The girl was twenty-three, maybe younger. Her lipstick was sometimes hard red, sometimes smeared. Her skin was always milk white, cocaine white. Sweet and tough. She didn't seem to know how to brush her hair but left it to hang dark and thick and matted in back, loose around her face, tangled in hoop earrings.
She lived in an apartment in the back of somebody else's big house, where the house crouched at the edge of a park. When the man knocked on her door, it was night. Her lights were out, but she opened the door. She was home, awake. The man said, "Maybe you want to take a walk?"
She knew him from around. They rode the same city bus. He ordered sandwiches where she worked. Once they'd sat side by side on a bench while he had his lunch break, and she had her federally mandated afternoon fifteen minutes. His voice was soft. His shoulders were broad, his skin like butter. She blew out a candle on an end table, then went outside. Night air brushed against her warm as breath. Her door clicked, locked, behind her.
They walked uphill on an uneven sidewalk. She said, "Where you going?"
He said, "Just came from a movie," and he pointed over his shoulder. Blocks away, there was a theater. Art films. He said, "Cafˇ Flesh." He looked at her sideways, out of the corner of his eye, and smiled. It was a confession: Cafˇ Flesh. Vintage art porn. She let it sink in.
"Never seen it," she said, virginal as she could muster.
He tugged at her long hair. She smiled back, almost laughed. He was sexy. Yes, it was a booty call. Anything wrong with that?
They were on a dark side street lined with houses, not the main street, where bars were, where people were. Then another man's voice called from somewhere. The voice said, "Brautigan!" It was sharp, like an accusation. It was a man in the shadows, hunched like a crow, walking toward them. When he yelled the name a second time, the man at her side waved hello. Turns out, that was his last name: Brautigan. She hadn't known before.
He gave a nod. His friend, closer now, said, "Haven't seen you around."
Brautigan smiled, looked away and back. "I'm still here." His teeth flashed, damp and gleaming as they caught the street light. There was something sheepish in his smile. Shy maybe.
The other man was short, with a bowl haircut. He said, "Keeping busy, right?" like he'd heard it before. "Who's your new friend?"
Brautigan said, "Look, I'll call you. I will."
"Right," the other guy said. "I'm sittin' by the phone already."
When Brautigan and the girl started to walk, the man stepped in front of them. He stepped close. It was only a gesture, one second, almost invisible, but too close. His mouth opened, ready to say something. He ran his tongue over his lower lip.
Brautigan and the girl ducked around him, kept walking in the dark, into air thick with jasmine and exhaust. After they'd gained distance, the guy on the corner yelled, "I'll see you again, Brautigan! I'll call you, right?" Half threat, half plea.
"What was that?" the girl whispered.
Brautigan shrugged, and gave a glance over his shoulder. "A guy I know."
He lived above a tavern in a sprawling set of rooms with too many roommates but plenty of space. When he and the girl cut through the kitchen, a pack of old hippies were loading a bong at a cluttered table. She recognized one or two, from the neighborhood.
Brautigan's bed was in the next room, on the floor. The windows were open. The curtains weren't curtains, they were mismatched sheets. The sounds of the street came in as though the beer drinkers, downstairs and outside, were in the room.
"It's hot in here," she said. She kicked off her sandals. The apartment was heavy with trapped heat: summer sun and the body heat of so many drunks below rising up off a dance floor, a jukebox clunking its way from one forgotten song to the next.
The man, Brautigan, brought two bottles of beer from the kitchen. They kept the lights off, but enough street light seeped in to make the room blue and pink in patches, dark in the corners.
He took his shoes off and lay on the bed, his back against the wall. His feet weren't bad, for a man's feet. They were callused, but his nails were clipped, not curled. She stretched out beside him. A line of sweat sneaked down her front, between her boobs, and trickled over her flat stomach. She pressed the beer to the side of her face. "How do you sleep in this heat?" she said.
His smile was sweet and boyish. "Not at all." With one hand he pushed the strap of her halter top down over her shoulder. It was an assertive move, a hint of aggression, but gentle really. She took a slow sip of beer. He reached for the other side, pushed that strap down too. Her shoulders were round and white.
He put his mouth to her shoulder. His tongue touched her skin. His hands were big, his fingers long, and he pushed her halter top down lower, halfway down, a little further, until it marked a line across her nipples, then lower again, until her breasts were out, free, pale and round in the dark room.
It felt good, her sweaty skin in the air. That kind of heat was meant for losing clothes.
He bit her nipple. She put her beer on the floor, listened to an ambulance down the block, somebody in trouble, and then someone else laughing, a drunk downstairs, a voice rising over the twang of a mass-market country song. He hiked up her gauze skirt. Her underwear was moist and hot. Nylon. Not meant for the weather. There was the sweet smell of her body in that heat, salt and skin. He pulled her underwear down, making her a centerpiece, pungent, a bouquet there to fill the room. She was pale white in the streetlight, the dark around her. "I'm not going to be the only one naked," she said.
"Why not?" he said, "The impressionists lived like that, artists and models — "
"And in strip clubs," she said. "If somebody's paying. My point exactly."
When she pulled his shirt over his head, he raised his arms. His armpits were a garden of hair. His ribs swam out, bony and graphic, then sank below his skin as he dropped his arms to his sides again. He stood up. She got to her knees, reached his zipper, pulled his jeans down. His cock was already hard and straight, pressed out, free of clothes, as though aching to touch her mouth, so near. She could smell him, rich and animal, the summer night. "You don't have tattoos, either," she said. Everybody had them, now.
He bent and climbed onto the mattress. The mattress was cheap. It tipped like a sinking boat. She asked, "You're a runner?" His thighs had that runner's mark, defined muscle, slightly bowed.
He laughed, surprised. "No, not at all." He pushed himself down, mouth on her belly, then farther, finding his way through the tangle of her untrimmed bush. She thought to pull him back up, roll away, go take a bath, wash off a long day, sweat, nylon, start again, and she said, "I hadn't planned on — "
His tongue, flicking and strong, found her clit. She forgot about stopping him, gave in, sunk back against the cheap mattress where music seeped up through the floor. Her hand, when she lifted it over her head, hit something soft — a cat, sleeping in the pillows, that ducked away — and the hippies in the kitchen laughed, and people downstairs and outside were talking and the world felt so crowded, they might as well have been on the sidewalk, naked on the street, but she closed her eyes and let his tongue lead her forward, her body warm, her head swimming. One of his hands, his long fingers, held her thigh, as though to keep her from closing her legs. The other hand slid underneath, touched her asshole. Her body tensed; the world pushed back, and those people on the street were good as gone. She involuntarily pointed her toes, then let them curl, tilted her hips, her pelvis, toward his face. Her orgasm came on fast, born of that tension and moving into the full release, waves of warmth radiating. She wanted to hold on to it, to make it last forever. She rode her orgasm, fingers in his hair. She forgot to hold back, forgot about the thin walls and howled her own siren wail, saw the cat run, then she started laughing because she couldn't help it. It was delicious.
Brautigan climbed on top of her, his cock big, thick and ready. He wiped his face with the back of his arm. He pushed himself inside. She smelled her musk on his lips. He slid his tongue into her mouth and she pulled him closer, raised her hips against his to match his thrusting, and she arched her back. They were soaked in sweat where their skin met, wet as though they'd been swimming. Then she felt a change. His cock. It turned into a soft nudge, not a thrust at all. He moved his hips sideways, spiraling, pushing in and out faster, but she knew -- he'd lost it, his hard-on.
She let him go on for a moment, then palmed his ass. She held on, to stop him. He paused. She pushed, wordlessly urged him to roll off, and he gave in.
She got up, and tried to open the windows farther, then tied one sheet of a curtain in a knot to let a breeze through. "It's too hot," she said, giving an easy excuse. The last thing she wanted him to feel -- this big, sexy guy, this man who'd come to her door, who turned her on, who made her come so fiercely she'd seen orange behind her eyelids -- the last thing she wanted him to be was embarrassed. She'd take it on, his cock. It needed plumping.
Easy.
She blew air over his belly, a cooling breeze, then over his damp thighs. She put her tongue to his shaft and drew a line, base to tip, coaxing. Again. When it started to swell she sucked it into her mouth, between her lipsticked lips, and drew her mouth up and down. And there it was, full and eager, his skin taut, a vein running down the side.
In a quick move, he put his hands to the side of her face, lifted her head away. She let him. He turned. His come made an arc over his bed, over his sheets, in white pools and drops, and he closed his eyes and breathed out in a way that she could hear his breath.
When Brautigan had fallen asleep, she got up and put her clothes on. She didn't hurry, but took a minute to look out the window, down at the city. Then she left, cut through the kitchen. There was only one old hippie at the kitchen table now, one she'd recognized earlier. Usually he wore a straw cowboy hat. The hat was on a chair. His long grey-black hair had that ring of hat-head.
He said, "I know you, don't I?"
She said, "No." They walked the same sidewalks, sometimes drank in the same bars, that was all.
"Good to see you here." He waved a cigarette at Brautigan's bedroom door. "We were starting to wonder about that guy. Thought maybe he was a little..." The hippie held out an intentionally limp wrist, the universal, though dated, sign for queer. She saw now, maybe he wasn't a hippie, with all those liberal values, so much as just an old pot smoker in need of a haircut. He said, "Glad you can vouch for him."
"Vouch?" She fixed her lipstick without a mirror. She'd done it enough times before.
The hippie said, "Yeah, you know," and made the limp wrist again, gave a little swish, like maybe she missed it the first time. No subtlety.
There'd been that guy in the shadows, the man who walked like a crow, his voice full of accusation. What was that about, anyway? He wasn't good-looking at all.
She felt close to Brautigan, like she wanted to protect him, and at the same time far enough away that she had no clue who he was. She'd just, that night, learned his last name. She said, "He's all right. But I'm not here to vouch for anybody." She slid her feet into her sandals. Then she walked home alone, through the hot city, to her apartment in the back of somebody else's big house.
