“Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” She watches him for a moment, then her eyes lose focus and some settling or shift in her lumbar regions signals he can press in again. Home he thinks, leading with his crotch, and her core seems to part and flow around him. They’re trembling. It’s so hard not making any noise. On the other side of the backdrop people are talking and carrying on with their idiot lives. Faison seems near tears as she grabs his lapels and wraps her legs around his waist, cowgirl boots and all. He clutches her from below, her compact little bottom fits neatly in his hands and he conjures up a mental picture of that, his hands full of fabled hot-pants ass and it strikes him in a blaze of exploding pheromones, Holy shit, I’m making out with a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader! Faison, meanwhile, has forged ahead, she’s rolling her hips and breathing mansions of glory in his face and on this day Billy will let himself believe he’s special because she comes in fewer than a dozen strokes, with a mighty clench and up-curving heave, a dolphin squeal stuck deep in her chest. That last torque of her hips nearly breaks his back, at least that’s the way it feels as he hangs on with every bit of life’s breath squeezed out of him, his vertebrae popping like bubble wrap. Then it’s done, except for a few lingering aftershocks. Like a shipwreck survivor dragging herself onto a beach, Faison releases first one leg, then the other. Her boots find the floor. She slumps against him.
“You okay?”
She mumbles something, then glances to the side to make sure no one’s watching. “My God,” she murmurs, and like a child whose attention is wholly elsewhere, she reaches up and gives his Silver Star an idle pull. When she draws back and looks up at him there are tears in her eyes.
“I’ve never moved this quick with anybody,” she whispers. “But it’s not wrong. I know it’s not.”
He shakes his head, which of its own accord tips toward her. “It’s not,” he mumbles into her hair.
“It’s just you, something about you. Maybe it’s the war.” She grabs him by the short scruff of his neck and gets him where she can see his eyes. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-one.”
He forces himself to meet her stare. In a second or two his retinas ache.
“You have an old soul.”
He thinks that might be from a movie but doesn’t mind. There may even be a kind of truth in it, the way Iraq ages you in dog years. He gives her a tug and she promptly collapses against his chest.
“We better go,” she murmurs.
“You’re incredible.”
She sighs. Neither of them moves. The voices are moving away, toward the back of the room. His erection is active and painful but apparently there’s just nothing to be done about it.
“I’m gonna be honest with you,” she whispers, “I’m not a virgin. I’ve had three boyfriends, but they were all long-term relationships. I’m not casual with my body, I just want you to know that.”
He nods and dips down for a whiff of her neck. Beneath the floral scents of perfume and soap he discovers a dense, rooty smell like sweet potato paste. Her smell. He can’t remember ever being so happy.
“It’s a really serious thing for me,” she whispers. “Being intimate with somebody.”
“Me too,” virginal Billy mouths into her neck.
“But it’s like if you really care about someone and trust them and know they feel the same way about you, I think it’s okay to be physically intimate. But it takes time, you know? To build that kind of trust. It doesn’t happen after one or two dates or a couple of weeks, it takes time, a real commitment to honoring each other. Like for me, just where I am in my life right now, I need to be with somebody for at least three months before I get to the trust point.”
All of which seems like a lot of information, but Billy doesn’t mind. He knows what his fellow Bravos would say: Let’s fuck now and I’ll owe you three months.
“That’s all right,” he whispers. “But I’d sure like to see you when I get back.”
She lifts her head. “Back from where?”
“Well, Iraq. We’ve gotta finish out our tour.”
“You—what?” She’s still whispering, but barely. “You’re going back? But nobody said, wait, everybody just assumes, oh my God, yall were done. Oh my God. When are you leaving?”
“Saturday.”
“Saturday?” she cries, her voice breaking. She lifts her hair with one hand as if to rip it out, an ancient gesture that makes Billy weak in the knees. Only women, he thinks — only his mother, his sisters, and now Faison, only they have ever shown real grief for his sake, and his eyes burn with gratitude for all womankind. Faison rises on her toes for a furious kiss, and Billy’s erection, which had been napping at half-mast, instantly springs to attention.
“Oh my God,” she whispers, “if we could just—”
“Cheerleaders!” barks a female with a drill sergeant’s voice, “form up in the hall!”
“Oh shoot, I’ve gotta go.” Faison gives him a last kiss, then cups his cheek with her hand. “Listen…”
“Give me your digits.”
“I just got a new phone!” Meaning—???? “Come find me, I’ll be at the twenty-yard line.”
She pokes her head past the backdrop’s edge, then turns. “Billy,” she murmurs, and tries to smile, but falters when her eyes meet his. Then she’s gone.
JAMIE LEE CURTIS MADE A SHITTY MOVIE
BILLY HAS NO IDEA how they got here. That part is blank, like a concussion knocked him clean out of time’s flow into the next half hour, for he finds himself deposited on the playing field. The Bravos, Norm & Co., they are milling around the flats near the end zone, deep in the stadium’s horseshoe curve where the wind tears around in stinging freshets and flukes, a regular toilet bowl of rotary action down here. The transect of sky through the open dome is the color and texture of rumbled pewter, an ominous boil of bruised sepias and ditchwater grays that foretells all kinds of weather-related misery. “Gonna snow,” says Mango, their winter-conditions expert, “I can smell it,” but nobody pays any attention to him. Their little huddle is a-swirl with movie talk. Something has happened, Billy infers, new developments have been breaking while he was otherwise engaged. Howard and Grazer are out, apparently. Hanks is definitely out, Stone was never in, and Clooney’s people keep assiduously not returning Albert’s calls, but suddenly looming in the breach is Norman Oglesby with the promise, or let’s say the potential, or at least the not-so-far-fetched possibility, of robust millions in production financing—
“He’s intrigued,” is how Albert puts it, intrigued implying a level of interest higher than running your yap but short of laying the actual lucre on the table. “He likes the idea, and he likes you guys. But it’s early days yet.”
Early days, but Bravo has only two left, a woefully short fuse in the labyrinthine world of the movie deal. First this has to happen and then that has to happen and then about thirty more things simultaneously or in sequence without any previous item crapping out on you, the process fed, as far as Billy can tell, by outrageous verbal plyings of fear and greed. You make it happen by convincing everyone it’s happening, belief in the first instance being a vaporous construct of duplicity, puff, evasion, cant, and bald-faced lies. A con, in other words. Not that Billy thinks less of Albert because of this. It seems the process has huge margins for treachery built in; everyone just assumes everyone else is lying until a critical mass erupts from the sheer tonnage of bullshit put forth, and then they aren’t. Lying, that is. A sort of truth has been made to happen. Whether this business model has anything to do with the quality of the product that Hollywood turns out, Billy hasn’t had time to consider.