Justin Taylor - Flings - Stories

I’m wondering, Is this a real story, or is it more like his own roundabout way of asking for — Oh, but I shouldn’t be stupid. Besides, if he wants it, he’s going to have to say so, or else make a move. Not that I’m in a huge hurry to be gagged with my own underwear, but being pinned at the wrists and bent over the coffee table might make for a nice change of pace. What I won’t stand for, however, is this “I’m sending you a signal to make me the offer” shit. Of course, he’s gotten pretty good about asking for what he wants — which, by the way, I credit myself with having taught him because I remember what it was like when we first got together — so maybe this is just the drunken truth slopping out. Speaking of which.

“I gave Evan Stanz a blow job,” I say. Evan is Zachary’s best friend. They grew up together, and both did their undergrad at Wesleyan. Now Evan lives in Chicago. He works in real estate and on the weekends plays bass in a grunge nostalgia band. The first time Evan visited after we had started dating, he slept on Zachary’s couch for four nights. We’d been together about three months at the time.

My fingers are drumming on the table. Zachary drains his drink. Would you believe that I did not engineer this whole conversation to lead up to betraying myself in this way? At least not consciously. But it’s worth stressing that even in retrospect my confession does not feel inevitable — it has taken us both by surprise.

“That night was the first time I was ever really, like really mad at you,” I say, exponentially more amazed with myself every moment that words keep coming out of my mouth. “You remember how we fought? And I was thinking I was going to break up with you, that’s how mad I was, and — oh, fuck it, I wanted to.”

“Were you trying to get caught?”

“God, no. I waited until you were asleep. Evan was asleep, too. I had to wake him. I told him to be quiet, and that if he ever breathed a word of it I’d deny the whole thing. We didn’t fuck. He didn’t touch me at all. I did what I wanted to do, and then it was over.”

“Did you swallow?” he asks, trying to do the ice-cold thing, though to sell it he’d have to be able to look me in the eye.

“You’re taking this rather in stride,” I say. “And also, fuck you.”

“Just tell me if you did.”

“You’re being disgusting.”

“I’m curious.”

“Well, I wasn’t going to spit it on the floor, was I?”

“Lacey Anne,” he says, and it’s like, Okay, so we’re done being hard-asses now.

“If I had it back, I mean if I could do that night over—”

“He told me.”

“Excuse me?”

“He told me.”

“Told you.”

“When I told him I was going to propose. He said he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t.”

I feel the bottom drop out of my stomach. Here I’ve been keeping this terrible secret close, nursing it with my guilt. And then it turns out that the boys have long since settled the matter among themselves. How nice for them.

“Well, did he think I was good?” I ask.

He ignores my question. We bask in our silence, maybe zone in on the green of the microwave display clock — if you squint hard you can make the LED quiver, the numbers swimming apart into fragments before your blurring vision, your watering eyes. I can hear cars idling at the light. Someone’s blasting dance music.

Then he breaks the silence, says, “You want to know something funny?”

“Something funny? Oh, yeah. I mean, you bet.”

“Maybe ‘funny’ isn’t the word. I don’t know, I never expected to say this, but since we’re talking I guess I might as well tell you that when you told me the thing about you and Evan — well, I mean when he told me the thing, but then, seriously, again when you said it just before — both times the first feeling I had wasn’t anger or hurt. I swear to God, Lacey Anne, it was straight-up jealousy. I was in love with him for a long time. The whole time we were growing up, I guess. I’d have done anything for him, I really would have, or with him, not that I ever tried, or I mean there was never any question of — but it’s like, if just once, you know, like if I could have ever put it out there and had to own it, maybe my whole life would have been different. I don’t know. And not that there’s anything wrong with my life now, but — well, it made me feel bad for that past version of myself, that’s all. That kid. He ached so fucking much.”

“Baby,” I say, meaning it.

He stands up and so I do, too, though I’m not sure where we’re supposed to be going. It’s as if I’m watching myself — watching us — from somewhere else, not like the God’s eye view from the ceiling but maybe like a pervert on the fire escape, peeping in. As Zachary rounds the table I grab my dress by the skirt and in one fluid but graceless motion pull it over my head and off my body. I ball it up and chuck it at him. He catches it and throws it down. We end up on the couch, tangled, neither one of us speaking but both of us thinking the same thing: Is this the spot where it happened? Is this?

There are several competing theories about where Stonewall’s arm might be. Marauding Union men is the popular one, though considered unlikely by serious historians. It may have been stolen in the 1920s; there’s a whole school of thought about that. The notion I find most compelling postulates that the original marker was never meant to designate the exact burial plot but rather the field of battle where the injury was sustained. Everything else, says this theory, has been one long misunderstanding.

At the winery we took the tour and then spent some time tasting. There was a Cabernet with a blackberry thing happening that I liked. We bought three bottles and asked the sommelier if he knew of a decent place in town to eat. Zachary would propose to me the next day beneath an oak on a green slope at noon, and I would of course say yes, and we would kiss and start ourselves, our lives, careening toward everything that I’ve already shared. But let’s stick for a minute with the night before the proposal. In our suite at the Red Roof Inn there was a little coffee maker by the sink. I took the two plastic cups out of their plastic packaging while Zachary opened one of our bottles. We shut off the overhead light, then turned on both bedside lamps and the shower. We left the bathroom door open and the bathroom light off. The water was warm, then all of a sudden too hot. I wanted to get it perfect. A little steam’s okay, but nothing scalding. We climbed in. Zachary worked the soap between my legs, exploring me as if for the first time, as if he didn’t already know me by heart. I reached back. He said, “Lacey Anne.” He loves to breathe my name when he’s inside me, and it is the only time that I genuinely enjoy hearing it said, because it’s like everything I love and hate about myself somehow comes together, and I feel exposed and completed, named and found.

Which is a good line to end on, though it must be obvious by this point that neither of us is the type to leave well enough alone, so I may as well tell what happens next.

He picks the boy out — a student from the 201 class he taught last semester. He says there were hints dropped, inklings. They’ve kept in touch.

The boy, Blake, comes on a Wednesday. He knocks on our door even though we cracked it open for him when we buzzed him into the building. Zachary is sitting on the couch, watching something on TV he doesn’t care about. A sport. I’m checking the spaghetti sauce. It’s sauce, all right. “Nearly done,” I say as I turn toward the knocking, which has nudged the door fully open. He stands in the doorway, obviously nervous but trying hard not to show that he is. I do not try to hide that I’m sizing him up. He ought to know it. He’s taller than either of us, and somewhat bedraggled-looking in dirty white jeans and a pair of beat-up Converse All Stars. He wears a thin yellow T-shirt with a mud-colored corporate logo, a red bandana tied loose about his neck. His beard is patchy. He’s holding a six-pack of PBR in a plastic bodega bag with a black-eyed smiley face above the blue words THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU. The smiley face is the same color as his T-shirt must have been when it was new.