Josephine
|
|
Originally Published in Amazon's: Sexy Tales of Strong Women
I've been a bad, bad girl. I've been careless with a delicate man. It's a sad, sad world, when a girl will break a boy just because she can.
Fiona Apple
"Criminal"
In the city all sins can be absorbed. The city is a sponge, soaking up all the detritus of twisted behavior, and no one gets away without leaving their stain. It’s a place where people play games with the night; a place where people take the stench of their perversion into the dark, just to keep the smell out of the house. It’s the breeding ground for a woman to be careless with a delicate man; a wasteland for a man to loose His sensibilities to His own desperation.
Once upon another time…
Fragile glass balls of self imposed frustration shatter against the mirror, falling like the muted broken music that rises up the stairs from Richard’s lair. Her fingers flip carelessly through the strands of Her hair, ripping out the knots of selfishly perceived betrayal, throwing them at Her own reversed image. The same seven notes repeat again and again, then comes the eighth, always different, always wrong; like Richard, never able to complete the melody he’s started. Theirs had been a harmonious marriage, until he found a new dalliance, a new obsession, something other than Her.
She contemplates the carelessness of Her attire. Such carelessness doesn’t come of its own accord, it has to be manufactured. From such contrived carelessness comes satisfaction. She dearly needs satisfaction. A man with the right needs will succumb to such constructed carelessness. Just having someone succumb to Her would provide its own satisfaction. She’s seen such a man, in passing, through the smeared expansive pane of a café window; broad shoulders, thick hair, hunkered over a cup of desultory java. The window is Nick's. The desolation is all His. Maybe She’ll give Him something other than His contemplation to grasp. She opens one more button on Her blouse. Maybe She won’t. It’s up to Richard.
Her eyes lock with Her own. She looks back at Herself with the reversed, reflected coldness of Her burning need. She gives Herself a quick nod of affirmation. She 'will' have Her satisfaction. Her eyes drift, down past Her blouse to the thin, fragile skirt, carelessly purchased with intent one half size too small. The lace of Her bra blooms from the blouse’s placket, from the purposeful neglect taken while the buttoning Her blouse. Delicate petals of fabric draw attention to the spray of freckles flowering out of Her bare cleavage. It’s amazing the power those small puddles of pigmentation can hold. Each of those fleshly stars shines with thermal nucleic hormonal energy. She’s seen it in the eyes of Richard’s friends and the husbands of Her friends. She’s not seen it in Richard’s eyes in a long time.
A chill runs up Her legs, ending at their junction with a warm tingle that threatens a certain precipitation. It’s not a breeze. It’s the hem of Her skirt tickling Her bare thighs, touching Her closer to Her arousal than Richard has in weeks. The brush of fabric against Her whispers of carnal threat. No, not 'threat' -- 'promise.' She raises Her chin and smiles wickedly. Vulnerability is Her greatest weapon. The same seven notes lift and fall again, dragged down by the wrong eighth. Richard hasn’t found the melody yet. Smile gives way to words uttered too carelessly soft to be heard, “Richard, I’m going to Nick’s Cafe.”
Another Place
“How come you always end up here, in Nick’s café?” The question and gurgle of coffee surging out of the glass carafe invades His twisted contemplation. Tony, Nick’s nephew, watches His eyes while pouring, filling the white void before him with black jittering nervousness.
He’d come to contemplate. Is it fate that pushes people to each other’s perversions or some sort of dark Karmic magnetism? Why is it that once someone gets bent, they want to get bent further? And, why the betrayal? Why does it always lead to betrayal? Mostly, He contemplates why He hadn’t let go of what He’d already lost? Why had His twist come out to entwine around Josephine’s?
Josephine: the ultimate lover – ex-lover – with legs that begged to…. Josephine: the lover who squandered her proficiencies around any club exuding a hip thrusting beat. Josephine: His fiancée – ex-fiancée. Some women collected shoes, then bored with their style, left them in the back of the closet. Josephine collected men. He’d been left in the back of Josephine's cerebral closet.
To answer Tony, He indicates the elegance of the relationship between cup and saucer; the way the saucer protects the counter from overflow. The saucer bears the weight of the cup, yet everyone only gives consideration to the value of the cup. No one ever considers the saucer. “I dunno, I guess the wind just blows me this way.” The gurgling black liquid fills and defies the rim of the cup. The saucer will provide protection to the counter – as long as it can. He’d always thought He’d been the cup, filled by Josephine; but in the end He was only the saucer filled by her overflow. "Tony!"
"Yo, sorry." Tony pulls the towel from his shoulder, dipping an end of it into His cup, soaking up enough black nervousness to stop it from overfilling His white void. “Wind, eh? I get it. You mean fate, don’cha. It’s an analogy. Learned that in lit class today.”
“Actually, Tony, it’s a metaphor.”
With a bell-jangling cry of trapped desperation, She floats through the shattered panes of His sanity, brushing the jagged shards, risking laceration. He never met her, but He knows She's there, like so many others before. They are always there. He feels Her moving to a table as the angst of the bell above the door fades. He only allows Himself a glimpse of Her, reflected in the chrome of the coffee urn, reversed in His jaundiced rumination. Even in Her mirrored distortion, She is not Josephine, but in His contemplative distortion She could very well be.
He tries to push Her to the back of his mind, way back, beyond the barren waste of His psyche. He doesn’t need to be bent any further, but She’s already passed through His glimpse, rubbing a pheromone laden salve over the wound of His betrayal. Her presence ruffles the hair of His psychosis, tickling the scalp of His compulsion. The thin delicate fingers of Her contrived carelessness reach through His skull, pressing against His better judgement, ready to deftly extract His soul.
“Yeah? Well, what did bring you….” Tony’s sentence and attention drifts over His head. Nick's nephew sees what was reflected in the shard of His glimpse. Behind Him, She sits; all lines and roundness in perfect geometric, trigonometric symmetrical mathematical balance to His twisted need.
Legs extend from under the fragile hem of a skirt, carelessly exposed, carelessly murmuring, 'You want these wrapped around you, don't you?' The fabricated carelessness in Her attire betrays the carelessness in Her behavior.
“Man, look at that.” The patty melt Tony had indulged in a half hour earlier slithers out of Tony’s mouth, sticking its prongs up His nostrils. "She’s checkin’ you out. Why don’t you….”
“So, Tony? How’s your Aunt doing?”
“Man, she got busted. Some uptight, on the rag cop, busted her. All these years being a klepto and everyone would just write down what she took. Uncle Nick was always good for it. It worked for everyone. No one cared, until some anal defensive cop gets a bug up his ass. Now she’s got to do community service.”
"That’s anal retentive.” He finds the courage to lift His eyes again; or, is it weakness? She’s gone. The bell above the door cries out in frenetic betrayal of Her escape. She’s left Him to rust in the junkyard of His own contemplation. Was it grace or an opportunity missed?
“What," asks Tony, "is anal retentive?”
Another night, and…
More nights, more coffee, more contemplation, more twisted angst, more delicate desperation, more looking past Tony, past Himself, searching for His demon-savior, reflected in coffee urn distortion. He can’t let go. At least He’s keeping this wretched miasma of despair plunked on a stool at Nick’s instead of traipsing around, spilling that ugly stew of contemplation, angst and need all over town; or, hiding from it in a bottle. Perhaps a bottle would be better. A bottle might teach Him how to let go. The bell above the door chatters a cartoon chuckle. It laughs at Him. He won’t look. The laugh dies.
She knew, even before She saw Him through the sanguine smear of glass and unrequited angst that He was there, gripping whatever betrayal created the need She sought. Even hunched, His shoulders are broad. She inverts Her eyes, peering into Herself, seeing those shoulders spread like angel wings over Her; tensed with the strain of 'holding back'. Something that isn’t there fills Her, crawling up the inside of Her thighs, twisting what should be satisfaction into urgency. She moves forward, approaching the minion of Her gratification.
She stands just behind His left shoulder, an old Loony Toons devil/temptress; whispering Her inducements. He smells the enticement, a musk that confuses desire with need under a Chanel fragrance that barely masks the pheromone incense. Where is His saving angel? Where is the angel of ‘no’? Should be on His right shoulder.
He focuses from His contemplation, angst and need to --- freckles; freckles like stars sweeping the sky, falling into the canyon of Her cleavage. Nearly imperceptibly, She straightens Her shoulders, spreading that cleavage, spilling the pigment pulsars. He can feel those droplets of beckoning falling from Her, cascading over His shoulder, down His front.
Fighting a smug smile, She watches His eyes, reversed and chrome distorted in the urn. Each freckle falls like acid rain on the fragile shell of sensibility that covers His libido. Set in a square face of rugged individualism, are soft delicate eyes. The eyes of a man slave to His inability to stay back from the brink of meaningfulness. Always it has to be meaningful and always the brink will crumble. Always, He will fall into the abyss of feminine retribution. Drawing in women is not His problem. Letting go is.
She knows what's in His head. She entertains a whim of what might be occurring in His pants. The freckles define the reason for wearing the thin strap frock that confuses the boundary between lingerie and dress. Thin straps bear the fleshy weight of blatant seduction, attached to lacy triangles of fabric that cup Her. She would let Him cup her in the same way. His palms alone would cover Her more than the delicate fabric, fondling Her in course desire. An ache that isn’t grips Her. She leans to him.
Her breast ebbs and wanes against His head in the rhythm of each swelling breath She takes. A single thin layer of fabric is the only thing that mutes Her pulsing seduction. Her eyes watch His, waiting for them to release the stare that swells Her carnal appetite. She arches Her back, just enough so that the fabric slides across Her hardening hunger. His eyes are portals to His need. She is the evanescent voyeur peering into Him, watching Him as He ephemerally enfolds Her with His sight. He is exposed to Her; displaying His hunger to have every sense satiated by Her. The thin fabric of Her dress can’t mute the simpatico distention of Her own need.
“The wind didn’t blow you here tonight.” She waits the half a heartbeat it takes for him to realize it wasn’t fate that brought Her to Him, perhaps Him to Her, but not Her to Him. “There is no wind tonight; only stifling heat. You know, heat that pounds away on you like a man who hasn’t loved in weeks.”
A black specter of memory looms in the windows of His eyes. Mouth gaping, it shrieks the silent scream of machismo pain. She knows its cry. He should go before He gets in too deep.
Too late.
She's between Him and the door, between Him and His sensibilities. He rises from His stool, extracting His wallet. She presses harder against Him, compelling Him to sit, comparing the hard, unyielding contrast of His arm to the pliancy of Her own flesh. An electro-erotic tingle dissipates throughout Her, collecting again in the damp tropics of Her libidinous spite. She flattens the orb of Her pliancy against His rigidity. He suffers the same promising burst of electro-satiation. Of that She is sure.
Her hand flinches, inflicted with the need to measure the voltage and wattage of Her empowerment. Her hand twitches with boundary crossing hesitation toward the denim barrier that masks the scale of His arousal. Her need falters. Her hand falls, instead, on His wrist. His resolve drains. She absorbs it, filling Her libido. “Don’t be rude. Sit down – Please.” He sits with so much canine obedience it’s wicked. Wickedness exhales into the inflating balloon of Her satisfaction. She has reason – no, 'cause' -- to be wicked. That much Richard has given Her.
He looks at Her. It’s a look that may or may not survive when the only thing separating Them is the silk cocoon of preservation She’s woven around the jade stone of Her soul -- If She lets Him inside. He doesn’t speak. He won’t.
She takes the stool beside His. Her leg slips out from under the delicate hem of the dress that barely hides Her motives, carelessly touching His. “Let me guess.” She already knows. He wears His reason like a cross, burned into His forehead. She studies the swelling of His desperation not even denim can hide. His knees weaken. He sinks to His stool, the denim brushing coarsely against Her bare thigh, Her momentarily disclosed need. She places Her hands on His chest. There is an enticing solid strength beyond the flannel barrier. She extracts an engagement ring from a breast pocket; the one that Josephine had thrown across the room at Him, denying Him His anger. “Your fiancée slept with someone else. Your fiancée betrayed you.”
He doesn’t speak. They look at Each Other, seeking the honesty Both know the Other will obscure. In the nakedness of the night, would They bother searching for the same honesty; or, would it be a non-sequitur. He doesn’t speak. She drops the ring in His cup. “Be rude, then.”
She stands. He is too mired in His contemplation, useless, unable to leave that dead and decaying womb. Her need resides in the tactile world. He looks into the black that has just swallowed His recent past, then pushes the cup away. “Why do you come here?”
She searches Her purse, stalling. “That’s adolescent. ‘Show me yours, and I’ll show you mine’…eh?”
His dread lashes out. He grips Her wrist. She sucks in Her breath, too fast to subdue. She has not sucked all of His resolve from Him. She steels Herself against the urge to pull away. Vulnerability can be as much of a liability as an asset. Using thumb and forefinger, He rubs the pale circle around Her 4th finger where Her tan is marred. Her wedding ring is in the medicine cabinet, behind the Midol and birth control, where Richard will never see it. “What’s his name?”
“Richard.” She picks up His spoon, fishes the ring from the black refuge.
He opens a napkin for Her. “Richard, doesn’t pay enough attention to you.” She places the ring on the napkin. “Is it, sports, the guys – another woman?”
She sits. Standing, He 'could' touch Her exposed legs, running a finger up under Her dress. She takes His hands in Hers, helping Him to dry His recent past. “It’s music. He’s obsessed.” Her eyes drop, carelessly. “He sits at his keyboard all night, writing little black dots on paper. I get dressed up and go out to see if he will notice I’ve left. I’ve done it twice. He hasn’t noticed.”
Her eyes come up quickly before His reaction can dissolve. He examines the ring as if every facet holds an answer. “Yes, Josephine slept with another man.”
She sees it. It swells and protrudes from Him, aching for release. It excites Her. It’s a guilt She can grasp, and massage; hardening it for Her own lascivious purposes, She looks at Her watch. “I should go and see if Richard's noticed. I stay out a little longer each time increasing the chances he might notice.” He nods. She rises. “Unless there is something in that cup of coffee that will answer your questions, you could walk me to my car.”
She walks away. He peers into the cup. For the last twelve nights, there had been no answers in the black solution; maybe escape, but no answers. Under the chatter-laugh of the bell above the door, real escape had just left. The cartoon chattering bell laughs at Him.
The giggle of the bell chases Her down the sidewalk, dies, then laughs again. She trembles. The late summer night chill draws itself across Her like a damp rag. She’s dressed for thick heat. His approaching need, chases away the chill. Still, She trembles. He’s beside Her. “I don’t get it. Why Nicks? You’re not a ‘Nick’s’ type.”
“What makes you think you know what ‘type’ I am?”
He stops. She takes two more steps before spinning into latent carnal confrontation. The dull smoldering coals of His eyes rake Her, clawing Her breasts, Her tummy, Her legs. She won’t respond. It’s Her need to know, not be known. “I get the angst, but why the guilt? You aren’t a ‘guilt’ kind of guy?”
He nods, turns away, turns back and turns away again. He might leave. She turns away. “My car is this way.”
The night air draws its dirty damp rag across her again. His indecisiveness ices Her ardor. Then, He is beside Her again, the glowing ember of His need warming Her fervency. They walk, brushing Each Other’s shoulders and lascivious psychosis. Their twists splay, exposed and reaching out, threatening to entwine. They are almost at Her car, almost at the junction of options and choices. She offers up a 'I'll-tell-you-what-I-know-you-tell-me-more' bargain. “You followed her, stalked her, to catch her, didn’t you?” She stops. He takes one more step into His reticence, then turns. There’s more. She presses the negotiation. “You watched them?” He looks away, then back. Still more. She ups the ante. “Through the window? From the hallway, before you interrupted them?” His eyes fill with a brown ‘not quite.’ “You hid in the closet?”
He looks away. There is so much more; too much to be hidden behind the taciturn sheen of His corneas. It's the thing that must never be said, but must be spoken. Just the awareness of its existence moistens Her urgency. She moves to Him, Her hand on His chest, face secret-sharing close. She knows. She can feel his twistedness in Her hand. It's fuels the fever of Her perverse need. Knowledge moistens here and hardens there. “Oh my. You stroked yourself while they made love."
He looks away. She holds Him there, placing Her hand on the denim covered bulge of His memory. His memory fills His jeans and the ardor of Her appetite. “What was it? The need to know if the other lover was better than you? Being where you shouldn’t have been? Maybe, you have a thing for watching?”
He tries to turn away, but She has His bloated arousal in the grip of Her constructed carelessness. Lips fluttering against His cheek. “I know a way we can find out.” The sizzle of His zipper tears through His inhibition. “I wish I’d been there, to see it – to see you. That is hotter than imaginable. You came off, while watching, didn’t you?”
He doesn't move, mired in His twisted bent. She takes His hand, placing it between Her legs, pulling it up against Her moist, exposed vulnerability. She rolls Her hips forward, then back, rubbing Her damp fever into His hand. She nibbles on His ear, reaching behind Her, gripping the driver’s door handle, pushing Her commanding vulnerability at Him. He digs into Her. She presses the door-unlock on Her key ring. The car’s chirp is lost in Her whimper. She grabs His wrist, pushing His hand from Her. “No! I want to see what happened that night. I want to watch -- you.”
She opens the car door, sinks into Her desire, legs extended from the car, open. Her silky, pouting exposure is visible below the rim of a hem creeping up from Her arousal. "I want to watch you while you watch me. I want to see you watch.“ She teases Herself with a single beckoning flick of a finger “Take it out. Stroke it. Step back. Hide in doorway behind you, like it was some closet.”
The street is empty. He reaches to His zipper, to cover His protruding, swollen bent. She grabs His hands, releases Him from His jeans, and His inhibitions. His need protrudes up into the cool night air, pointed directly at Her. She pulls Her hands away, offering Him no fulfillment; nodding to the doorway. She raises her knees, displaying Herself.
He sinks back, closeting Himself into the shadows. His broad hand takes His carnal exposure, inflating it and His twisted craving. Nothing touches what lies at the canyon of Her open legs, except the perversion of His sight. His mouth draws open. His tongue writhes its own desire to be free, to touch. His whimpers rain on Her, drawing Her own craving to Her vocal surface. She fights not to indulge the satiation of Her begging, damp urgency. Maybe it's a need to be lanced by His swollen, hard psychosis.
Vocal night moths flit toward their divided tryst. People are coming, a couple engaged in their own unstained romance, giggling as they approach. He fights to stifle the whimpers of escaping demons. He’d rather be caught plunging His aberration into Her wet perversion, than to be seen gratifying His own distended deviation. Something surges through Her, radiating from Her open, begging vulnerability. Her whimpering calls to Him. The couple is nearly upon them. His depravity unleashes from His throbbing arousal. Viscous white drops snow spatter on the pavement between Them, in the path of the undistorted couple.
He buries His face into the shadow of the corner. Less thought would be given to a man driven into a doorway by a desperate need of a urinary nature. He stops stroking, but still His desperate, fleeting satisfaction surges out of Him, twitching His member like some sexual divining rod. He stifles His moans. The couple passes too absorbed by their fair romance to notice the ejaculating perversity hiding in the shadows. He zips His flaccid guilt into His pants and turns. The car is gone. She is gone. All that is left is the dissolving, milky stain of His perplexing degeneration on the sidewalk.
Another Doorway
The doorway engulfs Him in shadows that closet the contorted wreckage of His contemplation. He contemplates Her carelessness. He contemplates the fate that pushes people to each other’s perversions; or is it some sort of dark Karmic magnetism? He contemplates why contemplating in the shadows of a doorway across from Nicks, is as unfulfilling as contemplating at Nicks. Mostly, He contemplates why He never lets go.
The heat has returned. It pounds away like a man who hasn’t loved in a week; a man who can go on for hours in the shadows of a doorway. She strides over the horizon of the dry barren waste of His psyche; stepping into the saffron light that spills through the sanguine smeared glass of Nick’s front window. Her legs scissor beneath a black dress that is purposefully a careless six inches too short at either end.
He steps from the shadows of His contemplation, into the tawny illumination of observation. She takes His empty stool, all lines and roundness in perfect geometric, trigonometric symmetrical mathematical balance to His twisted need. She watches as Tony pours His black contemplation into His cup and saucer for Her. Yet, She is oblivious to the elegance of the relationship between cup and saucer, the way the saucer bears the weight of the cup. She thinks only of the cup in the functional way it will allow Her to sip His contemplation. It’s too bitter. She dilutes it with the façade of sugar’s white purity.
He leaves the yellow-brown luminance of the street light, crossing the saffron bloom to enter Nick’s. She won’t indulge the cartoon laugh of the bell above the door by turning, but smugness paints it's crimson gloss across Her lips. He takes the stool beside Hers, taking the one that was Hers when She last invaded His contemplation.
“Well,” Her hair carelessly falls across Her face. “How’s my favorite voyeur exhibitionist? Did I leave you….” The last of Her carelessly chosen words, bloat and stick in Her throat. He's driven His hand between Her legs like an axe wedge, pulling it up against Her naked fever. He digs into Her degeneration, exploring the careless way She has forgotten underwear.
Her panic wraps around His arms, digging into it with fearful nails enameled with blood red. She can no more move His arm anymore than She could have moved a fire plug protruding from the ground. It is all She can do is to reign in Her carelessness and harness the begging whimper of Her fleeting satisfaction. She lessens Her grip, tightening Her moist perversion around the depraved invasion of His finger. Her arousal threatens Her with carnal seizure.
Tony joins the exhibition, the unwitting voyeur, tossing wood on the fire of Her climax. “Hey, man! Where you been? Hey? Is she okay?”
“She’s fine Tony. Just got the chills from a summer fever. Why don’t you go in the back and get me one of those 'good' steaks that I know Nick keeps for special customers." Tony trots off with his skepticism.
“Please!” She leans against His shoulder, infusing the fibers of His shirt with unfathomable pleadings that He not let Her stop Him. Her legs pull up, holding Him where He is. Her body is wracked with spasms, seizures begging to take in air, to take in Him.
Tony returns with the steak to fill His hunger. He is once again wrapped in His contemplation. She is gone. Tony offers up the steak. “Hey, man. Where’d the babe go?”
He looks past the boundary where the saffron light falls into the shadows that soaks up all the detritus of twisted behavior. “I don’t know.”
Yet, another night.
He tries walking out of His contemplation, but it follows Him, uptown, downtown, cross-town. It's followed Him through a week's worth of nights and miles traversing concrete reality. At least, it's better exercise than plunking His purposelessness on a stool at Nicks.
"Hey. How are you doing?" The voice waits half a heartbeat for Him to realize that fate has dealt another hand. It isn't Her voice, but it is a familiar voice. "Are you okay?"
He turns toward the woman who has left the sanctuary of those who get their bents straightened by prime time television. This woman is encased in some unseen glow that protects her from the stains, His stain. This woman is not Her, nor is she Josephine. Still, this woman possesses much that is beckoning; thin, yet with a seductive roundness and a naivete that exudes strength. In her urbanized country sundress, there is an allure that pulls at something buried in Him beneath the dung of betrayal. "Hi, ah…."
"Cheryl." The woman, Cheryl, wades closer, sinking deeper into His muck. "I know Josephine, sort of." A saccharine smile of appreciation stretches the leather taut angst of His face. Its façade is not reflected in the gray-silvered contemplative cataracts of His eyes. Cheryl risks getting mired in the mud of His degenerate bent. "Look, I know about what Josephine did. I know what she's like. What she does. I knew for a while. I wanted to tell you, but didn't know how. She was my friend and -- and…. I'm sorry."
"Thanks." The taciturn word had to be pushed through the reticence of His twisted shame. He doesn't know what to do with the lifeline Cheryl has tossed into the tar pit of His obsession.
"Look. If you need anyone to talk to, you could call." Cheryl retreats, before sinking into the sludge and tracks too much of it around her world. Still, the lifeline is there. "Or, we could just get together for coffee."
"Sure. I'd -- I'd like…." He stops. She appears, from behind, pressing up against His haunting contemplation with Her furry psychosis. Her fingers lace with His, between the digits of His warped yearning. She pulls His hand back, toward Her, pulling it between two halves of a fox fur coat, pressing it up against the silky fur of Her own exposed sexual bent.
"Oh?" Her question flits over His shoulder, bats in Cheryl's face. "You're not at Nick's. You should be. I've been looking for you."
Cheryl retreats, shaking off the manure of His and Her affliction. The lifeline is withdrawn. Cheryl disappears, off to scrub away the brief stain that she has allowed to soil her.
She steps around Him, placing Herself between Him and the retreating rescue into the world not stewing in the stains of the degenerate. She opens her coat. Her soiled proclivity is bared beneath it. She enfolds Him in the steamy cocoon of Her need. "Put your hands in my pockets. Hold my coat around us."
He does as He is told, embracing the sick succor that comes from twisting His bent. She presses Her hand against the ineffectual denim barrier to His swollen necessity. She uncages it, releasing it to Her own grip, stroking it until He quivers against the strain to subdue any vocalization of His deviance. The shame of betrayal's pain, releases, ejaculating against Her naked tummy, dribbling down Her front. She presses up against Him, smearing the impure white of His sickness against His jacket. "You should stay at Nick's where you belong."
Taking it home.
Fragile glass balls of expanding frustration shatter against the mirror, falling like the muted broken music from Richard’s lair. Her fingers flip carelessly through the strands of Her hair, ripping out the knots of self perpetuated betrayal, throwing them at Her own reversed image. The same seven notes repeat again and again, then comes the eighth, always different, always wrong; like Her escapades into the muck of betrayal. Always lacking in the satisfaction of resolve.
She contemplates Her carelessness. She should have been caught by now with such carelessness. She should have had that satisfaction. She dearly needs satisfaction. A man with the right needs, succumbed to such carelessness, but the satisfaction was always fleeting, momentary.
Her eyes locked with Her own, right for right, left for left; looking back at Herself with the coldness of Her burning need. She and She give Herself a quick nod of affirmation; but, will She have Her satisfaction? The same seven notes lift and fall again, dragged down by the wrong eighth. Richard hasn’t found the melody yet. Sad self inspection gives way to words uttered too carelessly soft to be heard, “Richard, I’m going to Nick’s Café -- again.”
He's out there! She sensed it in a fecal odorous way as She touched the doorknob. It was Her own scatological proclivity. Framed in the door, He stands just at the boundary between Her private purgatory and the dark sponge–night that soaks up all twisted behavior; that netherworld where She has left Her own stain. He floats just inside that place where people play games with the night; just to get the stench of their perversion out of the house. The stink drifts in, embracing Her.
"This was in the pocket of your fur coat." He enters, invades Her purgatory, holding up a deposit ticket with Her name, Her address. Seven gargoyles of Richard's inattentiveness rise up the stairs. The eighth flounders and falls at Their feet. He looks to the steps leading to the basement. "Richard?"
Seven demons of Richard's ignorance climb the steps. The eighth trips and falls halfway in its climb. He moves to help the fallen incubus of Richard's alleged transgression against Her. She places Herself in the path of His ardor. His sudden fervency grabs the hem of the dress She had carelessly slithered into. Her manipulative carelessness is yanked up around Her tummy. She gasps at the exposure and the possibilities, discovery, retribution, satisfaction. He spins Her around, pushing Her toward the brink of Richard's lair. She places Her hands on the wall, to keep from being shoved down the steps, into the abyss of Richard's obsession.
His hand is between Her legs, then up, hard, pressed into Her wet aberrant need. He digs, pinches and massages Her self destructive perversity. Seven ghouls of Richard's indifference float up. She supplies the correct eighth, a yelping minor fifth from Richard's missing note. It's a perfect octave from His twisted warp.
He pulls out His rock hard need. Seven specters of Richard's apathy flit toward them. He drives His ardor-laden vengeance into the wet void of Her gratification. She cries out the harmonious eighth one perfect third from Richard's dalliance. The birds of Richard's curiosity flounder in the stairwell, seeking air to lift them.
"Here he comes," He grinds the detritus of His twisted satiation into Her.
"Oh God. Stop!" Her desire for bent satisfaction holds Him. She cries in anguish.
"No." He thrusts the tool of Her impending climax deeper. He pushes the slinky careless fabric She calls a dress up over Her breasts and grabs Her with the fever of His own urgency. "You should have known better than to be careless with delicate man."
"Fuck you." She whimpers, holding back Her release. She will not be so careless as to waste it without the satisfaction of having been caught in the throes of Her carelessness. "Tomorrow night We’re going to Josephine’s!"
"No!" He growls, purging his delicate need into Her, staring into the wide deer-caught-in-headlight eyes of Richard. "We won't."
"And I need to be redeemed to the one I've sinned against, because he's all I've ever known of love"
-- Fiona Apple
Fiona Apple
"Criminal"
In the city all sins can be absorbed. The city is a sponge, soaking up all the detritus of twisted behavior, and no one gets away without leaving their stain. It’s a place where people play games with the night; a place where people take the stench of their perversion into the dark, just to keep the smell out of the house. It’s the breeding ground for a woman to be careless with a delicate man; a wasteland for a man to loose His sensibilities to His own desperation.
Once upon another time…
Fragile glass balls of self imposed frustration shatter against the mirror, falling like the muted broken music that rises up the stairs from Richard’s lair. Her fingers flip carelessly through the strands of Her hair, ripping out the knots of selfishly perceived betrayal, throwing them at Her own reversed image. The same seven notes repeat again and again, then comes the eighth, always different, always wrong; like Richard, never able to complete the melody he’s started. Theirs had been a harmonious marriage, until he found a new dalliance, a new obsession, something other than Her.
She contemplates the carelessness of Her attire. Such carelessness doesn’t come of its own accord, it has to be manufactured. From such contrived carelessness comes satisfaction. She dearly needs satisfaction. A man with the right needs will succumb to such constructed carelessness. Just having someone succumb to Her would provide its own satisfaction. She’s seen such a man, in passing, through the smeared expansive pane of a café window; broad shoulders, thick hair, hunkered over a cup of desultory java. The window is Nick's. The desolation is all His. Maybe She’ll give Him something other than His contemplation to grasp. She opens one more button on Her blouse. Maybe She won’t. It’s up to Richard.
Her eyes lock with Her own. She looks back at Herself with the reversed, reflected coldness of Her burning need. She gives Herself a quick nod of affirmation. She 'will' have Her satisfaction. Her eyes drift, down past Her blouse to the thin, fragile skirt, carelessly purchased with intent one half size too small. The lace of Her bra blooms from the blouse’s placket, from the purposeful neglect taken while the buttoning Her blouse. Delicate petals of fabric draw attention to the spray of freckles flowering out of Her bare cleavage. It’s amazing the power those small puddles of pigmentation can hold. Each of those fleshly stars shines with thermal nucleic hormonal energy. She’s seen it in the eyes of Richard’s friends and the husbands of Her friends. She’s not seen it in Richard’s eyes in a long time.
A chill runs up Her legs, ending at their junction with a warm tingle that threatens a certain precipitation. It’s not a breeze. It’s the hem of Her skirt tickling Her bare thighs, touching Her closer to Her arousal than Richard has in weeks. The brush of fabric against Her whispers of carnal threat. No, not 'threat' -- 'promise.' She raises Her chin and smiles wickedly. Vulnerability is Her greatest weapon. The same seven notes lift and fall again, dragged down by the wrong eighth. Richard hasn’t found the melody yet. Smile gives way to words uttered too carelessly soft to be heard, “Richard, I’m going to Nick’s Cafe.”
Another Place
“How come you always end up here, in Nick’s café?” The question and gurgle of coffee surging out of the glass carafe invades His twisted contemplation. Tony, Nick’s nephew, watches His eyes while pouring, filling the white void before him with black jittering nervousness.
He’d come to contemplate. Is it fate that pushes people to each other’s perversions or some sort of dark Karmic magnetism? Why is it that once someone gets bent, they want to get bent further? And, why the betrayal? Why does it always lead to betrayal? Mostly, He contemplates why He hadn’t let go of what He’d already lost? Why had His twist come out to entwine around Josephine’s?
Josephine: the ultimate lover – ex-lover – with legs that begged to…. Josephine: the lover who squandered her proficiencies around any club exuding a hip thrusting beat. Josephine: His fiancée – ex-fiancée. Some women collected shoes, then bored with their style, left them in the back of the closet. Josephine collected men. He’d been left in the back of Josephine's cerebral closet.
To answer Tony, He indicates the elegance of the relationship between cup and saucer; the way the saucer protects the counter from overflow. The saucer bears the weight of the cup, yet everyone only gives consideration to the value of the cup. No one ever considers the saucer. “I dunno, I guess the wind just blows me this way.” The gurgling black liquid fills and defies the rim of the cup. The saucer will provide protection to the counter – as long as it can. He’d always thought He’d been the cup, filled by Josephine; but in the end He was only the saucer filled by her overflow. "Tony!"
"Yo, sorry." Tony pulls the towel from his shoulder, dipping an end of it into His cup, soaking up enough black nervousness to stop it from overfilling His white void. “Wind, eh? I get it. You mean fate, don’cha. It’s an analogy. Learned that in lit class today.”
“Actually, Tony, it’s a metaphor.”
With a bell-jangling cry of trapped desperation, She floats through the shattered panes of His sanity, brushing the jagged shards, risking laceration. He never met her, but He knows She's there, like so many others before. They are always there. He feels Her moving to a table as the angst of the bell above the door fades. He only allows Himself a glimpse of Her, reflected in the chrome of the coffee urn, reversed in His jaundiced rumination. Even in Her mirrored distortion, She is not Josephine, but in His contemplative distortion She could very well be.
He tries to push Her to the back of his mind, way back, beyond the barren waste of His psyche. He doesn’t need to be bent any further, but She’s already passed through His glimpse, rubbing a pheromone laden salve over the wound of His betrayal. Her presence ruffles the hair of His psychosis, tickling the scalp of His compulsion. The thin delicate fingers of Her contrived carelessness reach through His skull, pressing against His better judgement, ready to deftly extract His soul.
“Yeah? Well, what did bring you….” Tony’s sentence and attention drifts over His head. Nick's nephew sees what was reflected in the shard of His glimpse. Behind Him, She sits; all lines and roundness in perfect geometric, trigonometric symmetrical mathematical balance to His twisted need.
Legs extend from under the fragile hem of a skirt, carelessly exposed, carelessly murmuring, 'You want these wrapped around you, don't you?' The fabricated carelessness in Her attire betrays the carelessness in Her behavior.
“Man, look at that.” The patty melt Tony had indulged in a half hour earlier slithers out of Tony’s mouth, sticking its prongs up His nostrils. "She’s checkin’ you out. Why don’t you….”
“So, Tony? How’s your Aunt doing?”
“Man, she got busted. Some uptight, on the rag cop, busted her. All these years being a klepto and everyone would just write down what she took. Uncle Nick was always good for it. It worked for everyone. No one cared, until some anal defensive cop gets a bug up his ass. Now she’s got to do community service.”
"That’s anal retentive.” He finds the courage to lift His eyes again; or, is it weakness? She’s gone. The bell above the door cries out in frenetic betrayal of Her escape. She’s left Him to rust in the junkyard of His own contemplation. Was it grace or an opportunity missed?
“What," asks Tony, "is anal retentive?”
Another night, and…
More nights, more coffee, more contemplation, more twisted angst, more delicate desperation, more looking past Tony, past Himself, searching for His demon-savior, reflected in coffee urn distortion. He can’t let go. At least He’s keeping this wretched miasma of despair plunked on a stool at Nick’s instead of traipsing around, spilling that ugly stew of contemplation, angst and need all over town; or, hiding from it in a bottle. Perhaps a bottle would be better. A bottle might teach Him how to let go. The bell above the door chatters a cartoon chuckle. It laughs at Him. He won’t look. The laugh dies.
She knew, even before She saw Him through the sanguine smear of glass and unrequited angst that He was there, gripping whatever betrayal created the need She sought. Even hunched, His shoulders are broad. She inverts Her eyes, peering into Herself, seeing those shoulders spread like angel wings over Her; tensed with the strain of 'holding back'. Something that isn’t there fills Her, crawling up the inside of Her thighs, twisting what should be satisfaction into urgency. She moves forward, approaching the minion of Her gratification.
She stands just behind His left shoulder, an old Loony Toons devil/temptress; whispering Her inducements. He smells the enticement, a musk that confuses desire with need under a Chanel fragrance that barely masks the pheromone incense. Where is His saving angel? Where is the angel of ‘no’? Should be on His right shoulder.
He focuses from His contemplation, angst and need to --- freckles; freckles like stars sweeping the sky, falling into the canyon of Her cleavage. Nearly imperceptibly, She straightens Her shoulders, spreading that cleavage, spilling the pigment pulsars. He can feel those droplets of beckoning falling from Her, cascading over His shoulder, down His front.
Fighting a smug smile, She watches His eyes, reversed and chrome distorted in the urn. Each freckle falls like acid rain on the fragile shell of sensibility that covers His libido. Set in a square face of rugged individualism, are soft delicate eyes. The eyes of a man slave to His inability to stay back from the brink of meaningfulness. Always it has to be meaningful and always the brink will crumble. Always, He will fall into the abyss of feminine retribution. Drawing in women is not His problem. Letting go is.
She knows what's in His head. She entertains a whim of what might be occurring in His pants. The freckles define the reason for wearing the thin strap frock that confuses the boundary between lingerie and dress. Thin straps bear the fleshy weight of blatant seduction, attached to lacy triangles of fabric that cup Her. She would let Him cup her in the same way. His palms alone would cover Her more than the delicate fabric, fondling Her in course desire. An ache that isn’t grips Her. She leans to him.
Her breast ebbs and wanes against His head in the rhythm of each swelling breath She takes. A single thin layer of fabric is the only thing that mutes Her pulsing seduction. Her eyes watch His, waiting for them to release the stare that swells Her carnal appetite. She arches Her back, just enough so that the fabric slides across Her hardening hunger. His eyes are portals to His need. She is the evanescent voyeur peering into Him, watching Him as He ephemerally enfolds Her with His sight. He is exposed to Her; displaying His hunger to have every sense satiated by Her. The thin fabric of Her dress can’t mute the simpatico distention of Her own need.
“The wind didn’t blow you here tonight.” She waits the half a heartbeat it takes for him to realize it wasn’t fate that brought Her to Him, perhaps Him to Her, but not Her to Him. “There is no wind tonight; only stifling heat. You know, heat that pounds away on you like a man who hasn’t loved in weeks.”
A black specter of memory looms in the windows of His eyes. Mouth gaping, it shrieks the silent scream of machismo pain. She knows its cry. He should go before He gets in too deep.
Too late.
She's between Him and the door, between Him and His sensibilities. He rises from His stool, extracting His wallet. She presses harder against Him, compelling Him to sit, comparing the hard, unyielding contrast of His arm to the pliancy of Her own flesh. An electro-erotic tingle dissipates throughout Her, collecting again in the damp tropics of Her libidinous spite. She flattens the orb of Her pliancy against His rigidity. He suffers the same promising burst of electro-satiation. Of that She is sure.
Her hand flinches, inflicted with the need to measure the voltage and wattage of Her empowerment. Her hand twitches with boundary crossing hesitation toward the denim barrier that masks the scale of His arousal. Her need falters. Her hand falls, instead, on His wrist. His resolve drains. She absorbs it, filling Her libido. “Don’t be rude. Sit down – Please.” He sits with so much canine obedience it’s wicked. Wickedness exhales into the inflating balloon of Her satisfaction. She has reason – no, 'cause' -- to be wicked. That much Richard has given Her.
He looks at Her. It’s a look that may or may not survive when the only thing separating Them is the silk cocoon of preservation She’s woven around the jade stone of Her soul -- If She lets Him inside. He doesn’t speak. He won’t.
She takes the stool beside His. Her leg slips out from under the delicate hem of the dress that barely hides Her motives, carelessly touching His. “Let me guess.” She already knows. He wears His reason like a cross, burned into His forehead. She studies the swelling of His desperation not even denim can hide. His knees weaken. He sinks to His stool, the denim brushing coarsely against Her bare thigh, Her momentarily disclosed need. She places Her hands on His chest. There is an enticing solid strength beyond the flannel barrier. She extracts an engagement ring from a breast pocket; the one that Josephine had thrown across the room at Him, denying Him His anger. “Your fiancée slept with someone else. Your fiancée betrayed you.”
He doesn’t speak. They look at Each Other, seeking the honesty Both know the Other will obscure. In the nakedness of the night, would They bother searching for the same honesty; or, would it be a non-sequitur. He doesn’t speak. She drops the ring in His cup. “Be rude, then.”
She stands. He is too mired in His contemplation, useless, unable to leave that dead and decaying womb. Her need resides in the tactile world. He looks into the black that has just swallowed His recent past, then pushes the cup away. “Why do you come here?”
She searches Her purse, stalling. “That’s adolescent. ‘Show me yours, and I’ll show you mine’…eh?”
His dread lashes out. He grips Her wrist. She sucks in Her breath, too fast to subdue. She has not sucked all of His resolve from Him. She steels Herself against the urge to pull away. Vulnerability can be as much of a liability as an asset. Using thumb and forefinger, He rubs the pale circle around Her 4th finger where Her tan is marred. Her wedding ring is in the medicine cabinet, behind the Midol and birth control, where Richard will never see it. “What’s his name?”
“Richard.” She picks up His spoon, fishes the ring from the black refuge.
He opens a napkin for Her. “Richard, doesn’t pay enough attention to you.” She places the ring on the napkin. “Is it, sports, the guys – another woman?”
She sits. Standing, He 'could' touch Her exposed legs, running a finger up under Her dress. She takes His hands in Hers, helping Him to dry His recent past. “It’s music. He’s obsessed.” Her eyes drop, carelessly. “He sits at his keyboard all night, writing little black dots on paper. I get dressed up and go out to see if he will notice I’ve left. I’ve done it twice. He hasn’t noticed.”
Her eyes come up quickly before His reaction can dissolve. He examines the ring as if every facet holds an answer. “Yes, Josephine slept with another man.”
She sees it. It swells and protrudes from Him, aching for release. It excites Her. It’s a guilt She can grasp, and massage; hardening it for Her own lascivious purposes, She looks at Her watch. “I should go and see if Richard's noticed. I stay out a little longer each time increasing the chances he might notice.” He nods. She rises. “Unless there is something in that cup of coffee that will answer your questions, you could walk me to my car.”
She walks away. He peers into the cup. For the last twelve nights, there had been no answers in the black solution; maybe escape, but no answers. Under the chatter-laugh of the bell above the door, real escape had just left. The cartoon chattering bell laughs at Him.
The giggle of the bell chases Her down the sidewalk, dies, then laughs again. She trembles. The late summer night chill draws itself across Her like a damp rag. She’s dressed for thick heat. His approaching need, chases away the chill. Still, She trembles. He’s beside Her. “I don’t get it. Why Nicks? You’re not a ‘Nick’s’ type.”
“What makes you think you know what ‘type’ I am?”
He stops. She takes two more steps before spinning into latent carnal confrontation. The dull smoldering coals of His eyes rake Her, clawing Her breasts, Her tummy, Her legs. She won’t respond. It’s Her need to know, not be known. “I get the angst, but why the guilt? You aren’t a ‘guilt’ kind of guy?”
He nods, turns away, turns back and turns away again. He might leave. She turns away. “My car is this way.”
The night air draws its dirty damp rag across her again. His indecisiveness ices Her ardor. Then, He is beside Her again, the glowing ember of His need warming Her fervency. They walk, brushing Each Other’s shoulders and lascivious psychosis. Their twists splay, exposed and reaching out, threatening to entwine. They are almost at Her car, almost at the junction of options and choices. She offers up a 'I'll-tell-you-what-I-know-you-tell-me-more' bargain. “You followed her, stalked her, to catch her, didn’t you?” She stops. He takes one more step into His reticence, then turns. There’s more. She presses the negotiation. “You watched them?” He looks away, then back. Still more. She ups the ante. “Through the window? From the hallway, before you interrupted them?” His eyes fill with a brown ‘not quite.’ “You hid in the closet?”
He looks away. There is so much more; too much to be hidden behind the taciturn sheen of His corneas. It's the thing that must never be said, but must be spoken. Just the awareness of its existence moistens Her urgency. She moves to Him, Her hand on His chest, face secret-sharing close. She knows. She can feel his twistedness in Her hand. It's fuels the fever of Her perverse need. Knowledge moistens here and hardens there. “Oh my. You stroked yourself while they made love."
He looks away. She holds Him there, placing Her hand on the denim covered bulge of His memory. His memory fills His jeans and the ardor of Her appetite. “What was it? The need to know if the other lover was better than you? Being where you shouldn’t have been? Maybe, you have a thing for watching?”
He tries to turn away, but She has His bloated arousal in the grip of Her constructed carelessness. Lips fluttering against His cheek. “I know a way we can find out.” The sizzle of His zipper tears through His inhibition. “I wish I’d been there, to see it – to see you. That is hotter than imaginable. You came off, while watching, didn’t you?”
He doesn't move, mired in His twisted bent. She takes His hand, placing it between Her legs, pulling it up against Her moist, exposed vulnerability. She rolls Her hips forward, then back, rubbing Her damp fever into His hand. She nibbles on His ear, reaching behind Her, gripping the driver’s door handle, pushing Her commanding vulnerability at Him. He digs into Her. She presses the door-unlock on Her key ring. The car’s chirp is lost in Her whimper. She grabs His wrist, pushing His hand from Her. “No! I want to see what happened that night. I want to watch -- you.”
She opens the car door, sinks into Her desire, legs extended from the car, open. Her silky, pouting exposure is visible below the rim of a hem creeping up from Her arousal. "I want to watch you while you watch me. I want to see you watch.“ She teases Herself with a single beckoning flick of a finger “Take it out. Stroke it. Step back. Hide in doorway behind you, like it was some closet.”
The street is empty. He reaches to His zipper, to cover His protruding, swollen bent. She grabs His hands, releases Him from His jeans, and His inhibitions. His need protrudes up into the cool night air, pointed directly at Her. She pulls Her hands away, offering Him no fulfillment; nodding to the doorway. She raises her knees, displaying Herself.
He sinks back, closeting Himself into the shadows. His broad hand takes His carnal exposure, inflating it and His twisted craving. Nothing touches what lies at the canyon of Her open legs, except the perversion of His sight. His mouth draws open. His tongue writhes its own desire to be free, to touch. His whimpers rain on Her, drawing Her own craving to Her vocal surface. She fights not to indulge the satiation of Her begging, damp urgency. Maybe it's a need to be lanced by His swollen, hard psychosis.
Vocal night moths flit toward their divided tryst. People are coming, a couple engaged in their own unstained romance, giggling as they approach. He fights to stifle the whimpers of escaping demons. He’d rather be caught plunging His aberration into Her wet perversion, than to be seen gratifying His own distended deviation. Something surges through Her, radiating from Her open, begging vulnerability. Her whimpering calls to Him. The couple is nearly upon them. His depravity unleashes from His throbbing arousal. Viscous white drops snow spatter on the pavement between Them, in the path of the undistorted couple.
He buries His face into the shadow of the corner. Less thought would be given to a man driven into a doorway by a desperate need of a urinary nature. He stops stroking, but still His desperate, fleeting satisfaction surges out of Him, twitching His member like some sexual divining rod. He stifles His moans. The couple passes too absorbed by their fair romance to notice the ejaculating perversity hiding in the shadows. He zips His flaccid guilt into His pants and turns. The car is gone. She is gone. All that is left is the dissolving, milky stain of His perplexing degeneration on the sidewalk.
Another Doorway
The doorway engulfs Him in shadows that closet the contorted wreckage of His contemplation. He contemplates Her carelessness. He contemplates the fate that pushes people to each other’s perversions; or is it some sort of dark Karmic magnetism? He contemplates why contemplating in the shadows of a doorway across from Nicks, is as unfulfilling as contemplating at Nicks. Mostly, He contemplates why He never lets go.
The heat has returned. It pounds away like a man who hasn’t loved in a week; a man who can go on for hours in the shadows of a doorway. She strides over the horizon of the dry barren waste of His psyche; stepping into the saffron light that spills through the sanguine smeared glass of Nick’s front window. Her legs scissor beneath a black dress that is purposefully a careless six inches too short at either end.
He steps from the shadows of His contemplation, into the tawny illumination of observation. She takes His empty stool, all lines and roundness in perfect geometric, trigonometric symmetrical mathematical balance to His twisted need. She watches as Tony pours His black contemplation into His cup and saucer for Her. Yet, She is oblivious to the elegance of the relationship between cup and saucer, the way the saucer bears the weight of the cup. She thinks only of the cup in the functional way it will allow Her to sip His contemplation. It’s too bitter. She dilutes it with the façade of sugar’s white purity.
He leaves the yellow-brown luminance of the street light, crossing the saffron bloom to enter Nick’s. She won’t indulge the cartoon laugh of the bell above the door by turning, but smugness paints it's crimson gloss across Her lips. He takes the stool beside Hers, taking the one that was Hers when She last invaded His contemplation.
“Well,” Her hair carelessly falls across Her face. “How’s my favorite voyeur exhibitionist? Did I leave you….” The last of Her carelessly chosen words, bloat and stick in Her throat. He's driven His hand between Her legs like an axe wedge, pulling it up against Her naked fever. He digs into Her degeneration, exploring the careless way She has forgotten underwear.
Her panic wraps around His arms, digging into it with fearful nails enameled with blood red. She can no more move His arm anymore than She could have moved a fire plug protruding from the ground. It is all She can do is to reign in Her carelessness and harness the begging whimper of Her fleeting satisfaction. She lessens Her grip, tightening Her moist perversion around the depraved invasion of His finger. Her arousal threatens Her with carnal seizure.
Tony joins the exhibition, the unwitting voyeur, tossing wood on the fire of Her climax. “Hey, man! Where you been? Hey? Is she okay?”
“She’s fine Tony. Just got the chills from a summer fever. Why don’t you go in the back and get me one of those 'good' steaks that I know Nick keeps for special customers." Tony trots off with his skepticism.
“Please!” She leans against His shoulder, infusing the fibers of His shirt with unfathomable pleadings that He not let Her stop Him. Her legs pull up, holding Him where He is. Her body is wracked with spasms, seizures begging to take in air, to take in Him.
Tony returns with the steak to fill His hunger. He is once again wrapped in His contemplation. She is gone. Tony offers up the steak. “Hey, man. Where’d the babe go?”
He looks past the boundary where the saffron light falls into the shadows that soaks up all the detritus of twisted behavior. “I don’t know.”
Yet, another night.
He tries walking out of His contemplation, but it follows Him, uptown, downtown, cross-town. It's followed Him through a week's worth of nights and miles traversing concrete reality. At least, it's better exercise than plunking His purposelessness on a stool at Nicks.
"Hey. How are you doing?" The voice waits half a heartbeat for Him to realize that fate has dealt another hand. It isn't Her voice, but it is a familiar voice. "Are you okay?"
He turns toward the woman who has left the sanctuary of those who get their bents straightened by prime time television. This woman is encased in some unseen glow that protects her from the stains, His stain. This woman is not Her, nor is she Josephine. Still, this woman possesses much that is beckoning; thin, yet with a seductive roundness and a naivete that exudes strength. In her urbanized country sundress, there is an allure that pulls at something buried in Him beneath the dung of betrayal. "Hi, ah…."
"Cheryl." The woman, Cheryl, wades closer, sinking deeper into His muck. "I know Josephine, sort of." A saccharine smile of appreciation stretches the leather taut angst of His face. Its façade is not reflected in the gray-silvered contemplative cataracts of His eyes. Cheryl risks getting mired in the mud of His degenerate bent. "Look, I know about what Josephine did. I know what she's like. What she does. I knew for a while. I wanted to tell you, but didn't know how. She was my friend and -- and…. I'm sorry."
"Thanks." The taciturn word had to be pushed through the reticence of His twisted shame. He doesn't know what to do with the lifeline Cheryl has tossed into the tar pit of His obsession.
"Look. If you need anyone to talk to, you could call." Cheryl retreats, before sinking into the sludge and tracks too much of it around her world. Still, the lifeline is there. "Or, we could just get together for coffee."
"Sure. I'd -- I'd like…." He stops. She appears, from behind, pressing up against His haunting contemplation with Her furry psychosis. Her fingers lace with His, between the digits of His warped yearning. She pulls His hand back, toward Her, pulling it between two halves of a fox fur coat, pressing it up against the silky fur of Her own exposed sexual bent.
"Oh?" Her question flits over His shoulder, bats in Cheryl's face. "You're not at Nick's. You should be. I've been looking for you."
Cheryl retreats, shaking off the manure of His and Her affliction. The lifeline is withdrawn. Cheryl disappears, off to scrub away the brief stain that she has allowed to soil her.
She steps around Him, placing Herself between Him and the retreating rescue into the world not stewing in the stains of the degenerate. She opens her coat. Her soiled proclivity is bared beneath it. She enfolds Him in the steamy cocoon of Her need. "Put your hands in my pockets. Hold my coat around us."
He does as He is told, embracing the sick succor that comes from twisting His bent. She presses Her hand against the ineffectual denim barrier to His swollen necessity. She uncages it, releasing it to Her own grip, stroking it until He quivers against the strain to subdue any vocalization of His deviance. The shame of betrayal's pain, releases, ejaculating against Her naked tummy, dribbling down Her front. She presses up against Him, smearing the impure white of His sickness against His jacket. "You should stay at Nick's where you belong."
Taking it home.
Fragile glass balls of expanding frustration shatter against the mirror, falling like the muted broken music from Richard’s lair. Her fingers flip carelessly through the strands of Her hair, ripping out the knots of self perpetuated betrayal, throwing them at Her own reversed image. The same seven notes repeat again and again, then comes the eighth, always different, always wrong; like Her escapades into the muck of betrayal. Always lacking in the satisfaction of resolve.
She contemplates Her carelessness. She should have been caught by now with such carelessness. She should have had that satisfaction. She dearly needs satisfaction. A man with the right needs, succumbed to such carelessness, but the satisfaction was always fleeting, momentary.
Her eyes locked with Her own, right for right, left for left; looking back at Herself with the coldness of Her burning need. She and She give Herself a quick nod of affirmation; but, will She have Her satisfaction? The same seven notes lift and fall again, dragged down by the wrong eighth. Richard hasn’t found the melody yet. Sad self inspection gives way to words uttered too carelessly soft to be heard, “Richard, I’m going to Nick’s Café -- again.”
He's out there! She sensed it in a fecal odorous way as She touched the doorknob. It was Her own scatological proclivity. Framed in the door, He stands just at the boundary between Her private purgatory and the dark sponge–night that soaks up all twisted behavior; that netherworld where She has left Her own stain. He floats just inside that place where people play games with the night; just to get the stench of their perversion out of the house. The stink drifts in, embracing Her.
"This was in the pocket of your fur coat." He enters, invades Her purgatory, holding up a deposit ticket with Her name, Her address. Seven gargoyles of Richard's inattentiveness rise up the stairs. The eighth flounders and falls at Their feet. He looks to the steps leading to the basement. "Richard?"
Seven demons of Richard's ignorance climb the steps. The eighth trips and falls halfway in its climb. He moves to help the fallen incubus of Richard's alleged transgression against Her. She places Herself in the path of His ardor. His sudden fervency grabs the hem of the dress She had carelessly slithered into. Her manipulative carelessness is yanked up around Her tummy. She gasps at the exposure and the possibilities, discovery, retribution, satisfaction. He spins Her around, pushing Her toward the brink of Richard's lair. She places Her hands on the wall, to keep from being shoved down the steps, into the abyss of Richard's obsession.
His hand is between Her legs, then up, hard, pressed into Her wet aberrant need. He digs, pinches and massages Her self destructive perversity. Seven ghouls of Richard's indifference float up. She supplies the correct eighth, a yelping minor fifth from Richard's missing note. It's a perfect octave from His twisted warp.
He pulls out His rock hard need. Seven specters of Richard's apathy flit toward them. He drives His ardor-laden vengeance into the wet void of Her gratification. She cries out the harmonious eighth one perfect third from Richard's dalliance. The birds of Richard's curiosity flounder in the stairwell, seeking air to lift them.
"Here he comes," He grinds the detritus of His twisted satiation into Her.
"Oh God. Stop!" Her desire for bent satisfaction holds Him. She cries in anguish.
"No." He thrusts the tool of Her impending climax deeper. He pushes the slinky careless fabric She calls a dress up over Her breasts and grabs Her with the fever of His own urgency. "You should have known better than to be careless with delicate man."
"Fuck you." She whimpers, holding back Her release. She will not be so careless as to waste it without the satisfaction of having been caught in the throes of Her carelessness. "Tomorrow night We’re going to Josephine’s!"
"No!" He growls, purging his delicate need into Her, staring into the wide deer-caught-in-headlight eyes of Richard. "We won't."
"And I need to be redeemed to the one I've sinned against, because he's all I've ever known of love"
-- Fiona Apple