25. Cal
CAL
The apartment over Kessler’s garage is what I could get on short notice. Month to month, one room and a bathroom, a bed and a hot plate and a window that looks at the back of the feed store. I moved out of the house four days after the diner.
Her name’s not on the lease, the house was mine first—none of that mattered. She asked for space, and space with my furniture in it isn’t space. I left the hooks on the wall. Took the gym bag, some tools, clothes. The rest of it can sit there being ours until somebody decides it isn’t.
First night in this room and it’s loud the way empty rooms are loud. The fridge hums wrong. Somebody’s dog goes off twice down the block.
I eat standing up over the sink—canned chili, straight out of the pot, because unpacking the one box of kitchen stuff felt like admitting something.
I do sixty pushups on the bare floor just to burn something off.
Check a phone that’s got nothing on it—the club thread, a parts alert, nothing from her, which is what I asked for, which is the deal, which doesn’t stop me checking it three more times like the phone might be lying.
By ten I give up on the night and get in the shower, mostly for the noise of it.
Water through pipes is at least a sound that means something’s working.
And that’s where she gets in.
Or where I let her in. I want to be honest about the mechanics of it, because there’s a second—hot water on the back of my neck, eyes closed, mind finally slack—where the thought walks up. The sound she makes right when she’s about to come. Just that.
And I could shut it down. I’ve been shutting things down all week, I’ve gotten good at it, it’s basically my new trade.
And I don’t. I’m tired. I miss her like a lung. I let it run.
It starts obvious. Her hips. Her mouth. The picture comes up hot and fast like it’s been waiting all week right behind my eyes: Tessa on her knees on our bed with her wrists crossed behind her back in my belt, looking at me over her shoulder with her hair stuck to her lip, saying well?
—bratty even tied, always, mouthy right up until she can’t be.
The arch of her back when I’d pull her hips up.
The wet clutch of her around my fingers when I’d work her right to the edge and stop, and the absolutely filthy string of curses she’d let out at the ceiling—Cal, I swear to God, you son of a bitch, don’t you dare stop—and how much I loved being the son of a bitch who stopped.
The taste of her. Riding my mouth with her fingers in my hair, thighs shaking on either side of my ears, right there, right there, and me holding her off it one more time just to hear her beg, because she would, she’d beg gorgeous and furious at the same time, nobody on this earth begs angry like her.
I’m hard before I’ve decided anything. Cock heavy and aching in my fist before I’ve admitted that’s what my hand went down there to do. Two weeks since her wrist plus two years of material. It was never going to go any other way.
The water beats on my shoulders and I work myself slow, and the reel keeps running.
The first time she came on my cock—third date, her place, that dumb little apartment with the radiator that clanked—how her eyes went wide like it surprised her, like her own body pulled something on her, and then she laughed.
Right in the middle of it. Came apart laughing with her heels digging into the backs of my thighs, and no one ever told me a sound like that existed before her.
Her on top with my hands pinned over my own head—my turn, don’t move, I mean it—grinding down slow just to watch my jaw go tight.
The noise she makes right on the edge, that broken little inhale, like the top of a hill on a bike, stomach-drop and all. The low way she says my name when she’s close. Cal. Like it’s a secret between her and the ceiling. Like the ceiling’s the only other one who gets to know.
My hand speeds up on its own. Fist tight, breath going ragged against the spray, hips starting to push into it, and it’s not even the obvious stuff finishing me, that’s the thing that wrecks me about it—it keeps sliding sideways into things that have no business in a shower fantasy.
Her cold feet finding my shins at two in the morning.
The weight of her hand on my knee in the truck.
Her laughing mid—she does that, laughed sometimes right in the middle of getting fucked, delighted, like she couldn’t believe her luck, like I was her luck—and I’m hard as a post in a rented shower chasing the memory of a woman LAUGHING, which about sums up where I’m at.
I brace one hand flat on the tile. Cold wall, hot water, forearm sliding up so my forehead’s against it. It doesn’t take long.
Her voice in my head goes there he is and my whole spine pulls tight and I come hard enough that my knees dip, cum striping the fiberglass wall, hips jerking through it, her name coming apart in my mouth at the end—quiet, wrecked, two syllables mashed into the crook of my own arm like the empty apartment might carry tales.
For about four seconds it’s good. It’s her. That’s the ugly miracle of it—for four seconds she’s mine again, warm and laughing and close enough to taste.
And then it’s just me in a shower again. Water going lukewarm. My own breathing. Some guy’s radio playing outside the window, tinny country, a song she’d change.
The shame lands before I’ve even got the water off, and it lands harder than it has any right to.
It comes up through my gut first—a low greasy roll, the same wrongness as the bathroom floor at the house, dialed down but the same brand—and then it’s in my chest, and then my face is hot in a way that’s got nothing to do with the water.
I stand there dripping with one hand still flat on the tile, right next to the mess I made of it, and I can’t look at that either, and I run the water another minute just to rinse the wall like a man cleaning up a scene.
She asked for space. She stood at the end of a booth with a white line around her mouth and asked me for one thing, one, and I gave her the town, the diner, Casey’s street, the gas station—and then hauled her into a fiberglass shower stall four days later anyway, because my body doesn’t honor deals it wasn’t in the room for.
That’s what I can’t get around, toweling off in a room that echoes. Even wrecked. Even guilty. Even doing every single thing right for the first time in months—underneath all of it my body just wants what it wants, on schedule, like a dog that hears the food bin no matter what’s burning upstairs.
And there’s something about that I can’t stand tonight. Like even this is evidence. Like a better man’s grief would’ve shut the whole works down for a season, and mine didn’t, so what the hell is mine worth.
Nothing, probably. Nothing’s wrong with it, I mean—I know that, some sane back room of me knows that. The guys at the shop would laugh me out of the bay. You jerked off thinking about your own old lady, somebody call the papers.
I know exactly how it sounds. Knowing how it sounds doesn’t touch it, not tonight, because the shame isn’t really about the shower and I know that too, standing at the sink with the towel around my neck, not looking at myself in the mirror.
It’s that for three minutes she was mine again, and none of it was true. That’s the part that sits wrong.
The real her is across town in Casey’s guest room deciding whether my word’s worth anything, and I got to have her the one way that costs nothing. And free is what got me here.
I get dressed. Drink water from the tap out of my cupped hand because the glasses are still in the box. The bed’s a strange bed and it feels strange, sheets too new, no dip worn in it anywhere, nobody’s cold feet incoming.
I lie on my back in the dark with my chest sitting wrong and my hands stacked on it like a dead man, and when the reel tries to start up again around midnight—the laugh, the belt, the Cal against the ceiling, the whole warm loop of her—I shut the water off on it hard.
Roll over. Punch the pillow into shape twice more than it needs.
Then I run engine specs in my head until they blur. Bore and stroke on the Road King. Torque sequence on a primary cover, inner to outer, crisscross. Valve lash. It’s the only prayer I know.
Work at six. The bill’s not paid yet.
Nothing tonight paid it.