9. The Repeal
THE REPEAL
Here is what I expected: a secret. Six weeks of creeping up the back stairs, and Todd and Scott carrying on with the coffee can and the wastebasket, and me running two economies at once.
Here is what happened. Aaron told them on the Monday.
He did it at the kitchen table, sitting down, at nine in the morning, in the voice with the hedges off. I wasn't in the room. I was on the stairs, which is a different thing from being in the room and a much better seat.
He said he'd been keeping a record. He said what was in it.
He said he'd asked Scott to make the rule in February and why, and that he was sorry about that specifically, because it was a real rule for a real reason and he'd used it as a fence for himself and that wasn't fair to anybody at the table.
Todd said, "You wrote down her period? For seven months?"
Aaron said, "Yes."
Todd said, "Man, that's the most disturbing thing I've ever heard in my life," and then, about four seconds later, "did she know?"
"She does now. She found it. She's the reason I'm telling you."
And Scott, who had said nothing at all, said: "Is she okay with all of it."
That's the sentence I've kept. Out of the whole year, that's the one I'd put on the house if they let me put something on it.
Three men at a kitchen table with a chili-pepper doodle on the fridge behind them and no idea what the correct procedure was, and Scott Cauley's whole contribution was to ask whether I was okay with it before anybody moved on to what they thought about it.
So I came down the stairs and said, "She's on the stairs, and she's fine, and she'd like the rule struck."
There was a fairly long silence.
Scott got the ledger off the fridge.
I want to be careful about the next part, because it would be easy to tell it as though I won.
I didn't win it. I'd tried to win it, back in February, with an argument and a lie about the pill, and I'd lost three to one.
What actually happened in March is that two men changed their minds in front of me and said why.
Todd's why was Todd's. He said, "If she's doing it with him she's doing it. Us being careful after that is just, like, a costume."
Scott's was longer and it was the only time all year I heard him string that many words together.
He said the rule had been about consequences and about the house, and that the consequence he'd actually been worried about was one of us deciding something for me without saying so, and that on the evidence he'd been worried about the wrong man in the wrong direction, and that he was not going to sit at a table and vote a second time on what happened inside somebody who was standing right there.
Then he said, "But the deposit thing was real and it's still real."
And I said, "I know it is. It's my deposit too."
He looked at me for a second and then he ruled a line through HOUSE RULE. NOBODY FINISHES INSIDE ANGIE, one stroke, and under it he wrote STRUCK 3/24 and, because he was Scott, ALL PARTIES PRESENT.
Todd said, "Do I get to keep the pepper?"
"You keep the pepper."
The house did not become an orgy. I want to correct the record on that, because I know how this reads from outside. What the house became was a house where nobody was being careful anymore, which sounds like the same thing and is not.
It became ordinary. That's the whole thing I'd been after since I was seventeen and I finally got it in the last six weeks of a lease.
The Thursday after they struck it, I was at the counter making a sandwich at about two in the afternoon, in the shirt, and Todd came in and stood behind me and put his hands on my hips and said, "Hey, so, can I."
Asking. Six months in, out of pure habit, the big idiot.
I said, "Todd, I will put this knife down and go get the ledger and read you the minutes."
He laughed into the back of my neck and pulled the shirt up and took me right there against the counter with the bread out and the mayonnaise open, and it took about six minutes and he never took his shoes off.
There was no foil. He didn't reach for anything or check anything or slow down at the end to make a decision about me, and when he got close he just said, "Oh, God, Ange," and shoved in to the root and stayed there.
And I felt a man's cock let go inside me for the second time in my life and the first time in daylight. He was thick enough that there was nowhere for any of it to go, so it just filled up around him, hot, in pulses, and the sound he made was directly into my hair.
He stayed in me afterward for a minute, softening, with his forehead on my shoulder and both arms wrapped around my front, and he said, "That's so much better. That's not even the same activity."
I said, "I have been telling you for eight months."
"I know. I thought you were doing a bit."
He pulled out and I felt the whole of it start to come out of me at once and run down both thighs, and Todd said "whoa" in a tone of genuine scientific interest, and then he tore off two paper towels, handed them to me, said "thanks, Ange," and left to go to his three o'clock.
And I stood at the counter with the sandwich half made and my legs wet to the knee and the ledger hanging on the fridge two feet from my face with a line through the rule, and I finished making the sandwich, because I was hungry.
That was it. That was the whole fantasy, delivered. Not the sex. The sandwich.
Scott came in about twenty minutes later for the toolbox under the sink, because the lockbox on the front door was sticking and Duszak's realtor had been complaining.
He didn't ask. He didn't say anything at all.
He put the toolbox on the counter, took one look at the state of the backs of my legs, worked out exactly what had happened in that kitchen and how recently, and put me over the counter with one hand between my shoulder blades in the same motion he'd have used to move a chair.
Bare. First time. He went into me through what Todd had left and neither of us pretended that wasn't the case, and about four strokes in Scott Cauley said, "Christ," in a completely different voice than I'd ever heard out of him, which after five months of foil and four-minute maintenance was the single most satisfying noise of my entire twenty-first year.
He lasted longer than four minutes. He didn't say sorry at the end.
He got his hand around the front of my hip and pulled me back onto himself and finished so deep I felt it arrive somewhere I'd never had anything arrive, and then he stood there breathing with his hand flat on my back for about ten seconds, which for Scott was a sonnet.
Then he pulled out, and did up his belt, and picked up the toolbox, and said, "You want the dryer on low?"
I said, "There's nothing in the dryer, Scott."
He said, "Then no," and went to fix the lockbox.
Aaron came in at the end of it. Of course he did.
He came in the back door with his bag still on his shoulder and stopped, and looked at me, still bent over the counter with my elbows on the formica and my legs in the state my legs were in, and looked at the back door where Scott had gone out, and did not say anything.
I said, "Don't you dare write this down."
And Aaron Petry put his bag on the chair and got the notebook out of the front pocket, because he'd started carrying it, and uncapped the pen, and wrote it down.
Two men, one afternoon, no rule, and a man in the doorway keeping the record.
I put my face down on my arms on that counter and laughed until I had to sit on the floor.