She’s a MILF who found me in the dark corner of a bar. She told me I was handsome and I flashed her my charmed smile, the one that usually buckled girls at the knees. Instead she slipped her hand around my arm. She pressed herself close, whispered seductively in my ear. She took me to her house. The next morning she rolled over and asked me if I wanted to rent it from her.
Now she’s my landlord.
Now she’s just another woman.
Now she’s always at my door in her slutty shirts, telling me I owe her money.
“It’s the tenth, Jonah.” Today she’s wearing sunglasses and my face is reflected in the wide lenses where her stare should be.
“I’m not stupid,” I say, even though my gaze drops to her chest. Her black bikini shows through the white of her shirt. The deep neckline accentuates her cleavage. Perspiration beads along the tanned flesh of her breasts and slips into the valley between them.
You are stupid. You are.
“It’s nearly the middle of the month,” she says. “I have to pay for my kids’ swimming lessons.” She points toward her car where her two daughters sit in the back seat.
“I just started my new job,” I say. “I don’t even get paid until Friday.”
She sighs and shakes her head, exaggerating. “So you’re telling me I drove all the way down here for nothing?”
“Look,” I say, reaching for my back pocket, fingers shaking around my wallet. I dig inside and hand her all the cash I have left. “There’s two hundred here, two-fifty.”
“That’s it?”
“Swimming lessons can’t cost any more than that.”
Her jaw tightens, hard, rigid, sharpening her tiny frame. “I don’t have the patience for this, Jonah. I really don’t. I’m not running a charity.” She puts her hand on her hip, drawing my gaze to the wooden beads dangling from the ties of her bikini bottoms. All I can remember is the way she rocked her pelvis while she was riding me, saying, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, just like my mom used to when she couldn’t handle being a single parent anymore.
“I’ll get it,” I say. “Like I said, I haven’t even been paid yet.”
“Next week,” she says, pointing her finger against my chest. “You can bring it to me. It’s too much of a hassle bringing the girls down here.” The end of her fake French nail digs heat into me, right where my heart’s throbbing.
“Fine,” I say. “Whatever you want.”
She nods, returns to her car. She tells her kids that she’s in a hurry, that they’re running late, that they’re going to the pool now. She looks at me before she pulls out onto the street. My gaze slips to the newspaper on the doorstep. The front page features a photo of smiling young girls, bikini bodies burning on the beach, bold black headline announcing: Summer’s Here!
I flip through the pages but there’s never anything that interests me.
Most of what Mark knows about me are lies. He thinks that I like the outdoors, that I like the heat. He always works shirtless, mowing every lawn with his defenseless back braised red under the sun. The mole on his shoulder looks bigger, but he says he likes it when the girls stare.
“The cancer’s getting you,” I say, dragging a bag of grass clippings behind him.
He shrugs. “Cancer’s gonna get everyone in this kind of heat.”
“Have you even read about it?” I ask.
“About skin cancer?” He turns his head. “It’s not even real cancer, man. They cut that shit right off. It’s minor surgery.”
“You can’t always get rid of it all. It really depends on how deep the disease has gotten into your skin.”
“Jesus, man,” he says, smirking at he points at my sweat-stained shirt. “Go buy some fucking sunscreen if you’re so fucking paranoid.”
“I’m not paranoid,” I say. “These are just facts.”
He turns away, pushes the mower up the ramp and into the bed of his truck. “You sound like Cheryl,” he says. “Melanoma’s not so bad if you look at the entire spectrum of cancer.” He twists the cap off his water bottle, chugs it back. “I mean, if I could pick a cancer, it’d be melanoma.”
I stare at him, prying my sweaty gloves from my hands before clenching my fists tight.
He’d be better off with no cancer but he’s already tangled up with his wife and his toddler son. Most nights he complains about Cheryl, about how she always has to have her way. Mark says he can never do anything right by her. When his phone rings and an argument arises, I imagine what Cheryl’s voice sounds like on the other end, its piercing sound stabbing my insides, until Mark hangs up again. He’s oblivious. He always laughs it off, makes the same joke about how he probably won’t be getting laid for a while.
All it ever makes me think about is how much better things used to be, when men drank real drinks instead of the shitty weak beer that Mark digs out from the cooler in the back of his truck. He offers me one but I shake my head.
“It makes it easier, you know,” he says. “Have a couple and you’ll be drunk enough to finish the work without noticing the heat.”
I take the beer. I crack open the tab and do what I do best, even though the cold barley taste of pale lager is never enough to calm the burn in my throat. It builds when I think too much. It’s an ache I feel every time I take a breath.
Mark tilts his can back and takes a long swig of his beer. I remind him that there’s still the back half of the complex to weed and he groans and wipes his brow.
“You feel like spotting me a couple hundred bucks?” I ask.
“What?” he asks.
“Speeding ticket,” I say. “Yesterday afternoon.”
He finishes the can and reaches for another. “What’s wrong with you, man? This is the third one in two months.”
I shrug and take another swig, pretending. “It’s a curse.”
He sets the beer down, reaches for his wallet. “I can’t keep doing this, you know. Cheryl’s going to find out.”
“Stop being so honest,” I say.
“You have to be honest when you’re in my position.” He flashes a look, acts like he’s smarter even though he’s the one guzzling the beer.
I tell Mark that I’ll make it up to him, that I’ll finish the work and he can enjoy his drink. That’s what he does, enjoying his slow decay under the sweltering heat of the sun. He slugs the cans back with hard chugs just like my dad.
Even the low growl of the WeedWacker doesn’t stop the memory of misery, the crack of the alcohol in his voice. He drank rum exclusively after the divorce, the scent of it hitting my face when he told me about my mom’s postpartum depression.
“You know, your mom tried to drown you in the bathtub once,” he said. “I saved you. I stopped her. I pulled you out. I fucking do her job while she’s rotting? She couldn’t even get out of bed back then and now all she does is thank Jesus for whatever it is she believes he did. She’s like all of them, you know? They’re all just greedy whores.”
This house without air-conditioning is an oven in the heat wave. What little relief I feel quickly fades into the void between these four walls. I lay on the couch with the lights off, the windows shut and the curtains drawn. During the day I can’t watch television. I can’t use my computer. I can’t cook, can’t clean, can’t use the dishwasher. The thermostat drifts a little higher whenever I try to get anything done.
At night it’s easier to go out. It’s easier to seek relief than to let the heat swell inside of me.
Usually it’s a walk that ends up elsewhere: the pub, the club, spaces where I can feel less alone when surrounded by strangers.
I sit at the bar like men used to, facing the alcohol, all those cold glass bottles lined up on the wall. The bartender is the only person who ever stares back. The only thing he ever asks is if I want another drink, but sometimes he’ll lean in with a warning, the sort that makes me wonder why the heat brought me here in the first place. He glances behind me and points to the girl smiling from across the room. She walks over and introduces herself, says her name is Bailey or Lindsay or Ashley.
Her name never matters.
Every girl comes wrapped in the same little dress, a flimsy tube of fabric that clings to her curves. Her hair’s coiled up in hairspray, her presence covered in it, glitter and gloss and sexual aggression. She slips her hand over my arm and slithers her way in. I’d love for this to never happen, for me to be the gentleman instead of the idiot whose gaze always slips to her tits.
Little Sluts, my mother used to call them.
This one, she asks me what my name is.
“Matthew, Mark, Luke.” I draw a breath and turn back to my drink. “What does it matter, really?”
“It’d be nice to know who I’m talking to.” She stands there and I look at her again. I try to make eye contact because the last thing I want is to lose control. My heart throbs in my ears and my fingers cling too tightly to my glass.
“I’m not interested,” I say. It’s the easiest way to put it, the easiest way to spurn her advance without causing a scene.
“Asshole,” she says, lips puckered aggressively around the last half of the word. They’re glossy pink, like melting plastic. Her steps waver backward before she turns altogether, retreating back to her table of friends.
I return to my drink, the cold gin unable to tame the sound of her behind me, telling all of her girlfriends that I’m a real piece of shit.
Because you are, aren’t you?
I walk home, taking the pedestrian walk on the bridge. There’s a girl coming from the opposite direction that makes me forget about the riverside breeze against my face. She’s in regular clothes, in jean shorts and a shirt, but then I notice the shade of her lipstick and I can’t help but clench my fists.
She notices. She makes eye contact and then she tenses. She keeps walking, her footsteps clicking on the sidewalk. She pulls her bag close to her chest.
I stare for too long. My jaw clenches and the girl looks away, breaks the connection as he passes.
Every flash of lipstick is a moving target, a trick. She’s a lie, just like all of them. Her coiled locks slip over her shoulder. She walks faster, tightening her grasp into the strap of her purse. I bite my tongue; bite down while the words flood my skull.
One day you’ll stop falling for it.
One day you’ll spread her cancer.
One day you’ll feel so much better.
If she didn’t want the attention, her lips wouldn’t be so red.
My dad used to take me grocery shopping before my mother had full custody. He’d buy discounted microwave meals and stack them on the conveyor. He’d gawk at the covers of the magazines in the checkout line.
“Looks kind of like your mother, doesn’t she?” he asked, pointing at one of the covers.
The woman had my mother’s dark hair and brown eyes, but her whitewashed skin looked ghostly against her bloodstained lips. He pulled the magazine from its metal slot and flipped through the pages to the full spread of the model that was supposed to be my mother, sprawled out half-dressed the way people never did in real life, her eyes lined in dark lashes like stingers that threatened to pierce my face if I leaned in too close.
My dad nodded and smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “Just like her, right?”
Mark is like any other married man, slipping into a white plastic chair on the patio with a selection of empty cans beside him. Cheryl tries to rub his back while their son screams and pulls at her leg. She rolls her eyes and shakes her head, passing a glance at me before I get the chance to swallow the steeping flood she triggers in my chest.
I retreat to the inside, where most of Mark’s birthday guests have retreated. The house’s air-conditioned chill smells of fresh paint, of excess and excuses, a farce of a real relationship Mark seems to think he has. I only planned on staying a short while, and I’m the only one without a drink. Watching the girls makes my smile emerge. They’re all strangers in the white light, outside of their comfort zone.
The trick is picking the right one.
She’s the girl who stumbles into the crowded kitchen for a wine glass even though the bottle she’s carrying is already half-empty. She sets it on the counter too hard. She digs through the cupboards, preoccupied, unaware of her place until I grab her attention.
“I don’t know if you even need a glass at this point,” I say.
“Probably not,” she says, “but it helps to keep up appearances.”
She chooses a glass and nearly knocks it over when she goes to pour the wine. I put my hand down over the base, holding it steady. This close, the fake floral scent on her neck coaxes me to flinch when she offers me the glass. The red inside is deep and dark.
“Nobody needs to see how much I don’t want to be here.” I flatten my hand on the counter and meet her gaze.
“Am I being that obvious?” she asks.
“You’re not being forced to stay here, are you?” Closing in, I reach for the charm of her necklace, this resin cube with a flower locked inside, delicate petals frozen in limbo. I take the plastic in my hand, holding her gaze until her cheeks darken to match her glass.
“You smell really good,” she says.
My grip tightens around the charm. She glances away and takes another sip, the red dying her tongue as she stumbles over her words.
“You smell masculine, but like not like shitty cologne.”
My fingers relax. I drop the necklace and watch her as she takes another drink. She smiles and then bites her lip over the expression. “I haven’t spoken to anyone all night,” she says. “Maybe you should just take me home.”
The honesty soothes boiling pressure all the other women have ever left. I gather a breath of conditioned air and brace myself, gripping my fingers around her waist.
“Was that too obvious?” she asks.
“Maybe you should tell me what your name is,” I say.
She lifts her hand and whispers in my ear like she’s some kind of secret.
Ellen and i take a cab back to my place. The entire ride she’s a giggling heap of drunken anticipation, her name a sticky mess of two syllables, lingering in the back of my skull. My tongue dries, sticks to the roof of mouth. I can’t speak. I’m frantic, handing the driver my card, searching the depths of my pocket for my keys—sliding the right one into the lock. My breaths echo inside the heated darkness of the house when I pull her inside.
In the bedroom she clings to me, lets me pry her clothes off. She kisses aggressively, her mouth brimming with slurred words.
“God, I’m so drunk,” she says, her desperation so hard her tits heave. “You can do whatever you want. Do whatever you want to me.”
I kiss her back, but it’s not long before she fades out, before her grasp slips from my shoulders and she passes out heaped on top of the sheets. I grab her frame and I shake her. A damsel moan slips from her mouth. Her head turns against the pillow. The overhead fan blows her dark curls over her pale face. She’s a gone girl. She’s sleeping beauty lost in consequence.
There are rules for this sort of scenario.
There are rules, but not everyone follows them.
I pull away from her, tendons flinching, making sweaty fists before I climb off the bed and draw a slow breath.
I throw the sheets over her naked flesh and spend another night sweating on the couch.
In the morning she gags in the bathroom. There’s a chill in the house, a lowered sense of unease. I wait for her, staring at her purse on the coffee table. It’s a small package of burden, glossy black patent leather that reflects my face when I lean forward.
She appears in the hall and I knock the purse over. It topples over the edge of the coffee table, falls somewhere on the other side. Her face is flushed, her cheeks red, hair greasy from the night. She’s not the same girl. She leans against the wall and crosses her arms, her smile looking hesitant from behind her faded lipstick.
“What did I do last night?” she asks, her voice shaking.
She’s a danger in this moment, seconds ticking away at the situation she’s wound me into. She stands there reminiscent of other women, only she’s asking me for answers instead of cornering me into her version of the truth.
“You passed out,” I say. “I slept here. It seemed only decent.”
She sighs, wipes her palm over her mouth. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I only really remember the cab ride. I remember walking through the front door.”
You can do whatever you want.
I shrug. “It could have been worse.”
She swallows, turns her gaze to the floor.
“You alright?” I ask.
“Yeah,” she says. She wipes her lip and takes a seat beside me. “I’ve done this enough times to know that it’s a shitty way to meet people.”
“It’s the easy way to meet people,” I say. “Nobody ever said it was foolproof.”
She laughs. “Well, you seem like a nice guy,” she says.
I try to be a nice guy, yet my gaze proves otherwise, slipping over the scar on cleavage, just over her right breast. It’s an old scar, long and faded into her skin.
“I’ve been with far more vile men than you,” she says.
She catches me looking at the scar, but she’s not like Jill. She turns her body away, makes herself a bigger secret, something to be unwound. The light reflects on her skin, makes it look creamy like over-milked coffee. She smiles, hesitant, her bare lips still glistening. She’s smitten in the shadows, charmed by all the lies.
You’re a nice guy. You’re a nice guy.
I am. I offer her a ride home. She goes to look for her purse and I take her arm, suggesting that she probably left it at Mark and Cheryl’s house. In the air-conditioned solace of my truck she tells me about her miserable job selling engagement rings at the jewelry store. She tells me how she ends every evening in the bathtub with a bottle of wine.
“The darker the better,” she says.
She thanks me when I drop her off in front of her townhouse unit. I lean in, inhaling her scent—a wet garden, the scent of rain, something to tame this dry desert heat. Her skin makes me think of Mark’s coffee—two creams, two sugar. He drinks it back every morning and always complains about being dehydrated every afternoon.
“I’d like too see you again,” she says. “Is that okay?”
You shouldn’t drink coffee.
“I’d like that,” I say, and I smile because I’m a really nice guy.
Mark tucks a fresh cigarette behind his ear before hauling out the two red gas containers from the bed of his truck. They’re older cans, plastic cans, bombs that could explode in the right circumstance. I’d tell him about all the articles I’ve read about smoking around gasoline, but he’s never been the sort to heed warnings.
“Cheryl and Ellen used to work together a while back,” he says, drawing the nozzle from the gas pump. He slips it into the opening of the first can. “Every party she’d have a bottle of Shiraz, wouldn’t share it with anyone. Cheryl would always tell me stories about the dudes she was fucking.”
“What does it even matter?” I ask.
He shrugs. “She’s actually a blonde, you know?”
The way he says you know makes him sound like my drunk dad.
“Not sure why a blonde would ever want to ruin her hair like that,” he says. “I’ve never seen the appeal of brunettes.” He fills the container, transfers the nozzle to the second gas can. Then he looks at me. “How was she? Was she any good?”
My tongue’s stuck, dry in my mouth, thinking of her, of the things I could have done.
“I don’t share that kind of shit,” I say, because gentlemen never tell.
“You probably should,” he says. “You make it seem so fucking easy.”
I look at him.
“All those bar stars,” he says. “Your landlord.”
“It’s nothing,” I say. “It’s them. It’s not me.”
He sighs. “Cheryl was the only girl who ever threw herself at me, you know.”
I bite my lip, watching him as he twists the cap back onto the gas can. He returns the nozzle back to its holder. Then he pulls the cigarette from behind his ear and retrieves his lighter from his back pocket.
“You’re asking for it,” I say.
“What?” he asks, lighting the end of the cigarette.
“You’re going to die of cancer,” I say.
All of the most-watched videos have MILF in the title. It’s the same word my friends used to describe my mom when she was bent over gardening in her denim shorts. Cut at mid-thigh, they weren’t even attention-seeking. But all the women in the videos look like girls starved for attention, nothing like my mom, who didn’t even flinch when my dad started getting drunk, started calling her a cunt all the time.
She said she was going to leave him: that she was going to take me away.
She divorced him and took me on a whale watching tour, said we were getting a fresh start. She kept commenting on how fresh the ocean was, but the ocean looked so angry, its edges sucking at the boat, lapping at it like a massive tongue. Its surface was like the back of a scaled demon roaring at me. Mom laughed beside me, thinking everything was supposed to be a lesson, saying, “You don’t want to get thrown in there, Jonah. The ocean will eat you alive.”
I take a sip of gin, feeling like the sissiest man God ever spoke to, and I shake my head, shake it all away because it’s disgusting. The gin cools my mouth, vapour on my tongue, creeping down my throat.
On the screen there’s a MILF that looks like Jill. She’s tackled onto the floor, her dress pulled up. The guy spits in her face. He slaps her, calls her a whore. It’s all good until the MILF starts to moan, her back curving with her lips. The ice in my drink is already gone. The heat’s been affecting me my entire life. I’m sweating rivers, stroking myself until my dick gets sore. A groan comes up my throat and I throw the glass across the room, dousing the wall with the smell of gin and relief. All I want is to pour another drink but I just fucking can’t with this kettle boiling in my lungs.
When Mark gives me an envelope of cash on payday I take it directly to Jill. I pick through her mail-box. She subscribes to Cosmopolitan. The cover is a slew of bold capitalized words: NAUGHTY, SAUCY, SEXY: 69 NEW WAYS TO GET ANY MAN, all the self-help she needs. She’s yelling at her kids, her voice sounding through the door. I knock and she answers with paint all over the front of her shirt. I hand her the mail, the envelope of rent money on top. She rifles through the bills, counts them out in front of me, shaking her head as her kids scream, complaining about how there isn’t enough red paint, the colour on her shirt, and she winces like she’s in pain.
“Not a good day?” I ask.
“No,” she says. She smiles for a moment, but then her fingers twitch over the magazine. She stares down at the cover and sighs. The girls, they’re making a mess of the papers and brushes while the red bleeds over the edge of the kitchen table.
“Sometimes don’t you just want to kill them?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer. It’s awkward. It’s fucking awkward, but I force myself to smile. Does she not remember, or is she just denying that she admitted it, that she hated being called Mommy.
“You know, my mom raised me by herself,” I say. “She survived.”
“Really?”
“I was probably worse than the two of them combined.”
She looks down, her voice low. “It’s hard. It’s really fucking hard sometimes.”
“I can imagine,” I say, even though I can’t. It just feels good to pretend, because all I can think of is that afternoon my mom was trying to refill the mower with a shitty plastic jerrycan, and I was whining, throwing a fit. She flinched, dropping the can, the plastic cracking. There was gas everywhere and she fell to her knees and started heaving, pleading, “Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, I can’t do this anymore.”
Jill finally smiles. “The kids go to their dad’s on Friday,” she says, taking a step forward, sliding her presence into my personal space. “It’s a relief, getting a weekend to myself.” She mimics the model on the magazine, every issue just a chest pressed forward, hip cocked, hand placed low, fingers pointing down like an arrow guiding me.
You’re losing control.
“My mom never had any weekends to herself,” I say. “She never had the chance to get away.”
“Did you know your dad?” Jill asks.
I shrug, shifting my gaze, glancing down at the magazine. “He didn’t really respect women.”
She doesn’t answer. She bites her lip and her pale face goes paler. She shifts, but she still holds her cover pose. My gaze drifts to the red on her torso. It fuels the heat in my chest. My shoulders tighten and I draw a breath. My tendons flinch. My fingers curl.
You’re making fists.
“I hope your weekend goes well,” I say before walking back to the truck.
On the way home I stop at the grocery store to buy a bag of ice for my drink, and I stand at the checkout counter, clutching the bag in both hands like it’s a shield.
I pull Ellen’s purse out from under the coffee table. I pry it open and lay all of its contents on the table: her receipts, lotions, a manicure kit and her birth control. There’s a charm on her keys, a capital letter “E” embedded with white rhinestones. Her lipstick’s in the bottom corner of the bag. It’s a shade called Berry Queen, bruised red, the slant on the stick curved to her lips. I draw the colour over my wrist, a line all the way down, back and forth, asking for attention. The lipstick goes on thick, greasy. The shade makes my lungs burn, makes my fingers start to shake.
I rub my fingers over the red and wipe it on my jeans, on the couch, the heat spreading.
The pressure builds inside my tightened fists. I unzip my pants and jerk off, picturing her leaning in front of the mirror, putting it on. I picture her kneeling between my knees, the greasy consistency of her mouth like hot oil burns on my dick.
You have to stop.
I keep stroking, thinking of her smile, of the void she had with her lipstick faded. My hard-on throbs in my grasp and I stroke until I’m exhausted and drenched in sweat, sitting on the couch useless and stupid and unable to get off.
I try to convince myself that this isn’t cancer.
I wait until the perspiration cools my flesh and I draw a full breath of air, taking a sip of gin, its flavour diluted by the ice, chilling my throat all the way down.
Everything’s going to be okay.
I buy her a hundred dollar bottle of wine using the money from her wallet. It’s Shiraz in the most bruised shade of purple I could find. She pulls it from the gift bag at the end of our date, leaning awkwardly in the passenger seat of my truck.
“You didn’t have to do this,” she says.
“I wanted to.” Easing in, I push her necklace aside and touch the scar on her chest. There’s a silence in the haze. She stares at the wine, answers the question I can’t ask.
“I used to mess around with this guy who was into knife play,” she says.
For the first time of the night I actually meet her gaze, raising my eyes from the mottled flesh across her chest.
“He was more of a knife-enthusiast, I think. It was like he got off on just having one around.”
“Was it bad?” I asked.
“I had to get stitches.” She looks away, stares down at the bottle, at the darkness inside. “It was stupid, getting involved with him. I always kind of had a thing for fucked-up people. I don’t know why.” She shrugs her shoulders and then rubs her finger over the scar. “You do so much stupid shit when you’re trying to figure yourself out.”
“Do you regret it?”
“Usually I tell people that the scar’s from a drunken accident.” She clutches at the neck of the bottle, makes it seem like she’s about to open it. “I tell them that I tripped and fell on my wine glass.”
“That almost sounds more believable,” I say.
She laughs with me. She laughs at herself. It’s strange, because her honesty doesn’t seem like some kind of Cosmopolitian trick to lure me in. Still, I follow her when she lets me into her house. She takes me to her bedroom and I have to fight the urge to punish her for it.
Mark reaches into his cooler after work. Instead of beer it’s cola. He says the caffeine is just as good, but I know exactly what was behind the change. He takes a swig and cringes, complains about the carbonation as he pushes the mower up the ramp and into the back of his truck.
His back is burnt.
The mole looks even bigger, looks about ready to swallow him whole.
The next time I see Jill is when she drops by my sweltering house in the early evening, asking me for rent before it’s even due.
“I think you owe this to me,” she says.
“Owe what?” I ask. “Tenants don’t owe landlords favours.”
She sighs and takes a step closer, presses her way into my space. “I think our situation is a little bit different than that, Jonah.”
There’s sweat on her chest, but this close I can smell the perfume she’s sprayed there. It’s vindictive, the tips she gets—the lessons she learns inside the glossy pages of her magazine. Her eyeliner must be waterproof, because even in this heat the black doesn’t smear. She draws a breath that’s slightly laboured. Her chest rises and I turn my head. I grip at the door frame, pressing down too hard, my blunt nails digging into the trim she’d never bothered to paint over, trim where she once traced the lines of her daughters growing up, growing taller, growing older, growing into women who will continue to manipulate men like me.
She puts her hand up, drapes her fingers over my shoulder.
“I’m seeing someone,” I say.
“What?” she asks.
“Her name’s Ellen.”
She doesn’t react, and that’s when my fingers start shaking. The breath I draw shudders in my throat. I think of Ellen, of the position I’ve put myself in. I think of what little respect Jill has, digging her pastel pink nails into the fabric of my shirt, trying to steal me back, trying to make me property.
Little sluts.
Greedy whores.
All the things they say about women are true.
She meets my gaze, blinks her dark eyes, her lips making a subtle smirk. “Jonah, I just need you to be a friend to me right now. I’ve got two kids. I’ve got stuff to pay for.”
“Then go and fuck somebody else,” I say.
Her hand falls away. “Excuse me?”
I draw another breath, losing hold of my stance. My fingers grip at the door-frame, turning white against the trim.
“I’m your landlord, Jonah.”
“No, you’re not,” I say. “You know exactly what you are.”
Her lips purse, her eyes glistening for a split second, but then she blinks and replaces her look of fear with the dark-eyed glare of a woman sucking me inside of her.
“Do you want me to kick you out of here? Is that what you want?”
“What I want is some fucking air-conditioning,” I say.
She leers, easing back a step, creating distance again. She sighs and crosses her arms. “Start paying your rent on time. Maybe I can help you.”
Just like that, spit out, all chewed-up and red.
She turns walks back to her car. She starts the engine and glares as she drives away. Behind me all the heated air from the house tries to escape. Coiling my shaking fingers into my fist, I take a step outside, where it’s colder, where there’s some kind of relief.
My footsteps throb all the way down 12th Street, the air thick in my lungs. The night fills in by the time I get to the park by the river. There’s a woman in the arena parking lot, loading up her SUV, a fucking soccer mom in denim shorts and a pink shirt with a collar, her dark hair in curls. I watch her and feel the heat building. My strides widen, footsteps sounding heavy in the dead space of the empty parking lot. It’s so late. There’s nobody around. She turns just as I approach, but she’s not fast enough to counter my tackle, not strong enough to push back when I shove her against the car.
I pull back a fist and it happens so fast, the hard sensation of my knuckles hitting her jaw.
She pushes at my face, her nails tearing my cheek. Her voice wails an animal moan, its pitch filling me with adrenaline. I punch her again and yank at her leash of tangled hair, covering her mouth, hauling her away from the car. Her feet drag gravel over all the white dividing lines of the parking lot. She stumbles when I get to the boat launch, and I pull her down the wooden boardwalk to the slough.
My feet sink into the sand. She loses her balance and I shove her down. I climb over her, press my knee into her chest. She tries to scream and I hit her harder, saying, “Shut the fuck up, shut your fucking bitch mouth.”
The dark’s festering: her face is a blur. Everything’s a blur, but it doesn’t matter who she is. All I want is to punish her, and I keep asking myself one question.
What’s the worst thing you can do?
I ask her, “Are you scared, bitch? Are you fucking scared?”
She doesn’t answer. Her moan deepens, and it gets stronger and more agonized the harder I hit.
A tingling sifts through my fingers with each strike. I punch at her chest, at her throat, her face, this jackhammer sensation making me curl my fingers, pull my arm back, bring my fist down again and again. The tingling stings with wet heat and I grip at her hair with my opposite hand, making tangles, tangles, everything tangled up because I can’t even breathe anymore. There’s only the world going black, and my voice is an ocean calling her a fucking cunt.
You fucking cunt, you greedy fucking useless cunt.
You, you, you.
This is you, isn’t it?
You’re pushing your elbow over this whore’s throat and you’re undoing your pants because you know it’s the worst possible thing you can do. Her throat pulses against your hand. Her heart’s beating and it’s shaped like fear. Your dick isn’t even hard and you tell her, “Suck me off and it’ll be over faster.”
She only moans. You climb up and shove your dick in her mouth. She tries to suck it, but her mouth feels like nothing. You can’t even recognize her face because it’s filled with red. She’s a plastic gas can leaking fuel, weak and flimsy, and you hold her down while you stroke yourself, get yourself hard, because sex wasn’t what you were thinking about, but this is just the worst thing you can possibly do to her.
You rip her shorts: tear them down. She’s not even struggling when you spread her legs. It’s so easy and she just takes it when you spit on her cunt and shove yourself in. You choke her, pushing your weight onto your hand. You’re staring her down and she knows her place and you’re telling her, “That’s it, bitch, that’s it, that’s fucking it.”
You hit her again and again, each strike followed by her guttural moan. You take her, pull her hair, drag her toward the river and push her face into it, washing yourself, washing the evidence away. The water’s so cold and dark that it’ll eat her alive and that’s the worst thing, the worst possible thing, because she didn’t even have the chance to prove otherwise.
You leave her there. You walk away. And for the first time you feel a breeze blowing, cooling the sweat on your face. You exhale and it tastes like gin, its strength chilled over rocks. You walk home and the pavement feels like ice under your feet. It feels like coming, because you haven’t been able to for weeks and that’s what relief feels like.
I’m in the bathroom, putting gel in my hair and combing it back like I did that night at the bar. My phone rings. It’s Mark. “I know it’s your day off,” he says, “but I picked up a job near the airport and I know you need the money.”
He offers to pay for lunch at the airport, and I meet him there with scratches on my face and scabs on my knuckles.
“What happened to you, man?” Mark asks.
“Bitches be crazy,” I say, because he seems like the type and he laughs.
“Your fists, too?” he asks.
“It was a rough night at the bar,” I say.
“Oh yeah?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say, and that’s the end of it.
He reaches behind him, tries to scratch at the peeling burns on his back.
On the table there’s a copy of the newspaper, an article on the front page in bold black: Woman assaulted, raped at McArthur Park.
It tells me everything I can hardly remember: the woman, the victim, how she was found unconscious, barely breathing, how she’s currently recovering from multiple injuries: heavy bruising, a split lip, broken teeth, a broken rib, a fractured jaw.
All of it’s a blackout in my head, and all I remember is approaching her from behind, her dark hair and her Jeep Cherokee, the same car my mom used to drive. The article uses the term “anger rapist” because that’s apparently what I am. It says I might strike again. The warning words speak in my head like a voice, like how the Bible used to speak to my mom, saying, “You’re pervasively angry” and “You’re aggressive and violent,” and “You are Jekyll and You are Hyde.”
There’s a picture, a composite sketch, clear lines defining sunken jaws and dark eyes, my hair greasy, uneven. I lick my lips. A drop of sweat beads on my forehead and I’m wondering, “Is that what you look like?”
The article says that every woman should be aware of you, this pencil sketch of you, one woman’s memory of her night with you.
“You okay?” Mark asks, still scratching, still unable to do anything about his position in life.
I look up and fold the paper, covering the article. The air conditioning kicks in above us, its white noise cooling the sweat. “I’m great,” I say, and a smile forms on my face that takes no effort to make.