Chapter 17
Several beers later, the baseball game is over and the old guys have left. The other couple is long gone. A few new people
have arrived, and they drink in small clusters at scattered tables, but it’s still pretty quiet.
Approximately half the drinks we’ve gotten have not been what we ordered—it’s like we stumbled into a game of Bartender Russian
Roulette.
But, most importantly, I have not fucked it up.
It’s Tasha’s turn to grab drinks, and she comes back with a couple of shots. This time she slides in next to me and places
a shot glass in front of each of us. Her leg is against my leg and I think I really like it there.
“Okay, this time, I made sure we got what we ordered,” she says.
“No way,” I say to the shot. “This is such a bad idea.” The floor is tilting, and I don’t actually remember how many beers
we’ve had.
“Yes way,” Tasha says. “Because this little baby is called, wait for it . . . a sinkhole!”
We both double over laughing.
“Okay, okay,” I say. “You’re right. We have to.”
We hold up the shots to toast. The liquid looks gold and a little sparkly. We’re both mesmerized . . . or maybe that’s just
me.
I stare into the depths of the shot glass.
“What do you want?” Tasha asks suddenly, her eyes soft, her words slurring just the slightest, cutest bit.
Wow.
First date, huh? My lips are tingling and my good sense has evaporated, so here goes.
“I want to not feel sad and heartbroken anymore,” I say, and boy, just saying it sort of helps? I keep going. “I want to have
more than like five bucks in my bank account. And this next one isn’t a want, per se, but I probably need to learn how to cook something other than hot dogs and cereal? And I want my parents to stop worrying about me and also to
know that I’m just different from them, and yeah . . . I guess I want to know who I want to be in the first place. And I want
to stay alive and unmurdered and I want to kiss you.”
“Thank you for that long and very complicated answer,” Tasha says sincerely. “I appreciate you telling me all that. But actually,
I wasn’t asking you. I was asking the shot.”
“Oh my god,” I say, promptly dying of drunk humiliation.
She smiles, gently swirling her shot glass as she holds it up to one eye and closes the other. “I don’t know, doesn’t it look
like a portal to another dimension or something? Like it would speak if you asked it the right question?”
“I think it wants to swallow us whole,” I say, dropping my head on the table. “Which right now, I’d be okay with.”
Tasha finds my hand and puts it on my shot glass. “Here’s to the sinkhole that brought us together,” she says.
I pull my head up off the table, we clink glasses, and then shoot it, and it is revolting. We’re both instantly gagging and making weird faces. “What was that?” I ask, trying to scrape the lingering taste off my
tongue with my teeth.
“Malort and tequila!” she says with a giggle.
“You are a menace,” I say.
“I’d like to kiss you too,” she says, and time stops.
“So gimme a kiss, you menace,” I say, grabbing the ends of her bow tie and pulling her toward me.
And suddenly we are the couple making out in the booth. She tastes like beer and Malort and tequila and she is a very, very good kisser.
When we come up for air, it’s clear that neither of us wants to be done, but there’s not much more we can legally do in this
booth.
“What do you think about maybe getting out of here?” she asks, our foreheads still touching.
Chris flits through my mind, and I tell him to get lost.
“I like that idea,” I say. “But not my place. There’s an infestation. Poodles.”
She nods sagely.
“I have to close my tab,” I say and stumble up to the bar. The bartender turns around to close me out and I wait for my card,
my eyes drifting over the pictures again.
And that’s when I see somebody I do recognize after all.
Who is that?
My drunk brain tilts, trying to match the face to a name.
I’ve almost got it when Tasha comes up behind me and buries her nose in my hair. Her lips find my neck and her hand grazes
my wrist and I am going to need an underwear quick-change, or an industrial-strength hair dryer, if we don’t get them off
me soon.
I sign my name, and I’ve already forgotten the photo as she takes me by the hand and we get out of there.
If this is a mistake, I can’t wait to make it.
It turns out Tasha lives a short walk in the opposite direction from my apartment, so we get back to her place pretty easily, if inefficiently. We have to stop every few steps while she drunkenly—but adorably—tells me something about zoning or tree-trimming or license plate stickers.
She lives in a one-bedroom, and her building is classy-old, as opposed to should-be-marked-for-demolition-old, like mine.
Her place is on the first floor, and as she lets us in, I’m extra glad we didn’t go to my place, because this apartment is
cool and fashionable, like her, and everything actually goes together in a quirky, accidentally-on-purpose perfect kind of
way.
As soon as she’s turned the lock behind us, I spin her around and push her up against the door, our hands all over each other.
I kiss her again and then tug her hair so I can get at her neck. My lips are numb from kissing and from that bad-idea shot,
and I start to worry that maybe my sex personality is “big slobbery dog,” and then I wonder if Chris thought that, and what the hell, get out of my head, Chris.
Then Tasha slips past me, glancing over her shoulder and reeling me in. I pretend I’m a fish she just caught, and I try for
sexy fish as opposed to realistic fish, but to be honest, it’s unclear exactly how successful I am.
In the bedroom, everything slows down. We’re kneeling on the bed and she pulls off my tank top, throwing it on the floor somewhere,
and I am instantly so glad I showered that sticky stuff out of my hair and ALSO that I went with my one set of good underwear
even though I had no idea if this was a date, because It was indeed a date, yells my brain, which seems to just want to speak in all caps right now.
Let’s do this, yells my brain. And by “this” I mean Tasha.
I’m wearing a lacy black bra that she quickly gets rid of, and she holds me by my hips, running her tongue from my waist up and up and up, between my tits and then along my neck, then biting softly as she fiddles with one of my nipples, and never has anyone enjoyed doing their civic duty as much as I am right now.
She’s still kissing my neck as I fumble to unbutton her shirt—her bra clasps in the front, and as I unhook it, it’s like opening my favorite book.
Oh, hell yeah.
A book with boobs in it.
Then we topple over and we’re on the bed, and our pants are coming off, and it’s hot and dirty, and I’m kissing the tight
muscles of her abdomen and along her side where her skin is so impossibly smooth, and she’s making these fantastic noises,
and I work my way down and down and down her body, and Oh my god I haven’t had sex with a woman since college.
All at once, I am very sober.
I can’t fuck this up.
But also, I’ve been cohabitating with a dick (yep, I mean that both ways) for the last ten years, what the hell do I think
I’m doing here? Literally, What am I doing here?
Okay, think, think, think. Maybe it’s like riding a bike. Come on, muscle memory. Come on . . . any memory.
The alphabet.
Do the alphabet!
Sure it’s Girl Sex 101, a total bush league trick, so to speak, but you gotta start somewhere. In this case, with “A.”
And slowly, it all comes back to me.
And then, after a little trial and error, it comes to her.
If you know what I mean.