Nick
NICK
WEEKS GO BY without any interaction with Tate. I text him occasionally, only to receive curt, blunt answers. But I don’t see him at all.
There are signs of life here and there: His Lexus in the driveway, shoes kicked off by the door, dirty dishes left in the sink. There are signs of the girlfriend, too—a small pair of Keds, a hair elastic I find on the couch—but they’re rarer, and after a while, I start wondering if she’s even still living here. God knows Tate wouldn’t tell me if it didn’t work out.
That’s probably why, when I hear voices coming from the kitchen one morning, my first thought is to wonder who Tate is talking to and why he’s up so early.
It’s just after six and I’m getting back from a run, hot and sweaty even at this hour from the early morning mid-summer sun. Tate probably hasn’t even gone to bed yet. It’s entirely possible he has yet to break a sweat this season since he sleeps all day and spends his nights in an air-conditioned basement.
I pad noiselessly into the kitchen on my rubber soles to discover Tate sitting at the kitchen island with no shirt on, eating peanut butter from the jar with a spoon. On the other side of him, a thin blonde has her back to me, her head in the fridge. So I guess there still is a girlfriend, after all. Now I’ll finally get to meet her—the patient soul who puts up with my son’s nocturnal habits and seeming inability to wear a shirt.
“Hi, Son.”
“Hey, Dad.” Tate looks up from the peanut butter jar with surprise. “You’re up.”
“Went for a run.”
The girl lifts her head and closes the refrigerator door. As she turns, I shift my eyes to her with an expectant smile.
And then time grinds to a halt.
Micro-seconds stretch into minutes, hours, days. She smiles back, vivid green eyes bright and cheerful, and then a cloud passes over them.
Shock and recognition reverberate between us both.
It’s her.
She blinks, only briefly, but I’m aware of the movement of every molecule and every atom between us. When she opens her eyes, it feels like eons later, and the look she gives me this time is so different now than it was at first. Her eyes are wider, the whites showing. Her smile is wooden and tight. What I see come over her face comes over mine as well. Like everything falls while the smile fights to stay in place.
How can this be?
How can Salomé be here, in my kitchen, with her thick hair tied back into a tight, tidy bun, wearing worn cotton workout clothes that look closer to rags yet still somehow cling appealingly to her? How can she be here with Tate? My son?
I can’t compute what I’m seeing, and my brain starts doing cartwheels, avoiding everything but the obvious truth.
She’s a friend, I think.
She’s a personal trainer, and he’s decided to shape up.
It’s a mistake.
She’s lost.
She has a twin sister and this isn’t her.
In the amount of time it takes for us both to blink again, a hundred reasons have gone through my mind, trying to make sense of why she’s here. Because the one reason she might be, the one that makes the most sense, simply cannot be.
“Dad, this is Zo?,” Tate says, blissfully unaware of what is passing between us, how very much has happened in my internal world since walking into the room. Still, a part of my mind reacts.
Zo?—ah, see? It is a twin.
It takes an extra unit of processing power for me to logically deduce that Zo? is her real name.
I’ve known her so intimately, but I don’t even know that about her.
Well, I obviously don’t know anything about her.
“Nice to meet you,” I manage.
My throat is dry and tight. The words catch and don’t come out right.
There’s got to be another reason . Another reason she would be here, at my house, with my son, at six o’clock in the morning.
“Nice to meet you, too,” she says stiffly, reflecting back all the panic and confusion I’m feeling.
The moment must drag on, get awkward, because eventually Tate stands up. The squeak of his stool across the marble floor snaps me to attention, and Salomé—er, Zo? —and I break eye contact.
He places the peanut butter jar on the island, leaving the spoon inside. “Time to go, babe,” he says.
Babe.
She reaches over the island for the peanut butter, takes the spoon out and rinses it, and screws on the lid.
“You need a shirt,” she tells him, putting the spoon in the dishwasher and the peanut butter in the fridge. She doesn’t look at either of us, and a heavy sense of dread settles over me.
“Nah,” says Tate. He walks around the island, places a hand on her waist, right where my hand has also been, and kisses her cheek. It knocks the wind out of me. “Let’s go.”
“Nice to meet you,” she says as they walk past me into the foyer.
Her eyes lift only briefly, and I manage to smile with something approximating friendliness.
I’m sure she recognizes me. I’m sure that I’m not imagining her shock and surprise, and I’m sure that she doesn’t want Tate to know that we’ve met before, either.
Once the front door closes behind them, I sit down at the kitchen island and cover my face with my hands.
She’s my son’s girlfriend.
I’m gutted. Horrified. His hand on her waist, his lips on her cheek… What would he think if he knew the ways that I had also touched her?
* * *
“That,” says David, taking a sip of his beer and not even turning to look at me, “is fucked.”
His eyes are glued to the couple performing in front of us, just like everyone else here—men and women in various states of undress gathered around three sides of a windowed room that David calls “the foreman’s office.”
When he first leased the space, it had been previously used as a factory. At the very back of the large, open back room are two former offices wedged in a corner, both with windows. The smaller one, currently empty, is against the wall and only has one window. The larger one, the foreman’s office, has windows on two sides. Recently, David cleared out both rooms, added beds, and had the windows replaced so that they could act as peep show booths. And tonight is the club’s inaugural sex show.
Every spectator here, David included, is spellbound by the show taking place in front of us, and I, a card-carrying voyeur, am the only person who isn’t watching. I’m alternately looking between my friend and my drink, my mind still going in circles after this morning’s revelation that the girl I’ve been mildly obsessed with is sleeping with my son.
Not even the woman’s escalating cries and gasps as the man behind her starts thrusting harder can distract me from my thoughts, and I sigh, wishing David had some advice or anything reassuring to say. But he’s miles away, watching the couple with a look of rapture on his face.
The live show is a success, and it’s a good night for his business, based on the looks of the crowd around the room, but that’s not what’s behind my friend’s smile. I’ve seen this look before. This is the look David gets right before something fun happens—before the drinks arrive, or just as the vacation starts, or, in this case, when he’s about to fuck someone. This is David getting off on the sexual energy in the room, and he’s definitely got his eye on the pale, dark-haired girl currently getting railed by the big man in the rubber bull mask.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate the aesthetics of the show. The girl is full-figured and curvy, with an alluring femininity that contrasts with the masked man’s raw, bestial power. It’s a fun scene to watch, but this kind of voyeurism isn’t to my taste. It’s too staged, too public, too performative. I need something deeper. Something real. And something else that’s hard to define, an elusive quality. An ability to give oneself over to the experience, to completely lose oneself in pleasure.
For all that her arousal seems genuine, the girl in the room isn’t transported like that. When she looks up to the crowd—making eye contact with David, I notice—there’s an awareness of her performance that, while it might be a turn-on for others, does the opposite for me. It’s too calculated.
Even though Zo? is a performer by profession, she never seems like she’s acting. She has stage presence because of her authenticity. That’s why I can’t stop thinking about how she grabbed my hand in the VIP booth and how impulsively she seemed to crave my touch. She wasn’t doing it for the performance. It wasn’t for my sake. It was pure, unfiltered lust, and thinking about it has me tied in painful knots even now, when I need to get her out of my head more than ever.
How could she possibly be my son’s girlfriend? In what world do coincidences like this exist?
I can remember so clearly the silky texture of her skin. How the side of her waist felt, where my son touched her as he kissed her, where I held her as I pushed my cock up against her ass, wishing the barrier of my clothing hadn’t been between us.
Thanking God now that it had been.
“Tell me it’s not that bad,” I say to David.
Behind the window, the bull is coming, pulling the girl’s head back by her hair as he roars out his pleasure and then deflates, shoulders slumping in exhaustion, back heaving.
“It’s bad,” says David, without missing a beat. He puts his empty beer bottle down on a table beside us and then lifts his eyes heavenward in a theatrical manner before finally looking at me. “I’m trying to think if I’ve ever done anything worse, and yeah—nope. Even I haven’t tried to fuck my kid’s girl. You’re a very bad boy, y.”
I roll my eyes. “You don’t have a kid,” I point out unnecessarily.
He claps a hand on my back. “C’mon. Let’s get your mind off of her and onto someone else.”
His eyes trail back to the foreman’s office and the dark-haired girl now exiting it. He wants to talk to her, and I’m cock-blocking him, keeping him here listening to me when he wants to go have fun.
But fuck that. David’s whole life is fun. And mine just got turned upside down.
“I feel like the worst fucking person,” I say.
His eyes snap back to me and he gives me his full attention. “You can’t do that, . You’ve got to put it behind you. It was an honest mistake—you didn’t know, and for fuck’s sake, she’s a stripper. Shit like that is bound to happen to her. So she gave you a lap dance one time. This girl could be in your life forever. Who knows? What if they end up getting married? You need to get your head on straight fast . Move past this.”
An uncomfortable thought occurs to me.
“Should I talk to her? Make sure we’re on the same page?”
David’s face is a mime of horror. “Jesus Christ, are you kidding? You pretend like you don’t even recognize her, okay? Like you get so many lap dances she could be anyone. Trust me, she’ll be relieved to think you forgot.”
“Yeah,” I mutter, thinking about the spasm that rippled through her as she came.
I’ll just act like fingering a stripper is perfectly normal for me.
David arches an eyebrow at me.
“I’m fine,” I say louder, waving him away with my hand. “Go sow your wild oats. Don’t worry about me.”
I know I’m not imagining the look of barely-disguised glee on his face. He’s like a kid at Christmas. How does he live every day of his life like this?
“Come watch,” he suggests. “You can be my pervy sidekick. We can do some cuckold role-play.”
For all that he can be a fucking single-minded idiot, David is the least judgmental person on the planet—I have to give him that.
“Not tonight,” I say, giving him a crooked smile.
His eyes slide away, and I look over my shoulder to see what he’s looking at. The man in the mask and the pale-skinned girl are standing with another man in a towel, who’s waving David over.
“Ooh, I have to go.” He grins, practically rubbing his hands together.
“Go. Have fun.”
“But you’re not leaving, are you?” he asks, stepping backward towards the trio of naked people waiting for him, unable to stop the momentum pulling him towards the pale-skinned girl.
“Gonna go home. Ruminate more on my situation.”
“No!” Now he’s ten paces back. People turn to look as he raises his voice. “Fuck someone before you leave!” He lifts both hands in the air like a preacher giving a sermon. “You must fuck when you come to the Ball & Chain, am I right?”
Around him, scattered laughter, a few claps, and a whoop in agreement.
“Next time.” I wave.
There’s not a body, a scene, or a person on Earth who could get my mind off of Zo? right now. My intention is to go home, hole myself up in my room, and hope to have a clearer head in the morning.
But underneath that, skirting the edge of my subconscious, is a thought, inappropriate and shameful. It’s knowing that she might be home, too. That I might run into her. It’s knowing that when I’m at home now, I’m close to Zo?.