by J. J. Murray
“Guys can be such pigs,” I said.
“Yeah.” He squeezed my girls and started moving down … down …. “We have our moments, though.”
Yeah, Roger can talk, and most of our dates have mirrored our first night together. I’ve been worried that we’d run out of things to talk about in between kinky sweat sessions, but we haven’t. While Karl and Juan Carlos talk mostly to my body, Roger talks mostly to my mind. All three are lusty, don’t get me wrong, but Roger is caring. Roger is … loving.
And that scares the shit out of me.
Love just can’t be a part of this “love square,” or whatever it is I have going. If this thing is to last, the only L-word I can stomach is “lust.”
And what have I learned from my three lusty men? I’ve learned that sometimes knowing exactly what’s going to happen in bed is comforting. The expected always makes me feel safe and secure. I know what to expect from Karl and Juan Carlos—hard, fast, and continuous loving where they are in control of me for the most part. And when the expected becomes boring, I call on Roger and his unexpected thrills and my chance to take chances. I have learned that I like the unknown, I like a little mystery, I like to lose control, and I like the sheer rush of being especially naughty.
These three have taught me that I have a vivid imagination, and that no matter how we do it, it always comes out good.
I guess that makes me good at being bad. At least I’m good at something.
Chapter 10
Izzie brings me a basket full of what she considers “sexy” lotions for a housewarming gift the third Sunday I’ve lived at the cottage. She also brings me a bucket of fried chicken.
The chicken is a better gift, though it definitely hasn’t been cooked nearly enough. Chicken should be crispy, not limp, and it should make a sound when you eat it. The lotions, though, are just plain nasty. I can’t stand the scent of wheat orange marmalade, kiwi eggplant, and cherry avocado. Who comes up with these messed-up mixtures? I put lotion on to keep my skin soft, not to feed my skin food combinations that would never hit my lips. I have a feeling I’ll be using this basket—unwrapped—as Mama’s gift on Mother’s Day.
Izzie is, in most ways, my opposite. She is a classic dark beauty with a perfect smile, slender nose, impeccable hair, cute dimples, and short, thin legs. She’s a dark Dorothy Dandridge, physically blessed but also repressed as hell. Men hit on her all the time, and she just brushes them off. She’s prettier than I am, smarter than I am, more educated than I will ever be, and more cultured than I’ll ever dream to be. Yet, she and I are friends and have been since I started working at Patrick Henry, where she’s a guidance counselor. I can’t explain our friendship.
It just … is.
I suspect most friendships are like this.
They just … are.
I first met Izzie in the faculty lounge of McQuilkin Hall. She was on her lunch break, microwaving a vile Healthy Choice meal she really doesn’t have to eat. She asked me and my bologna, mayo, and cheese sandwich, corn chips, and Pepsi to join her, and we started talking. Eventually, we stopped talking and started ranting about Patrick Henry High School, but only when we were alone in that little room. Whenever any white folks came in, we kept our fire on hold, playing our little “happy Negro” roles. There aren’t many people of color working at PH, where forty percent of the student body is a minority. If I ever quit, they’d lose at least a full five percent of their African-American workforce. We fuss about the lack of black people, the new black superintendent who isn’t from Roanoke (we have some decent “home-grown” folks, but we rarely hire them), the new building going up on our campus, the bell schedule, the students, white folks, Roanoke—you name it. But as soon as someone white comes in, we chat about the weather, church, shoes, food, and weight loss, usually in that order. They’re safe topics for a faculty lounge, and they even allow the white folks to join in on our conversations if they want to.
“It’s so strange seeing you out here,” she says, picking daintily at a drumstick while I tear into a wing. She wears a dark blue skirt, matching blouse, hose, and reasonably high heels.
“It is kind of strange, but I like it. How was church?”
“Good. You should come with me sometime.”
I misquote some poetry to her: “I keep the Sabbath staying at home.”
She rolls her eyes and dabs at her lips with a napkin. “But you need Jesus, Lana.”
“I don’t need another man in my life right now.”
She rolls her eyes. “Uh-huh. Jesus should be the only man you’ll ever need.”
I roll my eyes.
“This is quite a love shack you have here, Lana,” she says with a smile. “Does each of your men get his own room?”
“No.”
“You must wash your sheets often, then.”
Oh yeah. I’ll have to do that. I didn’t have this problem before. Maybe I’ll get two more sets of sheets.
“You are planning to wash the sheets, aren’t you, Lana?”
“Of course,” I say, nodding.
“You should get some satin sheets. I hear they’re the sexiest.”
Right. As if I can afford them.
“Are there lots of … critters out here?”
Izzie has trouble with the “wildlife” at PH, bees and yellow jackets mostly. “Just a few bullfrogs, a bunch of bats, some mice. Oh, and a ground squirrel that lives in the attic.”
She smiles. “At least you have a man to ‘go check’ when you hear a noise.”
“Yes.” Though because our lovemaking can get loud, I don’t hear the squirrel much anymore. Maybe it’s listening? How perverted!
“Which one of your three gentlemen is most likely to go check without giving you any attitude?” Izzie asks.
Izzie likes asking questions like these. Her other favorite is to play “what if?” with me. “All three would go check eventually,” I say, “but … Karl would check the fastest.”
“Karl is the mighty hunter, huh?”
“Something like that.” The fact is, Karl has the smallest bladder on Earth and has to pee every ten minutes.
“So, have they all spent the night here since you moved in?”
“No. None of them ever spends the night, and none of them will ever spend the night. I don’t go for that.”
She blinks. “There’s not much you don’t go for, Lana.”
Sometimes I think Izzie judges me, and other times I can’t tell. She seems to admire what I’m trying to do one moment and acts like my mama the next.
“But they’ve all been here with you, um, in bed since you moved in, right?” she asks.
“All but Karl.”
“He’s still AWOL?”
“No, he’s in New York.” I think.
“Same thing. What if, say, you’re with one of your men and another man happens to show up unannounced?”
I shudder. “I hope that never happens, and it’s less likely to happen since I moved out here.”
“Well, what if it did happen? Would you sneak one out the back or …”
“I don’t have a back door.” Why don’t I have a back door? Mama’s little house has a front door, two side doors, and a back door. I wonder if it’s legal for a house not to have a back door. I have a front door and a side door, both within thirty feet of each other.
“Okay, would you sneak one out a window, or would you invite the other one to join the two of you for some interesting fun?”
I don’t answer that one, instead growling, clearing the table, and washing my hands. When I lived in Roanoke, I thought the only way all three might actually meet one day was if Karl’s Blazer broke down at Fairview Cemetery while he was there selling his Coach bags (for whatever reason) during a funeral Roger was presiding over, and Berglund Auto World sent Juan Carlos to fix it. Stuff like that happens only in bad dreams, worse sitcoms, and the worst movies.
Though I do have this one recurring nightmare, and I will never tell Izzie about it. I’m getting busy with one o
f them in some generic bed in a hotel. At least I think it’s a hotel because there’s a Gideons Bible on the nightstand and a really awful watercolor of some ducks hanging above the bed. Anyway, I’m getting busy when either there’s a knock on the door or the phone rings. As soon as I hear the knock or the phone, the man in the bed disappears, but there’s always a wet spot for some reason. When I get to the door or pick up the phone, there’s no one there. For the rest of that dream, I wander the halls of some spooky hotel completely naked looking for my men, only no one at the front desk has seen them … and no one notices I’m naked.
“You have thought about having a threesome, haven’t you?”
“Hmm?”
“I know you’ve thought about having a threesome, Lana,” she says.
“I haven’t thought about it, but I know you have.”
Though Izzie never acts on her fantasies, she sure has a ton of them. Most of them involve two men, each man “servicing her” (her phrase) while at the same time she “services” them. Izzie even says she has “toys” at home that feel almost like the real thing. “You have dildos and vibrators?” I had asked, and she said, “No, they’re toys.” She has a different name for each, um, “member” of her single-woman’s drawer, and from what she reveals during our Sunday talks, she has a lot more members in her “club” than I do, some long, some thick, some that vibrate, and some that even thrust.
“It’s a nice fantasy, Lana. You should imagine it sometime.” She looks out the kitchen window at the pond. “But if you had to have two of them at the same time, which two would you choose?”
“Come on, Izzie. That’s not going to happen, so why should I answer?”
“Why won’t it happen?”
“Because I’m extremely careful, that’s why.”
She turns from the window. “Well, what if one day you aren’t so careful?”
If I don’t answer her perverted questions, she’ll keep asking—in different ways—until I do. “Okay, okay. Uh, Karl and … Juan Carlos.”
And the two of them would probably put my stuff in traction for a week. I should have said Juan Carlos and Roger. They’d be gentler. Karl and Roger? Man, it’d be like making love to a saltshaker and a pepper shaker. Though the contrasts—one fast, one slow, one fierce, one tender—might be nice. Mmm … If I had Karl working it down there and Roger licking—
“They’re the freakiest, huh?”
“Hmm?”
“You were just thinking about it, weren’t you?”
I nod. “It was pretty hot.”
She smiles. “I knew it.”
“Roger is actually the freakiest,” I say quickly.
“The white boy?”
I hate it when she calls him that, though “freaky” is not quite the right word for Roger. “Roger just happens to be the most adventurous.”
Izzie leans closer. “How so?”
I know this will make her church drawers moist. “Well, he has this thin gauze instead of curtains in front of this great big window at his apartment, and sometimes we do it behind it, and other times …”
“What?” She scoots forward on her chair.
“Other times we leave it completely open, and we don’t care who might walk by and see us.” Okay, I haven’t been bold enough to do that yet, but Izzie won’t know.
“You nasty girl!”
“It isn’t nasty. And the next time we’re there, we might just leave the door open a few inches, you know, just in case anyone walking by might want to … join us.”
“Whoo.”
I always get a “whoo” out of her. “One time Roger attacked me in his kitchenette, doing me right there on the counter while I kept on eating.”
“Oh, my God!”
“Trust me, Izzie, never try to eat hot soup and make love at the same time.” Though slurping chicken noodle soup while a man is slurping you is kind of nice.
She fans the air in front of her face. “It’s getting hot in here. Let’s go upstairs.”
We go upstairs, curling up at either end of the couch, me in some ratty sweats, Izzie looking like an advertisement for Church Women’s Wear Daily.
“Would you ever let two of your men service you at the same time?” she asks.
“No.” Not unless they tag-teamed me or something. One would have to finish before the other began. I could never do both of them at the same time. I want to live to see forty. “And anyway, why so many perverted questions today? Didn’t you just come from church?”
Izzie laughs softly. “Yes. But come on, Lana, you’re living one of my main fantasies. You’re living a fantasy that a lot of women have. How many women have the services of three men? You’re the only one I know, and I’m naturally curious.”
“And horny.”
“I can’t help it.”
“And nosy.”
She looks away, but she’s still smiling.
“Can you ask less perverted questions?”
“Okay, okay.” She thinks a moment.
“Don’t think too long, now.”
She looks at her hands. “I only seem to have perverted thoughts today. Oh, I know. Let’s say that your friend arrived and you were out of tampons. Who would go out and get them for you?”
Izzie’s non-perverted questions are often pretty dumb. “I would never ask them to do that.”
“Just suppose, then.”
I sigh. “Hmm. Karl would say, ‘You trippin’,’ or something like that.”
“He wouldn’t go?”
I shake my head. “Probably not. And Juan Carlos would go, but he’d come back without them, telling me they were sold out.”
“So Juan Carlos would lie to you?”
“Not lie, exactly. He’d just be too embarrassed to buy them.” Juan Carlos even seems to have trouble handing me my underwear and bra when we’re through.
“What about the white boy?”
“Roger—that’s his name, Izzie—Roger would go, but I’d have to write it down in detail. He would probably U-Scan it and bring me the wrong size or brand.”
She rises and looks at my CDs in a little case on top of the TV. “What a strange collection of music. Do you listen to all of these?”
“It’s their music, not mine.”
“And you leave it out in the open like this?”
I roll my eyes. “I listen to it, too.”
She blinks. “You mean … that this is the music you do it to.”
“Sometimes. I also listen to it when they’re not here.”
“Interesting.” She holds up Power Rock of the ‘70s. “This has to be for the white boy. White boys like that rock ‘n’ roll stuff.”
Not Roger. “No. Guess again.”
“Oh, please don’t tell me Karl. I would lose so much respect for him.”
“It isn’t Karl.”
“So it’s the Mexican. But … power rock?”
I giggle. “Girl, you haven’t lived until you’ve had a Mexican playing power air guitar to some Led Zeppelin while jumping up and down on your bed wearing only a smile. It gets him going … and going.”
She pulls out a CD Karl had a guy make for me. “Hmm. Bessie Smith, John Coltrane, and Muddy Waters. This has to be the white boy trying to get in touch with the black experience.”
“Nope.”
“Karl?”
“He’s older than old school, and trust me, doing it to some stomp music is the bomb.” Muddy Waters’s “Mannish Boy” makes my waters muddy every time.
She runs her fingers over the rest of my collection. “That means that the white boy likes Keith Sweat, Al B. Sure, and Babyface?”
“Yep.”
“Hmm.”
“He has good taste, doesn’t he?”
She shrugs. “These are all right.”
She’s impressed. She just doesn’t want to show it. “Roger even sings ‘Reasons’ to me.”
“No.” She sits on the couch again.
I wince. “It isn’t pretty, though he does kno
w all the words. I make him whisper it to me now, and it is très erotic.”
“So he’s one of those white boys who tries to act black.”
“No. He’s himself all the damn time. He’s too busy being Roger to be anyone else.”
“Uh-huh.” She sits and straightens her skirt. “He’s just like all those wiggers walking around PH.”
“He isn’t a wigger, Izzie.” Roger dresses like any other white man, I guess, and he doesn’t sling the slang, as most wiggers do.
“Uh-huh. He sounds like one.”
“He isn’t.”
She sighs and shakes her head. “Whatever. Anyway, I believe that all this revolving lust is going to end badly. I just know it.”
In addition to being the most perverted church person I know, Izzie thinks she’s psychic. She makes goofy predictions all the time, like the time she predicted a white man would win the presidential election. “Hillary Clinton could have run, right?” she had said. She also thinks she can predict the weather, saying vague things like “We’re going to be having some weather today.” I guess she has nothing better to do … until she gets home to her single-woman’s drawer, that is.
“I see nothing but trouble from all this,” she adds.
“So far so good,” I say.
“Too good,” she says. “And you know what they say about good things. All good things must come to an end.”
She’s so quotable. She must read Reader’s Digest. “They also say, whoever ‘they’ are, that you can never have too much of a good thing, and I intend to have as much of a good thing as my booty can stand.”
She tsk-tsks me. “You’re playing with fire, girl, and you know it.”
“At least I’m warm.” And sweaty most nights. Unlike Izzie, who, by her own admission, hasn’t had a date since Clinton was in office and hasn’t had sex with a living person since her senior prom.
She looks off into space, which means she’s probably thinking up a perverted question. “If you had to part with two of them, or if two of them suddenly wised up and dumped you, who would you want to stay with you?”
That’s a depressing thought. “As I’ve been telling you, I need them all.”
“Oh, can’t you just choose one and leave me the two leftovers?”
