Up For Review:
Somewhere (Not here)
My Fish Tank submission, attached and embedded. A note to all and sundry: A) this is still rather first draft-y (appropriate, of course); there's already a dozen things I want to tweak, and I'm eager to hear more, and B) the working title was "Pretty Much," but that's really for another piece which I'd thought this one was going to be but isn't; I like "Somewhere (Not Here)" better, but it still isn't perfect maybe, and I'm stealing it from a song by Alpha, not that there's anything wrong with that. So any suggested titles are also of interest. Anything else will wait till I can leap in and comment with mad abandon.
Now, Ellie - sex with Ellie was like this: the first time, she told me she was from another world. The second time, she crushed my hand in hers and told me she had a terrible fear of infidelity. It wasn't till the third time that she told me she couldn't come.
"I just can't," she said. "Stop that. What are you doing?"
"I'm just," I said.
"Well, stop. It's sore. Don't. Just spoon me."
We were in her room, on her narrow twin bed, since she had her own bedroom, separate from her roommate, while I shared a single open corner room with a gay boy from Minneapolis who looked like a young Richard Thomas (down to that fetchingly distracting mole on his cheek). Of course, the only way to sleep two people on a twin bed with any approximation of comfort is to spoon: back to front, the back of (usually) the smaller pressed to the front of the larger. Which then bodies forth the dreaded problem of the Fourth Arm: she, being the smaller, and the foremost, can easily enough fold her arms against her breasts, even stretch one out before her to the edge of the bed. Myself, being the hindmost (her buttocks nestled in the bowl of my groin, my nose tickled by her freshly washed hair) - well. My topmost arm easily enough could curl around her, rest upon her, careful not to lay too much weight upon the softly fleshy arc suspended between her hip and ribcage, but my bottom-most arm, the fourth of our four arms: where to put it? I couldn't fold it against my chest, rolling my shoulder forward a little, as my chest was pressed to her back. No room. I couldn't sleep with it beneath me, not at all, or stretched behind me - I'm not a contortionist, for God's sake. The best solution seemed to be to fold it like a broken wing and tuck it under my pillow, pressing my pillow to my ear as if I were listening to it. But my fingertips would start to tingle and then go numb, and it felt like blood was pooling in the meat of my biceps and shoulder, chilling, a little, from stillness. Stretching it without disturbing her was a delicate process at best. Some nights, carefully, stealthily, I could stretch it up and out almost to full length beneath both our pillows, our sleepy heads.
This was how I whiled away those muzzy post-coital hours.
"There is another, better world," she muttered. "There has to be."
"What?" I said.
But she was asleep.
Oh, Ellie! You have hair the color of a freshly fallen autumn leaf and eyes like the storm that sends it skirling. - Or so I wrote in the only letter I ever sent her. I dreamed of that hair: of lying back in my own narrow bed (I hadn't yet seen hers; imagine the young Richard Thomas out for the nonce, on an assignation) with her astride my hips, impaled, slowly bucking up and down and back and forth all at once, her arms rising as her breasts stretch and climb a little up her chest as her belly curls and tautens as her hands shovel up that hair, that hair, up and back, a Mucha girl, a shampoo ad, her neck suddenly slender and fragile under its glowering weight. She would coo, and she would purr, and she would close her eyes, oh, my.
Instead: that hair was smeared across her pillow, her chin sunken a little, wrinkles in the flesh along her jawline, her mouth twitching almost into a grimace with every thrust. "Are you?" I said, stopping, my weight strutted above her on the heels of my hands, elbows locked. "Are you okay?" Hoarse with effort.
"Don't stop," she said. Touching the side of my face. So I didn't.
There are those orgasms that you build with brute force, pumping, pounding, slapping, grunting till you've torn the thing out by the roots and fall down, gasping. And then there are the sneakers: you'll be stroking along, pleasant enough, and no real shift in anything but nonetheless here it comes suddenly out of nowhere, and there isn't a power on Earth could stop your hips, your cock, your balls now, not until it's had its way with you. This one was a sneaker, lancing suddenly from the balls of my feet through my rigid thighs and pistoning relentlessly into her. I was so surprised I kept going, reflexively, after it had washed away, until I dully realized it was more than a little painful. I fell over, poleaxed. My ears were tingling. "What?" I said.
"Are you okay?" she said, again.
"Um." I swallowed. "Yeah. I just. Let me."
She kissed me, and kissed me, and burrowed her face into the hollow of my shoulder and kissed me again. "It was like," she said, her lips against my skin, "you went away. Like you were someplace else."
"I was," I said, thickly. All I wanted to do - no matter that it was yet mid-afternoon - was close my eyes just for a moment. Or two. But she squeezed me and kissed me again and then she said something about what it was Peter had suggested.
Peter was small and had unearthly long fingers and curly dark hair cut into what I suppose was really a mullet but somehow never came off that way. He and Louise had a two-bedroom apartment off-campus, and he and Ellie would disappear into the bedroom that smelled of incense and was kept dark, the only illumination being a skein of Christmas lights, while Louise and I would sit in the living room and drink chai or wine and talk about bad fantasy novels.
What Peter had suggested was - well. "Wouldn't that be," I started to ask.
"Not really," said Ellie. "Not if it's all at the same time. Not in the same place or anything." She blushed. "It would mean so much. He really seems to get it, you know?"
He did, too. "It's a beautiful image," he'd say, or something like it, in the living room, after he and Ellie had done whatever they did. Read cards or stars or palms or tea leaves, gazed into crystal eggs, sniffed incense, rubbed singing bowls, visualized lights. "All those worlds on a string, like pearls, strung between two storms, one light, one dark ..."
"If I could just," Ellie would say. Frowning. "When I try to remember - the light is so bright, the colors ..."
"It must be hard on you," said Peter once, when we were alone.
"On me?" I said, opening my eyes. He was trying to teach me an exercise for warding my room against evil influences, uninvited apparitions, unseen presences: sit, cross-legged, in the floor; focus all your attention on the middle of your forehead until it begins to tingle and grow warm; visualize that feeling leaking forth as green light, light that would coat the walls, float to the ceiling, seep into the floor. I'd gotten the tingle, at least.
"As a once-born," said Peter. "It must be hard for you to understand."
"Once-born?" I said.
To his credit, his smile was warm and open. "Born once only," he said, "and only in this world. It must be hard for you to understand where she's coming from."
Perhaps. But it wasn't as if I hadn't been trying. Still - another world?
"It's important," she'd said to me, that first time.
"I can see that," I said. "But - "
"It's something I've known all my life. Ever since I was a little girl."
"Yes," I said.
"Do you believe?"
"I believe you," I said, after a moment that was arguably too long. Then: "I believe that you believe."
She sighed.
So one night we went for a walk, the four of us: Peter and Louise and Ellie and me. Meandering along the main quad, under the prickly Gothic shadow of Albert Hall, across the Commons, through the sculpture garden by the Art Museum. Under a streetlight where the campus finally petered out, I found myself standing by Louise as Ellie took Peter's hand in hers.
"Well?" said Peter. And Peter and Ellie walked away towards Peter and Louise's apartment, while Louise stood under the streetlight, her hair a golden halo fillipping over her cloak's dark lowered hood, smiling at me. "Shall we?" she said.
I hadn't given this much thought. For one thing, Louise was as tall as me, and robustly Reubenesque; the joke (more at his expense than hers) was she made Peter look like Jack Spratt. But more to the point: swaddled in that dark green cloak as she was, I couldn't find a way in; no hand to hold, no elbow to hook, nothing but her smile under eyes that slid away from mine much like mine slid away from hers.
For another thing: I'd somehow thought, vaguely, for some reason, that Peter and Ellie would go to Ellie's room, leaving their apartment to Louise and me.
"I, uh," I said, "have a roommate. He might ..."
He was. We bought a six-pack of cheap beer in green glass bottles and drank it on the steps of the library. It was a warm enough night for November.
"Does he usually," I asked.
"Often enough," she said. "At least this way I know when he's doing it, and where. And with whom. Plus," she said, grinning at me, "I don't so much mind, myself."
But our only kiss was sloppy and awkward. I felt bad about pressing the issue, and she felt bad about not pressing back, and anyway our eyes started sliding away from each once more. We ended up on a couch in the half-lit gloom of a downstairs lounge, under my coat and her cloak. She was warm and smelled of something clean and summery.
"He has terrible nightmares," she said, her voice soft and muzzy.
"Nightmares?" I said.
"Something - it's big, and it's black. With horrible eyes. It's chasing him. Always." She sighed and settled against me, her head on my chest, my chin in her hair. "I saw it once. I think."
Now, of course, my cock was stirring, not so much someone else might note it, but enough to pull away from my balls a little, to impinge upon my consciousness as, well, itself, unique, there. I opened my inordinately heavy eyelids. "What?" I said. "Saw it?"
But she was asleep.
"You didn't," said Ellie, the next night.
"We didn't," I said, pulling off her jeans.
"But you have to," she said, unshouldering her bra and twisting it around, "otherwise it isn't fair," deftly unhooking it and tossing it aside.
"What's fair?" I said, jerking my sweater over my head.
"There has to be a balance," she said, pivoting on one hip, lifting the covers, folding her knees to her chest so she could tuck her feet still in those green socks under and pull the covers up over her belly. "Otherwise," her hands diving under, her hips lifting, "it's like I'm cheating on you." One hand fishing out and dropping to the floor a pair of plain cotton underwear, baby blue.
"I'm the one to say if it's cheating or not," I said, undoing my belt.
"And it's not?"
"It's not."
"You're fine with it?"
"I'm fine." My cock bobbing with blood and anticipation as I ripped open the condom wrapper. "Did it," I started to ask as I wrung the condom around the head, clumsily unrolling it, carefully, but she didn't hear me.
"Still," she was saying. "You ought to."
"What?" I said, snugging the condom at the base, pinching the little bubble of air out of the tip.
"Sleep together." She scooted to the other edge of the bed as I lifted the covers.
"We didn't want to," I said. Climbing up on my knees.
"But Louise is beautiful!" she said, lifting her knees, frowning as I kicked the covers out of the way.
"And I'm not bad myself," I said, planting my hands on either side of her hips. Her teeth nibbling at her lower lip as I lowered myself for a kiss. "Eh?"
"You should," she said.
"And us?" I said, pulling back. But she grabbed me, her hands nimble little things on my rubbered cock.
That night when I came it felt like a huge gobbet of come squeezed out of me all at once, stretching the head of my cock, forcing it open, bloating the condom in a single sudden burst. It wasn't a sneaker per se, but the sudden unexpected relief from all that straining effort was so delicious that I rode it out, eyes closed, jaw set, shivering, stroking slowly, slowly, nothing at all in mind but the feeling of being inside her, of Ellie, wrapped around me.
"Nick?" she said.
I didn't say anything. Stroked into her again, and once more. Eyes wide under closed lids. Lips trembling open. It wasn't as if I couldn't say anything. I just - didn't want to.
"Nick?" Her hand brushing my cheek, my hair. "Nick? Are you okay? Are you there? Nick?"
I blew out a breath full of half-voiced syllables, nonsense sounds. Homina, homina, affazza frazzlefass. Let my head droop suddenly. Held still, above her. Arms trembling. Shivering. Her hand on my neck then, pulling me down, a weight. I let her, collapsing onto her, her arms around me, her thigh brushing my hip as an ankle locked with my knees, squeezing. "Oh, baby. Oh."
I opened my eyes.
"What was it like?" she said, as I rolled over on my back. Plucked the soggy condom from my deflating cock like an afterthought. "What was it like?"
I told her.
I told her it was as if - as if I'd gone somewhere else; someplace grey, empty. Drained. I thought of Stu's midterm party, when I'd done a nitrous whippit, and I told her it was like a curtain of static had come between me and everything else, as if all of it, the world, were suddenly a bad channel on a dying television set. I told her it had happened before, sometimes, but never - never so much. Never so, so intensely. I told her -
"I think," I said, "I think I'm starting to understand."
"Oh," she said, her head on my shoulder, her arm across my chest, her leg across my hips, her thigh pressed against the wet smudge of my cock, her foot still in one of those green socks nimbly wriggling between my shins. "Oh." Squeezing me, kissing my throat, my cheek. Falling asleep.
I lay there for a while, not moving.
But a week later, she went to see Peter again. Alone, this time. And again, a couple of days after that. It was helping her, she said. She was starting maybe to see things. It wasn't like she loved him, God no, or like it was something she wanted to keep doing or anything, but for now, she said, after the third time, for now it was something important, something she had to do. I understood, right? And there was Lousie. You guys really ought to. You know?
I'm not sure where Louise spent those nights.
And even so: when we fucked, when I came, I would still hover above her, shivering, eyelids fluttering. Stroking slowly like a suddenly thoughtful machine. Blowing out that muzzy glossolaly. Trying so hard to act like I was really (if only for a moment) someplace else.
Thus November, and most of December. That Christmas, my folks went to Switzerland, and I didn't really want to go, and I didn't have money for a plane ticket anywhere else, so I made arrangements to stay in town, housesitting for Stu since the dorms were closed. For two weeks I slept on his ratty futon and ate Chef Boyardee and Campbell's soup out of the pan over his tiny electric stove and worked my way through a couple of his bottles of Old Grandad. I watched too much Matlock and Star Trek and read a half-dozen books I can't even remember and never once saw someone I knew. Christmas Eve I went to see a second-run movie at the Apollo; Christmas morning was just another day to sleep in.
Stu came back shortly after the New Year, a couple of days before the dorms re-opened, but my routine didn't change that much at all. Bad TV, bad books, bad booze before lunch, only now I was sleeping on the floor of his quasi-dining room. I remember Stu unapologetically watch a porn tape in the living room, the lights off, bathed unmoving in the flickering bluish fleshy light, me curled up in the sleeping bag, half reading Eric Van Lustbader or maybe it was Diane Duane, oddly - comforted, I guess, by the wet sounds coming from the TV speakers, the thick voices, oh, oh God, that feels so good, fuck me fuck me fuck me please oh yes.
One night - I think it was after I was back in the dorms, after young Richard Thomas and everyone else had come back, but Ellie wasn't with us, so maybe not, but a number of us, at least me and Stu and a guy named Howie and what was her name, Lisa, who'd already written a couple of text-based games for Infocom, we all went to the Inn for a general welcome-the-fuck-back party. I drank a couple of White Russians, I guess maybe because it was cold or I thought it was sophisticated or something. Anyway: this woman came up to our table to say hi to Howie or something. Short, or on the short side, and not really at all my type. Spider Robinson has that line snarking off about guys who like skinny girls, girls who look like, he said, pubescent guys with apples in their shirt pockets, you know? Well, she wasn't like that. Not quite zaftig, but generously on her way. She had hair-colored hair, too light to be brown, but dark enough that calling it blond would have been pushing it. Dishwater, I guess, or ash, if you're feeling charitable. "Kimber," said Howie, "this is Stu, and Lisa, and Nick."
"Hi," said Kimber.
I couldn't take my eyes off her. All of the rest of her aside, it was her eyes: green, bright green, unearthly green, crinkling at the edges, lighting up at one of Howie's stupid jokes.
And at some point she got up - to go to the bar, or take a piss, or something - and somehow bumped the table or my chair as I was setting my glass back down and before I knew it I was kicking my chair back with a lap full of cold wet White Russian glop. "Shit," I said, and "fuck," and I started, absurdly, to giggle. And then her hand was on my shoulder.
"Couldn't happen to a nicer lap," she said, and she squeezed, and off she went.
"God damn," said Stu, smirking.
"What?" I said. "What?"
Now that I think about it, maybe this was after the dorms had opened, because I think Ellie and I had our welcome-back sex later that same night. And she never did like Stu, so maybe that was why she wasn't at the Inn. But while I was looking down at her I kept thinking of those eyes, those green eyes, eyes like somebody had fucked with the color settings on her TV set, skewing all the colors - or at least skewing that green, that too-bright, screwballing green.
Still: when I came, I held myself rigid above her, eyelids fluttering, feigning far away. Zaffazza fabblerazz. Mamminna. Oh. Oh, baby.
And it was two days after that, or three, that I showed up early one morning at her room looking for something, not even her, a notebook I think, and Peter looked up at me from her pillow, blinking owlishly.
"Kimber's throwing a party next weekend," said Stu. I was drinking more of his Old Grandad, and Q was flirting with Captain Picard.
"That's nice," I said.
"She told Howie to tell me to tell you to show up, if you wanted."
"Did you tell Howie to tell her I was already going out with somebody?"
Stu snorted, and a week later I went by myself to Kimber's party. It was a house full of people I mostly didn't know, and I did what I usually do at such parties, which is grab a beer and find a corner and sit and drink and watch and every now and then get up and get another beer. The music was typically, self-consciously eclectic: a Bitch Magnet EP, one of Nico's solo albums, some Frank Sinatra in his prime. I came back to my corner with my fourth or fifth plastic cup to find some guy was bobbing there, long blond hair and a Viking beard, yammering about horoscopes over the music into some girl's ear. "When were you born?" he yelled.
She said, "June fourteenth," and turned, and grinned, and there were those goddamn eyes.
"I knew it," he said. "A Gemini. You're so engaged, engaging. Extroverted. You're so open to new experiences."
"You're so full of shit," she said. "I was born in September. It's Nick, right?"
"Yes," I said.
"Let's dance, Nick," she said, and like that, we were dancing.
Short, shorter than Ellie, but the curves were something to hold onto. Something other than the beer was bubbling through my blood as her hand brushed my skin under my shirt, above the back of my jeans. We were both already drunk enough that it didn't matter we weren't exactly in step; it was funny. "You know," she said, half giggling, "what really sucks?"
"What," I said.
"I really am a Gemini," she said, and then we kissed. It wasn't like a first kiss. It was like we'd been kissing all along, and we'd just punctuated it with a little conversation, come up for air and then dived right back into it, deep rolling open-mouthed kisses, kisses you get lost in. The Digable Planets were skit-scatting along, and then I think U2, something big and epic and drippily romantic, and I don't know if either of us noticed when people started leaving.
"Why me?" I think I asked, at some point, because I remember her saying something along the lines of, "I don't know. You're cute. Your hair. I like your hair."
But mostly we kissed. And danced. And held, and squeezed, and groped.
I was unbuttoning her still-swaying jeans when I realized I hadn't brought a condom or anything like that. I hadn't thought this through at all, really; then, I hadn't come to Kimber's party thinking I was actually going to be unbuttoning her jeans, you know? The whole situation was more than a little unreal: I was three sheets to the wind and busy hauling up a fourth, slipping my hands into the pants of someone I'd said maybe a dozen words to, total - it was all distant, hard to grasp, happening to somebody else entirely, something I was hearing about after the fact.
"Hey," she said, bucking against my hand. "What's up?"
I shook my head and said, "Nothing," and popped the last button and yanked off her jeans and underwear and socks pretty much all in one go. And she didn't say anything at all when I stepped out of mine, my bare cock bobbing heavily, and when I sat down with a thunk on her living room floor, my fingers wet and oily already, slathered, smearing along her flank, her heavy tit, she crawled without hesitation naked into my lap knees to either side of my hips, and her fingers were as shockingly cold on my cock as her cunt was scalding. "Oh, fuck," she said, breathily, her weight sinking lower and lower until she'd taken all of me in, her nose brushing mine, and when we kissed this time it was hesitant, awkward, like the first time, bumping teeth, hissing. But our hips knew what they were doing.
If either of us came I don't actually remember it. All of it was so fluid, formless; flirting to dancing to kissing to stripping to fucking with no real boundaries, no discrete steps from here to there. And somewhere along the line, sleeping, there on the floor, my head under the old school desk she used as an end table.
And I'm pretty sure we fucked again, early that morning; I remember seeing a beam of sunlight crawling into her outflung hand on the dark wood floor.
When I jerked awake to the sound of church bells down the street, she stirred and rolled to one side. She'd half-covered herself with her flannel shirt, her bare hip ballooning out from under it. My head ached and my gut was sore and my eyes were bleary and my cock still had a bubble of something wet and sticky in the pocket of my foreskin and the length of it was crusted in something flakey and yellowish in the weak wintery light, that dusted off at a touch. It took me a minute to realize it was her, her come, smeared along my skin and pubic hair and dried to a delicate scum.
I couldn't find my underwear, and didn't bother to wake her up.
"Where were you last night?" asked Ellie.
"A party. Where were you?"
"At Peter's. Louise was wondering if you ever wanted to hang out with her again, or what."
"Ellie," I said, and I sighed. "I already did."
"What?" she said. "Did what?"
"Only it wasn't Louise," I said.
"Oh," she said. And then, "Did you enjoy yourself?"
"Was that the point?" I said.
"Who was it?" she asked, some time later.
"No one you know," I said.
Oh, we fucked again, Ellie and me. Three or four more times, at least. But I never again bothered to close my eyes when I came, and she never reached up again to touch my face. That last time, lying there in her bed, spooned against her, my arm began to ache, and slowly, slowly, I sat up, sliding it carefully out from under her pillow. She murmured something in her sleep as I slipped out from under the covers, but didn't wake.
I found my pants and my shirt and my shoes and got dressed in the dark.
When I got back to my own room, the young Richard Thomas was curled up against his brand new boyfriend, who looked like a creepy Kyle Maclachlan. I stood there looking down at them for a long, long time.
"What?" said young Richard, sleepily.
"Nothing," I said, and I went down to the downstairs lounge and stretched out on a couch and fell, after a while, to sleep.
The end.