by Julia Kent
“You doubt everything.”
“A healthy dose of skepticism is the sign of an active mind.”
“And a healthy dose of listening makes for more empathy.”
“I have plenty of empathy.”
She snorted.
“I just don’t have patience for bullshit.”
“You think my story about Marlene is bullshit?”
I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned back against the couch. “Go on.”
“Marlene finds these poor men and takes ‘em to her house. Gets them to wine and dine her while she’s screwing them. Mama’s been way more free with all the details since she got married to Calvin and we went back to Ohio for the wedding and came clean about us. I guess she thinks I’m grown up enough to know.”
“To know your aunt is, uh...”
“The town whore? Yeah. You can say it. Once she was arrested for fucking those hockey players in the Maine airport, it kinda sealed the deal.”
I don’t point out that technically that incident had nothing to do with being a town whore, but there’s an evolution to any long conversation with Darla, and interrupting her with pesky facts is a bad idea.
I waited in silence for her to continue.
“So these salesmen… well, after a while, Marlene found one who kept coming back. Like a regular. And he had enough money to do some nice things for her, like buy her flowers and get her a new sump pump.”
“How romantic.”
“When water starts seeping into your basement causing mold damage, a sump pump is better than a week-long cruise to Cabo, Joe.”
I just nodded and bit my tongue, trying not to point out that Marlene had some really low standards.
“Josie had sent her the money for the repair, but Marlene blew it. Mama liked the salesman. Think his name was Archie or Archer. Something like that. And Marlene couldn’t take a sump pump and buy percs with it.”
“If anyone could, I’m sure your aunt would be the one to figure that out.”
Darla sighed deeply. “Yeah. She would. But she didn’t. And that meant some of her basic needs were being met by Archie – let’s go with that name – and old Archie was a true help to Marlene.”
“But...”
“But Archie was married. Lived in Harrisburg, and came through Peters every three months or so. Started staying at Marlene’s for three or four days while he did business. Sold something connected to trucking. I don’t know the details. It’s all a blur, but I read it in his obituary.”
Oh, God. The guy is dead. That means she’s about to tell the whole, complicated story, right down to the color of the ribbon on the flowers at his funeral.
Bzzzzz.
I reached for my phone.
“Don’t answer that,” Darla scoffed. “It’s just your mom.”
I tap the green button to accept the call because at this point, talking to my mother is a better alternative than hearing how Darla’s aunt’s meal ticket died in Ohio.
“What?” I said into the phone.
“Is that any way to talk to your mother?”
“When you’re just harassing me to return to law school and won’t accept that I’m a separate human being with my own volition, yes.”
“I knew raising you to think for yourself was going to come back and bite me in the ass,” my mom declared.
“Since when did you raise me to think for myself? I had to learn that on my own!”
“I didn’t call you to fight, Joey.”
“You called to hound me about law school.”
“No. I called because you just turned twenty-five and that means I need to tell you something.”
“Did my letter from Hogwarts finally come, fourteen years too late?”
Mom always sounded like she was in a hurry and a little irritated, so the choked, softer response put me on alert. “It’s important. Can you come home and sit down with us?”
“Us? Us as in you and Dad?”
“Yes.”
“Mom, what is this? You’re freaking me out. What does turning twenty-five have to do with anything?”
“I don’t mean to alarm you. We just need a meeting with you. Tomorrow? Seven?”
“I have to fly out the next day. Can’t it wait until I come back?”
“No.”
“Fine. We’ll be there.”
“We?” Her voice was like an oboe with a dry reed.
“Me. Darla. Probably not Trevor, but –”
“Not Darla! This is family business.”
Unfortunately, she said that loud enough for Darla to hear. She looked up from her YouTube video displaying a baccarat game and frowned.
Fuck.
“I’ll come alone, but you need to realize she’s my girlfriend.”
“I know.”
“Just like Gene is your boyfriend.”
Full stop. Silence. I love to shut my mom up.
With the truth.
“I am fine,” she said, clearing her throat repeatedly on the word fine, “with having Darla present for later conversations, if you choose. But not for this first one.”
“What is it?”
“Just come over, Joey. Please.”
“Fine.” I ended the call, pissed and confused.
“What’s Joanne up to now?”
“Nothing unusual,” I said, telling the truth without giving too much. “Just more pressure.”
“Didn’t sound like it was about law school.”
I peered over her shoulder. “Every video you’re watching is about gambling. Please don’t tell me you’re going to try to become a poker player. You know you’re terrible at it.”
“I am not!”
“Yes. You are. Your face shows everything. I’ve seen four-year-olds who can bluff better.”
“I am an accomplished liar.”
For some reason, that made my chest hurt.
“So am I,” I blurted out.
I was lying to her right now, technically.
“Are we seriously trying to convince each other we’re the better liar? That’s one hell of a dynamic in a relationship,” she mused.
“Why are you watching so many gambling videos, Darla?”
“Because I plan to play a little. Trevor has me convinced I need to work on this abundance mentality shit.”
“Abundance mentality is just a politically correct phrase for being smart.”
“Huh?”
“If you play your cards right and go for what you want, you’ll always get it.”
“Only a rich white man from the suburbs with well-off hoverparents could spit that kinda nonsense out and actually believe it.”
“And only a poor, lower-educated woman raised in a trailer park in flyover country by a widowed, disabled mother could unilaterally brush off what I’m saying by waving it off as privilege,” I shot back, curling into myself, all my muscles smoothing out, removing emotion from them. This feeling hadn’t kicked in for a long time, the tense, taut sensation of being on shaky emotional ground and needing to defend my position.
At all costs.
We both were breathing hard, and I saw the same stunned feeling inside me reflected in her eyes. Tempers can flare quickly in people too proud to back down. My blood slammed hard, spreading through my arms, my legs, a pulse point in my ankle starting to throb.
I wasn’t going to break first, though.
“I thought we were long past this shit,” she whispered, not in softness, but in fury.
“So did I,” I countered, my eyes narrowing involuntarily, shoulders dropping, my body rooting in place as if preparing for a descent into self-preservation, emotions tucked away, reflexes at the forefront. When I’m in this state my heart disappears, a clinical, cold detachment taking over.
“How do we do this? How do we get from talking about your mom or my aunt’s fuckbuddy to being at each other’s throats so fast?” She worked hard to control her emotions but I could see all of the turmoil on her face, her eyes beaming out a dis
tress signal.
“We haven’t done this in a very long time,” I said, extending a verbal olive branch, the closest I could come.
“But why?”
“Because if we did this all the time we wouldn’t have lasted three years.”
She froze.
“That’s not what I meant, but ouch, Joe. That hurts to hear.”
“It hurt to say it.”
“Do you walk around holding back? Is that what you mean?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Are you saying the only reason we’ve lasted as long as we have is because you’re not telling me how you feel because you don’t want conflict?”
“Do I look like the kind of person who doesn’t speak his mind, Darla?”
“No. So can you explain what you just meant?”
“I meant that when we met, we lived in wildly different worlds. Now we don’t. You joined our world here in Boston. And we’ve joined parts of your world. We don’t clash like we used to. If we did, we wouldn’t have lasted. We’ve all bent toward each other, instead of staying rigid.”
“Even you?”
“Yes, me. You think I’m that unyielding? Jesus, Darla, I came clean with my parents about you, me, and Trevor. I found out last year my parents have a similar, uh, arrangement with my dad’s ‘business partner.’ I’ve gone to Ohio and claimed you in the middle of a culture where I could have been beaten to a pulp behind a used auto parts store that doubles as a justice of the peace’s office. I have bent and bent and bent.”
“So have I.”
“So have you,” I conceded. The forcefield of Tetris-like pieces of defense that I built around me started to soften.
“We were just talking about Vegas. Gambling. Nothing big,” she said in a voice filled with ponder. “And we get like this.”
“Do you really think that only rich, white, over-educated, hoverparented guys can play their cards right and have good things happen to them, Darla? Is that seriously your worldview?”
“You make it sound like people who don’t get what they want are to blame. Do you believe that?”
“No,” I insisted.
“And no to yours, too,” she said with a nod.
“We have more common ground than we think.” I wanted to touch her. To re-establish some intimacy. We might as well have been an ocean apart, even as I smelled the coffee on her breath as she breathed hard, her emotions right under her skin.
“We do. So how do we get past this?”
“How about a blow job?”
“What?”
“A blow job.”
“We’re in the middle of a fight and you want me to put your dick in my mouth?”
“Yes.”
“And you think I should just give you that because...”
“Because it’s the best way to get over this tension.”
“I’m not feeling any tension.”
“Maybe you are,” I argued, touching the line of her jaw with my fingertips. It was the first time either of us had touched the other and I knew I was breaking my own rule. My old rule. I reached out for connection. In the past, I’d have viewed that as weak.
Now, I thought it made me more mature. Definitely more mature than Darla.
Which meant I won.
The blow job would just be a bonus.
“Where am I feeling tense, Joe?”
“In your jaw. It needs a good stretch.”
If Darla wore glasses, she’d have peered at me over them, but her eyebrows flying up and her chin tipping down was close enough.
“Besides, it’s hard to be mad at someone when you have their dick in your mouth,” I added in a low voice, trying to butter her up, turned on the longer we talked.
“You know this from experience?”
“What? No!”
“Then why do you think that’s true? I can be plenty mad at you while sucking you off.” She chomped her teeth a few times. It sent shivers through my ball sac.
“That’s not funny,” I growled.
“But it’s true.”
“I’m not good at this whole making-up thing, Darla. You know that.”
“I could tell. Asking me to go down on you is the worst apology you have ever come up with, Joe.”
“I’m supposed to apologize? For what?”
“You really want that blow job?”
“Yes.”
She just sat there, tapping her toe, arms crossed over those big, round tits I love so much.
“I love you,” I said, struck by the fact that I love her tits. Yes, I’m shallow. But I do. And maybe instead of a blow job, she’d let me give her a pearl necklace. Sex was the only way out here, for me at least. If we’re connected by flesh and suck and lick and thrust, I have a way to communicate with her that doesn’t involve my asshole mouth.
“Say it to me, then. Not my tits.”
Busted.
“I was voted most likely to succeed in high school, you know,” she said in a teasing voice that made my semi go to full mast, fast. There was something in her tone that said the worst of the storm had blown over (so to speak) and we were left with the raw, brisk edges of the finish that make you turn your face toward the wind and take it all in from a safe place.
“You were?”
“Yeah. Except they spelled it different.”
“What do you mean?”
“You spell it ‘s-u-c-c-e-e-d.’ They spelled it ‘s-u-c-k s-e-e-d.’”
“I’d imagine you’d have to be really good at it to get that kind of title.” The belt buckle felt like a slab of stone against my cock, which pushed up like the tendril of a vine, seeking light.
Seeking wet.
Mercifully, Darla unbuckled and unzipped me, moving herself to a chair as I towered over her, repositioning my feet for better balance. As she pulled my pants down, I let out an audible groan.
This was going to be great.
One of the best features on Darla is her hair. Long, blonde, frizzy, and thick, sinking my fingers into it when she wraps her warm, sucking mouth around my hard cock is like winning the sensory lottery. All that yellow curl up against my tan belly, the up and down of her deep-throating like getting soft silk against my skin while she gives me what I need.
We’ve been together long enough that sex has more layers to it. In the last year, we’ve gotten wilder. Blunter. More raw and raunchy in a way that strips away the old expectations of emotionality. I don’t mean we’re crude, and we certainly still respect each other, but it’s also a refreshing change to say what we want the others to do to our bodies and get it.
Shorthand, if you will. Sexual shorthand.
Darla was doing anything but shorthand to my dick in that moment, her long, even strokes making me pull her hair, fisting it in my hands as she pulled me in, as my tip struck the back of her throat, the sides of my shaft dragging along her pearly whites while her tongue flicked the tip. Too much of that and I would become one twitching hormone, spilling into her like a kid in the middle of a wet dream.
Not enough and I’d be thrusting into her, begging for more.
She had me right where I wanted to be, trapped between arousal and orgasm, riding the wave as long as possible. Sometimes sex felt so good, it was like time stopped and all you wanted was the endless space before the orgasm, where the intensity wasn’t there but all the pleasure just went on and on. I could have stayed like that forever, but Darla upped the ante, her pinky finger pushing at the puckered edge of my ass with just enough pressure to make my cock jump in her mouth as she did that thing – oh, God, that thing – where she looked up at me as I looked down at her and it was like having a goddess bow before me.
I was seconds away from glory.
And then she abruptly dropped my shaft, my balls, my ass, her mouth popping off me like a Champagne cork.
I whimpered.
“But –”
As Darla wiped her wet mouth with the back of her hand, she simply said:
“All your org
asms are mine. See you later.”
“You can’t do this!”
“Just did.”
“But when will you – when can we – ” I sputtered.
She shrugged.
“A shrug is not an answer!” I bellowed.
She shrugged again.
“Wait!” In desperation, I rifled through my mind’s list of topics I could use to get her to stay. “But you were telling me this whole story about your Aunt Marlene! You can’t leave me hanging! I need to know how it finishes!”
“Since when did you give a shit about my aunt back in Ohio?”
“I care! I’m a very caring person,” I protested. I was, too.
I cared a lot about getting off right now.
Mercifully, she reached for my cock and then – hold on – was she petting it? Petting my dick over my pants?
“That’s all you’re getting for now. On both counts.”
And with that, her big, grabbable ass sashayed out of the room.
I was just outplayed.
CHAPTER SIX
DARLA
M e and airplanes don’t mix.
We’re like oil and water.
Bleach and ammonia.
Joanne Ross and anyone fucking her son.
You know.
But I’ve gotten better. A whole lot better. I try to book buses for all the band travel, but once in a while we get a gig that is too far to justify it. Like Los Angeles. We all flew out there, except for Tyler. I managed.
Mostly, Joe and Trevor managed me. And not like that first time, where they each gave me a Xanax by accident and Joe tried to get me to join the Mile High Club and my shirt got flushed down the toilet.
With me in it.
Anyhooo… I’m better now.
A lot.
Because Giles said he’d cover travel, I went ahead and held my nose and put all of us together on a direct flight. It cost more than economy with connections, but was worth it. That’s part of my problem, too. Like, in general, not just when I’m about to get on a metal tube that rises in the air by physics magic.
The problem of spending money.
When you grow up poor (and trust me, I was poor), you don’t spend money you don’t got. You make every penny count. You can’t even go into debt like normal people when you’re stone-cold poor. You don’t have credit cards or fancy home equity loans or student loans.
