The Pisces(19)

I imagined bringing this kid to Annika’s house. I didn’t want him knowing where I lived. Or in there to begin with.

“No, that’s okay. What’s your address?” I asked.

Then I texted Claire:

I’m going here with a strange boy from the internet

it’s your fault

if i don’t text you after then this is where to find the body

His house was one tiny room that reeked of cigarettes. The mini refrigerator, stove, and oven were right at the foot of his bed, and the bathroom just off the head of it. There was beige wall-to-wall carpeting, even in the “kitchen” part, with stains that looked like spaghetti sauce, tar, and generally a lot of lint. He had very few books for someone who claimed to be a writer and loved to read. I counted seven: three of them Bukowski.



“I love Bukowski maybe the best, actually,” he said when he caught me looking at the books. “Find what you love and let it kill you. So raw.”

I didn’t say anything. He put his arms around my waist and began kissing me, then pulled me onto the dirty plaid bedspread and took off my dress.

“You have such a hot body for forty,” he said.

“Thirty-eight,” I said.

“Mmmm,” he said, sliding his fingers into my underpants and tracing my war-torn labia. “I love your pussy. So hot that you have hair down there.”

I took off his pants. His cock was hard as a stone, yet simultaneously pink and slimy. I didn’t want to touch it. So I didn’t. He began fingering me, very dryly, adding further battering to my poor wax-mangled vagina.

He kept whispering, “Can I fuck you? I want to fuck you. Will you suck my dick?”

I kept saying, “No, not yet. I’m not ready.”

I guess in an effort to turn me on he inserted two more fingers into my wilting vagina, banging them in and out. My labia burned but I was surprised to find that up inside me I was wet, as though I didn’t know I was turned on. Now the wetness began to come down onto my labia and clit. But he ignored my clit and just kept banging away.

“Such a hot, tight, pink pussy,” he said.

I didn’t know how he knew it was pink. He hadn’t even looked at it or licked it.

“Let me fuck it. Please?” he said.

“No,” I said.

“Okay, then will you suck me? Just suck me a little,” he asked. “I want to see those hot old lips on my cock.”

That was it.

“You know what I think would be hot?” I asked. “What would do it for me? I want to watch you jerk off for a little.”

He stopped finger fucking me and looked me in the eye.



“Really?”

“Oh, yeah. It’s the biggest turn-on. I wanna watch as you lie there and give yourself pleasure. Jerk that hot dick.”

I don’t know where I was getting this from. When I was in my twenties I used to like to watch my boyfriend jerk off. But not this dude. I think I was just trying to get him to come, and get out of there without having to touch his weird pink dick and mismatched brown balls.

Lying on his back, he complied and began to stroke it. I was just, like, “Oh yeah, baby, that’s it.” I thought about all this subterfuge, just to get out of a situation that I had put myself in. Technically I didn’t even need to do anything to get out of the situation except leave. He kept looking at me and I just wanted him to come quickly. Right before he spurted he asked if I could lick it. I told him no, then I wouldn’t be able to watch.

When he was finished I said it was a hot experience, but I had to go home and feed Dominic and give him his medication. He said that he wanted to do something to me—that it shouldn’t just be him who got off. I told him that this was wonderful, really, and had been more than enough.

Out on the street I felt free, strangely elated. It wasn’t just the joy of escaping him but the fact that I had come out pursued and wanted—something new after my pursuit of Jamie all winter. I hadn’t gotten three blocks when he texted me:

u r amazing i’d love to do it again

I didn’t respond, but kind of squealed. No longer did Adam have to be real Adam. Now he was fantasy Adam again, and I had him and the fantasy in my pocket. Sure, the experience itself had been disappointing and gross, but at least it was different from the disappointment I’d grown used to in my years with Jamie. When he and I were together and the sex was less than riveting, I felt filled with doom after: ennui in my head and suffocating in my chest. It was the same doom that I felt in the car just before we broke up. There was an is that all there is–ness. I would go sit on the toilet immediately after he came. This was partially to avoid getting a urinary tract infection, but also so he wouldn’t see me frowning. When he found me sitting there sadly, I told him it was because the sex made me feel such powerful things. But really what I felt was despair: that this was all there would be, forever and ever and ever, until of course it wasn’t.



But if Adam wanted me, there were others who would want me, maybe many others, even some who didn’t read Bukowski. I imagined a bouquet of dicks, a stack of abdominal muscles like a deck of cards, painted across the sky. The hunger in me suddenly felt bottomless. It scared me a little.





14.


I found myself out on the rocks again later that night. I was throwing shells into the water when Theo the swimmer came paddling up, shoulders white in the moonlight. I hoped he would be there. He seemed happy to see me too.