Good In Bed

by Bromberg, K

“Is that the lie or the truth?”

  I backhanded his shoulder and he tipped slightly, holding his mug aloft so he wouldn’t spill. “The truth. I decided I wanted to do something a little less... cutthroat.” The real truth was that I’d learned a hard lesson four years ago.

  Too much ambition took away what you wanted most.

  “It’s not because of me, is it?”

  Damn it. Our eyes locked. How did he know these things about me?

  “Yes,” I sighed.

  “Fuck.”

  “Not just because of you... of us... of, well, not us. After that debate I went to nationals and got creamed. Slaughtered. And I realized I didn’t even like the cross-examination. What I liked most was the research. So I decided I’d go into a field where you get paid to learn things and help other people do research.” I finished my coffee with a few gulps as Sam set his mug on the ground next to the bed. He stood. I copied him.

  “C’mere,” he said, beckoning with open arms. Those strong hands cupped my ass and pulled me to him, the hard ridge of his bulge pushing into me, telling me he was awake.

  “I am so sorry, again, for what happened.”

  “Sam, you don’t have to—”

  “You’ll make a damn fine librarian, but you’d make an even better law librarian,” he added.

  “Someday,” I said.

  “I’ll hold you to that,” he whispered, then kissed me so well my toes uncurled and the throbbing reached my ears.

  “You have school details, and I have things to do. How about we get together at the end of the week?” he said, pulling away reluctantly.

  “Perfect.”

  The next kiss he gave me as we parted ways had to last three days.

  And it really was that good.

  But the dream was even better.

  Sam

  Moms everywhere seemed to have decided to antagonize their alienated progeny in the same twenty-four hour period, because the second I got out of Amy’s building, my own phone buzzed with my mom’s cell phone on caller ID.

  Taking a page from Amy’s playbook, I ignored it. Mom tried every month or two to pull me back into the fold. I had to give her credit for persistence.

  Empathy, on the other hand? A big old F minus.

  Shaking my head, I walked home, steeling myself for another sexfest at the apartment. After Joe moved out, Darla and Trevor had become even more amorous. I had to wonder if Trevor bought stock in condoms, because he sure was invested in their use.

  At the apartment I found Trevor sitting on the couch in his boxer briefs, staring dully at some nature show on television.

  “What’s up?”

  “She’s an animal,” he said hoarsely.

  I looked at the television. “Elephants generally are.” Some British actor’s voice narrated a segment on the feeding habits of African beasts.

  “I meant Darla.”

  “Can’t keep up, Bro?”

  He actually whimpered.

  “Sam! Your mom called,” Darla shouted from the bathroom.

  “Oh. Yeah.” Trevor added. “She called my line. Wants to talk. Told me to tell you to please call and not ignore her this time.”

  “And Trevor,” Darla called out in a sing-songy voice, “I have some sweetness for you.”

  Trevor held up four fingers and winced.

  “Four times already?” It wasn’t quite 10 a.m.

  He flinched and pointed at his dick. “It feels like sandpaper.”

  “Careful what you wish for,” I said, laughing. “Random Acts of Crazy pull you in.”

  He threw a pillow at my head and I dodged it.

  Glad someone was getting some.

  And I was glad (okay, not entirely...) it wasn’t me. Amy wasn’t ready, and I wasn’t going to take advantage of her like Liam had. Sleeping with a crying girl was a serious low.

  Not that I’d consider Liam above it.

  One of my bandmates, a guy I’d considered one of my best friends, had been Amy’s first, and he’d done it on prom night. And never said a word.

  For four years.

  Was this why Liam had encouraged me to tell Amy how I felt?

  Guilt. Liam was capable of guilt.

  Fucker damn well ought to feel guilt.

  I had no right to feel this way. I’d blown it four years ago and if Amy sought comfort in an old friend’s arms, who was I to judge. Or be pissed.

  Hello. Of course I was pissed. Being Mr. Reasonable was all fine and well when I was with a sobbing Amy, but right now?

  I wanted to punch a wall. Yet another missed chance at something special with her. Years lost. Prom lost. Virginity lost.

  Because I was lost.

  I’d called in those few weeks before prom. Once. And her mom took the message.

  Amy never called back.

  We’re all lost in our own ways.

  Bzzzzzz.

  My mom, again.

  Especially my own mother.

  Knowing I shouldn’t do it, I answered anyhow.

  “Sam. Thank God. Don’t you realize that if you don’t answer your phone, I assume you’re...”

  She sounded like Amy’s mom. Is there some training you get in the hospital after you give birth to perfect the art of nagging?

  “What’s up, Mom?”

  “It’s your father.”

  It’s always my father.

  “What about him?” I asked, gruffly. The comment Amy’s mom had made floated into my mind.

  “He’s sick.”

  “No shit.”

  “Don’t use language like that with me!” Her voice got shrill.

  “Don’t call me and tell me what to do. You know the rules.”

  Two years ago I’d cut her completely out of my life with a letter that detailed my exact boundaries. My therapist at UMass health services had helped me craft it. Mom was like a toddler; I’d had to constantly remind her of the rules and make her follow them, but she still, occasionally, pushed it.

  “He’s really sick,” she pleaded.

  “His liver?” I guessed. A fifth of hard liquor a day would make any liver scream.

  “No.” Her tone told me the answer was really yes. Ah, the lies. “He has pneumonia.”

  “Poor guy. Bet his ribs ache. I know how that feels.”

  Silence.

  “Something else I need to know, Mom? Because I need to get to work.” Another lie, but least this one was mine.

  “Work?” she asked, chipper. Change the subject when reality gets uncomfortable. “You have a job?”

  “Yup.”

  Impatience came through the line. “What is it, honey?”

  “I’m a stripper,” I said, suppressing a dark laugh.

  “Oh, you joker,” she giggled, as if we were best buddies, as if she hadn’t stuck by my father through what he did to me, as if she hadn’t betrayed the very essence of who I was and who she was supposed to be for me.

  Black was white and white was black. I would tell the truth and not be believed. She wanted me to tell a lie and be believed.

  Mirror opposites.

  “Anyhow, nice chatting, Mom.” Another lie.

  “What about your father?”

  “What about him?”

  Her voice fell to a hush. “I’ve never seen him like this, Sam.”

  “Did he ask for me?” The void inside me expanded as she hesitated, likely crafting an answer that would feed the lie.

  “Um, he would if he were more rested, you know.”

  “Bye, Mom.”

  Click.

  Chapter 9

  Sam

  They don’t actually want me. That’s one of the only reasons why I can do this kind of work.

  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that working as a bachelorette party entertainer is back breaking work. You could read the looks in the eyes of the women at these parties and know that they were drooling over something other than the actual guys in front of them.

  What they were really doing was projecti
ng their fantasies onto us.

  What they really wanted was the guy that they already had back home to want them the way that they pretended to want us.

  Pretend? Yeah.

  Pretend.

  They were pretending to want us. The hooting, the chanting, the hands on my bare skin, the fingers that tucked dollar bills just far enough below the waistline to tease and try to titillate, it was all pretend. It was fun for them, at least.

  And it was fun for me, too.

  My parents would tell me I was going to Hell for all this.

  I’d have to tell them I wasn’t just going there. I was the tour operator. And the nightly show.

  With a tip cup.

  What straight guy wouldn’t want a bunch of women grabbing them? Who wouldn’t want a crowd of women who were in a place for the sole purpose of watching you move your body, and bare your skin, so that they could entertain themselves with a little fantasy that looped around in their mind?

  But it was their guy’s face that they imagined. It was their fantasy men whose hips thrust toward them, whose legs were bare, whose chests heaved for them.

  Once I understood why these women were here, why they wanted to touch me, I could work it. I wasn’t Sam anymore – I was their Paul, or Keith, or Mark, or John. I was the guy they wanted to be with, the guy they wanted to want them, and once I wasn’t Sam, I could do damn near anything.

  You want that extra bit of strength in my hips when I push up against you? I’m right there, babe.

  You want me to flash you a wicked grin and wink, and pretend that I’m gonna do you later on? No problem.

  Liam had it down to a science. He went an extra little distance that I couldn’t bring myself to go, not because it was cheap or because I had any shred of dignity left.

  I didn’t.

  The first night I walked home with three-hundred and fifty bucks cash in my pocket and knew that there was a paycheck coming on top of that — dignity went out the door.

  Dignity couldn’t sign a rent check.

  What Liam had was a natural kind of showmanship, something that I couldn’t replicate.

  My pretending meant it was Amy whose fingertips that slid up my muscled arm, whose lips teased at my neck, her breasts pressed against my back as we fake danced. She became the woman I wished would want me, and so, in that sense we were all fair and balanced, weren’t we?

  My audience wanted me to be someone else, and I wanted them to be someone else.

  The difference was... well, maybe there was no difference. We were just trading on each other’s ability to pretend.

  It’s not a lie if everyone walks away happy, right? It’s all fun as long as no one gets hurt.

  If it wasn’t a lie, and it was fun, then why couldn’t I bring myself to tell Amy? That was the problem. Whenever I imagined telling her what my new job was, all I could imagine was how much she would stop wanting me.

  And that’s when it stopped being fun.

  And went back to being a lie.

  Amy

  The party Darla invited me to was in one of those Brownstones in the Back Bay, a place that looked like it could be in a Sherlock Holmes film just as easily as it could house a Senator. But for tonight, it was a jamming place, full of college students and a group of musicians who had gained international notoriety and that, somehow, Darla had managed to befriend.

  She was such an odd duck.

  Her ability to mingle between different classes and different social groups was something I envied. I got quiet, shy, and tongue-tied around people who were different from me. I didn’t understand how to act around someone who wasn’t part of my social group.

  Living in my little suburban bubble had seemed like the best way to live, until I’d gone to college and realized that there were lots of other ways to function in society.

  The problem was that I felt stuck between the two right now; realizing that the way I was raised wasn’t the only way and that I had choices, and yet, possessing absolutely no social skills to function outside my own norm. I was grateful for even having that awareness, but how do you get from point A to point B? How do you go from knowing that about yourself to experiencing life enough to acquire another set of skills in a radically different social milieu?

  That’s what life is, right? Learning how to be all of the different “yous” that you can be.

  Mom expected one Amy—her Amy. And one Evan, except Evan only knew how to be one kind of Evan, and that was Drunk and High Evan.

  “It’s way up here, on the fifth floor,” Darla said, turning behind as we walked up a set of stairs, and then another, and then another. You would think that extraordinarily rich people could afford elevators.

  When we got to the top floor, I saw that the structure of the townhouse was fascinating. It was one long, narrow home. This was an apartment, not a full townhouse. Imagine a row of ten, or twenty town homes, all five or six stories tall.

  Some were entire town homes; the richie riches could afford that, to have every single floor to themselves. Other homes were cut up into a combination of apartments. In some cases, people rented entire floors, and in other cases the floors themselves were chopped up into tiny little studios and one-bedrooms.

  Living in my own little, quirky apartment meant that I had acquired an eye for the oddities throughout Boston. You take a city that’s nearly four hundred years old and you’re going to find some really strange historical details.

  If you dug enough, and paid close attention, you could find just about anything you were looking for, from the mundane to the bizarre, from the horrific to the glorious.

  The crowd spilled out through the threshold of the apartment as Darla wended her way through, moving shoulders and hips in ways that seemed to make people part. She said “hello” here and there to people she recognized, a quick wave of a hand, a glance of a smile, and then we were on a back balcony.

  It was small, and before we walked through the threshold, Darla stopped me. “I want you to meet Jane.”

  “Jane?”

  “Jane Newhouse. This is her place.”

  “Oh, right.”

  A slim woman with an auburn page-boy greeted me pleasantly. She was a good five to ten years older than us, with that flawless creamy skin of someone who had been extremely Emo in her teen years. She smiled with her mouth, but her eyes stayed serious and hawk-like, hidden behind rimless glasses.

  A purple crushed velvet ensemble finished off the look. She could have been the host of Oddities: Boston Edition, and it wouldn’t surprise me if somewhere in the house she had a completely reconstructed rat skeleton, or better yet, that guy Ryan from the television show, chained to a wall in a red room of pain.

  Darla made quick small chat with Jane, while I marveled at the view from the giant French doors that were open. I had full access to the balcony until Darla grabbed me, Jane having departed, and said, “Once we have more than eight people out there, we need to leave. It’s an old building.”

  I nodded, drawn magnetically to that space. The view was incredible. The Charles River gleamed, the moon smiling down on it. Entranced, I couldn’t see any stars tonight, not from cloud cover but from city lights.

  You take the glow of a few million people in Boston proper, Cambridge, and the suburbs, and you don’t get to see much of the heavens at night. But what you do get, instead, is one hell of a trade off over the river.

  Cambridge beckoned, and to the left, if I peered hard enough, I could probably see the very edge of my hometown.

  I didn’t peer very hard.

  “This is beautiful,” I whispered to Darla who leaned against the railing and nodded quietly.

  “Yeah.” She thumbed toward the apartment. “But that’s where all the fun is.”

  Flashing me a wicked grin, she walked back in.

  Sam

  Sometimes Louise sent me and Liam together as two cops on jobs, and other times, like tonight, the party organizer had ordered a foursome. We dressed like that gr
oup from the ’70’s, The Village People, and Liam always chose to be the construction dude. He never explained why.

  I was always the cop.

  This building was fancier than most, although we’d done a couple of jobs in Beacon Hill at those giant Brownstones where one of the old shimmering windows cost as much as my entire college career. Here on the Back Bay, we were in one of those old brick buildings that stretched up high.

  This was a first floor apartment, which meant rent cost less than some of the others because there wasn’t a view of the river. Instead, they got an eyeful of Storrow Drive. That didn’t seem to stop anyone, though. There must have been seventy-five women crammed into the joint.

  Antiques cluttered the space, a lot of the furniture pushed up against the walls to accommodate the huge number of people there. Music blared; that was the whole point.

  I was supposed to walk up to the door and pretend to be a cop answering a noise complaint. And then, the party really began. Liam waited around the corner with Aaron and Jack in full costume as I marched up to the door and pounded loudly.

  “Police! Open up!” I said in my most authoritative voice. This was the part where something inside me clicked. I became the cop, I became this other Sam who got to strut, dance, and show these ladies a good time.

  Was this what I aspired to when I went off to UMass and worked three or four jobs for four years trying desperately to finish a degree that my father had told me I was too much of a loser to ever get on my own?

  Hell, no.

  Would my dad have a heart attack if he knew what I was doing now?

  Maybe.

  I think my mom would stroke out and be dead before she hit the floor if she knew that I was dry humping women her age as they tucked $5 and $10 bills into a piece of underwear that was so thin it told people my religion.

  Those thoughts had haunted me after my first night. They stopped when I saw the smiles and counted the money.

  So here I was, pounding on the door and announcing that these women had been very, very bad.

  The door opened and the woman who I could only guess was the future bride answered, flustered and worried. It was the same look I’d seen in the eyes of plenty of hosts and brides as we played out this game.