“No.”
“How old were you?”
“I think, probably, nineteen.”
“Did you fuck her good? Fuck her hard?”
I didn’t answer. This felt like too much for my nerves to take. I didn’t know why she was talking about this stuff. There was absolutely no way she was interested in fucking me. She was probably mocking me.
“Does it make you uncomfortable to talk about this stuff?”
“Maybe.” I thought she would stop but I really didn’t want her to.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because I’m a girl?”
“Maybe.”
“Because I’m young?”
“Might have something to do with it.”
“Teen girls have sex too, you know. I’m just curious.” She glanced down at my cock straining against my jeans. “It kind of looks like part of you likes talking about it.”
Maybe the best way to get her to stop talking about this was to turn on the creepy old man vibe, the exact thing I was trying to avoid.
“Why are you asking?” I said. “Do you want me to fuck you?”
The ensuing laugh could be gently described as derisive.
“I don’t really have much need for men in my life.”
She was silent for a minute or so, plucking her phone up from between her bare thighs and checking something. It made me nervous but I figured people in her age group had managed to master this art as well as I used to manage smoking, drinking coffee, and fumbling with the stereo while driving or how people of my father’s generation had managed to drive drunk.
“Would you, though?” she asked out of nowhere.
“Would I what?”
“Fuck me.”
Back on the sex thing. Jesus. Where was this carryout?
“No.” But, of course, I would.
“Why not?”
“Too young.”
“Bullshit.”
“I’m serious.”
“Do you jerk off to porn?”
“Of course.”
“And you, what, look for sad old women to jerk off to?”
“No.”
“Most of the girls you jerk off to are probably about my age. Maybe even younger.”
“That’s different.”
“How’s it different?”
“I don’t know. I’ve gotten older. The younger girls are the crazier they seem.”
“Wow. Thanks.”
Given the current scenario, how could she possibly be offended by this? She was the embodiment of that statement.
“What you mean,” she said, “is that you don’t want to be in a relationship with a girl my age. You would totally fuck me if there were no strings attached.”
This was completely true but her confidence annoyed me.
“There are always strings attached. That’s why I said jerking off to porn is different. That underpaid Serbian actress is probably not going to call me up in the middle of the night and tell me she’s going to OD on pills if I don’t start paying more attention to her. She’s probably not going to size shame me on MyFace.”
“That’s pretty good. Has someone done that to you?”
“What? OD?”
“No. Size shame you on MyFace.”
“Not personally.”
“And the other thing?”
“Not personally.”
“So all your ideas about crazy young girls seem theoretical. Not experiential.”
“Sure. I guess.”
“That just makes you sound like a scared little boy.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah. Okay. It’s just not something I think about a lot. I go to work. I exist. When I get horny I jerk off to porn. It’s simple. Maybe I’ll want something more someday.”
“Sounds boring.”
“Some of us are fine with boring.”
“Not me.”
“Clearly.”
“I wasn’t trying to make you feel bad with all the porn stuff. It’s an interest of mine, that’s all.”
“Porn?”
“Yeah. Well, what guys jerk off to. Actually, what people watch in general.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
I shrugged.
“I don’t want to be in porn. I make it. Like directing and filming and shit. All types of content, really.”
“That’s . . . one career path, I guess.”
“So now you’re going to be condescending?”
“I’m not being condescending. It just seems like there are probably other things you could do.”
“Okay. I might listen to you if you can prove you know what you’re talking about. So I’m curious to see where you live. Maybe when I drop you off you can invite me in and show me all of your nice things. Show me everything that being boring gets you.”
“All right. You got me. My life is shit. I guess I never had the porn option.”
She reached over and slapped her hand down on my thigh.
“Maybe it’s not too late.”
* * *
By the time we reached the carryout I was just happy to get out of the car and take a break from the verbal assault. My erection was nearly painful.
Dawn handed me a fifty and said, “Get a case of whatever. Nothing light. Coors. Bud. Whatever. Maybe Heineken if they’ve got it. No craft beer.”
The carryout was called Gas n Gas. I didn’t see any pumps anywhere. The outside lighting was yellow and there were bars on the windows, plastered with ads for the lottery and cigarettes. It seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. Gunshots and sirens provided a distant soundscape.
A painfully skinny girl wearing a red swimsuit top over nonexistent breasts and shorts even shorter than Dawn’s stood beside the door, smoking a cigarette. I glanced at her and nodded before opening the door displaying a typed sheet of paper stating customers had to remove their hoods before entering and that ice cream cones were not permitted in the store. I wondered what had happened to make this a problem.
The inside lighting was bright and harsh or maybe it just seemed that way after being on the dark country road. The clerk glanced up at me, probably to confirm I wasn’t wearing a hood or enjoying an ice cream cone, before going back to his phone. I went to the coolers in the back, prepared to grab the beer and head back up front.
I paused.
I texted Travis.
“Are you awake?”
The second after sending it, I wondered why I’d bothered. Was I going to tell him about Dawn? Was I afraid something was going to happen to me?
Maybe.
I focused my attention back on the beer cooler. It had been a while since I’d done this and it amazed me how readily the checklist resurfaced. The most beer for the money, the highest alcohol content, the best beer for the weather, the stuff I liked, the stuff I knew I didn’t like.
Fuck it, I thought.
I wasn’t buying it for myself.
I opened the cooler door and grabbed a case of PBR. It would either be exactly what Dawn wanted or she would ridicule me because of it.
I took the case of beer to the counter. The obese clerk stood up, looked like he might fall down, and lurched toward the old yellowed register.
He jerked his head toward the door and said, “That girl din’t ask you for nothin, did she?”
“No.” I instantly resented the clerk for trying to drag me into some kind of conflict.
“I gotta do more to keep the trash run off. Too much trash around here. They come around stinkin like dicks and hustlin my customers for drug money.”
“I . . . I’m not really from around here.”
“You a cop?”
He must have noticed the cop car for the first time. I glanced out and saw Dawn standing next to the car talking to the skinny girl.
“Nah. I’m just out for a ride along.”
This situation should have seemed absurd to anyone who hadn’t spent his
years working third shift at a store on the edge of the most dangerous part of Dayton serving people’s legal addictions.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess you guys get to have all the good shiny fun.”
After taking a long, leering look at Dawn and the skinny girl, he scanned the beer and gave me the total. I handed him the fifty. He held it up above his head and inspected it closely before marking it with a special marker and tucking it in the drawer.
“Um . . . do I have any change?”
“I know what you’re up to. No change.”
I thought about bringing the cop car into it but this guy’s spooky knowledge of the situation told me it probably wouldn’t do any good.
I knocked over a rack of ChapStick and grabbed the beer. While I went out to my night of good shiny fun, he’d be battling his girth to pick ChapStick up off a dirty floor.
“We need to go,” I said.
“Okay, Barcie’s coming with us.”
I assumed Barcie was the skinny girl. I took a quick glance at her, just long enough to take notice of a few things. Her thin brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail, but that still didn’t hide the bald spots on her head. She had a jagged scar in place of one of her eyebrows, was missing an ear and, when she smiled, I noticed she was also missing a lot of teeth.
“You mind driving?” Dawn asked.
“Um, I’d rather not.”
“Maybe it’s not really a choice? I mean, like, you can either drive or walk.”
I knew where we were. She knew where we were too. The really rational part of me knew that if I were forced to walk home, nothing would happen to me. The reasonably heightened paranoid part of my brain, however, more or less assured me something would happen and whatever it was would be terrible.
“Fine. Let’s just get out of here.”
I got behind the wheel. Dawn and Barcie got in the back. I pulled out of the parking lot and thought I had yet another, more serious offense to add to my growing list.
Dawn and Barcie sat in the middle of the backseat, Dawn more toward the driver’s side.
“Where am I going?” I looked at her in the rearview.
I was hoping this was the person she had intended to pick up and I’d be able to go home. I knew she’d said ‘a couple of people’ but my brain had gotten overzealous and edited that out.
“Just drive around for a bit.”
“Any particular place?”
“Just drive around. We’re going to eventually have to go to Kettering, so I guess if you wanted to start off in that direction, that’d be great.”
I had absolutely no sense of direction. I knew we were in West Dayton. Kettering was south of Dayton. I started back to Gethsemane, about ten miles west of Dayton. From there I knew how to get to Kettering.
“Hey, um, Barcie?” I said.
“Yeah, man,” she said slowly.
“Would you happen to have a cigarette I can bum?”
She handed a cigarette and a lighter up to me with a wildly shaking hand.
“Thanks.”
“Yeah, man.”
I lit the cigarette, cracked the window, and handed the lighter back to her. It was the first cigarette I’d smoked in months and it was great.
I continued down Route 4, going back the way we’d come. I expected the girls to be chatty but they were mostly silent. I took another deep, satisfying drag from the cigarette and glanced in the rearview mirror.
The girls were kissing, Dawn’s hands working between Barcie’s legs. Barcie’s head was leaned back, her mouth open. Something about the image struck me as slightly grotesque and I had to tell myself exceptionally ugly people were allowed to experience pleasure also. Dawn broke the kiss and I snapped my attention back to the road in front of me.
“It’s okay if you want to watch.”
I could feel my face flush with embarrassment.
“I, uh, probably need to watch the road.”
“Pull over if you want. There’re quiet little roads all over the place. You can pull it out, if you want.”
By ‘it,’ I assumed she meant my cock.
“I think I’ll just keep driving.”
“I changed my mind. I want you to watch. I think you’d be fine watching this on a computer screen. Maybe you need to experience it in real life.”
I took another drag off the cheap cigarette. It didn’t taste good anymore so I tossed it out the window.
“I think I’m just going to drive myself back to my apartment. I got you the beer. I did what you wanted me to. I don’t have to stick around and let you humiliate me.”
I glanced back in the mirror. Dawn had her phone in her hand, Barcie smirking next to her.
“Actually . . . you kind of do. After all, you’re driving around in a stolen cop car. If I were to call 911 and tell them how me and Barcie ended up back here, you’d probably be in a lot of trouble. Just pull off on the next side road.”
Why was I even fighting this? An extremely attractive girl was asking me to watch her make out with another girl who looked kind of like a monster. How was this not something I wanted to do?
I made a right on Jefferson Straight Road, drove down it about a mile, and pulled off into the gravel on the shoulder.
Dawn leaned forward between the seats and pulled the keys from the ignition and pressed a button. The spotlight burst into life, shining into the overgrown bushes that crept nearly to the road.
“Makes it look like you’re looking for something,” Dawn said.
Why was there no separation between the front and back? I’d never been in a cop car but I thought most of them had some sort of mesh to keep the criminal from the cop. Maybe it was retractable or something. Maybe Gethsemane was such a small town they didn’t fool with it. Maybe ‘sheriff’ was more of an administrative position than anything. Maybe Sheriff Bando didn’t haul around criminals. I started to wonder if it was a cop car at all, but the shotgun locked between the two front seats and the laptop in front of the dash seemed pretty legit.
“Okay,” Dawn said. “Move the mirror around where you can see us. It should make you more comfortable that way. It’ll be more like a screen. If I look up, I want to see your eyes, okay? I want to know you’re paying attention to us. And like I said, feel free to jerk off if you want.”
I didn’t say anything. My mouth had gone dry. I wasn’t a prude or anything, but I couldn’t pull my cock out in front of these two girls. I felt like they would end up ridiculing me if I did.
Dawn leaned over Barcie and began kissing her again.
She broke the kiss and glanced in the rearview. She smirked a little when she met my eyes.
“Hey,” she said, “Barcie’ll totally suck your dick if you want her to.”
I swallowed and my throat made a dry click.
“I, uh, think I’m okay.”
“You don’t think she’s pretty?”
I looked at Barcie in the mirror. She blinked so slowly it looked like she was about to nod off. The eyelid under the scar didn’t work as well as the other one and they moved out of sync with one another.
“It’s not that. I just don’t know her.” But that wasn’t it at all. It wasn’t even that I didn’t find Barcie attractive. It was more like I didn’t want to feel indebted to either one of them. If Barcie were to give me a blowjob, who knew what they would ask me to do next.
“I want to watch Barcie suck your sad little cock.”
My erection had come back in full force and it was going to be hard arguing with her. I knew it would be something I regretted doing. It had been less than an hour and I already regretted getting in the car with Dawn.
“Come on.” I tried hard to think of a legitimate excuse.
“Come on,” she mocked. “That’s like the worst argument in the world.”
“I’m married,” I said. There, that should do it. Marriage didn’t carry the weight it once did, but maybe it would work.
“You’re lying.”
“No I’m not. I
’ve been married for five years.”
“Where’s the ring?”
“We don’t wear any.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Because we’re not sixty. Because we’re progressive people who respect each other and don’t view marriage as ownership.”
“What’s her name?”
“Kathleen.”
“What does she do?”
“Teacher.”
“Where did you meet?”
“Community college.”
“Show me a picture.”
“I don’t have one on me.”
“Not even on your phone?”
“I don’t take many pictures with it.”
“Nice one. Whatever. That makes me want to watch more. Now you’ll be cheating on your wife too. Double fun. Wait. Is oral sex even cheating? I think the jury’s still out on that. Get back here, hoss.”
“Seriously . . . can we just not do this? It’s been a long night. You wanted me to help you and I did that. I just want to go home. I’m tired. I have to work in the morning.”
She leaned over the seat and looked at my distended crotch.
“You’re also very hard. It’s not like I’m asking you to take it up the ass or something. The scared little boy is still going to end the night safe and snug in his little bed and when you wake up tomorrow, you can get back to your sad little life. But if you tell me no again, then I’m going to take out my phone and press it one time and your life is going to get really really complicated and you’re probably not going to like any of it.”
“You’re not even the one doing it!”
“Barcie doesn’t mind, do you?”
“Whatever, babe,” Barcie said.
“Is that why you’re arguing? You want me to suck your cock?”
There was absolutely no right answer to this. But, yeah, that was probably the actual reason.
“I don’t want anyone to suck my cock.”
The girls started laughing and when I thought about what I’d just said I realized how ridiculous it sounded. It needed a lot of qualifiers, a lot of clarification. On its own, it had probably never been uttered by anyone who actually had a penis.
“Get back here. Otherwise you’ll be the one who ends up sucking cock. Besides, I don’t do that, so it’s not happening with me.”
What was the worst that could happen?
I was pretty good at avoiding things. Once I got away from these girls I could probably stay away.
This Town Needs a Monster Page 3