by Julia Kent
“Where is Maggie and what have you done to her?” I asked through a sip of coffee.
She laughed. “It’s true. I don’t disagree with you. It always seemed like there was something special there, but the horror of how things went down five years ago overshadowed the good. Sounds like the good flourished inside both of you. You two just have to hack away at the scar tissue, and if it’s meant to be, you’ll find your way.”
My chest tightened.
“And if it’s not,” she said carefully, “it’s going to hurt like a sonofabitch, but at least you’ll finally know. Have some peace. And some great sex.” She nudged me and winked.
The director of religious diversity caught my eye and started coming our way. “Gotta schmooze,” I explained as Maggie gave him the once-over.
“Hot priest.” Indeed, he was. A smooth Latino man from Bolivia with burnished dark skin, wide cheekbones and intelligent, lively eyes. Too bad he was taken.
By God.
“Don’t even think about it,” I joked with her.
“Totally not my type,” she whispered. “Besides, you defile a priest you go up in spontaneous combustion.”
“You keep looking at him like that and your toes will get crispy.”
She let out a low whistle. “Being singed isn’t the worst thing…”
She ran off before she got herself into even more trouble, and I found myself engaged in a conversation about bringing more mission trips into the residence life program.
And me? I’d found a little religion myself last night.
At least, all those times Liam made me shout, “oh my God!” counted for something, right?
Liam
I was in my shithole watching some documentary on Netflix about aging porn stars when my doorbell rang. So few people ever rang my apartment bell that I grabbed my phone by mistake, thinking someone had changed the ringtone on me as a joke.
Nope.
Took two more rings for me to realize I needed to check out my intercom.
I held the button and said, “Hello?” It felt like I was Alexander Graham Bell using the phone for the first time.
“It’s Amy.” She sounded determined.
“Why didn’t you text?”
Silence.
I hit the Enter button and buzzed her in. What the fuck would Amy be doing here? Sam and I weren’t working tonight. She and Sam seemed happy as could be. The band was getting more and more gigs. She was still a bookworm and doing fine as her second year of grad school started up.
And why not text me?
My apartment wasn’t exactly ready for guests. Pizza boxes everywhere, a stack of tissues on the floor, dirty underclothes bunched up on the floor where I took them off, old dishes I didn’t bother with, and—
I came to a halt as I scrambled to clean up. Why bother? Fifteen seconds couldn’t amount to anything of use.
Bang bang bang. She had a strong knock. I opened the door to find Amy there with an expression on her face that said she was just as befuddled by her visit as I was.
“Hey,” I said, inviting her in.
“Hey—oh, wow.” She pulled her head back like a nasty stench hit her. Hmmm. I’d been home all day and didn’t notice anything, but maybe I’d gotten used to it.
“Your apartment makes Charlie Day’s look like something out of a Martha Stewart magazine,” she said.
“Nice to see you, too.” I held back adding Fuck You. I had some manners with women. Barely.
“You are probably wondering why I’m here.” She started to sit down then bobbed up, repeating the gesture three times before perching her ample (and quite nice) ass on the arm of my stained couch.
“To randomly insult me?”
“That wasn’t random. Your apartment smells like Fritos and the decaying body of a Jeffrey Dahmer victim hidden in one of your walls.”
I stepped into the hall, opened my door, stepped in, and took a deep sniff. “You nailed it perfectly,” I marveled.
“Apartments are part of the reason I’m here.”
“You want to move in?”
She choked with laughter. “No. I want you to move out.”
“Huh?”
“I’m moving in with Sam.”
“Congrats. You mother will flip her shit.”
“I don’t care.”
I couldn’t help but smile wider. “Double congrats. Joining the ‘I don’t give a shit what my parents say’ club is a big leap for you. For anyone.”
She ignored the comment. “And I want you to take over the lease on my apartment.”
“Your apartment? The shoe box?” Amy had this weird little studio apartment carved out of the corner of a building. Literally. She had to peel her futon mattress back at one corner to be able to open her front door.
“It’s $400 a month less than what you pay for this festering butthole.”
“That’s my festering butthole. Quit insulting it.”
“My place is cheaper, and if I find someone to take over the landlord will let me out of the lease.”
“$400 a month would be awesome to cut out of my budget,” I agreed.
“That’s two or three fewer parties a month you’d have to do,” she said with an eye roll.
“Is that why you want to move in with Sam? To cut down on his stripping?”
“No!” she snapped. But there was a glimmer of truth there. “It’s because we love each other.”
“And you want him to get out of stripping.”
“Okay, sure. If the band keeps getting all these gigs then soon you—he—might be able to get out of it. I don’t mind it that much, it’s just…it gets hard, you know? Being the girlfriend and knowing all these hands have been on him. The nights he comes home smelling like other women’s perfume and body lotion. Knowing that. Imagining it. It’s just…”
“You trust him?”
“Of course I do!”
“Then don’t worry about him. Sam adores you. He’d never cheat on you.”
“That’s not it!”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s more about wanting him to excel at what he’s really good at. The drumming. If he came to me and said the stripping was his life’s work and he loved it and wanted to do it forever, I’d honor that. But it’s not. And so if we can spend more time together and deepen our relationship and—”
“And save money.”
She nodded.
The way she was acting was a little too…something. Angry? Resentful? Hesitant? Amy was always a mixture of so many things under the surface that you couldn’t put your finger on. Charlotte could be quiet and intense, but in a totally different way. That flashpoint temper was underneath and you always knew where you stood, emotionally, with Charlotte.
Amy was a complex labyrinth, and while I’d known her since we were toddlers, I wasn’t sure I actually understood her any more today than I did when I was two.
“Why else are you here?” The best way to deal with a mystery was to expose it to sunlight.
She seemed shocked and yet not at all surprised by my question. That was what I meant—Amy was too many reactions all layered into one. “I’m here to talk about Charlotte.”
“You and everyone else. Darla’s been picking at me for weeks.”
“She won’t bug you for a while. She’s deep in the fur.”
“The what?”
“Writing. Oh, never mind. Anyhow, back in high school you wouldn’t tell me why you and Charlotte broke up. She called me a few times and I didn’t know what to do.”
“Was this before or after…”
“After. After the prom.” Sam had completely disappeared off the face of the earth during our senior prom and Amy had been so sad, while I was at the beginning of my fuck-anything-with-a-pulse phase, and in a stroke of genius—and not one of my finer moments—I’d been gentlemanly enough to accept her flower. Pop her cherry.
Be her first.
We weren’t weird about it except when we were weird abou
t it.
“What did you do?” I asked, wondering where she was headed with this and getting a dark feeling about it.
She shrugged. “I didn’t. Do anything, I mean. It’s not like we were super close.”
“But you were friends,” I protested. Amy was right—she didn’t really hang out with Charlotte back then, but the edge of our different social circles did form a Venn diagram with overlap sometimes.
“I was seventeen and freaked out by Sam’s silence and…you know.”
“Right. Hey, no judgment. I didn’t exactly handle things well back then, either.”
Long sigh. “And that’s what’s got me thinking, Liam.”
“What.”
“How you handled Charlotte’s pregnancy.”
A slow burn began. “You’re going to lecture me now about breaking up with her back then?”
“No. No, seriously. No lectures. More just a nagging thought about what you said about your…” She waved at my crotch.
“My dick.”
“Your sperm.” Her faced scrunched up and she asked, without looking at me, “Are you really sure you’re sterile?”
“Have you and Darla been plotting this?”
She looked genuinely surprised. “Darla?”
“Okay, never mind. She asked the same question.” I blew out a long puff of air and ran my hand through my hair. Ew. I needed a shower. “Look, all I know is this: my mom, dad, and my doctors told me, twice, that I can’t have kids. Ever. My sperm are like Tony Romo: they can’t do the job when it matters.”
“You keep joking about it, but that has to really hurt. I know I don’t want kids yet, but I know I want kids. If someone told me when I was sixteen that I could never, ever have them, it would be devastating.”
Who knew this would turn into a therapy session?
“Sure.”
“Liam.” She said my name with that tone women get, the kind where they want you to be Sensitive Man and explore your feelings. Here’s the thing: I don’t have feelings the same way women do. Women have layer after layer after layer of feelings.
Mine are just one big thick chunk of rock. No, really.
“You want me to cry and tear my clothes and talk about how much it sucks?” I smiled a sick grin, one that made me feel a little maniacal. “I could.” I played with my thumb cuticle, pulling at the skin until it bled. The blood made me think of Charlotte and I touched my scab, the head wound healing nicely.
“Is that how it really feels?”
“It sucks,” I repeated. “It sucks to know that I have to carry this into every single romantic relationship I ever have, and to know that some women will reject me as husband material because I can never, ever be a biological father. That’s the phrase the doctor used. Both doctors, actually. Mom made me go to two different specialists.”
Amy just nodded. Maybe I had more to say about it than I realized.
“And both of them said ‘biological father’ and were careful to say that reproductive technology meant my future wife and I could use donor sperm. I was sixteen. I didn’t want to talk about sperm in front of my mother. Sure as hell didn’t want to jerk off in a cup looking at naked pictures of Jenna Jameson or Asia Carrera and hand my fresh goo off to get tested.”
Blood poured down my thumb and I sucked it, the metallic taste helpful somehow. “They both said that and I went back home and stared at my ceiling and pretended everything was fine when Charlotte asked me.”
“That was junior year, right?”
“Yep. Her senior year.”
“And you never told her.”
My hands started shaking. It wasn’t cold. “No. I just…should I have? Probably. But you don’t play in a band and run cross country and play soccer and study for AP History and go to football games and get high in Trevor’s garage and then throw out ‘Hey, Charlotte, if you ever want to be a mommy you’ll have to shove another guy’s jizz up your love tunnel in a doctor’s office to have a baby if you stay with me.’”
“Ouch.”
I spread my hands wide. “Reality is nothing but pain.”
“You don’t really believe that.”
“Try me.”
She thought for a minute. “Two different specialists? And no hope?”
“One of the doctors said in the future there might be some way they cut out my ball and squeeze a functional sperm out of some tissue. I don’t remember the details, but he said there’s a tiny sliver of hope if I let them half castrate me.”
Amy looked like someone watching The Human Centipede for the first time.
“Yeah. I know.” I swallowed hard and whispered, “But I’d do it if it meant I could have kids. If it meant I wouldn’t…well, you know.”
She reached over and grasped my hand. “I know.”
“The part that sucked the most, though? Wrapping it.”
She snatched her hand back. “What?”
“I can’t get a chick pregnant. I can still get an STD, though, but the spermies don’t work, and I still have to use condoms. If there’s one thing being sterile is good for, it’s getting out of taking a shower with your socks on.”
“You make no sense.”
“Sure I do. Sex with a condom on is like taking a shower with your socks on.”
She slapped my shoulder. “That is such a stupid comparison.”
“Go ask Sam. He’ll tell you the same thing.”
“You do wrap it, I hope? Sometimes we all wonder if you’re a Petri dish.”
That, of all the things out of her mouth, finally offended me. “I get tested every two months or so. Just went through it at the department of health. Clean as can be.”
“If you’re sleeping with Charlotte, you better be. Nothing like passing on an STD to a woman whose job involves teaching coeds how not to get them.”
Good point. “Hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“Think about what she does for a living, Liam. Why would she choose to do sex toy parties and work in residence life?”
“For fun and good stories?”
Amy rolled her eyes and stood gingerly. “Speaking of sex toys—”
“Let’s not.”
“Ask her for a catalog next time you see her. I’d love to buy some new—”
I shoved her out the door. “Thanks for coming over! Yes on the apartment! Goodbye!” I said loudly over her talk of buying dildos and warm-water flesh simulators.
Bad enough she succeeded in getting me to talk about my feewings.
But to make me talk about her sex toys? That was a low blow.
Chapter Fifteen
Liam
“This whole climbing-through-the-window-in-the-dark thing was cute and romantic at first, but now it’s just a massive pain in the balls. Like Darla,” I groused as I hefted myself into Charlotte’s apartment.
“You let Darla touch your balls?” Charlotte asked in a throaty voice. All the lights were off and I could hear, but not see, her. This was a rare night off for me—no stripping, no performances, no practices—and I was looking forward to an entire night with Charlotte. And breakfast with Charlotte. And leaving with the smell of Charlotte on my cuticles, in my ears, on my beard…
“Where are you?” I asked through laughter.
“Right here. Come and find me.”
I stood up a little straighter at that command. Were we playing a game?
I love games.
Especially winning games.
As my eyes adjusted to the lack of light, I walked into her bedroom, following the only dim source of glow I could find. Upon closer examination, I discovered candlelight. The strong, perfumy odor of lavender tickled my nose. And my cock.
Because candles?
Candles meant I was getting laid.
And then my cock realized there was leather.
On Charlotte.
On Charlotte’s tits and ass.
My cock did that cheering thing, like Kermit the Frog. Yayyyyyyyyy! Arms in the air and flailing and everything.
And then it got even better, because Charlotte was stretched out on her bed wearing a black leather corset, some black leather…thing with garters and fishnet stockings, and her nipples popped over and out of the bustier. Bright red stilettos, the kind you want to have digging into your ass while you’re buried balls deep in a woman, perfected the look.
I was going to eat her right now.
“What is this all about?” I asked as I striped my clothes off, from 0 to Naked in 1.2 seconds. Faster than a Ferrari. Powered by 8.0 Litre Hard-on.
“Product samples from my company,” she said in that low, sexy voice. “They asked a few of us if we wanted to try out some of the new BDSM-themed items. And they sent me an Esme 2.0.” She nodded toward the corner.
Esme stared back, doing her best Mr. Bill imitation.
“Version 2.0? What’s the upgrade?”
“Vibrating vagina simulator.”
“Esme’s such a voyeur,” I said, shaking my head. Her eyes were creepy, even as I turned away, knowing she’d watch us.
“Plus, they’re rolling out a huge new line in preparation for Valentine’s Day 2015.”
My dick bobbed appreciatively, as if listening.
“What’s happening then?” I asked as I crawled over her, dragging the tip of me across those fishnet stockings, making my jaw clench. I was going to spooge all over her belly button like a teen getting his first hand job if I wasn’t careful.
“You—don’t—what?” She sat up, her voice carrying this incredulous tone. “Fifty Shades?”
“You want me to be Christian Grey?” I could get into that.
“No, I mean—the movie?”
“They’re making a movie? Which porno actress did they get for that?”
She gave me a long, hard look. I gave her a long, hard cock.
Finally, she pulled back and gave my balls a light spanking. “Bad boy. You should know more about Fifty Shades.”
“How about I teach you more about—” And my own voice was cut off as I dove between her legs. Crotchless panties. And…instant erection.
“Liam!” she shrieked.
Sucking her clit into my mouth, surrounded by soft thighs that pounded out her pulse in beautiful symphony was one of the best damned places on earth. I could stay here for hours, leaving only to hydrate, eat, and meet basic necessities, her core like an altar where I could speak with God.