Presently she is pressed against the porcelain. The grout between the tiles is blackened with whatever sins the previous occupants have left behind, but she likes the stinging feeling against her. Water as cold as she can stand sprays from a limp showerhead, tickling her as the drops trickle down to find their way between the white of the tiles and the moon-pale glow of her untanned portions. The shower curtain is a dull tan, probably bought for longevity’s sake, and she leaves it partially open to let in a strong shaft of light, only hitting this motel’s bathroom window at this particular hour.
This is a ritual she knows well.
Her breasts pressed tightly to the wall, she imagines her heart beating Morse code into the plumbing, vibrating the secrets she can never expose. She feels the scents of the day washing away, sliding down her Goosebumps, amassing at her ankles, but she knows that although they may have left her body, they will not leave this room. They will evaporate off of the plastic curtains, the fogged metal knobs. They will join the other scents of this stranger’s abode to be sanitized by cleaning products and sprayed over by fake fresh floral disinfectants. Nothing in this room is ever left out in the open for very long.
When she finally gets out, squeezing the excess water from her long brown hair and wrapping a towel around her body, she lights a lone cigarette and sits upon the sill, slick wet legs crossed and kicking anxiously. The back of this motel has nothing particularly special to offer as far as a view is concerned—a high chain link fence tangled by vines, the backs of a few nameless warehouses—but she stares out transfixed anyway, taking long drags and glancing back every now and then to watch her puddled footprints evaporate to nothing. Birds she doesn’t know the names of are chirping out their last songs to the rhythmic rise and fall of crickets. All this she takes in to create the detachment, to make this more like a movie she has watched over and over and less like the reality it has always been. And has she always done this she wonders, a sudden breeze blowing off the fragile ash from her cigarette. Has she always taken a romanticized view of this sin? As if the rituals have become just another way to refine the variances of everyday life into a script she stands erect to the window and unravels the towel, white and damp with water, letting it fall beneath her. A gust of cold air snatches away the last beads of water, sending shivers through her body. Has this ever been more than just an escape?
As if to place the dot below the curved question mark a car is heard pulling through the gravel of the parking lot behind her. She bends quickly to grab the towel and dry off completely, wiping harshly and tightly wrapping herself up again, sliding through the opened bathroom door and out into the curtain-muted bedroom. Almost hoping it isn’t him, almost wishing away the ritual, she looks out into the parking lot. From her view from the second floor, out over the paint chipped balcony, she can only make out trunks. Out past the parking lot, cars are slowly funneling their way past—speeding up and slowing down at lights, an idling crowd of people staring straight ahead to avoid any sort of connection or contact with those around them. Though there is no movement within the lot and by now she is certain that his car has not pulled in (stupid, it is still an half hour from their agreed upon meeting time), she tries to make out which car has most recently arrived. Tries to find some small clue, as if she could feel the heat of the hood, or hear the ticking of the engine from her sealed in existence. Finally giving up, she falls back into the bed, again unraveling her herself naked beneath the damp towel and lights one of the two cigarettes sitting on the stand beside the bed.
You shouldn’t be wasting your best years on the worst of situations. She hears her mother’s words from a past fight, like the pointed edges of the broken coffee mug left behind her, smashed upon the floor. Walking briskly out of mother’s house towards her car (she’d never give her the satisfaction of running away), waiting for a final yell from the doorway as she drove away. But only silence. And in truth, there was nothing more to say. Her mother had always used her words frugally. They had been talking over breakfast in the kitchen. Light conversation turning a dark corner before she could even finish her toast. It must have been something that was boiling up inside her mother, something that needed to be said and there were no smooth transitions into such things.
“What do you mean?”
“Oh don’t do this to me, Caroline, don’t act as if I’m senile and can’t see—”
“—Moth—”
“—No, you’ll hear me out this time. You think I don’t know about him?” Caroline laughs spitefully, half-heartily trying to dismiss her mother, half simply trying to shut her up.
“Him who, mother? I haven’t been on a date in months.”
“So clever you think you are. Naïve. You think I don’t notice the private phone calls, the sneaking around. Sure you haven’t told me about any boyfriend, but there is man hidden in those actions—” Then silence, she could only sit there and brush the crumbs off the table. “Does he have a wife, is that—”
“Oh you think you’re so smart don’t you? You think you know everything, like my life has to be on display for you and everyone around me?”
“No.”
“You think every fucking thing I do is a mistake, don’t you? And you want it that way, don’t you? You want to just sit there laughing, watching me fall so you can make up some lesson for me to learn.”
“No listen to me.”
“Yeah maybe I am seeing some guy. Maybe I have my own reasons for not letting you in on every little thing in my life. Maybe I just enjoy a quick fuck every now and again without any goddamn attachments. Who are you to criticize?” The bitterness was flowing freely now and she knew that it was only exposing her more.
“Caroline.” The tone was stern, echoing from fights long past. Her mother would have her say. The air hung stagnant in morning light. When their eyes finally met, Caroline knew. And she knew that the words her mother spoke would hit that much harder. “Trust me; I know what you’re going through.”
Trust me; I know what you’re going through—a subtle line echoing infidelities down from mother to daughter. The words had crushed her.
The television inside the motel was old, veiled with dust, and rarely had a clear picture. Out of the few basic cable channels to choose from; the infomercials, the soap operas, or the daytime talk shows, she always chose the latter. The talk shows at least were grounded in some form of warped reality. Mothers that didn’t know the father of their child. Underage prostitutes confronting their parents. Relationships so enmeshed with infidelity that it was hard to tell exactly who was cheating on whom. These were everyday people who made mistakes.
The daylight began to recede, the shaft of sunlight crept back out through the bathroom window, leaving the rooms dark except for the television bouncing light off of the dull, white walls. Almost drifting off into a light sleep, Caroline checked her watch. She would have to get up soon and get dressed. And wasn’t that silly, she thought, putting on clothes that would just be taken off again. I should just open the door in the nude and save some effort. Is that all he really wants me for? Could that be it? Was it all for the sex? What was it, if not sex? The curled vines entwined together in formal relationship only clutch so tightly to the rusted fence for a chance of flowering one day at a better vantage. Why struggle up the tensioned links only to try and bud under the light at some new haphazard point? There was a drama involved in these ponderings that she would never call sultry, but she twisted over the sheets of the bed to try and quell the fire inside her.
Detachment.
It must all lie in the detachment, the double-edged sword. The very thing she used as shield against moral depression had only served to prolong the immorality. I’m an actress on a cheap set waiting for my scene to start. There is no reality outside of these walls and no family for him to go home to—just a finite script. When she finally swung herself around on the bed, feet hitting the floor, she realized that she would have to go to the bathroom. She moved quickly, the cold feeling of the bathroom tiles only intensifying her urgency to urinate. And just then, her lithe body cutting a dull silhouette in the dark room, by some cruel design, she heard a car pulling into the gravel lot.
Fuck fuck fuck, she thought disdainfully. She did her best to hurry up; thinking how ironic it was that she was still completely naked. The flush of the toilet beat out the knock on the door and quickly, her heart racing wildly with an excitement she rarely felt, she softly padded towards the door and opened it, the last light of the day exposing her to him.
“Now there’s a sight you don’t see every day,” he said smoothly, moving in towards her, slipping a short, skinny arm around her smooth body and moving towards the bed. Caroline laughed and after quickly realizing that the door was still open, kicked her leg at it, successfully swinging it home with a thud.
He set her up carefully at the foot of the bed only to topple her, crashing into the cushioned springs with a wheeze, an old sigh of dust collected from the past. She fell crucified, smiling, her breasts bouncing independently from one another. The man took her place at the foot of the bed, eating her up with his tired gray eyes, squinting through his glasses. He was a balding, middle-aged man, semi clean-shaven and anonymous, a face in the crowd. You could glance at the two together and put a good fifteen years between them, though this sort of calculation is always flawed by the fact that men seem to age faster, weighted down from hand-me-down pressures, not unlike gravity weighing down the mind and the soft, sagging parts in unison. In reality he was thirty-five and she was a firm twenty-six.
His belt clanged dully as it was loosed and pulled serpent-like by its head from the loopholes. She sent ten plump toes crawling up the front of his thighs, a two-pronged attack to rendezvous at his manhood. Her big toes were clever generals, quick and thorough, leaving no sensitive spot un-probed. She giggled with excitement, hearing his heaving breaths—the air had gone thick, electric. There was a soft friction to his tie being unknotted and discarded. It was a mellow sound with a gentle, melodic whistle that they both acknowledged with a secretive reverence. Every minute detail was magnified, important somehow, to be toiled over later in the days apart. An evil smile crossed her lips as she watched him watch her hand slide down to her cunt, rolling her fingers across her folds. Another giggle escaped her lips as his hands now forcefully worked the buttons of his shirt, fumbling, misfiring, pulling and tugging. Soon he was as naked as she, firmly awake in the drowsy afternoon, a palpable silence between them.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Harbinger. No calls today, but there is someone here who would like very much to meet you.” It proved to be the thunderclap, a lilting phrase transcending to that other world where she was just his secretary and he was just her boss. It was careful, cruel and sensual and thoughts quickly turned to actions.
The bed anchored clumsily as he dove upon it, grabbing her legs quite roughly and spreading them. He was careful however to mix the harsh with the gentle, riding his slick wet lips across the tensioned muscle of her left calf, catching an errant hair now and again, but persisting onward, flicking his tongue out over the soft crook of the under part of her knee, causing her leg to kick reflexively, a motion quickly stunted by his strong grip. He was intent to torture, then reward and when his tongue finally reached its destination, she screamed unabashedly, thighs squeezing together trying to quell the fever within her. He took his time and did not fight when she rolled over onto her stomach, flipping him on his back, straddling his face, pulling herself upright and back to reach his cock, spitting saliva into her hand and working it into his skin with a dirty professionalism. His thighs and torso began to rock back and forth in a thrusting motion, his buttocks flexing and relaxing, giving up the secret of his desires and she acknowledged; dismounting from his face now covered in her juices. She kissed him deeply, moving her body round to meet him squarely. His thrusting slowly quickened, gaining momentum, careful not to pass the point of no return. Caroline cried out wildly, arching her back to change the angle of entrance, her breasts now bobbing wildly. She bent down again to kiss his gaping mouth, letting her hair spill down to enshroud them. His pace quickened, slowed, quickened—torsos beating against one another in sometimes rhythmic, sometimes chaotic punches. He rolled her back over and she lay helpless among the sheets, sweat glistening over her body, taking whatever he was giving. She was faintly aware that their hands had clasped together in a white-knuckled grip. He was losing his control and his glasses were sliding comically down his nose. In a few minutes it would end and they would lay together, heated bodies clutching each other until they cooled, separating as the calm veil of sleep covered them. An epilogue playing out to the cacophony of an idle television quietly cutting to commercial breaks.
********************
Caroline and fallen into a short, deep sleep. Her body—spent to the point of exhaustion—lay sticking to the sheets as the sweat from her body dried. Her mind, however, was wild and alive in the murky depths of dream. The images were fragmented and confusing, mixing time and perspective, placing people in the wrong memories. In between this tangled cross-stitched web there lay a dark, incestuous undertone. Her mother, aged backwards at least twenty years, stood naked in her present day living room, peering out of the tiny front door window on the tips of her toes. She had the lithe, muscular legs that her daughter would inherit and the likewise naturally straight blonde hair. Though the house seemed lit with the afterglow of a late summer day, there were dark storm clouds outside the windows, heavy and pregnant, the promise of a storm. Trees were swinging; bearing the brunt of what must have been hurricane-like winds, losing branches, hitting power lines. Her mother relinquished her lookout at the door only to walk over to the large bay window, staring out unabashedly, muscles clenched and anxious, clearly waiting for someone.
Then she began waving.
From the back end view of the dream, her breasts, young and firm, lolled back and forth to the momentum of her waves like crude pendulums. Slowly the men appeared. Dark silhouetted bodies on the front lawn, peering in the windows, closing in on the house like a slowly amassing group of zombies. Her mother brought her hands together, clasping them and jumping up and down like a little child waiting on Christmas. Short bursts of giggles were the only sounds in the staticky room. The door burst open either from the wind or from the dark figure that stood in the doorway now, not necessarily menacing, but there was a hint of sin in the air as he entered. A blank, anonymous man come to take her mother. As they resided to the couch, he pounced upon her, grabbing at breasts and clumps of hair. Her mother laughed maniacally, laughter that echoed through the realm of dream and into reality as Caroline was rocked violently awake by her own shivering. The room had gone cold in the darkness. Michael lay next to her, breathing heavily, occasionally snoring. She eventually collected herself, but the image of her mother would not leave her.
********************
“What are we doing here, Michael?” The first words spoken in close to ten minutes. Startled, he adjusted his glasses which were creeping clockwise upon his pale, squinted face.
“What do you mean?” An awkward reply, wary of any tricks. He sat upright on the bed, attempting to turn on the light, but she stopped him.
“What are you doing to me, Michael?” He inched closer, trying to make out the look on her face.
“Well, I thought I had been making love to you, but I suppose—”
“—Are you sure, Michael? Are you sure you’re not just fucking me?”
“What the hell is that kind of talk?”
“Look, Miche—”
“—No seriously what the hell are you thinking, Caroline?” There was a defeated tension in his words as with a man ceaselessly holding together a poorly made dam. He ran a hand through his thinning hair, exhaled more out of nerves than exhaustion. Two naked bodies lying parallel to each other, foreign and scared to touch each other now that the intimate moments had ended. Caroline refused to look at him. Instead she spoke halfway into the pillow, half hoping she could muffle the words she was so afraid of saying.
“This is not healthy for me, Michael. This can’t be. Look, I know that deep down I do love you. I know that there is this fierceness inside me that shakes me wild with excitement when I think about our times together in this motel. But it’s just drama; it’s just escapism. I’m lonely and you’re unhappy. So we arrange times to fuck and then we go back to reality and act like there is nothing between us. Maybe I’m fulfilling some theater dream I had as a child. It’s play acting, Michael, it’s just fucking play acting.” Her words rose above and settled not between the sheets, but between their separated bodies. Michael took some time before answering.
“I’m sorry.”
“We both are, that’s why we’re in this situation.”
The words between them died as Caroline eventually drifted into a light sleep. Michael got up to take a quick shower and left quietly, looking back only once before exiting. It was a sad glance, one borne of self-loathing, cowardice and guilty desire. Caroline had rolled herself up into one of the white sheets, her hair feathered across her face. The door clicked close.
When Caroline finally woke up, she was slightly startled by the darkness of the room. Michael must have turned off the television because there was only darkness. She got up, rubbing her head, which was groggy from her nap, and walked towards the bathroom. The light blinded her eyes and the shower was damp and humid still from Michael’s shower. She turned on the cold water, letting it massage the back of her head. Looking down she laughed, seeing strands of Michael’s hair curled in question marks around the drain. Every time there seemed to be more down there swirling around. He really was losing his hair, she thought. She pictured his sink at home cluttered with hair thickening products. She wondered if his wife was a realist about it or if she played it off to him. She always had these thoughts afterwards, picturing what his family was really like inside their little house. And later, in her apartment she would check her email and he would have written some form of explanation or apology that would make her come back. She always did.
This is a ritual she knows well.
This is a ritual she knows well.
Her breasts pressed tightly to the wall, she imagines her heart beating Morse code into the plumbing, vibrating the secrets she can never expose. She feels the scents of the day washing away, sliding down her Goosebumps, amassing at her ankles, but she knows that although they may have left her body, they will not leave this room. They will evaporate off of the plastic curtains, the fogged metal knobs. They will join the other scents of this stranger’s abode to be sanitized by cleaning products and sprayed over by fake fresh floral disinfectants. Nothing in this room is ever left out in the open for very long.
When she finally gets out, squeezing the excess water from her long brown hair and wrapping a towel around her body, she lights a lone cigarette and sits upon the sill, slick wet legs crossed and kicking anxiously. The back of this motel has nothing particularly special to offer as far as a view is concerned—a high chain link fence tangled by vines, the backs of a few nameless warehouses—but she stares out transfixed anyway, taking long drags and glancing back every now and then to watch her puddled footprints evaporate to nothing. Birds she doesn’t know the names of are chirping out their last songs to the rhythmic rise and fall of crickets. All this she takes in to create the detachment, to make this more like a movie she has watched over and over and less like the reality it has always been. And has she always done this she wonders, a sudden breeze blowing off the fragile ash from her cigarette. Has she always taken a romanticized view of this sin? As if the rituals have become just another way to refine the variances of everyday life into a script she stands erect to the window and unravels the towel, white and damp with water, letting it fall beneath her. A gust of cold air snatches away the last beads of water, sending shivers through her body. Has this ever been more than just an escape?
As if to place the dot below the curved question mark a car is heard pulling through the gravel of the parking lot behind her. She bends quickly to grab the towel and dry off completely, wiping harshly and tightly wrapping herself up again, sliding through the opened bathroom door and out into the curtain-muted bedroom. Almost hoping it isn’t him, almost wishing away the ritual, she looks out into the parking lot. From her view from the second floor, out over the paint chipped balcony, she can only make out trunks. Out past the parking lot, cars are slowly funneling their way past—speeding up and slowing down at lights, an idling crowd of people staring straight ahead to avoid any sort of connection or contact with those around them. Though there is no movement within the lot and by now she is certain that his car has not pulled in (stupid, it is still an half hour from their agreed upon meeting time), she tries to make out which car has most recently arrived. Tries to find some small clue, as if she could feel the heat of the hood, or hear the ticking of the engine from her sealed in existence. Finally giving up, she falls back into the bed, again unraveling her herself naked beneath the damp towel and lights one of the two cigarettes sitting on the stand beside the bed.
You shouldn’t be wasting your best years on the worst of situations. She hears her mother’s words from a past fight, like the pointed edges of the broken coffee mug left behind her, smashed upon the floor. Walking briskly out of mother’s house towards her car (she’d never give her the satisfaction of running away), waiting for a final yell from the doorway as she drove away. But only silence. And in truth, there was nothing more to say. Her mother had always used her words frugally. They had been talking over breakfast in the kitchen. Light conversation turning a dark corner before she could even finish her toast. It must have been something that was boiling up inside her mother, something that needed to be said and there were no smooth transitions into such things.
“What do you mean?”
“Oh don’t do this to me, Caroline, don’t act as if I’m senile and can’t see—”
“—Moth—”
“—No, you’ll hear me out this time. You think I don’t know about him?” Caroline laughs spitefully, half-heartily trying to dismiss her mother, half simply trying to shut her up.
“Him who, mother? I haven’t been on a date in months.”
“So clever you think you are. Naïve. You think I don’t notice the private phone calls, the sneaking around. Sure you haven’t told me about any boyfriend, but there is man hidden in those actions—” Then silence, she could only sit there and brush the crumbs off the table. “Does he have a wife, is that—”
“Oh you think you’re so smart don’t you? You think you know everything, like my life has to be on display for you and everyone around me?”
“No.”
“You think every fucking thing I do is a mistake, don’t you? And you want it that way, don’t you? You want to just sit there laughing, watching me fall so you can make up some lesson for me to learn.”
“No listen to me.”
“Yeah maybe I am seeing some guy. Maybe I have my own reasons for not letting you in on every little thing in my life. Maybe I just enjoy a quick fuck every now and again without any goddamn attachments. Who are you to criticize?” The bitterness was flowing freely now and she knew that it was only exposing her more.
“Caroline.” The tone was stern, echoing from fights long past. Her mother would have her say. The air hung stagnant in morning light. When their eyes finally met, Caroline knew. And she knew that the words her mother spoke would hit that much harder. “Trust me; I know what you’re going through.”
Trust me; I know what you’re going through—a subtle line echoing infidelities down from mother to daughter. The words had crushed her.
The television inside the motel was old, veiled with dust, and rarely had a clear picture. Out of the few basic cable channels to choose from; the infomercials, the soap operas, or the daytime talk shows, she always chose the latter. The talk shows at least were grounded in some form of warped reality. Mothers that didn’t know the father of their child. Underage prostitutes confronting their parents. Relationships so enmeshed with infidelity that it was hard to tell exactly who was cheating on whom. These were everyday people who made mistakes.
The daylight began to recede, the shaft of sunlight crept back out through the bathroom window, leaving the rooms dark except for the television bouncing light off of the dull, white walls. Almost drifting off into a light sleep, Caroline checked her watch. She would have to get up soon and get dressed. And wasn’t that silly, she thought, putting on clothes that would just be taken off again. I should just open the door in the nude and save some effort. Is that all he really wants me for? Could that be it? Was it all for the sex? What was it, if not sex? The curled vines entwined together in formal relationship only clutch so tightly to the rusted fence for a chance of flowering one day at a better vantage. Why struggle up the tensioned links only to try and bud under the light at some new haphazard point? There was a drama involved in these ponderings that she would never call sultry, but she twisted over the sheets of the bed to try and quell the fire inside her.
Detachment.
It must all lie in the detachment, the double-edged sword. The very thing she used as shield against moral depression had only served to prolong the immorality. I’m an actress on a cheap set waiting for my scene to start. There is no reality outside of these walls and no family for him to go home to—just a finite script. When she finally swung herself around on the bed, feet hitting the floor, she realized that she would have to go to the bathroom. She moved quickly, the cold feeling of the bathroom tiles only intensifying her urgency to urinate. And just then, her lithe body cutting a dull silhouette in the dark room, by some cruel design, she heard a car pulling into the gravel lot.
Fuck fuck fuck, she thought disdainfully. She did her best to hurry up; thinking how ironic it was that she was still completely naked. The flush of the toilet beat out the knock on the door and quickly, her heart racing wildly with an excitement she rarely felt, she softly padded towards the door and opened it, the last light of the day exposing her to him.
“Now there’s a sight you don’t see every day,” he said smoothly, moving in towards her, slipping a short, skinny arm around her smooth body and moving towards the bed. Caroline laughed and after quickly realizing that the door was still open, kicked her leg at it, successfully swinging it home with a thud.
He set her up carefully at the foot of the bed only to topple her, crashing into the cushioned springs with a wheeze, an old sigh of dust collected from the past. She fell crucified, smiling, her breasts bouncing independently from one another. The man took her place at the foot of the bed, eating her up with his tired gray eyes, squinting through his glasses. He was a balding, middle-aged man, semi clean-shaven and anonymous, a face in the crowd. You could glance at the two together and put a good fifteen years between them, though this sort of calculation is always flawed by the fact that men seem to age faster, weighted down from hand-me-down pressures, not unlike gravity weighing down the mind and the soft, sagging parts in unison. In reality he was thirty-five and she was a firm twenty-six.
His belt clanged dully as it was loosed and pulled serpent-like by its head from the loopholes. She sent ten plump toes crawling up the front of his thighs, a two-pronged attack to rendezvous at his manhood. Her big toes were clever generals, quick and thorough, leaving no sensitive spot un-probed. She giggled with excitement, hearing his heaving breaths—the air had gone thick, electric. There was a soft friction to his tie being unknotted and discarded. It was a mellow sound with a gentle, melodic whistle that they both acknowledged with a secretive reverence. Every minute detail was magnified, important somehow, to be toiled over later in the days apart. An evil smile crossed her lips as she watched him watch her hand slide down to her cunt, rolling her fingers across her folds. Another giggle escaped her lips as his hands now forcefully worked the buttons of his shirt, fumbling, misfiring, pulling and tugging. Soon he was as naked as she, firmly awake in the drowsy afternoon, a palpable silence between them.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Harbinger. No calls today, but there is someone here who would like very much to meet you.” It proved to be the thunderclap, a lilting phrase transcending to that other world where she was just his secretary and he was just her boss. It was careful, cruel and sensual and thoughts quickly turned to actions.
The bed anchored clumsily as he dove upon it, grabbing her legs quite roughly and spreading them. He was careful however to mix the harsh with the gentle, riding his slick wet lips across the tensioned muscle of her left calf, catching an errant hair now and again, but persisting onward, flicking his tongue out over the soft crook of the under part of her knee, causing her leg to kick reflexively, a motion quickly stunted by his strong grip. He was intent to torture, then reward and when his tongue finally reached its destination, she screamed unabashedly, thighs squeezing together trying to quell the fever within her. He took his time and did not fight when she rolled over onto her stomach, flipping him on his back, straddling his face, pulling herself upright and back to reach his cock, spitting saliva into her hand and working it into his skin with a dirty professionalism. His thighs and torso began to rock back and forth in a thrusting motion, his buttocks flexing and relaxing, giving up the secret of his desires and she acknowledged; dismounting from his face now covered in her juices. She kissed him deeply, moving her body round to meet him squarely. His thrusting slowly quickened, gaining momentum, careful not to pass the point of no return. Caroline cried out wildly, arching her back to change the angle of entrance, her breasts now bobbing wildly. She bent down again to kiss his gaping mouth, letting her hair spill down to enshroud them. His pace quickened, slowed, quickened—torsos beating against one another in sometimes rhythmic, sometimes chaotic punches. He rolled her back over and she lay helpless among the sheets, sweat glistening over her body, taking whatever he was giving. She was faintly aware that their hands had clasped together in a white-knuckled grip. He was losing his control and his glasses were sliding comically down his nose. In a few minutes it would end and they would lay together, heated bodies clutching each other until they cooled, separating as the calm veil of sleep covered them. An epilogue playing out to the cacophony of an idle television quietly cutting to commercial breaks.
********************
Caroline and fallen into a short, deep sleep. Her body—spent to the point of exhaustion—lay sticking to the sheets as the sweat from her body dried. Her mind, however, was wild and alive in the murky depths of dream. The images were fragmented and confusing, mixing time and perspective, placing people in the wrong memories. In between this tangled cross-stitched web there lay a dark, incestuous undertone. Her mother, aged backwards at least twenty years, stood naked in her present day living room, peering out of the tiny front door window on the tips of her toes. She had the lithe, muscular legs that her daughter would inherit and the likewise naturally straight blonde hair. Though the house seemed lit with the afterglow of a late summer day, there were dark storm clouds outside the windows, heavy and pregnant, the promise of a storm. Trees were swinging; bearing the brunt of what must have been hurricane-like winds, losing branches, hitting power lines. Her mother relinquished her lookout at the door only to walk over to the large bay window, staring out unabashedly, muscles clenched and anxious, clearly waiting for someone.
Then she began waving.
From the back end view of the dream, her breasts, young and firm, lolled back and forth to the momentum of her waves like crude pendulums. Slowly the men appeared. Dark silhouetted bodies on the front lawn, peering in the windows, closing in on the house like a slowly amassing group of zombies. Her mother brought her hands together, clasping them and jumping up and down like a little child waiting on Christmas. Short bursts of giggles were the only sounds in the staticky room. The door burst open either from the wind or from the dark figure that stood in the doorway now, not necessarily menacing, but there was a hint of sin in the air as he entered. A blank, anonymous man come to take her mother. As they resided to the couch, he pounced upon her, grabbing at breasts and clumps of hair. Her mother laughed maniacally, laughter that echoed through the realm of dream and into reality as Caroline was rocked violently awake by her own shivering. The room had gone cold in the darkness. Michael lay next to her, breathing heavily, occasionally snoring. She eventually collected herself, but the image of her mother would not leave her.
********************
“What are we doing here, Michael?” The first words spoken in close to ten minutes. Startled, he adjusted his glasses which were creeping clockwise upon his pale, squinted face.
“What do you mean?” An awkward reply, wary of any tricks. He sat upright on the bed, attempting to turn on the light, but she stopped him.
“What are you doing to me, Michael?” He inched closer, trying to make out the look on her face.
“Well, I thought I had been making love to you, but I suppose—”
“—Are you sure, Michael? Are you sure you’re not just fucking me?”
“What the hell is that kind of talk?”
“Look, Miche—”
“—No seriously what the hell are you thinking, Caroline?” There was a defeated tension in his words as with a man ceaselessly holding together a poorly made dam. He ran a hand through his thinning hair, exhaled more out of nerves than exhaustion. Two naked bodies lying parallel to each other, foreign and scared to touch each other now that the intimate moments had ended. Caroline refused to look at him. Instead she spoke halfway into the pillow, half hoping she could muffle the words she was so afraid of saying.
“This is not healthy for me, Michael. This can’t be. Look, I know that deep down I do love you. I know that there is this fierceness inside me that shakes me wild with excitement when I think about our times together in this motel. But it’s just drama; it’s just escapism. I’m lonely and you’re unhappy. So we arrange times to fuck and then we go back to reality and act like there is nothing between us. Maybe I’m fulfilling some theater dream I had as a child. It’s play acting, Michael, it’s just fucking play acting.” Her words rose above and settled not between the sheets, but between their separated bodies. Michael took some time before answering.
“I’m sorry.”
“We both are, that’s why we’re in this situation.”
The words between them died as Caroline eventually drifted into a light sleep. Michael got up to take a quick shower and left quietly, looking back only once before exiting. It was a sad glance, one borne of self-loathing, cowardice and guilty desire. Caroline had rolled herself up into one of the white sheets, her hair feathered across her face. The door clicked close.
When Caroline finally woke up, she was slightly startled by the darkness of the room. Michael must have turned off the television because there was only darkness. She got up, rubbing her head, which was groggy from her nap, and walked towards the bathroom. The light blinded her eyes and the shower was damp and humid still from Michael’s shower. She turned on the cold water, letting it massage the back of her head. Looking down she laughed, seeing strands of Michael’s hair curled in question marks around the drain. Every time there seemed to be more down there swirling around. He really was losing his hair, she thought. She pictured his sink at home cluttered with hair thickening products. She wondered if his wife was a realist about it or if she played it off to him. She always had these thoughts afterwards, picturing what his family was really like inside their little house. And later, in her apartment she would check her email and he would have written some form of explanation or apology that would make her come back. She always did.
This is a ritual she knows well.
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