Should I get up and hug her? Alan wondered. When he’d gotten into fights in the past with women-various girlfriends and one ex-wife-after all the sour words and recriminations and accusations and you did this and you did that it always came down to something simple like she just needed a hug and a kiss. Then the situation would calm down and laughter would come and then maybe, in the best of times, they’d make love or at least have sex. Was this one of those occasions where a hug was the answer? Alan got up and gently placed his arms around Ellen’s shoulders.
“What? What? You want sex now? What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I don’t. I don’t want sex,” Alan stammered. “I just thought maybe a hug would…” Why bother finishing the thought? He withdrew his arms and turned to resume his place on the couch.
“Where are you going? I didn’t say I didn’t want to be hugged. I just… I’m just freaking out.” She shot another glance out the window. “Maybe you should fuck me right about now.”
“What?”
“Do I stutter? Maybe you should fuck me. Now.”
“But this wasn’t about sex, honest. I swear. I wasn’t being…” Was she toying with him?
“Just fuck me. I need to be penetrated. I need to have something tearing my mind from Mona. But don’t think about Mona while we’re doing it. I know she’s healthy and young and I’m not. Well, I’m young, but you know what I mean. Her body versus mine. Don’t fantasize about her. Or don’t think about her being torn limb from limb like chicken. You won’t get an erection from a thought like that. Maybe Eddie would, but Christ, I don’t want to think about what gets Eddie off.”
Ellen marched into the kitchen, shucked off her baggy army-surplus shorts and cotton undies, grabbed the counter and pushed her ass out at him. “Do it,” she commanded. Normally a take-charge woman was a turn-on, but this was a lot of pressure combined with deeply troubling extenuating circumstances. Alan dropped his pants and massaged into being a serviceable if slightly spongy erection. “Don’t be gentle. Don’t be slow,” Ellen ordered. Such hard words. Such hard angles. Though he didn’t want to think about Mona, he did think about the food. Food would soon inflate everything back to normal.
Alan followed Ellen’s edicts and pounded away. She gritted her teeth and bucked against his pelvis, meeting each thrust with equal force. Alan thought about stacking china and how delicate porcelain was. He thought about building model kits as a boy, then dropping rocks on them or blowing them up with firecrackers. He hoped their bones were up to this punishment. It had been a while since he’d run out of vitamins. How was his calcium? How was Ellen’s? They should have added a good multivitamin to the shopping list. And Jesus, lots of items from the pharmacy. What were they thinking? Just food and batteries? They’d been discussing keeping it to necessities. What could be more necessary than vitamins and headache remedies? Some pink bismuth. And not store-brand. Pepto Bismol. Or Pepcid AC! Some antidiarrheal. Oh yeah, that’s hot stuff. That’s the stuff of a Penthouse letter. Why not just start contemplating osteoporosis? Or scoliosis? Or any other bone-wrecking -osis?
“I want you to come inside me,” Ellen snarled, thrashing her head back and forth. This was very odd. This wasn’t a hate fuck. Alan had only experienced that phenomenon once or twice in his past, especially with his ex-wife. She’d stare up at him, eyes squinted in concentration, slowly and with great deliberation intoning, “Fuck my cunt,” over and over. This wasn’t like that exactly, but it was certainly angsty. And very aggressive. Ellen snapped her head back and her hair whipped across his face.
“Clairol,” he said, slapping his forehead. “Clairol Herbal Essence!”
“What?”
“Nothing,” he said, feeling lava pump into his face. He smacked her ass and pumped harder to throw her off the scent of his wandering mind. After several more minutes of violent hammering he obliged her request. His knees and thighs immediately turned to jelly and he sank to the floor. Ellen slumped beside him. She pressed her head against his chest and murmured, “Hold me.”
It always came down to a hug.
And as he ran his fingers through her oily hair he silently mouthed, Clairol Herbal Essence.
It had been two weeks earlier that Ellen had teased Alan as he trudged up the stairs, Bataan Death March-style, with case after case of Kirkland bottled water. Nothing had really happened yet-certainly not on the level into which it would blossom-but Alan’s girlfriend, Tammy, had convinced him that preparedness wasn’t anything to scoff at. So there he’d been, doing the lion’s share of lugging, wishing for an elevator.
“All you need are some camouflage fatigues and a headband,” Ellen said with a smirk as he approached her on the landing. Her infant daughter, Emily, was suckling a full, barely veiled breast. Though Alan found nothing sexy about nursing-lactation was not a kink he found appealing-he was enamored of Ellen Swenson’s boobs and any peek was welcome. Tammy, tart-tongued and efficient, was all nipple and no tit, her chest a smooth plane of milky white skin dotted with two pencil eraser-size pink protrusions. Though not in love with Tammy, Alan was fond of her, but he craved suppleness and Ellen had it. He blinked away his unchaste thoughts and refocused on Ellen’s eyes.
“Huh?” Despite the temperature outside, his face was awash in perspiration.
“You and the gal pal are really kicking into survivalist mode.”
Alan eased the case to the ground with a thud, panting. “Better safe than sorry. That’s Tammy’s philosophy.”
“It’s just some infected rats,” Ellen countered. “They’ll be dead in no time. You’ve seen all the open manholes everywhere.”
“Yeah, I know. Between the rats and the noxious fumes, driving back with the supplies was a bitch.”
“You keep a car in the city?” With all that was going on, that was what Ellen marveled at. It made Alan smile. These were the real concerns of full-blooded New Yorkers. Not rats biting and infecting commuters down in the subway and pedestrians on the street. Not crews in hazmat suits spelunking the city’s subterranean infrastructure for the last two weeks, pumping who knows what kind of toxic gas down there in hopes of obliterating the ferocious rodents. Not people either stumbling around hacking in each other’s faces looking like death warmed over or sporting surgical masks. Where you parked: that was a thing at which to marvel.
“Tammy keeps it in Brooklyn. It’s her car.”
“Ah,” Ellen said. “Brooklyn. Remember when Manhattan was the place to be? Now it’s Brooklyn.”
“Now it’s Brooklyn,” Alan agreed.
That exchange had been two weeks ago. Now, Alan was side by side with Mike, Ellen’s husband, hammering nails into planks of plywood to further buttress the closed-off entranceway to their building. Over the clatter of their work Mike shouted, “This doesn’t bode well!”
“What?” Alan stopped hammering, as did Mike.
“This. This doesn’t bode well. Us sealing ourselves in, FEMA barricading the only exit… this doesn’t look like it’s gonna be resolved anytime soon.”
“Soon?” Alan replied, taking a breath.
“Yeah, soon. I’ve got faith. This’ll blow over. Everything does. A monsoon hits, people die. Still, life goes on, normalcy resumes. Tsunamis. Collapsed levees. Earthquakes. This’ll blow over. New York’s a tough town.”