4. Open Season
OPEN SEASON
Everybody was back by the twelfth and the house was different by the fourteenth.
Not in the way I'd braced for. I'd expected weirdness, some throat-clearing period where everyone had to establish a new personality.
What actually happened was that Todd told Scott, and Scott told Aaron in about six words, and then the house went on exactly as before except that now, sometimes, somebody used me.
That is the single best thing that has ever happened to me and I'm aware of how it sounds.
The first week of the semester Todd took me twice, both times in his room, both times with a condom he got out of a coffee can on his dresser and rolled on in the dark with the practiced fumbling of a man who has done it a hundred times and never once done it well.
He was loud. He talked the whole way through, filthy encouraging nonsense, you're unbelievable, look at you, God, and he came with his forehead jammed into my shoulder and his whole weight down on me and then apologized for the weight, which I told him to stop doing and he never did.
Todd was fun. I want to be fair to Todd, because of what happens later. He was fun, he was generous, and he was the only one of them who ever made me laugh with his cock inside me.
But Todd needed a bed and a door and about forty minutes, and a bed and a door and forty minutes is an evening with the lights off. It wasn't the thing.
Scott was the thing.
Scott Cauley waited eight days after he was told.
I have no idea what he did with those eight days.
Thought about it, presumably, the way he thought about the fuse box.
And then on a Tuesday afternoon in the third week of January I was in the basement moving a load over from the washer to the dryer, in the shirt, on my toes to reach the back of the drum, and I heard the stairs.
He didn't say anything. That's what I want you to have.
He came down the stairs and crossed the basement floor and put one hand flat between my shoulder blades and bent me over the top of the washing machine, and the lid flexed under my forearms and the whole thing rocked on its feet.
I said something. It wasn't a word.
He pushed the shirt up over my back with the same hand he'd bent me with, one motion, and then his palm went down between my shoulders again to keep me there, and I heard his belt and I heard the foil.
The foil. Even then, even in the middle of getting exactly what I'd been asking three men for since September, some part of me heard that little tear and went: oh.
He was not thick like Todd. He was long, and he had a broad flat head on him, and he did not spend one second on the approach.
He put two fingers into me first, which I think now was a check rather than a courtesy, and whatever he found there satisfied him, and then he took my hip in one hand and pushed the head of his cock into my cunt and sank the whole length of it in one long push until his hipbones stopped against my ass.
I want to be clear that I made a noise like a door.
He stood there for a second, all the way in, not moving, his hand still flat on my back. And then he started to fuck me and he did not stop or change his mind or check on me for the entire duration.
It was the best four minutes of my life to that point.
The washer was the wrong height, an inch too low, so my tailbone kept coming down on the metal edge of it and by minute two there was a bruise starting.
The lid squeaked. Every stroke drove my hipbones into the enamel and my nipples dragged on the cold lid through the shirt, and the drum was full of somebody's wet jeans so the whole machine shifted an inch to the left with him and had to be shoved back.
And Scott said nothing at all. He breathed.
He adjusted his grip on my hip once. He was a man doing a job well and I was the job, and my head hung down over the front of that washing machine with my hair in my face and my mouth open, and I came like that, hard, up on my toes with my forehead on the lid, without a single hand touching my clit and without one word said to me.
He kept going through it. He got faster. His fingers dug into my hipbone hard enough that I had marks the next day in the shape of a hand.
And then, at the end, right at the end, he said, "Sorry."
That's all. One word, out of nowhere, in the flattest voice in Virginia, and he shoved himself deep and held there and I felt his cock go rigid inside me and start to pulse, and I felt every single throb of it through the rubber, all four of them, and it was the loneliest thing I've ever felt in my body.
Nothing arrived. That's the thing. All that motion, all that force, a man's whole spine locking up behind me, and at the end of it nothing came into me at all. Just a shape moving inside a layer of plastic, spending itself somewhere I couldn't reach.
He pulled out. He rolled it off and tied it and dropped it into the wastebasket by the utility sink, and pulled his jeans up, and said, "You want the dryer on high or low."
I said, "Low."
He put it on low. He went up the stairs. From the top of them he said, "Thanks, Angie," and the door closed.
Four minutes. Maybe five.
I stayed bent over the washer for a while with my heart going and my thighs shaking and the shirt still up around my ribs. And then I stood up and pulled it down and went over to the utility sink and looked in the wastebasket.
There it was on top of a dryer sheet. Knotted at the neck, the way he tied everything at the neck, and heavy at the bottom with about a tablespoon of him.
You could see it through the rubber. All of it, gathered in the toe of the thing like the last of the milk in a bag, sitting in a plastic bucket next to a mop.
I stood in that basement and looked at a used condom for a long time.
I'd gotten everything I'd asked for. Every single term. No evening, no conversation, no permission sought, no fuss made, thank you and the dryer on low. He had used me exactly as advertised and it had been so good I could still feel the shape of him.
And there was the whole of him in a wastebasket, six feet away from me, thrown out.
That was the afternoon I worked out what I actually wanted, and it took me until March to be able to say it, but the shape of it arrived in that basement.
I didn't want to be used. I wanted to be used up. I wanted the part that couldn't be tied off and put in the trash. I wanted proof.
I went upstairs and made a cup of tea and my hands were not steady, and on the fridge the ledger hung off its pierogi magnet with the phone bill split four ways in block capitals.
Three weeks later, they voted.