by Sunniva Dee
“Babe! How’z-z it? I miss our g-i-i-irl!” The music surrounds him, sex oozing from every beat.
“Where did you go?” someone moans. “Come back.”
“Hush, it’s the Queen babe. I’ll be right back. Hold that position.” He giggles, voice hitting falsetto on a few notes. Crap, this is Lenny sick drunk.
“Babe?” He’s back, mouth against the receiver.
“You guys all need to stop calling me that.”
“But ba-a-abe,” he whines sadly. “We mis-s-s you.”
“So much that you’re having orgies every night?”
He confirms this easily. “Yes! Better join’em than fight’em. Although fighting, hmm.” He giggles again.
“So Luka...?”
“Man, I never seen him in action before—”
“Really, I doubt you’ve never watched his movies.”
“Yeah, but in real life. Damn, he’s got it down, man!”
Jealousy rushes down my chest and slams me in the gut. It’s so powerful I have to suppress my gasp with a hand over my mouth.
“Just now, he was giving it to this one chick from behind, and he’s holding onto her ass, right, and she’s, like, wiggling.” The alcohol makes Lenny slur. “So he slides out of her when another chick gets in front of him on her knees, and he turns the new chick, lifts her up, and pushes inside of her, like, freaking standing, and it’s like nothing to him.
“Luka’s hammered too, and he never even lost his balance. He pounded her so hard she was squealing, and she came, right there, in the middle of the floor, before he put her down and went back to the other chick. Dude’s got stamina. He did five of them before he sprayed the last one right in the face. Fucking crazy.”
“He’s... Every night? No, right?”
“Pret-t-ty much.” Lenny laughs, incredulous too.
“How has no one told me this!” I shout, and Aci turns in her bed next-door. I lower my voice and repeat it in a whisper.
“’Cause everyone kno-o-wz how you feel about Luka.”
“What the fuck?”
“Ha, Julian even knew.”
“Julian knew that I hate his guts.”
“Nu-huh, not likely, nope. And everyone knows why he’s the only guy you haven’t wanted around to comfort you at night.”
“That’s bullshit. It’s because he’s a despicable human being.”
“Whatever you say, ba-a-abe.”
“It’s hormones, probably,” Mom says to my father, and that makes me even more pissed. Why can’t I just be mad? Joy has been harping about the stages of grief and anger being one of them. The person is supposedly angry at the one who died as well as at the world. Of course, her analysis is according to western textbooks and expectations of our responses, and I just can’t deal with that crap. All I know is I’m definitely mad right now, and it’s not at Julian. It’s his brother I have a beef with.
I call Joy to have her go over to the Queen and “check on my stuff.” That’s random as hell, and she instantly calls me out on it.
“Oh yeah, god forbid the Fratters rob you blind all of a sudden.” She snorts. “You want me to get a padlock for your door?”
“Whatever, just... can you head over?”
“Geneva. What’s going on? What are you worried about?”
“My stuff,” I say to be funny at this point. I exhale, rubbing at something that feels like a knot between my eyebrows. It’s been there since I spoke with the guys a few days ago. Damn, they’ve turned the Queen into the Playboy Mansion. “I talked with Diego.”
“And? You didn’t tell him I want him, right?” She’s joking. Not about the wanting-him part. I’d never tell.
“It’s mayhem at the Queen. Luka’s pulled out every stop and is going crazy over there.”
“What’s he doing?”
She’ll read between the lines anyway, so I might as well be up front. I hate it when she interprets me, embellishes, and engraves my crap into my soul so I’ll never forget it.
“He’s bringing women over, and it’s not just one or two like before. Dude’s hauling home a butt-load of his, quote-unquote, colleagues, and he’s letting the other Fratters partake in the fun. Like, all over the house. It’s a— By the sound of it, the Queen has become a… a…”
“A dungeon of sin? A nonstop, hopping orgy?”
I need something to drink. I look around and find lukewarm water on the night stand.
“Sorry, Geneva. I need to not say things like that.”
“But it’s true though. What are the neighbors going to say?”
“Is it the reputation of the house that worries you?” she asks, voice sweet. “Or something else?”
“Everything about it worries me. What’s it good for? I love these guys like family. They are family, and now Luka isn’t just thwarting himself. He’s doing it to his friends too. I can’t stand the thought of what’s going on there. They drink, fight, have sex like it’s going out of style. It’s crazy.”
“They’re out of balance.” I can almost see her sage nod, chin thickening on the way down.
“Exactly.”
“You gotta let them live out their despair. You don’t have monopoly on reacting to what happened, darling. He was their friend. Luka’s brother, twin brother at that. Of course they’re going to act out.”
“What are you talking about? Luka’s reaction isn’t normal.”
“It isn’t?” That sweet voice again, like I’m supposed to see it for myself.
“No! He’s always been promiscuous as hell, but if he doesn’t calm down, he’s going to end up dead too. Don’t you see? Can you imagine Mama if the last of her men dies in a random mishap, like some sex game gone awry or AIDS.”
She quiets. Then she says, “You really care.”
I choke up. I’m young, and I don’t have children. Maybe I never will, but it’s probably biologically ingrained in women to relate to a mother’s agony. To lose a child must be like I feel, just multiplied by… a lot.
“Mama has been in my life for a while.” I try for a laugh.
“The whole Verenich clan has,” she replies.
Insomnia and darkness is a horrible mix. Why do they go hand in hand? My laptop is my friend until the moon and the river call from outside.
The opposite riverbank is free of houses, a miracle my parents don’t take for granted. Now, it gives me the freedom to get out of bed and pull the curtains apart without having to get dressed. I let the night invade my room, moonlit water shimmering and the shadows of well-known trees interrupting a blue that’s not as dark as my thoughts.
Julian. My studies. The Queen. The Fratters. Luka.
I haven’t heard from Joy since she agreed to visit them. It’s been days now. I’ll call her in the morning to get her straight-forward account of the situation. It will be different than Lenny’s drunken version and Diego’s censored one.
James. Handsome, straight-laced James with his dirty-blond, short-cropped hair, intelligent eyes, and small, stubborn mouth. I remember his arms, steady and solid around me. He lulled me to sleep at the Queen with his slow, even breaths. I text him.
It’s four in the morning, and I don’t want him to text back. What I want is for all Fratters, Luka included, to be asleep.
Hey. It’s been awhile.
How are you? I type back.
Okay. Studying for finals. You?
I exhale, relieved. Of course, that’s why you’re awake. The instant I write it, I want to take it back.
It’s easy to stay awake with Luka around.
My heart sets off, and I realize that I don’t actually want James’ side of things. I’ll wait for Joy.
Keep studying, I type. Then I add, XOXO to not seem too obvious.
My cell rings. I can’t not pick up. “Hey, James.”
&nbs
p; “Hey, babe.”
“You guys and the ‘babe’ thing.” I want to ignore the deep thump of the bassline in the background.
He lets a quiet chuckle out through his nose. That’s James. Understated but crystal-clear, he won’t speak unless he’s sure of his opinions. Neither does he engage in what Julian called social-laughing, i.e. laugh to be a part of a joke or enjoyment in a group. If James laughs, it’s because he’s genuinely entertained.
“You call us ‘Fratters,’ and we call you ‘babe.’ You’re the babe of the Queen. It’s one of those things.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. I could have been ‘the lady of the Queen’ or ‘the chick of the Queen. Hey, the queen of the Queen.”
“Well, you’re a babe and we love you, so there you go: we have double reason to call you that.”
“You didn’t before Julian died.” It shoots out before I can think it through.
“We did,” he replies softly.
“Ha, you don’t think I’d have remembered?”
“Because we never did it to your face. Julian knew.”
“Seriously?” I can picture him now, lazily finding that funny.
“Yeah. We used to refer to you as ‘the babe.’ When are you coming back? You are coming back, right?”
I shift to my side, legs curled and the phone pressed under my ear against the mattress. “Yeah, I’ll be back soon.”
“Is Portlandia treating you well?”
I snicker. “Yeah, it is.”
“Sleeping?”
“So-so.”
“Figured that’s why you were up.”
I wake up gasping. I fell asleep talking with James, and I didn’t even notice it. Nipples taut and my skin overheated, I’m squirming. The dream of Julian making love to me was so vivid I can’t shake it off.
I still feel his hands on me, the searing path he made over my breasts. He was inside me, moving. We were climbing, but then his face morphed to James’. I noticed, but it was too good for me to stop, and by the time I woke up, his moans were those of Lenny when we kissed.
I squirm under the sheets. The fabric chafes nicely, and I stroke my stomach and the inside of my thigh. The house is quiet. A quick glance at the alarm clock shows six a.m.
With cautious fingers, I glide through my own folds and circle the hard knob waiting for release. I don’t feel guilty when I orgasm to a fantasy of Connor, then Marlon inside me. They’re just fantasies. My body still burns and longs, so I force out a third climax.
“You’re quiet,” Dad says a few hours later. He keeps a home office for when he’s not seeing patients, and today is a home day. “Are you working on the Amazon trip?”
“Not much else to do until the funding solidifies,” I say, and we don’t discuss the obvious, that I’ll need a new partner.
“Unless you can work on the first doctoral article? Maybe it’s too early.”
It’s easy to get lost in inertia, but Mom’s encyclopedia and Dad’s gentle reminders nudge me in the right direction. Despite thinking I should have pursued a more lucrative field, they’ve supported me a hundred percent since I landed on anthropology.
“I was going to give the Reading Room a try today,” I say.
He nods, chewing on a piece of bacon. “Sounds like a good idea.”
After breakfast, I do what I promised. With my laptop, I settle in at the small study desk between two bookcases. The wall in front of me is made of glass, beyond it the lawn and the river below soothe.
I start downloading published articles. I need to narrow down the number of tribes I can visit in the Amazon. There are still a handful that haven’t been contacted by missionaries or anthropologists, and I’m definitely staying away from those.
We know more today than we did decades ago about the repercussions even the slightest contact with our world can have on these micro-societies. It’s one of the first things we learn in my field of study, to always be alert to our subjects’ needs. In more than one case, entire villages have been wiped out due to diseases that were new to them. They were often as simple as a cold.
Which rules out the Vi Araras, the Kaw’a group, and the Lacasso Indians.
Julian dreamed of us being the first to contact one of them. “We’ll just make sure we’re healthy and don’t bring any diseases with us.”
“And how could we prevent that? We’ll bring foreign bacteria with us no matter how healthy we are.”
He shrugged and flipped his book closed. Crossing his legs on the bed, he leaned forward and pulled me in like he always did when he wanted to charm me into surrender.
“The odds are so small. Come o-on. We’ll act like it was an accident, like we were simply going to study the Lara’ people, and then we ran into the Vi Arara. Can you imagine? We’d be famous afterward. We’d get funded by Harvard!”
He was a dreamer, my man. Not always that ethical, but I was there to shoot him down. No way I’d have the destruction of a whole culture on my conscience. My job is to document and describe, and that’s where it stops. The loggers and surrounding Amazon farmers do a good enough job at the destruction side of things.
I narrow down the groups from four hundred to fifty. I’ve always been drawn to the tribe that started my obsession with foreign cultures, the Lara’s with their burial rites and inexplicable treatment of women. Yarunami will have passed away by now, but the thought of meeting one of her descendants makes my heart jump.
To approach this scientifically, I can’t select a group based on my heart and a single story though. There needs to be more than that, as well as a hypothesis to prove or reject.
I startle when my phone buzzes. Snapping out of my reflections, I realize that I’ve worked a good two hours already. “Hello?”
“Hey, I’m at the Queen now,” Joy murmurs under her breath like she’s doing something illicit. “Good timing too; everyone’s out of the house.”
“How is that good timing? I wanted to hear your take on how they are. Wait, how did you get in?”
“The spare key in the flowerpot.” She exhales, doors creaking as she moves around. “Okay, they need to clean up in here. Geez.”
“Seriously?”
“They’re guys, Geneva. You’ve been away before and come home to a pigsty.”
“Not with James around. James and Diego usually keep it tidy.”
“Well, they’re not doing a very good job of it this time. Hold on.”
She sends me videos. Short snippets with the drapes of our main living areas in disarray, haphazardly drawn or open despite the sun outside. My favorite tablecloth droops to the floor, leaving half of the dining-room table naked. I should have tossed out the flowers, I think, narrowing in on the vase lying sideways with wilted roses spread across the fabric.
“It’s like a pack of wild animals ran through the house, tipping over furniture and shit on their way. This is so bizarre,” Joy says. “I’m reconsidering my affinity for Diego. What a bunch of jerks. Hold on, I’m going upstairs.”
“No, please. I don’t even want to know.”
Another door creaks. “Diego doesn’t make his bed.”
“Really, you’re checking his room?”
“Yeah, it’s pretty neat in here for a guy. Boxer briefs, huh? Nice. He’s got the ass for it. He has condoms in his underwear drawer.”
“Joy.”
“I know, I know. Getting to your room.”
My hinges are oiled, so I don’t hear her open the door.
“Untouched. Unless you didn’t empty your lingerie drawer and spread it out on the bed yourself?”
“What are you talking about?” I shout. “I so didn’t! What the hell is going on in that—”
“Kidding! Where’s your sense of humor, girl?” Joy snickers. “It looks like you were just here. Even your bed is made.”
I exhale so hard I feel my shoulders sink.
“But so you know, in the hallway there’s everything from towels to baseball gear, golf balls, tennis balls—o-oh, a pretty bra. And here’s a G-string. Yep, I can see that Luka must have brought his friends home, and they weren’t confined to the downstairs areas either. Seems he, or someone else, got them to the upstairs hallway. As of yet, there’s no telling if they’ve been in any bedrooms.”
“Take a picture.” It can’t be as bad as she describes it.
She sends me one.
It’s as bad as she describes it.
What were they doing with all the sports gear? That’s Nathaniel, though. He’s all about the ballgames. I hope he didn’t mix sex with sports, especially not team sports. Geez.
“Do you want me to check any other rooms?”
Luka’s.
“Nope, I’m good.”
“Here’s Luka’s. Ready?”
“No!”
“Okay. It’s locked anyway.”
It isn’t. It’s just an old house. “He never locks it. You just need to shove it open.”
That sound must be the door banging into the wall of his room. I’m relieved that my psych friend doesn’t state the obvious, that I clearly want her to check.
“Whoops! Sorry, guys. Just looking for... scissors.”
Groans. Sleepy moans. Luka muttering something to the effect of “in the top drawer of my desk,” and “that you, Joy? What’re you doing here?”
Joy must be playing along, because the phone clatters to a hard surface and the sound of a drawer opening and loud rummaging ensue. I hold the phone away from my ear.
“Who’s she?” a soft girl’s voice asks.
“A friend of a friend,” Luka replies and clears morning sexiness from his voice. My heart sprints off.
“Got the scissors,” Joy says, breathless. “Thanks, Luka. Was gonna pick up some stuff for Geneva and send it off.”
“She’s staying up there, isn’t she?” he gravels out.
“Seems like it.”
“You’re hot,” a different female voice purrs. “You want to join us, hun, since you woke us up anyway? I’d love to see what you’ve got under that little dress.”