CHAPTER THIRTY
Kim began laughing.
“What?” he asked, taking the opportunity to pull out and roll over onto his back in the narrow space afforded between her and the wall.
“We fucked so hard we broke the bed!” she cried, laughing harder.
“Oh, shit, is that what happened?” he muttered, realizing they were leaning at something of an angle.
“Yes!”
“Shit, sorry.”
She finished laughing and then sat up and looked down at herself. “Oh, man. Holy fuck. We made such a huge mess.”
“Apparently.”
“Also, I don’t care about the bed. I mean, it’ll be annoying to fix, but whatever. Lots of things are annoying. Not right now, though. Holy fuck me, did I fucking need that.” She stretched, then popped her neck loudly with a groan. “I think this might be the best I’ve felt in the past two years.”
“How long has it been since last time?”
“I told you: two years. Shit, two and a half now.”
“Oh, I thought you meant you’d been thinking about fucking me for two years.”
“I did, but also I more or less swore off sex when it occurred to me that my life was not going in the direction I wanted it to, and if I didn’t figure out a way to course correct soon, I’d be seriously fucked five or ten years down the road. And I was not doing that.”
“Smart. Also, sorry. That sucks.”
“Well, my debt is now officially clear. I paid off the last of it yesterday, and I’ve got a nest egg of two grand in savings, so it worked.
Although Jesus, I thought I’d be farther along the path after two years of consistent fucking effort.
I guess I kinda made it harder for myself with how much time, money, and effort I put into training for boxing.
” She sighed and looked down at her crotch again.
“Man! How did all of this come out of your balls!?”
He chuckled. “I’m not sure. Especially after yesterday.”
“What happened yesterday?”
“You remember that cougar?”
“Yeah...Signy?”
“Sadie. We fucked like six times yesterday.”
“Holy shit, dude! Yeah, how in the hell do you have any left, let alone this much!? I guess you’ve been working them overtime for, what, months now? It probably makes sense that they’re kinda like a muscle, the more you work ‘em, the more powerful they get.”
“I do wonder if it works that way, although that sounds like pseudoscience that a lot of people believe but isn’t actually true. I think I just blow huge loads.”
She sighed and flopped back down onto the bed.
“I need to take a shower but I don’t feel like getting up yet.
This is just...too nice. I have been so stressed.
And then reconnecting with you sort of broke the dam of my horniness.
I’ve been just, you know, dealing with it, and I’d repressed it enough and pushed the sexual frustration energy into boxing and working out.
But then you had to show up and be super fucking hot and fuck, man!
I fucking masturbated that night to you like eight times in a row. ”
“This is absolutely so unreal to hear from you.”
“Why?”
“I mean, how you remember me? Bad with women, kind of a loser, weird-”
“I never said that!”
“I mean, that sort of comes paired with ‘bad with women’.”
“It doesn’t have to! I just, you know, thought you were shy!”
“I was, to be sure. But my point is: how you thought of me then? I’m still kind of like that. Like, I’ve done some changing, and I’m likely going to do more even over the course of this year, but I’m still kind of awkward and shy and not very confident.”
“If fucking six goddamned women, all of whom are seriously hot, doesn’t make you confident, I don’t know what the hell will.” She paused, then sighed. “Shit, that sounded kind of mean. I didn’t mean for it to, I’m just-I’m baffled!”
“I know, it’s just trauma. It’s lodged in my brain and it’s probably not coming out completely. But whatever, today is a happy day and you’re clearly in an amazing mood. So we’ll talk about something else.”
“What?! No! Don’t just cover up because it might be inconvenient for me!” Kim said, popping back up.
“You’re a lot more...energetic than I remember,” he murmured.
“I’m not normally like this, it’s like you just...broke down every fucking mental barrier and defense I have all at once! You broke the seal and don’t change the subject!”
He laughed. “Okay, fair enough. But it’s not like I’m suffering in silence over here. I am very happy, too. Honestly...I’m cool with keeping the conversation more casual.”
“Fuck that! I’m tired of ‘casual conversation’! I’m tired of meaningless small talk bullshit, I haven’t had something real in so long!”
“Okay, Kim, we’ll keep it real, but let’s talk about something else.”
“Fine. You can take a shower with me and tell me exactly how you ended up with all these wives in your life. I am seriously dying to know.”
“All right. But first, I have to ask: what do you want to do today? It is a date day.”
“Honestly? I want to hit like an arcade or something, gorge on fucking pizza and wings, and then, I dunno, get high or something. I haven’t done that in forever. And it’s legal now!”
Gabe smiled. “I know the perfect place.”
…
It took him two hours to tell her the whole story.
Mostly it took that long because she kept asking for details. And over half of them were sex details. And then when she realized he actually had a huge repository of porn they’d filmed on his phone, she’d kept demanding to see.
And then they were hitting the arcade at the big entertainment center he kept finding himself coming back to again and again.
It was kind of unreal, seeing her like this.
Almost like seeing a completely different person.
But as they gamed together, and he usually won, he thought back to their original times together.
And he realized that hints of this had been peeking through. Sometimes she’d get overly excited over something, or get especially passionate during the debates they sometimes got into, or, a few times, got epically pissed. Thankfully never at him.
He realized she’d been pretty tightly controlled for a lot of it, and she seemed more controlled now, but all of her discipline seemed to have dissolved. He’d be a little more worried, except that she was just unrelentingly happy.
And given everything she’d been putting up with for the past two years, she deserved it.
He was beginning to get the picture: Kim had done the thing that every asshole over fifty loved to shovel.
She had denied herself a great deal for years in order to ‘live responsibly’.
In other words, she hadn’t actually lived all that much, sacrificing too many positive experiences on the altar of capitalism.
That’s what it always came back to, didn’t it?
When her hunger became too great, they ditched the arcade and hit the pizza place and ordered forty wings and a large pepperoni with stuffed crust and marinara sauce to dip in.
“Oh my God, man, I fucking missed wings,” Kim said after eating seven in a row.
“How long has it been?”
“Shit...a year? Wings are kinda expensive. I mean, especially after the whole, you know, pandemic thing fucked everything up and made everything more expensive. And then prices fucking never went back down because of course they won’t.
Why would they? They had an excuse to charge up the ass for everything, and enough time passed that we fucking got used to it… ” She sighed.
Kim picked up another wing, then paused and seemed to contemplate it. “You know, I used to be one of those assholes who believe everyone just needed to ‘work really hard’ to get out of poverty.”
“What changed your mind?”
“Actually trying to do it. I mean, yeah, I did it, after two fucking years of suffering. But there were setbacks I couldn’t have predicted, and there could’ve been so much more.
And the only reason I actually managed to do it was the job I managed to land.
If I’d been on minimum wage this whole time?
I’d still be working on the debt, easily.
And on the one hand, yeah, I was kinda stupid and irresponsible with my spending, but nineteen year olds shouldn’t have credit cards and, shit, we live in a society that blasts that shit twenty-four-seven.
Like, they actively try to squeeze every dollar from us, do everything they can to put us in debt, and then fucking shame us when we get in debt?
That’s like bullying someone into drinking and then giving them shit for being drunk. ”
“I mean, you won’t hear any arguments from me,” he replied.
“Yeah, I knew you knew. I didn’t really say anything back then because I didn’t want to annoy you.
And thank God. It was so fucking ignorant.
And that isn’t even counting all the horseshit that can happen!
How about people in medical debt because they had a goddamned medical emergency?
Or car debt? Their fucking car crapped out on them and they need a car because we’ve built our cities to prioritize cars at the expense of literally everything fucking else.
Or getting robbed? Their identity stolen?
Cops can barely give a fuck and corporations take fucking forever to help get your money back, if they ever do it at all! ”
“We’re in a box designed to siphon money from us. To siphon everything from us, really,” Gabe replied.
“Fucking exactly! And now I can’t fucking stand shitheads who actually defend this shit, or who claim ‘you just don’t understand capitalism’.
Fuck you! I understand it just fine. Either you don’t understand, or you’re just straight up evil.
God, the amount of people who seem to actually get off on the suffering of others is...
truly sickening. Ugh, whatever. You’re right, this is depressing. ”
She ate the wing and he finished off his current slice of pizza, grabbed another and dumped some crushed red peppers across it. Kim was watching him do it, and she suddenly raised her eyebrows.
“What?” he asked.