Before Navy could speak on my behalf, I spoke up and admitted I had lost the bet. “But it wasn’t an objective verdict,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said, “he was a disinterested third party.”
“She doesn’t let a win drop so easy, does she?” Navy asked me.
“Never does,” I said.
“What was the wager exactly?” he asked.
“Well, we didn’t formally make a wager,” Bonnie said. “We should have let Da Judge here decide the stakes,” she said. “He was Da Stocking Judge after all.”
She stood up and made a mock curtsey in front of him. “Your honor, what would you have mandated as the stakes?”
Navy was about to say something when Bonnie put down her drink and threw up her hand and signaled for him to stop. “Judge, please don’t shout your decision in open court, it’s undignified, whisper it here, in a sidebar.” She laughed and winked at me and leaned forward and lowered her ear close to his mouth. He cupped his large hands over her ear and she listened. Then she cupped her hands over his ear, as if repeating it all back to him. My dick tingled, rose, stiffened. Navy nodded at Bonnie.
“That’s very fair, your honor,” she said giggling, “Your honor, that that’s so fair it’s town-of-Mayberry fair.” Then he started to whistle the theme from The Andy Griffith Show. My cock rose with each sly note of that TV tune and Bonnie smiled at me. Then she stood up and took the waiter’s hand and they left the terrace as the Cake tune replayed on a loop.
For about a minute or so, I sat passively staring at their abandoned wine glasses. Snapping out of my hard-on reverie, I went into the living room, hoping against hope that that’s where they’d gone. Bonnie’s scattered shoes stared at me from the empty rug. I sat on the living room couch as my cock nodded warmly in my pants, and swelled, throbbed, beating time to that echoing tug of war of words between navy blue and black. I knew I should have gotten up off my ass and searched the house for them, and my face flushed with anger. Yet I sat there. Though I knew in my gut she was already way past flirting with him, I realized that she liked the prick.
In my head I heard her voice, navy blue, black. Black, navy blue.
I went upstairs. I heard that Andy Griffith tune whistling from behind a door near a barely furnished bathroom. I couldn’t tell which of them was doing the whistling. Standing there, I felt faint, small, stupid, like a nosy pre-teen kid whose babysitter has gone off to make out with her boyfriend. I pressed my right ear to the door and heard the soft smacking of lips and subdued, persistent giggles. I felt a kind of exotic anger, like I’d been badly conned and had somehow let my con artists get away with it out of some misplaced masochistic admiration for their clever, quick footed game.
The door was locked. I considered shoulder rolling it open, and then I considered simply knocking and shouting.
I went to Navy’s bathroom and took a piss, nearly wetting myself through the awkward angle of my hard-on. I sat on the closed toilet lid and perused his stack of Penthouse magazines. I thumbed through one and then another and then another. I stopped and stared at pictorials of couples. A cowboy getting a blowjob from a redhead, a guy with six pack abs hoisting a blonde in a blue bra onto his enormous cock, a sailor getting his balls licked by two brunettes with seahorse earrings and glamorous cocktail dresses. I felt for sure I was dreaming all this. Demoralized, I tossed the magazines and went back to the bedroom door where I could hear panting, an odd squeal, a giggle, and occasional “yes, of course,” and, at another moment, “you mean . . . further down? . . . right here?” I pictured Bonnie sticking a forefinger into Navy’s ass and suckling his crown. I pictured her asking, “That do the trick?”
I knocked hard. I jimmied the door handle. Though it grew temporarily quiet behind the door, soon the breathing and the whispers and the panting started up again. I stormed downstairs. I threw her heels across the living room where they crashed against the coat stand that collapsed to the floor like a drunken mannequin.
Finally I wandered outside the condo. I looked up at the only lighted window and saw nothing. I recalled the waiter’s dark unibrow. His silver belt buckle. His vest, his trousers. I pictured his long fingers on Bonnie’s loop earrings, and his hands gripping her ass like his ass was all hers.
I pictured her hands sliding that belt off his waist.
In a spasm of rage I keyed the driver’s side of his jeep door. I pictured Bonnie whispering the phrase “Navy blue” as she suckled his crown again and fondled his balls. I could see her holding his cock before her eyes and taking it in with a school girl’s curiosity, and then her tongue running the length of his shaft, her tongue pressing and stopping gently mid-shaft before finishing the lick with a lap around his swollen knob. I could see her index finger pressing into his silvery precome. I could see him smiling, his cleft chin. Navy’s dark eyes beaming at his new, impulsive best friend, my girlfriend.
It was so cold outside and my cock was so hard that I had to sit down inside Navy’s unlocked Jeep. I shivered. The car smelled of pine air freshener and cheap cologne. I pictured the prick running his hand over her smoothly stockinged legs. Navy blue legs. Like a bored and petulant child, I combed through his glove compartment and fished dimes out from under the passenger seat and slid them between my finger and thumb. I thought about the difference between the color navy blue and the color black and I touched my hard-on through my pants. I took out my cock and rubbed my own precome into the shaft and stroked, taking in the smell of the cheap cologne, feeling vulnerable in a strange car, in a strange parking lot in a strange apartment complex. I stroked harder and harder, recalling Bonnie extending her right leg in the restaurant light. I recalled how he’d said so confidently, Your stockings are navy blue and I recalled their high five and I came, violently, spraying my black jeans and the edge of the passenger seat. Hurriedly, pathetically, I wiped it clean with crumbled bits of tissues and rushed out of the Jeep, sure that someone had seen me. But the area was dead silent, the silence broken by the occasional creak form the nearby docks and the tolling of that bell buoy in the distance.
When I got back to the condo, the front door was locked so I tried the terrace. It too was locked. Through the glass I could hear that “Short Skirt/Long Jacket” song still playing. It seemed their funky song was taunting me. My cock was so stiff I could hardly walk. My head was heavy with a kind of passive almost feminine rage.
On the terrace I sat in a chair and took up one of the wine glasses and when I realized I could be drinking his wine, I spit it out in disgust.
For a long while I stared at the black water and the invisible bell buoy out there. I felt the night pressing down on me like a bad joke. I might have dozed off. I know I paced and sat and paced again. I pictured Bonnie staring at herself in the mirror as Navy entered her from behind, her face girlish and tensed with pleasure as he held her by the garter belt like a harness and they fucked doggy-style.
When I stood up I saw through the glass that Bonnie was lounging alone in the living room, her shoes on, the TV tuned in to a cooking show. “Look, Rachel Ray’s cooking those very same scallops you ordered tonight,” she said, “looks yummo.” She was wearing an oversize white T-shirt. Her legs were bare.
I asked her where the fuck she had gone, where the fuck her dress had gone, where the fuck her stockings had gone.
She waved the remote control and gazed down at her legs and then around the empty room in mock surprise, with her hands over her mouth and she said, “Oh shit. Who do you think stole them?”
My strangely confused rage returned. I almost smacked her face. I ran upstairs. Nearing the bedroom, I heard snoring. The bedroom door was half opened and that waiter prick was asleep on the bed, his bed, unmade, with creases on the vacant pillow next to him, his naked body barely draped in a red blanket from his thighs on down. His cock, dark and long, partly nestled in bushy black pubic hair, dangled spent there between his legs. Beads of spilled jizz glistened and caught the lamplight.
&n
bsp; I saw a pair of stockings draped over the small lamp on his night table. “They look very navy blue in that light don’t they?” Bonnie asked me, whispering.
I jerked forward and gasped. Bonnie was behind me, in that stupid oversized T-shirt, giggling and whispering. I told her she’d scared me.
“He scared me,” she said. “You see that? That’s a pretty big mess.”
Speaking deliberately and loudly, I asked, “Exactly just what the fuck happened here?”
She was extraordinarily calm. She held my hand and squeezed it. She stared straight into my eyes and whispered, “Duh. What do you think happened here?”
Then she pulled a roll of paper towel from behind her back.
“Navy and I decided on a wager. That’s part of what happened,” she said. “We decided he and I would bond, and that he, of course would well, lose it, which obviously, he did, and that and you, having lost the bet, would come up here and clean up.”
She pointed over my shoulder at the stockings on the lamp. “As you can see objectively in that lamplight, those babies are navy blue. You know you lost. Pay up.”
I was so ambushed by this bitchy bluntness, by her complete lack of contrition for having done God knows what for God knows how long with this waiter prick, this stranger here laying naked in his own bed before my own eyes, that I said absolutely nothing.
He was waking, groggy and I almost ran from the doorway. He pressed his hands into the mattress and shifted himself up. When he saw me there he waved, gently, the way one waves to a favorite nephew or to a shy poodle.
“She told you the wager I guess?” he asked. His voice was deep and groggy.
“I did,” she said.
He sat up and reached over and drank from a glass of Scotch on his night table and his cock shifted, leaking a silvery thread. It swelled and filled but wasn’t rock hard, which somehow comforted me and assuaged my embarrassment.
As I stepped into the room, I saw a pool of come had caked the dark hairs of his left thigh. Beads of dried come dotted his belly hair too.
I thought if I got close enough I could kill him. Yet seeing the aftermath of their wild antics, and being thrust into this raw and weird intimacy, I felt a certain humiliated respect for the guy. He’d given us a lift. He’d charmed Bonnie. They’d enjoyed each other’s company. I felt so dizzy that I pressed a hand into the nearby dresser for balance. Standing behind me, Bonnie kissed the back of my neck. “A bet is a bet,” she said. “Do the right thing.” Her logic was so direct, so confident, that I accepted the roll of paper towel as she handed it over my shoulder.
Then I thought about justice, and fair play. And how black isn’t navy blue, at all, really. And that those stockings discarded on the lampshade, those stockings I’d shopped for and bought of her using my kindergarten French were now, in fact, navy blue stockings, not black.
I unrolled a few sheets of paper and stepped closer to the bed.
The waiter grinned like a wiseass. Navy. He sat up even further, gingerly, so as not to upset the spill on his lap and legs, gazing at me with a sleepy admiration.
I could tell from his fake shy smile that he knew that I was coming toward him to pay off the bet: to wipe clean the sticky mess on his thighs and on his lap, a mess that, in my own way, I knew I was responsible for making.
Such a Special Couple
Kristina Lloyd
Joining us in bed last night was the ghost of his ex-girlfriend. He can’t see her but I can.
I see her everywhere. She’s all over his apartment, usually in bits, which is how I prefer her. She’s sweat and bloodstains on the mattress, skin cells in the dust, and hairs down the sofa. I look in a mirror and she’s standing behind me, six years of images checking her reflection.
Unfortunately, she’s also with us when we fuck. Sean pounds away, clutching my hair and whispering, “Take it, slut.” I whimper, begging him to stop, and she’s whimpering, too. I can hear her in my head – Ah, ah, no, please!
I wonder if she took it as well as I do, and I want to ask,
Who’s best at begging, me or her?
In his apartment is a room I’m not supposed to enter. It’s not exactly locked (well, you have to check, don’t you?) but is half-barricaded by a low bookshelf. Privately, I call it his Bluebeard room. And to be honest, if his ex-girlfriend were in there, I wouldn’t mind as long as she were dead.
But she’s not. It’s just her stuff. She’s lodging with a friend elsewhere in the city. One day, she’s going to rent a place of her own, ideally south-facing and overlooking the river. Then she’ll collect the rest of her belongings. I’m starting to think someone may need to move the river for her.
Sean must trust me because he gave me some keys recently, asking me to pop in and feed the cat while he was away. I thought it was sweet of him but, well, a bit stupid, really.
Pop in. Sure I’ll pop in. It’ll only take ten minutes.
Ever have those moral dilemmas when you can’t decide? Where there is no gut feeling, no deep true voice you know you’ll ultimately obey?
No, me neither. I knew I would go into that room to see what she was about.
He hardly mentions her. There’s no evidence of her in his life. For several weeks, he couldn’t even say her name. “My ex,” he would say when the situation required it. Eventually, I said, “So does she have a name, this ex of yours?”
I saw him flinch. “Jasmine,” he said briskly. “Jas for short.”
Jasmine. Pretty white flowers in hot, sultry lands.
Jazz. Music to get stoned to in small, seedy bars.
Jasmine. Jas for short. Why do they always have such fucking stupid names?
He was away on a software training course (I saw the paperwork; he wasn’t making it up) so I had his place to myself for the evening. Hell, I had it for the night if I wanted. The bed smelled of us. First thing I did when I got in from work was bury my face in the sheets. No, I tell a lie. That was the second thing. First thing was tiptoe through the usual rooms and stand in their weird emptiness, nervous of the space.
In the evening sunlight, everything I knew was remote and unfamiliar. Sean’s apartment is a junk shop. There’s a headboard behind the sofa, old shoes in a crate, a stereo on a trolley, planks of shelving he hasn’t assembled, that kind of thing. The place seemed frozen, more like a museum’s recreation of Sean’s home than Sean’s home itself.
I felt like a trespasser. He was very absent, and the place was still and silent apart from the cat at my ankles, mewing for food.
The bed was rumpled as it had been when I’d left that morning. He lives and sleeps in the one room, you see. The Bluebeard room used to be their bedroom. You can understand him not wanting to make love to me in there.
Ignoring the cat, I sprawled on the bed, scrunching grubby sheets to my face, inhaling Sean, myself, and the gorgeous smell of fuck. All day at work I’d had him on my body, felt the tenderness of a spanked ass, the soreness inside me, heard his whispers in my ear.
“You dirty whore,” he likes to say along with “Suck it, bitch” and “I’ll fuck you till it hurts.” He’s got quite a repertoire. It makes me hot and ashamed. The previous night he’d lubed my ass. I’d clutched the pillows, groaning as he’d filled me in slow, hard inches. I am so far gone when I’m impaled. I belong only to whoever’s doing me – not because I owe him but because I don’t belong to myself. I am a babbling wreck. I am lost. Someone’s got to stay in charge of me, haven’t they?
I fed the cat, opened the Bluebeard door, and edged around the bookcase. Supposing his course got canceled? A bomb alert at lunch-time and now he was strolling up the road? No, he’d have phoned, wouldn’t he?
He was decorating. Or he’d started at some point. He’d told me that once but I’d thought it was a lie. I felt bad for having doubted him. The walls were as white as paper and the floor was covered in wrinkled, paint-spattered sheets. In the center, and similarly draped, was a large hump of possessions, an altar to Jasmine, Jas for
short. In one corner stood a ladder, a pot of paint and various decorating paraphernalia. I stood for a while, breathing steadily. It was all okay. It felt anonymous and clean. He was erasing her with white paint.
Yes, all okay except for one thing, a glass crystal pendant hanging from the ceiling. Its clear facets glittered, and refracted sunlight cast a small soft rainbow on the opposite wall.
Funny, I didn’t know Sean had New Age tendencies. What next? Chanting? I pictured them lying in bed on lazy mornings, warm-skinned and having poetic thoughts about light.
She’d left. Her stuff was packed away. They were over. But he couldn’t remove the last vestige of their tender times, her pretty little crystal and how it lit up a room.
I found their porn in about ten minutes. I’m embarrassed about that. I think it was fairly slow of me. Under the drapes of her altar was a sideboard and small cabinet, spaces stuffed with Jasmine. Presumably, she had with her what she needed so this was what mattered. I opened a plastic black sack. It was full of crumpled clothes, smelling of perfume. I breathed her in much as Sean had done for years, remembering the first night I’d stayed with him.
It wasn’t planned. We’d bumped into each other in a bar, friend of a friend. He took me back to his place and fucked me silly. It was so hot, a nice, slow session moving from skin, kissing, sucking, and fucking into the scary arena of him nudging at my limits. And my limits kept splintering, melting, and re-forming. That night, I found a new space for myself, one where it was cool for me to have my head rammed against a pillow, a fist in my hair, lips brushing against my ear, whispering, “You like this, don’t you? Filthy little bitch.”
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