—I really liked that.
She was talking in my ear.
—Yes.
—Yes?
She was laughing but I still couldn’t. —Me too I mean.
—Let’s not stay too late k? I’ll want my turn.
—K,
I was stuttering it out. —K, —K, —K, —K,
• •
—You know her name’s not a real name, right Cole? You know it’s some art technique or whatever?
—Her dad named her. A really famous painter suggested it, and—
—OK, but it’s not. A real. Name.
It unnerves Alec, for some reason, to hang out with her practically at all. He was fine with the other girls, sexy even to know he knew the details while we just hung out talking, but for some reason not now, for some reason this is for some reason different. I mean, I know what the reason is, I guess. I know I know it.
• •
Her mom picks her up at my house. She runs right out. I wave at both of them zipping away, my breath clouding it up when I rest my face on the cold pane. Her taste in my breath, then on the window alone.
• •
Supposed to be reviewing the rules of the argumentative essay, day after the second date. Her mouth on my cock, so deep, right when I walked in the door. My homework rustles. Pros and cons. Cons, I guess, is that if she were really sucking me all the time it would be hard to do anything else. But holy fuck the pros.
• •
I call her and she says she just came.
—What? Like touching yourself?
She finishes the sip of water. —Home. Shopping with my mom. What did you say?
—Hi. I said hi.
—Hi, Cole.
• •
—You know her name’s not a real name?
—You told me this a thousand times.
—What kind of name is that even anyway?
I sigh at Alec and type back. —Different from all the other girls.
—It’s really different, freaky.
Alec, you have no idea.
• •
—Do guys like it when the girl talks dirty?
Her teeth are a little purple from red wine. Never knew there was such a thing ever, a girl who drinks red wine.
—Guys?
I’m trying not to think of Alec. There was some dirty talk, sure.
—You, then. Do you like it? You want me to talk like a whore?
She leans in and whispers in my ear. —150 for oral, 300 for a straight fuck.
—Beat it, I’m a cop.
Big purple laugh.
• •
Out up on the hill, haven’t been here in forever, wind and leaves moving across the junky scraggle of a field. A lost squirrel goes by quick.
—I keep living so many places, Cole. Everyone I ever met at every school just starts to blur by. I follow them and see their parties on the screen, and it’s just like some old scenery I passed. You know? You don’t. You live here. But another semester, a year. I just keep moving and there’s no real place, no destination.
I’m loving her suddenly. I feel it in my throat and my pulse keeps thumping.
—I could be it.
She kisses me and I taste the chocolate she likes, found a forgotten square in the coat she bought on a weekend in London.
—You could be.
She moves my hand to her breast.
• •
Third date her mom was out again, and we just had some toast downstairs, hardly talking. Up to her room, she took off all her clothes before we even started. I thought I would look away, but I didn’t,
—Cole, get naked, I want you naked.
and then I did.
• •
—It’s one thing to write love poems.
She’s holding a sheet of paper over us, like a strict, square cloud. We’re on our backs in bed looking at it.
—That’s the poem? The real first line?
—Yeah.
—It’s one thing to write love poems? That’s cool, actually.
—I told you, Cole. It’s one thing to write love poems. Another, however, to deal with that deity of the river of blood.
—See, that sounds more like poetry that I was thinking.
—You mean it’s bad.
—Oh, I forgot you—
—Yeah, I translated. But it is bad, it sounds ridiculous. There’s another part where the real translation is godhead, I have to make that also not ridiculous.
—Well, go on.
—Really?
—Yeah, really. What did you think?
The paper sinks down. She curls my leg over hers. —Even the girl, who thinks she knows her young lover …
—Why did you ask me over that time?
—The first time? I don’t know, we just met, right? Maddy introduced us?
—No, you just beckoned me over.
—Before that, we met at lunch. No, wait, maybe I was just looking at you. I remember your jeans were too tight.
—What?
—Your black ones, Cole. How could you not know that, the way that was. Even she isn’t close enough for him to tell how this lord of lust.
—You’re kidding about that. Lord of lust?
Her leg keeps rubbing over me. I’m getting thicker and thicker. The line about my jeans too tight, it’s working.
• •
Done with homework, or half-done anyway. Think of a good search term, amateur outdoors. Hello, girls. Then her name comes up on the screen. Still not used to seeing it.
—What are you up to?
I shut all the naked windows. —Nothing you?
—To be honest I was masturbating.
Hard to type “whoawhoawhoaohmygodwhat” so I type nothing.
—Not super successfully, though. Can you call me? Are you alone?
My pants are already uncomfortable as I walk to lay my backpack across the door.
—Yeah one sec.
—Are you hard, Cole?
Fingers on the phone, I’m saying it out loud to the waiting screen. —One sec one sec one sec …
• •
She speaks up for it, the sex. It’s not just something she lets me do or enjoys. It’s something she wants and asks for. Actually, she’s like that, I am seeing, about everything, and it’s exciting. It’s spooky.
• •
She shows up one morning bounding into school with a quick kiss and a motorcycle helmet, shiny black like a smooth globe of a blank new planet, tucked under her arm trying to look like no big deal. She cannot help grinning no matter how long she’s lived in Europe.
—My mom let me have it for the day. I’m taking you on a ride after school.
We’d already had sex, but that afternoon with the howling wind, my fingers clenched on her back real hard, the shriek in my ears rushing by and the cooped-up sight with my eyes locked on her back, reined-in with terror and the buzz, the stupendous vibing of the thrum of the shiver of the engine all up between my legs pushing its electrics through my throttling spine to my gasping teeth, the dismount onto the gravel of the rest stop to be tugged through damp trees to the woods shady and chilly on the damp ground, ripping the wrapper open while she smiles with her jeans off and socks on, that was the first time we fucked.
• •
—Officially together?
She repeats this in the tone of what’s-the-problem-officer. I already thought it might not work, to ask her.
—OK.
—Do we need a permit, Cole? Do I have to pay for the whole year up front?
—I was just asking.
—Can we just, play it as it goes along, by ear?
And, like a sock to the stomach, I get how every previous girl felt looking and asking that question, officially, at me.
• •
We walk in together to a party, and it’s like they can smell it on us. She must have told some girl who told everyone. I get high-fivey nods from guys I don’t know. Girls only t
alk to me about her. We dance a little but everyone is wondering why don’t we just leave. We have a car. Lords of lust. We should be in it fucking.
• •
—You’re with Grisaille now? Officially.
Alec was waiting where we meet up sometimes, mad. He hadn’t answered the last couple times but I hadn’t thought about it. —Yeah.
—And you didn’t tell me. It’s officially, and you didn’t—
—I did tell you. What, Alec, the fuck? Is it the details you want?
He shoved me, a real shove, and then scraped at his eyes a little. —Fuck you.
—What?
—Figure it out.
He was already stalking away toward the gate. What are the rules on this? If he was a girlfriend, I would try more onscreen, I’m a dick or sorry or Are you OK are we OK now? or try to hack it out through his friends. But his friends are me, and guys I wouldn’t ever talk to about anything, and besides he is not, not, not my fucking girlfriend.
• •
—S, A …
I tell her she’s wrong already. —It wasn’t even S.
—Felt like S. Do it again.
—I love your eyes when I do this.
—It feels like finger painting.
—It’s not finger painting. I’m writing a real word on your back. Guess.
—L.
—Not L.
—Don’t make me guess, Cole. It could be anything. Just keep writing.
And I do. I keep writing, and not just, I’m thinking, the dirty parts. There’s more.
• •
—So you lived in Cairo and Lisbon.
—Italy as a kid. Germany for, I guess it was, one semester, and then back again.
—Like here.
—Well, not much like here.
I lean into her belly, the smell so warm and strange with something girls at my high school do not wear, do not smell like. Familiar, foreign at the same time, like someone I literally dreamed up. —Did you have a guy in Germany?
—Cole.
—I’m just asking.
—You want me to start that, you? You who can’t be in the same room or else Adrienne will tear you limb from limb she hates you so much?
• •
—What are you doing?
I stop it, I was nervous about it anyway. —Sorry.
—No, no, go ahead. I’m just curious.
• •
—You’re a beautiful girl.
—I don’t know.
—What? You are.
—Girl feels weird.
—You’re a beautiful woman.
—No, no, now I’m old when you say that like that.
—Well not girl not woman, I don’t know—
She moves close. —Just say beautiful.
And I do.
• •
—Keep your panties on.
—What?
—Keep—
—But how could we—
—I’ll pull them aside, leave them on.
—OK …
She stands up with a ridiculous, ridiculously sexy smile. —… If you wear one shoe, and both of these barrettes …
• •
Kristen waves her hand in front of my face. —Group project. Not, Kristen does it while you think about your girlfriend.
—OK, shut up, OK.
—She is something to think about, though. You’ve met your match with that one.
I say it dirtily so she’ll shut up maybe. —A perfect fit.
She just rolls her eyes. Nothing’s dirty to her now, not in month four, is it, with Mark and his beard. —She could snap you in two, Cole. She probably has, come to think of it.
• •
We sit at the donut place all day after school. I have an English paper I totally spaced and Grisaille is at her phone and drawing birds on napkins. Her bare wrist brushes me and I remember her skin and look up slow, her leg tendrilled up with mine now, the epic happy, so calm, that there’s so much time with her stretched out, plenty to finish this moment before we go home to her room.
• •
Rob runs into me in the parking lot.
—You’re with that Spanish girl now?
—She’s not Spanish. She just lived in Lisbon for a while with her dad, so actually—
—Yeah. But you’re with her? How is that?
We’ve hung out a thousand times but always in a pack. I know maybe two things about Rob—he plays football, and last year punched some guy’s arm, I don’t remember the rest. I try to make up a way to talk to him. —The best fuck.
He grimaces and keeps walking. —Dude. I just meant, is she nice.
• •
—It’s one thing to write love poems. Another, though, to deal with that river-god of the blood: hidden, guilty. Even the girl, who thinks she knows her young lover, even she isn’t close enough for him to tell how this lord of lust, in the lonely times before she knew him, before she eased him, almost before she seemed possible, would lift up his godhead …
I wasn’t laughing but now I am, just a little. —Sorry.
She smiles but she is almost, actually, sad about it. —I know. Still ridiculous.
—It wasn’t, until that word.
—Yeah, but do you know what it is? Godhead?
I squint my eyes to last year’s Lit class. I was hardly there then, what with Amelie when her mom went away for ten days. —Godhead. Isn’t it—
but then I’m shrieking. She’s grabbing my cock, almost joysticky, and waving it around.
—wet with the utterly unknown, and churn the night—
—Ouch ouch ouch!
—to an endless riot! Ha!
• •
Alec’s wide lonely eyes actually turn my stomach one day in the hall. —We haven’t hung out in a while.
—We hang out all day every day all school day long.
—Maybe this weekend you want to,
—She and I will probably go to Luka’s party.
—She and I.
—Alec, she’s my girlfriend.
But he’s just looking at me. —Alec.
—I guess I thought …
But he doesn’t finish it. I have to tell him, so what I say is, —But I told you, we weren’t.
• •
I looked on the computer and there’s a scale for it, gay to straight and you can be anywhere on it. I’m on it at the part of, if there’s no girl why not, and now there is, so let’s stop and be cool about it.
He’s at, obviously, some other part.
• •
And the person I would talk about it to, this Alec situation or mess or nothing, would be Alec. My hand hovers on the screen. Grisaille doesn’t answer, so now I don’t have to decide whether or not to talk about it with Grisaille, I scroll through my others, almost laughable how I will never tell any of them any of this.
• •
Even the girl who thinks she knows her young lover, even she isn’t close enough for him to tell—
• •
Let’s watch something. Hello, look at this girl bent over the table. Four years ago I think, I thought anal sex just meant you were really particular about it.
• •
She calls in the morning. —Run over here.
—I have the car though.
—But I want you sweaty, Cole. Record-break the two-mile, that run.
• •
—Get on top of me.
—No, no, Cole. Keep like this. Keep moving. Yes.
—But I want—
—Don’t care what you want, keep moving, yes, yes, yes, yes, fuck, yes, yes.
• •
—I want to watch us in the mirror, Cole, but I need my glasses.
The Venn diagram of adorable and fuckable, in the mirror with glasses on and nothing else, her legs up against my chest, grinning until I push deeper and she has to close her eyes.
• •
—Stop covering it up. It’s cutest now.
—Now?
—It’s cute. Like a little slug when it’s done. Don’t get me wrong, it’s hot when it’s big. But your little resting cock, so cute. Adorable godhead.
—Still ridiculous, that word.
—Well, you can’t put penis in a poem, right? Also ridiculous. Cock? Oh, you’re ruining it.
—You’re ruining it. It’s your talk that did it.
—So much for cute.
—But it’s hot now?
—Yes. Getting there.
• •
I press in deeper. It’s further but it’s not closer. Not the latex, just the separateness, some other distance I can’t slide across. Grisaille feels the same, I can tell, her legs urging me on. But we can’t, we need to, get closer than this, can we? Can we? Is there a trick to it, a technique that will make this as wild and together as I know we are feeling? Is there? I am almost crying at how far away from it we are finding ourselves, on this trembling actual bed.
• •
She got up and went to the bathroom and came back wearing only my shirt. I was on my back on the bed. She stopped at the edge of the bed and clutched my hair a little. Then she moved so she was on my mouth and just rubbed there. Her moans were so unpretty I knew it was real. She tasted like everything, like a girl, like a person, like a creature. Midway I tried to reach for her and she said no and like this came on my mouth like I wasn’t even there and I, so much, loved it.
• •
I would like to excuse my son Cole from school this morning. I could see at breakfast that he had spent Sunday afternoon fucking and fucking and needs to spend today thinking about it and masturbating and recuperating.
• •
We kiss hard in the vitamin aisle and then there’s an old man scowling at us. Leave us alone. This is, have you seen her body, what we’re for, to be messing around if we want to.
• •
And every time she walks up to me it’s another motorcycle ride.
• •
—Wait, you’re,
—What?
—Your arm, if you could,
—You’re acting like I’m in the way, Cole. Like I’m smack dab in the middle of your path—
—Well,
—of fucking me, Cole. Me. Hello.
—OK. Put your arm anyplace you want then.
And I’m shrieking out of the bed while she howls with giggles.
—Not there!
—You said anyplace!
• •
All the Dirty Parts Page 4
