Here & There

by Joshua V. Scher

  I welcome the weight of her as she crawls onto me, savor the lashes of the hammock cutting into my back, the creak of wood with every swing of the pendulum of us. Delight in the pain of her teeth tugging at my bottom lip. Her nipples press through her shirt against my chest. My hands slide up her moon-soaked legs, over her green shorts, and slip under her shirttails, fingertips tracing over the rolling hills of her ribs. I’m lost in the landscape of her.

  She leans against my chest with hers, to free her hands to reach behind, grab mine, and pull them down over her ass. The sensation of her taut muscles flexing and releasing in my palms drives me over the edge. My fingers dig into her flesh. I pull the heat of her against me, pressing the hardness of me into her.

  Her lips brush across my ear and out comes a soft moan. I pull and press again, but she wriggles free, shimmies her way up the hammock, climbs up my torso, her knees boxing my ears, leaning out grabbing the post the hammock hangs from for balance with one hand, while the other reaches down, hooks under the white trim and pulls her green athletic shorts to the side.

  Her taste inundates my mouth, as the soft texture of my tastebuds drag across her, until my tongue hardens into a point and circles. Looping from top to bottom, each circumscription mirroring the gyrations of her hips, until I sink my tongue into her. The universe shrinks into tight darkness. She shudders away from my mouth and courses her way back down my body, sits up, her legs on either side of me, feet firmly planted on the deck below, and unbuttons her dress shirt. I tear mine off.

  The applause of the rain on the leaves picks up. The wind pushes some drops beneath the eaves, and it patters against the railing, fragmenting into smaller drops, splashing against my cheek.

  Lorelei leans down.

  Her tits press against me.

  She sucks my earlobe and unzips my pants. Murmurs into my neck, “Your mouth felt so good on me.”

  I swell in her grasp with this suspiration. I’m so fucking hard it hurts. I feel her fingers hook under the white trim again, pulling her shorts to the side.

  Somewhere in a distant corner of my brain, a high school health teacher’s admonitions echo into a hurricane, something about condoms, but everything goes quiet when she tucks her pelvis under, and I slide into her, bare, a strigil rippling through her insides, shivering tremors in its wake.

  She’s so wet that, on the first rock of her hips, I’m thumping against the back of her. One of my arms has reached beneath her shirt, under her arm, across her back, and over her shoulder. I hold her in place against the force of my hips, thrusting up, and her pelvis curling under.

  Sweat drips off her and puddles on my chest, pooling in my neck.

  I am surrounded by Lorelei.

  She is anchored to the ground, driving me deeper inside of her, grinding against my stomach, tightening with every shift, constricting with each plunge, and I’m pushing back with hardened determination.

  Lorelei breaks out of my grasp and sits up, straddling me, her hands buttressed against my chest, hips angling for greater penetration, her core squeezing me with anticipation.

  I feel it rising out of me. The surge.

  “Lorelei—”

  She nods.

  “Lorelei . . .” the desperation claws at my throat. “Stop . . .” it is barely a whisper. “I’m close.”

  She shudders and drives her arms against my chest, sinks them into me, pylons pinning me down. “I know . . . I feel . . .”

  She rocks and sinks me deeper into her, her lips wrapped around the base of me, her clit brushing across me, then grinding back. Brushing then grinding.

  The surge extrudes upward.

  My hands struggle for a purchase against her sweat-saturated hips. She slips through their grasp. Trying to push her off is like shoving a wave of water. The hammock binds me against her, the more I back away, the more she sinks down with me, swallowing me deeper.

  Lorelei nods, exhaling in sync with the rocking of her hips, “I want it. I want it.”

  “Lore . . .” I can’t hold on, I can’t keep it in.

  “I want it. Come in me, come in me,” her words blending together into one undulating sound, “Comeinmecomeinmecomeinme.”

  Lorelei leans down and seals her lips against mine. She exhales into me, filling my lungs, stretching my rib cage from the inside, until I collapse inward and breathe back into her. Respiring back and forth into each other, our chests chasing and retreating from one another’s, as the oxygen between us fades, as we grow hungrier for air, inhaling the other deeper, as an exquisite blackness strangles us together. And she pulls her hips forward and then snaps them back across the frictionless plane of me, driving me into her tapering depths. My fingers dig into her hips. Finally I can’t take it anymore: I burst, spraying against the back of her, just as every one of her muscles constricts.

  She splashes down onto me.

  Her spasms milk the rest of my come into her.

  Breath comes out in heavy sighs.

  My fingers shark through her hair.

  She mumbles into my chest, “I wanted your come in me. I wanted you in me.”

  “I know. I did too. I just couldn’t give in.”

  “I know. I had to tackle you over the edge.”

  “You’re the sexiest linebacker I’ve ever fucked.”

  Lorelei laughs into my chest. “I want this. I want you to stay in me.”

  “I don’t want to ever be separate from you. I haven’t since the first day you walked into the office.”

  She nods into my chest.

  A raindrop splatters onto the railing and splashes us.

  We drift off to sleep like that, salty and stuck together on the hammock, my prick still inside of her.

  Well, that’s what should’ve happened.

  Instead I came back to an empty veranda, drenched from rain with an angry welt growing on my forehead where a low-lying branch and I disagreed about who had the right-of-way in the dark.

  I didn’t hear the voices until I was leaning against the frame of the backdoor, using an old towel to sweep the sand off my feet.

  Lorelei’s laugh and a man’s voice.

  My heart dropped to the floor next to my book bag.

  “Danny? Is that you?”

  “Yep.”

  “Come on in and meet our host.”

  What else could I do?

  There they were, sitting on the couch that Lorelei and I had spent so many evenings on together, getting drunk and swapping tales. A bottle of Pinot Noir on the coffee table between them.

  Lorelei was in tight jeans and a loose-knit sweater that seemed all the looser knit due to its adherence to form. Black bra too, in case you were wondering.

  Sitting across from her was a pair of Nantucket red slacks, held up by a blue canvas belt that had a red crab woven in every inch or so, topped with a tucked-in light blue gingham short-sleeve dress shirt with, wait for it, a popped collar. But all I saw were his searingly-white teeth, glazed with Pinot.

  The outfit’s name was Bret, or Brent, or Bart, something WASPy. Might as well have been named Baxter Whitehorse McMayflower. He was the friend of the lender of Lexuses whose SUV we had been jaunting around in. He was the chap who owned this little beach cottage in Newport.

  “Dude, you totally know how to make an entrance,” Gingham whistled. “I don’t know whether to get a towel, an ice pack, or a camera.”

  Lorelei didn’t just laugh at this blueblood wit, she touched his arm. The room sharpened into focus, like in that famous scene in Raging Bull, somehow the room grew and blurred, while my focus narrowed and zoomed in on Lorelei’s fingers brushing across his arm as if to sweep his too-muchness excess off.

  “I’d settle for a drink.”

  “Some Pinot Noir, man?” Gingham pointed with his chin at the bottle. “Oregon, not that French Burgundy jug wine. Willamette Valley.”

  “Brent’s a bit of an oenophile.”

  Of course he is. “Got any rye?” A bit of an overdramatically masochist
ic request. At least it might burn the numbness out of me, and then any bad taste left in my mouth would be my own doing.

  “Oh yeah, man, I’ve got an awesome craft rye.” McMayflower strutted over to his liquor cabinet and offered a generous pour in his Waterford rocks glass. “Rī rye. Local blend, distilled over in Peacedale.”

  I took the two fingers and shoved them down my throat intending to gag. Fuck it all if this actually wasn’t the first brand of rye I liked. Goddamnit. What could I do but have another?

  “Smooth, right?”

  “Actually it’s the harsh burn I like.”

  He let out a hmm and left the bottle on the table next to the chair that Lorelei had covered with a beach towel for me.

  Meanwhile, Lorelei had dropped back onto the couch. A little too close to center. McMayflower crossed his leg so his knee was practically touching her. “So I’ve been hearing about your little secret project.”

  “You told him about my mother?” The heat of my accusation was stoked by the burn from the rye.

  Gingham looked confused. “Your mother’s a chameleon?”

  So she hadn’t told him about everything, just our hypothetical Chameleon campaign for Anomaly.

  The hurt in Li-Li’s expression said it all. Her disappointment, my lack of faith. Her presumed betrayal turned me into a very real Benedict Asshole. It was visible only for a second. Her eyes dropped with disappointment toward her own glass, hit bottom, and then her smile rose up as she turned and put her hand on the red pants.

  “Mother’s his code word for it.”

  “A code word for a code word?” asked the WASP.

  “Wheels within wheels, man,” I raised my glass, finally hopping on board. Lorelei kept her back to me and chugged away along her train of thought.

  “Like I told you, Danny here’s kind of like a savant in our world, and our competitors circle him like sharks around chum.”

  “Hence your need for the secret getaway. Glad I could help out you guys at my seaside cottage.”

  Too bad you couldn’t have stayed more of a silent partner.

  “It’s been a great base camp for our field research,” Lorelei smiled.

  “Seems like a lot of trouble for your version of the Dos Equis guy.”

  Lorelei pushed his shoulder and flipped her hair. “I know, right? Still we’ve got this Lovecraftian narrative going on and our protagonist is an aristocratic French letch.”

  “Is there any other kind?” Gingham quipped.

  Lorelei laughed too hard at this.

  “So what is the product exactly?”

  “Can’t really get into it,” I interrupted. “But if we do it right, it’ll be bigger than bottling the Fountain of Youth.”

  “Got it, you’re a snake-oil salesman,” he sneered.

  “Look at that, the WASP does have some sting.”

  “Danny!” Lorelei snapped.

  “What? McMayflower and I are just winding each other up. This is good rye.”

  “Brent, I’m sorry. Danny’s been burning the candle at both ends with this.”

  He held up a magnanimous hand, “It’s ok. I’m sure his little make-believe hypothetical can be quite taxing. Question marks always are. I wasn’t trying to step on your toes, Danny boy; just in my world, we only invest in realities.”

  “Like credit default swaps.” I deserved a drink for that one and poured myself another rye.

  Lorelei laughed/cackled over my zinger. “Woo, sparks are flying. What do you say we blow off some steam? Pull the release valve.” Lorelei rested her hand on his knee. “I discovered the perfect place in my research the other day.”

  God love her for trying.

  “What did you have in mind?” Gingham raised an eyebrow.

  “Foxxxy Lady.”

  McMayflower laughed.

  Really? Last time I went to that strip club was my junior year, for the Legs and Eggs brunch for a buddy’s twenty-first birthday. “I’m doing ok right here,” I confide into my rye.

  Lorelei finally turns and looks at me. “You don’t want to come with us? I heard Beimini** loved the place. Took Reidier there all the time.”

  A high pitch shrieked through my ears as the release valve was yanked.

  * * *

  ** Page 327.

  * * *

  My discovery instantly transformed my B and B by the sea. Everything was different, now that I know what he knew. The Stone’s Throw Inn was a trap waiting to spring. I had to get out of there. I had to keep moving.

  Should I have gone back to black stone? Did I make a mistake?

  I could have led them right to him. The solution would have created the problem. I need those pages, though, to confirm the results of The Reidier Test.

  ECCO I

  Our lives are the footnotes of an obscure and enigmatic narrative in search of a teleology.

  ~John Kinbote

  Maybe writing in the third person will give me the objectivity I’ve been missing.

  ~Richard Valis

  *

  * * *

  * I made it to the bottom of Hilary’s bottomless carpetbag. Ecco’s Folders. Maybe this was the end. Maybe it was just the bottom. Order had long ago given way to rant, report to historical fiction. Neverthess, this content does cover the latest dates in her entire report, so at least from a linear perspective it makes “sense.” Ecco’s Folder.

  * * *

  1:18 a.m. December 1, 2007

  The front door of 454 Angell opens a few inches. It stops. It opens a few inches more. Stops. Then it swerves all the way open with Eve in tow. Her hands cling to the doorknob for balance. Her arms and torso stretch out across the threshold practically parallel to the floor, as if she were attempting some sort of yoga pose. Her feet are still rooted to a spot outside on the veranda. The screen door rests against her rear end.

  Eve hangs in that pose for a few moments, getting her bearings. Finally she relinquishes her death grip on the doorknob with her right hand and places it just past the doormat on the floor, halfway along the invisible arc traced out by the door. She holds this downward-facing drunk pose for several moments until she can finally will her feet to follow her inside. They tentatively tiptoe toward her hand. In a bold and fluid maneuver, Eve plants her feet inside, swings her right hand up to the inside doorknob, latches onto it, and with her left hand still on the outside knob, levers herself up to standing.

  She makes a small, satisfied smile, then spins her hips around and torques the door shut with a thunderous slam.

  It takes Eve a few seconds to parse what just happened. When the revelation pierces through the fog of alcohol, Eve wrinkles her nose and frowns at the door. She then scolds the door with a castigating and extended, Shhhhhhhhh.

  “Had a good night, did we?” asks Reidier’s voice from the dimness of the dining room.

  Eve holds her hand in front of her eyes, as if she were blocking the glare of the sun, and squints into the dark dining room. “Rye?”

  “Who else?” He watches her squint his way for a moment. “Sit down, if you can. I’ll get you a glass of water.”

  Reidier tosses the object he was fidgeting with onto the table, stands up, and turns a lamp on as he heads for the kitchen.

  Eve sighs and then shoots a breath upward to blow an imagined strand of hair back. She focuses on the dining-room chair closest to her. In another surprising display of grace, Eve walks a perfectly straight, possibly overly straight, line from the hallway into the dining room to the targeted chair.

  Having reached her intended destination, Eve’s inebriation reclaims her kinesthesia as she pours herself over the arm of the chair into the seat while at the same time tries to remove her jacket. She somehow ends up seated with one leg dangling over an arm of the chair, while one of her arms is bound up behind the back of the chair by a sleeve that, instead of making its way off, got trapped beneath her leg. Eve struggles to disentangle herself, but ultimately capitulates to her circumstances and instead tries to transf
orm her entanglement into a purposeful repose.

  “Pourquoi êtes-vous jamais encore éveillé?” Eve whispers over her shoulder, like a Southern lady of leisure reclined on a chaise lounge, to Reidier.

  The room is empty.

  Eve looks around confused and then squints down the table at the object Reidier left behind.

  “What was that?” Reidier asks as he comes back into the dining room carrying a tall glass of water in one hand and a tall glass of milk in the other.

  Eve looks up at him and the glass of water he holds out for her, baffled as to how he snuck up on her so quickly. She takes the glass and tries to dissect his question.

  “Qu’est-ce?”

  “You said something as I was coming in. I asked you what you said,” Reidier repeats.

  “Ah. Oui.” Eve nods and takes a big gulp of water. She looks down the table at him, waiting for his answer. “Oh, yes!” Eve realizes he was waiting for her. “Why ever are you still awake?”

  Reidier walks back to the other end of the table and sits down. He takes a sip of milk. “Because when I got home there was a random coed sitting in the den, and my wife was nowhere to be found. Nor was she answering her cell phone.”

  “That’s Caroline. She is taking my French poetry class. Smart as a whip that one, but a poet . . . No. I had her babysit. The boys fingerpainted today, did you see?”

  “Where were you?”

  “Imbibing.”

  “So I gathered.”

  “If I’m going to see double, I prefer it to be on my terms.” Eve tosses him a coquettish smile.*

  * * *

  * Terms I can’t argue with. This chick is my Athena, I sort of worship her.

  * * *

  Reidier doesn’t rise to the bait. Instead he takes another sip of milk.

  Eve narrows her eyes at Reidier. She tries to lean forward, but her jacket is still tangled up.

  “Would you like some help?”