Teddy Wayne - Loner

I shrugged.

“What part were you?” Layla asked.

“Macbeth.”

“ David! ” Sara laughed. “You played Macbeth last year, and we just saw Macbeth , and you didn’t mention it all night?”

“You didn’t ask.”

“You must be a really good actor if you got cast as Macbeth,” Layla said. “What else were you in?”

“That was it. I only auditioned for it because my girlfriend was Lady Macbeth — she was the female lead in all the plays — and I always said I didn’t think acting was that hard, so she dared me to audition.” I was surprised by how easily the backstory came to me, reinforcing— buttressing —my previous lie to Sara about Heidi McMasters. “Then, when I got the part, I had to go through with it. The drama teacher kept hounding me to act in the spring production, but I didn’t want to. I couldn’t stand the theater kids. Acting’s for people with no real personality of their own. Just ventriloquists for other people’s ideas.”

“Huh.” Sara smiled, looking at my face as if hoping to glean all the other secret talents I had yet to divulge. “You think you know someone.”

When we were home, Sara asked me to scratch an itch on her back. She lay facedown on the mattress and pulled up her shirt.

“You’ve got a blackhead,” I said as I raked my fingernails over her skin. To my surprise, she asked me to pop it. These were the familiarities you broached, I supposed, once you’d had sex. I pinched the decimal point until the head crowned and a thin brown pill sprouted out. It would have repulsed me if I didn’t take such pleasure in its extraction.

“Got it,” I said.

“ Ooh , show it to me,” Sara squealed, turning her head around to take a gander. Bearing the fragile specimen on my index finger, I reached in her direction.

“Hold it under the light,” she demanded, scooching toward her bedside lamp. I moved my hand beneath its heat and she squinted with shameless fascination at the dark, bulbous root. She looked disappointed when I flicked it with my thumb into the trash.

“Are there more?” she asked, pulling up her shirt again.

“No,” I said without looking.

We got in bed and her whispery snores picked up within minutes of turning out the light. I lay there contemplating her willingness to have me extirpate her impurity, unable to fathom letting anyone — even Sara — examine at such close range my own vile subcutaneous matter.

I was on the crumbly precipice of sleep when you entered, briskly slipped into your room, and reemerged soon with your toiletries. Once you were gone I removed myself from the bed, careful not to rouse Sara, donned the mesh shorts I kept at her place for bathroom runs, and stepped into the hallway, shutting the door behind me. I stood there waiting for you to return. Finally the bathroom door opened and you appeared. Preoccupied by your phone, you inched your way down the hall.

“I got locked out,” I said as you approached. “She isn’t hearing me knock over her white-noise machine and I don’t want to wake up the hall.”

You briefly registered me and returned your attention to the screen.

“Very thoughtful of you,” you muttered, typing away. “You two have such a wholesome thing going on. Together every night. Happily ever after.”

“Something like that,” I said.

“I wonder what that’s like.”

“A healthy relationship?”

You continued to thumb the screen aggressively. After a long break you spoke almost as though you were talking to yourself and had forgotten I was there. “Being attracted to nice guys and not self-centered assholes.”

It took me a moment to come up with a reply.

“People are more complex than simple binaries,” I said. “The assholes usually have a little niceness underneath. And the nice guys have a little asshole to them.”

“Do they?” Your lips curled coquettishly. “The nice guys?”

“Some of them.”

“And would you put yourself in that category? One of those assholish nice guys?”

The hall was silent except for the apiarian buzz of the overhead light. I canted my head, as if somewhat abashed by the classification. “Others have.”

Your phone vibrated. You closed your eyes before looking at the screen, bracing yourself for bad news. But then your face brightened when you opened them and saw who it was.

“Hey, you,” you answered quietly, turning to unlock the door. “I thought you couldn’t talk.” You walked in without holding the door for me. I caught it just before it swung shut.

Back in Sara’s room, I thought about flinging your door open like an outlaw in a saloon, striking the phone and Liam’s voice out of your hand so I could show you how feral my desire was, that I wasn’t the wholesome nice guy you assumed me to be.

Then I reassessed what had just transpired. The way you’d spoken to me was still major progress, the culmination of two months of meticulous strategizing, a beautifully arced shot into the corner of the goal after a cat’s cradle of short, precise passes and incremental gains in field position. I had gotten this far through patience and caution, taking calculated risks, not through brute strength.

I shed my shorts and eased into bed. Sara’s body turned in sleep. I pictured you behind your door, telephonic captive to Liam, and slid my hand under old reliable RAISE OHIO’S MINIMUM WAGE NOW!to fondle her left breast. She shifted again. My hand sauntered down her stomach. She palmed my wrist and dazedly murmured something I couldn’t hear.

“I want you,” I said, uncoiling my index finger and prodding her on top of her underpants.

“David,” Sara said, now awake. “Not tonight.”

“But I want you so badly,” I repeated, putting my weight on top of her.

“I’m at the end of my period.”

“I don’t care,” I said, and mashed my mouth against hers. I rolled her underpants off. When I tried to penetrate her, Sara spoke up, but not to demur.

“My tampon’s still in,” she said. I looked away as she took care of it.

Up until now I’d been mute in all our bedroom activity except for the small glottal exclamation I’d allow myself at the conclusion. But tonight I wanted to be loud, to be heard by Sara, by all of Matthews Hall and Harvard Yard and Cambridge, and, most of all, by Veronica Morgan Wells.

“I love fucking you,” I said, a notch above a whisper, a golf commentator narrating the putt. I found my hand moving to Sara’s soft throat and massaging it.

“I love fucking you,” I spoke at normal conversational level, our moans alternating with the cheap squoink ing institutional bedsprings, her eyelids shut and quivering.

Then I closed my own eyes and imagined you beneath me — in your white bed, your canvas painting leering at us lasciviously, the air sugared with your lavender fragrance — as my other hand drifted up to Sara’s nape and my fingertips touched with room to spare around her slender neck. When I climaxed I cried out in my loudest voice yet, enough to call someone’s attention from across a crowded room, only this time I reversed the second and third words of “I love fucking you.” And I wasn’t calling it across a crowded room. I was calling it through the wall.

You’d speculated about my romantic personality and you’d now heard me having intercourse. No more measuring out my life with coffee spoons; it was time for a paradigm shift. Breaking up with Sara the morning after sex would be too harsh. And you were still asleep anyway. The real coup would be if you overheard it. Not only would it alert you to our severance, one that I’d initiated, but if Sara became distraught, it might make David from Prufrock look a little dangerous, not so wholesome after all.