Maidenhead (3 page)

The woman wore green stone earrings that made her lobes droop. A thick turquoise choker held her neck up. The guy nodded at the woman but we kept walking by pretty quickly. That woman definitely knew it was strange that I was with this guy, that he was so much older and that we were holding hands.

‘Your dad gives you money for trinkets?’ the guy asked, leading me way past the store.

I realized how much pain I was in from walking fast and needing to pee.

‘A little,’ I said.

‘Here.’

We were about five blocks from the beach, I guessed, a long way from the last motel. I hadn’t really kept track of exactly where we were. The guy was leading me up a flight of wooden stairs. I wondered how long he’d been in Key West. I followed him down an outdoor hallway. I think it was a motel, but there was no sign. The walls were white-painted wood, with holes in the slats. Spider plants hung from the rafters outside.

The guy opened his door without a key. The room was small and blasted with sun. I was thinking that he was going to play the ocarina for me, he was going tell me what kind of music he liked. I stood at the doorway, not going in. Why’d he ask if my dad gave me money? I wanted to be with a musician. This man with big hard brown shoulders, no hair on his chest. He dropped my hand. I scratched my arm. I made a note of where the alley was, the direction of the sun.

‘Enjoying the sun?’ That was the first thing he’d asked me.

‘Everyone likes the sun in Florida,’ I should’ve answered.

The guy was waiting for me to come into his room. I noticed his nipples for the first time. They were black, poking out, encircled by hairs.

‘Please come in now. I welcome you.’

I heard the door close and then lock behind me. There were two beds in his room, some clothes on the floor in a pile. The table had a hot plate on it.

‘I need the bathroom,’ I said.

My heart was racing and spherical. I turned the taps on full blast, locked the door quick. I realized I didn’t have my towel around my waist anymore and I didn’t know where I had left it or my book. My bathing suit looked skimpy, it was more like a bikini than a one-piece. I heard the guy outside the bathroom door.

‘Okay in there?’

‘Yo!’

The guy laughed. He knew I meant to say yes. I took off my bathing suit. His hands were so big. The guy’s bathroom was exactly like ours at the motel. There were two thick toothbrushes in a dirty white cup and a bar of green soap that had fallen in the sink.

I was sitting on the toilet with my bathing suit off with both taps running but I couldn’t pee. Maybe I’d waited too long. I could feel it almost coming but then it wouldn’t come. I couldn’t push it out either. His shower had rust around the drain. My vagina was killing me now.

Then the guy knocked on the door and I thought he was going to come in.

‘You okay in there, girl? Everything okay inside there?’

‘
No!
’

I grabbed my bathing suit and I tried to get it back on and turn on the shower at the same time, and I turned the shower on and got in it when I started peeing, finally. The water was burning. I didn’t feel relief. My suit was half off and half on and I felt pain shooting up as I peed. I was too hot with hot water all over me.

When I walked out of the bathroom it took a few minutes for my eyes to see. Everything had gone grey. I was soaked in my bathing suit in this room with two beds. There was incense burning, a spark on the table.

‘Open the curtains,’ I said. I heard speed in my voice.

The guy was sitting in an armchair right by the screen doors.

‘I said I can’t see.’

The guy reached his arm behind him and fiddled with the curtains. There was a screech and rings clanked. A white stripe of sun rippled down his brown chest.

I stood there, arms crossed, testing the light, prickly in my stuck-on suit.

The guy’s finger drew figure eights in the line of sun on his chest. Tickling. He had taken off his bathing-suit shorts.

I stood there and I was just watching him: watching him in that white line of sun watch me. Then I saw his penis move and I started to laugh.

‘Take off your bathing suit.’

There were drips dripping from the shower, drips dripping from my suit. It felt like an army of ants down my legs. If I could’ve ignored that tickling I would’ve just taken off my bathing suit like the guy said to.

‘Don’t you like me?’ the guy asked from his dark chair.

I couldn’t respond, but I nodded heavily.

‘Well, I like you,’ the guy said. ‘I already know that I do.’

He wanted to do it with me, he wanted me to be like one of those college girls on the beach, bums offered up. But I also knew that something else was going on. If this was simple, or normal, I would’ve already been near him, we would’ve already been kissing.

‘Come on. You can come over here.’

The guy stopped tracing the wobbling light on his chest. He looked down at his penis. He shifted on the chair, got it into the light. The sun struck a ray right through it. It was standing up hard, hard-bobbing in little circles. The guy didn’t touch it, he was feeling how it was shaking.

‘Come. Come here. I’ll show you how to do it.’

I wasn’t afraid at that moment, I wasn’t afraid of his thing or of him. But I was just getting used to looking at it and wanting to get closer when the guy leaned back and shut the curtains.

‘You don’t like light,’ he said.

The ripple left his body. He closed the curtain and made the room dark. I was going to run if he got up and tried to touch me. I wanted to run and smash into his window like a bird.

But the guy didn’t get up to try to touch me. He kept swaying silently in the chair. The darkness softened around my eyes.

The guy started stroking himself, squeezing after the strokes, squeezing at the bottom.

‘I’ll show you how to do this,’ he said. ‘Come.’

It looked like he was thinking about something and then looking at me. I felt myself hard-bobbing like him now, from side to side, then back and forth. My feeling of being in the room turned into a flicker. The walls and the ceiling met in a curve. My thighs pulsed too hard. I felt paralyzed.

‘I don’t want to,’ I heard myself say.

‘Come on. Come over.’

‘Not yet.’

‘When are you going to be ready?’ the guy said. His voice was strained. He was about to get up. ‘Hey, girl. We don’t have all day.’

He was about to get up and come get me.

I had to get back the sun.

I heard the guy laugh as I ran past him: ‘Hey, hey, it’s okay. I’m not gonna hurt you.’

I pulled too hard at the curtains. A chain of rings clinked and the curtains came down. I crouched in them, hiding. I couldn’t see. The curtains got lifted quickly off me and the sun was back inside. The guy was right there. He had a foot on either side of me, his ankles were at my bathing-suit holes.

‘Stay there, just stay. Shhhhh. It’s okay.’

I was swallowing my breaths.

I felt him way up above me, whispering: ‘Stay there, stay. Stay, just stay ... ’

Sharp wet heat hit my bathing suit. Eyes open, I felt it soak through my hair. Prickles of sun and prickled piss. My forehead fused with the grains of the rug.

‘Yeah, god.’ I heard him saying. He was rubbing himself fast above me now. His cock was fat and humping the air.

Like a bug I found my book and my towel. The guy was talking to himself, hunched over himself, and I ran.

Down the stairs, the wind touched me and people looked. Everything blurred through the streets. I didn’t care. I ran across the sand and into the ocean and dunked my head under. I stayed down scratching and plunging myself like a dog.

LEE: He marked you. That’s what he did. That guy knew he could sniff you out anywhere now.

GAYL: I don’t think you should extrapolate his desires.

LEE: Why? You think he didn’t want to fuck her?

GAYL: Of course he did, he wanted to fuck her.

LEE: So that’s pretty ominous, whatever, right there. This guy wants to fuck a beautiful, totally naive teenager but he pisses on her because she’s afraid?

GAYL: Man, I think you exaggerate. Feminists exaggerate. But whatever. I’m not gonna yet fuck with your rosy vision of all this.

§

My mother’s lips were stuck together. It was a cramped, littered patio for dinner on our third night. I thought my mother was mad at my father about our motel, the wrong timing of our trip because of American Spring Break. Not talking over dinner, though, was even worse than her being all silent and repressed. Everyone else on the patio was talking and drinking with fries in their mouths. It was like we five weren’t supposed to be sitting together but by some coincidence we just had to be. Being eighteen is freedom. All the kids on Spring Break who were humping in their rooms and drinking from buckets were barely older than Jody but they were fucking and humping and slurping from buckets. I had a huge plastic lemonade filled mostly with ice. My dad was drinking some Wild Turkey or something. My mother rolled her eyes when he’d ordered that and if she’d been speaking I knew she would’ve said something like: ‘Neil, what are you trying to prove?’

My mother was frustrated. Maybe all mothers are frustrated, as if they shit out their hopes with each kid.

‘I’m going to have fun on this vacation,’ my dad said to our waitress, who was probably twenty, white-blond, with gunked-on mascara. ‘Unlike some people who don’t know how to have fun.’ More rolling of eyes by my mother. Jody got up and left the table. The waitress left too, saying, ‘’Scuse me a sec, I forgot my pad!’

This patio had red lights strung across it and music blaring, half-Spanish, half-English. People had meat and pickles piling out of straw baskets, way-too-big plastic cups of spiked Coke. I think some of the kids were probably staring at us – this family who weren’t even looking at each other.

Our waitress came back with a redder mouth. I bit through ice.

‘Excuse him,’ my mother finally spoke. Those tight two words were granted to the waitress because my father ordered a second supersize Wild T.

The waitress, who had on suspenders over her T-shirt, laughed stupidly. ‘That’s okay, ma’am!’

I wondered what that Tanzanian guy was doing tonight. Had he had lived here for a long time? I wished that I hadn’t run out of his room. I wished I’d just stayed. What would’ve happened if I’d just fucking stayed? Would we have had sex? We were supposed to use a condom. I knew that much from Jen. She had a stash that her mother had given her when she turned fourteen. ‘Like mother, like daughter,’ Jen laughed. She showed me how to put a condom on a guy using a frozen hot dog. It was totally disgusting because the thing started melting when it was my turn, too soft to hold the condom right. We ended up flushing it all down the toilet.

‘Jesus, Neil, you’ve had enough!’

My father had tripped or something getting up from the table to help our waitress hand out our plates. They weren’t even plates, they were baskets. The waitress was laughing and apologizing and so was my dad. My mother didn’t do anything when Jeff got up to help. My dad must’ve been getting drunk. He was back in his chair, helpless with his burnt nose. Our waitress squeezed around our table in between other people’s chairs. I’d never seen my father drunk. His moustache was wet.

When I was running out of that guy’s room I heard what he said. My father took a gulp of his drink. My mother closed her eyes. It was like she didn’t have the energy to be a mother anymore, like she’d reached some kind of expiry date.
Come back, you little bitch.
That was what that guy had said when I was running out of his room.

I’d ordered a double-decker grilled cheese. Four triangles of white bread were stacked in my basket. The cheese inside was as orange as a pylon and glued over the sides.
Little bitch.
That guy called me
little bitch.
Jody still hadn’t returned to our table. My mother’s Caesar salad looked frozen. My father was sucking a caramel rib. I took a bite of my sandwich.
Come back, little bitch.
The sandwich was salty and fat. I felt something drip in my underwear.