Perfect Fifths_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [78]
Marcus, now fully engorged, needs not only a shower but a cold one. He tilts the nozzle as high as it will go to accommodate his height, then turns on the water.
“Yi! Yi! Yi!” he yips, hopping from foot to foot under the icy stream in a way that resembles a Native American rain dancer, or so he has been told. He always likes the shock of that uncontrolled rush of cold water, likes making his bones crackle and his skin pucker before adjusting the flow and relaxing into warmer, more tolerable temperatures. He’ll keep it cold until his cock calms down. He thinks about unpleasant subjects. Like how he’ll tell Jessica about Greta.
“Natty calls her Regreta …”
The bad joke does little to make him go limp. He thinks more about Greta.
Greta was the one who likened him to a Cherokee under the cold water. She liked comparing him to other people, as if she could understand Marcus better by studying similar subject matter. In that vein, she assumed wrongly that this cold-shower habit was born out of a desire to conserve hot water, as many eco-minded coeds his age try to do. When Marcus explained that, no, his actions had nothing to do with saving the planet, Greta guessed again.
“Did your family have many children sharing a single bathroom?”
“Two kids, two adults, two bathrooms.”
“Self-abnegation?”
“No.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
Jessica, Marcus realizes as he bounces under the freezing rain, never noticed this dance, or if she did, never mentioned it. For all their years as a couple, they spent remarkably few days in consistent cohabitation, and Marcus has often wondered whether things would have turned out differently if they had regularly shared a bathroom before he proposed. Would they be married now if she’d had the opportunity to grow accustomed to peeing while he was hopping around in the shower? Or if she’d come around to accepting the two toothbrushes in the holder as indistinguishable and interchangeable?
His cock points straight up at him accusatorially. It’s not my fault! it sneers. You’re the one who offered to share a room with her!
Greta was a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in authority and identification, kinship, sexuality, gender, historical consciousness, comparison and translation, and finally (at least according to her official CV), narrative theory and the ethnographic method. She was curvaceous and blond and in the habit of wearing low-cut embellished silk tunics in acidic brights. At forty-eight, she had earned the marionette mouth wrinkles and brow furrows that made her look her age, but not unattractively so. In fact, she had earned the red-hot-tamale symbol alongside her high rankings on RateMyProfessors.com, and was widely considered one of the more doable instructors on campus—a distinction that had been entirely theoretical until Marcus came along. Or so she claimed.
Greta’s career had shown early promise but had been quickly waylaid by marriage and motherhood. Greta had divorced twelve years ago and had worked hard, researched hard, published hard to make up for lost time. Her son was a graduate student on the opposite coast, at the same university where her ex-husband, also an anthropologist, has served as the glorified cornerstone of the department for over two decades. The husband, in fact, was once Greta’s professor. But she didn’t talk much about the