by Averil Dean
In the morning, long before dawn, he wakes without an alarm and pads barefoot to the ship room where I’m working out the latest plot twist. It’s been a long night and I’m at the point in my draft in which the whole thing resembles the ramblings of a nine-year-old. My eyelids feel like sandpaper.
“You look tired,” he says. “Why don’t you come in and lie down.”
My heart turns over like a sleepy child at the sight of him, rumpled and radiating blanket heat across the space between us. I lay my pen aside and rub my eyes with my knuckles.
“I should probably get home.”
He moves up behind my chair and lays his big hand over my chest, his thumb stroking my neck.
“How about I run you a bath, make you something to eat and you can sleep here until I get home from work.”
Since the day we met I have not been alone in Jack’s house or left him alone in mine. I haven’t showered or slept here. I’m tired and hungry, but the bath makes me nervous. I’ve been careful to keep my bad foot covered. The scars could only have been made by a cutter—the assortment of old and new, all on one foot, all suspiciously symmetrical—all unmistakably deliberate.
Jack sees my hesitation and unknowingly delivers the best argument of all.
“I have bubbles,” he says.
Concealment.
So he runs the bath and I light a candle, smoke some weed, brush my teeth. When the tub is full he undresses me and I slide into the water, let it close womblike over my head and come up gently, the waterline at my lips. I blink at him in the candlelight.
“You don’t even know,” he says. He sits outside the tub, his chin propped on one arm, free hand snaking under the surface to find my breast.
“Will you tell me something?” I ask.
“Probably.”
I lick the water from my lips. “What was prison like? What was it like, really?”
“Is this for the book?”
“No.”
He doesn’t answer at first. His hand is gentle, his thumb passing back and forth over my nipple.
“People throw the word nightmare around,” he says. “A crowded store is a nightmare. A wait in line. A tax audit, whatever. But in a real nightmare there’s a sense of unexpectedness. Nothing makes sense. You’re going along and suddenly your house is not your house, or the person with you is not that person. And you’re still applying waking logic, you’re trying to make it make sense. You want to wake up, not just because you want to get the fuck out, but because you’re looking for order in the chaos. You want things back the way they were when you were awake.”
His hand travels down my body, his fingers slide between the folds of my labia.
“Prison is that kind of nightmare. Anything can happen and nothing makes sense. It’s a circus of freaks. And you’re locked inside.”
His fingers circle my clitoris, and he finds a steady rhythm, up and down, his eyes on my face. I know, and am comforted by knowing, that he’ll bring me off.
“I thought about women all the time in prison,” he says. “We all did. Alone at night. All of us jerking off, you could hear the mattresses. The cursing. Everyone dying for a woman. Pussy was all we talked about.”
I lean back and let my legs spread open as if in sympathy, thinking of the men he describes, the need in them, the rotation of power from male to female. I feel the echo of that pent-up desire in the gravitational force of my body. The idea moves me. Excites me. There is a difference in the glide of his fingers as he draws the fluid from my body.
“Not even just the way it feels to get laid,” he says. “Not even the fucking blissed-out ride. We missed everything.”
His eyes are on my breasts, which rise and fall with my breath and the tidal pull of his voice and fingers that draws my body like the ocean to the moon. I lift my feet from the water and brace myself on the edge of the tub. My head tips and I arch back. The water eddies around my nipples.
“The way you look when you come, the way your mouth opens. The sounds you make. The way you taste when I’ve got my tongue inside you.”
Orgasm approaches from a distance, a wave on the horizon, building in size and weight. His fingers have not left my clitoris and his voice is low and calm, but underneath is the relentless physical force of him, heavily in orbit around me. I am fluid. I am the sea, rising to the shore.
“So hot and wet, you can’t imagine. You don’t know how much I think about it. You don’t know what it feels like, watching you come.”
A note of tension creeps into the seductive cadence of his voice. He wants me. He wants to see me come and I want to watch him while I do. His gaze moves over my breasts and mouth, to the water where his hand is submerged. He slides his fingers inside, curved upward, and presses hard. He sees my surprised response and murmurs encouragement. This is like nothing I’ve felt before. He’s uncovered a secret my body has been keeping even from me. His fingers pull me into a rhythm and I begin to move with him.
“Let’s see it, baby, let me see....”
He nudges me from the inside, the tip of his finger fitted like a key into a hidden lock. A wave of pleasure overtakes me, sweeps up my body and lifts me to his hand. My lips part and I let go with a sigh. I watch him, watching me, my clitoris in the palm of his hand. He looks as if I’ve given him a gift.
“Oh, fuck, yes,” he says. “You don’t even know.”
I close my eyes. My vagina contracts around his fingers as he draws the last retreating ripples from my body. When I am still, he smooths his hand down my thigh, around my calf and ankle. I remember my ugly foot and drop it quickly back under the bubbles. I see a flash of puzzlement in his expression; to distract him, I rise out of the water to kiss him full on the mouth.
“You don’t know,” I tell him, tracing his lips with the pad of my thumb.
He helps me out of the tub and dries me with a beach towel, tucks me into bed. I lie naked between the sheets with the scent of his hair on the pillow beneath my cheek.
“Lie still, baby,” he says. “I’m going to make us something to eat.”
He kisses my forehead and I roll to my stomach and close my eyes. I am swollen, heavy with sleep, warm and tranquil as a sunbather on an empty beach. I hear the distant clatter of pans and dishes, the friendly shush of rain outside the window, and I am asleep.
* * *
My foot.
Something is moving up the sole of my foot. In sleep, I imagine a dog’s nose snuffling. Then awareness rushes me upward. I open my eyes.
Jack is at the end of the bed. He has the covers pushed back and he’s bent over my foot, frowning. His thumb is the dog’s nose from my dream.
I scramble up the bed, swatting him away. With one hand I draw the covers to my chin, and as I do there is a crash. He must have set a plate on the bed and I’ve sent it overboard.
He doesn’t look away from me. His eyes are steady, his mouth an uncrossable line. He takes a fistful of the covers and pulls gently, evenly, one hand over the other. I can hold the sheets in place or I can let go—either way is just the same with Jack.
I am naked and trembling against the headboard when his fingers close around my ankle. He straightens my leg and I look away, more exposed than I have ever been. Don’t look at me. I want to scream and fight, bloody his nose with my heel. Stop looking at me, I’ll hurt you, leave me alone.
He doesn’t say a word. He presses a kiss to the unwilling sole of my foot and lays me back on the barren expanse of the fitted sheet. His voice when he comes makes me want to cry.
“Don’t,” he says. “Don’t...”
CHAPTER TEN
The loss of the secret of my nicks is a heavy blow. Since I started laying them at the age of ten, no one other than the occasional doctor has seen them. But my initial dismay has faded, has shifted to a strang
e exhibitionist thrill, the almost-sexual release of knowing he’s uncovered my secret. He’s pushed farther into me than anyone has before.
Something is changing in him, too. I can see that he believes he’s found some sort of key, something he’s been looking for, a missing piece to the puzzle of me. He’s harder on me now. He pinches me; he bites and pulls my hair. He demands all the space inside me when we fuck. He watches my reactions, catalogs the things that get us both off.
Outside of bed he’s become tender, even doting. He’s working his way around my rickety bungalow, fixing the leaky plumbing, replacing the screens and faucets. He arrives one Saturday with two friends and a truck bed full of lumber, and together they rip up my old porch and replace it. The next weekend he shows up with brushes and buckets of paint, and we work our way from one end to the other, with the music turned up and a hash pipe glowing on the steps. The next day, when the paint is dry, he bends me over the sturdy new bannister. I come twice, the scent of sawdust and turpentine in the air, and leave a row of half-moons with my fingernails in the fresh paint.
* * *
“Truth or dare?” Jack says.
I hesitate, weighing my options.
We’re in Jack’s living room. Midnight has long since come and gone, in a haze of sex and weed and lukewarm wine. I’m wearing his linen shirt and nothing else, having lost my panties in a bet two hours before.
“Truth,” I say.
Jack starts making chicken noises that end in a burble from the candy-striped bong on the coffee table.
“Bite me,” I say. “Truth.”
He exhales, slouches back against the cushions. His bare chest gleams in the firelight, the skin wrinkling over his abdomen like folds of thick velvet on a table. He takes off his glasses and cleans the lenses with a corner of the blanket we’ve dragged in from the bedroom.
He’s working on a pirate ship. The pieces are laid out neatly across the coffee table: masts like matchsticks, delicate twine for the ropes. He has tossed out the “faggoty” skull-and-crossbones decal, saying that the shape and color are enough to indicate its rogue status.
“Give me a number,” he says. “How many men have seen that tattoo on your pussy?”
I roll my eyes and drop a tiny ball of weed into the cup of the bong.
“Seriously? Why are men always so obsessed with statistics?”
“We like to know our place in the batting order.”
“You’re up, stud, isn’t that enough?”
“No.”
I flick the lighter and set the weed aflame. Smoke begins to fill the chamber. I breathe it in, hold it, let it go. “Well, as it happens, the tattoo is a fairly new addition and you are the only man to have seen it. Other than the guy who put it here, that is.”
“Fuck. That’s not what I meant.”
“Then you should’ve said what you meant.”
“How many men have fucked you?”
“Sorry, your turn is over.”
He smiles lazily. “What was it like, having a male tattoo artist do that piece?”
“I don’t know. Kind of surreal...”
“Did it turn you on?”
His deep, quiet voice melts through my buzz.
“Yes.”
“Did it make you wet?”
“Yeah. I could feel his breath on my hip.”
“Mmm-hmm. Did you wish he’d bend you over and fuck you, right there on the table?”
I lay back, prop my legs over the back of the couch, angled so that Jack won’t be able to see between them. With my head tipped over the edge of the seat cushion, I watch the upside-down flames and the flickering yellow light on the ceiling, as though a super-8 movie is about to begin.
“No, I wanted him to finish my tattoo.”
“Liar.”
“It’s my turn, anyway. Truth or dare?”
“What do you think?”
“I’m running out of dares.”
“Not my problem.” He runs a hand up my thigh.
I mull this over. He has already collected his mail from the end of the driveway, naked, singing “California Girls” at the top of his lungs while I watched from the doorway, wrapped in a blanket, shaking with helpless laughter. He’s shameless and cannot be humiliated. I decide on a different approach.
I open my legs, let one foot rest on the top of his thigh. His back grows rigid and his hand begins a downward slide from my knee.
“Don’t touch,” I say. “And don’t look. Not for thirty minutes.”
He groans. “Thirty stoned minutes, those are like dog years—”
“Hands in your lap.”
“Fuck.”
At first I think he won’t take the dare. Then he tears his gaze from between my legs and sits in mock chastity on his side of the couch, fingers interlaced, knees together.
“Truth or dare,” he says. “Goddamn, I want to look at you.”
I unfasten the button between my breasts to let his shirt fall away.
“You’re doing great,” I tell him, nudging his swelling hard-on with my toes. “I think I’ll take the dare, since whatever it is, you won’t be watching.”
“Aren’t you clever.”
He leans forward to pack another hit. I blink up at the ceiling, watching the patterns of light through half-closed eyes the way you’d watch clouds go by from a picnic blanket. I imagine the gurgle of the bong as a creek running nearby. I close my eyes, then remember that Jack’s dare will need to be monitored, and open them again.
“Here’s the dare,” he says, exhaling. “You’re going to find someone. A guy, whoever you want. You’re going to break into his house, and you’re going to take me with you.”
“No.”
“Can’t say no. You agreed to the dare.”
“That’s not—”
“That’s the dare.”
“Jack. If I get caught in some strange guy’s house, it’s bad but sort of ridiculous. We know that, right? But if you get caught, or we get caught, that’s another thing altogether. No one is going to laugh it off and send us on our way.”
“So you’re afraid.”
“I’m cautious.”
“I thought you had balls.”
“Yes, well, if you turned your head, you’d see that I don’t.”
“Fuck. Is it thirty minutes yet?”
“Not even five.”
He leans back, staring straight ahead of him. I follow his sight line and realize he can see our reflection in the glass door. Our images float like spirits on the night sky, dancing orange and purple, our pale skin warmed by the firelight. A ribbon of gold highlight flows across his shoulders. My torso is a horizontal slash on the couch, which is sunk in the shadows so that we appear to be levitating over a murky abyss.
Our reflections gaze at each other.
“Take the dare,” he says. “And have another hit.”
I blink. The dimensions of the room feel strange, as if the walls are closing in.
“Fine,” I say. “It’s my turn. And I’m gonna need a truth.”
Jack is silent. I wait, unable to judge the passage of time, floating in the moment with only the last feeble pops of the dying fire to penetrate the buzz in my ears.
“What do you want to know?” he says at last.
I get the impression that any question would be unwelcome, but I’m full of courage.
“What really happened with Rosemary?”
His face remains hidden in the reflection, so I turn to watch his profile. His nose has a small bump along the bridge, as though it’s been broken—possibly more than once.
He turns to face me. A muscle in his jaw twitches.
“That’s thirty minutes. Time for your next dare.”
“That’s not even close to thirty minutes. And what if I want truth?”
“Forget it. Come with me.”
“No, I’m comfortable.”
Jack gets up and stands for a moment looking down at me. I begin to feel self-conscious; I press my thighs together and pull his shirt across my breasts.
“Get up, Alice.”
But he doesn’t wait for me to move. He bends over and scoops me off the couch. I watch us leave the room through the scattered reflection in the window, and turn the corner to his bedroom.
He tosses me on the bed and goes to his chest of drawers. When he turns back, I see what’s in his hand.
“No no no.” I’m scrambling up.
But Jack is right there, blocking my path. He won’t let me get to my feet.
“Shh,” he says. “You’ll be fine.”
“Jack—”
“Don’t you trust me? Look where you are.”
I blink and try to clear my head. I’m drunk, annihilated on weed. I have been alone with Jack for hours now. He’s been all over me. Inside me. It’s too late to worry about shifting the balance of power, too late to parse degrees of control.
He begins to slide the sleeves of his shirt down my arms.
“You don’t want to do this for me?”
I try to improvise.
“No, it’s just that I read that Stephen King story, you know the one, where the guy dies and the wife is handcuffed to the bed, and—”
Jack smiles.
“I’m thirty-two. Swear to God, I won’t die on you.”
My heart races, and fear begins to burn through the weed and the wine. “Please, Jack, let’s do something else.”
“This is a dare, baby, you don’t negotiate a dare.”
“I didn’t ask—”
He reclaims his shirt. I shiver and cross my arms over my chest.
“I don’t need you to ask. Give me your wrist.”