Bored? Read this!

[SLSduke82]

Well, I know some of you have read some of my fiction. I posted a few chapters of my fourth novel, couple of weeks ago. Well...wrote myself into a corner, 70k words in. Plan on finishing it, but needed to switch gears.

So I started novel #5. Trying my hand at 1st person...don't do a lot of that. First time in novel form. I have about 100 single spaced pages, and writing from a stalker's POV is quite fun

Anyway, I'll post up the first chapter, for the hell of it. I know I'm always bored and looking for something to do. If anyone wants more, there's 28 more chapters after this The title is tenative, as well.

--Jon

______

The Third Wheel

Night falls, I’m alone
Skin chilled to the bone
You turned and you ran
Slipped right from my hands

Blue on black
Tears on a river
Push on shove
Don’t mean much
Joker on Jack
Match on a fire
Cold on ice
A dead man’s touch
Whisper on a scream
Doesn’t mean a thing
Won’t bring you back
Blue on black

– Kenny Wayne Shepherd Band

Chapter 1

Our date went well.

Or, correction, was going well. Swimmingly, as Mum enjoyed saying. Yet, if she spoke that adverb now, I would’ve had to change my underwear. Lordy. Ol’ case of Brown Spot in Your Shorts by Hoo Shat Poo. You know what I mean.

Mum’s ghost, God rest her tortured soul, would’ve said our date was going swimmingly. No ghosts in the corner café, in suburban Wexford, twenty minutes north of Pittsburgh, which was abuzz with activity and smelled and sounded fine. Brewed coffee, jazzy muzak, hushed, cultured voices, soft track lighting, walls painted in earthen tones. What else could one require for a first date?

Un-sweaty palms and forehead, I guess. A handkerchief, laundered white cotton edged with lace, took care of that. Before folding it, neatly, into squares and slipping it into my pocket, I glanced at the red, stitched, cursive initials at the bottom right-hand corner, above a sewn daffodil, her favorite flower.

S M. No, not my initials, which are T B, for Tom Brown. A name as exciting as oatmeal without milk, sugar, or butter, which Pop enjoyed toward the end of his life. God too rest his no-so-tortured soul.

S M for Sandra McCullough. Again, nothing overly exciting; to the average man.

I’m not your average man. Far from it.

Yet her name at least sparked one’s synapses to life. Sanda, a sexy first name. Wilma, middle name I left off the handkerchief, but for which I knew the foundation. Wilma was Sandra’s mother. Something in common, we shared, both our parents, dead in their late sixties. McCullough. A surname full of Irish lore.

Indeed, her hair was a golden-red, flowing to the middle of her back. Face, creamy unblemished porcelain, freckled, heart-shaped.

Beautiful enough to still one’s heart, except mine, which raced along like a frightened horse.

She wore a white blouse and pleated skirt. The top two buttons were open and revealed cleavage deep as the Marianas Trench. A shudder passed through me, settling in my groin. Her legs, tan to spite her heritage, a mile long if they were three feet, two baby-smooth roads which formed a Y under that skirt. And that Y? My word, I could only imagine. And did.

Red hair there, too, I bet. Hoped. Fiery—catch my drift?

Lordy.

Her diverted eyes, under plucked eyebrows? A tantalizing mix of green and blue, glacial ice under a strong sun.

I put the kerchief in my pocket, having decided it might be weird to give it to her, on a first date. Old fashioned. I might as well’ve checked a gold pocket watch with a monocle, pipe clenched between my teeth. She was contempo, all the way. Independent (like me), single (again, I point a finger at moi), childless though she was thirty-three (same here, though I was thirty-five), and could pass for twenty (can’t say the same). I swear. Twenty. Only females in their late teens and early twenties could sport a body as fit and tight as hers, on a regular basis. But a thirty-three year old?

I imagined saggy breasts, a stomach stretched because of a few kids, maybe even a C-section battle scar. A face pulled down by the strain of gravity and family life. Or life in general. Hair, thinning, dyed or permed.

Not Sandra, my Sandy. She defied time. She spat in time’s uncaring face. She rebelled against the world, the apotheosis of the modern woman.

An associate lawyer, to boot. With Brown, no relation, Brown, again, no relation, & Stevenson, attorneys at law. Their office was a pretty structure in downtown Pittsburgh, which itself wasn’t such a pretty city, the entire fifth floor of the ten-story Melanizer building. The sun gilded the building’s windows no matter what its position in the sky. My video camera couldn’t quite catch the colors the windows reflected, when the heavens weren’t gray, a rarity here in western PA.

We first met outside that building. Love at first sight. I swear.

So, then, as I sat sipping my iced coffee, why the awkward silences? Are you shy, Sandy? Why do you keep looking away, toward the door and your watch? Why drink your chai tea latte, your favorite, in quiet solitude? I’m right here.

Stupid! How could I think it was going well? Swimmingly? Say something, anything! If only.

She glanced, once more, toward the door.

It opened, and in stepped an imposing man, at least to me, of similar age to us both. At six-five, a foot taller than one Tom Brown. Even Sandy had an inch on me. I took after Mum, not Pop.

He wasn’t imposing because he was the Frankenstein or mob type—though I saw some Italian in his features, namely the dark skin, dark eyes, black, styled hair—but because he was the jock type.

Jocks and myself have a long, long history, tainted, that I don’t feel like getting into at the moment. In time, maybe, not now. At present, I wondered why she was smiling at the tall, dark, and handsome newcomer, a muscled cliché, whose broad shoulders and chest stretched his forest green polo, whose legs looked like Sequoias wrapped in Levis, whose meaty hands took Sandra’s, whose strong arms helped her up from her seat, whose almost girlish lips pecked her on one cheek, then the other, and whose deep voice, ala a Caucasian Barry White, said: “Sorry I was late. Damn Bimmer broke down a mile from here. German engineering, my ass. I walked, just to be able to see your pretty face again.”

“Oh, stop it,” Sandy said and pecked him on the lips.

My blood turned sub-zero.

“I mean it. Can I get you another drink?”

“I’m still working on mine. Help yourself, though.” She nodded toward the counter, where a line, five deep, had formed. “I can wait another few minutes.”

“Sure thing.” He swaggered away, sockless in brown loafers, which thudded across the tiled floor.

She sat back down at her table. Their table, I guess.

Mine was one over.

Suddenly, I didn’t want to be there, the closest I’d been to her. Red-hot blood rose to my cheeks. I slipped the napkin from under my drink. Condensation left a wet ring in the middle of it. Can you possibly understand what it took for me to sit this close to you? Maybe some day. Some day.

I tore the damp napkin to shreds, under the table, needing to busy my hands, in case they got me in trouble. Lordy knows they have before.

Lordy knows this asshole, who placed his order, could rip my head off with his pinky.

Calm. Calm as a cucumber. Another of Mum’s favorite sayings.

I was as calm as a hurricane, but no one around me noticed. Not even her.

Over the years, I realized no one noticed me. Sometimes that’s a good thing, particularly during high school. Other times, not. Like now. If she’d just cast me one glance, sidelong, I could die a happy man.

No one noticed the man sitting one table over from an empress, who I gladly would’ve fanned with a palm and fed single grape after grape to, if she just gave me the chance. No one noticed the man who came for his first date (on time!) and, with the Italian stallion’s arrival, fell into his perpetual place as the world’s third wheel.

I didn’t want to be there, but stayed and sucked at my now-empty iced coffee. The straw made a disgusting slurping sound. I sucked harder. Look at me.

She didn’t, watching the asshole return with his drink—some icy frap deal, in a clear plastic cup.

Real men drink coffee, I might add.

He sat opposite her. I decided to remain and listen. From my briefcase, at my feet, I withdrew a yellow legal pad and a fountain pen, the same brands she used.

As they talked, I penned S M over and over again, in the borders. Sue me. Lordy knows she could. And when they said something of interest, I made notes.

About a minute into the conversation, I glanced up, avoiding their eyes, and looked at the table behind Sandy and the asshole. A awfully ugly woman with acne scars, maybe forty-five or fifty years old, was staring at the back of Sandy’s head. The woman wore a Pirates baseball cap, pulled over stringy brown hair, and also had an iced coffee. She was chubby, borderline obese, and sported a peach-fuzz mustache (yuck), hoddie, and baggy jeans, though early June warmed the land. A tom-boy female teen, wrapped in a fiftyish woman’s, unappealing skin.

She looked from Sandy’s skull to me. Her eyes widened and receded once, like she’d been caught with a hand in the cookie jar. And she certainly didn’t need another cookie.

She stood, picked up her drink, and folded the Sunday paper, neatly, into big squares. She left the café, bumping into an incoming patron, who turned to glare at the fat ass.

Huh.

I had a notebook and pen to make it look I should be there, not as a third wheel, but as your typical, plain as vanilla, lanky, American male, enjoying some brew in a coffee shop; without a date. Back to doodling and jotting notes I went.

[brk_05]

Still bored. Where's my next chapter?

[SLSduke82]

Haha...hope you're not bored cause of the writing Ask and you shall receive.

___

Chapter 2

Most of what they made was small talk. That translated, into my notebook, as S M. Or Sandra. Sandy.

Below the words iced coffee, yes, even one T B ♥ S M. I wanted to erase that, as it seemed too childish. Well, I had a fountain pen, so I blackened the initials-heart-initials.

More friggin small talk. I sketched the asshole’s face and considered drawing a circle around it, then a horizontal line, within the circle, bisected by a perpendicular one. No, no. Bad thoughts. Lordy, keep them away, come again some other day.

I blackened out his face, too.

Noon rolled round to one, and the store became more crowded. Sandy and I’d been here for an hour, the asshole thirty minutes or so. The volume of customers’ voices drowned out Sandy’s and the Dude’s, as I came to think of him, but they responded in kind, to make one another heard.

Small talk gave way to more interesting things, which I noted.

“—no clue,” Sandy was saying. “I was hoping within a year, two tops. It’s been three now. Still not a partner. You’d figure with all the convictions I secured, hell, even right out of school, they’d see me for who I was.” She shrugged. “Guess not.”

“You’re not thinking of moving on, are you?” The Dude reached across the table and took her hands.

She laughed. I could almost feel the sound, like oiled silk; like how I imagined a women felt, at the Y, but could only imagine.

“No, not at the moment,” she said. “They pay me well, and that jackass Stevenson thinks I have a crush on him. Him! In court, in that black suit of his, I swear he looks like a penguin. Wawk-wawk-wawk. I thought that, once, and started giggling in the courtroom. Why, I got you worried, Tony?”
So he had a name. Tony. How creative. I surmised his last name ended with a vowel and rhymed with ziti or prosciutto, something like that.

He bit at the inside of his cheeks, held the flesh between his teeth, which made him look like a fish. “I’d hate to see you go.”

“Not sure what she’d have to say about that.”

Tony looked around, eyes darting like a buck’s. Or fawn’s. He missed me, though. It was a quick motion, but I saw it just the same. I see little things, notice my surroundings. It’s a good trait to have.

Sandra’d said “she.”

I penned this down.

“Quiet,” Tony said.

She rolled her eyes. “Who gives a crap?”

“Me.”

And me.

“Oh, psshh. It’s been what,” she said, “three times?”

“Four. And think of this, Ms. Lawyer. Half.”

½, written below she.

She reached across and patted his hand. “I can do pro bono work, you know.”

“I don’t want to think of that. I have Bill and Christa to think about. What about them?”

Yes, what about them? I wrote those two unknown names down.

But their conversation quieted. I strained to listen, heard but mumbles.

This went on for ten minutes. I began to wonder if the employees noticed me, a third wheel who finished his drink half an hour before but remained hunched, scribbling, over a legal pad. I admit, paranoia sometimes trailed an icy finger up my spine. Nobody, of course, noticed me.

Their voices rose, once more.

“—you free tonight?” she asked.

“Should be. I usually meet up with the guys for a drink at Jack’s—”

Jack’s, I wrote and thought I knew the place. A smoky, noisy bar in Pittsburgh’s South Side, usually packed with college students and adults unwilling to admit they’ve grown too old to mingle with such a crowd. Posers.

“—but they’ll understand.”

“I’m sure they will.” She flashed a smile which melted my frigid backbone, sent my paranoia on a sunny vacation to the Bahamas, where I hoped we’d someday go. Honeymoon suite, and all that. Iced champagne, rose pedals, strawberries, entwined lovers. Sandy beaches.

“Nine, nine-thirty?”

“Perfect,” she said, “but not too late. I have to be up early. Need to be in the courtroom by eighty-thirty.”

“I’ll see you then.” He kissed his palm and blew the kiss at her.

She caught the kiss and touched it to her lips.

My stomach knotted.

Tony stood, stretched, and took his empty drink to the wastebasket. On his way out, he made a gun of thumb and forefinger, pointed it at an older female clerk, and bent his thumb. Bang, see ya, tiger.

The clerk smirked.

Sandra sat a while, then stood, gathered her garbage, without looking at me, deposited her cup, and went for the opposite door.

I watched her through the spotless glass. Her hips swung, like the pendulum of a grandfather clock, counting off sexy time.

Her buttocks looked nice, as always.

After she left the parking lot, in her Mercedes coupe—license plate, LAW CHK—I went to mine. No, not a Mercedes, but a Chevy Impala, white, unassuming.

I had lots of time to kill until nine, or nine-thirty, and decided to take in a movie, then get some dinner, at a pizza joint. Both attended by me, myself, and I.

No, scratch the pizza. I was watching my weight. And exercising more. A chicken salad, then.

Great.

Yet my appetite vanished right around the time Tony came into the café, the man I knew nothing about, which was unlike me, and didn’t return.

Chapter 3

The movie blew more than a porn star. Or Janis Tamoney, who I once heard did that to the entire football team at my high school. Sure, students—most envious, either male or female—probably exaggerated the tale, but don’t such stories have non-fictional roots?

But I only guessed about both. Janis and a porn star, blowing. Or maybe Janis was a porn star. Or dead, I neither cared nor knew. I only thought of her then because the actress on screen, about seventeen and not known to me, looked like Janis did all those years ago. Big-breasted, thin, shoulder-length black hair. The past had, and still has, a way of creeping up on me like that, like a puma, or something. All quiet, sneaky, stalking to within feet without one knowing, then bam.

I turned my mind’s eye around. Uncle Pete was within reaching distance. As soon as he saw me looking, he scampered into the bushes. Good at hiding things, he.

Back to the subject at hand. I’ve never seen an adult movie. I swear. They demean women. It’s filmed prostitution. Disgusting. Lordy.

Yet the matinee did blow. I can’t remember the title, or the content. Some chick-flick. At least I was just one of four sitting before the big screen, hunched down in my seat, in the back row. The popcorn was okay. Screw you, diet. And it was something to do. The movie, I mean.

The young clerk behind the front counter gave me the wrong ticket. I wanted to see whatever new war movie was playing; something macho. Oh well, can’t win them all, sonny. Life’s hard. Two more of Mum’s favorite sayings, both so very true. I didn’t feel like arguing with the clerk. Arguing was the wrong word. I make people uncomfortable. This, I knew. Her face had grown red and she stuttered, though the speech impediment didn’t seem ingrained, but brought on by the situation. Thus, I accepted the ticket and dreamed of Sandy. No need to go into great detail, for I already have. The honeymoon fantasy.

From the ocean, came Tony. They frolicked in the waves, leaving me to peer out at the thin black line separating sea and sky.

I sighed, and the movie played on. I hadn’t made the kid behind the concession stand uncomfortable. He looked as if he smeared his head with grease, feeding all those pimples. Though almost two decades separated us, our kind picked each other out with ease.

Birds of a freaky feather flock together. He? Unattractive and pimply. Me? Lordy, it was a short list, but enough.

It wasn’t length, but girth, right? Yeah. Thought so. I forced more popcorn into my face, not hungry in the least, and tried to shove Tony out of my head. He pushed me right back, ground my face in the sand. I could almost feel the grit between my teeth; but it was just the shell off a popcorn kernel.

Don’t you just hate that? I know I do.

[blackredline2006]

more please

[SLSduke82]

^ Sure.

Chapter 4

8:45, read my car radio’s clock. I skipped dinner. Hell, I had reserves. The kernel’s skin was still lodged between my rear molars. Nothing would get it out, not even the edge of a piece of paper I tore from the legal pad. Wished I had some floss.

I glanced at the pad before the dome light went out. Iced coffee, multiple S Ms, Sandys, and Sandras, two heavy black marks which had been a childish, love-stricken set of initials separated by a heart and the asshole’s face, she, whoever she was, ½, Bill, Christa, popcorn. The light went out. I set the pad on the passenger seat, in case I needed to jot a note.

I powered down the windows an inch and turned off the car’s ignition. I’d parked my Impala across the street from her house, out of an arc-sodium streetlamp’s range, though it wasn’t yet on. Two other cars, one fore and one aft, became vague in the darkening twilight. I knew sitting here while some sunlight remained was risky, but whatever. Like I said, most people don’t notice me, as if I’m a ghost.

I wasn’t, if you’re wondering. Somehow, that would’ve made things easier.

The clock reached 8:50, then the radio shut off, too. The sky told the time. It shifted from milky indigo, to fire-red, like her hair, to peach, to purple, to black. Stars shone. Darkness fell across the maple- and oak-lined, suburban street, Carlyle Lane. She didn’t live in a gated community, but might as well’ve. The townhouses here, in the rolling hills fifteen miles north of Pittsburgh, thirty-six-point-four miles north-east of my apartment, were beautiful. Two to three stories, brown or red stone, white trim, lawns manicured by paid help to look like golf greens. The smell of fresh cut grass and honeysuckle and mulch drifted into my car, teased my nose (and allergies). Crickets were tuning their instruments, preparing for their nightly symphony. Fireflies bobbed and flickered and spoke to one another without words. I like fireflies.

One might’ve snapped a picture, or painted one, and entitled it “The American Dream.”

She deserved it and found ways to express herself amongst street after street of cloned town homes.

On her front door hung two silk daffodils, tied at the ends of their plastic stems, hooked over a nail. The tops of the flowers faced the stoop, but looked right in doing so. Below that, a welcome mat, which featured a calico cat standing on top of the word WELCOME. Flanking the mat, two potted ferns. Most of the other houses looked the same, even the entrances, but not hers, not my Sandy’s.

Lordy.

The streetlamps came on, at once, and formed a molten-metal river of radiance, which bent right an eighth-mile away, out of sight. Instantly, the world turned from “The American Dream” to “Loneliness Under Bronzed Light.”

I didn’t much like the dark, even if I sat in it, in my car, hid in it, watched out from it.

I’m okay with the day and evening. But not night. Not dawn.

A coldness blew in me though the breezed puffed warm air, through the opened window, across my cheek.

The headlights turning onto Carlyle, from behind? Not lights guiding a driver, in the present, but lights like demon’s eyes, shoved into Uncle Petey’s Ford. The headlights fall across my curtain as the great hunter pulls up in his rust-bucket pickup, and are gone. Footsteps sound on the other side of my door. Blackness caresses the frosted windowpanes beside my head, for it’s winter, two and a half hours until dawn. The sun rises late. It’s buck season. My door opens, and Pete doesn’t stand there, but Dad, smiling, though he’s struck with a nasty case of bronchitis. I call him Dad, then. Pop came after cancer.

Up, he says. Up, big guy. Petey’s here. You ready?

I shake my head and shove it under the comforter, and Dad laughs.

The front doors opens and bangs shut.

[SLSduke82]

(Ch. 4 cont'd)

I twitched and realized I’d fallen into the quicksand of that memory. The slamming door came from across the street, in her driveway.

I sat safely out of the streetlamp’s reach, but Tony wasn’t. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew his size, and his car. That damn Bimmer, German engineering his ass. An M3. Big spender. License plate—I squinted—AGF 8102. I jotted the letters and numbers down. No vanity plates for him.

She deserved them.

But did he deserve her?

Ass out of u and me, I know; I assumed not.

I wrapped my hands around the steering wheel. He fished around in his pockets. The BMW chirp-chirped. Its lights flashed once, twice. I knew the neighborhood better than he. No one wanted his damn car. Damn flashy car, black as the night above. He walked over the pathway. Even though he seemed to be wearing sneakers, not enough light to tell, his footfalls reached my ears. Clop, clop, heavy as a Clydesdale, one step closer to her.

Sandy’s front door opened. The light in her front hall silhouetted her, threw her shadow onto the stoop. I could only make out her hair. It seemed to burn without consuming itself; there was some biblical about her. Not holy—I was beginning to understand that—but fabled.

I gripped the steering wheel tighter. Not fair. Not at all. Life’s hard, then you die. Pop added the last part. My guts twisted, turned to stone. Turned into a living thing which spread something so hot it was cold throughout my veins, which rose like worms beneath my arm’s pale flesh, over the tightening tendons in my forearms. Tighter still. The pain mingled with the living creature inside me, that green monster, and if I could, I would’ve yelled out. Not at her, never at her. At him. Would’ve fanned her with a palm, plucked grape after grape into her mouth, hoping she’d touch the tips of my index finger and thumb with her tongue. To my mouth I’d put my fingers and kiss them, how romantic. She’d melt. I’d melt. The coldness kept me from melting.

They embraced on the front stoop. Their heads were lost in shadow, but formed a larger shadow. His lips, no doubt, touched hers. What’d she taste like?

Cinnamon toothpaste, of course. The kind in a clear bottle, the kind as red as her hair. A taste full of Christmas, of family, of rightness; the taste of a woman, I’d only known once. Not cinnamon for Cathy. She hardly ever brushed her teeth. I brushed twice, before a date, to make up for her bad breath.

They moved inside. They shut the door.

I sweated, and finally let go of the wheel. I beat the steering wheel until my fists went numb. Numb.

No lights came to life, on her second floor. Please, please don’t come on. Don’t go up there. You’re better than that, Sandy. You know better. He’ll use you.

She’ll use him.

I put my right fist to my mouth, and wiped the tears—half shed from the pain—away with my left. Stupid, stupid.

Numb. Numb, my nose, that morning, twenty-seven years before. The puma, named Memory, leaps.

Dad’s still laughing, kindly, when I poke my head from under the covers. My eyes adjust to the light, but take their time. My body knows this is a poor, lonely hour to be awake. Dad, you’re really not coming?

No, he says. I would, if I could.

Still sick?

Still sick. Sorry about that. He coughs, as if to prove a point. His chest rattles. Maybe I’ll catch what he has, right at that moment, and be sick, too. Won’t have to go. A fever’s not so bad. Gives me funny dreams; sometimes fun.

Let’s go, Dad says, Petey’s waiting for you. He crosses the room, I’m nine, and flicks on my bedside lamp. I squint. He bends over, coughs once more, and sets my long johns, then my snow pants, then my down parka with the fur-lined hood—we had money—then my gloves, my hat with earflaps, bought for the occasion, and, at last, the orange vest, onto my bed. The vest glows like something supernatural, possessed with neon.

I look into the hall, for Mum. She’s still sleeping. Do I really have to?

Dad looks at me. What?

Do I really have to?

He sits on the edge of my bed, which slopes toward him, under his weight. No, he says, you don’t. You don’t ever have to do anything you don’t want to. But this is good for you. You’d go if I wasn’t sick, right?

I nod.

Then just try to enjoy yourself. Uncle Pete’s been talking about the trip for a month.

But he drinks.

Dad chuckles, which breaks into another fit of hacking. Glass in his chest. I wince.

Yes, he says, he does. But you’ve seen me knock back a few. Tom, today’ll you see, for just a few hours, what it’s like to be a—cough, cough—man.

I sigh, and get dressed. I turn to the window, where it’s still dark.

But then a light turns on, and the memory fades. It wasn’t the sun, rising early, outside the window of my childhood bedroom, but the overhead light in her bedroom.

No, no. Yet, like a car wreck, I can’t look away. Forms, their forms, pass before the pane, blocking the light. This went on for a minute, then two. The light went out, leaving me to fill in the rest.

Do they head back downstairs? No. Of course not. The name of this picture? “De-robing in the Dark.”

I peered through the windshield, down the street. A firefly left the security of grass under its wings, blinked. Its tail dimmed, dimmed, cut an arc through the night. The bug landed on my windshield.

I reached forward and flicked the glass, under the insect. It launched itself into the night, blinking neon-green. Neon. Like my vest, but not. It is orange, not yet glowing, as the sun isn’t up. Petey has already cracked a Budweiser. The sound of the pull-tab, the crack of aluminum, was like the crack of twigs under our boots. The air is cold, bitterly cold. The woods, unlit—

—like her bedroom where, back in the present, two lusty animals moan and scratch and, maybe, bite, thrust. Or one lusty animal. No, she couldn’t be. She’s too sweet. Slow, was how she’d like it. Same here. Linked, syncopated.

In my mind’s eye, the image formed. I tried to fight against it, but I couldn’t. I hovered above the bed. At first, I saw my head, my neck, where she held me. My bare back, not big-muscled, but toned. Waist, narrow. Buttocks, skinny, rising, falling. The back of my calves visible, knees and shins on the comforter, toes spread because it feels so good.

I caught a glimpse of her face. Her chin rested on my shoulder, eyes shut, mouth open an inch. Her hair smelled like strawberries. She inhaled, exhaled into my ear, the roar of the ocean.

The only other part of her I see? Her legs, spread for me, feet flat on the mattress, knees bent at a forty-five degree angle. Then she got into it, hooking her ankles together behind my ass, helping me—

—but it’s no longer me making love to her, but Tony. And he doesn’t make love, no. Not his kind. They fuck. How I hate that word.

He had muscles. The bulged, they rippled, they sweated. She screamed, perhaps in pain. He’d be bigger than me. More of a man, right, Sandy? Was that who you really wanted?

He could toss her around like a doll, so he did. Every position imaginable.

STOP.

The fantasy turned nightmare faded.

I sat alone, in my car.

Her window? Still dark. It would be until they were finished, and plodded down to the bathroom, to shower together.

And that’s when I noticed, in the rear window of the car parked before me, some old rusty jalopy, make, model, and license plate concealed by the night, a brief flash of fire.

A lighter.

The flame went out.