Yes, even here, in this world of overfed girl stock who can’t afford to go to a more attractive beach, where the fit, intellectual bald girls tend to go. I’d expect a shaved head from a girl who goes to college, who goes to all those other, better beaches – good breeding implies a necessary type of sensitivity – but there you have it; it’s here too. I suppose I have myself to thank for the Ribbonheads trend. I’m unsure yet if this is going to be an asset or a liability on a girl. I am fascinated by hair, particularly so-called bad hair – dyed, fried, thin, limp – and lack of hair altogether may be too much, too extreme. I look at all the bald heads around me, but nothing in me responds – my dick remains unimpressed.
24
AS A YOUNG ADULT I HAD AN ACCIDENT. IT WAS A WARM summer morning and I was rushing to help Jason move his art from his old apartment to a new one.
I didn’t want to help Jason. I wanted to have a leisurely Saturday, with a beautiful girl I was seeing – this was when I was dating beautiful girls – someone whom I only recall as brunette. That’s what I wanted to do instead of helping Jason with his move. But occasionally, I would force myself to do unpleasant selfless things in order to maintain the long-term connections that I felt demanded such things; this is what friendships are like.
I rode my bicycle through the sticky streets of Chinatown, through a market with its fish smells and bakery smells, all of it mixed in with garbage and decades of immigrant effort evaporating from the sidewalks. At one point, I got off the bike to cross the street. I walked onto the street and felt a strange tug on my shin.
I looked down. I could see a small, light blue surface poking out of a red gash on my leg. I had walked my front wheel into my own leg. I sliced it open as the wheel turned, cut down to the muscle.
I bent down to hold the wound with my hand, make it close and stop the blood from flowing out of it. As I tried to pull the flaps of skin together over the blue-white fat tissue, something damp and thick fell out of the gash, a piece of meat. It landed wetly on the ground. And it was that quiet-yet-solid wet sound that did it: The world started turning fuzzy, then black, and then it disappeared. The last thing I heard was metal crashing beside me.
When I came to, there were people all around me. I was lying on the ground with a cold compress on my forehead. A voice said an ambulance was on its way.
This is what I dream about my second night at the beach house, about the accident. I wake up exhausted with my jaw clenched, my body clammy from sweat. Even though I don’t believe in omens, the sinister way the event has repeated itself in my head, in the guise of a dream, seems like a warning.
***
It is in this melancholic mood that I leave the beach house with Dog to go for our walk. We get out later than usual, as it took me forever to get ready: my exercises were laborious, my shower not very refreshing – sand under my eyes.
I couldn’t eat much, but I screwed around the kitchen nibbling on things before I gave up.
In addition to my troubling mood, the weather is humid, the sun hazy behind a veil of moisture. The day is an out-of-focus photograph.
I want to check out the smoothie shack, to see if I can find any inspiration there, pull myself out of this funk.
It’s not as packed as I expected. Only two Internet stations are occupied and there’s no lineup. I order my usual acai smoothie and a bottle of water for the walk back. The bald girl behind the counter seems stoned, eyelids barely lifting as she confirms the order. A zombie. She doesn’t smile. But then she does a double take, eyes narrowing as if she recognizes me. I’m used to double takes, but this one is off; it’s not curious or friendly.
“What?” I say.
“Oh, sorry. Nothing,” she says and turns around. I watch her skinny ass as she fumbles with the smoothie machine. She hums quietly to herself as she passes me the smoothie and water. She hums completely off-key. I want to tell her to shut up, but I’m a gentleman so I say nothing.
I check out the two Internet stations. The first one is occupied by a couple, probably in their early thirties, both dressed in khaki, both with the same dirty-blond hair. They are wearing rubber shoes. One day they will produce a plain child, maybe a girl. Maybe I will still be alive by the time she turns eighteen.
At the other station, there are two girls – one looks a bit like Dolores. As soon as I see her, I feel the anxiety clawing up from the bottom of my gut: What if the actual Dolores is here? But no, she wouldn’t be here, I remind myself: that bungalow got sold last year.
I count backwards from twenty. Neutral subjects. Nature, fashion. What to get for dinner tonight. I take a few deep breaths.
The second girl is one of those flawless beauties, with a cute nose and straight black hair that even in this humidity stays silky and flat. Her top is something that looks like a see-through skirt that she pulled up over her breasts to wear as a dress. Her thighs are long, smooth bars of chocolate. An Eight.
She catches me staring. Smile full of bright white teeth; it’s the well-oiled smile of someone who gets stared at often. With that, my desire falters and, despite my anxiety, I check out the Dolores look-alike again (noticing, too, the flicker of outrage in the pretty girl’s expression as I do).
I take in the clothes that don’t really fit Dolores-girl, the chinless, round face. She turns to me and blushes. Too close, too much alike. I look away.
I go outside to untie Dog. Maybe I should just stay in today with The Sopranos, which I am finally watching to see what all the fuss was about. Or I could try to tackle the new, complicated contracts Patrick drew up for the Ribbonheads. They are becoming more and more demanding and are threatening to leave. This is actually fine with me, as their job is done – the campaign was successful, and I’m not in the business of representing aspiring actresses.
“Hey,” someone shouts.
I turn around. It’s the bald girl who served me my smoothie, the zombie stoner. She’s walking toward me, quite gracefully for the undead. Her jaw is no longer falling off its hinges.
“Are you that actor?”
This happens from time to time. It hasn’t happened in a while, so it takes me a moment to remember that I’m used to it. I get used to it again by the time she catches up with me. “No, I’m definitely not him.”
“Are you sure? Aren’t you supposed to say no even if you are?”
“Good point. But yes, I’m sure.”
“Okay.”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
“No, that’s okay. Are you sure?”
“Yes. Very sure.”
“Alright. I believe you. What’s your name? I’m Bride,” is what I think she says – bride – as she thrusts her small hand forward, and I say, “Sorry?”
“My name is Bride. As in getting married. Bride. I know. My parents had a peculiar sense of humour. My childhood was quite traumatizing.”
“That’s funny,” I say and take a closer look at Bride.
She avoids my eyes, which is confusing: this aggressive introduction and then the coyness that follows it. She’s almost my height – very tall for a girl – with a thin, muscular body. She’s standing ridiculously straight, as if she wanted to further accentuate her almost complete lack of chest.
Her face is all nose, which is not what makes her so strange looking; it is the wide slash of lips that seems to throw her face off balance. She reminds me of someone, perhaps $isi before cancer and before she became $isi and had plastic surgery to make herself more acceptable-looking, cute enough for a magazine cover.
“Had enough?” she says. I can’t tell what number she is. Anything between Two and Seven.
“Of what?”
“Checking me out,” she says.
I laugh. “Sure. I wasn’t. You remind me of my friend’s daughter.”
“Ooh, pervy.”
“What?” What’s wrong with you, I want to add but don’t. This is probably just her clumsy way of flirting, saying offensive things to see if I’ll lose my cool. I smile and sh
ake my head as if she were a silly child. She is a silly child.
“I’m just joking. Jokes! Sorry,” she says.
“No worries. I got it.”
“So. You never told me your name,” she says.
“Guy. As in that guy. My parents had a peculiar sense of humour too.”
“Wild.”
“You have beautiful eyes,” I say.
“Thanks,” she says, not at all surprised by this sudden change of gears, the compliment. I wonder if her confidence is actually just a cover-up for shyness and insecurity.
“Is this your dog?” she says.
I nod.
“Beautiful dog.”
She doesn’t bend down to pet him. Maybe she’s afraid of dogs. Maybe she got bitten by one as a child. An image of a grotesque scar, a swirl of valleys of flesh, pops into my head. I try to place it somewhere on her body, somewhere exciting – under her small breast, or the inside of her thigh.
“You can pet him,” I say. “Don’t be scared.”
“I’m not. I’m just not that crazy about pets. I like looking at them, but that’s about it.”
I wonder if being a dog owner makes me look sentimental to her, or worse, if it says something about me I’m not aware of – like that I wouldn’t say no to a placenta milkshake or a yoga retreat.
“No offence,” she says, possibly mistaking my silence for hurt.
“Don’t you have to go back?” I nod in the direction of the smoothie shack.
She blinks and gives a big toothy smile. “Yeah, I do. I just wanted to say hi, see if you were that actor. Sorry. Didn’t mean to bother you.”
“No bother at all,” I say and make my decision. “Listen,” I say.
“Yeah?” She doesn’t look away this time. She is nothing like Dolores. But she has that clarity, that sugar in those lovely mahogany eyes that make her look innocent, corruptible. And even though part of me thinks that I might not be the first to have noticed these eyes – that there might’ve been a boy before me, or even a man who had to perhaps lower his standards just to be able to look into them – I’m willing to take this risk because if that’s not the case (another man), then I would like to be the first.
“Would you like to hang out later on?”
She tilts her head and puffs out her cheeks. She says nothing. It’s obvious she’s trying to play some abridged version of hard-to-get so I help her out, pretend to plead with her. “I’m harmless, I promise.”
“Yeah? Too bad.”
“Too bad?”
“What’s the point of you then?” she says.
“I’ll make you laugh,” I reply.
“Yeah, don’t,” she says, and I laugh. I laugh because I’m suddenly nervous. She laughs too, then, but it seems out of politeness; it’s cut short.
I say, “See? It’s working.”
She rolls her eyes at me. She rubs herself on her shaved head once in that now-familiar gesture of girls enjoying the strangeness of their baldness, their hands surprised at not getting caught in hair.
“Maybe another time then. It was nice to meet you,” I say and start to turn around.
“Don’t be such a girl. Be here at seven, okay? Leave the dog at home,” she says, and I flinch at the insult, at the rudeness, at being given a command.
I let it go and say, “Great. Seven. See you then,” and I snap the leash. Dog jumps on me, places his paws around my waist. We wrestle for a moment, me trying to make him sit back down, him too excited to submit, both of us engaged in a brief, aggressive dance.
“Actually, eight is better,” Bride says.
“Sure. Eight,” I repeat, sounding a bit too hysterical.
“Okay. See ya then.” She walks away.
“Sit,” I hiss. “Sit the fuck down.” But Dog tenses his back, not wanting or unable to obey. I am not violent, but in this moment I have a hard time not swatting him across his nose.
25
SHE TAKES HER TANK TOP OFF WITHOUT LOOKING AT ME, unceremoniously, as if this were her bedroom, as if I wasn’t here. She sits on the bed, scratches her ribbed torso, looks down to figure out what’s itchy. I still don’t seem to be here. I try to pinpoint exactly when I lost control this evening. Before this evening. Earlier. Probably when I met her, when she asked to meet at eight instead of seven, and like a dumb motherfucker I just said sure like I had nothing else to do.
She gets up and jump-dances on the bed to Charlie’s newest song. The band has gone almost entirely electronic since the flick they did a song for. It was a smart move for them to abandon their pop rock ambitions and focus on tracks you can really dance to. Just last month, one of their songs got sampled by a popular German tech-house DJ, which gives them cred beyond anything we could’ve created artificially. A nice ambitious track that borrows from dubstep but without the nasty bass wobble. Overall, Charlie’s popularity has risen; there’s a line of sneakers in the making already, and one of the Charlie members was photographed having coffee with James Franco.
The robot voice in the song talks about wanting to do things to a boy.
As she dances and jumps, Bride’s tiny nipples bounce up and down. I want her to stop jumping, her nipples to stop bouncing even though it’s cute.
It’s not cute. It’s annoying. If anybody saw this, they’d wonder if she was drunk, but no. In fact, she’s the opposite of drunk. She is someone who refuses to drink. Earlier tonight, I offered her a drink when we came in after going to the beach, but she turned it down.
“Are you an alcoholic?”
“Ha ha ha. No. I don’t drink, that’s all.”
“Not even a beer?”
“Is this making you uncomfortable that I don’t drink?”
“No. Just curious as to why. Most people in their twenties drink.”
“I’m barely twenty, dude. Anyway, I don’t. I don’t like to lose control.”
Which is why I don’t drink. But I can’t worry about that, about her not wanting to lose control. I can probably get her to lose control in some other way. Her jumping on my bed is not her losing control. In fact, it’s the opposite – it’s her controlling this situation, like a nasty toddler, which I’m tolerating for now because I am a gentleman.
I leave the bedroom to go and make myself a drink. I’m not planning to lose control, but this is one of those rare moments where I think I’d like a drink. When I come back with my vodka and soda, she’s lying on the bed, looking up at me, smiling. She’s now fully naked. She took her clothes off herself; she wouldn’t even relinquish that task to me.
We haven’t done much besides some necking when we tumbled into my bedroom – she pulled me toward it, the bedroom, as if she lived here instead of me; she seemed to know exactly where to go, so I let her pull me and we fell through the door – no leading her to my bed to take her apart.
“Like what you see?” she says.
“Very much so,” I say.
“Are you thinking about what to do to me?”
I’m thinking about plunging into her, flipping her onto her stomach, biting her neck. I’d pull her hair if she had any.
“Like what? What are you thinking?”
“Let me see you,” I say and stand above her, looking down at her little body. She nods. She opens her legs wide and spreads her little pussy with her little fingers, presenting herself to me.
“You’re lovely.”
“Wanna lick it?” she asks in a small voice, a new voice. A porno voice. Daddy’s-little-girl voice.
I set the vodka and soda down on a dresser. She doesn’t let go of my eyes as I kneel in front of her. I pull her toward me until her knees are hanging over the edge of the bed. She’s got big, bony knees – boy knees. Her ankles are thin enough for me to wrap a hand around each. She smells delicious: sour, hot. I start licking her, parting with my tongue, seeking out the little nub.
She makes a noise, a sigh. I finger her tight little vagina with one and then two fingers, and on it goes, the licking and the finger-fucking, until sh
e starts bucking her hips and pushing my head down. She’s breathing fast, “Don’t stop, don’t stop –” Finally, she tenses as her cunt explodes. She moans. The soft wetness opens and closes around my finger. I keep my finger there until it subsides. My dick is rock hard.
“Give me a second,” she says, but I’m not really interested in obeying her anymore tonight. I grab her by the hips and flip her over, gauging the movements of her body, looking for any signs of struggle, but there are no objections; she’s happy to be flipped over, and she makes a loud grunting noise when I enter her slick, tight hotness.
She moans and buries her face in the pillow, the back of her bald alien head vulnerable, the sight of it only making me harder and more determined to fuck – right through her if I could. I turn her onto her back and spread her legs as wide as they’ll go. “Be a good girl. Open your eyes.” I push hard. But she won’t obey; her eyes remain closed. A thought flashes through my head: just slap her. As soon as I think it, her eyes pop open, and then I feel a sharp sting on my cheek, a quick, efficient slap, her little hand like a blur in front of my face.
I don’t know if it’s the combination of me thinking it and her doing it as soon as I thought it, or if it’s the way her face looks as she does it – unsure yet perversely pleased with herself – but I come hard, the most powerful orgasm I’ve had maybe ever. I am blown to pieces inside, my body vibrating in wave after wave of pleasure. I collapse on her hot, crazy body. She wraps her legs around me, enveloping me for a moment, her limbs skinny but strong. Like a spider.
***
The phone rings so loudly it’s as if something detonated in my head. I sit up in bed, disoriented. I try to remember where I am, who I am and what this is. This is Bride in my bed. She is sleeping. Sleeping, she looks like a child. She is a child, actually – well, not exactly, but she’s close enough to a child to be called one. I touch my cheek, as if I could feel the imprint of the girl-hand that unleashed such violence on it last night.
The phone rings and rings. I’d prefer to go back to sleep, or better yet, wake up this animal beside me and stuff my dick right in its face, but the phone. Rrring, rrring.
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