Alligator - Lisa Moore [78]
He thought he would marry her.
From one night of making love he thought they were going to get married and everything he gathered together from that night on would be for her too. If he found a sugar bowl, it would be for her. If he bought an exercise bike or took cooking lessons or if they got into yoga or signed a mortgage, it would be for her.
He had allowed himself to be duped on such a grand scale that it made him light-headed.
He looked at the sugar bowl and this is what he thought: And I still love her. Because he thought of taking the strawberries from the fridge that were very cold and he had squashed one in his fist and tried to get the juice that ran over his knuckles to drip into her mouth but instead it ran down her chin and onto her neck and the smell of it on her skin when he licked it, and she liked what he was doing, which amazed him.
She licked his knuckles that were sticky with juice and she took his finger in her mouth and sucked it and he thought he was having the love tugged out of him. Tugging every single drop of love and loss and sexual-wanting-to-fuck and aloneness up out of his body through his finger with her gorgeous hot wet mouth, the way a magician tugs an unending line of knotted silk scarves from a gloved fist. Her mouth was a fist and he wanted it elsewhere. Her eyelashes were sooty and thick and her cheekbones and the strawberry smell was full of summer and when he lifted her up against the wall was she ever light.
And when she came, which he had never made a girl come before, he saw her eyes fly open and how startled she was, and that look was love he was pretty sure.
Even if she did take the goddamn money, which he knew she didn’t need for anything, she just took it.
He took down the coffee jar and scooped out five spoonfuls. Then he tore back the bedsheets to check for a note.
For a minute he thought she might have left a note. He opened the door to the fire escape, half expecting to find the girl there.
When she wasn’t there he felt the room behind him beat like a heart, thumpthump, thumpthump, and it was a very empty room and he realized that no matter how much it was clear she had duped him, he couldn’t get it through his head.
COLLEEN
FRANK HAD FALLEN in love with her while they were having sex; she watched it happen. She fully expected to be caught and perhaps beaten up for taking his money. She had just met this guy in a bar and she went home with him and what happened was her eyes flew open and his eyes were already open and she’d had an orgasm, which was something that had never happened to her before.
And it had happened to her, unbidden and unexpected; her eyes flew open and his were already open.
He’d looked proud and shy. She’d been swallowing Jell-O shooters at the bar, layered globs of vodka and tequila and crème de menthe with a tiny wizened mushroom in the centre of each layer. She’d found herself convulsed with weeping after the orgasm: a wrung-out, lust-fuelled loss of self, an expulsion of her soul through her eyes and sweat glands and vagina and ears such as usually only happens in dreams.
Frank dealt with her crying the way one might treat a runover cat. He moved her gingerly and with lavish care until her forehead was resting on his collarbone; he kept very still. He smoothed her hair, which was full of static from his sweater; he didn’t actually touch her hair but patted down the brittle aura of electricity that circled her head.
Get it all out of you, he’d said. The bed rocked and gurgled with her sobs. He had hummed “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” with such gravity and profound lack of tempo that it took her a long time to recognize it. She was almost asleep when she heard him say, I love you.
He told her he loved her and the words tumbled down the drunken, bottomless well of her with a sombre finality.
As a thirteen-year-old she’d started drinking and smoking