Xhenet Aliu - Brass

“You’re nice,” you breathe into his ear, and he responds by releasing the tight grip he has on the flesh of your back, which makes you regret what you said. You liked the not-nice touch more than the soft circles he begins rubbing over your neck. Even his cock, as stiff as it is, feels like it’s tentatively pressing into your belly. You curl your hand over it, first over his boxers, then under them. But first you take your shirt off, because you think that’s what he would want. After all, you’re doing this for him, you tell yourself. This is a gift to him, and he seems to not know how to unwrap it, so you have to do it yourself.

“Luljeta,” he says, and you notice that he uses your real full name, which almost nobody does, and it sends a strange vibration down your spine and makes you grasp onto his cock harder.

“Ow,” he says.

“Sorry,” you say and let go of his cock altogether, though you quickly replace your hand with your mouth. That’s when his tight grip on your shoulder returns, while his other hand grabs a handful of your hair and pulls hard enough that you wait to feel pain that never comes.

“Luljeta,” he says, and then says it again, though he must know that you can’t very well answer.

You moan something like “Hm?” with his dick still in your mouth.

He pulls your hair again, which makes you feel briefly like a marionette. It’s your turn to say ow, but you manage to stifle it.

“You don’t have to,” he says.

You pull away from him just long enough to answer, “What?”

“You don’t have to do this for me,” he says.

Again you pull back. “I. I know. I want to.”

He’s silent, except for a deep quick breath, when you put him back in your mouth. Then he pulls on your hair again, then both of your shoulders, steering you away.

“Come up here,” he says.

“Why?” you ask.

“I want to see you,” he says.

“You don’t like it?” you say.

“No, no, I do.”

“Then what is it?”

He lets go an impressive lungful of air, a breath that could’ve gotten him deep under the surface in a free dive. “You don’t have to do this,” he says again.

“I want to,” you repeat.

“I don’t want you to.”

“Oh,” you say.

“I mean, like, I want it, but I don’t want it from you.”

His dick is still hard in your hand.

“I mean, I want it from you, but not like this.”

You don’t know what to do with your hand at that moment. You don’t even recognize it as your hand.

“It’s just, like,” he says. “A girl’s supposed to be in love first.”

Penises are so ugly, you realize. They’re skinned, weird baby animals.

“I like that you’re a nice girl,” he says.

“I told you I wasn’t,” you say. “I’m so not nice that I thought sucking your dick was being nice.”

Finally he seems to understand, because he doesn’t say anything after that.

You feel such a sudden, deep embarrassment that you have to wonder whether it’s mere embarrassment or some new viral form of it. And as if you’ve come down with a virus, you begin shivering, and you pull away to your side of the bed and smooth the covers back over you. Still you feel cold, and apparently it’s contagious, because you feel Ahmet all the way on the other side of the bed shivering, too. You lie there, huddled and contorting and rubbing your own limbs with your own hands, wishing you were made of wood so that the friction would start a fire.

Funny thing about getting accidentally knocked up, everyone tells you what a mistake you made and then goes out of their way to be nicer to you than they’ve ever been.

Yllka began bringing me tea when she intercepted me on the way up the steps, and I always sat with her and drank it even though what I really wanted was to crawl into bed and pick up where I’d left off at 4:15 A.M.

“It’s çaj mali, mountain tea, it’s good for the baby. It won’t keep you up,” she’d said.

The only thing keeping me up was Yllka herself, but I didn’t say that. It was good to have her on my side, or more likely the baby’s side, with me there just by proxy. Babies make people softer, at least while the babies are tucked away in wombs not crying or wanting for much. Homeless men downtown turned and smiled at me when I walked by. Mamie kept stumbling upon baby clothes at tag sales and buying them because she might as well, and Greta was doing the same with picture books and mobiles, and Yllka and Gjonni were forgetting to forward our gas and electric bills along to us.

“What is this?” Yllka asked the last time I stopped by with the rent check, as if she’d never seen one before.

“The rent,” I said. “It’s the first of the month, right?”

“Oh, that,” she said and shook her head and whispered, though there was nobody around but us. “Just hang on to that for now.”

So everything was fine, everything was settled, except, of course, for every part of my body, which was wound so tight that I trembled constantly and had to fill my cup only halfway with çaj mali so that it wouldn’t splash over the rim when I tried to bring it to my lips. I couldn’t tell people what Bashkim and I wouldn’t even admit to each other: that things were fine because we saw each other never, him making it home to bed just as I was waking up, me getting home after he’d already left for work. Yllka must have known that, but still she said one day, after she refused the rent check, “I’m glad you two have worked things out.”

“Umm-hmm,” I said.

“He told her that they should divorce, you know,” she said. “He told you that?”

Even though it was only half-full, I managed to knock the cup of tea completely over. “Yeah, of course,” I said.

“He just can’t leave her with nothing, you understand? Think about it from her perspective. All alone, her husband promising the world and then taking everything away from her all at once. And it’s not like America, women can’t just go out and make a life for themselves the way they can here. There a woman is for a family, and without a family she’s nothing.”

“I know,” I said.

“You don’t know. You can’t. Nobody here can understand how deep that thinking runs. And now things are falling apart over there. It’s almost worse now than it was before. At least with Hoxha you knew what kind of misery to expect. Why did she stay? Why, when she could have come here, where they could make some money and not worry from one day to the next if there will be bread to eat?”

It was true that our shelves here overflowed with bread. In this city alone there were a dozen grocery stores the size of small Albanian villages with aisles dedicated to nothing but bread. There were outlets that sold the leftover bread on clearance, in the three-week state between fresh and moldy, and old people plucked up expired loaves by the fistful and threw the slices, chunk by chunk, into the ponds at Hamilton Park for the ducks to scavenge.

I also knew, because it was the white stuff I smeared my peanut butter on in the morning, that there would never be enough bread to satisfy the kinds of things human beings the world over were hungry for.

I said, “Yes, she shouldn’t have chosen to starve.”

“What was he to do? You can’t just be married to someone on the other side of the world. She is so stubborn. She should have just come with him or divorced him there.” Yllka looked at me, then reached for my hand. “I’m sorry. I know it’s difficult for you to hear about her.”

“Well, she exists.”

“Yes, but not as his wife. Not anymore. It’s just a matter of ending it properly.”