“He saw me open the curtains and bolted down the street right away,” Margaret told a dumbfounded Cordo. “And then I called the police, told them what happened, they sent a patrolman over to search the area, took a description from me.”
“Was he homeless, do you think?”
“Didn’t look it. Looked like he was searching for something specific.”
So thereafter Cordo brought the trash bin into the garage.
In October one of the dating websites brought Cordo into contact with a redhead named Lila who was properly named Delilah but who had shortened her name in order to scorn those who had tried to flirt with her by singing “Hey There Delilah” when she was younger.
“Lila’s also a concept in Hinduism,” Cordo told her during their first date at a seafood restaurant one night on Mercer Island. “Means ‘play,’ describes everything in the universe, ultimate reality.”
Lila nodded, smiled.
“I know nothing about any of that,” she said.
“I don’t know why you would,” Cordo said, also smiling. “I know a lot of pointless things.”
“I don’t know if I would call it pointless,” Lila replied. “There’s certainly a point. Things like that are what make individuality.”
Cordo smiled more.
“Indeed.”
Lila was an OBGYN nurse at Seattle Children’s Hospital. She had worked there since straight out of nursing school at UW. She had had a daughter with her college sweetheart-turned-mongrel ex-husband, who had cheated on her for five of their 10 years together before she found him out. The divorce had been finalized last year and they now shared joint custody of six-year-old Rachel, who spent a week at each parent’s house.
Cordo told her about Amelia—Millie—about Lourdes, sidestepping the nastier details, and told her about his work.
After dinner and on the ferry ride back across Puget Sound, they held hands in a corner window seat looking out at the water while drinking hot chocolate out of Styrofoam cups.
“I really like you,” he told her.
She smiled.
“You don’t really know me yet.”
“Maybe not. But I think you’re the kind of person who listens to her own music rather than just listening to whatever’s on the Top 20.”
She chuckled.
“Is that important?”
“To me it is.”
She smiled after staring at him for a half-second. Then she nestled in closer to him.
Once back ashore they made concrete plans for their next date—a picnic next Friday afternoon at Golden Gardens, weather permitting, when Rachel would be with John and Lila had the day off while Cordo would take a half-day.
In the harbor parking lot, Cordo walked Lila to her car and after the requisite hesitation, he kissed her and it was a good kiss. They both fell into it as though swan-diving into a pool of warm chamomile tea and they lazily but lithely backstroked in it for a few minutes resembling hours.
They smiled at each other when it was done and then said goodbye.
At dinner the next evening, Hester eating kibble from her bowl beside her seat, Amelia talked of applying for the Washington Research Foundation Fellowships, which were for $6,000 and typically given to undergrads in advanced stages of research.
“But the application deadline is in February, so I think I can really develop my current research and narrow my aims in order to get it.”
Cordo nodded as he chewed chicken.
“What is your research on?” he asked.
“The effect asexually reproducing rootstocks have when grafted onto sexual scions and vise-versa. How does the soil affect the grafted plants or the agent used to hold the two together? What minerals could be added or subtracted from the soil to help? I’m trying to see if asexual reproduction can be transferred across genera, then eventually families and orders.”
Cordo absently nodded.
“Sounds time consuming.”
“It is.”
“Where are you doing this?”
“The Botany Lab at school.”
“They just let you do that there?”
“More or less. I spend time with Tom there and when no one’s around, I do my experiments.”
“Experiments?”
Amelia rolled her eyes.
“I’m not using chemicals, at least not yet. Currently I’m splicing several members of the Boechera genus—Sicklepod, Tulare, Last Chance, and Drummond’s Rockcress—after those have been completed, I’ll—”
Cordo raised his head.
“What—Drummond?”
Amelia stopped, thought.
“Yes, Drummond’s Rockcress, it’s a pervasive mustard flower. They abound on campus.”
Cordo thought.
“That was your first word—Drummond.”
Amelia again knew not how to respond.
“Well anyway if I can get the fellowship and become a legitimate researcher in the lab, it’ll make everything far less complicated. I’ll…”
She went on but Cordo tuned out, thought more even as he gazed at her and dissected his chicken.
Though their romance was proceeding nicely, both Cordo and Lila agreed not to introduce each other to their families and children yet, so they spent Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s apart, though surely texting and talking at night on the phone in private. Because of work and Lila going to see family in Sacramento, she and Cordo did not see each other again until after the new year.
Tom and Mark had Thanksgiving with Cordo and Amelia and announced they were moving in together. They went to see Mark’s and Tom’s families at Christmas, to Olympia, then to Tacoma. And with Margaret gone to Eugene for the holidays, Cordo and Amelia were left alone together—with Hester of course.
They tried watching the 24-hour A Christmas Story marathon but halfway through the first viewing, Amelia declared it stupid and went to her room, closing the door. Cordo rolled his eyes and got a bottle of wine, his eyes glancing at the brightly lighted iridescent Christmas tree in the living room, under which lay Amelia’s presents, perhaps wondering why the fuck he tried.
He watched in dread as she opened these presents on Christmas morning, pretending to record the mirthless episode as she tore off the wrappings as though she were weakened by hypoglycemia and found gifts she’d been expecting because she’d asked for them—a sketchbook to draw “plant specimens” in, various seeds such as Venus flytraps, lavender, and jasmine, a desk lamp that could nourish plants with its light—and other gifts she hadn’t asked for, which Cordo had improvised, hoping for the best—ornate ceramic pots, a flowery phone case, a pair of leather gardening gloves, a black straw gardening hat that resembled the most matronly headgear a housewife ever wore but also seemed somehow very Holly Golightly.
“Thanks,” she said, throwing away all the shredded wrapping paper, then collecting her things and vanishing into her room with Hester beside her.
Cordo chuckled, shook his head. He texted Lila and Tom a blank-faced emoji with a revolver pointed at its temple.
So he must have been relieved when Lila got back into town. They made a date for Friday night and after dinner, they walked along the waterfront with yachts and sailboats in the harbor beside them and the bay sloshing against the hulls while ahead in the distance, the lights made the city look as though it belonged in Tron, the Great Wheel lazily oscillating to the great vocal delight of its riders.
“I’m fairly certain she hates me,” he told her as he walked with his hands in his pockets.
“She’s only 10.”
“And in college majoring in misopatery.”
“Misopatery?”
“Hatred of father.”
Lila chuckled.
“When did you stop hating your parents?” he asked.
She thought.
“Maybe 18 or 19. When I moved to college.”
“Well I’m fucked. I won’t survive another eight years of this.”
She laughed again.
<
br /> “Sometimes I wish I just had a normal daughter. I’d be less fucking clueless. But no, I have Bobbi Fischer.”
“He was a boy.”
“Bobbi with an ‘I’.”
“And I don’t think he was a child genius, just a chess prodigy.”
Cordo looked testily at her.
“You’re her father, she loves you. She probably just has a lot to deal with—stress. She’s a 10 year old in college, how often does that happen?”
“Maybe it was a bad idea.”
“If her own father doesn’t know how to interact with her, how can you expect other children and overworked underpaid elementary school teachers to? At least in college, she can govern herself.”
Cordo chewed his bottom lip.
“I don’t know. I’ve thought all this to death a million times.”
“So it’s time to stop. If she needs help, I think she’d be smart enough to come to you.”
Cordo nodded. They kept walking in silence and separation for a moment. Then Lila put her arm through his, which was cocked in an ‘O’ shape as he still had his hands in his pockets. She walked close enough for him to smell her coconut shampoo and feel the warmth of her body beneath her cardigan.
“How long’s it been since we saw each other?” she asked, her fog-breath illuminated by the lamps lining the harbor path. “Don’t you wanna touch me?”
Cordo looked ahead, kept his hands stashed away.
“Yeah I do.”
He looked at her and she at him as they continued walking but slower, ponderously.
“I’ve been dying to touch you.”
They came to a stop, turned fully to each other.
“So…” she said, one eye alight, the other dark.
Cordo took his hands out of his pockets and put his arms around her waist inside her cardigan, ran his hand up her spine, pulled her in, kissed her. She grabbed his neck with her warm hands, her fingers stroking the back of his ears and flicking strands of hair.
Cordo drove them to Lila’s house in Redmond after he’d called Tom asking if, for the sake of his having sex for the first time in a decade, he would stay the night with Amelia and Tom ribbingly agreed and wished him luck.
It wasn’t like a movie, they didn’t burst through the front door with their faces inseparable as they rent off their clothes and blindly stumbled to the nearest surface.
Instead, Cordo sensibly parked in her driveway and the motion-sensing light came on, the result of the house getting randomly egged several times last year, Lila told him.
They got out and Lila led the way to her front door. Her house was a one-story green affair, a dark wooden front door and one-car garage. Inside was a house under the command of an effeminate woman with good affordable taste, the kind of décor that would not be and was not noticeably destroyed by the inevitable carelessness of a young child. The floors were pale pink ceramic tile with cheap throw rugs all over, along with a large blue cuks shag rug in front of the TV in the living room—Rachel’s preferred seat.
“Before and after she takes a bath, she likes to roll all around naked on it,” Lila said. “And after she goes to bed, I do too.”
Cordo smiled. He sat on the taupe-colored suede couch with Victorian embellishments on its cherrywood frame and fat tasseled pillows while Lila went into the kitchen to get some wine.
“I’ve had this bottle since three Christmases ago,” she said, handing him a stem glass of red and sitting close to him. “Waiting for a good occasion.”
“Then I’m glad I came over.”
“So am I.”
They tapped their glasses and sipped in the ensuing ringing, gazing at each other over the rims. They talked for another half-hour until they finished their wine. Then Cordo put both of their glasses, empty except for those tiny inextricable burgundy puddles in the stem depressions within the glasses, on the natural crystalline agate coasters with velvet pads underneath, so as not to damage the acacia coffee table. Then he took Lila in his arms and kissed her as deeply as he could without breaking her nose and teeth. Their breath was the bittersweet taste of cabernet. He half-pushed her and she half-fell back onto the armrest and he held the back of her neck as they made out for perhaps five minutes. Then Lila stood and took his hand and led him down the hallway lined with pictures of Rachel and Lila and her parents to her bedroom. The light revealed the queen-sized bed with an aquamarine spread and cedarwood head- and footboards. She kissed him at her bedside and then pushed him down onto it before she turned off the light, then went into her darkened bathroom, holding up a one-minute finger to him as she turned on the light and closed the door. In the glow from beyond the door, Cordo got undressed, hearing the faucet running. He pulled the sheets away from the top of the bed and sat on the edge naked and waited with shoulders tense.
A few minutes later, Lila came out with the light already off and Cordo was blind in the blackness for a moment, sensing her only by the smell of her perfume and shampoo and sweat and musk—a primordially arousing fish smell—emanating from her vagina. Then by degrees his eyes adjusted and could discern the pale figure of Lila in the curtained moonlight, slowly walking toward him with full strong legs elbow-jointed by a pubic mound of dirty blonde hair and she had the round hips that come with childbirthing and a slight paunch in the belly and breasts neither too large nor too small, her aereolae large but nearly indiscernible for how pale they were. Her hair looked like tongues of flame swaying around her collarbone and shoulders as she came to him, kissing him standing while he remained sitting. Then she pushed him back and straddled his sides. He could feel her wetness slide up from his navel as she kissed her way up his body.
He grabbed her butt, which had little goosebumps on it, and hoisted them both farther across the bed and she started kissing down his cheek, neck, chest, stomach, waist, and finally his penis and testicles.
The blowjob was as good as could be done on someone who hadn’t had one in years. Cordo flinched repeatedly during the few minutes until he stopped her and pulled her back up to him, her lips wet with her own saliva. They made out some more before he flipped her over and made his way down her body to her vagina. He dragged his tongue through her short coarse pubic hair and then delved into the top of her slit, uncovering her clitoris quickly and flicking it with vacillating darts of his tongue, an exercise for which there is no analogy. She immediately started groaning, writhing, gripping the bed sheets, legs buckling and closing, Cordo pushing them apart and holding them down at the insides of her soft shaved ankles.
He stayed at her clitoris until she came 10 minutes later, supplementing his tongue with two fingers stroking her labia minora, alternately sticking his middle finger inside, turning his hand palm-up, then moving the inserted finger in a “come here” way, massaging a strangely silky-sandpapery part of her internal anatomy.
Her marvelous body was agleam with sweat and she was catching her breath after she was done and Cordo came up and she kissed him and tasted her own bitter natural lubrication and cum. After several more intimate moments of making out wrapped in each other’s arms, she spun on top of Cordo and took hold of his branch-like penis and stroked it smoothly up and down with one hand while with her other she reached behind to the nightstand but she reached too far back and blindly knocked over the pastel blue lamp with a cream shade. She caught it before it rolled off the table but had to lurch to do so, pulling Cordo’s penis longer than it was meant to, and he sat up in urgency at the sensation and after Lila had righted the lamp, they laughed and then kissed some more.
Then she pushed him back down, gave the crown of his penis a quick popping suck, then pulled open the nightstand drawer and removed a condom wrapper and a bottle of lubricant. She tore open the wrapper and put it on Cordo, sliding it down with her mouth. Then she squeezed out a glob of lube and lathered up the studded latex, as well as herself. She got upon her haunches and positioned Cordo’s penis with her entrance, then slowly pushed down. They both held their breath and closed the
ir eyes as they sank into each other and when completed, they looked at one another and Cordo pulled her down and kissed her as he started thrusting up into her. She gasped sharply as though in pain.
“Are you OK?” he asked.
“Yeah, fine, keep going.”
He did. She lowered her face beside his head as he thrust longer and harder, she licked his ear, the lobe and the cartilage. He shivered and groaned and she asked if he liked that and he said yeah and she kept doing it.
After so long he flipped over and continued in missionary. He cradled her head against his forearm and went slow and deep while staring into her eyes. He buried his face in her hair and wrapped one arm around her side and to her back and with the other grasped her butt near her perineum and pulled her into him more with each thrust, entombing himself more in her warmth and wetness with each stroke, and they were both sweating and breathing hard and there was the whisper of the latex along with the squelching of Lila’s and Cordo’s lubricant mixed with sweat and the soft slapping of Cordo’s testicles against Lila’s anus but the bed and the headboard were solid, silent, and thank God for that and Lila was moaning, interchangeably whispering, “Oh yeah,” into his ear and grabbing his back, squeezing his butt, pulling him deeper, and Cordo stopped for a second, turned himself a little so that he lay just off-center of Lila, and continued, going suddenly faster and prompting Lila to moan more and whisper more emphatically, “Oh fuck” and he went faster, thrusting harder to where it may have actually hurt her but she wouldn’t tell him to stop and he was now perched upon his toes and forearms while she had her arms around his neck and legs around his waist like a koala and he went on for another two minutes before he stopped and collapsed breathless and exhausted still atop her.
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