CRACKS
Brisbane 1989
Richard bought a car at an auction although neither of us could drive.
He was always buying things. He had a way of making money disappear. I was barely capable of keeping track of the rent but he was worse than I was.
“Let’s eat out,” he’d say, meaning a fine restaurant and perhaps a new shirt to wear to it, and the most expensive meal on the menu. He bought me gifts that I didn’t want. Kitschy little things, oil burners and homoerotic prints and subscriptions to expensive gay porn magazines. I felt myself digging my heels in, feeling responsible. I was not his mother and yet he made me like a mother to him, always setting boundaries, the voice of reason.
“It’s always up to me to find our partners,” I complained to Laura one day after a shift. “I never see him put any effort in. If it were up to him it would be just him and me.”
Just him and me. I could see the humor in it. Just him and me should not be so bad really, but when I thought about this possibility, all the life seemed to escape out of the relationship.
“You love him, don’t you?”
I couldn’t be sure I really loved him at all. I loved what I did with him. I loved the potential of our relationship. We had fun. It was exciting, but I had lost my drive to go out every night in search of fresh blood, and our evenings alone together left me irritable.
Brian moved off the couch and into the spare room. We didn’t charge him rent but he brought us food and vegetables and I began to enjoy the distraction of him being around. He did the washing and helped with meals. Sometimes when I snapped at Richard in frustration, Brian would be there to pull me aside.
“Let’s go for a drive,” he said one particularly restless Sunday afternoon.
My final assignments were due and I should have been working, but I was raging about one thing or another and I knew that the afternoon would start to plummet if I didn’t leave the house. It had been days since we’d had anyone. I felt cooped up, I had started to pace in the evenings.
“You look like you need your fix.”
Brian parked at the edge of the Botanical Gardens. We would walk, he told me. We would smell the herb garden and maybe steal some cuttings to plant in our own.
“What fix would that be?”
“Someone to distract you from the problems with your own relationship? Sex. Sex with some complete stranger to make you guys feel like you are not all alone with each other.”
He seemed like a wise man then, someone twice my age and just as perceptive. He had been in our home for a handful of days and he had put his finger right on the problem, our problem, that we didn’t love each other enough.
I felt his hand on my knee and it was a comforting weight.
“I’m tired,” I told him. “University is almost over. I don’t know what I’m going to do next.”
When his finger inched inside the elastic of my panties it was unexpected. I hadn’t felt any kind of sexual energy between us. I didn’t find him attractive and I had decided that he didn’t find me attractive either, but here was his finger inside me, teasing me, changing my mind about my own attraction to him so easily.
“You want to sleep with us?” I asked him, shifting my hips closer to the driver’s side of the car and spreading my knees for him. He slipped a second finger inside and slid it back and forth.
“No,” he said. “But I wouldn’t mind sleeping with you alone.”
This was against the rules, our rules, the rules that I had set for both of us. The rules that Richard had agreed to.
When Brian removed his finger he held it to his nose and then he sniffed at it and he wanted me. This made me want him back.
“Have sex with me,” he said then and I could hear the desire in his voice.
“I won’t break our rules,” I told him. “I won’t sleep with someone without telling Richard first.”
“Are you going to tell Richard?”
“I think this thing with Richard might be over.”
“You won’t regret it.”
“Maybe,” I said. “We’ll see.”
