“I shut off the security cameras,” she said. “It’d be embarrassing — a hundred hours of me on all-fours.”
“I’d buy that tape.”
“They wouldn’t appreciate it as much as you would.”
“What if I’m a thief?”
“Steal whatever you want,” she said. “I don’t live here. I’m just visiting. They trust me not to do anything screwed up. Their mistake.”
We tried all of the beds and all of the other places too. Everything was too nice. We fucked on all of it. I kept waiting to be told the house had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It felt like a possibility.
K liked to hang out nude. I didn’t really care either way. I mean, once you see someone naked for more than a minute and a half, you just become used to it. She would make breakfast, fried eggs and toast, with her clothes off. She’d walk through the entire house, from end to end, and I’d hear the soft pad of her feet. “I wish I could be nude all the time. In class mostly. I think it would help my studies a lot. Test taking. I think I’d be getting a 4.0 if my pussy was out.”
She touched herself lightly. I got hard … again. It was a running cycle with us.
“I don’t think it would help your classmates any.”
“I’m concerned only about me. Not them. I’m already getting a 4.0. My IQ is 136.”
“Bravo,” I said, clapping.
Her breasts were small but looked like weapons of mass destruction. Sharp nipples pointed up and out. Her ass was not human. It appeared to have been stolen from a classic statue. Something from the Louvre. She liked to shake it at me, which was fine with me. It was not every day that fine art just wanted to shake at me.
The expansive living room upstairs could easily swallow up the dumpy Lagoon House. I sat in my boxers on the leather couch, looking out the window at the Atlantic Ocean and feeling kinda starstruck in a way.
“This is my problem with them,” K said, pointing at a walnut desk. “They’re stupid.”
I knew right away what she meant. It had bothered me too.
“The desk is facing the wrong way,” I said.
“It’s right in front of a window overlooking the fucking ocean, and these idiots have it facing away. ‘Cause, Jesus Christ, this living room is soooo interesting!”
I considered the grand piano and the spiral staircase leading up. Still, I agreed.
“Let’s move it. Spin it,” I said.
She liked that idea. We went into it right away, rotating the desk around so that it faced the ocean (as it should). Then she cleared all of the stuff off of the top of the desk, sat on the top of it herself. “What do you think?”
I didn’t have to say anything to that question, and she didn’t need an answer. That’s not what I was there for. At least that’s the impression I got. Maybe I’m underrating myself. I kissed from her knees down and then back up to the inside of her thighs, where it counted.
“Oh, that’s it,” she said with her legs wrapped around my neck, pulling me farther in.
There were piles of fashion magazines in the downstairs bathroom. They were on a rack of shelves next to the space-age toilet, the automatic towel drying rack, the luxury tub with whirling jets, and a TV built into the marble wall. I sat in the whirlpool tub looking through the magazines, while K Neon kissed my neck and fooled around with me under the surface of the warm, swirling water.
“Here’s another one of your descendants,” I said, holding the fashion magazine up to compare the two: K and a blonde runway model — rail skinny, lips parted, eyes painted coal black, head tilted. “You’ve got more freckles,” I said.
“But a better mouth.”
“A much better mouth,” I said. She was slightly deranged. Her head disappeared under the hot, swirling water, and her lips closed around my dick. She slowly started to suck.
She was down there so long that I thought she was gonna drown. When she came up, she came up laughing. Hair plastered to her face, gasping for air.
“I need a scuba tank!”
“You don’t have one somewhere in this house?”
“I don’t know … so many closets. I can hold my breath for three minutes. Let me show you.”
There was an element of dark genius to her, and, to be honest, I had no clue what she really meant when she talked most of the time. K was one of those people who talked in layers, in questions — questions that aren’t meant to be answered. I did my best to keep up with her in conversation by just saying funny shit and being opaque, even playing dumb. I was certain that, at any moment, she’d find out I was a moron, and our little game of house on the ocean would come to an end.
She’d been places. Paris. London. Barcelona. As a little girl, she was a competitive horse rider.
“An equestrienne,” she said, splashing the water. “But I didn’t do very well. Some gates are just toooo high, and I didn’t like pushing the animals.”
K Neon had been out on a sailboat, spent many nights at sea, looking up at the stars.
“One night we’ll lay out and I’ll tell you the history of the cosmos.”
“Ah, go to hell,” I said.
She splashed me again.
“Accurately,” she said, “it was more of a yacht than a sailboat.”
She was out of my league for sure, and I often felt like she was just tolerating me.
“When are they coming back?” I asked.
“Who?”
“The people in this house … your family?”
She laughed, darkly, and lowered her eyes.
“Don’t call them my family. That’s just so sadly inaccurate.”
“I don’t have much of a family either.”
“You live alone?”
“With people.”
“People?”
“I’m in a band. I live with the drummer. And another guy.”
She led me out of the tub, as if I really needed to be led anywhere, and dried me off with a warm towel that probably cost more than my weekly paycheck.
“We can’t be dripping wet all over the place,” she said. “Slick surfaces. It’s one thing I won’t tolerate in this house. I’ll freak. I mean it. Danger, danger, boy. That’s how my mom broke her neck. She doesn’t walk anymore.”
“Where doesn’t she walk?”
“Where? She doesn’t walk everywhere. Anywhere. She’s in a chair.”
“Where’s the chair?”
“Zurich.”
“Don’t know where mine is,” I said. “Florida last I heard.”
“That’s nice. Florida can be nice.”
I didn’t get into how not nice the part of Florida that my mom “lived in” was. K didn’t talk anymore about the wheelchair. We probably looked like two sea urchins, covered in spikes for self-defense, standing by a bath tub and trying to change the subject to something, anything that hurt less.
“Let’s go do something.”
K Neon took my hand. We walked down the marble hallway and through another set of doors. She adjusted the lights, many of them, with a movement of her wrist. There was a large bed. A room with windows that opened up on the gardens. K stood next to me at the window and rattled off names of the flowers.
“Foxglove, mullein, bearberry, wild lupine, blue salvia, morning glory, hibiscus.”
K pointed to a bird sipping nectar from one of the flowers, the name of which I had already forgotten.
“That’s a magnolia warbler.”
I turned away from the garden window, looking at the wall. There was a large painting of a Japanese woman with blue lips in a kimono. I leaned in and looked closely.
“That’s expensive. They’re collectors,” K said, pointing up at the ceiling.
An empty house. The empty people. The missing persons.
“Cool shit.”
She shrugged, faked a yawn, and took me over to the bed.
“I’m more interested in what’s alive,” she said.