Maidenhead (14 page)

‘And put your finger in the stream.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Please, Angel. Come on. I want you to do it.’

I imagined Lee saying, You’re not dumb! Go!

Elijah crouched down in front of my thighs. His head was almost half my body. Why would I go? Why would I go now? I could touch his hair, his pulsing neck. His lips in the middle of his black beard, blooming. Elijah stared between my thighs at my underwear. I felt them getting wet. I didn’t know what to do.

‘You’re ready now?’

His voice was soft. I nodded.

Elijah touched the head of his flute to my gut.

‘Don’t,’ I said. But it felt okay. Elijah pressed my stomach harder. It hurt just a little. I felt like I had to piss.

‘You can go,’ he said.

‘I don’t have to. I really don’t.’

Then Elijah traced the flute up underneath my shirt. He drew a line with it through my breasts. From under my shirt it went to my lips. He touched my lips with the head of the flute. It was damp from his mouth. He started opening my lips.

I was going to say
don’t
again but Elijah used my open mouth as a chance to go in. The flute was a prod. My lips hardened around it.

‘Relax them.’

I did it. I relaxed. Then I heard a sound, like a fan just turned on.

Elijah pushed in and out of my mouth with the flute. My T-shirt got pulled away from my body like a tent. There was friction. He could see everything. I felt my lips soften but I was still sucking. I let the flute move in and out of my lips, under my shirt. I closed my eyes and I knew he was looking. He was looking at me with that flute fucking in and out of my mouth. And then I couldn’t help it, with it pressing on my tongue, so relaxed I wanted to say
guh
, I started peeing right through my underwear. I put my hand there to stop it but I couldn’t stop it.

The flute poked and twirled faster. Elijah’s breath was metallic, right at my neck. ‘I told you to come. That’s it. I told you to come.’ I spasmed. It all went too fast. I was still pissing when I came. My throat felt like a balloon. I wanted it out of me, coughing.

‘What am I gonna do, what am I gonna do?’ It was hard to speak right. ‘My underwear’s wet.’

Elijah helped me stand. I felt totally weak. I let him work off my skirt and my soaking underpants. Elijah got some toilet paper and he wiped me like I was a child. My knees started to bend. He held me up by the armpits.

‘I missed you,’ he said.

I had never been so close to a man. I’d never been able to be right there, and his smell, his sweat, the metal root smell of his breath and him helping me. Elijah had to balance me up against the sink. Then he closed the bathroom door with his foot. The door stuck on something. My lips were open, my eyes were closed, I was trying to swallow to stop any tears.

Elijah whispered up at my ear: ‘Would you come places with me if I asked you to?’

‘Yeah,’ I heard myself saying. ‘I’ll go anywhere, anywhere with you.’

I opened my mouth. I had to kiss him alive. I had my tongue in his mouth and I was sticking to him. It was all happening to me, it was finally happening. I moved around my tongue, we were kissing and dancing. I rubbed my red cheek onto his beard. Elijah moved his hands to take off his pants, with one foot sliding off his shorts. The lights were so bright in that bathroom. I wanted the flute again. I only wanted him. I wanted what he wanted. Elijah had the flute in one hand and he was holding me where I was with the other. I looked down at his legs as we were kissing, his two long naked thighs and cock low like a stick. Tears globbed and swelled at the top of my throat. Elijah pressed his thighs into mine. His purple-brown cock underneath all the hair. I could see how it was charging. I wanted to hold it. But Elijah slipped the flute between my thighs. He started rolling it back and forth so the middle almost kept slipping inside me. I made sounds like cracks that I couldn’t control. The sink pushed into my back, forming a bruise.

‘You have to be in the right place,’ Elijah whispered, straining, as he twisted the head of the flute. ‘I’m trying to help you.’

It was uncomfortable and I couldn’t breathe right. I looked down between his naked chest and my T-shirt: his fist upturned, half of the flute. His cock was twice the size of the flute.

‘I’m gonna stick it up there as far as it’ll go.’

I was not held up by my feet anymore but his knees pressing into my thighs.

‘Take your hand off the sink and rub yourself now,’ Elijah sounded tense. ‘Take your hand and touch yourself.’

I squeezed my hand down between us. I didn’t know why he wanted me to do that right now. I heard something outside the bathroom door. I was terrified Gayl was going to walk in. I stared at the doorknob, it wasn’t moving.

‘Forget it, forget it. Rub in a circle.’

I’d already come and I felt too raw to do it.

‘Go on, keep on rubbing. That’s good.’

Elijah was smiling at what I was doing.

‘Say you’re my bitch.’

‘Uh?’

‘Say you’re my little bitch.’

The wooden flute was all the way inside me. It felt good one second, then it felt stuck.

‘Come on, say you’re my dirty little bitch.’

As my knees softened the flute got higher.

‘Say it. Say it.’

‘I’m your, I’m your little dirty ... ’

Elijah licked in my ear. ‘Yeah like that ... ’

‘Bitch.’

Oh god, that felt good! His tongue in my ear.

My head dropped back and now I was really feeling something, the flute in my body, a dog humping desperate, a bitch on the floor. I grabbed up and pumped. My hips moved side to side, it pushed in me hard and forward and I pulled and wiggled back. I felt myself making fire like that. Then my whole body clamped and a bark left my jaw.

The bathroom went dark. I was floating, my arms and legs full of needles. I dissolved to the floor. The flute rattled there.

‘Elijah,’ I whispered, feeling for his feet. ‘Turn on the light.’

‘Shh, I’m right here.’

‘Turn on the light!’

I heard a small bell, a ping. My necklace had pinged. It was gone, in the hallway.

‘Please! Turn it on!’

Something bad was going to happen. I felt his hands on my head. How’d he see where I was? I couldn’t see. I held on to his wrist and he lifted me up. Then Elijah hugged me.

‘We don’t need the light,’ he said.

We were shadows touching. I wanted it to last. I closed my eyes, putting darkness on top of darkness, and breathed our smells being mixed together.

I took a picture like that of the two of us together, locked in the bathroom, locked in this hotel so that I would always smell this: rosehip, caramel, the fountain of piss.

We were encased, intertwined in silence for a while.

§

‘Dad, Jeff, this is Lee.’

Jeff stared at Lee like she was trapped behind glass. She wore the same fuzzy red sweater as when I first met her. My dad still thought that Jen and Charlene were my friends. He had on jeans and a button-down. He wasn’t saying anything.

‘
Dad
... ’

‘I’m Myra’s father. Neil. Call me Neil. Sorry. Please.’

Lee looked my father in the eyes. ‘It’s really great to meet you, Neil.’

‘Yes, yes, you too. So what do you do, Lee? Myra hasn’t told me anything about you.’

‘I’m in between jobs,’ Lee said, totally at ease. ‘But I’d like to be an editor one day. I work with Aaron too.’

My father glanced at me.

‘Uh, Aaron is Jeremy Copter’s brother. Jeremy from my school. He’s friends with Jen and Charlene and those guys. We hang out sometimes.’

‘Oh. Okay,’ my father said. He seemed disoriented.

The doorbell rang. Jeff ran for the door and my father left us to pay the pizza delivery guy. The table was dirty. It hadn’t been wiped in a week.

‘Your father seems nice,’ Lee said. ‘Concerned.’

‘He wasn’t always. It’s changing. I mean, since my mom left.’

Jeff brought the pizza to the table, holding it high in the air. My dad offered Lee a glass of wine. ‘You’re of age, I take it?’

‘I’m okay,’ Lee smiled.

‘I’ll have a glass,’ I said. I felt embarrassed by my father and Lee talking to each other.

My father visited our liquor cabinet in the living room and returned with a bottle and three fancy glasses – the full-bowled ones with the really long stems.

‘This is a burgundy,’ he said. ‘The good stuff.’

‘Cool!’

‘Your mother and I brought this bottle back from our final trip to Europe.’

‘When you and Jody had that party,’ Jeff piped in.

‘Oh yes,’ said my dad, looking at me.

Final trip, I thought.

‘Our neighbours called the cops,’ Jeff explained to Lee. ‘I slept through the entire thing!’

‘Apparently it was a very,
very
good party,’ my father added, moving his eyebrows up and down, like he used to.

‘Why?’ Lee asked.

‘Myra’s friend Jen threw up sangria, was that sangria? I remember orange pulp in a beautiful cloud burned into our good white couch, which we had to throw out and, if I remember correctly, the police were called ... ’

My father paused for effect.

‘
Dad
.’ I didn’t want him to go on. I knew he was trying to be funny. But it was like my father was drunk without even opening the bottle.

‘Lee, have you met our Jody yet?’

‘No,’ I hissed. ‘Lee hasn’t met Jody.’ Jody would have fucking killed my father for this.

‘Wine sounds good,’ Lee said. She smiled at me. ‘Okay?’

The music had been cranked up so loud at that party that no one had even heard the door. The police barged in, there were four of them and they were shouting at everyone. No one thought to turn down the music so it was on the entire time they were there, checking every single room, confiscating every single bottle. I was with Jen and Charlene in my room, sharing a mickey. I didn’t even know that Jen had already thrown up. Apparently the police found Jody naked in our parents’ room with three university guys. That was written up in the report so my parents found out. They had to pay this massive fine for underage drinking. They didn’t even know that Jody was on the pill.

My dad poured three full glasses of the burgundy. I reached across the table for mine.

‘Hang on,’ Lee said. ‘Let me make a toast.’

Lee looked at me and nodded. I felt so strange.

‘To Neil, to Myra, to Jeff and to Jody
in absentia
.’ Lee looked up at our alien light fixture that hung over the steaming pizza box. ‘Thank you for this food and this company and being in the moment. Chin-chin.’

Jeff started laughing. ‘Chin-chin?’

I downed my wobbly glass. ‘Chin-chin! Thank you, Father, for that final trip!’

My father sipped his wine and ignored me. ‘Cheers. Thank you, Lee. It’s been a while since I’ve had anything to drink.’

‘This is really, really good,’ Lee said.

‘Yep. My mother knows her grape,’ I said. ‘Wonder what she’s drinking in Seoul. She’s in Seoul, right?’

My father peeled his pepperonis off his slice and ate them first. ‘Yes, Myra,’ he said. ‘We all know that.’