The Pisces(18)

He might have been disappointed in what I looked like too, but he didn’t show it.

“You’re really cute,” he said, as though assuring both me and himself. “You look a lot younger than forty. A lot younger.”



“I’m thirty-eight,” I said.

“Not that I don’t like older women. I love older women. You’ve got seasoning. But you look like a young older woman. Or an old younger woman—”

“Okay,” I said, relieving him of having to speak. “I got it.”

“So what do you want to do?” he asked. “Do you want to stay here and have a drink or do you want to go for a walk?”

“Let’s have a drink first,” I said.

“God, you’re really cute,” he said.

We turned in to a little dive. I ordered myself a vodka tonic. Rarely did I drink liquor anymore but I felt that the situation called for it. I needed to be less lucid than I was. He didn’t offer to pay for my drink. But he got two tequila shots, offering me one, and a Jack and Coke. I declined, laughing.

“So what have you been reading lately?” he asked, after toasting me with one of his two shots. I had told him over the Internet that I was a librarian, and he loved that. He had asked me to wear my glasses, but I didn’t wear glasses.

“I’m almost always reading the Greeks,” I said. “I’m doing a project on the poet Sappho that I’ve been working on for a number of years. Trying to finish it this summer.”

“Oh yeah, I read him in high school,” he said. “I’m really into the Beats right now. Do you like the Beats?”

I liked the Beats for a second when I was fourteen. By sixteen I realized they were mostly just good for picking out a douchebag. There was something about douche bros and the Beats. They just gravitated there.

“Yeah, I love them,” I said. “Who is your favorite?”

“Kerouac,” he said. “I’m really into Kerouac, Burroughs, and Bukowski. Kerouac just keeps it so real, like the way he writes his characters it’s just so—legit. I would love to write like him someday.”

“Right,” I said.

“So how about that walk?” he said.

Outside it was almost dark. He lit up a cigarette and offered me one. I declined and watched him squint and inhale, then exhale. Clearly he had studied that move: a James Dean kind of smoking pose. But he was no James Dean, and his hands were even more monkey-werewolf than the rest of him: monkey in the way they curled around the cigarette like they were clutching a banana and werewolf in the way his arm hair crawled well over his wrist and onto the hands themselves. He was hairy to the knuckle. We started to walk and I felt like I was going to vomit. I kept wanting to say, “You know what? Thanks, but I’m not feeling so great and I’m just going to walk home.” But we kept walking.



Suddenly he grabbed my hand and said, “Can I kiss you?”

But he didn’t wait for me to respond. His palm was sweaty, but his lips were full and I closed my eyes and it felt shocking to be kissing someone new. The new mouth shape was exciting, also strange. After eight years I forgot that lips could come in different shapes and feels. Also, the taste of cigarettes and whiskey was exciting. I was half nauseated and half turned on. I felt rebellious and young.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said, giggling. “You’re just cute.”

Looking at him, I really didn’t think he was cute. But I didn’t know what else to say so I shut my eyes and took the back of his head in my palm and pulled him toward me. Then he introduced his tongue, much deeper into my mouth, circling it in a clockwise motion. What the fuck was he doing? He was ruining it. I started to put my tongue out as a guard, to try to stop his rotating tongue, but I guess he just took this as a sign that I was turned on—that I was into it—because he continued with the circling, only deeper in my mouth, almost to my throat, gagging me. I put my finger up between our mouths, pretending to trace his lips, but really trying to create some distance. Then I closed my lips a lot, guiding him into softer and gentler kisses. I kept my eyes sealed shut. I could have just cut it off there. I’d gotten what I said I wanted. I’m not sure why I didn’t.



He rubbed my tits over my black cotton dress. I could feel his bulge against me. Then he started kissing my ear and neck, which I think is a turn-on for some women, because men do it a lot—especially when they are younger. I remembered these moves now from when I was in my early twenties: the weird breathing in my ear, the sticky trail on my neck, moves he probably read on Esquire.com. All I could think about was how my neck and ear now smelled like his breath, which had taken on a sour quality: the whiskey, tequila, and smoke forming a noxious stew.

“Let’s go back to my house,” he whispered into my ear.

“Uhhh, I don’t think so,” I said. “What if you’re a murderer?”

“I’m not a murderer.” He laughed.

“If you were a murderer you obviously wouldn’t tell me.”

“I’m so not a murderer,” he said.

“Well, I will just walk a little further and then I’ll decide. Maybe I can pick up some more clues in the meantime.”

“Yeah, let’s just walk in the direction of my house. Or we could go to your house instead?”