Nine Inches (18 page)

“Don’t you touch me!” Her voice was shrill and indignant, trembling on the edge of hysteria. “Don’t you dare fucking touch me!”

Sims was too shocked to speak. He wondered if she’d mistaken him for someone else, an old boyfriend, maybe, a jerk who’d hurt her in some unforgivable way.

It’s me,
he wanted to tell her.
It’s Rick. Dr. Sims.

“You
asshole
!” She shoved him again, harder than the
fi
rst time, like a schoolboy starting a
fi
ght. She looked almost feral, her face contorted with rage and revulsion. “Why’d you let her die?”

“I didn’t — ” Sims began, but he had no idea how to
fi
nish. “We did everything we could.”

“Oh, yeah.” She nodded in bitter agreement. “You did a great job.”

Heather turned toward the co
ffi
n, that adorable picture of Kayla, and lost her train of thought for a second or two. When she
fi
nally spoke, her voice was so
ft
er, more bewildered than angry.

“Really fucking awesome, Dr. Sims.
Th
anks for all your help.”

“Heather, please . . .” But by then he was already being led away by an apologetic man in a dark suit, an employee of the funeral home, who escorted him to the front door and ejected him, politely, from the premises.

THAT SAME
evening, Sims attended a retirement party for Irene Pollard at the Old Colonial Inn. It was an anomaly — he rarely socialized with the admin sta
ff
and wasn’t all that friendly with the guest of honor, a grandmotherly receptionist whose incompetence was legendary around the Health Plan. But he was still a bit shaken by the incident at the funeral home and thought a drink or two might help wash away the bitter taste in his mouth.

Th
e party broke up early, but Sims was detained on his way out by Eduardo Saenz, a gay physical therapist who’d helped him with a shoulder problem a couple of years earlier. Eduardo greeted him with boozy enthusiasm and invited him to share a pitcher of margaritas with some colleagues who’d relocated to a booth in the back room. Sims accepted without hesitation — he still wasn’t ready to go home — and was delighted to discover that the colleagues in question were Olga Kochenko and Kelly Foley, two of his most attractive coworkers. Sims didn’t know either of them very well, but they welcomed him like an old buddy, skipping right past the small talk and inviting him into their conversation.

“We were just talking about threeways,” Kelly informed him from across the table. She was an athletic, short-haired blonde, a nurse practitioner from Cardiology. “
Th
ere’s a little di
ff
erence of opinion.”

“Oh, yeah?” Sims nodded sagely, as though he were an expert on the subject. “What’s the problem?”

“Kelly doesn’t like them,” said Olga, a pharmacist whose short skirts and ridiculously high heels made her a frequent topic of lunchtime conversation among the male doctors of Sims’s acquaintance. “She thinks they’re tacky.”

“I never used that word,” Kelly protested. She had the planet Saturn tattooed on the inside of her right forearm, and a pink star outlined in black on the back of her le
ft
hand. “I’m just over it, you know?
Th
ere’s too much to keep track of.”

“Girl, you gotta learn to multitask,” Eduardo told her.

“I can walk and chew gum,” Kelly assured him. “It’s the other people I’m worried about. All those arms and legs
fl
ailing around. I’m sick of getting kicked in the face.”

“I’ll tell you what I hate,” Olga volunteered. She was sitting next to Sims, wearing a low-cut peasant blouse that revealed a hint of cleavage, just enough that he felt gallant for averting his gaze. “When you never even signed up for a threeway? Like a few weeks ago, I went home with this hot girl from my Zumba class? We’re in her bedroom, just getting started, and the next thing you know there’s this naked bodybuilder dude standing in the doorway, stroking his dick and
fi
lming us with his iPhone. I’m like,
Hello? Who the fuck are you?
And she’s like,
Oh, that’s Benjamin. I hope you don’t mind if he joins us.
”

Kelly rolled her eyes and said she’d been there, more than once. Eduardo wanted to hear a little more about Benjamin, but Olga turned her attention to Sims, sizing him up with a playful expression. She had a cute, slightly doughy face that she spiced up with dramatic eye shadow and long fake lashes.

“What about you, Doctor? What’s your professional opinion?”

“About threeways?” Sims made a slow motorboat noise with his lips. “You’re asking the wrong guy. I’m married with six-year-old twins.
Th
ese days it’s pretty much a miracle if I get a two-way.”

Olga laughed and touched her glass to his. “You’re funny.”

Sims
fi
gured they’d move on to a di
ff
erent subject, but they were just getting started. Kelly said she’d had her
fi
rst threesome back in high school, when she got seduced by a couple whose toddler she was babysitting, which meant that she actually got paid for it. Olga claimed that she’d once started making out with her dental hygienist right in the middle of a cleaning, and that the dentist eventually wandered in and joined the fun. Sims kept saying,
Come on, that didn’t happen,
but what did he know? Just because he’d washed up on a sexual desert island, that didn’t mean everybody else was stranded, too, doomed to a lifelong diet of coconuts. Some people were living it up on the party boat, enjoying the big bu
ff
et.

“You did one together, right?” Eduardo asked.

“Oh, God.” Kelly hid her face in her hands. “
Th
at was a disaster.”

“You were
fi
ne,” Olga said. “It was totally my fault.”

“She got the giggles,” Kelly told Sims. “And then I got them, too, and we just couldn’t go through with it.
Th
e guy got so mad.”

“Who was he?” Sims wanted to know.

Kelly shrugged, like the guy was just an extra in their movie. “Some asshole we met on vacation. Really full of himself.”

“It’s weird,” Olga observed. “I thought it would be nice, ’cause we know each other so well. But when push came to shove, it was like,
Yeah, she’s my best friend, but there is no way I’m gonna eat her pussy.
”

“Your loss,” Kelly said, and they all laughed.

Sims’s phone buzzed, delivering yet another text from his wife asking when he planned on coming home.
Soon,
he responded for the third time, grateful for the elasticity of the word, the way it renewed its promise with each passing moment, even as the thought of actually going home grew more and more oppressive. He could picture his arrival, the humiliating interrogation at the door, the way he’d have to account for his whereabouts and grovel for forgiveness, like a teenager who’d broken curfew. It was just too
boring
to contemplate, such a soul-killing exercise, and it made him wonder if Jackie felt as trapped as he did, as if they’d been cast in a bad play they’d never even auditioned for.

EDUARDO LEFT
around ten-thirty, but Sims stuck around to polish o
ff
the pitcher. Even in retrospect, he found it hard to blame himself for what happened next. He wasn’t
fl
irting with either of his new friends — not even with Olga, who was sitting so close, her knee bumping companionably against his beneath the table — nor did he possess even the remotest hope of getting laid. He was just happy to be there, killing time, postponing the inevitable return to real life. And he certainly wasn’t making a sexual overture when he stood up and announced that he was o
ff
to the men’s room.

“Want some company?” Olga asked.

“Excuse me?” Sims was pretty drunk by then and wasn’t sure he’d heard right.

Olga held his gaze. “I asked if you wanted some company.”

“In the men’s room?”

“Not this again,” Kelly groaned. “What is it with you?”

“I’m curious,” Olga explained. “I just want to see what’s it like in there.”

“It’s really not that great,” Sims assured her.

“All right.” Olga held up both hands in a gesture of surrender. “If it makes you uncomfortable . . .”

He heard the taunt in her voice, the junior high challenge to his manhood.

“I don’t mind,” he said. “You want to go, let’s go.”

“You sure? I wouldn’t want to put you in an awkward position . . .”

“It’s a free country,” Sims told her. “You can do whatever you want.”

Olga
fl
ashed a victorious grin at Kelly as she slid out of the booth. Even in heels Olga was tiny, at least six inches shorter than Sims, but he felt like a little boy as she took him by the hand and led him through the deserted restaurant.
Th
ey turned down a narrow hallway alongside the kitchen and stopped in front of a door marked
GENTLEMEN
. Sims pushed it open and stepped inside, with Olga following close behind. To his great relief, he saw that it was empty.

“Welcome.” He gestured at their humble surroundings — the side-by-side sink and urinal, the lone stall with its swinging door, the over
fl
owing trash can, the dingy tile
fl
oor. In the eternal contest between piss and disinfectant, the smell of piss had a slight edge. “I wasn’t expecting visitors.”

“It’s lovely,” she observed. “If I had a men’s room, it would look just like this.”

“I’m glad you like it.” Sims smiled uncertainly. “But if you don’t mind, I kinda have to use the facilities.”

“Go right ahead,” she told him. “I’m just a
fl
y on the wall.”

He could have ducked into the stall, but the dare, as he understood it, required him to use the urinal. He was just drunk enough not to be embarrassed as he unzipped and made the necessary adjustments, turning his body at a slight angle to preserve his modesty. Once he was under way, he glanced over his shoulder and saw Olga standing against the wall beside the hand dryer, watching him with friendly, non-prurient interest. It was a strangely intimate moment, and Sims could feel himself blushing as he turned around and
fi
nished his business. Neither of them said a word as he washed and dried his hands, then followed her out of the restroom.

Kelly was gone when they returned to the table. Sims le
ft
a tip, then walked Olga out to her car, a Mini Cooper parked at the dark end of the lot.
Th
ey kissed for a few seconds, and then he bent her over the hood, tugged her panties out of the way, and fucked her from behind, clutching a
fi
stful of her dark hair to steady himself.
Th
ey didn’t have a condom, so he pulled out; she turned around and knelt uncomplainingly on the gravel, smiling up at him like a suitor about to pop the question.

Sims experienced a powerful moment of euphoria in the run-up to his orgasm — it was almost as if his soul had levitated from his body — but it passed too quickly and he returned to himself with a thud, as if he’d fallen from the sky. He thought suddenly of Jackie —
Oh, shit!
— and then of Heather, standing in front of her daughter’s co
ffi
n.
Really fucking awesome, Dr. Sims.
When he came, it felt like a rush of sorrow, as if he were pumping molten sadness into Olga’s mouth, though she later remarked that it tasted pretty good, a little sweeter than average.

SIMS REALIZED
pretty quickly that the music he wanted to play required an electric guitar. Money was tight — he was paying the condo rent on top of his jumbo mortgage — so he focused on used equipment, checking Craigslist every day, making frequent visits to Rosedale Discount Music and the Guitar Center at the mall, hoping to stumble on a bargain. He came across a few decent instruments in his price range, but nothing that was anywhere near as good as the candy-apple Stratocaster he’d owned back in high school.

About a month into his search, a sympathetic clerk at the Guitar Center told him about Drogan’s, this under-the-radar shop in Gi
ff
ord that specialized in repairing and rebuilding vintage guitars.
Th
e owner was a legendary
fi
gure in the rock world, a former roadie who’d worked with lots of famous people.

“It’s pretty funky,” he said. “De
fi
nitely worth a look.”

Drogan’s didn’t have a website, but Sims found a listing in the white pages and stopped there on his way home from work the following evening. It was an o
ff
-putting place, a low stucco building that could just as easily have housed a machine shop or a XXX video store, squatting between an ugly o
ffi
ce complex and a tuxedo rental outlet on a godforsaken stretch of Lake Avenue.
Th
ere was no signage and only one small window facing the street, nothing to identify the business or suggest that a visitor might be welcome. Sims entered through the side door, startling the guy behind the counter, a middle-aged hipster who’d just taken the
fi
rst bite out of a monster burrito. He gazed at his visitor in mute apology, eyes wide and cheeks bulging.

“Jush secon,” he mumbled, his mouth full of beans and guacamole.

“Take your time,” Sims told him.

Still chewing, the guy put down the burrito and slid o
ff
his stool, wiping his hands on the front of his jeans. He was around Sims’s age, probably early forties, big and so
ft
in the middle, with thinning hair and Civil War muttonchops.

“Sorry, man. You caught me in
fl
agrante. Don’t get much business this time of night.”

“I didn’t mean to interrupt your dinner.”

“No worries.”
Th
e guy took a sip of bottled water, washing down his food. “I’m Mike Drogan, by the way.”