Fisher of Men

by Phoebe Alexander

  “Yeah, I guess you'd call it an orgy,” she admitted. “There were two women and four men. One woman, Pam, was part of a couple. Her husband – never caught his name – was the one with the mustache. Then there was Casey's friend Rhonda, the blonde I suspect hates me. And then there were two other men, Tony and Jason. Tony was this sort of doughy looking white guy and Jason was a younger, very ripped African American man. And of course there was Cap.”

  “So how long do you think you were standing there watching?” Aimee asked.

  “I don't know, probably a good fifteen or twenty minutes...maybe longer. It's all so hazy now.” She tried to remember what compelled her to stay so long. Maybe I was hoping to be discovered? Perhaps I was secretly waiting to be pulled into the room? she considered. Maybe I'm angry because I didn't get asked to play?

  Aimee sighed into the phone which sounded a little bit like a hiss. It wasn't often that she was at a loss for words, but she was clearly struggling to find the right ones to console her friend. “I wonder why you watched for so long...did it turn you on?”

  Ugh, Leah thought, I was afraid she would go there. After the elevator arrived in the lobby, Leah had gone to use the staff restroom near her office. She was shocked to discover that her panties were soaking wet with desire. Despite her personal convictions, her body had responded on a visceral level to the scene in the hotel room. There was nothing she could say or do to deny her evident arousal by what she had witnessed. “Truthfully, yes, a little.” It was now her turn to sigh. “Is that bad?”

  “I think you're just a little confused by it all,” Aimee offered. “And I think that's perfectly understandable. You've practically re-established your virginity in the last few years and instead of easing back into the proverbial baby pool of sexual activity, you are jumping headfirst into the shark-infested ocean!”

  “Well, that's a very colorful way to put it,” Leah agreed, impressed as usual by her best friend's flair for the dramatic. “I am just not sure what to do now. I can't really be mad at Cap. He didn't do anything wrong.”

  “Why don't you just talk to him?” her friend suggested. “Talking never hurt anyone, right?”

  Talking is what got me into this mess, she thought. If I hadn't talked to him, then I would have never known he had so many layers and complexities; I would have never wanted to unravel his mysteries. I wouldn't have gotten sucked in by his charm and those damn dimples. But she knew it was futile to completely ignore him. It was a small town and he knew where to find her. He'll eventually just show up on my doorstep or at my office if I don't respond to his calls. She breathed a sigh of concession. So I guess talking it is.

  Leah noticed, quite a bit too late, that she had missed church that morning. She was planning to lie down and close her eyes for twenty minutes before scrambling to make the 10:30 service, but she quickly slipped into a comatose state until 1PM when the phone ringing assaulted her peaceful slumber. It was her mother again. As soon as she processed the contact photo of her childhood home illuminated on the screen, she instantly remembered blowing her mother off just before the party the night before. Her head was pounding from the winning combination of lack of sleep and emotional turmoil, not exactly a prime time for conversing with my mother, she argued, but ended up answering the call nonetheless.

  “How was church this morning, sweetheart?” Ms. Miller chirped into the phone at approximately four million decibels.

  The pain radiating from a point behind Leah's right eye was staggering. She saw spots dancing on the white curtains in her bedroom, a sure sign that a migraine was about to erupt. Nausea and intolerance to light would soon follow. “I didn't go today,” she confessed, not even able to muster the energy to lie.

  Mrs. Miller wasted no time reaching into her maternal speech arsenal for her patented tone of disappointment. “Why not, honey? What's wrong with you?”

  “I worked late last night and I have a migraine today,” Leah explained. “I am just sitting in my apartment in the dark hoping that Glory won't make a mess on the floor before I feel up to taking her outside again.”

  Her mother's disappointment hastily gave way to empathy: thick, gooey empathy. Mrs. Miller only had two modes for responding to her children's illnesses: denial (as in “Take two Tylenol and a hot bath; you'll be fine.”) and extreme nurturing mode, and clearly the latter was the response du jour. “Oh, darling, you have just been working yourself way too hard lately. You don't ever take any time off; you're there at night and on the weekends all the time. You have absolutely no social life outside of church! It's just not right that you're stressing yourself out so much. No wonder you have migraines! You need to go tell that boss of yours that you need more time off! That way you can come home for Christmas!”

  Leah held the phone several inches away from her ear while her mother completed her diatribe. It was far easier to acquiesce than argue at that point. “Sure, Mom, I'll tell my boss what you said and let you know, okay?”

  “Go take a nap, sweetheart. You'll feel better when you wake up and then you can take Glory for a walk in the fresh air. It's already been super cold out west this weekend. Winter has definitely arrived in Nebraska!”

  Leah did feel somewhat fortunate that the temperatures in coastal Maryland were holding in the mid-50's, even though there was a fierce breeze blowing in off the bay and flat layers of clouds stacked against the horizon threatening rain. “Okay, Mom, thanks. Tell Dad I said hi.”

  “Sure will, honey. I love you,” she sang in her chirpy voice.

  “I love you too, Mom.” Leah hung up the phone and sighed, which made Glory perk up her ears and come into the room to investigate. Satisfied that nothing fun was going on without her, she turned herself in a circle twice and then laid down so that her hindquarters were curled against Leah's back. And there the pair slept for the next two hours until Leah's slumber was interrupted once more, not by a phone call this time but by a knock on the door.

  Her head felt considerably better as she rolled off the bed and to her feet, but she realized she was a little dizzy and disoriented from not eating all day. She expected to see a pair of blue eyes and dimples when she opened the door, and her suspicions were immediately confirmed. Except there was a pair of deep brown eyes, a wet nose, and a furiously wagging tail as well.

  “You wouldn't answer my phone calls,” Cap explained in an apologetic voice as he let himself inside Leah's apartment. She took a step back away from the door to grant him passage, surrendering her control over the situation. Glory immediately went from dead sleep to high alert mode in roughly a nanosecond, leaping off the bed and bounding into the foyer, her toenails clicking loudly on the tile. The two dogs spent the next sixty seconds sniffing each other’s rear ends while their owners formulated speeches in their respective heads.

  Cap went first once he was seated on the wicker loveseat in the living room. Leah returned from the kitchen with two glasses of iced tea and took a seat in the matching chair that was on the diagonal from him. Keeper and Glory were exploring the kitchen and other than loud panting weren't distracting the two humans from their conversation. “I wanted the chance to spend some time with you last night,” he began. “I was just finishing up with my friends and then I was going to come downstairs to find you.”

  His explanation annoyed her to such a great degree that she retorted: “Finishing up WITH your friends or finishing DOING your friends?” She was shocked she'd let something so catty come out of her mouth to someone she barely knew. She immediately bit her tongue to prevent it from expelling anything else embarrassing.

  His one-dimpled smirk revealed that he found some humor in her accusation, but he swallowed hard and tried to maintain his seriousness. “I'm sorry if you weren't ready to see that yet. I didn't intend to get involved in anything last night, but Rhonda practically dragged me into the room. I wish you would have come inside the room to watch and maybe join in, if you felt comfortable...it would have been hot to have another woman there.” He win
ked, and then both dimples made an appearance.

  Leah shook her head. She hadn't decided how she wanted to handle this situation: express her moral outrage? Brush it off? Forgive and forget? She had hoped to have some more time to think before having to choose. She suddenly felt guided by her conscience to say, “Can you just give me a moment?” She stood up to excuse herself. “I'll be right back.”

  She scurried down the hall to the bathroom and slipped inside, locking the door behind her. The tiny six by eight foot space enveloped her like a cocoon of safety. She looked in the mirror over the sink, leaning in so close that she could see all the pores on her nose, the few stray eyebrows that needed to be plucked, and the smattering of golden freckles across her cheeks that hadn't completely faded from her childhood. She pushed several strands of her thick strawberry blonde hair behind her ear and blinked a few times to distribute the tears that had formed in the corners of her eyelids.

  What the heck am I doing here? she asked herself. What is that man doing in my apartment?

  She instinctively sank to her knees on the shaggy seafoam green rug, feeling its twisted fibers dig into the flesh of her shins. “Oh, Father,” she prayed in a whisper, “I'm sorry I didn't turn to You first. I feel like I'm such a mess right now...I wanted things to work out so badly. I believed I could handle this crazy situation like an adult but I've denied everything You've taught me. I know You've promised to always be here for me, to never desert me, and yet here I am trying to do things on my own, like usual.

  “Please let the words flow out of my mouth, the right words that will reflect Your perfect love and peace. I pray my friendship with Cap can be salvaged, as it would be bad for me professionally if there were hard feelings over this incident. Thank You for loving me even though I am imperfect. In Jesus' Name, I pray, Amen.” She felt a tear slide down her cheek and quickly flicked it away as she raised herself to a standing position. Then she went back to face Cap.

  “Everything okay?” he asked, concern in his eyes. He'd taken his baseball cap off and set it on the rattan glass-topped coffee table and Keeper, already tired of Glory's puppy shenanigans, had retired lazily at his owner's work boot-clad feet.

  Leah nodded. “First, I want to say that I'm sorry for overreacting last night. You were with your friends at a swinger party and you had every right to do what you do at those types of parties. I shouldn't have been so...I don't know...” She reached into her heart to pull out some words, hoping that as a result of her prayer, God had placed some in there for her to grab hold of.

  He stared at her sincerely while scooting himself to the very end of the loveseat so he was close enough to place his weathered hands on top of hers. She observed that his nails were clean and well-groomed and that the hair on his knuckles was nearly white blonde, it was so bleached out by the sun. She noticed how warm and strong and capable his hands felt on top of hers, and how small and dainty hers were by comparison. He is so contrite, she observed. He's certainly not making this any easier on me.

  “Just say what's on your mind, Leah, don't sugarcoat it for me. Just let it all out.” His word “out” had a glaring Eastern shore pronunciation. She almost got hung up on that one word, “out,” and how there could be more than one way to say those three simple letters pushed together.

  She pulled her hands out from under him and took a sip of her tea, buying herself a little more time to collect that basket of words she'd been fishing for. “Alright, fair enough,” she finally conceded. “I'm going to be honest with you.”

  His eyes widened and the edges of his lips curled into a smile, but not enough to reveal the dimples. He crossed one boot so that his ankle rested on his knee and leaned back with his arms outstretched across the back of the loveseat. She had captured his undivided attention.

  “When I first started watching what was going on in that room, I wasn't really thinking of it as you. I felt like I was watching a movie, a porno, or whatever, just faceless bodies, strangers pleasuring each other. And it was so fascinating to watch the movements, to see how different configurations arose, to hear the sounds of ecstasy filling the room. And I thought, 'Wow, this is beautiful, all these people working together to make love.' Truthfully...,” she winced at admitting it, “I was getting sort of aroused by the whole thing.”

  He shifted slightly, taking in her words like a long swig of ice water on the hottest day of the year. His smile had flourished and his cheeks had taken on just a tiny flush of color. And Leah couldn't help but notice when he shifted that a bulge had developed between his legs. She immediately forced herself to look away. “And then what did you think?” he asked, anticipating that something had changed in her perception which eventually upset her.

  “Then I started thinking about you and me...and how badly I wanted you the other day. And how badly I still want you now, and knowing that you were fucking these other two ladies and not me, and what does it really all mean to you, anyway? I'm not sure I can ever be part of your world, let alone understand it. Maybe because I was brought up to believe in one woman and one man till death do they part or maybe because I'm just naïve or close-minded or whatever...I don't know if I am really okay with it after all, even though I really wanted to be.” She finished her explanation and watched him drop his boot back to the floor so that both feet were next to Keeper again.

  She watched him take a breath and she could tell he was calculating his response while trying to avoid becoming defensive. “First of all, I never expected you to be part of that world, Leah. I hope you believe that. Would I enjoy it? Oh sure, most definitely, I'm not gonna lie to you. But I'm not interested in you for purely sexual reasons, and that's also the God's honest truth.”

  “You're not?” she asked, then paused for a beat. “Well, then what, friendship?” She felt like she was baiting him.

  He smirked. “I think maybe you've conflated sex with love your whole life. I'm pretty sure that's the problem,” he theorized.

  “What do you mean by that?” she asked for clarification, her tone failing to disguise the disappointment that he had moved from the specifics of their relationship back to generalizations.

  “Well, you're spouting off that Judeo-Christian one man and one woman bullshit, and I want you to think about that for a second. You know, back in Bible times people got married when they were like 14 and died when they were 40. Women were property and had no rights. Men had harems of wives and concubines. How is that one man and one woman? How is that anything like what we do today?” Cap queried, his volume rising.

  Apparently, his attempt to avoid a defensive tone has failed miserably, Leah noted. “That's the Old Testament,” she retorted, matching his volume, “not the New Testament.”

  Cap sighed and dropped his theologically-based argument and opted for something more personal. “Here's how it is for me,” he offered. “Sex is a physical thing. It's on the surface, see? It’s body parts coming together. Like when I put my hands on top of yours a minute ago, I might have interlaced my fingers with yours, and we would have been connected, right? Sex is the same thing, but with genitals.”

  Leah was on the edge of her seat waiting to see where this would go. Her gold-flecked green eyes urged him on and she was grateful that Glory was occupied with a bone in the corner while Keeper dozed. She didn't want to miss a minute of this; she was on the verge of getting the answers she desperately needed.

  “Sex is a physical thing, okay, and then we layer emotions on top of it. It could be passion or lust or friendship or...or it could be love. It's a physical act that can express a whole bunch of emotions, and love is only one of them. Does that make sense to you?” he asked, leaning forward so that his elbows rested on his faded denim-covered knees.

  Leah's mind was racing through Bible verses, reconciling every biblical reference to sex she could think of with Cap's explanation. The whole subject was murky. She felt like she had 2000 years of biblical, theological, and doctrinal commentaries on what was probably the most intrinsic
and deeply-engrained of all human impulses after eating, drinking and breathing to sift through, countless layers of sin, shame, and eternal damnation all piled up and aiming to control sexual desire. Her headache was definitely back in full swing, pardon the pun, she smirked to herself.

  “I know, it's probably a lot different from what you're used to thinking,” he said with a reassuring smile. “I don't want to push you or pressure you. I just wanted to help you understand that this is something I do for fun. I have made wonderful friends in the lifestyle and we like to do things to make each other feel good. That's really all there is to it.”

  He paused for a moment and leaned closer to her, taking her hands into his again. “How do you fit into it? Well, I don't know right yet. Maybe we're destined to just be friends...or maybe there's more there. I don't think we know each other well enough to determine that yet.”

  Leah nodded; it was the one thing he'd said that she could wholeheartedly agree with. Everything else seemed a hopeless jumble at the moment. All she knew was despite her prayer and despite their discussion, she still felt like climbing onto his lap like she had the other day so she could feel herself pressed against his bulky frame and have his strong arms wrapped around her. She wouldn't, of course; she couldn't. But she wanted to.

  He was still holding her hands but now sat up, perfectly straight-backed, poised to stand. “Alright, I'm sorry that I just invited myself over like this. I'm normally much more of a gentleman. I just hated to think you were upset and didn't want to talk to me, and I didn't want to lose you...as a friend or whatever other potential there may be.” He squeezed her hands into his affectionately. “Are you still mad?”