Fishbowl (17 page)

Connor moved first, sidling onto the bed with one bent knee and the other foot still on the floor. He reached out to her, and she took his hand and lay beside him. He propped himself on an elbow and caressed her with a hand as soft as the air, from her cheek, floating down her chin and down her neck. His hand continued to her breast, not lingering long before carrying on down past her stomach and down farther still. There, held aloft by the Seville on Roxy like an offering to the sky, they made love.

He took amazing command over her body. At times their writhing was soft and passionate, and at others it was heated and violent. He had whispered. She had moaned. He had spanked, and she had scratched. At one point, Katie remembers screaming at the ceiling. At another, Connor had grunted in her ear that his cock belonged to her. By the time they had both come, many of the apartment lights outside had been turned off. It was that short hour, neither late night nor early morning, in which it seemed the whole city slept.

Lying on her side and looking out the balcony door, with Connor’s body mirroring hers from behind and his arm draped across her waist, she noticed that she couldn’t see the stars. Even at this hour, the city glow canceled out the sky. It didn’t matter though; she lay in Connor’s arms and looked out over the twinkling buildings instead. Those things said in the heat of passion were overlooked with embarrassment once sane minds prevailed. Katie did love Connor, but she had never wanted to own his cock, even though he had offered it so easily. She thought of how odd it was to offer ownership of parts of one’s body rather than a commitment of one’s feelings.

Why was one so much easier than the other?

“I love you,” she said into the quiet of the apartment. She needed the words back from him.

Connor grunted.

Surely he had heard, she thought.

She could feel his belly rising and falling, exerting a gentle, pulsing pressure against the small of her back. His breath was a soft and steady rhythm on her neck. It seemed, though he had been awake a moment before, he had fallen asleep.

Katie rounds the stairs between the thirteenth and fourteenth floors, her mind deep in reminiscence. There’s a noise from above, and she looks up to see a woman her age coming down the stairs toward her. Katie freezes midstep. The woman wears her pink nightshirt. Katie left it at Connor’s a week ago, and now, here it is, covering the perky breasts and toned body of this woman.

Katie chokes on a bit of vomit but swallows it back down. With the sour taste of bile in her mouth, she glares at the woman in her nightshirt and wonders which she will lose control of first, her fury or her sorrow.

29

In Which the Villain Connor Radley Judges His Heart and Finds It Wanting

Is it that simple? Connor wonders to himself.

He stands still, back to the balcony, and contemplates his tiny apartment.

Is it that easy to love someone? Is the feeling that simple? Surely it has to be more complex. Every time people talk about it, they say it’s this huge, life-changing emotion. But this is a subtler feeling than that. She’s everywhere, sure, in the things she has touched and left behind, but everything triggers a memory. It’s like he can see her, hear her, smell her everywhere. He thinks about her when she’s gone, and he cares not to hurt her. He does want to make her happy.

Are these things love?

Of course he wants to spend time with her and learn about her and ask her to move in … Is that true? He hadn’t thought about it before now.

Do I want to ask her to move in with me?

Connor’s eyes scan the apartment. He thought love would be a freight train of emotion, something huge and unwieldy and devastating. He sees everything Katie has touched in the apartment. The things she has moved and he remembers when she moved them. He sees the things she left behind. He remembers what she said when they were sitting on the couch together or while they were lying on the mattress. She’s always here in his mind.

Connor’s eyes drift to the bathroom. The door is open, and there’s a clutter of toiletries on the counter. A facecloth is crumpled in the corner against the wall. The condom wrapper on the floor, the peeled edge curled like a dried orange rind. The toothpaste and the toothbrushes sit in a cup by the basin. Two toothbrushes.

The toothbrushes, Connor thinks. Christ, I let Faye use Katie’s toothbrush. I told her it was for her.

This horrible shame, he wonders. Is this love?

The feeling that everything isn’t good enough for Katie, the feeling that no matter how good he is, it can’t be what she deserves, that is love. Everything he has done up until that point isn’t good enough. Katie doesn’t deserve Deb and Faye, and neither of them offers him a more fulfilling existence than Katie does.

But Deb, oh dirty Deb. She let him do things to her that most girls he asked wouldn’t. And she seemed to enjoy it too. He would have been too shy to ask such things, but she pretty much begged him for it. She loved it. In fact, a few of those things had been her idea from the start. Connor hadn’t even conceived of a few of them, which was surprising because where sex is involved, he has contemplated almost everything.

Connor blinks against the thought, trying to erase the images of Deb from his memory.

He decides that even Deb’s kinks aren’t worth hurting Katie. Deb’s not enough. He can forgo her for a lifetime with Katie. Then he thinks differently, maybe not … Deb and Faye were outstanding; it’s a lot to give up. He settles on his first thought again: Katie deserves better, and he has to deliver it to her.

And if he does, and if she loves him back, maybe she would let him try those things that Deb did. Surely love has its rewards along with its sacrifices.

Connor grabs another plastic bag from underneath the sink and starts rushing around the room. His goal: to make it a place Katie will want to stay tonight and, eventually, a place she will want to stay with him for years to come.

He hustles to the washroom and grabs the toothbrush from the cup. Katie will get a new one. He pinches the condom wrapper from the floor. From now on, the only wrappers that belong on the floor are those from making love with Katie. He grabs a hair band from the doorknob and an ankle sock with a pom-pom on it from behind the toilet. He uses it to wipe an errant hair from the toilet rim, not even sure whose it was. He scans the bathroom and decides it’s good.

Connor moves on to the living room, his panic rising. There’s so much to clean from the space in such a short time. As he tidies, he feels like crying and wonders how long he has felt this way about Katie. Maybe since the first day he talked to her, when she came by his cramped little office under the stairs during his office hours a week before the midterm exam.

When he saw her coming, he told Lonnie, his officemate, that he needed an excuse to ask her out. Lonnie shrugged and said he could make that happen.

She was beautiful, standing awkwardly in the door. She was not thin and lanky like most of the other women in the class. She was soft and curvaceous and her smile—oh, how he remembered her smile. Connor usually knows the exact words to say to a woman. It is as if that is his superpower, how the words will just come to him and how they will ultimately lead a woman to his bed. But in Katie’s case, he couldn’t think of much to say. It was as if she were the supervillain to his superhero, that she possessed the exact opposite powers that could nullify his sex ray.

Connor had pretended not to notice how she derailed him; desperation reeks of neediness, and women don’t like that. Confidence is needed.

“Welcome,” he said. It sounded forced, lame. He was crippled in her presence. “Come in.”

Connor can’t remember exactly what was said, but he knows he wasn’t as smooth as he usually is. He stammered out inanities and was repulsed by his own incoherence. She had him flustered, and he wondered if she knew it. It was usually so easy. Still, she seemed to want to chat with him and it seemed about more than the upcoming midterm. Or had he just wanted to believe that?

And then Lonnie oozed his distinctive stink into the small office.

Katie’s face curled in response.

That was his cue. “Can I buy you a coffee?”

And she agreed.

The short walk off campus was a blur. They chatted as they passed the computer sciences building. Connor waved at a student who waved at him as she walked by. She seemed to want to stop and chat, but Connor and Katie passed her by, engrossed as they were in conversation. They waited together at the corner in front of the university entrance for the light to change in their favor.

The next thing Connor clearly remembers is they were both sitting at a small bistro table by the window. The light was fading from the day, and everything outside was cast in a flat gray. Inside, there was the bustle, chatter, and clatter of a busy coffee shop, but as they talked, it all seemed to fade into the background. It was as if everything else shrunk away and all that was left was this beautiful creature across the table from him.

“I didn’t know at the time that my parents were swingers,” he said. “How could I? I mean, I was just a kid. In hindsight, it was the eighties and there was a lot of that going on in the neighborhood. I guess that’s why my parents always wanted me out of the house. I was encouraged to spend long days outside playing with my dog, Ian.”

Katie laughed.

“What?” Connor asked.

“Your dog’s name was Ian?”

“It was.” Connor feigned offense. He wanted her to understand, but he couldn’t be mad at her. “Why’s that funny?”

“I don’t know. Ian’s a person’s name, I guess. Not a dog’s name.” She chuckled.

“Yeah, well.” Connor fiddled with his mug. “He was my friend.”

Katie reached across the table and put her hand on his. Her palm was warm on the back of his hand, and he looked at her. She met his gaze for a few moments and then looked down at her coffee. She drew back her hand and seemed close to apologizing.

“No,” Connor said. “It’s okay.”

He cocked his head, seeking out her eyes again, and when Katie looked up, he smiled.

“I wish I had a group of friends growing up, but Ian was all I had. He was a good buddy. Sometimes it’s all you can do, give a dog a human name and make him a friend. Make your reality fit your dreams however you can. Kids do it all the time with things they don’t get. A little self-delusion can be a good thing. I had a good childhood with Ian, better than it would have been without him.”

They held hands across the table and talked. Their coffees grew cold and stayed untouched because neither wanted to break contact. Later, they went back to his apartment and talked some more. Later still, they made love. Connor now knows that is what it was.

Connor knows what he had been blind to then. His habits with women were stronger than this realization, and it took until now to figure it out. He stuffs the plastic bag of debris into the closet by the door and closes it with the resolution that he is done with Faye and Deb. From now on, there’s only Katie. He knows it because he really feels it, and that’s a certainty he’s never felt before.

Connor is going to tell Katie that he loves her.

30

In Which Faye Reminisces About the Rooting and Body Parts Connor Has Given Her

“My cock belongs to you,” Connor grunted two nights ago as he pistoned atop Faye, his hips colliding with hers with a meaty smacking sound, both of their bodies slick with sweat and their muscles quaking together. The mattress had been stripped of most of its sheets and covers as they had twirled upon it, and now it was bare against her back.

Faye rolled her eyes. She’d heard that one before. What would she do with it, put it on the mantel with the others? Perhaps mount it on the wall? How stupid the offer sounded.

She wrapped her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck. She pulled his body down onto hers. He felt amazing inside her, his skin sliding across hers, but what really elevated the titillation of the whole encounter was the couple in the apartment across the way, taking turns watching them fuck in front of the balcony door. She could see them—too far away to make out any of their details, a bug in a window with a telescope proboscis pointed their way. She made her best porn face in their direction and then stared directly at them. She wanted them to know she knew they were there.

Faye had suspected what was happening when they dragged the bed from the corner of the apartment to the balcony door. She had smirked when he told her he wanted to do it under the stars with her but then turned the lights on, spotlighting his apartment to the city outside and blinding them to the night’s sky. And she had outright laughed when he offered her the stars while adjusting the bed to offer the best exposure to the night.

Faye told him to “quit being such an idiot and fuck me.”

Then she stripped, stripped him, and started in on him with no further discussion.

She thought of his earlier offerings of the sky and the stars, and when he added his cock to the list, she said, “You’re so giving.” Then she stuck fingers in his mouth, two of them, knuckle deep, pinning his tongue down to keep him from saying anything else. He gagged a bit but didn’t seem to mind. She felt the warm, wet tube of muscle wriggle under the pads of her fingers, and his breathing past the obstruction sounded like an overrun dog. She didn’t need him to talk.

In no time, a strand of warm saliva traced a slimy path down the back of her hand to her wrist. It beaded there in preparation of making the trek down her forearm. Then, Connor bit down on her fingers, not hard enough to break skin but hard enough to send a jolt of pain up her arm, making her gasp with the shock, which, in turn, pushed her into a back-arching orgasm. Her seizing body caused him to convulse inside her and then collapse with his belly against hers, his cheek to hers.

Faye lay for a moment, breathing under the weight of him and feeling his pulsating retreat from inside her. She turned her head to the city view just in time to see the apartment with the telescope go dark and disappear into the surrounding night.