Love Me Back (5 page)

He stopped kicking the oven. Did you even make it a year? Tell me, he said.

Yes, I said.

Chlamydia, he said. Fuck you, Marie, he said. The baby was crying louder. He took his keys off the counter and went to the door. He put on one boot and lost his balance while he was putting on the other and dropped his keys and then he said Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck! and jammed his foot into the boot and stood up and punched the wall next to the door. It made a hole in the sheetrock and he bent over and held his hand between his legs. He picked up his keys and slammed the door behind him. The baby was crying so hard she was losing her breath between screams. I went into our bedroom to get her and the neighbor above us stomped on the ceiling and shouted Shut up, man!

I lay down on the bed with the baby and shushed her. She smelled so sweet and she was so soft and warm. She
made the most urgent little sounds as she latched on to my nipple. Shh, I said. She stopped crying and nursed until she fell asleep again.

Business had been so sluggish the night before Thanksgiving that Damon, the assistant manager, cut down to just me by eight thirty, and I walked out with $32, twenty of which was given to me by a man who had a cup of tortilla soup and a Shiner and said he was sorry I had to work the night before a holiday. When I got out I went to the Albertsons next door and bought bananas, brown rice, black beans, a yellow onion, a can of Ro*Tel, and everything to bake a pumpkin pie. I never baked so I didn’t have any of the spices or sugar or flour at home, or a pie pan. I had eight dollars left after checking out so I stopped for gas on the way home.

The next day I made the pie using the recipe on the back of the can. We were still getting WIC cereal and milk so breakfast was Kix and bananas. Thanksgiving dinner was the rice and beans with the onion and Ro*Tel added for flavor, which is what we usually ate, and the pie. He said the pie was the best thing he had ever eaten in his life. I let the baby eat some of the filling off my fingers and she went nuts for it too, flapping her short baby arms. Then we all fell asleep at about five and he got up to pee a couple hours later. When he came back he said For some reason it hurts when I piss. I said Really? but I didn’t say anything else, even though I knew that I had given Damon chlamydia and I knew I’d slept with my husband since then. Damon said it felt like he was pissing
glass, and when he went to his doctor they stuck a Q-tip up his dick and he said it made him cry it hurt so bad. I went to the health department because we didn’t have health insurance. They said I did have it, even though I didn’t have symptoms. They gave me the medication to get rid of it. Damon asked me who else I’d been with because there was no way he’d given it to me. I said John and Luke and he said John gave it to you. I didn’t ask how he knew but I knew he was right. Luke had just broken up with a girlfriend he’d been with for six years and he’d told me he had never cheated on her. I had to tell John and Luke and I never saw them except at work so I had to tell them at work. John didn’t act surprised. That again, he said. Luke said You’re kidding and then he said I knew it was a bad idea. A few days after that there was an awkward moment when Damon was voiding something for John at a computer screen and Luke and I walked up at the same time to ring. I had told John about Damon and Luke but I hadn’t told Luke about the other two because I knew he would have cared. Damon caught my eye and fumbled his manager card. I could feel Luke looking at me so I walked away like I had forgotten something.

I had thought about telling my husband but I kept putting it off. The day I decided I had to tell him I went to the apartment complex’s laundry center to wash a load of whites. His undershirts, the baby’s burp cloths and diapers and onesies, and our bath towels and dishrags. Our apartment was right across the parking lot from the laundry center so I started the washer and then checked on the baby who was asleep in her swing. I took a book outside and sat on the stairs in front of our door but I couldn’t read. I watched
ants carry off pieces of a Cheeto. Half an hour later I went to put the clothes in the dryer and the laundry room smelled awful, like shit. I opened the lid of the washer to take out our clothes and there was shit all over the stuff at the top. The smell made me gag and I let the lid fall and backed away from the washer. I didn’t know what it meant but I didn’t want to touch the clothes. On my way out the door I had to walk past a wooden bench and there was a foot-long turd on it. Only a human could have made it. When my husband got home I told him someone had wiped their ass with our laundry. He couldn’t believe it either so he went to look. We left all our things in the washer because I said I wasn’t going to let any of it touch the baby even if we washed it again and he agreed. But then I didn’t want to tell him about the chlamydia.

I did make it one year exactly. I first fucked John the day after our anniversary. I have a picture of the three of us at the Macaroni Grill. We went there because it was another Brinker concept so I could use my employee discount. Neither of us was old enough to drink. We ordered virgin daiquiris and played hangman and tic-tac-toe on the paper tablecloth. Roses are red, he wrote with the red crayon. Violets are blue, I wrote with the blue. What do you want? he wrote. I didn’t finish it because our food arrived. Our waitress took the picture. You guys are so cute, she said. He’s holding the baby and has one arm around me and we’re both smiling for real because the baby is grabbing his beard.

The next night I went to a park with John after work.
There was a jogging path that went back into some woods and we walked down it until we came to a bench. We sat down and it was so dark. He put his arm around me and brushed my nipple with his fingertips but I said Wait because I knew it would make me lactate and then we made out and I felt the milk, warm and soaking into the cloth circles I wore inside my bra. He tasted like onions but he was a good kisser. He had a nice face. Gray eyes with long eyelashes and dimples when he smiled. Soft spiky black hair. He pulled me into his lap and kissed my neck and said So you want this. Yes, I said. I waited for you in the walk-in. He paused and looked at me. No one falls for that, he said.

He grew up on the streets of St. Louis, he said. He told me he never knew his dad and he was taken from his mother and put in foster care when he was seven. He smelled like amber, wood, musk, earth. He exuded sex but at no one in particular. He talked to you while he chewed and bits of lettuce fell out of his mouth, then he belched, then he offered to refill your water. If he came up behind me at a computer terminal sometimes he would stand close enough to me so I could feel his erection and once he said Meet me in the walk-in.

Come on then, he said, and stood up holding me. I put my feet on the ground and unzipped his pants. He unzipped mine and turned me around so I was facing the bench. He pulled down my pants and I knelt on the bench, bracing myself against the back of it. It wasn’t very comfortable and I had bruises on my knees the next day.

On his chest the tattooed face of a pit bull he said was the best friend he’d ever had, on his left calf a beckoning,
bare-titted mermaid. Over his entire back a flaming skull, the fire burning up toward the nape of his neck and the jaw narrowing to a chin cleft at his tailbone. On his wedding finger a black band where a ring would go, on his left upper arm a cross made of scar tissue that stretched from shoulder to elbow, which he cut in with a knife in his other hand. Uncircumcised and he’d once had a Prince Albert but said it stopped him from penetrating as hard as he wanted to.

September was John, October was Luke, and November was Damon. There was some overlap which is how they all got the disease but John was unreliable and Luke felt bad about it and Damon was into me so he’s the one I started seeing regularly. John lived in a shitty efficiency and I went over there sometimes if he said I could stop by and sometimes I went without asking. Most of the time he wasn’t there, even when he’d said I could come over. He had a twin mattress on the floor of the apartment but he’d put it up in front of the bathroom when I was there and we did it on the carpet. I think he didn’t want me to get the idea that he wanted me. I remember one time he told me I looked good and one time I told him his bread was moldy.

Luke was the one I should have wanted. He was tall and too good-looking. He had a deep voice that made me wish for so many things and he had a pretty bird dog. I’ve never liked dogs but that one was fine. Eric. He was a lot like Luke. Calm and well-bred. Luke told me how they’d go for a run and Eric would suddenly flash into a bush and Luke would find him rigid, stuck in his pointer pose, staring at some prey
concealed in the brush. Luke would have to pick him up and set him down somewhere else before he would release his muscles. One afternoon we were all three on Luke’s bed and Luke was lying behind me. He started rubbing my ass over and over, soft and unhurried. Petting me. I felt so contained. He was always so warm, like he had a fever. When he had rubbed my ass through my jeans for a long time he nudged me up on my knees in front of him and unbuttoned his jeans with one hand while he breathed in my ear and put his other hand up my shirt. He found my nipple and slid his thumb across it and back across it. Then he moved his hand down to my pants and unbuttoned them and pushed them down. He put his penis against my lips. I never got very wet for anyone but for him that day I was slick and he took so long to ease himself inside me. So slow. I had my head down on the bed by Eric because there was nowhere else to put it and I had a hand on his flank. He smelled clean and he was just lying there watching us. Luke pressed into me so slow that by the time he was all the way in I was massaging Eric’s flank with one hand and his shoulder with the other. Mashing on him like a cat making biscuits. I didn’t really know I was doing it but I had to put the intensity somewhere. I could feel Luke getting harder and longer and then he reached over me and pushed Eric off the bed. He took hold of one of my wrists and gathered the other wrist up in his grip so he was pulling my arms tight away from my head and pressing my wrists down into the bed. I was so much shorter than he was that he still had his other hand on the small of my back. Pushing it down firm on his cock. He held me in place like
that and I kept myself taut against him almost as if I were trying to resist or get away but it was the best thing I had ever felt with a man.