“Gentle at first,” she said as Micah pressed the head of his cock to my ass.
“Shit,” he said, like he didn’t want to fuck me but really did.
Ivo leaned over me then kissed me like I’d never been kissed before. “You ’re so sweet,” she said into my mouth. Then she kissed me all over my face, and I kissed her back, tongue in her mouth, my hands in her hair. First time I’d ever touched her like that.
I felt the head of Micah’s cock in my ass. I felt how I opened.
“Easy,” Ivo said.
Micah moaned, sank deeper, fucked me. I grabbed Ivo. I was like a butterfly on a pin. She kissed my ear lobe. “Deeper,” she told Micah. “Come in his ass.” His face had twisted above me. The word “Shit,” broke from his lips, and then I felt jizz bust out of my cock like pus from a wound. You know how that is after, right?
I woke with spunk leaking from my ass. Micah was asleep under the covers, pillow to his face, a familiar stranger. I smelled that apple-cider smell of Ivo, but she wasn’t there. I figured she had another life opposite of what she’d left in the hotel. After Ivo, Micah and I were like what you’d find through Alice’s looking glass. I was cracked open, naked as an egg. Happiness is totally scary like that.
Kimberle
Achy Obejas
“I have to be stopped,” Kimberle said. Her breath blurred her words, transmitting a whooshing sound that made me push the phone away. “Well, OK, maybe not have to — I ’d say should — but that begs the question of why. I mean, who cares? So maybe what I really mean is I need to be stopped.” Her words slid one into the other, like buttery babies bumping, accumulating at the mouth of a slide in the playground. “Are you listening to me?”
I was, I really was. She was asking me to keep her from killing herself. There was no method chosen yet — it could have been slashing her wrists, or lying down on the train tracks outside of town (later she confessed that would never work, that she’d get up at the first tremor on the rail and run for her life, terrified that her feet would get tangled on the slats and her death would be classified as a mere accident — as if she were that careless and common), or just blowing her brains out with a polymer pistol — say, a Glock 19 — available at Wal-Mart or at half price from the same cretin who sold her cocaine.
“Hellooooo?”
“I hear you, I hear you,” I finally said. “Where are you?”
I left my VW Golf at home and took a cab to pick her up from some squalid blues bar, the only pale face in the place. The guy at the door — a black man old enough to have been an adolescent during the Civil Rights era, but raised with the polite deference of the previous generation — didn’t hide his relief when I grabbed my tattooed friend, threw her in her car, and took her home with me.
It was all I could think to do, and it made sense for both of us. Kimberle had been homeless, living out of her car — an antique Toyota Corolla that had had its lights punched out on too many occasions and now travelled unsteadily with huge swatches of duct tape holding up its fender. In all honesty, I was a bit unsteady myself, afflicted with the kind of loneliness that’s felt in the gut like a chronic and never fully realized nausea.
Also, it was fall — a particularly gorgeous time in Indiana, with its spray of colours on every tree but, in our town, one with a peculiar seasonal peril for college-aged girls. It seemed that about this time every year, there would be a disappearance — someone would fail to show at her dorm or study hall. This would be followed by a flowering of flyers on posts and bulletin boards (never trees) featuring a girl with a simple smile and a reward. Because the girl was always white and pointedly ordinary, there would be a strange familiarity about her. Everyone was sure they’d seen her at the Commons or the bookstore, waiting for the campus bus or at the Bluebird the previous weekend.
It may seem perverse to say this but every year, we waited for that disappearance, not in shock or horror, or to look for new clues to apprehend the culprit: we waited in anticipation of relief. Once the psycho got his girl, he seemed pacified, so we listened with a little less urgency to the footsteps behind us in the parking lot, worried less when out running at dawn. Spared, we would look guiltily at those flyers, which would be faded and torn by spring, when a farmer readying his corn field for planting would discover the girl among the papery remains of the previous year’s harvest.
When Kimberle moved in with me in November, the annual kill had not yet occurred and I was worried for both of us, her in her car and me in my first-floor one-bedroom, the window open for my cat, Brian Eno, to come and go as she pleased. I had trapped it so that it couldn’t be opened more than a few inches but that meant that it was never closed all the way, even in the worst of winter.
In my mind, Kimberle and I reeked of prey. We were both boyish girls, pink and sad. She wore straight blonde hair that moved in concert and had features angled to throw artful shadows; mine, by contrast, were soft and vaguely tropical, overwhelmed by a carnival of curls. We both seemed to be in weakened states. Her girlfriend had caught her in flagrante delicto and walked out; depression had swallowed her in the aftermath. She couldn’t concentrate at her restaurant job, mixing up simple orders, barking at the customers, so that it wasn’t long before she found herself at the unemployment office (where her insistence on stepping out to smoke cost her her place in line so many times she finally gave up).
It quickly followed that she went home one rosy dawn and discovered that her landlord, aware that he had no right to do so but convinced that Kimberle (now four months late on her rent) would never get it together to legally contest it, had stacked all her belongings on the sidewalk, where they had been picked over by the students at International House, headquarters for all the Third World kids on scholarships that barely covered textbooks. All that was left were a few T-shirts from various political marches (mostly black), books from her old and useless major in Marxist theory (one with a note in red tucked between its pages which read: “COMUNISM IS DEAD!”, which we marvelled at for its misspelling), and, to our surprise, her battered iBook (the screen was cracked though it worked fine).
Me, I’d just broken up with my boyfriend — it was my doing, it just felt like we were going nowhere — but I was past the point of righteousness and heavily into doubt. Not about my decision, that I never questioned. But about whether I’d ever care enough to understand another human being, whether I’d ever figure out how to stay after the initial flush, or whether I’d get over my absurd sense of self-sufficiency.
When I brought Kimberle to live with me she hadn’t replaced much of anything and we emptied the Toyota in one trip. I gave her my futon to sleep on in the living room, surrendered a drawer in the dresser, pushed my clothes to one side of the closet, and explained my alphabetized CDs, my work hours at a smokehouse one town over (and that we’d never starve for meat), and my books.
Since Kimberle had never visited me after I’d moved out of my parents’ house — in truth, we were more acquaintances than friends — I was especially emphatic about the books, prized possessions I’d been collecting since I had first earned a pay cheque. I pointed out the shelf of first editions, among them Richard Wright’s Native Son, Sapphire’s American Dreams, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a rare copy of The Cook and the Carpenter, and Langston Hughes and Ben Carruthers’ limited-edition translations of Nicolas Guillen’s Cuba Libre, all encased in Saran Wrap. There were also a handful of ninteenth-century travel books on Cuba, fascinating for their racist assumptions, and a few autographed volumes, including novels by Dennis Cooper, Ana Maria Shua and Monique Wittig.