Chapter 40
“Going to lunch!” I shout over my shoulder to the nearest manager, then I race out the front of the store and past the kiosks with teenage employees too busy playing Candy Crush to try and hawk shoe polish or fridge magnets or whatever kiosk good no one wants to buy.
I pick up my pace, now sprinting down the mall corridor and through the JCPenney.
A security guard tells me to slow down. I keep running.
A woman wags a perfume stick sample in my face.
“Dior!” she shouts, desperate for her commission.
I push open the double doors and see his Subaru there in the middle of the second row, headlights cutting through the heavy snowfall. I run toward him.
“Hi,” I say, panting as I pull open the passenger door.
“You didn’t need to run,” he laughs.
“I didn’t wanna waste our time together.”
I climb in and pull the door shut behind me. He waves a brown paper bag in my face.
“I brought you lunch,” he says. “Pil’s Deli. Best BLT in Anchorage.”
He sets the sandwich bag in my lap and tells me to take some breaths and get comfortable as he takes my hand in his, stroking the top of my wrist and tracing my knuckles. He moves his hand up the length of my arm to my shoulder and starts massaging it.
“Aren’t you gonna eat it?” he asks, nodding to the bag.
“I’m not hungry yet.”
“You’ve been working all day, you’ve gotta eat something.”
“I don’t want to waste our time together scarfing down a sandwich.”
“Somebody’s worried today…” he says, gliding his fingers through a lock of my hair. I shift.
“Hey,” he says, “is something the matter?”
I pluck a gum wrapper from the center console and roll it into a tiny tinfoil ball, pressing it until my fingertips dent.
I want to be fun. I want to be light. I want to be breezy and carefree and cool.
I want whatever he gives me to be enough.
I want to be satisfied. To be satiated. To be grateful. To be content.
But I’m not any of those things. I’m hungry and hurting and I want more. I want so much more. But I can’t say that. Because I’ve observed Mom long enough to know that nothing scares off a man like what a woman wants from him.
“Hey…it’s okay. I wish we had more time together too,” he says, reading me. Then he readjusts in his seat, twisting toward me. “Can I tell you this weird fantasy I keep having?”
And then before I can answer, he tells me.
His fantasy is that the world stops, everyone freezes in time except us, and we get the whole place to ourselves.
Somehow we wind up in Hawaii. We brew macadamia nut coffee and make big eggy breakfasts.
We go for long drives. We lie on the beach.
We watch the waves. We swing in hammocks. We make love.
“I know it sounds juvenile,” he says, disclaiming it. “And it’s not even really about Hawaii. Or it is, but only partially. It’s mostly about time. Having enough of it. Having plenty of it. Never needing to rush.”
I take this confession, this fantasy, as the proof I need. A calming, soothing salve. A testament to his reciprocal, equal feelings. His own plea for more time together.
“I could call in sick to work?” I offer. “It’s a slow day, they don’t need me.”
“No, no. I wouldn’t want you to do that.”
“It’s really no problem. I’ll call right now.”
“No, I should—I should get back anyway,” he says. “I told Gwen I was grabbing lunch with a friend. Probably can’t be gone too much longer as is.”
“Oh, right.”
My rosacea sprouts bright red, calling me out for being so stupid. For believing for even a second that the constraints on our time together were because of my work schedule and not his…life. There is no Hawaii, no beach. Just the scrape of windshield wipers against ice.
A hot lump grows in me, fiery and charged.
Does he know what he’s doing? Is he using his fantasy of us running away together as a thin, lazy way to appease me?
As a placeholder for being emotionally available?
For showing up? For loving me? I try to swallow this thing, to tell it to go away, to remind it how hard Mr. Korgy tries, that he’s giving everything he can, spending my birthday with me, bringing me BLTs on my lunch break, but this thing won’t leave.
And if this thing won’t leave, the best I can do is shove a pacifier in it to shut it up.
And there’s only one clear pacifier I can think of.
“Fuck me,” I say.
And he does. Hard. Here on the folded-down shotgun seat of his Subaru in the JCPenney parking lot with the sleet that pelts the window as our soundtrack. He thrusts into my solid rage, over and over, every pump puncturing it, making it weep like a bad blister.
We twist around so I’m on top, my knee pressing into the Cheerio crumbs ground into the seat cushion, and he tells me that I feel amazing, and he asks if I’m his good girl, and I say yes.
And then I ride him like the good girl that I am.
The girl who loves him. Who only wants to please him.
To make things easier for him. To be exactly what he wants.
What he needs. The girl who hopes that if I wedge myself into a doll, a dream, a marionette with lifeless eyes, porcelain skin, and no needs of my own, a doll who indulges his fantasies and guzzles his cum, maybe then he will love me too.