The lights went out.

  I let my robe drop and walked straight ahead to the harlequin-painted neon elf in front of me.

  I grabbed a handful of that candy-colored hair and yanked her head back. I slid my other hand down her breast all the way to her pussy where paint was spattered in the fuzz like glitter.

  I kissed her, open-mouthed, tongue-first, my fingers working her clit through the paint, through her wetness, her hands pumping paint over my cock, between my legs, into the crack of my ass, our bodies dancing, dancing, dancing, the pleasure of it like we’d learned nothing but pleasure for a hundred years, like we had done nothing but get our hands all over each other’s asses and cocks and pussies for centuries, and while we bucked and tongued and slicked and came, bodies framed around us, touched over us, spun and circled and laughed and groped.

  Again, again, again, again.

  Winnie

  Imagine you’re in a bright space.

  The world outside your circle of light is dark and unimportant.

  Imagine there are four of you. Two men — we’ll call them Jason and Finn — on a couch.

  A man and a woman on the floor.

  The woman is you.

  The man on the floor is Marvin, his hair oiled and shining. He’s wearing an orange jumpsuit that would make him look like a prison escapee if it didn’t have silver-spangled racing stripes and a giant silver butterfly collar that frames a deep V filled with brown skin and black curls.

  Those curls on Marvin’s chest keep snagging your attention. Teasing it. Turning you on.

  You’re not sure if you’re supposed to be turned on.

  Calvin Darling isn’t in the circle of light on this particular day. He has class, maybe, or a group project at the library.

  He’s elsewhere.

  You are here.

  Now imagine there’s a television, and it’s turned on, and all of you are facing it.

  No one is watching.

  Imagine that Finn and Jason began the evening side by side, but at some point Jason started to lean in, his shoulder overlapping Finn’s, and they began a slow-motion tumble spaced out over five-minute increments. It took them three episodes of Game of Thrones to get where they are, with Jason basically reclining between Finn’s spread thighs and Finn bumping up his hips now and then, as though he’s adjusting his position or resettling himself.

  Imagine you’re pretty sure Finn is hard, and you’re pretty sure he’s grinding into Jason’s ass, and you’re pretty sure that turns you on, too.

  Find your truth in these imaginary circumstances.

  It’s not easy.

  No one ever said it would be easy.

  Imagine that Marvin turns to you and asks, “So are you still a virgin?”

  You thought he meant cards, that first time. You were sure he meant you were a virgin at cards.

  But imagine he didn’t.

  Imagine you tell him yes, because technically you are. You and Cal have kissed and groped, masturbated in front of each other, made each other come, but that’s it.

  “No oral?” he says, and you say, “I don’t know how.”

  Imagine that Jason guffaws and Finn smacks his arm, and then they’re all talking too fast, nervous guy banter that sputters around what they’re really thinking.

  Everyone knows how.

  Sure, the basic mechanics, but technique?

  No such thing as a bad blow job.

  Bullshit. Giving head is a fine art.

  How would you know?

  Some reason I shouldn’t?

  It’s all in the tongue, what you’re doing with the tip.

  Naw, it’s the suction. Suck right, she can make him come hard enough to blow the back of her head off.

  Dude, like she’d want that.

  Why wouldn’t she want that?

  But you have to swallow.

  I could give a fuck if she swallows, as long as she knows what to do with her hands.

  That’s true, most chicks got no clue what to do with their hands.

  It’s something you learn from experience.

  You can figure it out watching porn online.

  You never see the hands clear enough in porn.

  There’s some movies where you do. I’ll send her links.

  You should show her.

  Fucking what did you say?

  I said you should show her.

  Imagine there’s a long silence.

  Imagine your ears ring, and your cunt burns, and then Finn kind of laughs and says, “Dude.”

  And Marvin says, “He wants to.”

  And Jason says, “Fuck, why not?”

  Locate your impulse in this scenario. Find your meaning.

  Dig into the dark space and perform what your heart wants.

  Do it.

  Turn around. Crawl closer to the couch, where Finn’s perched on the lip of it, staring at the top of Jason’s head, and Jason is peeling the denim off Finn’s hips with both hands, so eager he’s lost all self-consciousness.

  Watch the pretense fall from him. Fall away.

  Watch it roll off both of them and right out of the light, like a set piece on invisible wheels.

  Scoot up until you can feel the velour nap against your bare arm, until you can smell the warmth of Finn’s crotch, until you can feel Marvin’s breath behind you and see the muscles in his orange thighs, his knees planted to either side of yours.

  Study Finn’s penis, longer and skinnier than Cal’s. Darker, the head purple-brown and swollen where Cal’s is so pink, so wet.

  Watch the way Jason grips it, the way he strokes down the foreskin that Finn’s cockhead has already pushed aside.

  File that away, because you’ve wondered how that worked. What to do with foreskin if you ever encounter it.

  Watch Jason’s tongue lick a stripe of saliva up from base to tip.

  Watch him flick it over the head and listen to the hiss of Finn’s inhale as Marvin bumps against your lower back, a deliberate slow circling of his hips, his hands landing on your upper thighs to hold you still against him.

  Jason’s lips purse into an angelic O when he covers the head of Finn’s cock.

  His cheeks hollow when he starts to suck.

  His head bobs, and his hand works, and his fingers find Finn’s balls and play with them, weigh them, tug at them gently while Finn rucks up his shirt and slides his hand over his stomach, claws his chest, scratches up his neck with his fingers protruding through the ring of the collar of his T-shirt like the hand of an alien whose urgent needs are outside his control.

  Listen to Finn’s broken, panting breath when Marvin puts one palm on your stomach, slides it under your shirt, beneath your waistband, his fingers sinking right into the deep syrupy pulse between your legs as though they belong there.

  This is Finn’s smile, wide and darkly radiant. Stoned on ecstasy.

  This is the light spinning over his shoulders, Marvin’s disco-ball collar scratching your neck, Finn’s lips saying, “Baby, sweetheart, god, baby, yes,” while he’s pumping and groaning and coming in Jason’s mouth.

  These are your breasts, your boobs, your tits, yours, with Marvin’s dark fingers plucking at your nipple, baring you to Finn’s sleepy eyes, his happy mouth, to Jason’s slow turn and his tongue licking over his lip and the placid perfection of his expression.

  This is your orgasm, your red-gold-perfect sloppy heat that spreads from Marvin’s hand through your belly, over your breasts, spilling out over the room, making them sigh, making Marvin rub himself in fast hard jerks against your ass until he bites your neck and you feel his grip on you tighten, his hand grabbing at your pussy so hard it hurts, it hurts just right.

  This is not a drill.

  This is not an exercise.

  Nobody’s going to give you a grade.

  This is your life, baby-girl.

  Find your truth and take it.

  SEVEN

  Cal

  “You know how I told you about that weird couple I used to housesit for in college?”

  I was spinning on the metal stool in Mom’s office. I’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember.

  “Yeah. The ones with the carpet on their walls, and the sunken living room, and the Kali mural?”

  “The Grants.”

  “Mrs. Grant gave you a subscription to Playgirl for Christmas.”

  “She did. I was just thinking about when I graduated from college.”

  I squinted at her to see if I could get a bead on where she was going with this.

  Her energy was as rosy-mauve as it always was, pooling around her, breathing in and out of her. Winnie claimed that it was hard to let go of my mom once you starting hugging her because she felt so settled. She’s all nook, Winnie would say. I do remember that I was embarrassingly old before I stopped draping my arms and legs all over Mom whenever she had a chance to sit or lie down, and it always seemed like all the parts of me snugged into all the parts of her.

  She looked at me like she knew what I was thinking.

  “Don’t panic,” she said. “I’m not going to talk about graduation. Or at least, not your graduation.”

  “Okay.” I was glad. “Because I’m not ready to talk about that.”

  “I know.” She reached out with her foot and stopped my stool from spinning. “Why?”

  “Asking me that is talking about it.”

  “True, but why?”

  “Are you trying to ask if I’m going to shack up with Winnie in some dumpy fourplex apartment and get a job as a Spanish translator for nine bucks an hour at the literacy initiative office?”

  “No. I was not trying to ask you that. Though that is a highly specific accusation, and in case you’re wondering, I don’t care if that is what you do after graduation.”

  “Tell me about your graduation.”

  “So I had my last weekend working for the Grants. The next weekend was graduation. I was done with classes.”

  “Did they ask you for a threesome?” I gave the chair another spin.

  “Yes. But they did that every time I worked for them. This is not that story.”

  “There’s a story?”

  “Do you want me to tell that story? Think for a minute.”

  My mind went to last night, curled in Winnie’s bed naked, because we were always naked now. She asked me to lie perfectly still so she could explore every millimeter of my cock and balls with her devious hands, letting me see exactly how hard she came against Marv, how shiny Finn’s dick got from Jason’s mouth and his own come, letting me feel her breath and her face against my raging erection while her finger insinuated itself over my asshole, where I could suddenly feel my heartbeat like a kick drum.

  She licked the desperate and dripping stripes off my belly and thighs like some kind of evil cat, kissed me and let me taste myself in a sloppy French that went on and on while she furiously rubbed her clit, and never once did she so much as buss my dick. She made me come harder than I imagined was possible with just her soft hands, and breath, and filthy, delighted, high-definition thoughts about the friendly orgies she was having while I wrote a paper about guest labor practices in Texas border towns.

  “I do not want to hear about the threesome you did or did not have with the Grants.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “You can tell me about graduation.”

  “So I think they were short on cash, because they paid me exactly what they owed me, when they were usually extravagant, but they did give me a Gurkha.”

  “A what-a?”

  “Mr. Grant, in his business travels, went to Cuba all the time. I don’t even know if it was entirely legal. He had a humidor, a whole cedar-lined room off the master bedroom. I think they thought I was surprised when they showed me, but I had actually found it snooping around before, and I liked to sit in there, opening the cigar boxes and smelling.”

  “Creepy.”

  “I know, right? I can kind of be a creeper sometimes. Anyway, he pulls this box down and stands too close to me, like usual, and tells me about how the box is carved from bone. He made it sound like it was made from human bones, and who knows? Maybe it was. Inside were these huge cigars, like . . . well. Like dicks, Cal.”

  “Big cigars, is what you’re saying.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “Then he tells me, this is a Gurkha, the most expensive cigar in the world. I think I acted suitably impressed. I’m not sure. Then he hands one to me, and I didn’t know if it was to smell or hold or what, and then Mrs. Grant puts her arm around me, and it was pretty weird.”

  “I’m really sure I don’t want to hear the threesome story.”

  “So we stand there, packed inside his humidor, and I think I smelled it, trying to work out the cultural vibe of what was going on, and then Mrs. Grant started crying about me going out into the world and Mr. Grant was closing the box, and I realized that this Gurkha was my graduation present.”

  “A cigar as big as a dick.”

  “What was I supposed to do with it? Put it in my purse? Tuck it behind my ear? I went back to my dorm and put it in my pencil box.”

  “Sure. That or your nightstand.”

  Mom kicked at my shin, but I was revolving too fast.

  “At dinner sometime that week, I told your dad about it.”

  “You weren’t going out, though?”

  “Oh, no. He was this total player. I was just Becky Mailer, Friend with a capital F for Friend, a.k.a. Don’t You Dare Even Hope, Becky. He got all excited. Apparently, the way to get boys to come to your yard was to be in possession of a seven-hundred-dollar cigar and no idea what to do with it.”

  “This is getting to be a really fucking confusing story.”

  “Shush. He tells me, ‘Becky, you’re going as my date to the seniors’ party at The Mine, and we are going to smoke that cigar.’”

  “What a douche.”

  “You don’t even know. So I had been pining for John Darling for four fucking years, going to his stupid room parties, listening to him recite shit in Attic Greek, following him around like a pathetic ass, and this, this was how he asked me out? Over a Gurkha?”

  “Yeah, I can see why though, it’s a Gurkha.”

  We snorted.

  “So I’m kind of pissed, but also, let’s face it, desperate and in love with him.”

  “Sure.”

  “So I turn to my friend Karen, who is the most fantastically slutty person I know, and I tell her, ‘However you dress me, that’s how I’m going to this party.’ She puts me in this gold dress, it’s a wrap dress, like a six-inch rectangle that ties in a tiny bow at your waist, and it’s all sequins. I was naked. I was naked, and I was sparkling. There was no room for anything but naked in that dress, is what I am saying.”

  “I get it.”

  “I put the cigar in my cleavage. Who knows what that even looked like, but that’s what I did. The Mine was a bar, just a double-wide trailer with a half-acre gravel parking lot. The kind of place that made you bring your own glass and sold one kind of beer and shots.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve never been in a bar in my life.”

  “Everyone was there, the whole class, parts of the other classes. I’m thinking, I am never going to find John. Ever. Then I remember, I have a cigar as big as a baby’s forearm in my boobs, I’ll just spark it up and smoke him out.”

  “Did he come?”

  “Are you kidding me? It was like I had parted the seas. I leaned against The Mine, naked, and filled the air around me with seven-hundred-dollar burning leaves, and there was John, half-drunk, wearing a bowtie. He said, ‘You gonna share, Becky Mailer?’”

  “I’m speechless. I can’t tell if I’m learning something or getting scarred for life.”

  “This is not a parable, Calvin, this is life. This is my life. Just as real as your life. It happened, there is a way that it’s still happening, has always happened. Will continue to happen.”

  I looked at my mom, her dark curly ponytail, her red plastic eyeglass frames, the jeans, T-shirt, and sweater she always wears. But all that pink had kind of magnetized around her, and I could see her. See the short girl with big brown curls and a sparkling dress. See how strong she was in the moment, framed in smoke and neon bar lights.

  “What happened?”

  “I told him I’d share if he danced with me, and for the first time ever, he grabbed my hand. I don’t think he had ever touched me before that moment. And it’s probably hard to believe this about your dad, but if he wants to, he can dance. That’s what we did, all night long, we danced and smoked that Gurkha, and because it was so stinky, there was this space around us, just for us to dance in. I laughed so much that night that the next day I had to take aspirin to get out of bed, my ribs were so sore.”

  “But I thought you didn’t get together until some college reunion thing.”

  “Nope. We graduated. He went to Cambridge for grad school. I started that radio internship. I never heard from him after that night. It was a really hard time in my life. That’s when I rented that room from the station manager and never really felt safe, got assaulted, moved back home for a while, worked at the public library. I thought I was going to start reading on the radio, work my way up to stories, have a syndicated program no more than ten years after graduation.

  “I got the invite to the college alumni night and thought, Why not? I didn’t get out of the house much, and it was free. I saw John, and he looked the same. Just the same. God. Of course he did, it had only been five years, but for some reason it had felt like this whole life. This entire, endless life. Except, as soon as we started talking, I kept thinking, What happened? All that stuff we used to talk about until three in the morning, that was real life. All this stuff I’ve done since graduation? Didn’t feel real. Not while I stood there, talking to John Darling.”

  I spun on the stool. I closed my eyes. I could see it, the expression on my dad’s face in a banquet room, his eyebrows pushed together like he was trying to get my mom into focus but couldn’t, because she was so unbelievable. I could feel him see her and think of dancing, of sequins and smoke, of the way my mom laughed.

  “Where’d you go?” I asked, because even though I had never heard this story, I knew he’d asked her if she wanted to get out of there, and she did, and then they walked all over their old campus together, their hearts throbbing like they had been stubbed against life and broken.

 

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