by Megan Hart
More sobs dissolved her. I got up to pour her soda into a glass with ice and stuck a straw in it, then set it in front of her along with a box of tissues and a cold, damp cloth. She looked up. Her tears had washed away the last of her eye makeup, and without it she looked so much younger it made me want to cry, too.
“Thanks.” She wiped her face and kept the cloth pressed over her eyes for a minute.
“You’re welcome.” I gave her a minute. “What are you going to do?”
She laughed like it hurt. “I don’t know. He says it can’t be his. Can you believe it? Fucking bastard prick. Of course it’s his. Fucking married bastard fucking cocksucker!”
Another flurry of sobs sputtered out of her. I didn’t say anything. After a moment, she swiped at her face.
“I didn’t know he was married, Anne. Swear to God. Fucker told me he was divorced. He lied. God, why do men have to suck so much?”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said. “Not every man can be perfect like James.”
“Is that what you really think?” I shook my head. “Claire, don’t give him that much credit.”
She gave me a small, waterlogged smile. “Is that why you’re giving his friend blow jobs in your kitchen while he’s at work?”
Claire was the only one of my sisters who wouldn’t have judged me for it. “It’s complicated.”
“Well, shit.”
I rubbed her shoulder again. “Yes, he knows.”
“And he’s okay with it?”
“He’s the one who set it up.” Bitterness twisted my mouth with the words, though I wasn’t sure why. I had wanted this, and if he hadn’t given it to me I wouldn’t have taken it.
“I knew you were kinky.” She wiped her face again with the cloth and blew her nose in a tissue. She took a long sip of ginger ale.
One laugh slipped out. “I’m still not sure I qualify as kinky.”
“Anne, two dudes? Kinky. And hot.”
We heard doors open and close again as Alex left the bathroom and went back to his room. Claire sighed, her thin shoulders rising and falling. She slumped, forehead resting in her hand.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do, Anne. I have one semester left of school. I have a shitty job. I can’t tell Mom and Dad about this, they’ll freak.”
“Do you need money?”
She looked up. “You mean for an abortion?”
I nodded, silent. Her brow furrowed, and she looked at her hands. She rubbed a spot where her black polish had chipped off her nails.
“I don’t think I can do that.”
I took her hand and squeezed it. “Then you don’t have to.”
She started to cry again, and this time I knew what to do. I pulled her close so she could sob on my shoulder. I rubbed her back over and over. Her tears wet my shirt.
“Whatever you decide, Claire, I’ll support you.”
“I’m so scared,” she whispered, like she was ashamed. “You don’t even know.”
I had to close my eyes then, my throat closing tight against my own tears. “Yes, I do.”
She looked up at me, then down the hall. “Not—”
“No. Michael Bailey.”
“But you were only in high school,” she said.
“And I was stupid,” I told her.
Claire sniffled. “Did you tell Mom and Dad?”
“No.”
“Did you have an abortion?”
I shook my head.
“Did you…you didn’t have the baby!”
“No. I had a miscarriage. Maybe because of the endometriosis. Maybe not. I don’t know.”
“Wow.” Claire looked stunned. “I never knew.”
“Nobody did. I didn’t tell anyone. As it turned out, I didn’t have to.”
“What did he do?”
I sighed. “He didn’t do anything. We broke up.”
“I remember when you did,” she said. “I could hear you crying at night.”
“Ahh, good times, good times,” I said with fake fondness.
We laughed. She hugged me, and I hugged her back. She drank the rest of her soda.
“Does James know?”
I shook my head again. “I never told him.”
She nodded, like that made sense. “You’d better be on the pill and use a diaphragm,” she said seriously with another look down the hall. “Imagine how fucked up that would be.”
“I told you, I’m not fucking him. It’s an…arrangement.”
Claire made one of her distinctive faces. “Uh-huh.”
“If you need a good doctor, I can recommend one.” My change of subject didn’t even play at being subtle.
“Jesus. A cooch doctor. God.” Claire put her face in her hands again. “I need one that will work on a sliding scale. I’m fucking broke.”
“She does. And she’s great. And if you need money…”
She looked around at my shabby kitchen in a house valued for sale at half a million dollars. “You’re not exactly a fountain of cash, sissy.”
“You’re my sister. If you need help—”
She shook her head and gave me a watery smile. “I’ll keep that in mind. Right now, I just need to figure out what I’m going to do.”
Whistling alerted us to Alex’s return. Wearing a dark suit with a deep red shirt and black tie and smelling of the same rosemary and lavender lotion James wore, he came into the kitchen. He looked professional, but his smirk was anything but.
“Ladies,” he said. “Try not to drool.”
Claire rolled her eyes and gave him the finger. He put a hand over his heart and staggered back. “Ouch! That hurt.”
“Act like a cocky bastard, you run the risk of being treated like one,” she said smoothly.
I was interested to see that her flirting, no matter how little she might have meant it previously, had stopped. Claire even flirted with James, though without intent. Yet she’d backed off from Alex. She wasn’t being rude to him. Just…not flirting.
He got it. I liked that about him, that he was sharp. Fast. It could be intimidating, but it was also very sexy.
“Anne, I’ll be out late tonight. So don’t hold dinner for me or anything, okay?”
“Sure. See you later.”
He nodded and saluted Claire, grabbed his car keys from the hook by the door and left.
When he was gone, she said, “My, my, my. What a picture of domesticity.”
“He was being polite, that’s all. He’s still a guest in our house.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “Funny, but he doesn’t impress me as the sort who’d bend over backward just to be polite.”
For some reason, this annoyed me. “You don’t even know him.”
She shrugged. “He’s a Kennedy. And not one of the ones who fucked Marilyn Monroe, if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t, actually.” I frowned so hard it gave me a headache.
“He’s got how many sisters? Three?”
“Yes.”
“Big-time sluts,” Claire said. “Into drugs. His mom works at Kroger.”
“How do you know this?” I’d gone to the same high school as James and Alex, but five years behind. We’d never been there at the same time. If Alex’s sisters had been there, they’d have been before or after me, because I didn’t remember any of them.
“We were in school together, me and Kathy, the youngest one. We were on the drill squad together. She used to talk about him. Alex. He used to send her weird candy bars and stuff like canned pig’s feet from wherever he was in China.”
“Singapore,” I corrected. “And that still doesn’t mean he can’t be polite.”
She shrugged again. “I’m just saying, his sisters were slutty and his dad’s one of those guys that hangs out down at the VFW on disability.”
I gave her a long, steady look, and to her credit she did look faintly ashamed. “I don’t think I’d be judging anyone else so harshly if I were you, Claire.”
&
nbsp; “Yeah,” she said in a low voice after a moment. “But at least nobody pretends it isn’t true.”
Claire had been two the summer everything changed. I don’t think she could have remembered our family any differently than it was. In a way I envied her not having the comparison.
“This fucking party,” she sighed. “I can’t wait until it’s over.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
“Okay. I’m totally raiding your fridge.” She got up to sidle past me, but stopped. “Anne. Just…be careful. Okay? With that whole thing.”
“I will,” I assured her, though I wasn’t at all certain I could.
Even if I wanted to.
I discovered the power of an orgasm at sixteen. I’d fallen headlong into the teenage girl’s habit of spending hours staring at my face in the mirror wishing I looked more like the women in the fashion magazines and less like myself. I took long showers, standing beneath the water until it ran cold and I faced the wrath of my sisters who’d had to wait their turn. I washed my hair, shaved my legs and the places on my body where hair still seemed such an odd thing to have. I hadn’t thought much about the handheld shower other than it made it easier to rinse the shaving cream from my skin.
It felt good, that first unintentional burst of water against me. So I did it again, and held it there. A few minutes later, fireworks exploded inside me. I had to sit on the floor of the shower because my legs shook so much I thought I might fall.
I learned quickly how my body worked after that. At night, beneath the blankets and in the shower, I traversed my lines and curves and discovered all the places that felt good to touch and stroke. I learned how to prolong the pleasure until I couldn’t stand it anymore, and a mere squeeze of my thighs could keep me on the edge of coming for an hour or longer. How finally letting go could take me high and sink me low almost at the same time and leave me breathless and spent.
Michael wasn’t the first boy who kissed me, but he was the first to kiss me after I’d learned what sexual pleasure felt like. It was easy for me to put two and two together, to think about how my own hands could make me writhe and tremble and automatically assume his could do the same. In that way I was both lucky and unfortunate; my best girlfriend, Lori Kay, had also begun seriously dating a boy who wanted to push her into sex. She didn’t want to do it, not because she thought she ought to wait until she was married or anything like that, or that she was afraid of getting pregnant, because she’d been on the pill to control her periods since eighth grade. No, Lori didn’t want to fuck her boyfriend because he gave her no reason to think she’d enjoy it.
We had shared stories sitting under the big tree in her front yard, or in her basement during sleepovers. Her boyfriend was happy for her to go down on him but when he fingered her all she felt was irritated.
“Kissing’s great,” she confided. “But when he puts his hand between my legs it’s like he made a mistake on his homework and he’s trying to erase it. Rub, rub, rub!”
We laughed at that, and she marveled at my description of how Michael used his hand to make me come over and over. I didn’t tell her I already knew how it felt to climax. She’d said she never had one. We didn’t talk about masturbation.
So I was lucky in that learning my body had opened me up to having someone else know it, too, but looking back on it and the way things turned out, it might have been better if I’d been like my friend, who successfully put off losing her virginity until college.
After Michael I was sure I’d never fall in love again. I never wanted to lose myself inside someone like that again. I lost the desire to touch myself. Sex, even of the solo sort, had been ruined for me. The thought of kissing, touching, making love, turned my stomach so fiercely I couldn’t even watch romantic movies without feeling my mouth twist into a frown.
I went to college, relieved to escape my house and smiles we all put on to hide the truth. I worked hard in my classes and at the work-study programs I found to help support myself. I made friends with my roommate, a beautiful girl who had a boyfriend “back home” but who nevertheless found a lot of time to “hang out” with the entire Delta Phi Delta Fraternity on weekends. I made other friends, too, girls and guys. My dorm was co-ed and for the first time, since I had no brothers, I learned what it was like to live in proximity with boys.
I wouldn’t say promiscuity was rampant, but in college it was certainly easier to admit you’d fucked somebody without the stigma of high school when girls who had sex were whispered to be sluts. Hook-ups were frequent and most often initiated by alcohol consumption. Getting drunk was as much a part of the dorm life as eating fries at every meal or ordering pizza at 2:00 a.m.
I went to parties in the basements of frat houses, where the floor had churned to mud that left permanent stains on the hems of my jeans, and the music was so loud it was impossible to hear conversation. I didn’t need to talk to the boys who offered me beer. I didn’t want to. But I could dance with abandon, splashing in puddles of beer mud to songs that had been popular years ago but somehow managed to be played at every party.
Hey! Hey, what! Get laid, get fucked!
And everyone was getting laid, getting fucked, getting hand jobs and blow jobs.
It happened for me, again, finally, after a party. I’d gone at the invitation of my sophomore-year roommate, who was dating a theater major. We’d gone to some ramshackle Victorian mansion on the edge of campus. I wasn’t sure how many people actually lived there, but there must have been at least twelve. The rest of the guests were familiar enough with the house and its residents to act as though they lived there, too, helping themselves to food from the fridge and booze from the cabinet. Compared to the wild frat parties I was used to attending, this gathering was like a cocktail party where people actually sat around and had discussions, and the music playing in the background was heavy with The Cure and Depeche Mode, groups with lush instrumentals and heavy-duty lyrics about love, lust and life.
They served wine, which I tried to refuse without looking like a geek but ended up taking. It made me feel backward and awkward to hold the fragile-seeming glass, and to compensate I sipped regularly. My glass was refilled before it was ever empty. I was quickly deep into the alcohol haze. I went quiet with it instead of raucous, so I didn’t stand out among the serious conversations about acting methods and playwrights.
I knew nothing about theater, so when the tall boy with the long dark hair asked me if I was going to try out for Waiting for Godot, I blinked slowly before answering.
“I don’t know,” was my answer. It sounded more clever than it should have.
He smiled. His name was Matt. He was a theater major, a junior, and he intended to work with special effects. He offered to show me some of the models he was building for an independent film feature he was making with some of his friends. He called them his little monsters, and until I saw the small clay and wire figures, I thought he was referring to his friends.
We talked for a long time, sitting in the darkness of his room lit only by a black light. He’d put up velvet posters of Elvis and unicorns that glowed with vibrant, surreal luminescence in a rainbow of colors. When he leaned over to kiss me, I was surprised that he wanted to. I’d stopped thinking of myself as the sort of girl boys wanted to kiss, even though I’d fended off my share of groping hands and come-ons. I’d chalked their interest up to the beer and the darkness, because after all, why else would anyone be interested in someone with whom they hadn’t even spoken?
Matt had condoms in the drawer next to his bed and I didn’t dissuade him from using them, though I’d gone on the pill my freshman year and was adamant about taking them. He pulled me close and kissed me, his hands roving. I floated on the cushion of wine and soft music, on the sonnets he murmured. On his confidence that didn’t come off as cockiness. When he slid a hand between my legs, my thighs opened almost of their own accord, like my body had been waiting for so long for a touch that my mind could no longer overrule it.
We had sex and there were no bad consequences of it. I didn’t get pregnant again, or a disease. He didn’t break my heart.
I’d had sex again and my life hadn’t changed.
It was the last time I’d ever had more than a few sips of alcohol. Nothing bad had happened, but nothing would have happened at all had I been sober. It wasn’t hard to figure that out.
Two years and several lovers later, I met James. I was in my last year of college and doing an internship at a women’s shelter, and he was spending a summer shadowing his uncle part-time in the real estate business that had an office next to ours and spending the rest of his time overseeing his first construction crew. We were the ones sent to fetch lunch and coffee. We often met outside with our hands full of bags from the diner around the corner.
I didn’t fall in love with James. Falling sounds like an accident. Falling hurts. I’d fallen in love with Michael, fallen hard like slipping off a cliff and hitting the rocks below. Falling in love was something I’d vowed never to do again.
I chose to love James.
My life was better for it. We fit, two small puzzle pieces inside a much larger picture. I could laugh with him. I could cry with him. When he held my hand, I knew it was being held, and when he hugged me I felt embraced. He listened to me when I talked about my dreams and goals, and he told me about his. His easy confidence, his utterly unshakeable belief that the world would never fuck him over, attracted me. I wanted what he had, and I wanted him. I didn’t fall in love with him, but that didn’t make my feelings for him any less. They were made greater for being chosen, for being given on purpose. Individually there were things we lacked, but together we were perfect.
I never imagined falling in love ever again. I never imagined yearning. I had everything a woman could want with James. In our marriage, our house. Our perfect life.
Until he gave me Alex, I hadn’t realized something was missing, but until he gave me Alex I didn’t know I wasn’t the only one who missed it.
Chapter 12
I didn’t tell Claire’s secret, and she kept mine. I wanted to ask her what she was doing about hers, but because she pretended not to remember she’d figured out I was not fucking Alex, I pretended not to know she’d been knocked up by some married loser who’d led her on.
