“Fuck you,” he told the man in the mirror. For good measure, Ryan flipped him off.
What had happened? Loneliness? Was that a fucking excuse? Something he could say? He tried it on for size, telling the man in the mirror, “I’m sorry I threw your clothes in your face and dragged you out of the room, and then, for good measure, threw my fucking car keys at you, but I was lonely.”
The word tasted rancid.
Jealous. That fit a bit more. The poor jealous boy who hadn’t gotten enough attention, while the pretty girl got it all. The poor jealous boy who’d only had his fucking cock sucked earlier in the evening by a woman who really did seem to like him. Seem? Odd choice of words, wasn’t that?
Well, had Kendra liked him?
He blinked, and the hideous naked man blinked back. Why would she like that? Why would anyone?
If he hadn’t gotten drunk, perhaps Julianne would’ve liked him. Jeff had even said he was her type. The naked man in the mirror scoffed at that.
“Fuck you,” he said again.
In the shower, the water was scalding hot. He left it that way until he couldn’t bear it.
He could forgive her, he thought, for going off and fucking Bruce. How was it any different from all the other times she’d fucked Bruce, after all? It wasn’t. She could’ve come told him first. Asked him, maybe, if he was alright.
He could hardly blame the other men at the party for thinking Jennifer hot. She was hot. Last night she looked so very sexy in that dress. All they did was call it like they saw it. Thinking with their dicks perhaps, but wasn’t that what every man there did? Wasn’t that what this whole fucking thing was ultimately about? Thinking with their dicks and pussies for a change?
As if on cue, his own dick popped straight out. That fucking thing again. He was over the easy erection that pill had provided. He took the shower head down and pulled the knob back over to hot, concentrating it on the proud little fucker.
Before long, it went flaccid again.
Back to the bed, Ryan’s body pink and angry. He pulled the comforter over himself without toweling off, lying in in the now-wet sheets, and stared at the crack in the ceiling. Had it returned now just to torment him?
When he awoke again, the room was dark. His mouth was so dry it felt like his lips were ripping as he opened it. The migraine pounded. His hangover was here with him, here in the dark, and he could think of no more appropriate company.
He didn’t know if Jennifer would come home. He wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t.
If she did, though, he knew they should talk. That they should put it all out there. Everything they hadn’t talked about. The feelings about Jennifer’s outburst at Bruce and Paige’s house. The feelings about last night. The rights and the wrongs and the responsibility. It would all have to go on the table.
Once it did, though, what was to stop everything else from spilling out? That landslide that had been held back ever so precariously by a barrier emblazoned with the words, “Well, there’s always swinging.”
What if it started sliding and never stopped?
43
Ever since Jennifer had been a little girl, she’d loved watching planes take off and land at the airport. Watching them had been easier then, and one could do it from inside the airport without having a ticket. She’d spent many afternoons with her grandmother, riding the L into the lowest floor of O’Hare Airport, wandering past the massive terminal windows, watching them fly. They spoke to her of possibility, she could go anywhere, if she wanted to. There was some money involved, of course, but all she really had to do was climb aboard and be whisked away to someplace magical.
Someplace else.
Today, watching the planes from over a mile away, Jennifer still longed to be whisked away. To go someplace else.
She sat at the counter that lined the windows of the O’Hare Oasis, a steel and glass structure passing over a highway near the airport. From here she could see them take off and land, though without the immediacy of being right there in the airport with Grandma Straub. From here she couldn’t daydream about being told there was an empty seat on the next flight to Jamaica, and wouldn’t she just love to take it?
But the watching sufficed. In the last few years, she’d come here once a month or so, when she didn’t know what to say at home. When she’d yearned for contact and couldn’t find it. To avoid going seeking somewhere (someone?) else to look for it, she’d come here. Open twenty-four hours and loiterer friendly. No one would tell her she was taking up a table for too long. No one would say in that friendly but condescending tone “Ma’am, don’t you think you ought to go home?”
She sat at the long counter designed to eat and sit and work and lean. She needed to lean today. Elbows on the table today. How quickly things had gone south. Maybe that was the price they’d pay.
She’d not felt guilty about the things they’d done since they’d met Bruce and Paige, the things they’d done together. The sex. Occasionally there’d been a pang, sure, but one who grew up Catholic never quite loses the penchant for guilt or shame. Today, though, the shame had arrived in spades, setting up shop with guilt and loathing. Today she felt worse than she had in years.
Jennifer didn’t understand exactly what had happened last night, but she’d pieced together snippets. Ryan had gotten drunk because she’d left him alone. Half of herself refused to accept responsibility for that, wrestling with the other half. He’d been drinking before she left, after all – was it her fault he’d just drank more after? He could have said no. He could’ve taken her out of there with a word, not a hand.
She’d been scared after Paige. After the blowup. Scared that she didn’t belong in this community, doing these things. Because she wasn’t strong enough, didn’t have the emotional wherewithal it took. There it was, another pocket, another well of crude guilt bubbling up into her brain pan. Bruce and Paige, she’d really cocked that up, hadn’t she.
If she hadn’t insisted that night that they “go and see what Bruce and Paige were up to,” because she’d “really needed a friendly face right now,” well, they probably would’ve been at the party last night with the Shepards. They would’ve been there, to help the newbies navigate the deep end, filled with wonders, such wonders, but sharks, too. Bruce and Paige could’ve been the main show and not just the final act.
If only she’d managed her emotions better.
She heard her voice on the other side, the contrarian, the feminist side, say, “Fuck that shit,” clear enough that she looked around to see if anyone else at the counter had heard it too. They hadn’t.
Her emotions? Seriously? Of all the forms that the shame could’ve taken, all the avenues to deliver the guilt, her brain was trying to tell her that her emotions were the problem, after the drunken shit show that had ended last night’s event? Fuck that shit indeed. She’d followed her instincts, something that both she and Ryan were trying to do more, followed the thread as it showed up and took her somewhere.
She hadn’t sought any of that. It had been serendipity, kismet. Did it still count, if it turned dark and sour?
Is there a way back from this?
The question in her mind surprised her, she didn’t feel like she’d asked it herself. She’d encountered it, almost, spray painted on a wall, with stenciled illustrations of herself and Ryan cowering away from the words, as if painted by some gray matter Banksy.
She’d thought they could bounce back, after Bruce and Paige. Hadn’t been sure, but the possibility was still there. Vince and Kendra had kicked that possibility into an almost sure thing. They could still do it. They were young, sexy, strong, smart. Catches, the both of them.