by Alison Tyler
Dori continued to watch, stuck fast to the spot, thinking about what she was seeing. There’d been plenty of talk of coke in high school. In fact, several members of the class ahead of hers, the seniors of 1986, had been part of an actual cocaine ring. The most popular kids had created it, robbing from each other’s homes during parties, selling the televisions and VCRs, and buying coke with the profits. The scandal had been astronomical, with kids formerly destined for Ivy League schools winding up with court dates instead. But Dori hadn’t hung out with any of them. Her mates had been into underage drinking, not drugs.
When she’d worked at the beauty supply store, there’d been a buzz about coke, as well. But Bette had always shielded Dori from the seedier side of things. She’d behaved like a mama tiger protecting her young. Hypocritically, Dori realized now, because the woman seemed to enjoy her mind-altering devices. Or maybe Bette hadn’t wanted Dori to become what she was.
Gael made a motion, and Bette slid her panties down her thighs and over her kick-ass boots. She stepped out of them, and Gael resumed the position, licking and sucking Bette’s pussy in such a fierce way that Dori imagined she could feel his tongue on the split between her own legs. She’d never realized that watching would be such a turn-on and, for an instant, she actually considered touching herself. The need was there. The urge to slip the hem of her short dress up to her hips, to put one hand under the waistband of her panties and rub her clit.
This was her fantasy after all, wasn’t it? She ought to be able to do what she wanted. In the past, she had often been upset with herself for not taking the initiative in her dreams. Like the time she’d dreamt about having sex with Jon Bon Jovi, only to have him say that he wanted to bang Violet instead, but that Dori could stay and watch if she wanted to. How could she have allowed herself to be tossed aside in her somnolant state? She’d been annoyed at Violet for a week, without ever explaining why.
Still, something kept her from the act of public masturbation, and she simply watched, memorizing each frame for later use.
Gael was handsome, without a doubt. The silver in his hair seemed only to emphasize his good looks. Now that she was an adult, too, she could finally appreciate just how attractive he was. The fact that he and Bette were doing coke didn’t make Dori less interested. She was amazed at how unabashed the two were in their vices, and she realized that she found their lack of inhibitions defiantly sexy.
Because now, Gael was standing up, and he gracefully spun Bette around, so that her palms were flat on the bricks and his body was directly behind hers. He started fast, slamming against Bette, thrusting into her at a speeded up rhythm, and Bette was groaning as if the pleasure was too much for her to handle in silence. God, the woman was sexy. She had her head back, her mouth open, eyes shut tight. Gael kept her moving to his own inner beat, hands on her hips, pummeling her.
Dori was going to have to give in. Any moment, she might simply come from the proximity to their pleasure. Like winning a contact high at a party where the marijuana smoke reached the ceiling. A contact orgasm. Was there such a thing? Could she get off simply from watching?
Gingerly, she pressed the heel of her palm against her pussy. Even through the barrier of her white minidress and nude-colored panties beneath, she could feel exactly how wet she was. Good sex begets good sex. That’s what Violet always said. The fact that she’d been on a cold streak until hooking up with Luke flickered through her mind. She’d had no desire for the past few months to be with anyone sexually. But now look at her. First, she’d been both Dominatrix and captive to the King of her high school. Now, she was nothing more than a Peeping Tom, palm dancing in circles over her sex, fingers cupping through the two layers of her clothing. After only seconds, she was forced to bite down on the groan of pleasure that threatened to escape from her own lips.
Still, she didn’t want to be seen, to be caught.
She only wanted to watch.
She couldn’t remember ever having watched anything like this before. On her twenty-first birthday, she’d walked into an unlocked unisex bathroom at Zebra in the city to find two men fucking. She’d been drunk enough to stop and stare for a moment, forever memorizing the image, and the men hadn’t seemed to mind. And then she’d muttered apologies – For what? For the fact that they’d left the door unlocked? – and scurried back to the table to tell Violet what she’d seen.
But this was different. She wasn’t apologizing. She wasn’t making her presence known in any form. She was simply gazing in wonder.
Gael said something to Bette after a few more thrusts, and the woman pulled forward with agonizing slowness. Dori caught a quick glimpse of Gael’s cock, and she drew in her breath at the length. Bette was a lucky girl, wasn’t she? Then Dori saw Bette turn around and go down on her knees, not seeming to feel the dirt and grit through her stockings. Or not caring at the bite of pain, if she felt it at all. Slowly, Bette began to slowly lick her own sweet juices off the man’s glistening rod, and Gael put his hands on Bette’s shoulders and moaned.
A fresh shudder traveled up Dori’s spine at the vision.
There was something so damn dirty about that to Dori. Something crazy sexy about the sight, as well. Did Bette enjoy the way she tasted? She seemed to. She sighed and licked her lips when she paused for breath. And there was no question at all about whether Gael enjoyed the way Bette’s mouth felt on him. Dori could tell from the way he stood, from the way his body seemed suddenly to grow tense, that he was close to release. She wondered if Bette would drink him dry, or if he would pull back from her sweet mouth before he came. Would he decorate her skin with the milky drops of his pleasure, or would he shoot against the burnt-red brick wall, using his own come to add his own graffiti there? Which concept did Dori find sexier? She didn’t know.
All she knew was that this was better than any porn she’d ever seen. Being close enough to feel a part of the scenario, yet removed enough not to actually have to engage.
Dori watched until an iron-gray alley cat leapt down next to her from the top of the rusty green dumpster, and she jumped. She saw Gael turn his head toward her, and she backed up quickly, retreating toward the mouth of the alley and then onto the main thoroughfare. Her legs felt weak as she walked, but she didn’t slow down the pace. She wanted to get as far away from Gael and Bette as possible.
Maybe they didn’t really exist. Maybe this whole thing was just a dream. But she wasn’t prepared to hang around and find out for sure.
Dori walked quickly to her house, on a mission for the first time since hitting her head on the concrete outside of the Creamery. She realized that she could have gone here right from the start. Gael had given her the necessary information earlier in the day: her family was away for the month. There simply had been too many thoughts for her to process at once. But now that she headed through the familiar lanes toward the house she’d grown up in, she remembered that the person who had been planning on house-sitting had canceled at the last minute. Her mother had hired a neighborhood kid to water the plants instead.
She had a month.
She could go home, pretend that she was a relative. Nobody would know, right?
That is, if she didn’t wake up soon. If she didn’t roll over in bed and realize she’d hit the snooze button on the alarm clock once too often. That she’d missed her flight. That she’d need to spend all day in the airport on standby. But even the misery of flying standby was comforting to her, as was the concept of her real world, her real life, away from this limbo she found herself in right now. She longed for a place where her cell phone worked, a place where she could get her email.
A place where any one of her many friends would come to her rescue at a moment’s notice.
Without any trouble at all, she found the key under the chicken-shaped terracotta planter in the back yard – where it had been kept in case of emergency for as long as she could remember – then opened the back door. As soon as she walked into the house, she felt eighteen again. Or maybe
she felt six. Everything about the interior of the rear hallway brought her back to her youth. The smells were exactly what she remembered, a combination of the leftover odors of her mother’s amateurish cooking, her father’s pipe smoke, and the vanilla-scented candles that her mother burned every so often in the entryway – often to mask the scent of yet another incinerated roast.
Dori had been in fast motion on the walk home, but now she slowed down, walking in the manner of someone at a museum, admiring artifacts from ancient cultures. She showed the same reverence as she gazed at the fridge with all the photos on the front, pinned in place with a variety of colored alphabet magnets. Pictures of herself and her brother Miles from kindergarten on up. She continued to move slowly, heart pounding, wanting to run away, and yet wanting to spend the rest of her life in this one room.
This was the place where she had last felt really and truly safe.
She sighed and sat down at the kitchen table, then jumped back up again at a noise. The neighbor’s cat had come barging in through the cat door, heading right to her, hopping up onto the kitchen table to be petted.
She stroked the marmalade-hued Tiger Lily and then headed toward the cabinet in the corner. The liquor cabinet. She didn’t care if her headache hadn’t totally dissipated.
What she truly needed was a drink.
Chapter Eight
Dori was lying down on the hideous burnt-orange suede sofa in the living room, her shoes off, feet up on the arm rest. She was slowly sipping her father’s scotch, balancing the glass on the basin of her belly between swallows and, even though she was well beyond drinking age, she felt happily rebellious sipping the liquor. Even more rebellious was the fact that she was paging through one of her father’s vintage copies of Playboy, which she’d come upon in a box on the top shelf of the liquor cabinet. She wondered how much the collection would go for on eBay, and then realized there was no eBay in 1988.
She had a nice mellow mood going, when she heard a noise from directly upstairs.
Jesus. Would she not get a break?
She set the glass on the coffee table, and then started toward the stairs when self-preservation kicked in. She’d been taught never to enter a house with the front door ajar, never to go looking for an intruder if she heard a noise. In Manhattan, there were plenty of horror stories about what happened to friends of friends or neighbors of neighbors who had done just that.
But this world felt so safe. There couldn’t be anything truly dangerous lurking in the bedroom wing upstairs, could there?
Hand on the banister, she wondered whether she should she run out the back door or play Nancy Drew on her own. After a moment, in which she could hear more thumping and rustling, she decided to quietly tiptoe up the stairs to see what was making the noise – she could always lock herself in her parents’ room and call the police if she had to. She hesitated only long enough to lift a baseball bat from the umbrella stand next to the front door and then cautiously made her way up to the second floor, opening her bedroom door just as Chelsea fell in the window in a blonde, pastel-hued heap.
‘I’m sorry,’ the cheerleader said quickly, standing and brushing off the pleats in her kicky little skirt. She was wearing her blue-and-white uniform, which Dori found odd. Why would she be dressed to cheer during the summer? Especially, late at night.
‘Wrong house.’
‘What are you doing here, Shell?’ Dori asked the question before she could stop herself, so shocked to see her best friend’s twin sister climbing into her bedroom window that she spoke the thoughts as they appeared in her brain without any attempt at filtering.
‘How’d you know my name?’
The teenager and the woman stared at each other, then Dori, thinking fast, said, ‘I’m Bill’s cousin. Dori’s talked a lot about you.’ The lie came easy with the liquor. Maybe she would need to carry a flask on her for as long as this fantasy – or whatever it was – lasted. ‘My niece sent a picture from summer vacation last year.’ That could be true, couldn’t it? No, she and Chelsea had never been close, but they were more friends than enemies. ‘What are you doing in my – I mean, her bedroom?’
Just as the words were out of her mouth, a boy climbed in through the window. Marc Dameron. Chelsea’s beau then, ex-husband now. A rebel from the start, with his punk-rock hair and his battered leather jacket. He looked as surprised to see Dori as Chelsea had been, but he gathered his wits quickly. She’d never liked Dameron much. He had a false sense of superiority, but he was a thief. She’d known that even way back when.
‘Wrong house,’ he muttered, starting to head back out the window he’d just climbed through.
‘That’s what she said. Funny how you two didn’t think to use the front door.’ Marc hesitated with his hand on the window sill, then turned back to face the women. He looked to Chelsea for help. Hadn’t that always been the case? Dori thought. She’d bailed him out for years.
‘Well …’ Chelsea puffed her cheeks out and looked around the room. ‘You see, it’s the right house, actually. I was just returning something of Dori’s. And I knew she was out of town.’
‘Yeah?’ Dori asked. ‘What were you returning?’ Chelsea’s hands were very obviously empty.
‘I mean, borrowing something …’
How crazy, Dori thought. Chelsea and her man had been looking for a place to get it on. Had they actually fucked in her bed while she and her family had been on vacation? Looked that way. The thought made her wrinkle up her nose in displeasure, but she found that she was actually enjoying Chelsea’s obvious discomfort, although she had no idea why. Maybe it was because Chelsea had sworn she’d been a virgin until her marriage night. Or maybe it was because of the grief Chelsea had given her about fucking Luke after the reunion.
‘What did you want to borrow?’
‘Oh, you know. Her …’ Chelsea’s eyes did a tour of the room again, landing on a poster of a girl on a skateboard flipping through the air. ‘Her skateboard.’
Dori nodded. ‘It’s downstairs, I think. In the closet. You’re welcome to use it while she’s gone. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.’
Chelsea smiled smugly in the way of teenagers who think they have pulled something over on an adult, and she headed past Dori, walking through the house with the confidence she always exuded, a little flick in her hips to make her skirt swirl. Dori stayed where she was. This was only her second time back in her old room, and she felt momentarily hypnotized by the decor. She’d stopped in the room earlier, only long enough to set her purse down on the dresser before fleeing down the stairs to pour another scotch.
The posters on the walls were so familiar: Poison, Bon Jovi, The Police, U2. Movie posters, as well: The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, Pretty In Pink. In and around the posters were assorted oddball decorations. There was a packet of Saltines taped to one wall next to the light switch, and she had no idea why.
Had she really slept in this bed for eighteen years? The room seemed so much smaller than she remembered.
She looked at Dameron, who was sizing her up the way he always did when there was a cute girl in the room. The man had balls. Didn’t seem embarrassed at all to have been caught looking. Dori recalled the way he acted in present day. Whenever she ran into him at a party, he gave her that same look – an expression she’d always read as ‘I wonder what you’d be like in bed?’ And at hellos and goodbyes he hugged her for a beat too long, hand sliding down to rest on her ass if he thought nobody was looking. He was vile. She’d always thought so.
‘You house sitting?’ he asked, settling himself down on Dori’s leopard-print bedspread, kicking his legs out and getting comfortable. He had on scuffed black high-tops that were laced incorrectly.
She nodded. ‘Last minute. I was looking for a vacation, and my father –’ She shook her head, quickly. ‘Dori’s father got in touch with my mother. Set it up.’ Dameron didn’t seem to notice the slip.
‘You live in Manhattan?’
‘Yeah.’
‘G
od, I can’t wait to get there. I’m in this band. We’re going to New York as soon as we get up the money.’
Dori had forgotten that. The band. Their plans. Dameron now was a house painter. At least, that’s what he called himself. He tended to use the excuse as a painter to scope out houses that he hoped to break into. Chelsea had finally left him when he’d been caught, yet again, in a house that didn’t belong to him. The band had never taken off, and she wondered for a moment whether if it had, he might have ended up in a different situation. A different life.
She leant against the wall, looking at him. Although he didn’t know it now, he could look forward to at least seven of his next twenty years spent in prison. She wondered what he would say if she told him that. He wouldn’t believe her, she decided. Who would?
There was a crash and a scream from downstairs, and Dameron jumped up and sprinted down the hall, Dori following him. When she rounded the corner to the hall closet, she started to laugh. She’d forgotten about her mother’s method of cleaning, which could be summed up with a simple sentence: Shove everything into a closet and shut the door. That’s what her mom must have done right before leaving for Europe, because all of the contents had been under pressure in that closet and had come crashing down on Chelsea when she’d opened the door. The lithe blonde girl was totally surrounded by sports equipment, but there was no skateboard in sight. Dori helped Chelsea out of the rubble, lifting off her brother’s lacrosse stick, and pushing away several pairs of roller skates and two soccer balls.
And then Dori remembered.
Her skateboard was under her bed. That’s where she always kept it. When she went back upstairs to her room to snatch it up, she had to reach all the way under the bed, where it had rolled to a rest against the wall. As she backed out from beneath the twin bed, she knocked her shoulder against the wooden slats holding up her mattress.