Someone Else's Love Story (26 page)

“Rule one.” I said, “No kissing.”

“Oh, hell yeah, no kissing on the mouth.”

“Not on the anywhere!” I said. “I want to do this straight-up missionary. Fast and dirty, just long enough that I know what it’s like.”

“Right. Get in, get out, nobody gets hurt. So to speak,” he said. “Also, I have to be really drunk.”

I said, “Oh, ouch!”

He grinned. “Not because you aren’t damn cute. You know you are. It’s for later, when you never want to look at me again. I want plausible deniability. My story is, the whole thing is a blur, and I don’t remember what your nipples look like.”

“What about me?”

He turned his mouth down, like thinking, and said, “Mmm . . . I don’t care if you know what my nipples look like.”

“I’m serious,” I said, and smacked him. “Should I get drunk?”

“No. You have to be dead sober. You remember it all, because we’re not doing this twice. Then rule fifty-six . . .” He quirked an eyebrow at my puzzled look and said, “I lost count. Fifty-six is, we go right now. Boom! Done. No thinking, before or after.”

I nodded, and he got up, heading for the kitchen. I put the futon down into a bed, and he came back with a bottle of tequila and a shot glass. He’d already downed one, I could tell from his watery eyes. I took the bottle and poured him another.

He said, “Gimme a minute. I don’t want to puke it all back up and have to start over.”

“Plus puking is not sexy.”

He wiped his reddened eyes and said, in a teacherly and disapproving voice, “Shandi. This is not about being sexy. Can we all get on the same damn page?”

I laughed, and he downed the second one. He did five shots in all, in less than half an hour. Lord, but he was drunk.

Then we did it.

He claimed later he didn’t remember much at all, just as he had said. And this was merciful, because me? I remembered.

I remembered him slurring, “This is weird to do without kissing,” as he placed my hand over the fly of his jeans. There was a wad of something down there, oddly soft.

“Can you even do this? Why is it floppetty?” I asked, but even as I spoke, it stirred, like something waking up. I jerked my hand away.

He started laughing and said, “Don’t be funny. Me laughing will not help the floppetty situation. Take off your shirt.” When I hesitated, he said, “Big talk, but this isn’t going to happen with our clothes on.” He peeled his own shirt off over his head and then pulled his jeans all the way down his endlessly long body. He sat down naked. I was keeping my eyes carefully forward, but what I could make out in my peripheral vision didn’t seem particularly ready to have sex.

I struggled out of my shirt and my bra, and after I tossed them aside, it seemed fair that I should get to look. So I did. In the few seconds my eyes had been covered by my top, Walcott had undergone some changes. Radical ones.

“It’s that easy?” I said, fascinated.

“I’m a nineteen-year-old straight guy, Shandi. Those right there are boobs. Yeah. It’s pretty much that easy.”

I hadn’t ever seen a penis up close in human person before. It was weird-as-hell-looking, like a space alien hiding in my best friend’s pants. But a friendly alien, with a nice color. A nice shape. I leaned down to look at it up close, and me doing that, it got even readier, pushing itself up like a creature with its own life and movement, rising from the familiar long, skinny body I had seen a thousand times in swim trunks.

“Look, if this was for real, there would be kissing here,” he said, waving his hand around like a drunken conductor. “And you know, some rolling around, some rubbing and stuff. And then!” He banged his hands together and then threw them apart, sideways, almost knocking his laptop off the dresser. “Then we would make the sex.”

“Let’s skip to the end,” I said.

“You are like most guys’ dream girlfriend. Skip to the end. Ha!” He started laughing again, and it went down a little. So weird. He looked at himself and then covered his eyes like a long, stringy baby playing naked peek-a-boo. “Watch this,” he said. “Looking at boobs in three, two, one . . . Now!”

Bang, it was completely ready again.

I said, “How does that even . . .”

“It is what it is.”

He opened his top dresser drawer, and handed me a bottle of lubricant. Then he took out a condom and started working it on.

“Why do you have this stuff?” I asked, reading the label like I thought the lubricant might have basic sex instructions. “You and Jenna broke up a month ago.”

“I am, above all things, a hopeful man,” Walcott said, lolling onto his back. I’d never seen him so drunk. “This is all you now. I’m going to close my eyes and think of England.” He threw one arm over his eyes. “The cliffs! The Cliffs of Dover!”

So it was me on top, methodical and careful, as if I were learning how to use a tampon. The lubricant helped. I felt a weird stretching pressure, and then there we were. I was officially doing it, and it was nothing. I sat there for a minute, until the discomfort faded to an odd fullness. No bells. Not even any tingles. But not painful or scary.

I’d been so preoccupied with the mechanics that I’d almost forgotten Walcott was there. I noticed then that he was breathing weird.

“You okay?” I said, moving myself a little, like an experiment.

“Yeah. Can we be done?” he asked. He sounded slightly strangled.

“I don’t know,” I said. I tried moving again, and it changed his face.

“Let’s be done,” he said.

This was the part I didn’t like remembering. Right then, for really less than a second, I had an awful impulse to not stop. Not because it felt good or because I remotely liked it, but because his skin flushed on his whole chest, and I could tell from how he breathed that he was heading toward something. In that half second, I came to understand that I could push us forward. His body, drunk and helpless, would go forward if I made it, and I wanted that. To be in charge of a man like that. To own him, and it was a mean and vengeful want that had zero to do with sex.

But this was Walcott. I never wanted to do a mean thing to Walcott.

I didn’t want to do a mean sex thing to anyone. Ever.

I said, “Yes, let’s be done.”

I left him and cleaned myself up. I had bled, just a little. I had a weird reaction to seeing those vindicating drops of red on the white Kleenex, like a
See, I told you!
aimed at Mimmy and that pastoral counselor, at my dad and that psychologist. But I didn’t dwell. I’d gotten good at never dwelling. I dressed in the bathroom, and when I got back, Walcott had fumbled drunkenly back into his clothes, too, all the way down to his flip-flops. I came and sat by him.

“I know we said no kissing, but thanks,” I said. I leaned over like I was going to kiss his cheek, and instead I licked it, like a sloppy, disgusting dog lick.

He said, “Gah!” and we both laughed, and that was good.

I picked up the tequila bottle and I did three shots, dumping the liquor down into my empty stomach as fast as I dared, putting a tequila-soaked fence around all my new knowledges. Walcott had a bumper shot. We left the apartment and staggered down the road to the place we called Close Indian, having a rambling conversation about sci-fi movies, and we ate what must have been a thousand pounds of shawarma. I crashed at his place, like normal, and by morning, Walcott and me, we were back to being us.

The only thing he ever said about it later was, “I remember enough to be pretty sure it was ungodly bad. Don’t worry, it will be better with Doug.”

It wasn’t, though. It was much the same, only sweatier, with some pawing at each other first. Doug was grunty and gross. He got lost in it while I floated through, untouched even while he touched me. I couldn’t like him, during, not the way I liked him at dinner. It made me feel sick and small and broken and mean. Once was enough. I broke up with Doug, but it wasn’t any different with Richard.

Now, in my kitchen with Walcott telling me ruinous things about loving me, I realized he was right. It was completely unfair to count that night against him. Especially since that absurd event with Walcott was, to date, the nicest sex I’d ever had.

“You can’t be in love with me, Walcott,” I said, almost sternly. “You just can’t.”

“Too late,” he said.

“Walcott,” I said, because it made me feel so helpless, “I don’t know what to tell you. You say you are in love me, but what am I supposed to do with that?”

He spread his hands and half smiled. “Be in love with me back.”

He didn’t say it pleading or pathetic. He said it like I had asked what to do with a hungry baby or a burning house, and the answer was plain common sense.

But I couldn’t. How could I even think of trying, when my whole body became something electric whenever William walked into a room or smiled or I remembered resting my hand on the sleek, polished oak of his chest?

I stood there, not being in love with Walcott back, with ridiculous numbers of tears falling down helpless out of my eyes.

After half a minute, he smiled, but not a happy smile. He nodded.

“So, I guess that’s that,” he said. “You have to give me some room, Shandi, if you want me to get over this.” And then he left.

Chapter 10

W
illiam is down in the basement, elbows braced on his weight bench and eighty pounds on the bar, sweating so hard he’s in danger of losing his Bluetooth. He started at fifty pounds, and he’s been doing sets all morning. He is working his triceps now. Eighty is not hard on his arms, but he can feel his heartbeat in his side, a painful second throbbing.

Waiting for Bialys to call and tell him that Stevie has completed the business of being killed, he has stretched his body to the limit of what his healing abdomen will allow. Perhaps beyond it. His side burns and pulses with the rhythm of the lifting and his heart.

Today Steven Parch is being taken off the ventilator. His respiration will cease, and that will shortly end all of his body’s other functions. A sheet will be pulled over his face, and he will be taken to the morgue. If the uncle does not claim the body and its attendant expenses, the state will pay for a cremation. Parch will be reduced to gray dust, and even the dust will not be saved or set aside.

This isn’t wholly William’s doing. He can see multiple causes, high among them, Parch’s own poor decisions. But it is not separate from him, either. William’s causal relationship to this specific reduction of a complex living system into dust cannot be negated.

William’s Bluetooth chirps. His arms set down the eighty pounds, while his abdomen feels as if he’s set down more than double that. He walks over to the phone and looks at the screen, to be sure. It’s Bialys. He taps the Bluetooth, leaning on the sideboard.

“Is it finished?” William says, instead of hello. His manners and his phone voice have abandoned him. He sounds raspy and too loud.

Bialys clears his throat. “No. I’m sorry.”

The red pulse in his side becomes less interesting. “The uncle changed his mind?”

“No, they took him off at nine,” Bialys says. “Parch started breathing on his own. I waited around, but he’s still breathing.”

William digests this, feeling the pain in his abdomen receding in small, lapping surges. “What’s the prognosis?”

“Doctors say so much shit, who knows,” Bialys says. “The uncle signed a do not resuscitate, but he won’t end feeding or hydration. Says he wouldn’t do that to a dog. For now? Parch is stable.”

“Thank you,” William says. “Keep me in the loop?”

“Will do,” Bialys says, and closes the connection.

William likes this about him, how his conversations begin with what matters and end precisely when they end. More people should learn to skip the how-are-yous and see-you-soons. He wants to call Paula, disseminate this information with no preamble, and hang up. Perhaps he can start a trend. He likes this idea so much, he’s a little giddy.

Why is he grinning? It is foolish. Stevie could still die. In fact, his death is probable. Were he to wake up, William wouldn’t mind if he spontaneously combusted five minutes later. But in this moment, all that matters is that William has not killed him. He doesn’t want to be the catalyst for loss, even though Stevie’s child is a probable fiction, and if real, could be better parented by wolves.

He goes up the stairs, out of the weight room. On the hearth is a Lego Death Star, the figurines frozen in the middle of the last scenario he helped Natty reenact from a movie he has never seen. The secret hatch is open and three of Natty’s favorites are imperiled in a trash compactor. Natty will be anxious to rescue them.

Also, Shandi’s folder is lying on the coffee table. It contains William’s lab reports, as well a dossier on Clayton Lilli, courtesy of Paula. Paula wanted to drive it over to her house, but William retained it. Shandi came to him for help, and he wants to see it through. Shandi hasn’t come back to claim it, though. While he was waiting on Steven Parch’s death, he was glad to be alone. Now, it seems odd. She hasn’t come since Paula chased her out on Wednesday. Meanwhile, he sat on her information, absorbed in his own waiting.