Portland Noir - Kevin Sampsell [75]
“No,” I say. “There’s room for two lesbos in this doughnut shop.”
Liz doesn’t even notice me while she orders a McMin-nville cream—my favorite too, a custard-filled doughnut with maple frosting.
Some skinny dyke wearing tight jeans and Converse sneakers has her arm around Liz’s waist the whole time, but I realize when they turn to leave that the girl is remarkably flat-chested and her face is blunt and chiseled under her big black glasses.
Then I see his Adam’s apple.
I want to stop myself but I can’t. I follow them out the door and leave Amy standing at the counter.
I yell down the street, “I didn’t realize you were into dudes, Liz!”
Liz and her boyfriend turn around. She blinks once, slowly, her eyes weighed down by multiple layers of mascara, and says, “I’m not, Kate. I just like people who aren’t assholes.” She nods at the doughnut shop, where Amy is still inside. “Have fun with your puta nueva,” she adds. Liz knows that Amy is only a friend, but everybody is competition to her.
Her boyfriend flips me off. Liz sashays down the street and doesn’t look back.
Amy appears next to me, her mouth full of chocolate cereal and frosting. “You are a total failure at life, you know that, right?”
I shrug. Amy doesn’t get it. Amy didn’t make Liz come in a parked car. I still get off to the image of Liz in her tight black dress, leaning her head back with her red mouth open while I worked her clit with my fingers. And tonight I’ll probably fantasize about pushing her up against the wall of that doughnut shop and reaching my hand inside her fishnet stockings. I loved the way she held the back of my neck when I fucked her, forcing my lips against hers. She gave the dirtiest kisses.
Amy licks her fingers. “Let’s go to Backspace,” she offers. It’s one of the few late-night coffee shops downtown, which means it’s always full of high school kids. I don’t really want to go but, until we turn twenty-one we don’t have many other options.
Amy buys a second latte and grabs a deck of cards from another table. There’s a group of boys with laptops at a big table in the back and they’re all playing some computer game together. One of them leans back in his chair and sighs, “This is so fucking gay, dudes.”
Amy deals gin, which means she wants to talk. We’ve been playing gin since we were in the Girl Scouts. We used to play a quarter per point against other troops and clean them out. She spent all her money on makeup and I bought books. “How old is Liz, anyway?” she asks.
“Twenty-five,” I say.
“So does that mean it was, like, statutory rape when you were dating?”
“Nope. Just sodomy.”
“Oh.” Amy looks a little disappointed, like she was hoping for a felony, but her face brightens as she lays out her hand. “Gin.”
“You’re a cunt,” I tell her and slap my cards on the table.
She shrugs. “Homo.”
“Prude.”
“Dyke.”
“Breeder.”
Amy deals another hand and then leans across the table to whisper, “Don’t be mad that you can never have me.”
“Mad?” I point at her bug-bite titties. “There’s nothing there to motorboat. Forget it.”
Amy shakes her shoulders in an effort to make her nonexistent tits jiggle, which makes me snort. “Is that why you loved Liz?” Amy asks. “Because of her motorboat-ability?”
“And her apartment,” I answer. “It was nice to have a place where I could escape.”
Amy nods as she picks a discard. “I didn’t see you much then.”
“Yeah,” I say. I feel my cheeks tinge pink. It’s true. I dated Liz for nine months, right at the end of our senior year. I would live at her place on the weekends and never answer my cell phone. Amy sent me so many texts: where r u? call me. iron chef tonight? answer yr damn phone, plz!!
But I didn’t want to deal with anyone else. I just wanted to be in Liz’s apartment and see her looking disheveled in the morning. I loved the way she would roll over and smile at me with crusty raccoon eyes. “Morning, Glory,” she would say. Then she’d kiss me and I’d run my hands over her bare breasts, over her back, into her panties.
“Well, too bad she was a nut job,” Amy laments.
I nod