A Perfect Romance

by Layce Gardner

  Ellen pulled away from the kiss, leaving Dana shaking. And not from the cold, either.

  "You know what we have to do next, don't you?" Ellen asked.

  "Consummate our hatred?"

  Ellen laughed.

  "I was being serious," Dana said with a straight face.

  "I want us to get rid of our girlfriends first," Ellen responded. "What we have—what we will have—will be better if they're out of the way and we're not feeling guilty about cheating on them."

  "I wasn't going to enjoy it or anything," Dana said. "After all, I hate you."

  Ellen planted a popcorn kiss on Dana's lips.

  "How do I hate you?" Dana recited.

  Ellen popped another kiss on her lips.

  "Let me count the ways," Dana continued.

  Popcorn kiss.

  "I hate thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach."

  Kiss.

  Nine

  That night, Dana lay in bed by herself. This time instead of leaving room for Kimmy, she sprawled across the whole bed. But she couldn't sleep. She felt all pent-up like there was something about to bust loose inside her. She thought about masturbating but somehow that seemed like cheating on Ellen. She thought about ice cream, but she didn't even think sugary gooeyness could soothe her.

  So for the first time in over a year, she got the old Smith-Corona out of the closet and started typing. The words flew fast and furious. She didn't even care if they were good words, she was ecstatic that her fingers were dancing on the typewriter keys again.

  ***

  Excerpt from Bad Romance:

  I did a last second booger-check in the rear view mirror before I got out of the car. I had wiped off Trudy's makeup job on the drive over. She did a pretty good job if I had been a dead person. I quickly swiped on some watermelon-flavored lip gloss, but then licked it off before I could even get out of the car. That's the trouble with flavored lip glosses, they taste so good that I keep licking them off. It's a good thing they don't make bacon-flavored gloss or I'd chew off my own lips.

  I sucked in a breath of courage, grabbed the handle on the box of wine I'd bought(I had scored a two-for-one sale) and headed for the B duplex.

  The front door opened before I even got to the porch. As soon as I saw her I stumbled over a crack in the sidewalk that only my feet could detect. This stumble set into motion a whole series of events: My right toe slapped against the back of my left calf, I pitched the box of wine forward and followed its trajectory with my face. Somehow Kimmy managed to not only catch the box of wine, but using her magnificent and expensive breasts, she also softened the blow for my face.

  It was a Dooley for the record books.

  This wasn't the grand entrance I had envisioned, but it did get her full attention.

  I reluctantly pried my nose out of her cleavage and stepped back, but as anybody knows who's ever worn flip flops before, they are not the best shoes for backing up. I stepped completely out of my left one and tripped again. This time there were no cooshy cushions and I clunked the left side of my face against the porch post.

  I ended up on my tookus with my hand clasped over my left eye. I could feel it swelling. I looked up at Kimmy with my one good eye.

  "You look amazing," I said.

  She was too busy laughing to register what I'd said. I took the approach that she was laughing with me, not at me, and smiled back at her.

  "Sorry," she said. "I know I shouldn't laugh, but that was funny."

  You know how cats slip and fall, then get up and pretend that they meant to do it that way all along? That's what I did. I got up and smiled. "I meant to do that."

  For some reason that made her laugh even harder.

  I brushed off the back of my pants until she caught her breath.

  "I've never seen anybody do that without a banana peel," she said between chortles. "Sorry. I've always found it funny when people fall down."

  "Well, then, you should find me constantly amusing."

  "Winter is my favorite season. All that ice is better than a Three Stooges movie." She held up the box of wine and examined it. "Wow. I didn't know they made wine in boxes." She winked at me. "Let's go have a glass."

  She didn't know wine came in boxes? What was she, born in a barn? She pranced through the apartment (she really did prance too). I followed her through the bare living room and into the kitchen. I said the living room was bare, but I only assumed it was bare like it was this afternoon because, to be truthful, I wasn't looking at the living room. I was looking at Kimmy's shapely butt. It was swinging back and forth like a hypnotist’s pendulum. And she was rocking that tube top and cut-offs like nobody's business. She had a golden glow from head to toe and no visible tan lines. That must mean she sunbathed in the nude. I wondered if she did that in her backyard. I wondered if her backyard had a privacy fence. I wondered if I did a slow drive-by down the alley if I could see her sunbathing in the nude.

  "Ouch!" I stubbed my left toe on a kitchen chair. I blamed it on the blind spot I now had out of my left eye, but it might have been because I was too busy picturing Kimmy nude to actually see where I was going.

  I gritted my teeth, clenched my toe in my hand and hopped through the pain.

  "Maybe you should sit down," she said, pulling out a chair.

  Good idea. I sat down at the kitchen bar and gingerly touched my swollen eye. "Do you have any frozen peas?"

  "Peas?" she asked like she couldn't have heard me right.

  I nodded. "Yes. Peas, please."

  She opened the freezer half of the fridge and looked inside. "I hadn't planned on cooking peas...” She bent over and rummaged around in the freezer, pointing her butt in my direction.

  I was busy enjoying the view when I felt something wet brush against my foot. I looked down. It was that ugly little poodle from this afternoon. The one with the Leroy Brown attitude. It rubbed his/her nose all over my foot. I shook it off my foot and went back to admiring Kimmy's butt. That's when the little dog wrapped its front paws around my shin and started humping away. I tried to shake it off, but it gripped harder. Shaking my leg made the dog even more excited.

  I stood up and kicked like I was a punter going for the winning point.

  It sounded like a squeak toy when it hit the wall.

  I quickly sat back down. Kimmy had her head inside the fridge and didn't notice.

  The dog peeled himself off the wall and bared his teeth at me. I bared my teeth right back at him.

  "No peas, sorry," Kimmy said.

  I turned my teeth-baring into a tight smile and aimed it at Kimmy. "You have corn." I pointed at the bag in the freezer door.

  Kimmy turned her back to me again and looked inside the freezer, muttering something that sounded a lot like, "What the hell does she want with vegetables?"

  The damn dog was back in attack mode. He stuck his wet nose between my legs. I squeezed my legs together and got him in a knee-lock. He tried to twist away, but I vise-gripped him with my thighs. That would teach him to stick his nose where it didn't belong.

  "Are you a vegetarian?"

  I looked at Kimmy and smiled way too big. I swiveled on the barstool, hiding the wrestling lock I had on her dog. "No, I need a cold compress for my eye. So it won't swell so bad," I said.

  "Oh. Why didn't you say so?" She pulled out the bag of corn. I loosened my death grip on the dog and he backed away, shaking his head like Wile E. Coyote after he was hit on the head with a falling anvil.

  Kimmy pranced across the kitchen floor and gently pressed the bag of corn over my blackening eye. It hurt like a summabitch. She moved in a little closer, pushing her right boob mere inches from my nose. My eye started feeling better. I don't know if she was putting her boob in my face on purpose, but it was my experience that women never do anything even remotely sexual by pure accident.

  The damn dog sensed that I was vulnerable and moved back in for the kill. He stuck his nose directly into my crotch again.

 
; "His name is Snickerdoodle," Kimmy said. "Isn't he the cutest thing you ever saw?"

  "He sure is," I said with gritted teeth.

  If you think Rosemary's baby is cute.

  "He likes you," she said.

  "He's liking me a little too much for my taste."

  Kimmy laughed. I pushed the dog back (gently because Kimmy was watching) and crossed my legs.

  She scooped the dog up and said, "Aw, you hurt his feelings." She rubbed her nose against his nose and I made a mental note to not go anywhere near her nose tonight.

  Kimmy sat the dog on top of the table. She pranced to the other side of the room and opened one of the kitchen cabinets. I gave Snickerdoodle my most evil eye. He didn't seem threatened. I used two fingers to point to my eyes and then point to him in that "I've got my eyes on you" gesture. He was unimpressed. I finished off with an evil eye like the one Miss Celie gave to Mister in The Color Purple.

  Kimmy interrupted out staredown. "I don't have any wine glasses yet. I just moved in and haven't really had any time to shop or decorate. I usually eat out, so…" She pulled a dog bowl out of the cabinet. I knew it was a dog bowl because “Snickerdoodle” was painted on the side. "This is the only dish I have."

  She has to be kidding. She wants to drink wine out of a dog bowl?

  "We could put our mouths under the spigot and drink it that way."

  "We could," she said. "But that's so white trash."

  A dog bowl would be classier?

  "But what about the dog?" I asked.

  "It's okay, he loves wine. He gets drunk and passes out after a while."

  That explains it. The dog's not only a butthole, he's a drunken butthole.

  I pulled the plug on the wine box and Snickerdoodle licked his lips and drooled.

  On a scale of one to ten with ten being the best, I'd rate this date so far as a negative three. In under ten minutes, I'd gotten a black eye, a throbbing big toe, a bag of frozen corn, a dog bowl of wine that I was going to share with the dog, and the only time I made her laugh caused me great physical harm.

  This was good news. There was nowhere to go but up.

  Kimmy placed the brimming bowl of wine in front of the dog.

  Now would be a really good time for me to quit drinking.

  Maybe half an hour later, Kimmy poured the last of the wine into the bowl. I bet your average person didn't know that there were approximately ten dog bowls in every box of wine. Instead of liters, a wine box can be measured in dog bowls. Ten of them. Or maybe twelve. I kind of lost count after six or five.

  Snickerdoodle, aka evil personified, was passed out on top of the table with his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth and his eyes rolled back in his head.

  If I sit him out on the side of the road Maw Maw could have him stuffed by morning.

  I stopped lapping wine and jerked my attention back to Kimmy. She'd been talking for a really long time.

  "So when the hand modeling went tits up, I moved here," she concluded.

  "Hand modeling?"

  She posed her hands in front of my face like she was a queen and I was supposed to kiss them.

  "Pretty," I said because it was all I could think to say.

  She took her hands back. "You ever see a dishwashing commercial?"

  "Uh huh, sure," I said between laps.

  "Or a glove commercial? Or a close-up of a movie star’s hands?"

  "Uh huh."

  "Or somebody's hands holding a box of Hamburger Helper?"

  I lapped the last of the wine out of the bowl.

  "Me, all me," she said, pointing to her own chest.

  "Really?"

  "Not only commercials either. Movies too. I doubled the best of them. Julia Roberts. Angelina. Meg Ryan? All me."

  "Wow." I bent my head over the dog bowl and was disappointed to see all the wine was gone.

  "I made over one hundred commercials and fifty movies in my career. The only woman with better hands than me was Barbra Streisand. Then the economy went bust and the first thing Hollyweird got rid of was the hand and feet models. Now stars have to do their own hands. And, believe you me, they have some butt-ugly hands."

  "I bet," I said for lack of anything better to say.

  "Now, I'm still making a living with my hands only I'm styling hair with them."

  I nodded.

  "Money's not as good, of course, but what the hey. What can I do?" She looked forlornly at her hands.

  I looked forlornly at the oven. "When are we going to eat?" I asked. I was going to have to either eat soon or end up on the counter next to Snickerdoodle.

  Kimmy looked at her watch. "Soon."

  I broke open the bag of frozen corn and tossed back a few kernels. They weren't too bad if you didn't think about it.

  "Straight women like cunnilingus too, you know," she said.

  "Is that so?" I shoved in another fistful of corn.

  She crossed her arms and tilted her head like she was accusing me of something. "All you lesbians think you have the market cornered on the eating-out thing," she said like she was talking about going out to dinner at Olive Garden. "Us straight women like it too, but it's hard to find a man who will do it. I've even considered being a lesbian so somebody would go down on me without me having to ask them to do it."

  "I can't believe you have to ask," I said.

  "Well, there was my first husband. He went down on me. The first time he ever went down there, I made him stop."

  I had my mouth halfway open to ask why until I remembered it was full of corn and I shut it.

  She continued, "I was young and prudish, I guess. All those feminine hygiene commercials had me feeling self-conscious. Which is why I refused to work in a douche commercial. You ever see somebody holding up a box of Summer's Eve, it's sure as shit not me."

  "You have principles."

  "You bet I do. Then when I tried to get Marty, that was my first husband, to go back down there, we already hated each other, so it was too late. The French man I dated between marriages, his name was Jock, would go down there and stay all night if I wanted him to. He liked to pleasure me. I think that's the thing with French men. They may smell like warm chicken broth, but they love to make a woman feel good. Jock had a big dick too."

  "Is that important?" I asked because I really wanted to know.

  "It sure doesn't hurt any," she said. "I broke up with him because he was stupid and now I wish I hadn't. I mean, what's a little stupidity when a guy will do that? You can ignore stupid, but you sure can't ignore a guy who's bad in the sack. My second husband was horrible in bed. But he was smart. And he had a good job. I figured two out of three, right? I figured I could teach him the bed part."

  Wrong. The bed part is a natural ability. Like a superpower. You either have it or you don't.

  "Wrooong," she echoed my thoughts. "And he had an above-average dick. The problem with him was that he was fat. Not all over. Just his belly. His belly stuck out further than his dick. Which meant I always had to be on top. Which wasn't a problem because I like to be on top anyway."

  More good news. I preferred the bottom. Not because I was passive in bed. Because I was lazy.

  "You know how bad he was?" she asked.

  I shook my head.

  "One time I got on my elbows with my ass in the air and he couldn't even find the right spot. I mean, seriously, it's not like my pussy moved around independently of my other body parts or anything. I thought I was going to have to paint a damn bull's eye on it for him. I asked him once if he would like to watch me masturbate. I'm thought a sexy show might liven things up, you know?"

  I nodded.

  "Would you like that? Watching a woman touch herself for you?"

  Hell, yes. "Sure."

  "Well, he didn't. He got all indigent about it.” (Yes, she said “indigent,” not “indignant.”) She continued, "He said if I could do it myself then why was he there."

  "Oh. That's too bad."

  "And when I brought up the id
ea of cunnilingus? Forget it."

  "He wouldn't?"

  "Nope. Wouldn't even consider it. Said it wasn't natural. I said, 'Fucking doggy-style is about as natural as you can get and you wouldn't do that either.'"

  "Is that why you divorced him?"

  "Yes, but we're still friends."

  "How many men have you...been with?" That was a tricky question and I knew that. If her number was too high, it would be a definite turn-off for me. Too low and it would make me nervous because I'd wonder why it was so low when she was obviously very sexual and attractive. Like maybe there was something wrong with her that I couldn't smell.

  "Six."

  Okay, that's a good number (a multiple of three.) A middle-of-the-road number, not too low, not too high.

  "And out of that six, four of them wouldn't go down. I should never have broken up with stupid Jock. Those French women don't know how good they've got it." She put the tip of one finger in the middle of her chin and squinted her eyes like she was thinking real hard. "Makes you wonder about French lesbians, doesn't it?"

  "Oui oui," I said and giggled.

  She put both her hands under the table where I couldn't see them. I heard a snap unsnap.

  I eat when I get nervous, so I grabbed for the bag of corn and tossed another handful of niblets in my mouth.

  I heard another snap unsnap.

  Maybe Kimmy was getting comfortable. I'd never been good at reading signs from women. I didn't want to assume she was making sexual advances.

  I distinctly heard a zipper unzip. Okay, maybe she was getting really comfortable. Because of the counter, I couldn't see her from the waist down, but when she kicked her shorts up in the air and they landed on my head, I was pretty sure that was all the sign I needed.

  My nervousness skyrocketed into the stratosphere of panic. And when I'm panicking I can't be held responsible for what comes out of my mouth. "You know, there's a town in Indiana called French Lick. I always wanted to go there. For the heck of it." I threw back another handful of cold corn and chawed. Her jean shorts drooped down over my forehead.

  Kimmy had both hands under the counter, her eyes closed, sucking on her bottom lip and she was wiggling.