“I guess it isn’t if you don’t give a shit about anything,” I told her.
She forced herself to smile. “You know what’s funny? I used to have a whole other idea about how my life would turn out. I had all these aspirations. I thought I could be an actress or a teacher. Something where I’d get to perform. For a while, I even thought about becoming a hand and foot model, so I could be in one of those J.C. Penney catalogs.”
She had very nice hands. I hadn’t really noticed her feet.
“So do you do that anymore?” I asked. “Turning tricks, I mean.”
“No.” She frowned. “But don’t think there aren’t still people asking. The night after you stopped by, I had a guy offer me five hundred dollars to sleep with him.”
“No shit,” I said. “Who was he? A lawyer?”
“Uh-uh.” She bent her left knee and her high heel dangled off the end of her foot. “He was a fighter. I figured you might know him. His name was Terrence something.”
“Terrence Mulvehill!” My heart jumped like a fish on a line. “That’s the guy. That’s the champ. I’m trying to set it up so my guy Elijah will fight him.”
“Whatever.” Rosemary pursed her lips. “He was very nice about it when I said I wouldn’t sleep with him. And he tipped me a hundred and fifty bucks because I danced for him.”
“He gave one-fifty just to watch you dance?!” It was the first thing she’d said that I didn’t believe.
“Some people consider it an art form.”
When I started to laugh, she scowled. “Do not go judging me, Mr. Mafia. I see you’re here with me and you’ve still got a wedding band on.”
I stuck my left hand in my pocket. For all the fighting we’d done lately, I still wanted to do right by Carla and the kids. But our marriage was killing me. If things stayed the same, I’d not only never leave Atlantic City, I’d probably end up going to jail because of something her uncle got me involved in.
In the meantime, Rosemary was patting my hand on the Boardwalk railing. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you. Like I said before, none of us have lived a perfect life.”
That was what I liked about Rosemary. She’d been places. She wasn’t going to just dry up and waste the rest of her life in some obscure corner.
“Hey, I don’t even mind that you’re in the Mafia,” she said. “I could probably use the muscle sometime, being a single mother and all. ..”
“I already told you I’m not in the mob.” Though it was a hard argument to make after she’d seen the talk I’d had with Nicky.
“All right, have it your way,” she said with that crooked smile. “I wouldn’t mind it if you weren’t in the Mafia either. I think a lot of those guys are faggots anyway. The way they’re always kissing each other and worrying about their hair and nails.”
I looked down at her hand resting next to mine on the Boardwalk railing. It was a gorgeous hand, as smooth and white as marble. I could see why someone might use it in a catalog. I decided that if she didn’t move it in a couple of seconds, I’d stay.
“So are you a faggot?” she asked.
“What do you think?”
She looked at the top of my head. “I don’t know,” she said, keeping her hand where it was. “You got pretty nice hair.”
I took her by the shoulders and mashed my mouth into hers. When she started to resist, I used the weight of my body to push her up against the Boardwalk railing.
Then all of a sudden she wasn’t resisting anymore. I felt her grabbing hold of me. It’d been years since Carla held me like that. I’d gotten used to her just lying there, barely tolerating the things I tried to do. But Rosemary was different. She put her tongue right in my mouth, like she knew just what she wanted. Other guys in the Family said they didn’t like it when women got too aggressive, but here I was with maybe the biggest hard-on of my life and we were only just getting started.
The thing had a mind of its own. She reached down to touch it and I heard her moan a little. It felt as though I was holding a club between my legs. I wasn’t sure how I was going to go waddling down the Boardwalk with the front of my pants sticking out when it came time to go back to the car.
“Still scared?” she murmured.
“No, but I guess you are, you keep asking.”
Her eyes lit up and she did something that truly surprised me. She spit on her hand and reached under her skirt, so I could see she wasn’t wearing any underwear.
She touched herself as nonchalantly as a garage mechanic changing a tire. That should’ve sent me running home, but it didn’t. Blood was pumping straight from my heart to my cock.
Before I knew it, she had my zipper down and her skirt up. “Who’s scared now?” she was asking in a tranced-out voice. “Who’s scared now?”
She was crazy, I realized, as crazy as my father or any of the other hit men I’d known. But before I could say anything about it, she had my cock in her hand and she was guiding it quickly and easily into her. More easily than it ever went into Carla in eight years of marriage. This was different. My cock seemed to go right into the deepest part of Rosemary right away. She felt incredibly hot inside. Not just warm, but blazing like she had a boiler going. It made me think of the oath made members of the Family take: “May I burn like the saints in the fires of hell should I ever betray my friends.”
She turned me around and straddled me, so she faced the ocean and her legs hooked through the middle railing. Then she started grinding down on me. If anybody who knew Teddy or my wife saw me doing this on the Boardwalk I’d be a dead man, for sure. But the thought of death just made me fuck harder.
A seagull’s cry merged with Rosemary’s voice, asking me to give her more. If I wasn’t careful I was going to come too soon, so I tried thinking about other things.
Coffee grounds in a white garbage bag. Ice hockey. My wife’s couch in the living room. Nose hair. The way Nicky looked at me. My son’s Ninja Turtles. Smell Michelangelo.
Rosemary licked my ear and I picked her up and turned her the other way, so now I was the one facing the ocean. Thick foamy waves pounded into the shore. I looked down the Boardwalk to where the amusement pier was still going strong. I could see the green-and-yellow neon of the Ferris wheel and the switchbacks forming bold patterns against the stark black sky.
It wasn’t doing any good. Rosemary’s pussy kept getting hotter and wetter. Her voice was crying out like she was starting to come. The seagulls screeched back at her. She dug her nails through the back of my pants and into the cheeks of my ass as she drew me on and on. I felt the juice creeping up toward the tip of my cock like mercury rising in a thermometer.
“Please,” said Rosemary. “Please don’t stop.”
I exploded inside of her. The first shot was like a cannon blast, but the second was just as strong. The third didn’t have quite as much force, but the payload was just as big. And so it went with Rosemary holding on for dear life, until I was just spent and hollow.
Over her shoulder, I watched the waves roll away from the shore, carrying the sand and empty Budweiser cans out to the sea and the rest of the world.
Then I closed my eyes and my wife Carla’s face came to me, with her sad eyes and her full disappointed lips. And when I thought about her I felt an overwhelming sadness that made me want to fall to my knees and cry.
Not just because I’d let her down or betrayed her, but because after all this time and all these years, I finally knew what I’d been missing.