She pulled the hem of her dress down. One of her sandals had come off in the excitement, and she slid her foot back into it.
He kissed her again, quick this time. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”
40
“I’m actually not a real writer,” Kristen said.
“Oh?” said Mitch. “What does that mean?”
“I’m actually a third-grade reading teacher.”
“That’s awesome.”
“I write a little, though, like, on the side. Nights. Weekends. When I’m not totally exhausted. I haven’t published anything, though.”
“Well,” said Mitch, “every published writer spends a good bit of time being an unpublished writer. Part of the gig.” He’d heard a writer say this once, and he wondered if he’d repeated it right—if he’d arranged the words correctly. He must have, because she smiled.
“I’m gonna tell my mom that the next time she reminds me how much dental hygienists make.”
He leaned in to hear her, and she leaned in to be heard, and she smelled lovely. Not Starbursts, like Jenny, but good nonetheless. Some other candy, maybe. They were talking in Terry’s kitchen now—a study in barren stainless steel—but there were speakers mounted everywhere, so it was still loud, and Mitch had lost track of how many drinks he’d had. Everyone else was out in the TV room taking turns playing music from their respective eras. Mitch and Kristen were tucked away a bit, but they could still see their friends through a cutout in the wall over the sink.
“Both my sisters are hygienists,” she said. “They have cars and houses—like, real houses. I live in a one-bedroom with that ho over there.” She pointed to Molly, who at present was next to the flat-screen, showing Doug her impressive right calf muscle.
Doug nodded, chin in hand. Over the noise, Mitch heard him say, “So, you’re a toe-striker when you run. That’s how you get all that definition.”
“Can’t hardly blame her,” said Kristen. “If I had legs like her, I’d be showing everyone my calves, too.”
Mitch glanced down at the girl’s short legs, which were perfectly nice as far as he could tell. The Vans on her feet had Wonder Woman logos on them, which made him laugh.
“You have nice teeth, by the way,” she said.
“I do?”
“Family business. It’s my curse. I’m conditioned to notice everyone’s dental situation. And you look exactly like an English teacher, too, by the way. It’s kinda scary.”
“I’ve been told that,” he said.
“It’s not a bad thing. I like English teachers.”
“I was gonna wear my tweed blazer, but it’s warm tonight. Seemed like overkill.”
Kristen smiled. “Good call.”
He’d forgotten what this felt like. The rush of being this physically close to a girl he barely knew—and making her smile. “So, what?” he said. “Short stories? Novels? Nonfiction? Flash fiction? What do you write on nights and weekends?”
“Essays, mostly,” she said. “If I get enough of them, maybe I’ll try to, I don’t know, get an agent or something. That’s what writers do, right? Get agents?”
“I have no idea,” he said. “Sounds right, though.”
“I have seven essays that I don’t totally hate. Fifteen pages or so each. Which feels maybe halfway there.”
“I’d love to read them,” he said.
She looked up. “You would?”
He said yes but found himself suddenly brokenhearted with the knowledge that (a) he never would, and (b) he was only saying this because he found her attractive.
She tucked some hair behind her ear—just a simple thing he’d seen girls and women do a million times—but he found himself considering what it’d be like to bite her there, lightly, just above her star-shaped earring. Maybe she’d sink into him. Maybe she’d like it and go all dizzy and dumbstruck.
“I could send them to you,” she said. “I don’t know if they’re good yet. They probably aren’t. I want them to be. I’m trying to make them good.”
For nearly twenty years now, when students pre-apologized for their writing, he told them to stop it—to own their work, dammit. Amateurs apologize, not writers. But he let it go this time. Partly because he wasn’t her teacher, but mostly because he could see how much she cared.
Someone yelled “Shots!” again from the TV room.
It was Jenny. She stood over four shot glasses full of perfectly clear liquid, holding a saltshaker and a little lime-shaped squeeze bottle of juice. “And this time,” she said, “we’re taking it up a notch.”
Kristen and Mitch stepped back into the TV room, and they, along with Abigail and Terry and Molly and Doug, stood watching, because everyone knew what was coming. Despite their age differences, they’d all been on spring break. They’d all been too drunk in bars, in summers past. They’d all made questionable tequila-related decisions, and they’d all woken feeling shitty and full of regret.
Jenny stood on the tips of her toes and slowly licked Alan’s neck.
“It’s Girls Gone Wild in this place!” shouted Terry, and Molly shook her head. Kristen shrugged up at Mitch and smiled.
“That’s right, ladies,” Jenny said. “Body shots.” She sprinkled salt in the crook of Alan’s neck and held her shot glass up for the crowd. Then she licked the salt off Alan, took the drink down, and squirted lime juice into her mouth, straight from the bottle. When it was over, Terry stood stunned-looking, like the victim of a slow-moving hit-and-run, and Jenny set the shot glass upside down on the bar. “Your turn, bitches!”
Abigail looked at Terry, and he smiled. “I’m not scared,” he said, and when she licked his neck, he grinned and said, “Wait, wait…a little to the left,” and everyone laughed.
Molly, the athlete, took her time with the whole thing when it was her turn, making a show of it for her friends. She wrapped one toned leg around Doug’s waist—no easy feat—and had her way with him and her drink.
And then they were all looking at Mitch.
As drunk as the Husbands were, he could see conflict in their eyes, like each of them was thinking, simultaneously, Are you really gonna do this? and You’re not really going to do this, right?
Jenny, Abigail, and Molly showed no such signs of inner turmoil. “We’re waiting!” said Jenny.
Kristen looked up at him. Another shrug. She walked around the couch and passed her friends to get her shot and its accoutrements. When she returned to Mitch’s side, she said, “Maybe this’ll make a good essay someday.”
The sensation of the girl’s tongue on his neck took his breath away. And then it took it away a second time when she licked the rough salt off his skin. She put her hand on his chest both times, flush against his heart, supporting herself as she stood, like the other girls before her, on her toes. When Kristen swallowed the shot and the little blast of lime juice, she batted her eyes up at him and bit her lip, and that nearly took his breath away, too.
It took Mitch a second to recover while the Husbands laughed and applauded. And then it took him another second to realize that his hand was in his pocket—his left one. It’d been there this entire time: when the girls arrived, while he chatted with Kristen, while she used him as a human salt lick.
Maybe he’d put it there on purpose, maybe not. Either way, the result was the same. His ring was hidden from view. He was taking a break from being married.
41
He undressed her this time.
As frenzied as everything had been downstairs, coming up to his room reset things, and he moved more slowly.
“This dress is hot,” he said, “but it’s stupid. I don’t think you should be wearing it.” He reached around and pulled the zipper down from the nape of her neck, and then he went to his knees as he guided her dress down over her hips and legs. He kissed her stomach, and she squeezed the top o
f his head and twisted his hair.
The light stubble of his chin brushed against her belly, and he looked up at her. “I just realized,” he said. “You know that I don’t even know your last name?”
“It’s Butler, but that’s not imp—”
The rest of this was lost when he bit her gently. He stood up and smiled. “Nice to meet you, Jessica Butler.” And then he told her that her bra was stupid, too. “Even worse than that dumb dress.”
In just her underwear, it was cooler in his room than last time, and goosebumps rose on the bare surface of her skin. He rubbed her arms with the palms of his hands. “You’re cold. I could adjust the AC.”
She kissed him, though, to stop him from being like this.
In her pre-Mitch life, Jessica had slept with a total of five guys. Some of those guys were crazy about her, and some of them simply wanted to fuck her. The ones who were crazy about her acted like Ryan was acting now: lovely and sweet and gentle and concerned. But that was not why she was there.
She sat on his bed and looked up at him. “Why are you wearing so many clothes?” she whispered, and then she watched him strip down to his boxer briefs. She lay down on her back, and he settled gently on top of her.
Anticipation was loud in her head, like blood rushing.
“Did you see the end table I made you?” he said into her neck.
“What?”
“I set it out so you’d see it.”
“Oh,” she said. “Yeah. It was nice.”
“I never used that color stain before. I think it turned out really coo—”
She bit his lower lip and grabbed him over his underwear to shut him up. She rolled onto her stomach, and he kissed her between her shoulders and down her spine. As he pulled her underwear down, she closed her eyes and he kissed her lower back. He took a handful of her hair and pulled, which was exactly what she wanted him to do.
She imagined the possibility of years and years of this.
Forget reality and jealousy and an infinite number of unanswerable questions. Her happyish life with Mitch could continue on, and every once in a while a beautiful stranger would make her gasp. It’d be like some French movie, explicit and subtitled. The full evolution of a marriage.
Her iPhone had been cast onto the floor next to the bed, atop her dress. She opened her eyes at the exact moment that its screen lit up. It was a text from Luke.
Are you coming home soon Mrs. B???
The messages flowed from there, one text after another popping onto her screen.
Jude started freaking out.
And then Emily started freaking out.
I don’t know what to do.
Never seen them like this.
They keep asking where you and Mr. B are?
“Are you okay?” Ryan asked.
She rolled over and pulled a blanket over herself.
“Jessica?”
“My kids,” she said.
“Your kids? You…you have kids?”
She nodded and watched his face transform; she watched the desire fade.
“Yes,” she said. “And they need me.”
42
There aren’t a lot of buzzkills as thorough and deadly as a mirror.
As Mitch stood in Terry’s bathroom looking at himself, though, he was somehow able to set aside the papery skin under his eyes and the mother-of-pearl of his teeth and the fact that he looked, quite clearly, forty and drunk.
Jessica had told him that having sex with someone else made her feel alive again, and as rap music thudded along on the other side of the bathroom door, Mitch got it. The look Kristen gave him in the TV room, her saliva still damp on his skin, had made him feel just that.
Alive.
The barista, and the bookstore woman, and the girl from Towson U, and even Ellen straddling him with her tongue in his mouth…those weren’t actual temptations. They were pratfalls—moments of slapstick in his ham-fisted middle age. This was different. He took a breath and put his hand on his chest, where his heart was working double time. He took another breath, and then another, willing it to slow down. This was a calming trick he’d taught himself when he was a student teacher, years ago, and was nervous facing rooms full of bored-looking students.
He put his ring in his pocket and gave himself one last look in the mirror.
When he opened the door, there was music and laughing, and his intention was to rejoin it—to find Kristen and see where things went. But on his way down the short hallway that led to the kitchen and TV room, he passed Terry’s kids’ bedroom. He could’ve walked right by, but he didn’t. Instead, he stopped to look at the half-built SVÄRTA, which was piled like a shipwreck in the corner beside two small desks, one for each of Terry’s boys. There was a chest of drawers and two soon-to-be-replaced single beds, crisply made. Terry’s oldest, Will, was Jude’s age, and his youngest, Trevor, was a few months older than Emily. The sparseness of their room here at their dad’s apartment was jarring. There was a crayon drawing of a purple and black raven on one of the desks. On the opposite bed, a stuffed monkey lay on its side. It still had the price tag stuck through its ear. There was a kid-sized baseball mitt at the foot of the other bed—stiff and rigid, obviously never used. That was it.
Together, the effect of these random things caused a silence in his head powerful enough to drown out everything else.
It was a chillingly lifeless space, like a room in an institution for wayward boys, and he thought of Jude’s and Emily’s rooms at home, cluttered with Legos and chapter books and life. With discarded art projects, Hot Wheels, fidget spinners, and Beanie Boos arranged just so. He thought of Jessica and Emily painting Emily’s room together the previous winter. It was a project for the women, they insisted, barring Mitch and Jude from helping. Jessica wore a bandana as a headband, and Emily painted her bright-pink initials on the white primer.
Mitch had seen the kids no more than four hours earlier. But now he missed them so intensely that he had to grip the molding around the doorjamb because his knees felt so weak.
When he got to the kitchen, it was empty, and he stood next to the refrigerator and thought about what he was going to say to his friends and to these girls he’d just met, to Kristen. He could see all of them from where he stood, clustered together. The Husbands were laughing, dancing like goofballs, because that was the only way they knew how. The girls were dancing, too, and they were all barefoot now, their flip-flops and strappy sandals cast aside, except for Kristen, who still wore her Wonder Woman Vans. He silently wished her the best—the best in her writing, in being a third-grade reading teacher, in life.
And then he put his ring back on and left.
43
“Just hold up a sec, okay?”
Ryan was walking and putting on his jeans at the same time. It looked like dancing, and he nearly fell.
She grabbed her shoes off the floor.
“What’s the deal?” he asked.
“They’re afraid of E.T.,” she said. “My kids.”
“What? E.T. E.T.? The alien?”
“Yes. It’s this whole thing.”
He laughed and zipped his jeans. “So they’re not, like, hurt? They’re not dying? They’re scared of a fictional character, and so you have to leave?”
“Yes.”
He put his hand on her hip, pulling her back to him, away from the door. He put his other hand on her breast and kissed her neck. “A few more minutes of being scared won’t kill them, you know. Right?”
“Ryan, I have to go.”
“You’re fucking serious?”
She pulled away, and he stepped back, and she could see by the look on his face that he genuinely didn’t get it. Someday, maybe, he would. He’d have a kid, and that kid would be scared and calling for him, and he’d think back to this moment. But for now he was j
ust some dude in a row house. He might as well have been from another planet.
“Fine,” he said. “At least let me walk you out.”
“You don’t have to. My car’s just around the block.”
She shut his bedroom door and headed for the stairs. On the first floor, sawdust grit hit the soles of her feet, and she held the banister to put her sandals on.
Ryan came down after her. “Stop it. Didn’t you watch The Wire? We’re in Bodymore, Murdaland, here.”
It would take her twenty to twenty-five minutes to get home, depending on the stoplights, and she thought of Emily and Jude not knowing where she was, and it made her feel sick to her stomach. She didn’t belong here. This entire thing was a mistake.
Halfway to the front door, she was startled to see that there was someone else there, standing in the kitchen. Shirtless, like Ryan, he was black, and he had shockingly blue eyes. Both of which were now fixed on her.
“Oh shit,” he said. “Sorry, guys. Didn’t know anyone else was here. We’re making nachos if you want in.”
Even in her current state, Jessica could plainly see that he was gorgeous. Behind him, facing the open refrigerator with a hand on her hip, stood a girl with mismatched underwear and messy hair. She was skinny and pale, and even from behind, Jessica could see that she was younger than all of them. There was a mole on her back. Her shoulder blades protruded like budding sparrow’s wings. Jessica noticed all of these things at once, but it was the girl’s right ankle that made her stop walking. A blotch of faded black pen ink, like a bruise.
“Darnell, what the hell?” the girl said. “Did you seriously not get me my root beer?” Then the girl turned around. And when she did, she saw Jessica. “Holy…fucking…shit.”
It was Scarlett Powers.
Ryan held Jessica’s coat. Darnell held a bag of Trader Joe’s corn chips. Neither of them moved.
Scarlett looked at Ryan and then back at Jessica. “Wow, though, Doc. That dress is hot as shit.”
Last Couple Standing Page 20