One Night (21 page)

He could barely move. He could barely breathe. Sweat dampened his forehead.

Again he was Loki slammed into concrete.

I asked, “So how much does being mansion-smart matter now?”

Again he sat next to me. I put two fingers inside Susan, then put her taste inside his mouth.

I whispered, “Go find your wife. She's distraught. Go to the hospital and comfort her.”

“What's going on with you?”

“It's her turn to feel good. Go drive your wrecked car to your wrecked marriage. Go forget me.”

“Do the same with your boyfriend. Get your good-night orgasm with him.”

“Now who's jealous?”

“You'll probably be with him as soon as you leave me.”

“Wouldn't want to end up in bed with two guys within twenty-four hours, or the same week, so I might have to put him on hold for a change. That would be ironic, me putting him on hold. He'll be back. I know he will. I'm a smart woman. I am a good-looking woman. I'm having a hard time, but this too shall pass. You know how I give head. You know what I can do on top and from the bottom. You know there is good-good between my legs, so he'll be back. They all come back, or at least try. They wander the streets looking for better, realize they had the best of the best, then come back scratching at the door. You won't be able to do that. Once you're gone, you will be gone, as if you never were. Even though we used condoms, I'll still go to the doctor to make sure all is cool before me and my boyfriend hook up again.”

“See me again one day.”

“No.”

“I wish I could see you again.”

“I already have a boyfriend.”

“He's not good for you.”

“And what, you think you'd be better?”

“You wouldn't be in the streets trying to hustle rocks in a goddamn box.”

“You have a wife. What could I gain from being with you? Absolutely nothing.”

“I just wish that I could see you again.”

“You're ridiculous, and this is crazy, and it's getting a little bit too intense.”

“And you're not intense?”

“Take it down a few degrees toward reality.”

He put his pointer finger inside me. His digit slid into me like I was hot butter.

He made that come-here motion over and over, while his thumb rubbed on my spot.

Then he used two fingers.

He made me grab the sheets.

Made my back arch.

Made me want to howl.

His fingers. Each finger was like a new penis.

The things he could do with those digits.

I said, “No more.”

“What did I do wrong?”

I pushed down on his hand, squirmed to get him to stop, but he didn't ease up.

The fire came back and all I could do was ride the waves of agony. Love wanted to come down, and I wanted love to stay where it was. I contracted around his two fingers. He finger-stroked me.

“I want to see you again.”

“Stop, stop, stop.”

He gave me the right amount of pressure. That was my G-spot, the epicenter of madness. He knew how to make me act like a fool. Then he leaned in, and while he worked his fingers, he put his lips on me, sucked me from the outside. I wanted to kill him, wanted to marry him. It was that wicked.

He said, “I want to be with you.”

“Stop. Don't do this.”

“I want to see you again.”

He took to his knees and his tongue joined his fingers.

“Run away with me. Let's leave all our problems and go on the run.”

“You're going to make my love come down again.”

“Tell me I can see you again. Tell me I can have you.”

“Oh God. Oh, Jesus Christmas.”

Again, I held his head, put my fingernails in his flesh, wanted to mark him, and I sang.

When the song ended, he came back to my face, kissed me again.

I bit his bottom lip, sucked his tongue, bit it hard, bit it like I was evil.

He pulled away. “Ouch. What was that all about?”

“I told you to stop.”

He said. “You want me again, and you know you want me to fuck you again.”

“I don't want to be fucked, not all the time. Look, I love good sex to help get rid of all the tension. I need to ease the stress. I love to be pleased in bed, or on the floor, or on a chair, or put up against the wall so I lose it, fire all cylinders. Make me work, make me sweat. I want to be in the zone and lose control, but I never want to feel like I was fucked. I don't want to have sex and feel like I was conned.”

“This was your idea.”

“I know. You wanted some of this from the start. But you didn't con me into bed.”

“So you liked this or didn't like this?”

“How can you do that? Pick a woman off the street, not know her, make her laugh when she hasn't laughed in forever, and then make love to her like that? What kind of mess is that, that you can show up and talk to me like you know me, and have me like you know this body, like you have a right to this body, like we've been lovers for weeks, for months—how can you do that? I don't know you, and just like that I told you I'd sleep with you. Is that what you do?”

“You want me to fuck you without fucking you, and to make love to you without it being love.”

“Jesus Christmas, I've said too much.”

He shook his head. “I don't understand you.”

“How did we get here? I was trying to rip you off, not end up ten toes up, ten toes down.”

“Misery. Depression. Desperation. Maybe they weakened our orbit, our values, knocked us off our trajectory, and when an object loses its trajectory and approaches a larger object, what feels like it could be happiness, or what could be love, or just lust, that object pulls that lost object into its orbit.”

I said, “Why won't you leave? Is it so hard for you to leave?”

“I could love you.”

“What?”

“I could love you.”

“Don't say things like that.”

“I'll be honest. There is a connection. It feels like I do love you.”

This was no longer fun. It had become dangerous. Now I needed to escape.

“Let me repeat what I have said many times tonight. I'm not mansion-smart.”

“Neither am I.”

“You're married, with a possessive, jealous, distraught wife waiting for you to go comfort her.”

“I know my situation. I am aware of what's waiting for me when I leave here.”

“You don't know me.”

“You have shared your body with me. You have shown me part of your soul. You have laughed with me, have accepted me as I am, have taken me to your bosom, and for that I could love you. The world is a messed-up place, and being with you, tonight, I forgot all about that. Love does that.”

I pressed my fingers against his lips.

I said, “Anything beyond this, my spirit would suffer, and if we had an affair, a real affair, and I was the second woman to a married man, if I went against my core values . . . That may sound hypocritical at the moment, but this is not who I am, this is not who I want to be. What I have done tonight, if I stayed on this course and went down this road with you, my mental health would suffer, and this thing would never have the assumed perfection that it has had tonight. We would have pain day after day after day. I like you. I do. A lot. Obviously. On the real, if you ever get a divorce, look me up. Not separated, not legally separated, I'm talking divorced. And after your body and mind have handled the withdrawal of divorce, and there is a withdrawal period, find me.”

“How will I find you?”

“The universe put us together tonight. If the universe wants us to meet again, it will make it happen, when it's ready for it to happen, however it wants it to happen.”

“Give me a number. Give me a way to contact you.”

“Go tell your sorority-girl-condo-smart-intellectual wife you finally bedded the type of girl you always wanted to bed, a girl from north of your county line, an underachiever, the type who is equal to the dude who had sex with your first love—tell her that. Tell her you had your fantasy. Tell her how you made me come, how you went down on me, and how I went down on you, how I drove you mad.”

“You're jealous.”

“I'm so freaking angry.”

“Why?”

“Guilt. For allowing this to happen. I just sucked some married woman's husband's dick.”

“You're not married.”

“But you are. I don't have sex with married men.”

“Just with guys who don't give a damn about you.”

“I'm like every other honest chick. I sleep with guys who lie and say they're single. Things happen. Almost every guy seems to have a chick on the side. I deal with whoever until I find out I'm being played. But I have never, never,
never
entertained a conversation or had sex with a damn married man.”

“I popped the dreadlocks-wearing, tattooed woman's don't-do-married-men cherry.”

“Fuck you.”

“You're a bitch.”

“We're not having sex; that game is over. So, disgusting asshole, don't talk to me like that.”

He said, “Sure. It's late. We're tired. We're both tipsy and punch-drunk right now.”

“You'd better watch how you address me.”

“Everything was nice between us.”

“And you had to keep talking and kill the moment.”

He asked, “Why the sudden stress? Why feel guilty now?”

“People don't feel guilty about things they haven't done, asshole. They feel guilty after. This is after. This is after all that feel-good cunnilingus and fellatio and doggy style. This is after you were better than I had anticipated, after realizing I don't want you to leave, and I don't want you to stay.”

“Is it really guilt? Or do you feel something for me?”

“Don't flatter yourself.”

“Let's face it. You're smart, but you're in the streets doing rocks in a box. That tells me you have no motivation. You're smart, but you have no drive, not until you're down to your last bread crumb. Then you will get up off your ass and do something that's nothing more than a temporary fix, or could get you locked up, and you probably would love being incarcerated because you'd get a taxpayer-sponsored place to sleep and a few free meals to boot. I exist at a level, in a place you may never be.”

“You don't know me. You don't know my story, just like I don't know your story.”

“Your story is both obvious and cliché.”

“I'm getting a little past being a little bit angry now.”

“Now who can't handle the truth?”

“Don't appreciate you calling me a bitch.”

“I see the real you now.”

I snapped, “I see who you are, too. I see you.”

He backed away. “You're mad because I'm leaving.”

“Dinner. Money. Seeing you jump to go home after all this, after using a damn electric toothbrush to make me come. You penetrated me with a damn toothbrush. How am I supposed to feel after you do things like that to me? Now I feel like I've been bought and paid for and screwed and discarded.”

“That's ridiculous. We entered this not as a barter, but as consenting adults, as two people, as two human beings who had a strong curiosity, two people with a strong attraction to each other.”

“You're a repulsive half-breed. Yeah, I called you a damn half-breed. I'm saying to your face what the rest of America says behind your back, or tweets, which is basically the same thing. You are not in touch with the reality of the people, just the reality of the rich, which is not reality at all.”

“I see why your boyfriend treats you the way he does. I see why he treats you like you're a blowup doll, fucks you like a dog, gets his nut, then goes back to playing his games. I understand it now.”

“You're just an asshole. I know, same insult. I'll think of something better to call you.”

“The mind of a woman.”

I said, “Be careful where you travel. The mind of a woman is a labyrinth that ends at the truth.”

“You mean maze, not labyrinth. A labyrinth only has one path. A maze is complicated.”

I whispered, “Fuck you. Smart-ass asshole. Leave. Just leave. Get out of my life.”

“I will, but not until I understand what happened. Why the change in attitude?”

“I'll go home, or go to my boyfriend's place, and you go home to your wife. Pretend you've done no wrong, that you're as innocent as Joseph, and I'll go home smelling like alcohol, cologne, and latex.”

“Yeah. You meant maze. The mind of a woman is a maze inside of a maze inside of a maze.”

“It starts as a fun night. It starts off as just sex. Wild sex. And we set fire to the rain. We burn. We consume each other in the fire. And we connect. We're human. Some feelings are there. We enjoy it. Want more. It turns into a fling. Feelings take over. We catch feelings, and that fling is now a clandestine relationship we hide from our lovers, from wives and boyfriends. We want them and we want each other. Like the selfish, we want it all. And in time, things get out of control. It becomes a big mess, a big emotional mess. And I went in knowing from the top that you were not good for me. It's not about you being married. I'd wish that I'd never met you. Or that we had ended it right here, before Christmas. I'd wish that we didn't go on into the New Year, didn't go on until there was no good way out. Let's pretend we've had a long relationship, that we have had months of fun, that we have hurt other people, that we've made your wife's life a living hell, that we've shouted and cried, that we've come to our senses, and now let's end it.”

“Ah. The truth shows.”

“What truth?”

“You lied.”

“You're not worthy of a lie.”

“This isn't your first time being with a married man.”

“You don't have to jump in a fire to know it burns. Sex was the easy part. Naked was the easy part. We talked. I opened my soul to you. You saw me emotionally naked before I undressed.”

“Still a maze.”

“Leave. You had your swive. I had my swive. Your sacs are dry. Let the curtain fall. This concludes our social experiment of a destitute con woman and despondent married man, an experiment of opposites having sex, of strangers having passionate sex like they were in an unrecorded Masters and Johnson experiment, so take your obsession with girls on this side of the county line, women like me who reject guys on the other side of the tracks, guys like you. Take your strange and creepy late-night obsession with women who aren't mansion-smart, women you underestimate, and leave before this goes too far and I fall for you, and without warning I become the woman who shows up on your front porch to smile a bitter smile at your wife and tell her I'm sleeping with you, who would feel so much envy that I would do my best to ruin it all, would look her in her eye and tell her we'd been having an affair since this night, a night she was distraught and at a hospital agonizing over a family friend who was close to death, and do my best to destroy what you have with her and hope that drove you back to me, so just get out of my life.”

He said, “You have a dark side.”

“Almost as dark as yours. The way you hit that guy at 7-Eleven, that was a tell.”

“I released my demons at 7-Eleven, just like you released yours here.”

“Go back to the woman with whom you have a nonspiritual yet legal contract, a contract between moneyed and ambitious spouses, or, in your case, between educated fools. Go honor that pointless legal document that establishes rights and obligations between you and the woman who plays Candy Crush after sex. Why are you still here? We've done what we came to do. Why are you still here?”

“Because you are upset. This isn't the last memory I want to have of us together.”

“I knew this was too good to be true. I knew this was another goddamn mistake.”