T. Johnson - Hold It 'Til It Hurts

The laughter took the edge off, and Achilles made his move. It was quick like they were hungry. From the moment he put the condom on, until the moment they came, they never let go, saying nothing. After a nap, he went down for seconds. The light played on her body, all curves and arcs, gentle saucers and bowls, the flattening of the thigh where it met the bed, the hollow of the hip. Ines glowed like she was carved out of moonlight. He traced the gentle bends of her body, the earlobe so smooth save for the piercing divot, the highbrows high and regal, the gentle swoon of calf into ankle, the tip of the toe, the rising swell of thighs that gently bowed to her pelvis, the arc of her momentous ass, momentarily arrested by the bed.

She was a land he wanted to survey, to settle, to colonize. Were there shortcuts? A tickle at the diamond of the neck, a nibble of the toe, a run of licked thumb down the spine until it crashes into the warm embrace of her ass? She was flesh perfectly punctuated, all commas and question marks. Soon his dick was hard again. They did it again. Afterwards, they spooned. This was a new sensation, one he enjoyed. He and Janice brushed the dust off. In Goddamnistan, they wrapped sheets around themselves and shooed him out, frowning because the longer he stayed, the less they made. Sometimes he and Aiko held hands afterwards, but never for long because the only place she was willing to go where they could be alone was her garage. So they were always in a rush, trying to fit everything into the twenty minutes between school and when her mother arrived home. He pressed his nose into Ines’s armpits and neck, inhaling and holding it in, the he way he would around opium smoke, curious about the effect. He put his ear to her back and listened to her heartbeat.

“Why’d you pick New Orleans?” she asked.

He felt the vibrations travel through his head and down to his throat. “I knew people here I hadn’t seen in a while.”

“How long are you staying?”

“How long do you want me to?”

“A black male volunteer that’s not being forced to do community service? You’re a role model.”

“What was that?”

“You’re a role model.”

He liked that. “Is that why you want me to stay?”

“I never said I wanted you to stay.”

He pressed his ear firmly against her back. “You thought it. I heard you.”

Ines laughed.

“What about this boyfriend?”

“What about him?”

“Is he still around?”

Ines scanned the room. “Not now. But he’s not gone either.” She sat up. “Just because we had sex doesn’t make us a couple. Are you one of those brothers who thinks he owns a woman after sex?”

Achilles shook his head. Was this related to gender advising?

“I’m joking. I said that because I thought you were stalking me. You weren’t, but that’s how it looked.”

He laughed.

Ines sat up and patted the bed, excitement in her eyes. “What was your favorite kid’s book?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Tell me something about yourself.”

Achilles shrugged. “I talk all the time.”

“But never about yourself.”

“My dad was a manager at the mill, and my mom a housewife and part-time bookkeeper. Not much to it. I say what’s on my mind.”

“Tell me something new. How should I describe you on Facebook? Should I say, ‘Hi mom, I’m bringing someone over for dinner. You’ll like him. He only says what’s on his mind’? Actually, she might like that.”

Achilles smiled. He had only heard of Facebook, but she planned to tell her mom. Would he even be around long enough to meet her? What was she like? He knew only that she lived Uptown, on the river side of St. Charles, near that fancy theater.

“How did you get your name? Tell me again.”

“With only a knife, my father killed a bear named Achilles, the strongest and smartest prey he ever hunted. My triple-great-grandfather, a Greek, was said to be a descendant of Achilles. My mother liked the name.” After each tale, they laughed.

It wasn’t Tyrone, or Tyshaun, or Tyrell, but he would’ve preferred John, Mark, Luke, Matthew, or Troy. Kids teased him but adults liked it. The drill sergeants told him he’d have to earn it, but his father said, Never question your birthright. Of course Achilles had read the books, but had never understood the part about the birthright. Achilles was his father’s idea. His mom wanted to name him Price, after her great-grandfather, a fearsome middleweight boxer. His father had wanted to name him after a warrior, not a mere fighter. “Honestly, I didn’t even know how to spell it,” his mother always joked. His father had always dreamed of playing pro football, and attended Georgia Tech on a scholarship, so when she saw Achilles spelled out, she thought she’d been tricked into naming him after a muscle. She wouldn’t put it past her husband, because they had funny names on that side of the family: You know you have a distant cousin named Bicep. After a month of reading, she decided Achilles was a good name, better than Price. But, there was no point in telling Ines all of that.

He carefully untangled himself from Ines and tiptoed to the kitchen for a glass of water. The light from the refrigerator illuminated the pictures on the wall, a houseful of strangers, not that different from his home. Sure, the Conroys looked good in the photos on his mom’s nightstand. There was the year they dressed as the cast of The Wizard of Oz. His mom was Dorothy, his father the Scarecrow, Achilles the Lion, and Troy the Tin Man. Dressed in full costume and makeup, they posed in the barn. They looked happy, like people in a magazine ad. Next to that was his parents’ wedding photo, which obsessed him. Would he have liked the young man with the bull neck and brick jaw, the young woman with the button nose and bouffant? Would they have liked Achilles? It was hard to guess, because in all the photos in the house, Achilles is a magic trick. One minute he’s not there, the next he is. For an encore, see Troy.

Ines’s invitation to another screening filled him with dread. He imagined another obscure art film and Margaret, her every grin a reminder of his hair-trigger incident, pointing at him with her whole hand, shaking with the palm down, like she expected a kiss. Fortunately, she wasn’t there because it was a real screening. The Common Ground Collective, as Ines called her charity, cosponsored a picnic and medical van at Iberville Park, a single city block where houses had been cleared away and a small playground, now rusted, had been installed in their place.

When Achilles arrived, Ines’s two longtime assistants, Dudley and Mabel, were setting out the food. Dudley piled Mabel’s lap high with platters, and she wheeled to one of the folding tables, carefully arranging the food in neat lines. They bickered constantly, he accusing her of being too slow, she accusing him of piling too much weight on her.

“This is a wheelchair, not a pickup.”

“You got a mighty big cab, and a hell of a lot of cargo space.” Achilles found it hard not to laugh at that. Mabel was quite heavy. A large, short woman whose oversized tits spilled over her lap like two small, fidgety children, she smiled easily, and when she stopped to snack, she used her breasts as a shelf, her plate as stable as if it were on an airplane tray. Whenever she passed Achilles, she would say, “He’s just mad because I can wheel faster than he can walk.” Achilles helped them carry a few loads for the sole purpose of being a part of their obvious and infectious joy.

“Thanks for the hand, son,” said Mabel. Her voice was deep, and son reverberated. If things were otherwise, would he have spent summers with someone like Mabel? Achilles looked down at her, the dark spots on her cheeks, the thin elastic pants, the bumper stickers on the back of her wheelchair. They were only recently homeless, according to Ines, losing their house after forty years of marriage because her diabetes treatments had broken the bank — and failed. She was scheduled to have one leg amputated the following week.