Jowita Bydlowska - Guy

“To the beach house,” says Gloria, sipping her vodka.

“To the beach house,” I say, and turn to Jason.

“Why are the windows dimmed?” Jason asks. “To the beach house.”

“He shoots porn in here. To the beach house,” Gloria says in a tone that makes me feel proud for a moment, as if I had built this place myself. I like the easy, bored joke she made about the porn.

We spend the rest of our day joking and gossiping and sipping. We talk about Gloria’s workplace. It’s a PR firm that is now starting to get bigger deals: a small film festival and a small fashion week. Her firm, idiotically named after her – G-PR – has just hired a new slew of women, fresh out of PR school. Gloria says she no longer can tell the women apart. They all seem to be exactly the same age, though what age exactly she isn’t sure: twenty-one? Twenty-seven?

“Plus they’re all named Kayla or Krista or Karen, and they all have perfect skin and shiny hair, and this year they wear these indecent little outfits, I don’t know, like teddies or something, I don’t even know what those things are called but they’re –”

“It’s such a tease,” Jason says. “See-through. But not.”

“Exactly,” Gloria says, and I want to tell her how impressed I am with her second joke, the one about all the K names and ages, but instead I say, “How’s Kerry doing?”

Kerry is Gloria’s right-hand girl, possibly the only girl at G-PR without the shiny locks and smooth skin. She vacationed with us in Hawaii and took care of Gloria’s pet, a little ferret-like dog named Fifi. (Fun fact: it was the dog’s name that inspired naming $isi.)

“Kerry’s amazing. She was really helpful when Fifi –”

“Fifi was lovely,” I say. “Pinch between your index finger and your thumb. It stops the tears,” I squeeze Gloria’s arm gently.

“She ate her own shit.” Jason says exactly what I would like to actually say about the dog instead of what I just said.

“Fuck you.” Gloria shakes her head. Her eyes are wet but no tears. “Kerry is taking over the London account soon, and then she can have my job.”

“Nice,” Jason says. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to start a magazine.”

“Or a line of jewellery,” I try to help, suddenly remembering some pillow talk Gloria and I had, maybe even during that trip to Hawaii, when Kerry stayed in a room next to the room where I fucked Gloria. I fucked Kerry in her room when Gloria was at the gym. It was very tiring.

Gloria thinks for a moment. “Or write a memoir.”

“You should hire someone to write it for you.You’re too busy and too pretty to be a writer,” Jason says. He’s trying to make up for the shit comment.

“Thanks. Maybe Guy knows someone. Do you know someone?”

“I do,” I say. “Lots of someones who write, and who won’t make it boring.”

Gloria says, “You’re mean. I’m not boring.”

“You’re not,” Jason says. “You dated that count.”

“You’re not boring,” I say.

“And I could always develop a cocaine addiction. Addicts are hot.”

“It’s been done, and it’s not so hot,” I say. $isi’s face pops into my head.

Gloria says, “Or I could adopt.”

Jason yawns, “It would have to be an Indian. Or a Jamaican. A little Rasta baby.”

“Jason,” Gloria hisses.

“Or it could be like the kids my mother used to tutor. Learning disabled,” I say. Gloria’s painted big toe pokes me gently in the side. Her feet are in my lap – her large, bony feet that have none of the sloppy softness of Dolores’ feet, or at least what I guess Dolores’ feet are like. I imagine chipped pink polish and some white fuzz on her toes, which she never thinks to shave. This thought produces a feeling of a sob coming on, somewhere in the bottom of my throat: oh, the tenderness of those imagined plump feet. I must be getting drunk.

Gloria talks some more about her job, something about how on Fridays there’s always a little box of mint-green or pink or yellow macaroons from a place called Nadège, and there are little matching mint-green or pink or yellow flowers in a glass vase waiting for her on the desk. It’s one of the new girls, a Kristen, who does this, and Gloria picks a macaroon every few hours and throws it into a plastic bag in her purse so that it looks like she’s eating them.

“She’s just trying to make you fat,” Jason says.

“Oh my god, she is .”

“It’s passive aggressive. You should fire her,” I say.

“There are laws about that,” Gloria giggles.

“Laws schmaws.” Jason burps and gets up, wavering a little as he walks to the fridge. He makes a lot of complicated noise, cursing something about how “these fucking ice cubes are wrong,” which is the sort of thing that would bother Jason; he’s straight but sometimes acts textbook gay, bitching about ice cubes being wrong.

I turn to Gloria and mouth shall we? meaning a fuck and a nap. It’s getting late, almost three p.m. Soon we’ll move into pre-dinner, and there’s no way any of us will be able to survive it without a little rest.

I move Gloria’s feet and pull her up. She sways and leans on me. “Bye-bye, Jason,” she coos.

We go upstairs to the master bedroom, where we stand by the bed and undo my shirt first. Then Gloria’s white-and-cream dress comes off. It floats like a little cloud, bouncing off the bed and settling on the wooden floor. And then we’re in bed.

Her body is a combination of softness and muscle, the way her stomach barely ripples when she bends down, but when you touch it, it’s soft, just like the rest of her body, which looks hard.

We don’t kiss for long. Gloria is not much of a kisser, or maybe she used to be and is not anymore. I don’t really care to kiss her anyway, but a gentleman should kiss; otherwise the lady might feel like a hooker. I heard somewhere hookers don’t kiss. Jason said it wasn’t true. In any case, when Gloria and I kiss, for a moment I taste her slightly tangy tongue, the spritzer, the vodka, and then she spits me out.

I move down to her neck and her breasts with nipples like tiny pink bulbs. I nudge with my nose under her breasts, feel the trace of moisture in the crease. I lick the trace of moisture, trying to get some salt out of it, but it’s not really there; Gloria is too scrubbed. I’m talking years of scrubbing, not just this morning.

Her pussy is shaved. It’s another soft/hard extension of the small planes that are her body. I cup the mound of it and slip my thumb between the folds. She’s wet, the only part of Gloria that doesn’t get scrubbed, or maybe is impossible to scrub, and that opens up, uncontrolled. She moans quietly. I rub the little nub inside it, which grows even slicker and harder under my finger.

I look at her face. She mouths I want you .

I’d prefer she was filthier, said something like I want your cock instead, but she just smiles expectantly as I roll a condom over my unaddressed cock and aim at the warm, pulsing hole.

I fuck it slowly first, and then faster. As I speed up, Gloria’s legs go up and up until she locks them over my back. I lift her ass and pull her legs up to move them over my shoulders.

I close my eyes and imagine that I’m fucking someone else: Kerry, Gloria’s assistant. I feel myself expand even more, sweetly, painfully.

I wait for Gloria to sync completely into our rhythm. It takes her a moment to get there, but I don’t mind because the longer it takes her, the more Kerry she is. I hold her heavy, hard legs and pretend that they’re heavy and soft, spongy almost, the way Kerry’s legs would be.

“Now, baby?” I say.

Gloria moans in response, “Yes, yes, yes, now. Harder,” and I fuck her harder and her pussy starts to spasm and squeeze me, come on , so I come, hard, inside Kerry, Gloria.