Chapter 29
He comes over drunk.
“I’m drunk,” he says.
“I know,” I say.
“Is that alright? That I’m drunk?”
“Yes.”
And it is. It’s more than alright. I love seeing him like this. Glossy eyes. Jaw shifting. Bumbling around with beer stains on his shirt. His concrete walls knocked down, revealing someone childlike and needy.
I didn’t have long to prepare but I did my best, spritzing and shaving and smoothing every crevice as quickly as I could.
I didn’t have time to enter into the war zone with my hair, so I threw it up in a bun instead.
I double-cleansed my face to rid it of the orange goo, then serum’d, moisturized, primed, and applied my best ten-minute makeup.
Concealer, foundation, lip + cheek, gloss, brows, mascara.
Lots of mascara. Always lots of mascara.
“Come inside, it’s cold,” I say.
He kicks off his shoes and hangs his cardigan on a hook by the door.
I take in the satisfying sight of that purple cardigan finally off of him, finally hanging in my house.
It’s only a cardigan, but it feels like a victory.
I offer him a drink and he says okay, so I dig through Mom’s liquor bottles while he takes in the place—the outdated fixtures, the generic art prints—registering just how poor and tacky we are.
I did what I could, tucking Mom’s Bath & Body Works candles into a cupboard and hiding her stack of two-dollar Woman’s World magazines, but the meat of the place still shouts white trash.
The lamp with the dented lampshade from the sales section at Marshalls.
The ugly old ceiling fan. The green couch with the tear in the center of the middle cushion.
“That’s what you get for buying cheap pleather,” I say, using self-awareness as a crutch for my shame.
“At least the color’s nice.” He chuckles. I force myself to laugh along but inside I collapse. I want to show him that I know better, that I am better, than this place. That I can’t be reduced to or defined by it. By where I come from.
I used to not know the ways in which the white trashness of Mom and me was reflected in every detail of our environment.
Of our choices. A lamp’s a lamp, I figured.
Until the first time Frannie came inside to grab a tampon.
It should’ve been obvious to me just by the fact that it took her two years and an emergency to come inside my place when I’d been in hers a hundred times by then.
That I knew her door code and she didn’t even know where our bathroom was.
That she always dropped me off or picked me up but never went inside, as if the lower-classness would stain her just by being exposed to it.
But it wasn’t obvious to me. Not until she stepped foot on our dishwater-gray carpet.
I saw the way she was taking in the place. Or pretending to take it in but actually just judging it. Letting it confirm her opinion of me. Like because we had an outdated ceiling fan or the wrong brand of candle that meant we didn’t know the way the world works.
Something went sour in my stomach and I instantly wished she would leave.
That she could un-have the frame of reference she now had.
That I could rip her hand away as she caressed the cheap plastic picture frames and the very artificial-looking artificial plants and the spines of the cheesy 2-for-1 self-help books Mom was into at the time.
That I could wipe that stupid pitying smirk off her face when, on her way out, she eyed the Home Sweet Home doormat Mom got from the dollar section at Target.
I’ve never felt so powerless, watching someone judge me in real time, not based on anything I said or did, but based on what home decor I was surrounded by.
Who knew so much personal identity went into a fucking knickknack?
Next time I went over to Frannie’s place I took note of her home in a way that I hadn’t before.
The textured paint jobs. The recessed lighting.
The Le Labo candles. The concrete coffee table with the cream-colored Architectural Digest at 100 book that cost $125 (I looked it up).
I realized how much care and thought must’ve gone into it. And how much money.
Mr. Korgy’s home is as nice as Frannie’s.
Too nice for a high school teacher’s salary.
Gwen clearly comes from money. That explains the real leather chairs by the fireplace.
The brass knobs and sink fixtures in the kitchen.
The heavy plates on the table. Gwen said they were hand-molded. I was just impressed they all matched.
I don’t want Mr. Korgy to think less of me or be turned off because of where I come from. I don’t want him to see a Ross tag on the back of a throw pillow and think, “What the fuck am I doing? I need to go back to my wife. She buys pillows from Crate & Barrel.”
He’s been impressed by me writing about where I come from, but seeing it live and in person is a different thing.
People worry poorness will rub off on them.
And the bad taste that comes with it. They’ll read a book about it.
Or watch a movie where Jennifer Lawrence pretends to be poor while her eight-hundred-dollar highlights gleam in her close-ups.
But they don’t want to actually know it.
Be close to it in any kind of real way. Except maybe cutting a check for a grand or two around the holidays to the Salvation Army or the Red Cross.
But is that even exposing themselves to it, really?
Or just a way of distancing themselves from it even more?
“Where’s your mom?” he asks as I pour him his whiskey. I didn’t even ask him what he wanted. Didn’t need to.
“Any time a man looks tired or troubled you don’t ask him how he likes his drink, you pour four fingers’ worth of whatever you’ve got and you give it to him neat and you give it to him quick,” Mom used to tell me.
Back then, I wasn’t sure how this advice applied to a seven-year-old, but now I’m thankful for it.
“Night shift. Then out with her boyfriend,” I say, handing him his drink.
I show him to my room and he takes it in with great reverence, combing through the barrettes and hand creams and trays of jewelry on top of my dresser, touching hoop earrings and charm bracelets and shitty mood rings from that carnival with Frannie five years ago.
He looks at a picture of Mom and me. I’m a toddler, two or three, my hair pulled up into a high ponytail with a lavender scrunchie, messy curls raining down the back of my neck. One of Mom’s arms is wrapped around me, the other flicking a cigarette.
“Wow. Look at that smile,” he says.
He sits on the oversized beanbag chair in the corner, the one I keep swearing I need to get rid of because it takes up half the room. It doesn’t swallow him up the way it swallows me. He’s able to hold his own against the beanbag. I respect this.
I stay cross-legged on my bed and he stays sitting there in the beanbag chair, and we just look at each other.
Minutes go by in silence, interrupted only by the occasional sound of sipped whiskey.
Our eyes undress each other. Not just our clothes, but every pretense, every drop of posturing, every surface-level exchange, every line spoken with humor or cleverness or whatever tool we used to try to avoid this: the truth.
That we are so lost in each other that it’s pointless to try and fight it.
I scooch forward to the edge of the bed.
He stands up from the beanbag chair and sets his whiskey on my dresser.
A statement. My whole body shakes as he walks toward me.
I trace his lips with my index finger, then move my lips to his, rubbing back and forth, letting the nerve endings touch.
His breath is hot and yeasty. We kiss and pieces of myself shoot off in every direction.
Pieces that I might have to pick up later. But for now, we kiss.
He crawls onto my bed. The springs squeak, trying to kill the mood.
But they can’t. He runs his hands along my leggings.
Spanks me. I whine for him. We suck each other’s tongues and lick each other’s faces.
Our bodies are intertwined. Rhythmic. The opposite of every sexual encounter I’ve had so far.
We’re so connected. Too connected. Painfully connected.
Like my body already can’t stand the moment it ends.
The moment our bodies separate and I’m stuck with just mine.
I reach my hand down to his crotch and rub it over his sweatpants. There it is. Like stone. Pulsing. Throbbing. For me. I want to cry.
“Waldo,” he moans.
He peels off my shirt and leggings. I’m boiling for him.
But he makes me wait. Runs his hands along my thighs, then my underwear, the silkiness making me even more sensitive to his touch.
I tug down his pants and pull his penis out, letting its warmth surge through me as I just hold it, my fingers barely able to close over its girth.
He pulls my underwear aside, teasing me until my body begs for him.
He moves his finger to me and I see his eyes shift with recognition.
Now he knows just how much I want him. He grows in my hand.
I pull him toward me and he slides himself into me, pumping slowly, groaning with each pump, taking his time.
And then he starts pumping quicker, and quicker, and my mind becomes a blank sheet of paper.
An empty white void. The Matrix. He is, quite literally, fucking my brains out.
All my stupid anxieties and cyclical thoughts, my woes and insecurities, my open tabs and fast-fashion carts, gone and replaced with this. I’m alive. Finally.
Then he stops and I feel a swell of something worse than dread. Something cold and dark. A reminder that this won’t last.
“Why’d you stop?” I ask.
“Your turn,” he says, rolling over so I’m on top.
He pulls himself up against the headboard, relaxing his body underneath mine.
It’s so arrogant. So show me what you’ve got.
It makes me want to scream. He knows what he just did to me.
His pumping. His thrusting. His filling me up.
His making me whole. He can’t take it away like this.
I bounce on him as a whiny plea to get him to take charge again, to move himself into me with the force and pressure from thirty seconds ago when he was dominating.
But he only lies there, unflinching, watching me, almost amused.
I bounce harder and harder, higher and higher, up and down the length of it, my whole body on this one part of him, this single appendage of his containing all of me.
And then, finally, he takes charge again, grabbing my waist and twisting me around like a rag doll until he’s back on top. He pounds into me, harder and harder, his dick like iron as he grits his teeth, claiming me, until I scream.
Afterward, he strokes the small of my back and tells me he has to go, but before he does, I lay him down flat and I lick his curled belly hairs straight.