Freedom [130]
“No! No. Not at all.”
“It’s OK with me if you do. I meant to tell you that last month. You’re a guy, you have needs. I don’t expect you to be a monk. It’s just sex, who cares?”
“Well, the same goes for you,” he said gratefully, sensing another possible escape route here.
“Except it’s not going to happen with me,” Connie said. “Nobody else sees me the way you do. I’m invisible to men.”
“I don’t believe that at all.”
“No, it’s true. Sometimes I try to be friendly, or even flirty, at the restaurant. But it’s like I’m invisible. I don’t really care anyway. I just want you. I think people sense that.”
“I want you, too,” he found himself murmuring, in contravention of certain safety guidelines he’d established for himself.
“I know,” she said. “But guys are different, is all I’m saying. You should feel free.”
“I’ve actually been jerking off a lot.”
“Yeah, me, too. For hours and hours. Some days it’s the only thing I feel like doing. That’s probably why Carol thinks I’m depressed.”
“But maybe you are depressed.”
“No, I just like to come a lot. I think about you, and I come. I think about you some more, and then I come some more. That’s all it is.”
Very quickly the conversation devolved into phone sex, which they hadn’t had since the earliest days, when they were sneaking around and whispering on phones in their respective bedrooms. It had become a lot more interesting in the meantime, because they knew how to talk to each other now. At the same time, it was as if they’d never had sex before—was cataclysmic that way.
“I wish I could lick it off your fingers,” Connie said when they were finished.
“I’m licking it for you,” Joey said.
“That’s good. Lick it up for me. Does it taste good?”
“Yes.”
“I swear I can taste it in my mouth.”
“I can taste you, too.”
“Oh, baby.”
Which led immediately to further phone sex, a more nervous rendition, since Jonathan’s afternoon class was ending and he might return soon.
“My baby,” Connie said. “Oh, my baby. My baby, my baby, my baby.”
Joey, as he climaxed again, believed that he was with Connie in her bedroom on Barrier Street, his arching back her arching back, his little breasts her little breasts. They lay breathing as one into their cell phones. He’d been wrong, the night before, when he’d told Carol that she, not he, was responsible for the way Connie was. He could feel now in his body how they’d made each other who they were.
“Your mom wants me to spend Thanksgiving with you guys,” he said after a while.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said. “We agreed we were going to try to wait nine months.”
“Well, she was kind of a bitch about it.”
“That’s her way. She’s a bitch. But she’s been spoken to, and it won’t happen again.”
“So you don’t care either way?”
“You know what I want. Thanksgiving has nothing to do with it.”
He had been hoping, for paradoxically opposing reasons, that Connie would join Carol in urging him to come back for the holiday. He was keen, on the one hand, to see her and to sleep with her, and, on the other hand, to find fault with her, so that he would have something to resist and break away from. What she was doing instead, with her cool clarity, was resetting a hook that for a while, in recent weeks, he’d managed to work halfway free of. Resetting it deeper than ever.
“I should probably get off the phone now,” he said. “Jonathan’s coming back.”
“OK,” Connie said, and let him go.
Their conversation had diverged so wildly from his expectations that he couldn’t even remember now what he’d expected. He got up from his bed as if surfacing through a wormhole in the fabric of reality, his heart thudding, his vision altered, and paced around the room under the collective gaze of Tupac and Natalie Portman. He’d always liked Connie a lot. Always. And so why now, of all the inopportune moments, was he being gripped, as if for the first time, by such a titanic undertow of really liking her? How could it be, after years of having sex with her, years of feeling tender and protective of her, that he was only now getting sucked into such heavy waters of affection?