Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [62]
I wipe my face with my shirt, open the stall, and he is standing there, pulling the outside door shut behind him, sealing the darkness.
“This is the girls’,” I say weakly.
“Been thinking about you,” says Manny, and then he has pushed me back into the stall, closed it behind us, grabbed my arms and turned us so that he is sitting on the toilet. He unzips his pants, and I grab his dick hard enough to hurt. I want it to hurt. He doesn’t wince, intent on my loose shorts. He pulls me down on him so I am straddling him, and then he is inside. It is easy and wet. He grips my shoulders, pulls me down hard, rolls back away from me, pulls me down again, his face in my chest. It is the first time he has grabbed me over my waist, kept his hands on me closer to my face. Touched me.
“Wait,” he says, and then he is making me stand up, pulling off my shorts and underwear, bearing me back down on him. My clothes catch on one ankle, hang like they’re half-pinned from a clothesline. We have never done it like this. His hands are on my ass, and he tries to look down, to see, but it brings us face-to-face. Sweat gathers at his hairline, catches on the red grooves left by the clippers, like ant trails, across the top of his forehead. He grimaces, looking down, away, over my shoulder, up to the ceiling.
I grab his face.
Under my hands, his jaw, freshly shaved, feels like a cat’s tongue. My fingers are black as bark against his paler skin.
He will look at me.
He shrugs, twists his head to the side. Flipping like a caught fish. I roll my hips. It is too sweet.
He will look at me.
He snorts, puts his head down into my shoulder. I pull hard, and my hands slide along his face. I grab again.
He will look at me.
He grunts, grabbing at my sweaty sides, his eyes closed. His lashes are longer than those of any girls I know. Beautiful. The thumbs of his long hands press into my stomach, so he can pull again, but then they stutter. He presses hard again: my belly pushes back. He looks down and back up, eye to eye: all I have ever wanted, here. He is looking. He is seeing me, and his hands are coming around to feel the honeydew curve, the swell that is more than swell, the fat that is not fat, the budding baby, and his eyes are so black they are all black, and they are a night without stars. All I have ever wanted. He knows.
“Fuck!” Manny yells, and he is throwing me up and off of him. I hit the door behind me, the rough cat tongue of his face gone, and I grip steel, air, nothing. The bathroom smells like the salt of marsh mud, like tadpoles dying in their shrinking shallows, and he is zipping his pants, folding me into the corner of the stall when he opens it, leaving me standing in the dark bathroom, runny at the legs, breasts aching with bloom, one of Mama’s hair clips hanging from one string of hair before it falls into the toilet, lost in the scummy bowl. I wipe myself, flush the toilet, watch the water spin in a spiral, a baby storm, as it sucks the clip down and down and away.
I’ve crossed the threshold out of the bathroom three times, and each time that I think I am done crying, that I can go back into the game to sit next to my brothers as if nothing has happened, my eyes start leaking and my chest burns, hotter than the bright air with the bees drowsing in the crape myrtle, and I have to go back into the bathroom. I go in the other stall, pull my feet up, squat on the toilet. Smash my face into my salty knees.