I check my watch. It’s almost ten-thirty. “We have an hour and a half.”
He winks at me. “I’ll drink fast.”
I cross the room and study the view out the window. His apartment faces a street of similar buildings, a checkerboard pattern of light on their faces, winking back at me.
“What were you up to today?”
I turn. He’s come out of the kitchen to rest against the counter, feet crossed at the ankles, beer in hand. He gestures to my ratty outfit when I don’t answer right away.
“I was cleaning.”
“Cleaning what?”
“My car.” When the only people you talk to are people you lie to, it comes pretty easily.
“Do you have any friends?” he asks abruptly.
“What?”
“Do you have any friends?”
I haven’t had a friend in three years. And if the rate at which they abandoned me is any indication, I hadn’t had any for a long time before then, either. “Of course I have friends.”
“Who?”
“Why?”
“Because you suck at small talk.”
I’m not offended. I’m no better at conversation than I am at seduction. It’s hardly necessary when both parties know that the entire evening is just a prelude to sex. There’s no need to convince anybody when you’re already on the same page. Except for Chris. He appears to be reading another book altogether. “You didn’t bring me here for conversation.”
He takes a final sip of beer and puts the bottle behind him on the counter. When he straightens, it’s like he’s unfolding, like he gets bigger, more real, more everything. I don’t know why I want him.
I don’t know why he wants me.
“Do you have a dog?” I blurt out.
He’s about to take a step toward me, but now he stops. “What? No. Why?”
“Have you ever had one? Like, when you were a kid?”
He rolls his lips together, amused. “Yeah,” he says finally. “We had a dog.”
“What kind?”
“A German Shepherd.”
Close enough. “What was his name?”
“Astro.”
An iota of tension seeps out of me, like a fishing line being given some slack.
“Why?” he asks, a laugh hidden in the word. “Do you like dogs?”
Denise: divorced, dental hygienist, loves dogs. The alphabet dating game has a few necessary rules. Never bring them home. Don’t fall asleep. Stick to the story. “No,” I hear myself say. “I don’t like anything.”
“C’mere,” Chris murmurs, almost as though he can hear the warning bells clanging in my brain. He cups my face to kiss me and I try to calm down, will myself to focus. To do this. Mechanical, reliable. Get what I came for.
I press onto my toes and grip the sides of his flannel shirt to anchor myself. The fabric is soft under my fingertips, his chest firm beneath my knuckles. I open my mouth and kiss him harder, but he eases back, fingers curled into my hair, preventing me from following. He has his eyes open, watching, showing, and he kisses me again, slowly.
He doesn’t give a damn about midnight.
“I get it,” I mutter, twisting my head away.
“Get what?” he asks. His fingers find the hem of my hoodie and draw it up and off, tossing it onto the table. I’m wearing a black T-shirt underneath and now he slips his fingers into the waistband of my jeans and strokes back and forth over the skin above my panties.
I huff and try not to sound petulant. “What do you want?”
“The same thing you want, I think.”
“If you wanted what I wanted, you’d be naked.”
He laughs, tilting away from me. He doesn’t take his hand from my pants, and I feel his knuckles bump against my stomach. “You’re funny,” he says, wiping his other hand over his face.
“I’m serious.”
He’s still laughing. “I know.”
I pull off my T-shirt, and he goes quiet. Thank God for push-up bras.
“Give me what I want,” I say. I take his hand out of my pants and unzip my jeans, shoving them down to my ankles so I’m standing in a black bra and panties. His mouth opens a little bit. I know I’m not perfect. I’m too thin, too pale, too mean, too shadowed.
“Oh,” he says softly. Almost unconsciously, he begins to unbutton his shirt, letting it fall to the floor before tugging off his T-shirt. His socks and jeans follow suit, and then we’re both standing in our underwear.
He hooks a finger between my bra cups and tugs me in. I feel his other hand at my tailbone, tracing small circles there, dipping under my panties, but not far enough. Then those calloused fingers scrape ever-so-slowly up my back until they’re catching on the lace band of my bra. The hand in front slides over my throat to cup my face again, holding me in place for his kiss, but with his eyes now closed.
I relax and kiss him back. I feel the coarse skin of his palm on my spine and the scratch of his chest at my front, and I stand on my toes and put my arms around his neck and do what I came here to do.
“Your hair’s soft,” he murmurs, pulling back and staring at the strands he’s filtering through his fingers. “It’s pretty.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. “Thanks.”
“You’re pretty.”
There was a time those words mattered to me. It was before I saw my dad in a prison jumpsuit and I buried my brother next to my mother. It was before—
“What happened here?”
The hand at my back drops to my right leg, to the top of the bumpy pink scar that extends eight inches down the outside of my thigh.
“Car accident.” I don’t know if the truth is just easier to remember or simply harder to forget. I went to my brother’s funeral in a wheelchair. They pushed me over the damp grass at a rate so slow I could have crawled to the gravesite faster, but I know that’s what they wanted. They moved slowly so the press could take pictures, ask questions. Were you driving, Reese? There are doubts your brother was the driver. Did you choose the cliff on purpose, Reese? Why would you do that? He was only twenty-one, Reese.
“Looks painful,” Chris says. “Does it hurt?”
“No.”
Most men just ignore it. A couple cringed, but most didn’t care. They were nice enough not to ask questions, and they didn’t touch. I’m over it. A broken femur is the least of my battle wounds.
While I recovered in the hospital they made me see a shrink. He told me about survivor’s guilt, but he wasn’t trying to help me, he was trying to help them. I knew he was reading the papers. Hearing the whispers. He thought I was guilty of much more. He said “survivor’s guilt” a hundred times, the emphasis always on the guilt, not the survivor. And maybe he wasn’t wrong. Maybe that’s why I stand with my toes over the edge of the roof and drive too fast and go home with strange men. And maybe that’s why nothing worse has happened. Surviving is my punishment.
Chris watches my face as he unhooks my bra, then leans over to place it on top of my hoodie before returning to look his fill. This much he has in common with the others. They like boobs.
After the infamous crotch shot incident, there came the predictable slew of seedy invitations from porn sites and men’s magazines. As though flashing my crotch was the equivalent of a toe in the water, gauging the public’s interest. I said no, but even if I’d been tempted, my father would have disowned me. He tolerated a lot, but there were limits. In hindsight it’s funny that naked photographs were where he chose to draw the line. As though that were the worst thing a Carlisle could be caught doing.