by Eva Sloan
The bellman had left the bags by the door, but two maids had come in and were unpacking Susan’s before Kevin even noticed they were there. He would’ve told them he’d take care of it but as they transferred Susan’s underwear, and other unmentionables that had been packed for much more erotic adventures, he decided it best if they finished.
Amazingly, Kevin counted back the hours and only two and a half of them stood between where they were and Susan’s aborted marriage ceremony. Two and a half hours and he was already ready to jump out of his skin. He couldn’t stand seeing her like this. If she’d get up and start throwing things, start screaming all the nasty curses she knew how to use perfectly, maybe he’d get through this.
“Yeah, that Mark, what a fucking prick!” he’d say. Maybe he’d help her plan some mindless revenge. But with her lying there, helpless on the bed, all he wanted to do was lie next to her, holding her in his arms, protecting her from all those things that could hurt her.
But how could he do that? It’s what he should do. It was what a real friend would do, ignore their feelings and do what was needed for the good of their friend. But if he held her in his arms for one instant, he was sure he’d never be able to let go, never be able to just be her friend again, and the memory of it would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Susan groaned. A small gasp escaped her lips as her ribs expanded and contracted with the efforts of her silent sobs. Kevin didn’t give any of his misgivings or worries a second thought, he crawled onto the bed and lay down facing her, pulling her to him and holding her against him as she cried softly, her face pressed against his chest, soaking his shirt in tears without end.
~*~
Kevin did not sleep. For hours he simply held Susan, silently comforting her as she finally cried herself to sleep. Strangely, the sound of her breathing, and how her trembling, stress stiff body softened in his arms, gave him some relief. But for almost two hours he was afraid to even move, lest he wake her.
When Kevin finally slipped away, he found room service menus and three heaping bags of clothes waiting for him in the living room of the suite. He knew he should be hungry, but he didn’t feel the slightest desire to eat.
The bags made him pause. What if the driver had picked out nothing but tropical printed shirts and polyester pants? Or worse, what if everything was two sizes too small and ripped directly off the brawny backs of the cast of Queer as Folk?
Either way Kevin would not sport anything so cheesy or oversexed.
Well, he might try them on to cheer up Susan, but he certainly wouldn’t leave the room wearing any of it.
But when he pulled the neatly folded clothing from the shopping bags he was pleasantly surprised. A mixture of light weight pants, shorts, t-shirts, some tank tops and three different pairs of shoes--sandals, cross trainers and a moderately dressy pair of loafers. More surprisingly the driver had bought Kevin underwear--boxer briefs, thank God--socks and two boxer-style swimming trunks.
Though these choices were conservative, Kevin got the sense the driver probably knew his body better than any of his former girlfriends had--and without the advantage of seeing him naked.
It gave him a small shiver of distress. A tension headache started to form right between his eyes. Some days he wished he had a neon sign over his head blinking Straight! Maybe then he’d quit getting grief. He stripped out of his long-sleeved oxford shirt and the suit pants had been broiling him most of the day, and pulled on a pair of the shorts and one of the t-shirts. He would leave opening the packages of underwear until morning.
Kevin flopped down on the overstuffed couch, planning on turning on the TV, but the moment he fell on those plush, ever-so-soft couch cushions, he passed right out.
~*~
The tropical sun radiated in through the enormous bay windows of the suite, not only warming Kevin to the point of discomfort, but slowly robbing him of the still shelter afforded by the dark. As he pushed himself up off the couch, he was surprised by how little his back and neck hurt. This was the most comfortable couch in the history of the world. Yet no sooner did he think that then he remembered who was in the other room, sleeping on the bed--alone.
Kevin bolted back toward the bedroom and into the darkened room where the drapes blessedly remained pulled shut. Susan lay there, tucked in as he had left her. He circled the bed and crouched down, trying to see if her eyes were open. They were, but she wasn’t exactly awake. She still looked catatonic, eyes blank, expression slack, her coloring that of someone in shock.
Wracked with guilt, Kevin wondered if Susan was in shock. What if she was teetering on the edge of a real nervous breakdown? What if she needed professional psychological care, or industrial grade pharmaceuticals?
Don’t freak out! he told himself.
Kevin tried quelling the glut of thoughts bouncing around in his head. He needed to be steady if he was going to get through this. Unfortunately, as the whirlwind of panicked notions subsided, Kevin realized he had to pee in the worst way. It would have been a welcome distraction except “the worst way” included the mother of all pee hard-ons.
No, this can’t be happening. Hot guilt flooded his veins, and he prayed to God that Susan hadn’t noticed him hopping through the room to the bathroom with the front of his shorts tented with a woody the size of…well, a tree.
All he’d wanted to do was let her go, to say goodbye so they both could move on. But instead he was stuck in this Fantasy Island, Oxiconton nightmare, trying to help his comatose, unrequited first love get over her asshole ex-fiancé. God had to be a woman, one who hated him with a perverse passion.
Maybe Liz was God? Kevin laughed at the thought.
Touching himself in that state felt so wrong. His best friend was in the next room, her life torn to shreds by her lying, cheating fiancé, and here was her horn-dog best friend in the bathroom trying to bend his incredibly inappropriate stiffy down enough so he could take a leak.
Guilty or not, Kevin couldn’t not sigh with great relief as he voided the contents of his near bursting bladder. And he couldn’t ignore how good it felt having his manhood engorged in his hand. But with admirable restraint, and another heavy load of guilt swelling on each shoulder like twin boulders growing in size until they crushed him, Kevin pulled up his shorts, tucking his flagging erection back where it belonged.
As he washed his hands with the sweet-smelling hotel soap, looking in the mirror at his sleep-mussed hair and unshaved mug, he thought of Susan, and her bladder. He bounded into the bedroom and stopped cold. Was he just going to carry her into the bathroom and set her down on the toilet? Sure he could pick her up, but one problem--he’d have to pull down her pants and panties. The thought was not only disturbingly geriatric, but perversely more prurient than Kevin could handle.
Seeing the hotel maids unpack Susan’s undies was one thing, but to have to touch them while they were still on her...
“Susan?” Kevin’s voice cracked under the weight of his frenzied paranoia. “Susan? Do you have to use the restroom?”
Her stare never wavered, her expression unchanging.
Kevin folded his arms over his heaving chest. He couldn’t do it, it was too much to ask, and too much to do, and he couldn’t stand feeling so useless. Squeezing his eyes shut until green clouds of light permeated the blank slate behind his eyelids, Kevin did the only thing he could think of doing. Keeping his eyes closed he said, “Go to the bathroom, Susan!” Affecting the best impersonation of his own father he’d ever achieved . Voice commanding yet placatingly smooth.
He didn’t look, just kept his eyes closed. And then he heard her stir, heard the sheets rustle as she pulled herself out of bed. He opened his eyes as she disappeared into the bedroom’s private lavoratory. Kevin blew out the stinging breath he’d been holding. “Thank God.”
Though Susan got up and used the restroom on command, Kevin was frustrated when she immediately returned to her fetal position on the bed. Worse, she refused to eat a bite of the food he ord
ered from room service and then had to throw away. She wouldn’t even drink a glass of water, so Kevin left it sitting on the nightstand by the bed, and silently prayed she would drink and eat something for him before she wasted away.
~*~
Liz answered on the third ring.
“We’ve got a problem,” Kevin said on the other end.
Liz stood in the middle of her gallery, staring at two of the famous artist’s paintings side by side. She knew they should be shown together. They had been painted back to back, they were in the same style and they even matched chromatically. The first painting, a real stunner, was gorgeous enough to take the breath from one of those rotund divas down at the soon-to-be replaced opera house. It was the second painting that had her stumped. It sucked. Even by contemporary standards, even with an artist’s God-given right to differentiate style and texture and all of that shit--this painting was killing her.
“Liz? Are you there?”
“You think you have problems?” she said, turning her head to the side just in case she’d hung the damn thing the wrong way and might see the brilliance of it from another angle. “I’ve got shit hanging on my walls.”
“She won’t eat or drink, and she’ll only go to the bathroom if I yell at her like I’m my father.”
Liz tilted her head, remembering the brief couple of times she’d met Kevin’s parents. “I liked your father, real sexy voice.” She almost lapsed into insulting him, maybe something about him finally growing a backbone or something like that, but she needed him clearheaded until she could steal away and take over the watch.
“Well, it creeps me the fuck out! I think maybe she needs professional help.”
Liz laughed bitterly. The Boy Scout finally saying the F-word--only the second time she’d heard it from him. “I’ve been under the care of ‘professional help’ since I was fifteen years old, does it seem to have helped me?”
Silence.
“Point taken.”
She shook her head. Sure, he can make wisecracks, she thought, but I have to be good.
“So she’s just lying in bed, staring at the wall?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. I remember her getting that way for about three hours after Nate Jordan dumped her sophomore year--”
“Nate Jordan?”
“That was a year before she met you. And she just curled up in a ball for three or four hours, and then she started crying. Ten minutes after the waterworks started, she snapped right out of it and we went for pizza at Pete’s.”
Kevin sighed on the other end of the connection. “She cried for a couple of hours last night, and she’s still catatonic.”
“Well, she and Nate had only dated for a week, and they never slept together. He came out the next semester and became the president of Lambda Lambda.”
“Oh.”
“So, since she was in love with and slept with shit-head for close to two years, I think it might take a little longer for her to snap out of it.”
“So I should just wait?”
“What, are you just dying to hit the beach or something? What else do you have that’s pressing?”
“Funny,” he said, his voice turning serious. “But what should I do if she does snap out of it?”
Liz gave up on trying to figure out what the second painting was. She turned to her assistant, Lance, as she covered the mouthpiece of her cellphone. “Hang the damn thing in the back by the bathroom. Maybe some bulimic supermodel will fall in love with it when she goes to barf up all the refreshments she’s inhaled.” Supermodels were known to hit parties hard for food, trot off to the ladies room and purge. After that, they usually got toasted on champagne...then they would throw that up too.
“Liz?” Kevin’s voice spoke into her ear.
“For Christ’s sake, Kevin, you’ve known her for seven goddamn years! You’re telling me you won’t have anything to say to her?” Liz breezed back to her office and started flipping through her Rolodex. “Use that melon-sized head for something and think. What does Susan like? What used to cheer her up back in college?”
“What used to cheer her up?” Kevin murmured. “In college?”
“There you go! I can practically hear the gears moving around in that mammoth skull of yours already. Now leave me alone, mommy’s got work to do!” Liz hung up on Kevin, her eyes honed on the business card she’d plucked from her Rolodex.
Denton Crane: Private Investigator.
Liz remembered that Denton had been crude and lecherous, hitting on her with a dogged perversity that only made her want to slap the hell out of him. Who better to find Mark than one of his own kind?
Chapter 3
STANDING IN THAT CROWDED vestibule again, Susan’s dress felt so heavy, but that goddamn cocktail napkin was heavier by far. How many times had she been there? This moment always seemed to take forever, as if she’d stood there for hours before her life had dissolved around her and evaporated.
Things finally moved forward to her crying in Liz’s arms, but only for a moment, before everything crashed around her, shattering like crystal on concrete. The scene shuffled, flipping swiftly through disjointed moments, some from childhood, like when she’d fallen out of the neighbor’s tree house and broken her leg.
The next moment she was standing in the library at Dartmouth, and Liz was chewing gum and checking her makeup, bitching about the B she’d gotten on her Art History paper. “I even blew the little bastard too!”
There was a flash of Kevin smiling at her for the first time. She could still remember how she had pitied him, and yet couldn’t bear to send him away, like a cute, though geeky, puppy.
She was dancing like a fool in her dorm room with Kevin--couldn’t remember the song, just how happy it made her.
And then there was Mark, handsome and sexy as all hell, his dark brown eyes like melted chocolate as he asked her out for the first time. She couldn’t remember how they had met that day, only that he both irritated and turned her on.
She flickered through the romantic things, through the sex, stopping and holding on for dear life to a panel of memory where she remembered how his body fit against hers, and how she always lost herself in his scent. This she grabbed hold of with all her strength, until it faded away in her desperate embrace.
She was back in that dress, in the vestibule, and that goddamn napkin was burning a hole in her hand again.
And that was when something outside the dream started to bleed through. The song. The song she couldn’t remember, the one she’d been dancing so happily with Kevin to. It was playing, the final chords of it.
Susan’s eyes shot open just as the last of it faded into nothingness.
The room was unfamiliar and dark, the shades drawn, the only light coming from the door at her back. The song started again--Sheryl Crow’s All I Wanna Do. When Susan moved, her body was stiff with entropy, her head cloudy, as was her vision. She stumbled as she stood, the room turning slowly around her. She grabbed the nightstand and closed her eyes, willing everything to stop moving.
When, blessedly, the room did stop turning, Susan moved toward the open door, toward the music. But the urge to pee hit her so hard she turned tail and bolted for the bathroom, groaning with anguished satisfaction as she voided the contents of her bladder for almost a full minute.
Standing back up, she groaned again at the stiffness in her legs and back. Susan caught sight of herself in the bathroom mirror and gasped. Hair was frizzed out and tangled on one side, the other side matted down almost perfectly flat. But the sallow flesh of her face, and the violently black circles under her eyes, those made her clamp her eyes shut hard, made her turn and walk fast for the bathroom door.
Sheryl Crow was still singing about car washes and bars and Billy. Adding to the music was an aroma that made Susan’s mouth water and her empty stomach growl in protest like a Bengal tiger. The scent was so familiar, yet she couldn’t quite place it. As she moved cautiously through the foreign hallway, out into the rat
her glaring light of day, she was struck by the gorgeous view--the white sand beach, the palm trees swaying in the breeze, the deep, clear blue waters making the sky pale in comparison.
“Oh shit,” Susan mumbled. “I’m in Cancun.” She wondered who was with her. Had the dream about the cocktail napkin been just that? Was she on her honeymoon?
A man walked out from the kitchen area of the suite with a pizza box in his hand. She didn’t recognize him at first. Not until he shot Susan with a million-watt smile.
“Kevin?”
His smile turned into a grimace, but he laughed good-naturedly.
The last time Susan had seen Kevin was in college. Skinny and nerdy, yet cute, in a younger brother kind of way. But the guy in front of Susan wasn’t only built like an underwear model, his boyish face had turned handsome. Had he grown a few inches too?
He seemed more like a man now.
But something else flooded her mind. The dream about the napkin hadn’t been just a dream. Mark wasn’t there. He had really stood her up at the altar. And Kevin...
“You’ve been taking care of me,” she said, not a question but a realization. “You’ve been with me the entire time.”
Susan thought she saw a hurt look flash in his eyes, but he closed them so fast that she couldn’t be sure.
“Where else would I be?” When he opened his eyes again they were happy, if not downright smart assed. He shook the pizza box just as Sheryl started singing again. “I’ve got your favorite. Pete’s Pizza.”
Susan made a humph sound in her throat and gave him an incredulous look. “Pete’s back in Hanover...New Hampshire?”
“The same.” Kevin walked over and set the box on the coffee table, plopping down in the overstuffed couch cushions--just like he used to back in college.
Susan moved closer. It certainly smelled like Pete’s Pizza, her absolute favorite pizza in the world. “But how?”