Random Acts of Love (Random #5) (18 page)

Such a crock of shit.

The truth is that you talk yourself into love. It’s a delusion. And no one is more steadfast in defending an alternate reality that is out of touch with logical fact than a woman who has convinced herself that she has found her soulmate. 

“Those fuckers!” I interjected as Charlotte brought me a heated plate of baklava. Start with dessert, right? Fuck yeah.

“They’re assholes,” Maggie said, nodding her purple-haired head. Damn, that chick changes hair color more often than Jessica Simpson changes clothing size.

“They are!” I mumbled through a mouthful of honeyed goodness. “Ashamed of me. You can do a lot of shit to me and I have the tolerance level of Russell Brand on smack, but God DAMN you don’t treat me like I’m something to be ashamed of. I put up with it and grit my teeth until they snapped into tiny little tic-tac pieces in my mouth and now I’m done.”

“I can’t believe they did this to you,” Amy whispered, playing it safe. She was on my shit list, too, just for being, you know—happy. I’m not proud of it, but feelings are feelings.

“They’re assholes,” Charlotte added, rubbing my back. She knew how to care for a woman whose heart has been ripped into two by jackals pretending to be rock star law students.

“And my job! I’m band manager. Can’t be band manager for a bunch of assholes.”

“Liam and Sam aren’t,” Amy says quietly. “Assholes, I mean.” 

“You are on thin ice, chickie babe.” I pointed to her ring. “This is my bitch session. I say what I want, when I want, and how I want, and you can go sit in the corner and talk to your happy diamond.”

Amy shut up. I know. I was being a bitch. I burst into tears.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry, Amy,” I blubbered. “I just can’t take it. I shook up my whole life for them. My whole fucking life. I moved six hundred miles to be with them. Gave up a good job—” 

“Wasn’t she a gas station attendant?” Charlotte whispered to Amy, who just widened her eyes and said nothing. She always was smart.

“—and moved in with Trevor after a while, and really thought that after I saw what Laura, Mike and Dylan had, I could find a way to make this work with Trevor and Joe.”

“Who are Mike and Laura and Dylan?” Maggie asked.

“A billionaire threesome,” Charlotte said, as if it were commonplace to hear that.

“Oh,” Maggie said with a nod, as if
that
were all the explanation she needed.

“I need more beer,” I said with a sniff.

“How about Kahlúa ice cream pie,” Amy said, getting up and coming back with an ice cream pie the color of caramel.

“You’re redeemed,” I declared, “But hide the fucking ring.” She turned the diamond palmside, which only made her look like she was wearing a wedding ring, and then I started to cry harder.

“I’ll never marry them. Never have kids with them. Never have sex again, never use that new machine we bought that hooks up to a tablet computer and lets Joe program the vibrator...”

TMI, huh?

Charlotte leaned forward with interest. “You can find someone else to do that, you know. Plenty of chat rooms out there.”

“But it’s not the same!” I wailed.

Maggie just looked like a muppet from that X-rated Broadway show. The one where the puppets fuck on stage. Joe brought me to that at some community theater near Sudborough, and I about died laughing.

Great. Now I couldn’t look at Maggie’s purple hair without thinking about Joe.

Tears filled my eyes. “I hate this,” I said. “I hate how stupid I feel.”

Three sets of arms enveloped me. “You’re not stupid,” Amy said in a soothing voice. “You just fell in love.”

“Same thing,” I muttered through the sobs.

All three made sounds of assent. They got it. They knew.

“All I can do is eat and watch marathons of
Sons of Anarchy
. And then I see Jax’s ass and think about Trevor!” I declared.

“Trevor’s ass is
that
good?” Charlotte asked. Maggie kicked her ankle. Charlotte shut up, those painted red lips pulling in as she bit them. She dressed like an old 50s-style pinup girl, with sleek black hair and round eyes with lots of white showing. Classy. She was big and curvy like me but she knew how to make it work. 

I felt like a flannel-covered female impersonator by comparison.

“I need to do something. Anything. Whatever it takes to make my heart stop feeling like someone’s attached a fucksaw to it.”

Charlotte nodded in understanding while Amy and Maggie looked confused.

“A...fucksaw?” Maggie ventured.

Charlotte put a manicured hand on Maggie’s arm and shook her head slightly. “You probably don’t want to know.”

“Is it a sex toy?” Amy asked, her face wavering between disgust and intrigue.

“It’s a—” 

BZZZZ.

My, Amy and Charlotte’s phones all went off at the same time. Weird. Fucking weird.

We pulled them out and Amy instantly shouted, “Don’t read that, Darla!”

Too late. My eyes skimmed Trevor’s text:

PARTY AT TREVOR’S APARTMENT. 9PM. EPIC PUSSY AND ASS. BRING GIRLS, BOOZE, DRUGS, SEX TOYS AND SMALL ANIMALS.

My entire face began to tingle, and I hadn’t had a drop of alcohol yet, though Amy’s pie was beckoning. A fire lit in my belly, flaming up like crumpled newspaper used as a firestarter, the burn fast and furious, designed to catch and hold.

“Pussy and ass? Those should be Trevor and Joe’s nicknames,” I bit out.

“That’s right,” Maggie said. “Just ignore it. So what if they’re having a party. We’re having one, too.” She looked around Josie and Alex’s living room uncertainly. It was dead quiet, we had a drunk ice cream pie in front of us and a tray of half-eaten Greek food, and I was sobbing most of the time.

Some fucking party.

“You know what? If Trevor’s gonna have himself an epic party, I wanna do something epic, too. How about....” My mind went blank.

“A tattoo?” Amy suggested. I shook my head. I got nothing against ink, but I’m too much of a wimp to do it to myself.

“A psychic reading?” Maggie offered. I just rolled my eyes. I didn’t need to pay fifty bucks to have someone tell me my future was going to shit.

Charlotte offered nothing but a calculated look that slowly changed into a sly, slow smile. “Hang on,” she said, holding up one red-tipped finger, typing on her phone with her thumb. “He is within a short drive,” she muttered.

“Who is?” 

“This...guy. He did a demonstration at one of the regional passion supply workshops I went to. It’s a new trend, and this guy is starting to do this...thing. For people who want a souvenir to give their partners.”

“I got no partners!” I wailed.

“No, no, you don’t have to have a boyfriend or girlfriend. Or, um, boyfriends.” She looked around the room with a half smile. “Seriously? You want to know what this guy does?”

We all nodded.

“He bronzes your asshole.”

Thud. Three jaws hit the floor.

“I ain’t having no one pour bronze down my poopchute!” I shouted.

“No, not like that. He makes a mold of your anus, and then you can take the mold and have it made into a bronze cast. Some people even use the mold to make little chocolates—” 

“Quit messing with our heads,” I insisted.

She turned her phone towards the three of us and hit “play” on a video.

For the next seven minutes were were mouth breathers.

It ended and I whispered, “That’s a thing?”

“That’s a thing,” Charlotte said, nodding her head.

“I could cleanse myself of the vestiges of Joe and Trevor by bending like a pretzel and letting some strange man pour putty in my ass and make a cast of it, and later I can send a dozen chocolate anuses to my ex boyfriends?”

“Yes.”

I pondered that for a couple seconds.

“Let’s do it!” I shouted. “But I’m gonna need a metric fuckton of alcohol to make this happen.”

Amy gestured at her alcohol pie. “Four shots per slice.”

Game on.

We gobbled down that pie faster than Kanye West jumps up on stage at the Grammys. Soon I was full, tipsy, and ready to have my winking brown eye immortalized.

And then:

“What about the hair?” I asked Charlotte as we all stood. Maggie didn’t eat the pie and declared herself our designated driver.

“Hair? Charlotte’s delicate, perfectly plucked eyebrow shot up like a cat with its hackles up.

“Yeah. My butt hair.”

Amy and Maggie stopped moving.

“Butt hair?” Charlotte repeated.

“You know...the hair down there.”

“Don’t you wax?” Charlotte asked.

“Wax what?”

“Your anus.”

“I’m supposed to wax that? Hell to the fucking
no
.”

Charlotte frowned. “I don’t know. All the videos I’ve seen of it don’t show any hair in the model.”

“ALL? You’ve seen more than one of these videos?”

She just smiled.

“Did you have it done?”

The smile faded.

“Did Liam?”

The smile turned to an alarmed look.

“If I’m gonna go and get my puckered exit hole made into the form of a Russell Stover’s candy, Charlotte, you damn well can share a little bit about yourself.” That alcohol had loosened me up a bit.

“Yes. I did it.”

“And Liam?”

“He did, too.”

“Was his butthole hairy?”

Amy started doing that wheezy laugh thing.

“Um...no.”

“He waxes, too?”

“Not normally.”

“But he did for this?”

“Yes. And that’s it, Darla. I’m not saying anything more.”

“Do you eat his ass?” I asked, incredulous.

“Oh, God. Can’t breathe,” Amy said. Maggie was giggling and watching Charlotte, who wasn’t quite squirming, but was about as unsettled as I’d ever seen her. 

“Eat his ass? You mean, do I rim him?”

“There’s a
term
for it?” I was learning so much this evening. A term for making little chocolate anuses. Maybe I should have dumped Trevor and Joe a long time ago.

“Yes. Rimming is when you eat someone’s ass.”

“So I go to the anus stamper dude and tell him I want him to make it so I can rim someone?”

Charlotte bent in half with laughter. “You’re not waxing so you can rim someone. They’d be rimming you in that case. You wax so you can have a more accurate mold of your anus.” 

I paused for a moment to contemplate this. Trevor and Joe’s tongue had gone within inches of that puckered starfish, right? If everything’s clean and tidy, why not?

Wait.

We’d broken up.

Those two fuckers were never getting their mouths anywhere near my nether regions again. Never. Ever. I started to cry.

“Why are you crying?” Amy asked.

“Because they’ll never get the chance to lick my butthole,” I wailed. “And now I have this new sexual information I can’t use, because they were ashamed of me and I decided I couldn’t take it any more. But this means I can’t just go to them and say I want to try this new thing.”

I sat on the couch and looked up at Amy, Maggie and Charlotte. “It’s not fair.”

“Not fair...honey, what’s not fair?” Charlotte asked.

“It’s not fair that the closest I’ll ever come to getting rimmed by Trevor and Joe is to send them a chocolate mold of my anus.”

We all thought about that one for a minute. I could tell by the stunned look on all their faces that they, too, found this to be a serious predicament.

Charlotte gave Amy a long look and then glanced at the empty pie tin. She wavered a bit. “Amy, what was in that ice cream pie?”

“Ice cream and Kahlúa.”

“That’s it?”

Amy’s face brightened. “I think so. Maybe Irish cream? I’m not sure. That’s what Joe said. He said it’s home made and organic!”

“You brought something edible that Joe made?” I barked. “Oh, Lordy, we’re all gonna end up naked in the middle of a cornfield proposing to chickens. Joe likes to slip all kinds of psychedelics into food.”

Maggie looked at Charlotte with an expression of complete alarm and whispered, “I didn’t eat any, so I’ll babysit.” 

Charlotte conferred with her, their heads huddled together. “Good, because Darla has a small garden gnome on her shoulder who is the one actually speaking right now. Darla’s just its ventriloquist dummy.”

Maggie rubbed her shoulder and said nothing.

“Let’s all get our buttholes immortalized,” Amy declared. “After we pluck the lollipops off the ceiling.”

“Don’t ever take any food Joe makes again, Amy. It’s like men in white vans without windows asking little girls to help them find their lost kitty.” I reached down and touched my crotch. “Whew! Haven’t lost mine yet.”

“Your what?” Charlotte asked, looking around the room.

“My pussy. I got scared I lost it.”

“It can come
off
?” She sounded utterly astounded by this sage fact.

“Yep. Like a shoe. You slide it on and off at will. Just don’t fuck it.”

“Fuck what?” 

“The shoe.”

“Why would I fuck a shoe?”

“Hell if I know. ’Cause it feels good? Ask old Doc Oglethorpe.”

Charlotte’s hand flew to her groin and slid lower. “My pussy is right here!” she declared nice and loud.

“Oh, God,” Maggie muttered.

Amy found the television remote and was trying to eat it. “This does not taste like Irish cream or Kahlúa,” she announced. 

“I’ll get everyone some big glasses of water,” Maggie said, going into the kitchen.

“WAXING!” Amy screamed like it was the second coming of Christ. “We have to wax Darla’s butthole.”

I stopped. A warm fuzzy feeling, like mold was growing on me, made me just sway in the breeze in Josie’s living room. There was no actual breeze and I was not a nine-day-old piece of leftover bread, but the feeling persisted.

“Why am I waxing again?” I asked.

“To preserve your butthole.”

“You mean I have to wax it to make sure it stays in place?”

Amy looked at me with eyes like kittens in those paintings where the eyes are nine times bigger than normal. A woman could go swimming in those eyes. I tried, but she just squirmed away from me and began pulling on my pants.

“I like you a lot, Amy, but I am not into girls,” I said as diplomatically as possible. In sign language. She managed to get me down to my thong when Maggie walked back in carrying three waters.