Theodore Wheeler - Bad Faith

She asked one of them to dance with her, this after an hour of racing drinks. There wasn’t really a dance floor, but they piped in a club mix and there was an open area Anna pulled the kid to. He had on a rugby shirt, striped blue and white. His hair was wet, his cheeks red, like he’d just been in the shower. Anna was obliterated, her limbs heavy with alcohol. She stumbled through raunchy, improvised steps. She wore a knee-length black cotton skirt the kid inched up her thighs. Her legs flexed and rattled, tendons showed behind her knees. She wasn’t such a good-looking woman, that’s why those boys liked her.

Jacq and I met at an opening, seven years earlier, in New York. I was barely hanging on to the agency then, it was 2002. I introduced myself at the wine table. It would have been more awkward to not talk, so we talked. Neither of us were native New Yorkers, but we’d both lived in the city a long time. It was so soon after 9/11. We were over-emotional, over-endangered, out to prove both our cowardice and bravery. It was silly. I’d never talked so much about pizzerias and bridges in my life — and prattled on about them with such strong affection, as if they were beloved grandparents or something.

We were such opposites on the surface. Jacq was tall and pale, with jaw-length black hair, so skinny that her chin and shoulders looked like parts of a performance piece. Her parents were auto workers. She was a painter…a mixed-media…a whatever — she didn’t like having to explain to anyone what she did on canvas. She was (and still is) Jacqueline Ranier Roenicke; I was (and still am) Eric Samuel Green. I wore a tight brown cardigan, a shirt and tie underneath, wool-lycra trousers. I was a small-business owner, blond and pudgy. We were reverse parts of the same silhouette, and that’s powerful magic. She turned me on the same way an accused witch would have aroused a priest in Salem, Mass., in 1692.

We ended up at a downtown bar. It was full of suits, market and city government dweebs who tried to act tough. They couldn’t beat Jacq’s testosterone, however. She tore up to the bar and ordered Tullamore Dew, neat. She told off anyone who got near us. She accused them of trying to sneak an inch in on her man. You could get most of those guys to turn red just by accusing them of the slightest hint of homosexuality. It was too easy.

She pulled me into the men’s room near the end of the night. That’s when she fell in love with me, or so the story goes. She fell in love because I wouldn’t fuck her. I said we’d have to eat a meal first, at a table, with silver. She’d have to take me home before I’d make love with her. She kissed with her teeth while she laughed.

“Of course,” she said. “How adorable!”

I laid it on a bit thick, of course. I wanted to fuck her badly. The problem was that I’d never been able to become rigid in a bathroom. I couldn’t stomach the idea of those suit jocks listening to her moan, or them watching my ass dimple through the gaps of a stall divider. Bedrooms are made for sex. Wide mattresses, soft sheets, a ceiling fan rocking. This was the only audience I desired.

The wet-haired boy’s frat brothers egged him on. They wanted Anna to pull her shirt up. They wanted her to go down on him in the storage room while all of them watched. She was in a lawless realm, boys rubbing the crotches of their jean shorts as they encircled her. One of them tugged her arm toward the back.

Anna looked to me, her face wrinkled in frustration, but I didn’t move to help her. I leaned against the bar, nursing a bourbon and soda. When the song was over, she shook off the frat boys and slumped into the rail next to me. The kid she danced with asked her to come to a party with them. She told him to fuck off. We left soon after.

Anna collapsed in the hotel elevator. She said she was going to be sick. I had to carry her to her room, her words coming out backwards. I was sure security would follow us, but we made it through the door. She flopped to the couch.

When I jabbed Anna in the shoulder, her eyes rolled back in her head. Her bangs flipped around.

“What’s wrong with you?” I said. “It’s just some booze, you’ll be all right.”

We camped by the toilet most of the night. She slept on the tile with her knees at her chest, hands between her legs. “Take it easy,” I said, curled around her body. My hand was on her stomach, my ear at her mouth to make sure she was breathing.

Her head cleared after a few hours. It was four in the morning and I hadn’t slept. We were still on the floor of her bathroom. Anna shivered on the icy tile despite the comforter I wrapped around her. She was feeling better though, not so drunk anymore.

“What happened?”

“Nothing,” I said. “You didn’t do anything.” I paused, looking at her until she shrunk away. “It wasn’t anything unretractable,” I said. “Just regrettable.”

Anna buried her head in her hands to whimper.

She moved across the tile to where I sat against the bathtub. She nuzzled against my chest and pulled the comforter around us.

“What would I do without you?” she said. “You’re a very brave man.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I said nothing.

She continued on like that. I knew she was humoring me, trying to smooth things over. That’s what I thought, anyway. Maybe she believed that I’d stepped in on her behalf, once those boys started to paw her, and swept her safely away. I hadn’t.

“Sam,” she said. “Tell me something nice.”

Anna disappeared under the comforter. I felt her face through the fabric of my suit pants, the trembling vibrations of her breath. I didn’t think to stop her. She unbuckled and unbuttoned and unzipped.

“Anna,” I warned. “It’s not going to happen in here.”

But there it was. The thing popped up on its own — impertinent, triumphant — swaying out through my open zipper.

She put her mouth around the thing, her whole mouth, which somehow wasn’t dry. It was melting. My hips lifted and arched as far as she allowed.

I stopped her then, while I still could.

“What are you doing?” I asked. Anna snuck out from the comforter to rest her head on my stomach and look up at me. “It’s what I do,” she said. “You know, to make amends.”

She was not embarrassed to say this.

“That’s what you do with Jon?”

She nodded.

“God,” I said. “Just finish.”

Jacq was waiting at the airfield outside Alliance the next evening. She was in the gravel parking lot, lying on the hood of the old truck she drove, an F-250 that came with the ranch when she bought it. She adopted that truck like an orphaned child. It suited her.

We bounced onto the bench seat and swung out on the highway to reach full speed, the windows down all the way, seatbelts flapping loud in the gale, tires gripping over the patched pavement. We smiled out over the land. Jacq looked different in Alliance, on our ranch, than she did in any city. She wore jeans and a loose flannel shirt with nothing underneath. I preferred her this way. She rolled her sleeves up. There was paint on her knuckles and dirt under her nails. She tied pigtails so that the rubber band ties snuck out under her straw hat. I saw inside her shirt as she drove, her small breasts swaying, bouncing with the rhythm the road gave them. Her chest pocked with moles, tanned deep and reddish in the big, rusty, Western sunset.

Lorna Chaplin flashed her cleavage over the orange Formica counter when she rang up his total. Aaron was buying a microwavable Rueben and a Diet Pepsi. She worked at a filling station near the interstate in Ralston and had dark freckles around her neck. She wore low-rise stonewashed jeans without a belt. When Aaron looked at her midriff he noticed a pink scar across her navel. She said, “My eyes are up here, honey.”