Robin and Ruby

by K. M. Soehnlein

  She sits up. “Should I help?”

  “I hate these things,” he says, and then with a frustrated growl, he pulls the rubber off, tosses it to the floor. He throws his legs over the side of the bed and drops his head in his hands. He pouts.

  She pushes her hair back from her face, tilts her neck so the hair will stay out of the way. She sees that his cock, softening suddenly, has no foreskin, which is what she’s used to, with Calvin. She lowers her mouth, puts her lips around the head of it. There’s a taste from the latex—gross, medicinal—but she keeps at it, moves her wet tongue around, and the taste goes away under the wetness and the heat. She tries to figure out how to breathe.

  She doesn’t really know what to do here. She’s done this with Calvin but not much, she never really liked it with the foreskin. She wants to make Chris feel as good as he made her feel, but really what do you do with it? It’s strange, a big piece of person in your mouth, a piece of the guy machine. A big machine part. He pushes into her throat. She gags. The shock of it. “Sorry, sorry, I’m sorry,” he says.

  She hears the foil crinkling. He’s opening another one.

  “Try again?” he says, sliding hard from her mouth and fumbling again with the rubber. She lies next to him. “I want your first time to be special.”

  But she remembers the first time—the secret first time, Brandon, no condom, no gentle anything. The blood that time. It scared her enough to send her to her mother, a day or two later. Dorothy took her to the doctor, she meant well, she was concerned, but it was awful, the doctor touching her with hands that had hair on them. Opening her up and saying in his stern voice you’re lucky this time, your carelessness could leave you pregnant or diseased or both, don’t you know what’s going around out there, think about that, young lady.

  They kiss, and it feels different this time, not a sweet bloom but something raw and exposed, mouths chapped and burning as if cooked in the sun. The smells and tastes are different now. There’s soap on his lips from eating her out, and there’s something else there, too, which is, she guesses, her own smell. Weird to think about that. She feels in an instant daring and adult. She sees that together they could do everything, things she’s only heard about and never imagined for herself. She lays back. He’s got the rubber on. He gets in between her legs. She’s still wet, so it goes in quickly, sliding into her inflamed vagina. She’s heard of women using lubricants but never understood until now the way her body would create its own. He’s moving against her. She feels pressure in every direction, forcing the breath from her lungs.

  “Go slowly,” she says.

  “Are you OK?” He holds himself above her. She touches his skin. Nods. His skin is smooth and hot, like the door of an oven.

  “Can I push a little more?” he says. “I might be about to break the—I mean, you’ll probably feel—It could hurt.”

  Break the. Probably feel. Could hurt.

  It did hurt, back then. She did feel it. The broken hymen. The doctor used that word later. She had swallowed her scream, back then.

  “I’m afraid,” she says, or perhaps only thinks. He doesn’t seem to hear her. He pushes. She feels herself resisting, tries to relax. A deep breath, a flutter in her throat as she exhales. His hip bones press against. He is deep inside. He’s shining with sweat. A switch seems to have flipped, opening something up in him. Droplets hang and release onto her. His effort is clear. That’s good, she should feel to him like a virgin. “Just push,” she says, and he does, deep, and she lets herself cry out. He looks worried when she does this, so she grabs him and holds him close.

  They rock together. She shuts her eyes.

  A whimpering. She looks at him. His lower eyelids pool with tears.

  “Chris?”

  “I thought I was going to die, but now I feel strong again.”

  She kisses him. Then it all disappears, time disappears, and thought, and worry, and only sensation is left, and it sort of feels great and sort of hurts, but mostly what she does is look at his face, which is concentrated and beautiful, the sad eyes, the scar on his lip, the tendons in his neck, the black hair flopping like a curtain in the wind, a bead of sweat along his cheekbone. He’s pulling back, and then digging deeper and really going for it, he’s lifted her legs with his hands and is just going for it.

  And then at some point the balance goes the other way, and things aren’t so good. Despite the natural lubrication, there’s an irritated feeling, too. Some excess friction. “Slower,” she croaks out.

  “Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry.” He leans in and kisses her.

  “You don’t have to apologize,” she says.

  He says, “Let me pull out,” and he does. Then he says, “Oh, no.”

  “What?”

  She sees his penis pointing up to his navel, pulsating, oozing clear gooey liquid. But there’s no latex on it.

  She’s confused. “I thought you put it on—”

  “I did. You saw it.”

  He’s patting the bed around her. She lowers her legs, scoots backward.

  He says, “Is it in you?”

  “What?” She reaches down, it almost hurts to touch herself, she’s so inflamed, but her fingers slip in past the hair and lips. Then she feels the curled edge. She pulls it out, a dun colored wrinkled slimy thing. She winces.

  “Oh, fuck,” he says. “I think that can happen if, I don’t know, I heard it can happen, if it doesn’t fit right.” He’s stammering through accelerated breath. “Do you want, I don’t know, a towel or anything?”

  She looks at her fingers. She never took off the ring he gave her. She says, “Let me go wipe up the blood.”

  “Is there?” he says, examining under the head. The clear goo dribbles down the length of the shaft. Could she get pregnant from that?

  In the bathroom she runs the water, wipes herself with a warm cloth. There’s no blood. She hates that she’s lying. She doesn’t know what else to do.

  She sits on the toilet, she thinks she should pee, that if there were any sperm that got in she could pee them out. This is absurd, she knows, but she imagines it’s true anyway. The urine tingles as it passes through.

  When she gets back to the bed he’s lying on his side. “What are we supposed to do?” she asks.

  “You’re upset,” he says.

  “Aren’t you? The condom—”

  “I doubt it would, I mean, I didn’t actually shoot—”

  “No, I’m sure it’s OK.” She sits down, but apart from him. He’s still hard. Should she use her hand on him? No, not with Chris.

  “Come here,” he says, patting the bed.

  She spoons into him, letting him enfold her. She’s aware of the tangle of limbs, of hard parts and soft, the strangeness of trying to find the right position, the awkwardness of their breaths moving at different paces. He licks her shoulder, nibbles her ear. She feels his tongue near the scratch on her neck.

  He says, “I don’t want you to feel bad. This has been magical.”

  “Until I find out I’m pregnant.”

  “Shh, shhh, no. We didn’t get that far.”

  “I’m due next week, so we’ll know soon enough.”

  He rubs her hair, which calms her down. “Nothing bad will happen,” he says. “There’s something holy between us.”

  She takes a deep breath. He’s right. It was beautiful and holy and the condom probably only came off at the end, so there’s no chance—not much of a chance anyway. Nothing she can do about it now. Just be here with Chris. She thinks that she won’t sleep, and then she’s drifting away. Sinking.

  She’s awakened from a dream that disappears the moment her eyes take in the motel furniture, the drapes, their clothes scattered across the carpet. Two condom wrappers on the floor near the bed. She recognizes the whoosh of waves crashing beyond the walls before she registers a louder, closer sound: the ringing of the phone on the bedside table. It hurts her ears. She must be a little hungover. Her mouth is dry, too.

  Chris lies near
er to the phone, but he remains inert, his face so calm and youthful that she can picture him at age fifteen, the boy she kissed in the woods behind the seminary, the smell of wet leaves all around them.

  She reaches across him to the phone. “Hello?”

  It’s the guy at the front desk, telling her in a gruff voice that checkout was thirty minutes ago. She looks at the clock. 12:30. They’ve slept all morning! Bright light seeps through the crack between the curtains.

  Unsure what to do, she asks, “Can we have this for one more night?”

  “You plan on staying one more night?”

  “If the room is available.” She’s amazed at her own composure. Could they really stay longer? What day is it, anyway?

  He grumbles to himself, as if reacting to an impossible request, but then he says, “Well, I think if I move some folks around.” His voice is unconvincing. He’s lying to her. He just doesn’t want them there. “This is the kind of thing you’re supposed to request before checkout time,” he mutters.

  Chris is stirring beneath her. She covers the mouthpiece and says to him, “We slept late.” He smiles at her, his eyes full of wonder, as if she’s just told him something miraculous. Or maybe he’s remembering last night, as she is—the tumult of their bodies together.

  The manager comes back on the phone. “OK. One more night.”

  “Use the same card,” Ruby says.

  Chris raises his voice, “And tell the maid we don’t need the room cleaned.”

  Ruby repeats, “We don’t need—”

  “I heard,” the guy says and hangs up.

  “I guess that’s that,” she says to Chris. They both grin and fall naturally back into their spooning positions. Fresh stubble on his jaw brushes her neck, which sends a shiver along her skin. She reaches behind and grabs him. For a few moments, everything is bright and cheerful. Another day together. The room paid for. This improvised honeymoon can continue. Maybe life itself will continue like this, days and nights blurring into each other indefinitely, Chris at her side, nothing but deep, contented sleep to separate one leg of time from the next.

  Chris’s breaths fall into a steady rhythm. Sleeping again. She’s not sure she can. Her mind has become active. It was just a day ago, a little over twenty-four hours, that a different phone woke her up, a different voice on the other end: Calvin’s. He was leaving his apartment, was going to get his car from the garage and then would pick her up. Make sure you’re ready, so I don’t have to find parking.

  Now, just like that, the dream she awoke from comes back to her. Calvin was in it, knocking on the door, saying, “Ruby, I know you’re in there.” She didn’t answer, but he persisted. His voice boomed through the door: “Just come out so we can talk about the baby.” The baby!

  Involuntarily, she twitches, and Chris mumbles. “I slept again.”

  “I’m awake,” she says.

  “So, what’re we gonna do to get our thirty-five dollars’ worth?”

  In an earlier part of the dream Calvin was saying, “I have to drive you back up the Garden State Parkway. It’s Sunday. We have to go to church.” Alice was part of it, too. Ruby was pleading with her, “Alice, you’re a woman, you understand. I have to find Chris. I have to get to Chris.” The hotel room became her bedroom in Greenlawn. On the nightstand was the lamp shaped like a ballerina with its hollow bottom.

  She gasps, remembering suddenly. “It’s Sunday! It’s my brother’s birthday.”

  “Do you want to call him?”

  “Not Robin.” She pulls herself upright, struggling to reorient herself. What is she doing here? She’s out of her mind. She’s supposed to be driving back to Manhattan with Calvin. There was this idea about stopping at the cemetery—it was her idea in the first place. They were going to end up at Dorothy’s in time for supper. It’s Father’s Day, too. She can’t remember, did she tell Clark she’d stop by on her way home?

  “I have to go back to Alice’s.”

  “Seriously?” Chris says, “I don’t understand.”

  “Calvin has my bag, with all my clothes and toiletries—”

  “He’ll bring it back to New York, and you can just meet up with him later.”

  “No. I mean, yes, I could, but—”

  “We just paid for another night here.”

  She drops her head in her hands. “I think I really messed up…”

  “Are you mad at me?” he asks, an urgency in his voice that bothers her. This isn’t about him, why is he trying to take this on?

  “I just have to deal with this.”

  She gets up and scavenges the room for her purse, finally locating it in the bathroom. Inside is a scrap of paper that has Alice’s number. When she returns and picks up the phone, Chris rolls away from her.

  On the other end of the line, endless ringing. No answer.

  She hangs up. Have they all left the party? Did the rental end today?

  She dials again and waits through more ringing. At last, someone picks up. A female voice, loud and slurred, says, “Hello?”

  “Is this Alice?”

  “Hi, Alice. Wanna come to a party?”

  “No, this is Ruby. Is Alice there?”

  The voice calls out, “Which one of you stuck-up bitches is Alice?” and then the phone drops, and the muffled sounds of the party filter through the line—voices, laughter, another bad pop song she recognizes but can’t name. It seems impossible that the house is still full of people. She waits, frustrated, her fingers tight around the receiver, as Chris rises and walks naked across the room. He closes himself in the bathroom. Maybe he’s right. Maybe it’s a bad idea to go back there.

  Eventually she hears a click, and then the automated voice saying, “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and try again.” She puts down the receiver, redials, and gets a busy signal.

  Chris emerges from the bathroom, water droplets running off his face and neck onto his bare torso. His lean body glows from behind, like a saint in a religious painting. As he approaches her, his eyes seem to plead: Not yet. Let’s not break from this yet. She doesn’t want to, but what about all those plans? Then he squats down next to her and looks her in the eyes. “I don’t care what we do. I just want to be with you.”

  “I was going to visit my brother’s grave today,” she says.

  “Where?”

  “Near where my Dad lives. Paramus.”

  “Do you want me to take you?”

  She thinks about it. She nods. Yes.

  Their hands reach out to each other and meet with a tick of static electricity, which seems to seal the agreement. She feels panic slip away. Chris will take her to the cemetery. She’ll get herself home eventually.

  So they’ve bought themselves some more time. They embrace, and he nudges her back toward the bed, pulls her down into the sheets. For another hour, she forgets about everything outside this room. They try different positions this time. Even through her hangover, it feels clearer in the light of day, more intense. He pants her name as he comes. This time, the condom stays on.

  They cruise in Chris’s car down Ocean Avenue, along the promenade. The streets are Sunday-crowded with jaywalking pedestrians, slowing progress to a crawl. Chris swerves into the first open parking spot they see, which is closer to the boardwalk than to Alice’s house. “You wanna?” he asks, cocking his head toward the ocean.

  “No, we should, I mean, I should—”

  “Ten minutes,” he says, taking her hand. “One last blast.”

  She nods, not at all sure why she’s agreeing, and then just like that, they’re flowing toward the music, the rides, the smoke of an Italian sausage stand, the din of the ocean. He’s right, what’s ten more minutes? She clings to his hand, as if to let go would set her adrift in this sea of bodies, never to find him again. She imagines that any passerby who notices them would definitely think they were made for each other, with their matching hair and matching jeans and what must be twin expressions on their faces—a little bit satisfied and
a little bit selfish, understanding themselves to be apart from the rest of the world. It must be obvious to anyone who looks closely that they’ve just pulled themselves from bed. That they are lovers.

  Chris says, “It’s the first day of your post-virgin life.”

  She nods vaguely. “Now we never have to talk about it again.”

  The squeeze he gives her hand is a great relief.

  Chris pulls out his wallet to pay for their boardwalk tickets—in a passing glance Ruby notices that twenties are bursting from the billfold. He said last night that he had a lot of cash, but this is really a lot. Should she have asked for some for the motel? He should have offered to split the charge. A dark thought—this money was related to wanting to kill himself. Maybe he was going to give away all his money on the last day of his life. Or something.

  She puts it out of her mind as he takes her hand and leads her onto the Funtown Pier, toward the Ferris wheel, and they dodge little kids and harried parents and groups of teenagers making noise and blocking the way. They are cut off by a rushing group of girls chanting among themselves, “Walk fast, beat ten people, walk fast, beat ten people,” and then whooping as they secure a place near the front of the line. They remind Ruby of a certain kind of classmate at Barnard—athletic, nerdy, peppy to the point of annoying. Young for their age. There’s one boy among this group, in white OP shorts and a T-shirt that reads IT’S FUN TO WORK AT CHICK FIL’A. His blond hair is feathered, his face lightly freckled. His voice, as he gossips breathlessly with the girls, is pitched high. He reminds her of Robin—of Robin a few years ago, in high school, when he was a little softer, a little—for lack of a better word—gayer.