‘You love him still?’
Teresa nodded. She could not actually force the words out. This was more difficult than she had anticipated. Perhaps she should try telling this to an analyst.
Señora Espinoza was full of surprises. She saw right through Teresa, and Teresa, it seemed, could not read people as well as she thought.
Later that afternoon, at the market, she had briefly returned the casual smile of a handsome man browsing in the produce section. It took all of five seconds to engage a brief sexual fantasy about this stranger, a harmless momentary diversion. As a girlfriend had told her, when you stop looking, you’re dead.
The image was still in her mind when Rudy had come home. The bed, the condoms, the sex had all been components of the fantasy, and he had collected them like books off an easy-to-reach shelf. This raised the unsettling possibility that perhaps Rudy’s perceptions were growing stronger.
His sleeping arm was still in contact with her flesh, and that kept her from finding slumber for a few moments longer.
Sexual arousal fogged Rudy’s ‘read’, a factor of Teresa’s strategy the next day. If he saw her intent, like a Post-It note on the surface of her mind, he might get mad. She circumvented this hazard by waking first.
By the time his eyes opened, she had already taken him in her mouth, deep and slickly. Teresa knew of no more instant and intimate connection with another human than lovemaking, and what had befallen them both last night could not be called that. This time would be different.
His movements still dopey, his vision unfocused, Rudy exhaled his dreams and drew in air from the new day. His hands found her body with tropistic familiarity and engaged her skin with the warmth of need. She had removed more than his physical hurts, after her own, and now, refuelled by sleep, his touch was nothing but loving, as electric as ever.
Her goal ran further than the temporary removal of the pain, the anger. She knew a Band-Aid fix would only yield more pain for both of them. She had to exert control and not lose her head to lust, not tip over so far that Rudy might glimpse her intent.
She swung her leg over and gave him a splendid view of her ass as she backed onto him, engulfing his cock to the bone. Rudy ground his teeth and alternated between massaging her butt and clenching the borders of the mattress. He was awake now, damned sure.
It was essentially the same position used for rape less than a day ago — rotated ninety degrees, and divested of harm.
Teresa turned again on well-stretched muscles, keeping Rudy inside her, now meeting his gaze and commencing a quick, scooping thrust that shallowed his breath. With Rudy, there was a heartbeat before orgasm during which his entire body would tighten up, as if on the brink of falling off a very high cliff, a sort of diver’s tension Teresa knew well. She had to be alert for it. Her own first climax was a teasing little curl of sensation that was busy racing along on its own timetable, and she could not permit it to distract her, just this once.
She felt him tighten up, and broke rhythm precisely on the beat, rising up so he was almost entirely outside her… then surging definitively down, gorging him as she clasped his head in both hands and, with her mind, pulled as hard as she could.
The delirious abrasion and tactile immediacy of Rudy’s ejaculation sped her up and, unexpectedly, tipped her over, flooding her nerves with hot electricity. They rarely came simultaneously; that was an unrealistic cliché, a sort of porno movie gag they both mocked. But sometimes it actually happened that way, and this time it was happening exactly that way, as she felt his whole body, flexed hard as a fist, giving her everything he had as one of those little-death cries escaped him.
It was like getting hit by a wave and swept down by the undertow. Teresa grabbed him hard enough to leave bruises, and bit her lower lip, freeing blood, and hung on, and cried out herself.
He brought her a towel and a drink and a warm washcloth, and they stayed lazily tangled up for a while, as though the rest of the day did not matter.
She collected her wits and then, purposefully, replayed their love-making in her mind, superimposing the face of that anonymous guy in the market over Rudy’s. That man who hadn’t even been a flirtation, and who had, in total innocence, got her battered.
Rudy just smiled at her, stroking her hair. When he returned her fulsome gaze she felt sure he could see her trick, would plunge quickly towards a different kind of heat. He just kept looking at her, frankly, the way he’d stare if they were strangers and this was love at first sight. The conceit was nice but Teresa knew that love was a process of learning another person, and that took time, which was why she had stuck by Rudy even through the bitter times, the harsh and hitting times. You needed time, and caution, and tolerance, and if you did it right, you earned love. Surely Rudy understood that, but he just kept looking at her, and it was beginning to irritate her.
‘What?’ she said, suddenly self-conscious.
‘It’s funny,’ he said. ‘Yesterday I was drowning in anger, I was like a lit fuse, and I wished as hard as I could for things to change… and I think I got my wish, because I’m trying to read you right now and I can’t get a thing.’
‘Really?’
He swallowed and nodded. ‘For real. You know something else? It doesn’t matter. As long as I’ve got you, the rest doesn’t matter.’
Abruptly, she realised the rage had been successfully drained from him. It was like watching a film projected on glass, through which she could perceive Rudy’s face. She was reading two inputs. She knew her own expression must be absurdly blank. Not wanting to give herself away, she covered quickly by answering him with a kiss, and retreating to the bathroom.
Her lip still stung from her passion-chomp, and ministering to it would be a light task. She watched her mirror reflection touch healing finger to mouth. Nothing happened.
She tried again, concentrating. More nothing.
What she experienced instead was Rudy’s final thought as he dozed off, as clear, to her, as an announcement on a PA speaker. He would never hit her again. He no longer had it in him. He was penitent, and hopeful.
Which kind of pissed Teresa off. Rudy’s new attitude did not excuse what he’d done to her, last night and all occasions prior. He had loosened her teeth, blackened an eye, then rammed her until her asshole was bleeding. The big crybaby tragedy of Teresa’s life was that she never objected enough when shit was pulled on her, and Rudy had pulled a shitload. How dare that motherfucker beat her up, rape her, and then give her born-again doe eyes as an excuse the very next fucking morning?
Eyes narrowed, she cracked the door and peered out. The asshole was already asleep. Teresa noticed the baseball bat cocked against the jamb, Rudy’s idea of budget security. He’d never used it on her. With Rudy it was fists, kicks, backhands, choking. Manual labour.
He’d fallen asleep thinking he would never touch her in anger again.
‘That’s for goddamn sure,’ she muttered.
Rudy’s eyes fluttered open just in time to register the fat end of the bat, splitting his forehead. He could fix things up later. If he lived.
David J. Schow lives in the Hollywood hills, where he works as a screenwriter and author. His recent book releases include Wild Hairs, a collection of his non-fiction columns from Fangoria magazine, a new edition of his 1990 collection Lost Angels, and another short story collection due around Hallowe’en. As an editor, The Lost Block, Volume II: Hell on Earth is published by Subterranean Press, and if you look quickly enough, he turns up in the documentary which appears on Universal’s DVD release of Creature from the Black Lagoon. ‘“Why Rudy Can’t Read” is one of those wine-cellar stories,’ Schow reveals, ‘the kind that take years to mature. A large portion of it was handwritten on legal pages sometime circa 1992. It stayed in the files until 1999, whereupon it resurged and practically finished itself.’