Swimming Sweet Arrow (17 page)

“This is for us to smoke now,” she said, pointing to the water bong with her chin. “And these are for you to take with.” She pushed three joints toward me then, over the tabletop.

“How much do I owe you?”

“A dollar.”

“For three joints? You’re crazy.”

“It’s for you,” June said. That’s when I knew it was a gift and not a transaction, and that we had forgiven each other for whatever happened.

“I see you’re wearing that,” I said then, because when June pushed the joints toward me, I saw she had on the ring Ray gave her.

“I wear it most of the time now.”

“What’s it mean?”

“It means it’s easier for everyone if I wear it.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all,” she said, holding the smoke in. “What about you? Does Del ever talk about putting a ring on your finger?”

The question seemed strange to me. Even if I had a ring from Del, it would be nothing like her taking a ring from Ray at the same time she was screwing Luke. We couldn’t just be two girls sitting around talking about when we might get married.

“Mostly Del talks about knocking me up.”

“Are you going to do it?”

“Get pregnant? Jesus Christ, no.” And that seemed strange to me, too, that I’d even have to say that to June. I said, “A baby doesn’t interest me at all.”

“It might interest me if I was with the right person. I might want a baby then.”

That surprised me. It didn’t seem at all like her. But I
didn’t say,
Well, who’s the right person,
or
How are you going to
be able to tell whose baby it is?
I wasn’t there to fight or preach. So instead I went, “Well, I wish you luck with all of that. With choosing, I mean.”

“The choice is made,” she said. “You know that, don’t you, Vangie?”

I didn’t know how the choice could be made when she was still in the house with the two of them, but I nodded. I knew she wanted me to. She waited a few seconds before she said the next thing.

“It felt good when it started. Now it just seems complicated. The lies are getting more complicated. But I don’t lie to you, Vangie, and I never did. At least not for long.”

I said, “No, you didn’t lie for long.”

“The next time you see me, things aren’t going to be like this.”

She looked around the room when she said that, and I thought that’s what she meant: that the three of them weren’t going to be living in that house much longer, that she was going to make a move. She didn’t say that, but I was sure she meant that.

She passed the bong back to me then, and that’s when I looked past the ring and saw her fingers. Each one was bitten down to the quick of the nail. They looked like baby fingers, all pink and without even the thinnest thread of white nail showing. When I saw that, I knew I had no idea, really, of how things were with her.

“You know more about me than anyone, Vangie,” she said then.

“More than Luke?”

“Probably. You know different things about me, Vangie. You know me longer, too.”

I could tell by the way she kept saying my name that she was high, high, high.

“You know me pretty well, too,” I said.

We stopped talking then, and June filled the bong a second time. The ticking of the clock and the whirring of the refrigerator seemed loud, the way they always did when I was stoned. To keep from staring at June’s fingers as she packed in the pot, I studied the kitchen table. Along with salt and pepper shakers and a napkin holder that I remembered us making in seventh grade shop class, two bottles of
Jim Beam were out on the table. There were a few glasses with the whiskey, and it looked like it was just where the three of them kept it. Handy-like.

“Do you know what’s funny?” June said then.

“What?” I said. “What’s funny?”

“It’s funny you and I never kissed. I thought so many times when we were talking, Vangie, that we’d kiss. But we never did.”

I looked at her after she said that, and she looked like herself, but she also looked like a stranger. She was someone I loved and did not know at all. It was the way my mother looked to me right before she left, and the way Del looked when he came home from treatment. Strangers all the more strange because I loved them.

“I didn’t know you thought about that,” I said.

“Didn’t you ever think about it?”

It was the first time in a long time that I wanted to tell the truth, or what I knew of the truth.

“No,” I said. “Or if I did think of it, I didn’t know it.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt my feelings if you didn’t think about it.”

We sat there, not talking, and I felt the same way I felt the night I told her I wanted to be her boyfriend—even though she was the one who spoke, who said words that couldn’t be taken back. I thought we would go on sitting there, not talking, but June said the next thing. Took the next chance.

“Do you want to kiss now?” she said.

I didn’t answer, but I didn’t move when she got up from
the chair or when she smoothed a piece of my hair back from my face.

“Hey friend,” she said. Then we were kissing.

It was not like any kiss I ever had. There was no insistence in it, no next step. Her mouth tasted cloudy. When June made a small noise into the kiss, I did, too.

“It’s hard,” she said when she pulled away. “Both of us wanting to be the girl.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. If there had been a time to kiss, it was the night I told her I wanted to be her boyfriend. But I had backed up a million miles from that place. I could not keep letting her touch me.

“Do you ever think about leaving, Vangie? Going someplace else and starting over?”

“All the time.”

She told me again that the next time I saw her, things would be different, even though she really did love Ray. Then she told me about the kind thing Ray had done for her. I was hardly there and could hardly hear the things she was saying, but I made myself listen.

When her allergies were bad at the end of the summer and her eyes burned and itched, Ray would make her lie down on the bed, and he’d put his mouth over each of her eyes. He’d lick gently at each lid, at the little bit of red rim, and at the eyeball itself.

“He said that his mom used to do it for him when he was little, whenever he got something in his eye. He said it always made him feel better.”

“And that’s why you love him.”

“That’s not the only reason,” she said. “But what you said before? About how it can’t go on? I know it. I keep meaning to leave. And I don’t.”

And even though I was hardly there in the room with her anymore, I made myself say, “You can leave anytime you want to.”

I said it, but I didn’t believe it. I believed things were the way they were with Ray and Luke because June wanted them to be that way. She was right in the middle, at the center, and she didn’t want to swim to shore. Just as I was thinking that, Luke walked in.

“What’s this?” he said when he came into the room. From the way he looked at me, I knew he was trying to read my face, but I pulled that door closed. He stood watching us awhile, then he walked toward the table and reached for one of the bottles of Jim Beam.

“Guess I’ll join the party,” he said, but I was already pushing back from the table.

“Stay,” June said to me. “My two favorite people. I want you two to be friends.”

I said, “Luke already is my friend.”

“I always tell him you’re like a sister to me, Vangie. No, I tell him we’re closer than sisters. I told him you know everything.”

“I don’t know everything.”

“You know everything about us,” June said, and even though she was talking to me, she was looking at Luke when she said it. I could tell from the way her arm shifted that she was touching him under the table. Rubbing his thigh and cock.

“I bet you hear more than you ever wanted to,” I said to Luke.

“No. But I hear a lot. See a lot, too.”

When he said that, his face went cold, and I knew I wasn’t the only one in the room who could shut the door tight on what was inside.

“You’ve been a stranger out here,” he said then. “Have a drink?”

He was reaching for another glass, but he wasn’t asking me to stay. It was all a sign that I should keep on moving and become the stranger he just called me. I wondered when he’d come home and how long he’d been standing outside the kitchen, looking in at June and me. Long enough to see our kiss and all that sisterly affection was my guess. I stood up.

“It’s good night for me,” I said.

“All right, if we can’t persuade you,” June said, and downed the shot Luke had poured for her. Then she pushed the three joints toward me.

I said, “I’ll have to hide them.”

“Del doesn’t party at all anymore?”

“Not at all.”

“What does he do with himself?”

“He found religion.”

“Oh, Jesus.” June laughed. “Well, don’t worry. That will never rub off on you, Vangie. You’re as fucked up as I am.”

“I guess.”

“Well, say ‘hey’ to him for me.”

“I will,” I told her, though I had no intention of saying
her name. Luke was into his second shot of Jim Beam when I nodded to him. Then I was out the door.

On the way home, I did not let myself think about anything except the road. It had been a long time since I drove high. After a couple miles I rolled the window down all the way, took the three joints from the car seat, and held them up over the car so the wind would take them. I guess I could have saved them for a rainy day, but I wanted nothing to do with the kind of comfort or stupidity they brought. I didn’t want anything she gave me.

I knew I was angry with June, but it was hard to think through all the reasons. I didn’t like what she’d said to me, and I didn’t like what she was doing out at that house. It all seemed so easy for her. The two of them in love with her, and her just taking it all in, like it was her due. And to top it all off, bringing me into it, too. Fuck her, I thought.

I didn’t know if Kevin fucked her when she was a kid or if she was still trying to live out that story, but I was done trying to analyze and understand. I didn’t care why she was with Ray and Luke, I didn’t care that she used to think about kissing me. I didn’t want to be part of it anymore. That was clear in my mind as I drove the black roads home.

THAT NIGHT
when Del came home from the three-to-eleven shift, I was already in bed. I was still high, but I’d washed the marijuana smoke out of my hair. I was such an old hand at pretending to be straight, I knew I could blame any oddness on being tired.

When Del slid into bed behind me, his skin felt warm and
damp from his shower, and I knew if the light was on, I’d see where the shower had turned his skin red. He didn’t say anything and neither did I, but as he settled in behind me and draped one arm over me, I reached back for his cock, which was smooth and warm from the shower. I could feel him go alert, but he still didn’t say anything, and I kept grasping and holding until he was hard in my hand and I could run my palm over him and play with the hard-soft ridge of his head. I did that for a while, and then I let go so I could turn in the bed.

“I thought you were sleeping.”

“I’m awake now,” I said.

I kept pulling and tugging, and soon there was a little bit of wetness at the end of him.

I said, “Can you tell I want something from you?”

“Can you tell I want to give you something?”

I moved my legs apart then so he could get his fingers up into me, and we lay like that, each of us working the other.

“I want to open you up, Vangie,” he said then, and I knew what he meant. It always hurt a little when he did it, but I liked it, too.

“Can I open up your pussy?”

“Go ahead, honey,” I said, and I stopped touching his cock and lay facedown on the bed and let him pull a pillow under my hips.

That night, just like the other times he tried, he could only get his hand inside me up to his knuckles. His bones wouldn’t give and neither would mine, no matter how much jelly we used. But he’d get in far enough that he could
rub the muscles deep inside me, by my cervix, and the whole thing would hurt and feel good at the same time. It hurt to have the bones of his hand pushing into me, and it felt like my skin was raw from the rubbing, but I loved being touched so deep inside.

“There’s the nose,” he said, because that’s what my cervix felt like to him, and he kept touching it with the tip of his finger.

“Make yourself come, Vangie. Open up for me.”

I had to push up against my own weight to even get my hand between my legs, and then I had to hold myself up a little on one shoulder so I could rub. It made the blood pound in my head, but I knew it wouldn’t take me long to come, so I did it.

When I was close, I said, “I’ll come on your hand.”

“Do it. I want to feel it.”

I came hard. Del kept his hand deep in me for some of it, then he got inside me as fast as he could so he could feel the last bit on his cock.

“I want to put some come right up there,” he said. “Right up there.”

It felt like the inside of me was on fire, and when Del started to come, I felt it before I heard him. I could tell by the way he grunted and shook that he came hard, too.

“Those are some strong muscles,” he said when he was done, when we were just lying there. “You made my hand ache.”

“You made the inside of me ache,” I said.

“Was it too much?”

“Almost,” I said. “Just almost.”

He didn’t say anything about a baby or me going off the pill, and I didn’t say anything about his God talk. That night I needed a fuck hard enough to make me ache, and Del gave it to me. What he got from me I couldn’t say, but for the moment it seemed that my body and heart were enough.

26

T
HE
next morning was Wednesday, so I did not have to work at all and Del did not have to work until three. We were asleep when the knocking started, and it took me a while to even hear it, because I blended it into my dream. Sometimes my dad came by for a cup of coffee on the mornings he knew I was going out to the market, so I figured it was him and that he’d forgotten my days off.