Miracle Creek(75)

Around ten, when the vestiges of the sunset faded and darkness finally set in, Mary stood up, saying she was dizzy and needed water. He stood up, too, and was saying he should get going anyway, when she stumbled over a rock and fell against him. He tried to steady her, but he also stumbled, and they both ended up on the ground, laughing, her on top of him.

They tried to get up, but as drunk as they were, they ended up entangled, her thighs pressing and shifting against his groin, and he got hard. He tried not to, told himself he was thirty-three and she was seventeen and this was probably a felony, for God’s sake. But the thing was, he didn’t feel over thirty, and not just in the everyday, I-don’t-feel-as-old-as-my-age way he felt around those teenage hospital volunteers, wondering how he’d gotten to be someone they called “Sir.” It may have been the peach schnapps. Not the alcohol (though there was that) but the way it burned going down and settled hot in his stomach, sweet tanginess lingering in his mouth and nose. It was an instant time machine to those high school days of getting drunk with some girl and making out for hours and jerking off after, and sitting here now, drinking far too much of that shit, having one of those talk-about-everything-and-nothing conversations he hadn’t had since college—he felt young. Besides, Mary sure as hell didn’t look like an innocent girl in that dress, a trapping of seduction if he ever saw one.

So he kissed her. Or maybe she kissed him. His head was sludge; it was hard to think. Later, he’d hyperanalyze every frame of his memory of this moment for any clue that she wasn’t the enthusiastic participant he’d assumed her to be—had she squirmed to get away? had she mumbled no, however faintly?—but the truth was, he’d been oblivious to everything except the parts of her body in contact with his, and her reactions, her sounds and movements—those hadn’t been a factor at all. He’d closed his eyes and focused every neuron on the sensation of the kiss, the newness of her lips and tongue and teeth adding to the surreal feeling of being transported back to his teens. He didn’t want this moment, the pure physicality of it, to stop, so he wrapped his arms around her, one around her head to keep her mouth against his, and the other around her hips, steering her pelvis against his like teenagers grinding. He felt a deep welling of pressure stemming from his scrotum, building and building. He needed release. Right now. Eyes still closed, he unzipped his pants, grabbed her hand, and pushed it inside his underwear. He cupped his hand over her fingers, wrapping and holding them tight around his penis, and guided them into an up-down rhythm, its masturbatory familiarity combining with the unfamiliar smoothness of her lips and palms to drive him into a fevered frenzy.

Quickly, much too quickly, he came, the throbs of the contractions so intense, they were deliciously painful, sending tingles of electricity down his legs to his toes. The loud buzz of alcohol clogged his ears and white flashes burned behind his eyelids. He felt weak, and he released his grasp on Mary’s head and hand.

As he lay back, let the world go around in circles, he felt something press against his chest—but weakly, almost tentatively—and recoil. He opened his eyes. His head wobbled and the world spun, but he saw a small hand, above his chest—her hand, Mary’s hand. Shaking. And right above it, the oval of her open mouth, and her eyes, so wide they protruded, staring at her sticky hand, then turning to look at him, at his still-erect penis. Fear. Shock. But most of all, confusion, as if she didn’t understand any of this, didn’t know what that was coating her fingers, didn’t know what that thing was, poking out of his otherwise-on pants, like a child. A girl.

He ran away. He had no memory of how—he couldn’t remember standing, let alone how he managed to drive home with that much alcohol in his system. When he woke up the next morning, his hangover mauling his body, he had a moment of desperate hope of the incident being an alcohol-induced hallucination of some sort. But the semen-stain residue on his pants, the mud caked on his shoes—those confirmed the reality of what he remembered, and shame engulfed him, bringing back the buzz in his ears, the white flashes in his eyes.

He didn’t talk to Mary after that night. He tried to—to explain and apologize (and, if he was being honest, to see if she’d told anyone), but she went out of her way to avoid him. He managed to leave her a few notes—he had to go to her SAT class and find her car—but she wrote back, I don’t know why we need to discuss it. Can’t we just forget it ever happened? But he couldn’t forget it, couldn’t let her let him off that easy. Which was why he left her that now-famous H-Mart note, which his wife ended up throwing in her face, accusing her of stalking him!

It had been a year since that ordeal, but the shame and guilt and humiliation of that night—those never went away. Most of the time, they lay inert in a tightly knotted coil in his gut. But whenever he thought of Mary, and sometimes when he didn’t, when he was eating or driving or watching TV, that knot of shame erupted.

That night was the last time he’d had an orgasm. It wasn’t just Mary, but that plus the explosion and the amputation right after—the one-two-three punch of it—knocked out whatever sexual desire remained in him. Not that he never tried sex again. But the first time, when he started their usual foreplay—circling Janine’s nipples with his thumbs—he realized: he couldn’t feel anything. He had no idea if his touch was too hard or too soft, couldn’t gauge her readiness by feeling her wetness. His therapists had taught him how to type, eat, even wipe his ass with what felt like baseball mitts over his hands. But there’d been no How to Get Your Wife Off session, no alternative fondling techniques. It made him want to scream, this discovery of yet another element of his life the explosion had fucked over, and he couldn’t get hard.