The Nix(125)

She pulled off her shorts and tank top, yanked off her bra and underwear, and fetched the towel from her closet. It was the thinnest, smallest towel she owned. It was probably not even a proper bath towel because it did not wrap fully around her but rather revealed a long dagger of flesh all the way up her side. And the towel wasn’t a standard width either, since the bottom came down only to that soft fleshy ticklish part where her legs met her torso. Any sudden movement and all would be revealed, in other words. It was white, threadbare from many washings, almost see-through in places. She had laundered it many times to achieve exactly this look. She used it roughly the same way a magician used a watch: to hypnotize.

She opened the door.

“Hey,” she said, and Larry’s eyes darted south the moment he saw her and comprehended her and her fantastically small towel. “I’m not dressed, sorry,” she said. “I was just about to shower.”

He walked in and closed the door behind him. Larry Broxton, wearing his usual outfit: shiny silver basketball shorts, black T-shirt, big flip-flops. It was not that Larry didn’t own any other clothes—he did, she’d seen his closet, filled with nice-looking button-downs that were surely mother-supplied. It was just that this was the outfit he always chose, picking it up off the floor every morning and sniffing it and putting it on again. She wondered how long before he’d get sick of this one outfit, but it had been a month now and she hadn’t seen him change yet. Boys can be obsessively focused in their desires, she’d noticed. The things they liked they tended to repeat again and again and again.

“You needed something?” Larry said. Guys were often so eager to do what she wanted, especially when she wore the Towel. Larry sat on her bed. She stood in front of him, so that her body was directly at his eye level. If she drew the towel up an inch or two, he could probably see her perfectly manicured pubic everything.

“Just a little favor,” she said.

She had met Larry in her Intro to Lit course. She’d noticed him early on and wondered if he was trying to grow a beard or simply forgetting to shave. She’d seen him on campus. She knew he always wore the same outfit and drove a really big black Humvee. He never spoke to anyone until one day after class he asked if she wanted to come to a party at his frat. A theme party. They were roasting a pig on a spit. Grilling hamburgers they called Brontosaurus Burgers. Making something called Jurassic Juice. They called it the Slutty Cavegirls party.

Which was just so totally offensive! Because it’s a party at a frat. Obviously she would dress slutty. They didn’t have to tell her to do that. Did they think she was stupid?

But okay, she went. Leather toga, no undies, whatever, and drank Jurassic Juice until it tasted good, and talked to Larry, who used the word circumspect in a sentence, which was impressive. They talked about what was the worst thing about college. “The classes,” Laura had said. “The parking spaces are too small,” Larry had said. And Laura felt that familiar intoxicated grabby allover need where all she wanted was to press herself up against him tightly. But she wasn’t yet so drunk that she was going to ho it up in front of all these people. She invited Larry back to her dorm room, where she gave him a blow job and he totally came in her mouth without even asking, which she personally found rude, but whatever.

She didn’t know what circumspect meant, but sometimes you have to give a guy some credit. That’s a good word.

“Do you still have your job?” Laura said, by which she meant his fantastic work-study position at the campus computer support center, where Larry spent most of his three-hour shift watching internet videos, occasionally helping some poor professor who didn’t know how to hook up a printer.

“Yes,” he said.

“Oh good,” she said, and she stepped toward him, lightly touching her leg to his.

The weirdest thing that had happened when she seduced Larry in her dorm room that first time was that at the moment he orgasmed, she felt some odd lump of something suddenly enter her mouth, something soft but definitely, surprisingly, solid. She spit it into her hand and found what appeared to be a partially digested piece of Brontosaurus Burger. Which she assumed came out of Larry, and thus she concluded he had the unique ability to ejaculate his dinner out his penis, which was gross. After that, she requested that Larry do his deposits elsewhere.

“So at your job,” Laura said, “you can remotely log in to any computer on campus, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Perfect. There’s a computer that needs to be investigated.”

Larry frowned. “Whose computer?”

“Professor Anderson’s.”

“Oh, man. For real?”

She stroked his hay-colored hair with one hand. “Definitely. He’s hiding something. Something bad.”

Laura had not considered another possibility: that men in fact did not have the biological capability to ejaculate the contents of their stomach, but rather that the bit of Brontosaurus Burger had been in Laura’s mouth from the beginning, before the blow job even started, stuck there in the pit where a wisdom tooth used to be, and it was simply Larry’s orgasmic bucking that jimmied it loose. In other words, a coincidence, if an unfortunate one. Afterward, she told Larry he was no longer welcome to come in her mouth, and he enthusiastically suggested other places to do his business. Her face, breasts, and butt were the expected targets. Expected because they had both ingested so many hours of internet pornography that they were simply acting out scenes that had become normalized, even banal. That Larry wanted to finish every sex act by splashing onto some part of her seemed like the customary way sex should end, raised as they were on porn’s ejaculatory clichés. But then Larry expanded the target zone: He wanted to come on her feet, her back, in her hair, on the bridge of her nose, he wanted her to wear glasses so he could come on her glasses, on her elbows, on that thin part of her wrists. He was remarkably specific! She had no opinion about this, that Larry seemed to have a mental checklist of body parts he wanted to ejaculate onto. No opinion except that occasionally this made her feel like the sexual equivalent of a bingo card.