The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [28]
“Jesus,” Hamish said. He rubbed the back of his head and left my pants to fester around my ankles, the immediacy dangerously threatened once again.
I bit my lip. I writhed. “Fuck me,” I said, and hoped that no one’s God was watching.
This brought him back. He stared at me. “Wow,” he said. With a final tug, he threw my pants onto the gravel drive. I winced when he ripped off my underpants. They were not high waisted or gauzy or old like handmade paper, but his stripping me cut too closely to what I’d just done to my mother. I propelled myself up and grabbed for Hamish’s penis, which had poked above the waistband of his briefs.
As soon as I had my hand on it, I tugged him forward and down. He moaned in pleasure as I spread my legs and wrapped myself around him. “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck!” he wailed. I lay there in disbelief. He had ejaculated on my stomach. My fingers, sticky and enraged, squeezed. “Ow,” he said, and placed a hand on my wrist. “Let go.”
He moved around, flattening one of my knees painfully with his ass, until he was sitting on the seat behind my legs with his own legs bent up in a tent above them. I smelled the fetid smells of the backseat, where the crisp scent of my greenmarket groceries mingled with the danker smell of my ancient gym bag.
“Shit, I’m sorry,” he said. “This is intense.”
I lay there. Suddenly I was beside my mother in the basement. Mrs. Leverton was coming down the stairs with After Eight mints spread out in a decorative circle on an old enamel tray. The phone was ringing in the kitchen, and Manny was upstairs dropping condoms like so much rain.
“Will you take me to Limerick?” I said, as if I were asking to be voluntarily committed to an asylum just over the hill. I would not look at him. Did not want to see his face. Instead I looked at the square-cornered tear in the back of the passenger seat and tried to recall how it had gotten there.
Hamish was kind, even if motivated by an unnecessary shame. “Do you want to wash up?”
“I’ll stay here,” I said.
I could feel him wanting to say something but resisting. “I’ll bring you a towel,” he said, and I nodded my head at him, both to say yes to the towel and to make him, for the moment, go away.
I lay in the backseat and listened to the night noises surrounding me, thought of fucking Jake in Madison in the VW Bug. Avery would come and sit for the girls, and we would go to a dark spot at the edge of the U–Mad campus and leave the AM radio playing low while we made love.
I wanted to be looking up at the sky, but instead I was looking up at the waffled roof of my Saab. The cool night air rushed in the open door at my feet, and I shivered, drawing myself up and turning over to lie in a fetal position and stare at the back of the front passenger seat, where my mother’s braid lay tucked inside my purse.
I had once read one of Sarah’s true-crime books that she’d left at the house. It was a book about a serial killer named Arthur Shawcross, and the most vivid thing in it, for me, was the portrait of a woman whom he had obviously meant to kill but who was too smart for him. She was old for a prostitute and still doing speedballs and getting high. She’d gotten high for three days straight after Shawcross tried to strangle her while raping her in his car. He was a man who picked up a prostitute, drove to a deserted spot, and killed her after he was unable to perform. She had known how to talk to him, known how to brace herself so that his hands, enclosed around her neck, could not produce the leverage needed to crush her windpipe. And she had known that her survival was connected intimately with his ability to ejaculate. It had taken hours, or so she said, and it was arduous, but he was grateful enough that he