Christian Kiefer - The Infinite Tides

“We can keep it going,” she said. She kissed his neck. “Not at my house but maybe we can find a nice place to go to. A nice hotel or something.” She slid her hands up his shirt so that her warm palms moved lightly against his stomach. “Maybe not even in this town but somewhere else. We can go away for weekends sometimes.”

“I don’t think I’m up for that, Jennifer.”

“Really? Feels like you’re up for it,” she said.

“It’s complicated,” he said.

“Complicated?” she said. “How complicated is it, really? I like you. You like me. We get together. We have some fun. Then we go home. That doesn’t sound very complicated.” As she said this she dropped to her knees. In one fluid motion she pulled down his underwear and took him into her mouth. It was so fast that he barely had time to mutter a faint, weak, “Wait,” an utterance that was more abstract sound than word. He wanted to say, “I have a headache,” but the sentence sounded so absurd that he managed to hold his tongue and besides, with her own tongue on him all possible sentences faded quickly from his mind.

She paused only for a moment, to look up at him from where she knelt and to say: “Does it still seem that complicated?” Then she was at it again.

Keith closed his eyes. He knew that he should be telling her to stop but his mind was already blank and empty of anything — even his pain — and he looked down at her, the top of her head, her lips where they covered him, where they pulled him into and out of her mouth. Then he closed his eyes again. His migraine was a dull rumble somewhere far away.

And it was exactly at this moment that Sally Erler entered the room, the young couple to which she was showing the house just behind her. Keith heard her voice just a moment before she appeared in the doorway, heard it as part of the sharp and distant buzzing of his oncoming migraine, as an annoyance. She was saying something about “potential” as she turned into the opening and Keith looked over at her, without speed, without concern, and she took three clear steps into the room before she stopped and at last understood that there were already people in the room and what they were doing.

Then she screamed.

“Let’s not talk about what happened,” Sally Erler said over the phone. “Let’s just say I happened in on something. In the real estate business you hear stories about things like that. I’ve never … it’s never happened to me before … but let’s just say I happened in on something and we’ll leave it at that.”

“OK,” he said. “Let’s leave it at that.”

“I just don’t know what happened. I wasn’t early was I? Was I early? Maybe I was early.”

“I don’t know,” Keith said. “Does it matter?”

“No, I guess not,” she said. “Maybe it does. I don’t know. No, I guess not.”

It was later in the day now, cresting toward evening. He had not been surprised when his mobile phone rang and it was Sally Erler on the line. He assumed that she was calling to remove her name from the house but she had been talking for some time and no such stoppage of services had occurred; instead, a constant affirmation that she would not talk about what she had stumbled in on and then talking incessantly around the occurrence despite her various statements to the contrary.

It might have seemed comical had he not been so terribly embarrassed. Sally Erler had screamed and then had turned immediately and had herded her two clients out the door, down the stairs, and out of the house like some crazed farmer frantically trying to direct a flock of chickens away from a predator. Jennifer had only laughed — indeed it was as if she had wanted to be caught in the act — and, before he could even so much as say her name, had returned to him with a gusto that had finished him off inside of a minute, leaning away from him in the moment of release so that his seed spilled onto the carpeted bedroom floor. Then she leaned in, took him in her mouth one last time and returned his now red and pulsing member to his underwear, snapping his waistband as she did so.

“That doesn’t really seem all that complicated. Does it, Astronaut?” she said, rising to her feet.

“Christ, Jennifer,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “I’ll call you and let you know where we can meet.”

He retrieved his pants from where he had dropped them onto the floor and slid them over his legs awkwardly, tottering, and then he sat on the edge of the bed. “You’re really something,” he said. He could think of nothing else to say.

“You’re right about that, Astronaut,” she said.

He sat looking at her. Then he said, “We can’t keep doing this.”

“Oh really?” she said. Her voice was quiet but there was instantly an edge to it, the edge that had been present when she had dismissed him from her home earlier in the week, and Keith knew that this could easily devolve into an argument, which he simply did not have the strength for. The distant whining was well established now and already in the deep core of his mind there was a singular white arc of pain.

He wanted to ask her if she was embarrassed at being walked in on but it was obvious that this was not the case. He felt ashamed somehow but could think of no words to articulate that condition either and so he said the only thing he could think of: “You’re married, Jennifer.”

“So what? I’m married. You’re married. Who cares?”

“I’m not willing to do that. It doesn’t make sense.”

“You’re overthinking the whole thing,” she said.

“I’m not overthinking anything,” he said. “I’m just not doing it.”

She stood and looked at him, hands on hips. “You’ve just been using me,” she said at last.

“I’ve been using you?”

“Yes, you’ve been using me.”

“I didn’t ask you to come over here.”

“Is it a game to you? Do you think I’m stupid?”

“No, I don’t think you’re stupid.”

“That’s how you’re acting. Like you have all the answers and I don’t know what I’m talking about. But I know exactly what I’m talking about.”

“OK,” he said.

“You don’t think so?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

It was silent and she shook her head. Her face was flushed. “All you men are exactly the same,” she said at last. “You’re all a bunch of … fucking faggots.” She stood there for a moment longer, her face moving from carefully controlled rage to disgust to simple disappointment and at last she said, “Fuck you,” and then turned on her heel and walked out of the room.

“Jennifer,” he said, but the room was empty. He could briefly hear her on the stairs and then the opening and closing of the front door signaled her exit.

That was it, then. He sat on the bed, looking at the white pearls of fluid on the carpet, thinking that he should probably get a towel and clean them up but making no move to do so. He listened for further movement in the house but all was silent and after a time he stood and buttoned his pants and finally took the Imitrex tablet and then walked downstairs, hoping more than anything that the silence was real and that Sally Erler had left the house and had driven away and that he would not have to speak to her about what she had seen.

Indeed the downstairs was as empty as it had been when he had first returned to the cul-de-sac those weeks ago, or even emptier now that the sofa was gone.

“She made it worse when she came outside,” Sally Erler said now over the phone. When he asked her what she meant, she told him that Jennifer appeared on the sidewalk when the realtor was trying to placate the young couple and that she had said “some very negative things” about him, said them directly to the potential buyers and then had stormed off across the street and back into her own house, a house that Sally Erler had acted as selling agent on three years before, a point she made with no small sense of irony.