Dutch

by Madhuri Pavamani

  “What the fuck is Snellville?” I couldn’t help interrupting.

  “Curtail the disdain, thank you very much. Snellville is that wondrous place where everyone is someone.”

  “Says who?” I laughed.

  “The good people of the Snellville town hall. Shut up, Dutch, and let me finish my goddamned happy story.” She punched my arm like it was a totally normal thing to do only it wasn’t and for a second we both froze and I was about to say something, maybe tell her it was okay, when she decided to pretend it didn’t even happen. “So as I was trying to tell you, my friend Jessica and I would play in the woods all the time, climbing trees, building forts, kid shit. And one day we were running down the trail to my house.”

  “This isn’t going to be some child molester story, is it?” I interrupted her again, half joking, half not.

  She paused, shot me a look, and pretended I’d never opened my mouth. “And spied a magazine hidden under some bushes and because we were two totally curious utterly adventurous little girls, we stopped and pulled it out of its hiding place. And there, in all his nearly naked glory, stood this guy in leather underwear, right on the cover of the magazine because of course, we’d found a Playgirl, which we didn’t even know was a magazine, much less that it contained pictures of men and their very naked very big dicks. Needless to say, we immediately hid that piece of brilliant and titillating knowledge of the male body, then returned daily, sometimes more than once, to pore over every page until the thing fell apart from being handled so much.”

  She rolled onto her back and laughed, forgetting about the need to keep her hands pressed between her knees, seeming to forget about me, running her fingers through her hair, her bangles jangling in rhythm with her laughter. Right then I fell for her again and I wondered if that was what life was like with her, forever falling in love with her over the smallest of things, again and again, and I hated the fucking asshole who was going to be that guy because it probably wouldn’t be me and whoever he was sure as fuck didn’t deserve her.

  “What?” she asked, turning toward me, noticing a shift in my mood. “You don’t like my dick story? Was it not happy enough for you?”

  This time it was my turn to laugh even though I never laughed, at least not in bed with a woman. But I didn’t do any of this shit in bed with a woman. In fact, the only thing I did in bed with a woman was tell her to shut up, keep her hands to herself, and fuck her blind.

  Until this moment.

  Until Juma.

  I was so goddamned fucked.

  “I loved it—it explains a lot,” I joked.

  “Screw you.” She smiled and closed her eyes, then suddenly turned back to me and before I could protect myself with all my walls and barriers and barbed wire, she opened her mouth and I was done.

  “I like you like this. I mean not like this”—and here her eyes clouded and got a little glassy as she glanced at all my now-superficial aches and pains—“I hate all of that, your hurts, and if I ever find out who did them to you, I’m going to kill them, I swear to god.” Something about the way she said it, real quiet and serious, no joke in her game, told me she would do just that. She would kill them for hurting me, and that shit was fucking deep.

  “But this, I like,” she continued as she pointed at my eyes, “and I especially like this,” then she pointed at my half-ass smile.

  And for a long, glorious moment we just stared at each other, and if I was another man, a brave man, a man like that motherfucker Hitler’s Wet Dream, then that would have been my moment when I touched her right at the pulse point on her throat and leaned close to breathe in her essence and listen to her low cry of desire before I parted her lips and fucked her with my tongue. But I was Dutch Mathew, a fucked-up black-hearted killer for The Gate, and although I could have millions of women and had done just that, the one woman I wanted more than I had ever wanted anything in my life could never be mine because I didn’t have the balls to take my moment and own it like a boss.

  “But if you don’t want me to like this,” she added upon catching my dark expression, pointing her finger at me and around me, “then we can totally go back to the way we were before all of this,” and she smiled and pointed at us in her bed in her apartment and she was teasing and light and nervous and I so badly wanted to pull her into my arms and bury my face in her hair and never let go.

  Instead.

  “No, I don’t want that. At all.” My boss moment after all—the blunt simple truth, no flowery shit, and she breathed deeply and smiled and without thinking, I reached out and ran my thumb along her lower lip and she closed her eyes and her breath hitched and my dick screamed and pleaded and roared. But tonight, this moment, this time with her was not about sex and fucking and my dick and her pussy, it was so much deeper, and with a start, I pulled away from her.

  “I shouldn’t have done that.”

  Before the words left my mouth, I knew I shouldn’t say them, I didn’t want to say them, but old habits die hard and being a nasty, horrible, despicable motherfucker has been my oldest habit, and so the words tumbled out before I could contain them. She opened her eyes and looked a little broken and right then I decided I had hurt her enough for one lifetime. That all those other women I pushed away from me with my shitty behavior and vile words, all those moments when I could have been just one iota of a decent person and chose not to, all those everythings when I did something vicious and hurtful to someone just trying to comfort and care for me, they were all leading to this moment, lying next to this woman, watching the beginnings of another one of her heartbreaks, determined not to be its cause.

  “It’s not that I don’t want to . . .” I didn’t need to complete my sentence because I think she knew all the many and varied things I wanted to do to her. “It’s just that I shouldn’t.”

  “It’s okay.” She tried to blow off her pain like it was irrelevant and didn’t matter but it was relevant and it mattered.

  “No, Juma.” I said her name again because I liked the way it felt in my mouth and I liked the way she looked when I said it. “It’s not okay. At all. But I’ve been like this for so long that I don’t know how to be any other way anymore, despite the fact that I want to be all kinds of other things when I’m with you, better things, gentler things, things quite the opposite of who I am.”

  “And who are you?” she asked, and I thought she was joking but I met her stare and it was serious and she was not playing.

  “Dutch Mathew.”

  “I know that already,” she deadpanned. “Tell me something new.”

  She paused

  and she smiled.

  “And make it happy, motherfucker. The happiest moment of your existence.”

  I considered her for a few ticks and thought about how my fingers ached to touch her skin and wondered if that’s how she felt about me when she held her hands between her knees. I wished I could be someone else and not overthink everything when it came to her, but I couldn’t because she demanded overthinking, she deserved overthinking, she required overthinking. Which was why, no matter how badly I wanted to touch her again, no matter how desperately I craved it, I wasn’t going to do that to her. I wasn’t going to cross that barrier because although I knew I loved her like I loved nothing else, I wasn’t sure that would be enough to protect her from everything I was.

  But I could talk to her, I could share some of myself with her, and so I took a leap of faith.

  “I was eight years old the first time I rode an elephant—”

  “Uh-uh,” she interrupted me, shaking her head as she lay on her back smiling, “that’s too easy. You lived in India, there are elephants everywhere. Too damn generic.”

  “Elephants everywhere?” I rolled onto my side and raised my eyebrows at her. “Now who’s making assumptions?”

  “Please. A species of the animal is named after the country,” she countered, “so from what I can tell, no one’s making any assumption at all. I’m just letting you know that’s not the
story I want. The story I want requires some deeper digging—I want to know the happiest moment no one else knows.”

  “That would make you quite special,” I replied, and as soon as the words escaped my mouth I wanted them back, wondering what the fuck I was thinking putting them out there in the first place. She rolled toward me, rested her head on her hands, and studied me intently as if thinking through every detail of her response and possibly whether she was even going to bother responding at all.

  “Am I not?”

  And for the first time in fucking forever, I didn’t pause, never gave myself an extra beat to think over my answer because I didn’t want to but also because I didn’t want her to see me think on it. If she took away anything from this fucking bizarre night together, I wanted it to be that when she asked the one question that really mattered, when she left herself totally open and vulnerable, I gave the answer that made her feel good and I did it without hesitation.

  “You are.”

  “I am?” she asked, her eyes hinting at some well-earned mistrust.

  “You are,” I replied without elaborating because I wasn’t ready to and because I had already said enough. I could tell she was letting that simmer for a minute, rolling it around in that head of hers, thinking on it a bit, as she would say, probably wondering what the fuck my deal was—one second I was calling her a whore and the next I was kind of professing my affection for her. It was total fuckery and if she sat up right then and there and told me to get out of her house and her life and to never think about her again, I wouldn’t blame her. I was a dick and she had been my most tortured victim. Despite craving her love, I deserved nothing but her scorn.

  “I better be.” She finally smiled. “But don’t be thinking you’re off the hook on the story you owe me just because you’re speaking all kinds of beautiful.”

  “Fuck. No? And to think I thought you were easy,” I joked, all the while wondering who was this person in Dutch Mathew’s skin, lying next to this stunning woman, saying all kinds of charming shit.

  “Easy to fuck, sometimes. Easy to weasel out of some deep ass truth-telling, never. Quid pro quo, mister. Let’s hear it.”

  “Your persistence is exhausting,” I groused, when what I really meant was that I fucking never wanted her to stop asking me questions, telling me stories, making me laugh. And she knew this. Because she was goddamned brilliant and read me like a book every time our paths crossed.

  “I know.” She grinned. “And you love it.”

  And I finally gave in because if there was one thing I wanted to do before I left her side tonight—besides fuck her senseless, but that wasn’t an option—it was to leave her with a piece of me since she had already given me so many of her.

  “I kissed the love of my life under the banyan tree.”

  I waited, wondering whether that was good enough for her, revealing enough, personal.

  “Damn, Dutch, you know how to get a girl’s attention,” she closed her eyes and purred, no doubt waiting for me to continue. I relaxed and smiled, feeling all big in the britches, loving that she was focused on my every word. “But don’t be getting all smug and shit, thinking you have me, because sweetheart, you still gotta hold me, make me yours, keep me coming back for more. I want that story.”

  God damn I fucking loved her. I hated that I loved her, and I worried I would be the death of her, that my darkness would wind up consuming her as well, but I couldn’t help myself, it was too late, I was in this shit.

  “She had the blackest of hair and it hung down her back in these thick ropes and every so often she would weave jasmine into it, but I liked it best when she tied it up because that meant she was coming to play football and hang with the boys.

  “Her name was Kajal Chaudhry and she was smart and funny and had this biting wit that kept me and my friends on our toes. She laughed and teased and knew some insanely dirty jokes; she was pretty and smart and, in my fifteen-year-old mind, perfect.”

  I didn’t tell her how my parents despised Kajal, considered her beneath me, forbade me from spending any time with her, and ultimately oversaw her deaths while I was forced to watch, because this was my story and I got to tell it how I wanted to remember it—fresh and light.

  “Kajal lived down the road from my family’s compound, right next to this ancient banyan tree. That thing was enormous and majestic and all of us kids were convinced a djinn lived within its limbs, just waiting to snatch us off the street and cook us for its supper. Little did they know the djinn was Kajal, playing under that tree since she was a baby, making it her home away from home, her getaway from the world.”

  “But I knew”—and here I couldn’t help grinning, remembering Kajal in all her fucking magical mischief—“because on my way home one evening she popped her head out and invited me inside.”

  Without looking at her, I could feel Juma smiling at me, watching me remember Kajal, and unlike most women who might feel the pangs of jealousy as I recalled a first love or would hold it against me for sharing Kajal with them, Juma relished it.

  “I take it you went inside,” she said, knowing the answer but asking anyway.

  “You bet I went inside.” I laughed. “And then just like that, I was finding all kinds of excuses to meet Kajal under that tree, spending long hours doing nothing but chatting about books or cricket or how much we hated mathematics. And god damn, there were so many times I wanted to kiss her, so many chances that she left out there, hanging, just waiting for me to grasp them until finally she got sick of me and my hesitation and like only Kajal could, drew me close with a sexy joke, then leaned in and handled the rest. She fucking shook my world.”

  It was the first time I had talked about Kajal with anyone. Ever. Not even Avery knew anything about her. No one did because I never mentioned her because she was mine.

  Until just now.

  “I gotta go.” I sat up real fast, suddenly aware I was naked, suddenly panicked about getting the hell out of Juma’s house. She sat up as well, glanced at me, and then slid off the bed.

  “Sit tight and I’ll grab your stuff, banyan boy,” she teased as she left the room like it was no big thing that I was about to have a huge fucking meltdown in the middle of her apartment. I watched the sexy sway of her hips as she moved across the room and down the hallway, because even in the midst of a meltdown, I couldn’t not watch her, and I calmed and everything that had been spinning a million and one miles per hour slowed down to resume a more manageable pace. I leaned back on the bed, closed my eyes, and breathed a little easier.

  She returned holding my things, sat on the edge of the bed, maintaining a healthy distance from me, and smiled real tired-like. And because I wanted to hold her in my arms and kiss away her exhaustion but did not dare, I spoke.

  “Sorry,” I said as I slipped my T-shirt over my head and she turned her back so I could pull on my underwear and step into my jeans. It seemed so her to give me that bit of privacy at that moment—the woman had seen all of me and yet turned as I dressed.

  “You don’t have to be sorry.”

  “I panicked because I never talk about Kajal.” I had no fucking clue why I needed to be honest with her, but I did.

  “What happened to her?” She looked up at me with her big eyes and all of her was sincere and interested and holy fuck, she was stunning, but I needed a second to fit her and Kajal and myself into this space together.

  I must have shot her a funny look because she explained her question, as if it needed an explanation. I simply wanted a little more time to avoid it. “You speak of her in the past tense.”

  “And let’s just leave it at that—we’re sharing happy stories, so no more about Kajal, okay?”

  She nodded and smiled, then stood to leave. “I’ll make us some coffee.” And when she left, I knew she was so goddamned sad—for me and my loss that was still so profound I could not bear to share it with another—and I fucking hated myself for that.

  “I have another story for you.” I jo
ined her in the kitchen as the afternoon settled into its rhythm, the city below an amalgam of horns and sirens and traffic and the two of us, sequestered above it all, cocooned in our very fraught togetherness.

  She handed me a mug and smiled brightly and my black, dead heart died again. “You don’t owe me another word, Dutch—”

  “I know,” I cut her off, then sipped my coffee, realizing with a start that I hadn’t smoked or had a drink in hours, “but I want to tell you.”

  “But we agreed, only the happiest.”

  “We did which is why I wanted to tell you—I have two moments. My kiss when I was fifteen under that djinn-hiding tree with that perfect girl, and then twenty-two years later when I passed out cold at the feet of the most stunning woman I had ever laid eyes upon, who fucking wowed me with her everything.”

  She looked up from her coffee mug, a little shocked by my unexpected honesty, and waited.

  “I woke up in her bed, my gruesome injuries painstakingly and quite mysteriously cared for and treated, and she smiled and promised me she had taken no liberties with my space and I wanted her to take every fucking liberty she could think to take, I wanted everything about her to belong to me and only me and despite every horrible thing that makes me who I am I decided to have a little faith and believe that I might just be worthy of her smile and her touch and her kiss. And I leaned on my side and she on hers and we faced each other and laughed and I forgot myself for a while and it was fucking amazing.”

  I set down my coffee cup and, taking a move out of her book, stepped into her space, forcing her back against the counter as I pressed forward until we were almost touching but not. She met my stare and bit her lip and I was done. My dick was hard as a rock, screaming for her body, and even though I knew I could push her legs apart, slide her panties to the side, and fuck her silly, what I really wanted was something much simpler and less involved but far more intimate.

  I touched her face and her eyes widened but she did not move. I leaned down to her mouth and caught a whiff of peppermint and coffee, then whispered in her ear, “Can I kiss you?” And although she said nothing, she leaned into my body, offering herself to me to do with however I wished and it was then that I promised to care for her always, to love her, and never purposely hurt her ever again.