--ALWAYS HAVE, ALWAYS WILL.

                      

                           Untangled

I like her like this, I think.

She says, “Do you want a dangerous kiss, or a threatening one?”

“So, like, those are all my options?”

“Right now, tonight?  Yep.”

We’ve known each other two and a half hours.  I thought we were drunker.  She seems as clear-headed as an anchorman and my big toe won’t stop mating with the weird, longer one next to it, I’m that nervous.

“I guess I’ll go with threatening,” I say.

Jordan, Jasmin, Julia, Joy, J-something has Pennzoil black hair and cut-across bangs, straight as a surgical scar high up on her forehead.  In the bedside light, her lips glisten like pomegranate polyps.

“You’re a taxidermied cat,” J says, growling, or else grinding a set of molars.  “What’re you stuffed with?”

She grabs my stomach-fat through my shirt, and when I suck in my gut, I cough across her eyelashes.

“Sorry,” I say.  “That Glenn Livet kicks.”

J pounces, her head like a Venus Fly Trap that hasn’t fed in years.  Teeth pinch my ear, tight as a pair of pliers.

A second later, I feel like I’m at the dentist with miniature silver tools stuck in my mouth, trying to answer a question.  “So, threatening, huh?” I ask.

“Just getting started.”

“But is this actually a kiss?” I slobber-mumble.

J is Mark’s friend.  Somehow, she is.  He said, “So look, all right, she works kind of fast.  Yeah, and she’s a bit of a freak, but isn’t that what you need right now?”

Mark is always looking out for me.  He was my best man, or butt man as we called the role back then.

Somehow, while my lips are both being pierced by J’s fangs, her tongue turns into an industrious salamander.  It feels nice at first, a warm, slimy surprise in search of something, but then she flicks it slowly back and forth across my tonsil bell, and I can’t get any air.  I try to tell her this.  I’m unable.  I sound like a stroke victim yelling Save me! underwater in slow-motion.  I have no air at all, none.

I fling her off me, with strength I never knew I had, and J slams rag doll-limp against the boxy hotel air-conditioning unit by the window. 

My lips burn.  I’m gasping for breath, but I feel terrible and wonder if perhaps I’ve somehow killed her.

“What the fuck?” J says, sitting up and wiping spittle, hers or mine, from her dimpled urchin chin.

“I know,” I say.  “God, I’m really sorry.  Are you hurt?”

J faux-spits into a corner of the paisley-printed carpet.  “Mark said you were vanilla.”

“I couldn’t breathe.  Can vanilla even breathe?”

“Fucking tap my hand if you need relief,” J says.  “I’ll back off.  Some,” J says, the fierce grin returning as she crawl-prowls back to the mattress, her nostrils as wide as pug’s.

“Wait,” I say, “So did, like, Mark pay you for this?”

“What a dick,” J says, feigning schoolgirl hurt, though the truth is there in the way her eyes pinball the room’s walls before landing on mine.

“I have money, too,” I say.  “Some anyway.”

J’s brows--thin as Salvador Dali’s moustache, but without the fanciful curls at the end—arch like a cat’s back.  “Oh, yeah?” she snarls.

“Yeah,” I say.  “I’ve got some.  Come here,” I say, patting the mattress.

“Oooh.  What a big boy.  You taking over now?”

“I guess so, but I’m really not that big, if you know what I mean.  Except maybe for my gut.  Here, scoot in,” I say, opening up the blankets like a tent flap.  “Let’s cuddle for a bit.”

“Cuddle?  What the fuck?  You’re gay.  I told Mark.  I said, That Dude’s gay.”

“I’m not.  I wish I was, though.”

“What?”

I pull J into me, her face warm pudding against my chest, some sort of face stud poking my nipple, though I do my best to ignore the pain.

“Did Mark tell you what happened?” I ask.

“What do you mean?”

I stare at the ceiling.  As I always do, I see Leigh looking down at me.  She’s so fucking gorgeous, Good Lord.  She’s smiling and nodding.  She’s wearing that shit-kicker grin of hers.  She wants me to be happy, to go on, to live.

“So, you going to tell me or not, about what happened?” J say asks.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say.  “It does matter, of course, but, hey, do you think we can just talk tonight?”

“Huh?  Talk?  Like, talk, talk?”

“I’ll pay whatever Mark paid, double.”

J looks at me with uncertain eyes, like a girl being told she is beautiful for the first time.  “Well, if that’s what you want, all you want, all right.  Deal.”

I pull J tighter.  I pat her hair some.  It feels a little awkward and foreign, but I keep doing it, humming something that might be a lullaby or a favorite Bee Gee’s tune.

I wait until J’s breathing slows and she’s snoring soft and brassy, a stoned bumblebee in my arms.

“The thing you have to know,” I whisper, “is she was the love of my life.  She was and always will be.”

J’s breath shoots up my chest, something oaky and foul, like a rat drowned in molasses.

“I first saw her in college outside Todd Auditorium.  She had the biggest, brownest eyes I’d ever seen.  Like chocolate moons.  I don’t know if you believe in that sort of thing, but it was definitely love at first sight.  I was smitten.  Still am.”