don’t know what to think. It’s like an explanation, only not. It’s like an explanation he needs to punch into my gut, though I’m surprised as anyone to find I’m still standing when he’s done. I go one worse than that, in fact.
I blurt out: ‘Is that all you’ve got to say for yourself?’
And I don’t even know how or why. It just comes out of me, as jagged as I thought he was, and when I’m done he stares at me like I’ve gone mad. Maybe I have. He could punch me for real right now and I’d go down so hard, so hard. Hell, he wouldn’t even have to punch me. He could just swipe me with the back of his hand and I’d be bloody and sore tomorrow.
But he does none of those things. Instead he runs a hand over the bristle on his head, and when he does I see his knuckles are as raw as fuck. They’re not just bloody – they’re split and scraped and there’s a glimmer of something shiny in amongst everything, as though somehow he’s gone right down to the bone without gushing everywhere.
He doesn’t even seem to notice, however. He just seems … tired.
‘What do you want from me?’ he asks, only it comes out all run together in that gravelly voice of his. It’s like he’s entirely made up of building materials: rocks and iron filings and the stuff you line driveways with.
‘I want you to come inside,’ I say. ‘So I can take care of that hand.’
* * *
I don’t know why I say it. I suppose it’s because I can’t get it out of my head, once I’ve seen it. It looks disgusting, and it’s even worse under the queasy fluorescent lights of the store’s bathroom.
‘What did you do? Punch out a wall?’ I ask him, but he doesn’t answer.
He does something better than answering. He cocks one eyebrow at me, and the corner of his mouth turns up – almost like he’s smiling, really. Yeah, almost.
‘You know, if you look like a thug and act like a thug, people are going to think you’re a thug,’ I tell him, but again he doesn’t say anything. He just lets me run his knuckles under some warm water, a hiss or two coming out of him every once in a while. I watch the little sink turn red, then white again, and then finally there’s nothing but a series of tiny pink mouths along the heavy bumps of his knuckles.
And me holding his hand, as though it’s something separate from him.
‘Stay there while I get something to put on it,’ I tell him but really it’s only so I can go out into the store and catch my breath. Stop the shakes I’ve fallen into, somewhere in between touching his hand and right now.
However, when I go back in there I’m still doing it. And I think he notices, too, because his eyes go all over me in little stuttering fits and starts, and as I paint Bactine over his knuckles he asks if I think he’s going to hurt me.
‘No,’ I say, but I don’t know if I’m telling the truth.
‘I’m a thug though, right?’ he says. ‘Maybe that’s all I’m good for.’
I put strips of white over the little mouths, to hold them closed – neatly, I think. Fussily.
‘I don’t think so,’ I say and he replies:
‘’S that why you’re being good to me?’
Though I hadn’t really thought it was the case. His knuckles just looked rough, that’s all, and I wanted to see to them. It was me – the urge to make them all right again, to do what he hadn’t, to do what he probably never does.
And then he says: ‘Maybe you just want me to be good in return, huh?’ in this new kind of voice – this curling, deep-down sort of voice – and I can’t respond. I know what he means, of course I do, but I can’t tell him to back off or get out or any of the things I know I should go with.
They won’t come to me, no matter how hard I pull.
‘You want me to be good to you, baby?’ he asks, and maybe it’s that word. The one on the end, the one that isn’t my name. Or maybe it’s the way he puts a hand on me – so much gentler than everything else about him would suggest.
He just rests it on my hip, as though he could take it off any second. All I have to do is say the word and he’ll go away, he’ll never have existed, he didn’t come into the store the other day and throw Mickey D over the counter.
Only I know he did and I can feel that hand, those long thick fingers, stroking the material of my little grocery-store uniform into fine little wrinkles. He doesn’t bunch, or tug, or rip. It’s just those little wrinkles like he’s ruffling feathers.
‘I’ll be so good to you,’ he says, and I believe him, I do. I don’t know where it comes from or why it’s in me now, but I believe him enough to let him lean down slowly, and press his mouth to mine.
He’s soft on the upper lip and rough on the lower, just like I’d thought. But there are other things I don’t expect, like the strange half-smoke, half-cinnamon taste of him, as though he chews Big Red between each cigarette.
And his hands go up instead of down, circling over my back until I’m boneless and wondering what it’s like to be the kind of girl who fucks someone in a grocery-store bathroom. Is that the kind of girl he usually has? Up against some tiled wall somewhere, clothes barely off? Mouths hard and clashing, almost too rough to stand it?
Only then he says: ‘You live upstairs, right?’
And I don’t tell him no. Apparently I’m the kind of girl who takes strange, bullish guys up to her apartment when she’s supposed to be opening up her place of work, and when this guy says lie down on the bed and spread your legs, she does it.
I do it.
I spread my legs over my flower print coverlet, and he just comes right on over and slides his hands up my thighs. Underneath my dress, underneath all of my clothes with everything about him strange and too big in my neat little bedroom, one of his massive knees making my mattress dip and his face set to that almost-smile he sent me before.
His eyes glitter in the half-light and I can’t speak, I can’t breathe, he’s moving too slow and I thought this would be fast. Like someone ripping a Band-Aid off, quick and painless. You don’t even have to look.
But I do have to look, because he’s right there and now his hands are at my panties. They twist the elastic into spirals, and tug so slow it’s almost maddening.
‘This what you want?’ he asks, but his flickering smile says he already knows. My breath is coming in weird little hitches, and once he gets my panties around my knees – almost off, but not quite – the scent of my arousal hits the air.
Of course it does. I’m as wet as a river. He hasn’t even done anything and I’m so slick it’s embarrassing, my body like a wire strung too taut – but worse than this is the fact that he can tell it. Before he puts a single finger between my legs he can tell, and I think the idea makes him hard.
I can certainly see something, pressing against the rough material of his pants. And when he shifts on the bed the view gets better, until I’m sure I can make out the exact solid curve of his stiff cock.
Is
