He wasn’t sure she’d said what he thought she’d said. “You do what?”
“I love you.” She gave him a brief, emphatic kiss on the lips.
“Do you love everybody? This isn’t, like, a hippie thing? Peace and love and all that?”
She laughed. “I like that old-fashioned love thing. But I mean you. I love you. You, you, you!”
She tickled him on his sides under his arms, like an adult teasing a child. He struggled not to laugh.
“Thanks,” he said. “I mean,” and it was hard to speak the words, “I love you, too.” At that, she leaned close to his face again, grinning, put her hands at the top of his head and roughed up his hair.
“Would you like some wine?” said Todd, flat on his back in the bed. He sure would.
“Yeah, that’d be great,” she said. “Could we get something to eat, too?” Nude, she jumped up, knelt to pick up his bathrobe from the floor, wrapped it around herself and tied the belt.
“Oh, I’m sorry, are you hungry?” Stupid question.
“Kind of,” she said. “Are you?”
“I could eat something,” he said, but what he really wanted to do was drink. Eating would interfere with his buzz. “I need to go to the store, but I think I have some salami and cheese. Don’t have any bread right now, though. Got some cans of soup.”
“We could just have wine for now,” she said.
“Great, I’ll get some.” He went into the kitchen, got glasses out of the cabinet, rinsed them out since they’d been unused forever. He checked out his stash of wine. Damn, there wasn’t much, he’d have to go to the store to get more. He didn’t like to think they could smell it on his breath.
Sky called from the other room. “Hey, can I look through your movies?”
“Sure, go ahead,” he said. Uh-oh. Will she be disgusted they’re all porn?
He heard the sound of music and voices; she must have turned on the TV. He stepped back into the room and saw she’d put in a video. It was one he probably hadn’t rewound, since he wasn’t good about doing that. Looked like it was one of the Latex Dreams series, with the toothy girl who always went “Hrnt! Hrnt!” when she was having sex.
“So where’d you get all these movies?”
“Well, see, I used to run a video store, Exquisite Corpse, along with this guy named Hobie Lautenschlager, who I knew from school.”
“I never heard of that. Exquisite Corpse?”
“It wasn’t part of a chain. We just had the one shop. We mostly had horror movies, but we also got porn because, you know, it’s popular. Hobie had some money to invest in it, so it was pretty much his shop, really, though we were supposed to be partners.
“Hobie’s kind of a weird guy. He’s interested in the occult and voodoo and stuff. He’s interested in some Jamaican writer named Alberic Crabtree.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of him.”
“Oh.” Todd wasn’t sure this was a good thing. “Are you, like, a fan or anything?”
“No.” She seemed fairly adamant about it, but said no more.
“Okay. Me neither. How about Paradise Threshold, ever hear of that?”
She seemed a bit uncomfortable, hearing this. “Yeah, they were out there in Manhattan Beach. They were strictly ufology. They’re all dead.”
Todd was going to ask where Manhattan Beach was, but instead said, “Dead?”
“They committed suicide because they thought they were going to soul-travel off and merge with a comet.”
“Did that have to do with this Crabtree guy?”
“I don’t know, maybe somehow.”
Hmmm. “Well anyway, Hobie was all into that guy’s work, and he related it all to horror movies, which he also was crazy about. We had trouble at the shop because Hobie would do these weird things, like, somewhere he found a human skeleton, a real dirty one, like it had been dug up out of the ground—”
“Yikes, really?”
“Yeah, and he took it and stuffed it into an old TV with a smashed screen so it looked like it was coming out of the TV and put that in the shop’s front window. Which would have been kind of an appropriate thing for a video store that mostly had horror movies, but it was a real skeleton, so I was afraid the cops or the health department at least would hassle us about it. I had a real hard time talking him out of having that in the window. I mean, otherwise, he did a good job of managing the shop.
“Then he got all interested in this old soft drink they used to sell in voodoo shops in New Orleans a long time ago. He thought it had all these kind of magical properties, and all this.” He decided he wasn’t going to tell her about how you made the drug worm from it, and that he’d been cooking up some himself lately because the guy who’d brought her over asked him to. It seemed too complicated, and she might not like it that he cooked up dope.
“So, after a while, Hobie lost interest in the shop because he had a chance to rent this old dilapidated movie theater in town. He’s been running that for a few months. It was like his dream to run a movie theater and show horror movies. I was supposed to be in on it, but bailed out. I think he’s going to burn up all his money on it.”
“So you worked there, too?”
“Not really. All I ever did was try to paint a mural on an outside wall, but I never finished it.” Barely started it, in fact, but he didn’t say that.
“You’re an artist, huh?”
“Oh. Well, yeah. I went to art school for a while. Dropped out.”
“I bet you’re real talented. You seem like an artist.”
“No, I’ve kind of given it up.”
“Aw, that’s a drag. You just need more self-confidence.” The girl on the TV screen went on making her signature sound. Sky turned her head and looked down at him, smiling happily. “So is this guy’s name ‘Hrnt’?”
He forced a laugh. “No, that’s just a sound she makes.”
“Really, why do you like these movies so much?”
Todd didn’t like to get defensive about it, but it was hard not to. “I don’t exactly like them, I don’t think.”
“What do you watch them for?”
He wondered if she was asking him about jerking off. He’d feel silly denying it, so didn’t bother.
“I’m kind of trying to figure something out about them. Like, why they’re so depressing after a while. I know that sounds goofy.”
“Omigod!” She put her hand on his. “I know what you mean! You have to stay engaged with it or it gets really awful.”
She ran her hand down his upper arm. “I like that tattoo on your arm. Where’d you ever get that?”
“Oh,” he said, glancing at it, holding it out so she could look at it more closely. “At a tattoo parlor.”
She stroked her fingers over the image. “She’s beautiful.”
“Thanks.”
“That’s not her, is it? Your wife?”
“No.” He didn’t want to explain, it wouldn’t have made sense.
Sky turned back to the TV. The nude girl on the screen rolled over onto her knees, and the guy, middle-aged, fat and wearing only black socks, repositioned behind her and visibly inserted, pumping and groaning unpleasantly as she continued with, “Hrnt!” Sky pulled up her legs, letting the robe fall open, and put her hand at her crotch. Todd couldn’t see what she was doing from his angle, but apparently she was, omigod, playing with herself. She just wasn’t going to let up. She started imitating the cry of the girl in the movie. “Hrnt! Hrnt!”
The scene seemed to go on for a long time, though Todd looked only at Sky and not again at the TV. He could smell the distinct odor of fresh female wetness emanating from Sky. She stopped making the “Hrnt” sound, was breathing harder and faster, finally gasped, leaning her head on her knees and pulling her legs up tighter.