“So that smell was ok with you..my natural guy smell?”
Charisma tugged on my shirt, pulled me closer.
“It was more than ok,” she said. “It made me wet between my legs.”
“Oh you’re so fancy!” I said.
“Did I just hear you say I love you?”
“No. That’s wasn’t me. I know if I ever say that, that’s it, we’re over. I’m here on a drug weekend, how can I say love on a day like today. Weren’t we going out to the lake house today? What ever happened there?”
“I—no—I don’t know what was supposed to happen there but we’re not going.”
“What is going on with your housemate? You know? First she’s kicking us out. Next she’s putting her baby in the dishwasher. It makes someone like me, who wasn’t here for her previous accident..I wonder. That’s all I’m saying! She suffocated him?—Is that right?—I know we’re not supposed to say but did she come into the room to find him cradled to death or did she go into the room five minutes earlier and fucking smother him?”
Charisma covers my mouth with her hand.
“I don’t know,” she whispers. There’s fear in her eyes. She shrugs. “I can’t trust her words, I can’t trust her to take care of her baby. I’ve thought of taking Little Faulkner with me, pushing him underneath my arm, getting in that VW Rabbit 🐇 and getting the fuck out of here. Get that baby somewhere safe—I mean drop him on a hospital lawn somewhere in Indianapolis. And also,” Charisma says, “there’s some fear about what will happen if I expose her for..”
“For what she may or may not have done?” I say.
Charisma nods, eyes big and brown in the reticle, her head the moon that holds us all in its presence. Its yellowish glow. And I saw her as some form of astronaut who pledges to go where no one else had gone before, but upon arriving she discovered the surface was host to a party louder and bigger than any in the entire universe.
“Here Charisma!” I was drawn back into memories of the first time I ever went to Charisma’s house. We were standing in the kitchen—before it was redone—first I remember us eating hot dogs and Charisma goes into the cabinet and gets a spice bottle labeled “BHT” and we put that on our hot dogs even though “It’s a preservative, yes?” I asked her and her sister Faith came in with an open math book for her big half sister and said, “Here, Charisma! Oh hi, Matt. This is the one I need help with, Charissy dear, please.” “Charissy, please!” I say. “Remind me why we are eating this? Isn’t it a preservative? Why are we putting it on food that is about to be eaten, ie at the last moment possible to preserve something that is going to be eaten in one second?”
“We’re doing it for the flavor.”
“What’s its flavor?”
“Salty,” Charisma says.
“Shouldn’t we be putting salt on it? So we’re not wasting the side effect of preservation?”
“We could,” she says. “But this is like a better sort of salty. In the beginning of the world,” Charisma uses this metaphor to describe the Mesozoic and the crustaceous periods and how somewhere in between them human descendants from another planet introduced our small green Earth 🌍 to synthesized BHT and people just used it as salt. By the end of her colossal education, first Charisma and then Faith and I were all serving ourselves small piles of the white powder, licking it from our hands, and laughing—so much laughing.
And somewhere in there over a bump of BHT I noticed Faith while pretending not to notice—that sort of thing—in fact I did not know whether every time I went to Charisma’s house was a time when I went to see Charisma..or a time when I went to see her little sister. You can see I am inflicted with this sort of distractibility from Charisma to Faith or from Charisma to Brooklyn. I am always looking over my girlfriend’s shoulder to see who is standing forever beyond her. And in doing this, I neglect the present moment and I hate myself for this.
Look deeper, with Charisma and I sitting cross-legged on the basement floor, her bed an army blanket away, listening to Robert Redford seduce us with his crazy words, watching him in his most dapper role, most excited, most obsessed with some nondescript dream..with Charisma’s hand crawling above the carpet like a spider..finding my hand and jumping on top of it. And here’s where my memory lets me down, for I cannot remember if we kissed that first first time I came over or if we did it on many of the second and third and fourth first times we made for ourselves carving our holes in her basement home..Swiss cheese..South American sub-aquatic caves inviting us to swim ever deeper under boulders, seas unmapped, teasing us to go farther than our oxygen allows, Charisma coming up from a kiss grasping for air and pulling me up with one hand. She and I kissing for the first time in the relief of that tunnel, rolling over and over each other in her basement, every part of me that could reach out to touch her, every part of her that could cushion and catch me..both of us falling and falling into each other.
And when was that precious first fuck? Wasn’t I with someone else? Wasn’t I looking over Ashley’s shoulder at Charisma? Wasn’t I, when I got with Rebecca, still in an on again/off again relationship with Ashley? The new one always too special not to pursue, the old one forever too comforting to be able to let go of. Didn’t I like it when Ashley jerked me off like a baby, lying in her lap, the only rule was that we weren’t allowed to break eye contact? And how many relationships have I cheated off running some server in my own room—not just pictures of girls, not just videos, but full-tilt room control, the girl being there just for me, paid only by me, solo show—and I can tell her to jerk herself off with her hands, I can tell her to take off her panties, kneel at the crotch, and play herself with fingers so hot it could pay for a college education. When was that first fuck?
And why were we just fuck friends? We had known it from the beginning and (present monologue withstanding) it has been the one true example of a fuck friends sort of relationship that I’ve ever known. What was it that makes Rebecca special in that way Charisma wasn’t? Was it just that Charisma always drove me the fuck crazy when we were doing anything but fucking and Rebecca I’d worship as I drove us off the wall? I lusted after Rebecca, no doubt. I respected them both. But when I thought of sex with Charisma I thought of those screams that I never thought Rebecca would make. Rebecca I never would have expected to want to take it up the ass—Charisma I knew from the start she would.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“I’m thinking of the beginning of us. Isn’t that weird, that I never had sex with Tuesday but you and I’ve been doing it for years.”
“You weren’t ready with Tuesday.”
“That’s true. I wasn’t. But look at this: Tuesday and I went on a date to the planetarium and I was touching her pussy (over her underwear) and she was touching my dick (over my jeans) and her friend Katy drove us home and in front of my house Tuesday was lying there in her kilt—but she broke the rules ‘cause she had panties on—but I was touching her puss and that was in tenth grade and by the time I was a senior Nadia and I were going on dates and I never touched her puss—not one time. We dry fucked but I never took off her pants—she took off her bra and she took my hands and brought my hands to her and I felt her breasts. That’s the most we ever did.”
“You we’re learning,” Charisma said. “Different people are on different tracks. Their relationships are on different tracks. You were sensitive to that.”
“It’s like they’re nuns and you’re a bad nun,” I say.
“They’re nuns and I’m a schoolgirl.”
“I think that’s true. With Nadia I was walking on eggshells—not in a bad way. But with you it’s like I was lining up to suck the sex from your teats. I felt assertive with you—you know?—I demanded what I wanted. Well not demanded—”
“Oh yes,” she says. “Demanded.”
“With you I wanted to pounce on you and stick it and you know those nights at my house? When you gave us the antidepressants? I replay those nights. You are under me. You’re struggling off your jeans. I’m pulling off the panties your mother packed in your kitchen before you came. You just went into my bathroom. Put on your fresh panties that I know exactly what they look like: they’re white with one of those—”
“Grateful Dead bears.”
“Right. You’ve got a Greatful Dead bear right here and it’s sexy as fucking ice and I’m holding you down and pressing into you with my cock—that is one of the sexiest moments I know of: when you’re about to fuck someone and you’re still separated by these thinnest layers of cloth and you’re straining against them. And then I stripped you of those white panties and I pushed my dick into you and after a couple of times you say—”
“ ‘It feels so good, doesn’t it?’ “
And I say, “Yesss. Yes it does.”