I looked out over the standing water. Its perimeter was small and greasy, likely toxic, full of trash.
“I’m also thinking of you,” he said.
“That’s good.”
“That’s what you wanted to hear, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Then, yes. I’m thinking about you.”
At home, I found Butters sleeping in a basket of dirty clothes. My bedroom was a mess of boxes and stacks of books and pictures taken off the walls leaning together, their corners wrapped in bubble plastic. I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling. Butters climbed over my chest and I held her there. Her breath smelled sickly sweet.
Five
A week after the dance performance, I’m in the lobby of The Planet’s offices in Ybor. Brian has asked to see me. The floor is an open-style, bare-brick loft space, divided up with chic midcentury furniture and vintage cubicle walls. A neon sign above the sofa in the waiting area reads, DON’T GO VIRAL—START AN EPIDEMIC. This morning, I filed a story about health care for homeless people. It’s possible Brian wants to talk about it. It’s more likely he wants to see me for personal reasons. Since we began sleeping together six months ago, we’ve been doing it mostly in his car, or in public restrooms, or on the spongy floor of my termite-infested living room. Then, a few nights ago, he paid for an Uber to bring me to his house in Tampa. A blue craftsman on a brick street lined with oaks and Spanish moss; the middle-class domesticity of it surprised me. I had always thought of Brian as a boy, not as a man—a few years my senior, in his early thirties but by no means paying a mortgage or mowing a lawn. The stability of his living situation placed him in a higher category. I climbed a set of wooden steps to a shady porch with hanging plants and a red-painted door. The Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes” played inside the house. I looked down at my rolled-up cutoffs and V-neck and dirty black Converse, feeling underdressed.
Brian answered the door with a camera in his hand. It was expensive-looking. I guessed it was the one he had used to take the soft-focus pictures of his ex I’d seen on Instagram a month ago, just before they broke up. He had confided in me about his grief, and I wanted to be compassionate as he mourned the loss of their future. I vaguely wondered if his confidences were strategic, meant to draw me in, to show me how vulnerable he could be, but I fell for it anyway. I swiped through the photo set compulsively: Erin with her daughters, Erin laughing, Erin sleeping on a beach towel. Long after I stopped swiping, I still saw images of Erin projected onto the screen of my mind.
“Stand still,” he said, and aimed the lens at my face. Though I had imagined this moment, it was disappointing to see it enacted, his seduction requiring a prop. Inside the house was painted with accent walls of lime and blueberry. A large, flat-screen TV was mounted in the living room of leather L-couches and a chrome-legged coffee table. It was very IKEA. The few personal touches were black-and-white still lifes and obvious band posters, Wilco and Bowie.
He fumbled with the button of my shorts. We stumbled past the entrance to the eat-in kitchen, and he pinned me against the door frame of his bedroom and fingered me until wetness ran down my legs. “Lie down,” he said, and I noticed then that his room was empty. It was as if he’d just moved in. No dresser, no curtains hung on the windows, an open closet with a few collared shirts. Suddenly I felt cold, but I still crossed the room obediently to a mattress dressed in white sheets on the bamboo floor. I was sparking at the illicit feel of the setting, like amateur porn. Brian followed behind me and cupped my breasts in his hands. He circled my nipples. I pulled my shirt over my head and unhooked my bra. I turned around to face him.
“You shaved for me,” he said, and knelt on the mattress. He swept his fingers over my vulva. He pushed me back and climbed onto my chest. He was still fully clothed. I sucked him until he was almost cumming; then he turned me over and laid me on my stomach. He teased me. He lifted my hips in his hands. “Does your boyfriend fuck you like this?”
WE LAY BREATHING. The sheets were undone from the corners. I was dizzy with confusion, shame, seduction, exertion, as if Brian had drugged me. “Do you like being with me?” he asked into my hair.
“Yes,” I said.
He kissed my ear. “I feel like we’re good companions.”
We were sticky, my ass nestled in his lap as he held me around the middle. I felt his dick going flaccid and was moved by the tenderness this inspired. We hadn’t had time to use a condom, so when I adjusted myself, his cum leaked out of me.
“I don’t want you to talk about my boyfriend,” I said.
HE’S TOLD ME he has an hour-long lunch break. To kill time while I wait for him, I read a craft book that includes a short story at the conclusion of each chapter. The chapter on imagery concludes with Alice Munro’s “Wild Swans,” which strikes me as a naughty choice for an academic text. I take a picture of the paragraph of the inexperienced teenager orgasming for the first time. She’s assisted or forced by the minister sitting next to her on the train. A flock of swans takes flight all at once from the wet field streaking past her window. I text the photo to Brian. A minute later, he’s standing over me. “Want to go for a walk?” he says.
He checks his phone in the elevator and glances around the lobby when the doors open, as if someone may be waiting for him there. He guides me by the shoulder out of the building, and it occurs to me that he may be trying to hide me. We turn onto the main strip and aim ourselves at a block of restaurants with wrought-iron balconies. I assume he’s taking me to the Japanese bistro with high booths where we usually go for the Love Boat special. “I met someone you know,” I say as we pass a hookah bar full of teenagers. “You worked for her father.”
He’s quiet. He takes a napkin out of his pocket and wipes his nose, as if to redirect a feeling. The girl is our new hostess at the Pizza Shack. She’s nineteen and according to her was fourteen when she met Brian, fifteen when they began sleeping together. Brian was twenty-eight, and the events manager at her father’s bookstore. They’d talk about writing while she put in shifts after school, shelving books. He read some of her early poems—then he began leaving poems in her backpack, to be found when she was alone. On the day her father fired him, Brian stood in the parking lot, screaming at him: “She’s the second woman I’ve ever loved!”
The girl was hired at the Pizza Shack two weeks ago, but because I work in the kitchen, and she’s in front, I hadn’t met her until yesterday. She happened to be cleaning silverware when I refilled one of my two complimentary drinks per shift. “I don’t always work here,” I’d told her, though she hadn’t asked me. “I’m actually a writer.” She asked if I was published. I said I write for The Planet.
Then she said, “Do you know Brian Beasley?”
“So you work together now?” he says.
“Sometimes,” I say.
He nods. He looks away from me into a storefront where an old Cuban man sits rolling cigars. “Did she tell you we dated?” he says.
“Something like that.”
“Her father didn’t support it.”
“She’s a lot younger than you are.”