Mondo Crimson

by Andrew Post

  “I mean, I took a shit somewhere in there too, but I didn’t think you’d want an itemized rundown of how I spent my entire day off. But if we must, from 2:48 p.m. to 2:57 p.m. sharp, I was taking a dump. Then, from 2:57 p.m. to—”

  “So going down to the bodega and looking for something to watch on TV kept you so preoccupied that you didn’t notice I was three hours late getting home from work?”

  “Hey. I texted you, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, an hour ago. Which was still two hours after I was supposed to be home.” Mel didn’t know what character she was playing but she hated her.

  “I told you, I figured you were out with Beth. I didn’t want to be smothery. You said there was no reason for me to get jealous over you being friends with her so I just figured that’s what you were doing and figured I’d give you your space.”

  “Sure, but for four hours?”

  “I don’t know. I figured if I started texting you, you’d get on me again about how we’re not married and all that. You know, you can be kind of a tightrope sometimes.”

  I’m sure that’s true.

  Mel didn’t know why she’d never told Dani about Felix. Felix didn’t deserve the protection. But, as all lies will start small, one time early on Dani caught her off-guard asking what she was doing one weekend and she blurted something about going to go see her uncle, when really she was going up to Edgewater to help one of Felix’s friends with a faulty alternator. She never corrected herself, and ever since she continued stacking lie on top of lie. Maybe she was embarrassed. Dani didn’t know about what had brought Mel out to Illinois, nothing had ever been mentioned about the clusterfuck the auto lot dream had transformed into. Nor had Mel divulged how her debt had been picked up by some gangster who looked like an out-of-work lit professor. Sometimes she wondered what percentage of her, of the Mel she’d led Dani to think she knew, was actually real. Seventy-five per cent felt too generous. Fifty per cent? Forty-five per cent? Was Dani dating, without her knowledge, someone who was more bullshit than person?

  Dani took a long time before saying, “Wait, so are you accusing me of something here or…?”

  “I don’t know. Am I? Should I be?”

  “No. Because I’m not up to something that’d warrant an accusation. And how the hell did we even get here?”

  Mel gave her more silence, agony for them both undoubtedly.

  “How about this?” Dani said. “We’ll put whatever the hell this is on pause, I’ll come out there, and after they’re done getting a cast on you, we can talk this out, you know, not over the goddamn phone?”

  It had been a long, awful day. Mel didn’t want to deal with this, juggle lies and feel shitty about shoving her girlfriend’s emotions every which way. And because of Felix’s assignment to send Mel on a bus to Minneapolis in three weeks, she would have to cultivate yet another lie for Dani as to why she was going out of state. She simply didn’t have it in her, not tonight, to do that. So, right now, she was willing to take this one little chunk out of their relationship, which she would do her best to patch up in the morning, if it meant she could have one night off. Just one night.

  Shaking her head at herself, she made herself say into the phone, “I think you should stay at your place tonight.”

  “Seriously? All right, if you insist we drag all this bullshit out now, I feel I have the right to say that I—”

  “Please don’t be there when I get home.”

  “Listen, I know you’ve got to be in a lot of pain and that’s what’s probably making all this seem….” The smart girl abandoned that tack. “I was about to come get you. I offered to go out there, be with you.”

  “How kind.”

  “Don’t do that shit. You know what I mean. If I was up to something, if I didn’t care about you, why would I offer to do that?”

  “I don’t know. Because it’d help make it convincing that you don’t have a side piece?”

  “Mel, I don’t have a….” Dani groaned. “I am not cheating on you. I wouldn’t do that. We’ve always been totally up front with each other, about everything.”

  Mel caught that one in the chest like a steel bolt.

  “If I wanted to be with someone else,” Dani was saying, sounding like she might start crying now, “I’d be with somebody else. I don’t do games. I put up with enough of that shit with my ex and I wouldn’t do that to you.”

  “Fuck’s sake. Can we have just one argument where you don’t compare me to your goddamn ex? I’m not her.”

  “I know you’re not her. I know. That isn’t the point I was trying to—”

  “Do you know? Because you sure seem to think me and her are an awful lot alike – when, having met the bitch, I can say with authority we’re not.”

  “Fine, all right. But I just want to make it clear that that wasn’t what I was getting at.”

  “Then what were you trying to get at?”

  “Mel, the reason I haven’t called it quits on us is because I don’t want to call it quits on us. I want to be with you, only you. I don’t know what else you want me to say here. There is nobody else.”

  Mel said nothing and it killed her to do it, hurting almost much as her broken hand.

  “All right,” Dani said at last. “I’m going to my place. I’m leaving right now. But will you text me when you get here, just to let me know you made it all right?”

  “We’ll see.” Mel ended the call and buried her face in her hands – only wondering for a split second why her right palm felt so hot before the pain receptors in her broken hand caught up to the impact. Her curse echoed across the lobby. Even the security guard posted by the door glanced up from his newspaper.

  Mel looked over at the little boy with the T-shirt bandage on his head. He was laughing again and his mother, like before, was not happy about it. Another dirty look. Another sorry, ma’am. Another mouthed my bad. The little boy tried to fight down his smile.

  “Melanie Williams?” a nurse said, her voice suggesting weeks of no sleep.

  Mel started to stand. “But they were here before me.” She pointed, as much as she could with her swollen hand, at the boy with the T-shirt-bandaged head and his mother.

  The nurse only briefly glanced their way. “You have insurance,” she told Mel. “So you’re next. Come on back.”

  Mel reluctantly followed. When she looked back at the little boy, his eyes were closed and he was leaning into his mother, who had one last dirty look to give her.

  Chapter Four

  After goodnight kisses had been given out one, two, three, and the girls were in bed, Brenda and Steve went to their own room, locked the door, and took each other’s clothes off.

  She let her husband get a good, long look as she turned away to bend at the waist, taking her time pulling open the bottom drawer of their dresser. She lifted out the complication of leather straps and stepped into the harness and pulled it to rest in the notch of her hip bones and buckled the sides, pulling everything tight, watching him in the mirror behind her sitting on the bed, his eyes running up and down her bare back. He tugged on himself with a lazy motion of his right hand. His cock remained flaccid; he was only stretching the veiny length of it. The pain meds, in addition to making him unable to drink or operate any machinery heavier than a lawn mower, had also stolen easy erections from him. They’d found workarounds together, experimenting and referencing certain self-help sites, soon discovering methods for piercing the nerve damage and fog of pain meds and nudging things awake, so to speak.

  She turned and put her hands on her bare hips and struck a pose, letting him see the curve of the rubber unit strapped to jut from her mons veneris, impossibly pink, injection-molded to always be standing at full attention. It’d taken Steve some time to warm up to the idea, perhaps taking its presence in the bedroom as some sort of threat, but she had made sure to order one that wasn’t any
longer than his own – and now, whenever she brought it out, he smiled and climbed onto the bed to start getting himself ready.

  It took some doing. Even if she was getting cold standing there bare-assed and feeling kind of silly wearing this fake dick attached to her by what was essentially a leather jockstrap, Brenda did not rush him. She gave him the time to carefully get himself into position – any sudden shirking or twisting could mean a dislodged pin, blinding pain, and a trip to the hospital for emergency surgery. He was on all fours, struggling to set his knees as far apart as he could comfortably get them. She saw his face twisting sharply, releasing his held breath in a pained hiss.

  “You okay?” she whispered, touching him on his shoulder – and accidentally poking him in the ribs with her silicone appendage.

  He didn’t seem to notice. He nodded, looking at her via the mirror and not her standing next to the bed. His neck wouldn’t allow his head to turn that far. “I’m good.”

  He wasn’t, she could tell, but to ask him if he was sure would only snuff the work they’d put already in tonight – the little looks they’d exchanged at Applebee’s, the quick and furtive under-the-table touches and tickles they’d given each other while the girls went out into the mall to burn off dinner on the indoor playground. Her husband was delicate and so was the situation, but Brenda would be patient. She climbed onto the bed and moved across the pillowtop mattress on her knees to sidle up behind him, feeling the heat radiating from the backs of his legs and big pale ass, every move calculated to avoid jostling him too much. She watched him over his scarred back as he, in turn, watched her in the mirror squirting the gel into her palm, work it between her hands to warm it, and prepare the extension attached to herself, then prepare her husband.

  “Ready?”

  He nodded and she guided the appliance, entering him slowly with an easy and incremental push of her hips.

  She liked how his breathing changed, tightened.

  He tensed, shuddered, and she watched the gooseflesh spread across his upper back in a wave. Clamping one hand around his generous hip, she stroked the raised, shiny line going up his back with her other.

  The spinal surgery scar was flanked on either side by the series of round scars dotting in neat parallel lines where the pins had gone in – the tiny button scars looked like once upon a time he had to be strung like a corset to stay together.

  She slowly withdrew until only the tip was still inside, hesitated to build anticipation, and then started pushing in again, vanishing one bright pink inch then another, another. She kissed his back, traced the shape of his scars with her tongue, and pecked every freckle he’d earned over that summer as a lifeguard before they’d met.

  Their eyes met in the mirror. His face was a little red around the cheeks from his current posture, and he gave another small nod, a cue that he was ready to begin an attempt at the next phase. She reached down and around, into the humid space between his legs, her fingers grazing the warm softness of his belly. She took him in her hand, finding that just about as soft there, and squeezed and released in time with the quickening push and pull of her hips, feeling his pulse start to speed as he grew warmer and harder with each thump of his heart, the prostate massage working quicker than usual to get to that part of him buried under all that chemical numbness. Not that she didn’t believe him when he’d said it, but his body underlined how much he’d missed her this time.

  She slipped a hand down between them, hooked two fingers under the apparatus, and sunk them inside herself to the second knuckle. She reached forward to offer him the glistening sample of herself. Her fingertips went numb from the powerful, eager draw of his mouth.

  She withdrew and together they worked to undo the strap-on’s buckles – he attacking the left side, she the right, in this breathless hurry to stay ahead of his hard-won erection, which she worked with her free hand, multitasking. They kissed and she tasted herself on his lips, slightly metallic and salty. When the buckles jingled free, she dropped onto her back and lifted her legs and watched him pull the leather straps up and away, throwing it aside. He dropped onto her and plunged inside her and the sudden, hot weight of his body pressing hers only now let her know she was truly and fully home.

  She lay still, did not wrap her legs around him like she used to, and let him do the work in measured thrusts, lingering at full depth inside her core. She cradled his cheek in her hand and felt the sweat collecting behind his ear.

  “This okay?” she whispered.

  “Yeah. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  She guided his hands to her neck and pushed his fingers around tight, but as soon as she released him his grip loosened. She tried again and again he let go. She looked up at him and saw his uncertainty. It’d been some time since they had done this.

  “Zebra,” she said.

  “Zebra,” he agreed.

  That’d be the word, their usual word. Nothing else would serve as a brake pedal, only that.

  She didn’t need to put his hands back again. He held her and began to squeeze and she crushed her head back into the pillows, feigning that she wanted him to let go but she had not said zebra, so he did not – but he also wasn’t going any tighter either.

  “Keep going. You won’t break me. Tighter.”

  “Zebra,” he said.

  She opened her eyes. “I’ll say it if I need to. Tighter.”

  He just looked down at her under him, as if in pain of his own or sympathetic to the pain he might be causing her. She cracked him across the face with an open hand, his five o’clock shadow burning her palm. The mark she’d given him immediately reddened. The outline of her hand livid on his cheek. It’d been a risk. One wrong tweak of Steve’s neck and he might not be able to feel anything below the collarbones ever again. “We got you yours so give me mine,” she said. “Tighter.”

  His lips pursed and he leaned his upper body over her, crushing her down into the bed. She felt like she was being buried alive, seeing the pillow rising up and around her head as he pressed himself harder over her, into her. She waited to see the anger flare inside him, perhaps a frustration he had for her or something that’d happened in his life he had never resolved, maybe something he’d never even shared with her the shame was still so painful – but calling on it now, stoking it, dragging it into the moment.

  “Do it, you useless piece of shit. Or are you too much of a cripple to satisfy me?” she said and struck him again to help this along and she saw it appear in his face, and knowing he’d now do as she asked, she closed her eyes again and felt his hands begin to shake – not from hesitation or any fear of hurting her, but the constant torque he was obliging to apply to his wife’s neck making the muscles in his arms shiver, vibrating her where she lay, violent enough that for a moment she thought about saying zebra, fearing he’d give her a concussion. But she abstained, wanting this, needing it.

  The sound in the room took on a tinny quality, like an old TV stuck between channels. Her cheeks flushed, her tongue lost feeling, and she could feel her heart beating in her teeth. His thrusts began to speed up, and he released inside her, grunting and growling, his two-handed grip on her neck never failing. As she came too, swiftly behind it the sparkling in her closed eyes that’d only been at the corners swelled now and stole away everything, dropping her into a blissful darkness, balmy and silent and unreachable.

  She woke with a start, dizzy, ears ringing, coughing in the dark. Her throat was sore and a headache was ratcheting tight around her temples.

  For a moment she’d time-traveled upon seeing the red digits floating 2:11 a.m. in front of her face, believing she was still in a shitty Florida motel room and her entire welcome back – from the hot fudge sundaes with Steve and the girls to the movie they’d all watched together on the couch to the roll in the hay she and Steve had had afterward – had been little more than the wishful dreams of a lonely, homesick
woman.

  She waited for her eyes to adjust, seeing Steve sleeping beside her flat on his back – which, before the accident, he never did. He slept like the dead. Despite being a large man, he did not snore and he seldom moved, as if even while asleep he was afraid of knocking a pin loose. She drew the blankets away, finding Steve had dressed her in her silk pajamas.

  The room stank of water-based lubricant, her husband’s rectum, and Brenda’s own contributions. She swung her legs around and started to stand, her heel bumping against something hard and damp on the floor. She reached down into the dark and found the dildo in its tangled straps and set it on her nightstand, wiping her hand off on her pant leg. She felt mildly embarrassed now but couldn’t put her finger on why – perhaps because Steve had dressed her, which made her feel like a helpless child even though she knew he only did it because he didn’t want her getting cold. Maybe it was from that big honesty they’d shared tonight in bed after she’d spent three days in Florida trying to prevent anything about herself being known in any way. Regardless, she’d give the dildo a trip through the dishwasher – by itself – when the girls were at school tomorrow. Rolling her steps, she moved to the bedroom door, the chafing across her hips from the strap-on coming awake too.

  Moving down the hall, she checked on Rebecca asleep in her room and then Judy and Maureen in the room they shared, the nightlight throwing happy animal shapes across the wall in a comforting amber glow. Judy was always an animated sleeper and tonight was no different – feet on the pillow, half-cocooned by the comforter, one arm dangling off the side, her mop of raven hair in her face, tiny percolating snores. In the next bed, Maureen was still tucked in, just her head poking out from the even plane of her blankets, exactly as Brenda had left her. The odd couple, these two.

  During parent–teacher conferences last fall, Mrs. Weir brought out a folder and showed Brenda and Steve some of Maureen’s drawings that were, in Mrs. Weir’s professional opinion, cause for concern. As soon as she saw the pictures, Brenda thought they were some of her own she’d done as a child – the subject matter so similar, as well as the way Maureen drew people as just circles with stick-arms and stick-legs poking out of them and Xs for eyes. Everybody was dead. Like mother like daughter. Apple, tree. The distance too small to measure.