning against the car, sucking on a bottle of water like a baby cow calf. She downed that bottle in seconds, then wiped her mouth, tossing the empty in a recycling bin.

  “Lena says she ate more cookies than the two of us put together and she’s fine.”

  “Huh.”

  She glared at me. “So what could it be?”

  “Can’t be the coffee. Or the cream. All I’ve eaten since then is cookies and those gummy bears.”

  She frowned. “I’ve had coffee, cookies, gummy bears, eggs, and—”

  “Let’s check out the gummy bears.”

  Her stomach yawped like Mrs. Wilmer’s Labradoodle.

  “Go,” I said with a wave, trying not to laugh.

  She took off for the bathroom and I grabbed the bag of gummy bears. Nothing weird. They were just a five pound bags of—

  Sugar free gummy bears.

  Huh.

  Maggie’s smartphone was in a drink holder. I grabbed it and did a quick search on Google. Came to a product page with—

  Hold on.

&nb
sp; One thousand, three hundred and ninety two reviews?

  I opened the page.

  By the time Maggie came back, I had solved the mystery of our rotgut.

  “I know why we’re shitting water,” I said.

  “So eloquent, Tyler. Really. You know how to sweet talk a girl.”

  “Facts are facts. Sorry to offend your sensitive sensibilities.”

  “I live in a dorm with hundreds of eighteen and nineteen year olds, Tyler. You can’t offend me.”

  “It’s the gummy bears.”

  “The what?”

  “The gummy bears. Evil little sweet gooey, sugar free messengers of doom.”

  “How do you...?”

  I waved her smartphone. “Process of elimination.”

  “Very funny.”

  I frowned, caught off guard. What did she mean?

  Then I got my accidental pun and smiled at her.

  “Jesus,” I sighed.

  “Yeah, I prayed to him a few times, too, back on the toilet.”

  “This is a shitty situation.”

  “Caused by evil gummy bears. Tyler, that doesn’t make any sense.”

  I shoved her smartphone in her face. “Read.”

  Five minutes later she said, “I’m going to kill Darla.”

  “Darla?”

  “She’s the one who gave me the gummy bears. Gave me a bag, Charlotte a bag, Amy...oh, we have to call and warn them.”

  “No, we don’t.”

  “Why not?” Her voice went high, and yet there was a hitch in it.

  “You really want to tell them what’s happened? It’s kind of one of those ‘let’s never speak of it again’ things.” I sniffed, like a snobby British dame on a show.

  “I think I can—”

  Her phone buzzed in her back pocket just as Mordor’s fires flamed back up. I ran to the bathroom. This was turning into a game of shit tag.

  When I came back feeling as hollowed out as a soft-boiled egg, Maggie was smiling.

  Grinning from ear to ear. it was infectious, and I joined her.

  She held up her phone. “That was Darla, telling me not to eat the gummy bears.”

  I groaned. “Too little, too late.”

  “It seems her hometown was struck with some mystery illness. She said the CDC was practically pulling their version of a Stephen King novel by putting the entire region under a dome when they figured out Darla had given her mom the sugar free gummy bears to use as a wedding party favor. Half the town was at the wedding and ate those little colonoscopy prep kits masquerading as candy.”