Sarah Cortez - Houston Noir

While her mom urged her to return to Seal Beach, something about Houston’s hardscrabble, unsentimental landscape appealed to her. Despite the superficial prettiness of Southern California (paradise, some people called it), she’d grown up in an infernal household, her alcoholic father constantly yelling at her and putting her down, her mother enabling all of it, her younger brother addicted to surfing and speedballs to cope with the consequent racket in his brain. After this brother died from a heroin overdose, Jules could no longer bear the sight of the Pacific Ocean. The difference between the external beauty of her homeland and the internal bleakness of her heart was too much for her. Houston fit her; she fit Houston.

Traffic would not ease up. Four minutes passed as Jules waited for a break in the oncoming cars, although she probably missed a couple opportunities, so flustered she was by Dan’s invitation. Why would he invite her to coffee? Or command her, more like it. He had (he said) twenty-plus years sober; he wouldn’t flirt with a woman in recovery, would he? Especially one as new as Jules? She checked her face in the rearview mirror; the Rum Raisin lipstick feathered out from the smoking lines over her upper lip. She needed to stop smoking, but goddamnit, one thing at a time. She’d given up almost everything .

When she looked back at the traffic, she saw just enough of a break to swing out left, then turn immediately right onto the road which ran between the Hillcroft Transit Station and a wooden complex that housed businesses such as Jaycee’s Exotic Dancewear, Relief Ambulance Services, Video and Surveillance Equipment Outlet; a church, Iglesia Pentecostes: Camino Al Rey de Gloria; and a Hindu temple, the Sanatan Shiv Shakti Mandir. At the intersection of Harwin and Hillcroft, Jules’s pussy started pulsating and thumping against the seam in the crotch of her jeans. Her heart sped up; her breath grew thin and shallow. “Uh, uh-h-h,” she groaned, shocked by the sudden flush of lust. Waiting for the light to change, she shook her head no, feeling betrayed by her body. Dan must have something of the governor in him — a personality that, like alcohol and drugs, she was powerless against. Although she hadn’t picked up this energy consciously, her body had absorbed it and was making it known now to her mind. But dear god! She was living by the principles now; she needed to place principles above pussy.

When she arrived at Starbucks, her underwear was so wet she could barely catch her breath. She feared that if she went into the Starbucks, then, true to previous form, she’d be back in the parking lot in less than thirty minutes, straddling Dan in the passenger seat of his S-Class, sliding up and down his lawyer cock while he sucked her tits.

She found an empty parking spot next to his Benz. She checked his windows: they were duly tinted. As she headed to the entrance, she said a prayer to her higher power that she’d learned from one of the old guys in the meeting: Help me, help me, help me. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It was her favorite.

Inside, Dan stood near the front of the line. Jules stopped behind the last person, hoping to calm herself down, but he saw her and waved her toward him.

“What’ll you have? My treat.” He placed a hand on her back and moved her in front of him.

Behind her, Dan was a force, a magnet attracting her hips toward his. She stopped herself from leaning into the almonds, madeleines, and gift cards, afraid she would just succumb and press her ass against his package. “Dark roast, please,” she practically gasped to the barista.

“After two p.m. we only have Pike’s Place,” the barista replied.

“That’s fine,” she said. “I need to use the restroom,” she murmured to Dan, and sped off before answering the barista’s question: “Room for cream?”

When she emerged from the bathroom, Dan was sitting at a counter near the front window.

“Can we sit outside?” Jules asked. She trusted that the gaggle of Bangladeshi men at one of the tables, the roar of the freeway two hundred feet away, and her own hypochondria about breathing in car exhaust would dampen her lust significantly.

“Just to be clear,” Dan said, when they’d situated themselves at a free table on the patio, “I’m not trying to thirteenth-step you.”

“You’re not?” Jules replied, both embarrassed and relieved. “I mean, good! I hope you’re not.” She tuned her ears for a moment to the sound of semis trucking north on 59 while Dan removed his suit jacket and tie. Outside, in the afternoon glare, she could see that his eyes were sort of topaz-y, and his cheeks had more color than they did under the fluorescent lights of the Triangle’s windowless rooms.

“No. I’m not. I wanted to talk to you about Kelly.”

Jules took a sip of her Pike’s Place through the slit in the plastic top. She adjusted herself in her chair. Her pussy-pounding had ebbed almost completely.

“I see the two of you together a lot,” he said.

“We only see each other at the meetings. My sponsor told me to show up twenty minutes early and stay twenty minutes late, for the fellowship. Kelly’s the only one there, usually, until right before the meeting. Sometimes I give him a ride back to his halfway house, but it’s so far away that most of the time I don’t.”

“Definitely don’t give him any rides. Frankly, it worries me seeing you two together so much.”

“Why?!” Jules set her cup, which was scalding her fingers, onto the table.

“What do you know about him?” Dan asked.

“I know he went to prison for selling drugs. That’s where he got sober. He was sober in prison for six years, and he’s been sober since he got out around two years ago.”

“Selling drugs isn’t the only reason he was there,” Dan said.

“Why else was he there?”

“Voluntary manslaughter.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means he killed someone in the heat of passion.”

“Like his girlfriend?”

“Like that.”

“ Did he kill a girlfriend?”

“I can’t tell you that, but I can tell you that you should beware of getting too close to him.”

“Does it seem like we’re close?”

“Don’t underestimate the power of the program to bring people from completely different walks of life together in the back of a van.”

“What? You mean, like, in the back of a van — having sex?”

“If it’s rocking,” Dan shrugged. He handed her a business card. “Feel free to give me a call if he starts to freak you out.”

Jules looked at the card. It was heavy white card stock with the name Dan P. printed on it. The only other information was his phone number centered underneath.

“Is this your AA card?”

“That’s right. Put my number in your phone now,” he instructed her, “and call me right here. That way, I’ll have your number and I’ll know it’s you when you call, and I’ll pick up. You can call for other reasons too, but I want you to have it in case of emergencies. Neither I nor my wife mind me getting calls at all hours of the day, and believe me, I’ve been called at ALL hours of the day.”

Jules finished plugging his digits into her phone. She paused before pressing the red button. “Your wife?” she said.

“Thirty years. That woman has been with me through it all, as they say. She’s a champ. We have six kids.”

“Six kids?” She pressed the button, sending her number. “How is that even possible?”

“Surely you know,” Dan said.

Before work that evening, she plugged Kelly’s first name — that’s all she knew — into the Google search bar on her desktop, along with the years 2007 to 2014 , which she figured allowed for a margin of error in the amount of time he served, and the words voluntary manslaughter .