Beyond the Pale Motel

by Francesca Lia Block

  When it was over, he threw himself aside and lay sprawled out across the bed diagonally. His limbs were so long and shadows darkened the indentations of muscles. There was a lotus-flower tattoo above his heart that I hadn’t seen before.

  After some time he asked for a washcloth and went into the bathroom. I heard him washing for a long time, rinsing me meticulously off of him. I put my fingers between my legs and sniffed; I smelled good, sweet and musky, so I didn’t think that was the problem. Just a fastidious man, like a cat. He came back in.

  There was a loud sound outside and I sat up.

  Jarell frowned at the open windows. “Mind if I close these? With that piece of shit killing all those women out there…”

  Mandy Merrill. Adrienne Banks. Michelle Babcock. Their faces floated up in my mind like candles and then winked out.

  “The last one, Michelle, she was my neighbor.” Saying it out loud made it worse.

  “That’s fucked-up.”

  After he closed the windows and came to lie beside me, I moved my body until it fit into the curve of his arm.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  I nodded and swallowed. I didn’t want him to see me cry. When I lay my hand lightly on the flat playing field of his abdomen, he took my fingers and moved them to his groin. The hair was sparse and curly and his cock was hard.

  I danced my fingertips up the shaft. “You’re amazing,” I said.

  “My ex-wife didn’t think so.”

  I waited for him to explain.

  “She wanted what she called the finer things. The house, the car. It didn’t work out that way. I love to work with kids, but it doesn’t exactly pay the big bucks.”

  So here was the chink in the wall of this confident man. And it made me like him even more, much more.

  I was already wet and swollen with more wanting. We fucked again, almost as long as the first.

  “You just keep on taking more and more of me. Tell me how much you want this long, hard dick inside your dripping pussy.”

  “Please,” I gasped. “I want it so, so bad.”

  This time I came more softly, in lapping, lulling waves that washed away the remaining tension in my pelvis. He fell asleep on top of the sheets beside me, on his back, penis reclining against his thighs. So unself-conscious; I could never sleep like that, even alone, but especially not in a stranger’s bed. And as relaxed as I was from coming, and even with the security of having Jarell lying beside me, I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching us from the dark outside the window.

  * * *

  He was inside me once more, at dawn, hard as the night before, softly whispering the word goddess into my ear.

  But I was no goddess. And something was deeply wrong. With the world. With me.

  I knew I should get my ass to a fucking meeting. At least pick up my mala, meditate, and say a sobriety prayer. But the best I could manage was to answer my phone when Shana called me back on my way to work. By then she’d heard about Michelle Babcock of course and insisted that we all go to a meeting together that night. I told her that I’d thought about smoking weed with Jarell.

  “I might have to fire your ass,” she said. “You’re going to be sharing tonight, just so you know.”

  * * *

  As usually happened in meetings, my heartbeat sped up and it was hard to breathe. I remembered why I didn’t like to go that much, hated to share.

  “I’m Catt, and I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Hey, Catt,” the room said back. The church basement smelled musty and the fluorescent lights made my head hurt, made my eyelids heavy. My butt ached on the metal folding chair. Shana was on one side of me with her long, curly, black hair and white designer, skinny jeans, and Bree was on the other.

  “I have eleven years and I want to go back out.” I fingered the sobriety pendant on my key chain. “All I want sometimes is a drink. Especially after what happened to that woman. Michelle. She was my neighbor but I never even talked to her. I’m a fucking mess. Thank God I have my friends.”

  Bree squeezed my hand and I winced a smile at her. Shana nodded, face somber.

  “Thanks for letting me share,” I said.

  Across the room a guy was watching me. Was he? He didn’t look away when I glanced over. Typical forty-something hipster in a fedora and sideburns. Werewolf. But he was handsome—square-jawed, strong face, deep-set eyes under thickly bristling eyebrows. I thought I remembered his name. Dave? No, Dean. He had written a cult horror novel and ran a poetry night at the cafés. The writing was violent, poetic, like Chuck Palahniuk and Sylvia Plath’s love child. I thought maybe Dash had mentioned him before.

  But men in the program were off-limits. I’d already broken that rule once with Dash and proven its validity. Besides, I had Jarell. Did I? Maybe I’d see him again, but I wasn’t sure.

  * * *

  During the rest of the week I worked out harder than usual, drank a lot of vegetable juice, had Bree cut and color my hair and got a bikini wax from Kendra at the salon, because in our world at least, goddesses and would-be goddesses did not have body hair.

  I lay in happy-baby yoga pose, on my back, legs bent, feet in hands, on the table, and Kendra ripped the hair out of the pores, leaving me writhing. She stroked the tiny remaining patch for just a split second as if to calm me, remind me that this was a pleasure spot. All I felt was searing heat, but there was a gentle tingling where she’d touched me. Kendra’s hair was back in a sleek bun. I could never pull off that look, but it enhanced the fine, strong features of her face and the silk of her skin. I envied that skin and imagined it against Jarell’s, which was about one shade darker. She had a slim, strong frame with slender, muscular arms. Across her large breasts her tight T-shirt said TAKE IT ALL OFF.

  Kendra was one of those people who radiated happiness with a vengeance. She took acting classes and dance classes, ran marathons, hiked in the mountains, went camping, read all the bestsellers, saw all the latest movies, and cooked gourmet dinners. She had told me once that happiness was the entire reason to be alive, and she considered the pursuit of it her ongoing project.

  “Your skin is so sensitive,” she said. “You’ll need lots of cortisone and aloe and some antibacterial lotion until it calms down.”

  “Okay,” I gasped, trying not to scream. Was she done yet? She told me to put the soles of my feet together and pull the skin on my belly taut. Oh, God, not the lips. “I don’t think I really want a full Brazilian,” I said.

  “Too late. Sorry.”

  * * *

  You free tonight? Jarell texted me as if he had a sixth sense for waxed V’s. It was the first time I’d heard from him except for a brief thank-you text after he’d left that morning and the chaste hug he’d given me when I dropped Skylar off at practice. (I’d seen him hug a few other moms this way, too.) I texted right back, refusing to play Bree’s hard-to-get game.

  I just got super-waxed. Sore.

  I can make it better.

  * * *

  I kissed him at the door and it turned deep fast, and he pulled away and said, “You’re ready to go. I like that about you, Kitty Cat. No games.”

  I worried again that this was a bad thing—that I was too easy, that I should have waited. But it was too late, and besides, I wanted him. He was right; I was ready to go.

  As soon as we were in the bedroom, he had a hit of weed, then pulled off my T-shirt, unhooked my red lace bra, threw it aside, and stared at my naked breasts. They felt full and achy, needing to be touched. I pressed my forearms against the flesh to ease the growing pressure. His erection was tenting his shorts. He pulled off his clothes, still staring at me. “Take off your pants,” he said. “Take off your panties. I want to see this sore pussy.”

  Instantly even wetter, I ripped open the button fly of my cutoffs with one hand and stepped out of them; then before I could slide off my underpants, he grabbed me and pulled the panties off. He laid me down on the bed and gently spread open my legs with his knee.
I wanted to hump that big knee, have him press it against my pelvis where the tension was building so fast it felt explosive.

  I handed him a bottle of aloe by the bed. “She told me to use this.”

  Jarell massaged the cool gel into my skin, his fingers lightly grazing my clit as if by accident. I thought briefly of Kendra’s fingers there.

  “Is that better, baby?”

  Baby? Goddess? I reached up, put one hand on his neck and brought his lips to mine. His tongue licked my mouth the way he kissed me between my legs, firm and slow, steady. He ripped open the condom packet and rolled one on, flipped me over so he was on his back, I was on top. My eyes opened wide.

  He was staring at me, smiling. “Went right in,” he said. “How’s your sore pussy? Okay?”

  “Now it is,” I said, clenching around him. Maybe it was from all the blood down there, the contrast to the pain, or maybe it was the “baby,” but I came harder than before, clinging onto his neck until he shot into me. “Fuck fuck fuck.”

  Before he left, he asked me if I was going to be the one taking Skylar to the game on Sunday.

  Baby. Goddess.

  I realized I was thinking like a teenager, basing all my self-worth on the offhand comments of a man I didn’t even know. Arrested development of the addict. But I couldn’t seem to stop.

  “Yes,” I told him.

  * * *

  I sat on the bleachers watching Skylar and the kids play baseball, Jarell standing on the field throwing hand signals, all those little faces turned to him with complete trust. He looked so tall next to them. I couldn’t see his eyes under his baseball hat.

  In the hills above the park something was prowling. “Look,” the parents said. A mountain lion was walking along the ridge, watching us. The sun was setting, and the sky was streaked with pink and orange. The air smelled fiery, mixed with the grease smells of the hot dog stand. I wanted everyone to get out of there. Once I’d read you were supposed to make yourself really big if you encountered one of these cats head-on, so the mountain lion wouldn’t think you were a small animal. The Little League team looked like puppies from where I sat.

  Jarell came over to the fence. “It’ll be okay,” he said. “Someone just called animal control.”

  The parents were laughing nervously; the kids were pointing at the creature, distracted from the game. Jarell clapped his hands and they snapped to attention.

  His team won by one run and the puppy boys jumped all over their coach.

  I felt shy but I made myself go over to him later. I couldn’t see his face, shadowed by his hat, but he smiled at me, conveying secrets with his teeth. His body blocked the setting sun, dark shoulders against the sky. Someone had come for the mountain lion. I smelled smoke.

  Jarell’s son, Darius, came over, pulling on his father’s T-shirt. “Daddy, I want fries and Gatorade.”

  “Water and pretzels.”

  “Hi, Darius,” I said. “Great game, huh?” The little boy frowned at me and asked for fries again.

  I felt a tugging in my chest. What would a child of mine and Jarell’s look like? Chocolate-milk skin, green eyes, soft, loose curls. My belly tightened along with my chest muscles.

  “Just a minute. I’m talking to my friend Catt,” Jarell said to his kid, firm but gentle, which is how he touched me in bed. I remembered him sliding in with one movement the other night.

  But then he hugged me lightly, as if I were a small child, something delicate and precious, although his eyes on me were like big, plundering hands. “Thanks for coming,” he said, and then, more softly, “Do I get to see you soon? Where we’re the only wild animals.”

  * * *

  The last time Jarell and I were together, he lifted me onto his hips and stalked over to the mirror as if I hardly weighed a hundred pounds and watched our reflection as he bounced me up and down on him.

  “Look,” he said. I was afraid to see my big, white ass. “Look,” he said again.

  “I’m scared.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s too much.” I realized I wasn’t only scared of my big ass; I was scared of having this image in my mind. Because I would want to hold on to it then, I would want it to happen again and again. I would see it in the dark every time I closed my eyes and I would want it to return in the bouncing, pounding flesh. But at least it might obliterate the faces of Mandy Merrill and Adrienne Banks.

  * * *

  I went on Jarell’s Facebook page after he left and saw that he was tagged in a picture with his arm around a young woman at a ball game. Blond braids and candy-blue eyes, fake breasts, henna tattoos on her hands. This was how a goddess looked in 2013. What did I expect?

  Doubt has cold fingers and they can rip you open and creep right under your skin.

  Doubt, that bitch, was what got me to tell Bree about Jarell at work the next day. I’d kept my secret from her this long because I knew what she was going to say.

  I was right. Bree shook her head at me in the mirror as she fixed her lipstick. At least she didn’t chastise me for screwing her son’s coach. She knew that I’d never let my feelings for Jarell affect Skylar in any way. “You mean he’s never even taken you out?”

  “We stayed in. It’s what I wanted.” Not sounding defensive at all, of course.

  “But he didn’t take you out afterwards? He hasn’t even bought you a coffee?”

  I wanted to suggest that maybe he had to pay his ex-wife a lot of alimony, but I stopped myself. I was sounding pathetic. I had no idea what the deal was with Darius’s mother. Jarell and she could even still be together, for all I knew, in spite of what Facebook said.

  “I hate to be harsh, but it’s just a booty-call situation, Catt.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

  “I mean, if that’s what you want, it’s fine. God knows I’ve gone for those. Especially if he’s hot enough.”

  “He is.”

  “But you’re in a vulnerable position with everything that’s happened.” I was grateful to her for not saying Dash’s name out loud. Or bringing up Michelle Babcock. “Well, if he calls you within the week and asks you to dinner, I think it’s awesome, but if not, I think you should break it off.”

  And that was what I did. He didn’t call but he texted at seven forty-five the next Saturday night asking if he could come over. Booty call, I thought. I didn’t reply. That night I dreamed that while I gave him head, on my hands and knees on the mattress, he slid his finger into my ass, pulling me back and pushing me forward like a sucking machine.

  When Bree sent me a link to FU Cupid, I signed up.

  * * *

  I took Skylar to his game; I had made a pact with myself that my dalliance would never interfere with his happiness. Unfortunately, it didn’t exactly work that way.

  Maybe Skylar picked up the tension from me or maybe he was just having a bad day, but after he struck out the second time he hung his head and I knew he was crying as he ran to the dugout. In the next inning Jarell put him on third and he tagged a kid on the opposing team who was declared safe. It was hard to tell if the kid had really made it or not. Skylar was angry; I saw that clearly, though.

  On his third at bat I held my breath, sick to my stomach, praying for him to at least make contact. I hadn’t been praying enough lately, I realized. Might as well use one on my favorite person on the planet.

  But he struck out again, and this time when he ran off, he was crying. I wanted so badly to go to him in the dugout, but I knew it was off-limits. Until Jarell signaled for me to come back there. I ran over. Jarell had taken Skylar out of the game, and they were standing by a fence a little way off. Skylar was staring at his cleats, face red, chest heaving as he tried to stifle sobs. His dusty black canvas bat bag lay in the dirt like a dead dog.

  “Come here, Skylar,” Jarell said.

  Sky kept his eyes on the ground and wouldn’t budge.

  “Over here. Right now. Are you afraid I’m gonna bite you?”

  Sky shuddered. T
ears sprang to my own eyes and I put my hand out to touch his shoulder, but Jarell waved at me to keep away. I obeyed him as diligently as I did in bed. It was like a dream where you can’t move. What was wrong with me?

  “Come on.” There was a hard edge in Jarell’s voice now. No wonder I obeyed this man; that edge was always there, I realized, just below the surface. Still, I was the adult. I should say something.

  But Skylar stepped forward.

  “I can’t have anyone crying like that on my team, young man.”

  Skylar still wouldn’t look up.

  “Do you hear me? I can’t have a crybaby on my team.”

  This was too much. Sky’s gaze shot up. In the liberal, loving world of his life grown-ups didn’t call kids names.

  “Don’t call him that,” I said.

  “Please stay out of this, Mom. Godmom. Whatever.”

  “Come on, Sky.” I took his hand and handed him his bat bag.

  “Crying does not have any purpose,” Jarell said. “It just shows your weakness to your enemy. And if you want to model tears and make, excuse me but, a lily-white mama’s boy out of him, fine, it’s your choice. But you both have some learning to do.”

  I certainly did. Don’t sleep with the love-of-your-life godson’s baseball coach. Especially if he proves to be a Manticore. Cry it out. Cry as much as you fucking want.

  #6

  I went on FU Cupid and found Carlton, a tall Canadian artist. Gave him four hearts. He hearted me back. We chatted and he e-mailed me a link to his website—large portraits that resembled religious medieval icons, made with tinted beeswax. Encaustic, it was called. He said they smelled like honey. That was enough for me to give him my number.