Moondogs - Alexander Yates [59]
“Thanks,” she said a little flatly. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you.” He couldn’t tell if she was slurring, or if it was just her English.
“Then you shouldn’t have,” Bobby said. He avoided looking at her with the kind of practiced disdain that older siblings have for younger ones. They must have known each other.
Benicio, for his part, did not avoid looking at her. She stood so close that her breath cooled his cheeks. Her face had an odd, beautiful economy to it. Her lips, painted chrome red and slightly pursed, the rouge on her cheeks, her plucked eyebrows, the single strand of black hair tumbling down and dividing her expression into unequal halves; they were all collected with a loose precision. Every part of her seemed to fit together like shaved bits of colored glass with no spaces in between and no overlap. She was stunning.
“Who is your friend, and why is he looking at me like this?” she asked. “Do I know him?”
“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” Bobby asked.
“I’m busy for the next …” she held her naked wrist up to her face for a while and stared at it. “I’ll be done soon. Will you still be here, new friend?”
“No,” Benicio said, gripping his empty glass like an actor grips a prop. “I won’t.”
She shrugged, took her gin in hand and made her way back through the crowd. It wasn’t an effortless or graceful exit. She took her time, sidestepping the jostling shoulders, trying her best not to spill the gin. Benicio couldn’t look away. He saw her sit at a far banquet table next to an older white man who wore a dark turtleneck against the air-conditioning. He leaned in when she arrived, took the gin from her, and gave her a kiss on the cheek that wasn’t fatherly. He was drunk, but not sloppy drunk.
“What’s your budget?” Bobby asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, money can’t buy you love, but it can buy you loving. She’s not the most expensive, but she won’t be cheap. At least not in this economy. You’re interested?”
Benicio looked back at him. “I couldn’t be less,” he said.
BUT THAT WAS A LIE. As Charlie returned to announce, very sadly, that Renny would not be joining them, as he led them out of the hotel, as they caught a taxi in the hot, dark night, Benicio kept thinking of the woman in the green dress. He felt foolish about the drink thing, but not so foolish that he wasn’t still, twenty minutes after the fact, deeply turned on. She reminded him, vividly, of the first woman he’d ever loved. Or at least, the first woman he ever consistently fantasized about—his Costa Rican dive instructor. He remembered watching her pull her wetsuit off under the rush of an outdoor showerhead more clearly than he remembered any of the dives themselves. She was from the Gulf of Papagayo and taught the introductory courses at one of the resorts his father helped manage. At fifteen he’d been just old enough to get an adult certification, and for the next three years fantasies about fucking his instructor in the tank room beside the deep but narrow training pool became an important part of every orgasm he had—including those he arrived at with a high school girlfriend whom he no longer spoke to. The instructor was, in retrospect, not amazing looking—certainly nothing close to the woman in the green dress. She was taller than Benicio by a few inches, she had a broad back, a mannish jaw and thick thighs. She seemed perpetually short of breath and her bust heaved even when she was relaxed. But in her one-piece bathing suit and cutoff denim shorts she was, to teenage Benicio, beyond desirable.
His father noticed him staring during their first classroom session and said: “I don’t blame you. She’s a hottie. You should stay after. Chat her up or something.”
“I can’t talk to her,” he’d said, shocked. Because she was, after all, an adult. And he was a kid. And she was Costa Rican. And he was pretend Costa Rican. They were hardly the same species.
“You can do whatever you want,” his father said.