Nathan Hill - The Nix

“You gonna cuff me?” she said.

“Are you causing trouble?”

“I could. If that’s what it took.”

The next night was his night off, but he found someone to trade shifts. She was there again, same spot. He drove past her once, then again. She followed him with her eyes. She was openly laughing at him by the third time around the block.

The first time they screwed it was in the backseat of his police cruiser. Alice was at her usual spot, at the usual time. She’d simply pointed at the alley and told him to park the car there. He did. It was dark, the car almost completely hidden. She told him to get in the backseat. He did. He was not used to taking orders from girls, from hippie street freaks especially. He felt briefly resistant to the whole thing, but that evaporated as soon as she got into the backseat with him and closed the door and removed his belt, which fell loudly to the floor, holding as it was his radio and nightstick and gun. A great thud and clatter on the floorboards. And Alice didn’t even try to kiss him. She didn’t seem to want to, though he kissed her — it seemed gentlemanly, to kiss her, to stroke her face with his fingers, a gesture that he hoped conveyed thoughtfulness and human affection, that he wanted more than simply what was in her pants, except that what was in her pants was mostly what he wanted, at that moment very much so. She yanked at his slacks and all thoughts of his wife and the guys back at the station and the superintendent and the mayor and the slim chance of somebody walking by and seeing them, they were all obliterated.

They didn’t have sex “together” so much as Alice had vigorous sex with him while he lay there also participating.

Afterward, exiting the car, she turned and smiled her sly smile and said, “See you around, pig.” And for the rest of his shift he obsessed over what she meant by that. See you around. Not “See you next time.” Not “See you tomorrow.” Not even “See you later.” She’d said See you around, which was the least forward-thinking, most noncommittal thing she could have said.

Each encounter followed roughly the same basic emotional pattern: massive relief that Alice had returned, followed by ceaseless worry that she’d never come back.

And he needed her to come back. Desperately. Harrowingly. It felt like his chest and guts were held together by a single wooden clothespin that she could remove by simply not showing up. He imagined arriving at their usual spot and not finding her anymore and feeling his insides burst like a water balloon. The rejection would be terminal. He knew it. This led him to a morally questionable but, in his mind, totally necessary employment request: He asked to be assigned to the Red Squad.

After which his full-time job became to spy on Alice, which was really excellent because he could both keep track of where she was at all times and, even better, have a somewhat-plausible excuse if anyone found out about them. He wasn’t having an affair; he was undercover.

He bugged her room. He photographed her going into and out of various known subversive meeting places. And he felt more free when he screwed her. That is, until she asked him to do things to her that he found more than a little weird.

“Fuck me while I’m handcuffed,” she’d said that first time their lovemaking changed from standard-issue backseat sex to something kinkier.

He asked her why on earth she would ever want something like that and she gave him that withering, crushing, sarcastic face he hated so much. “Because I’ve never tried it in handcuffs,” she said.

But he hadn’t thought that was a very good reason. He could think of a million things he had never tried and had no interest in.

“Do you like balling me?” she’d asked.

He paused. He hated this, all this talking about himself and his feelings. One advantage to his wife’s post-child metamorphosis was that she had stopped asking personal questions completely. It occurred to him that he hadn’t had to express his feelings verbally in years.

Yes, he’d told her. He liked making love to her, and she laughed at that — the quaintness of a phrase like “making love.” He blushed.

“And did you ever think that you’d enjoy screwing a freaky beatnik like me?” she said.

“No.”

She shrugged, as if to say, Clearly I am right. She raised her hands to him, presented her wrists, which he reluctantly handcuffed.

The next time she asked for the handcuffs again.

“And try to be a little rougher,” she’d said.

He asked her to be more specific.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Just don’t be so gentle.”

“I’m not entirely clear what that means in practice.”

“Smash my face into the car or something.”

“Or something?”

And this is how it went every time: Alice asked for something new and weird, something that Brown had never done before and maybe had never even considered before, something that gave him the creeps and made him feel all sorts of dread that he wouldn’t be able to bring himself to do it — or wouldn’t be able to do it to her standards —and so Brown resisted it until eventually his fear of disappointing Alice or losing Alice overcame his shame and panic and he muscled through with whatever sexual act she wanted, self-conscious the entire time, not exactly enjoying it but knowing the alternative was much, much worse.

“You got anything to show me?” he said now, pressing Alice’s belly into the car and pressing himself against her back.

“No.”

“Anything in those jeans? Best to admit it.”

“Honest, no.”

“We’ll see about that.”

She felt his hands in her pockets, front and back, turning them inside out, finding nothing but lint and old tobacco. He patted her legs, outside the thigh, then inside.

“See?” she said. “Nothing.”

“Shut up.”

“Let me go.”

“Shut your mouth.”

“You’re a fuckin’ pig,” she said.

He pressed her face harder into the cold metal of the cruiser. “Say that again,” he said. “I dare you.”

“Fuckin’ cockless pig,” she said.

“Cockless,” he said. “I’ll show you cockless.”

Then he leaned over her and whispered into her ear, in a tone about five octaves higher and full of tenderness and affection, “Am I doing this right?”

“Don’t break character!” she scolded.

“Okay,” he said, “fine.” And she felt him pull at her jeans and yank them down. She felt the slight buckle of the metal where he forced her cheek against the trunk of the cruiser. Then the feeling of the morning air as he exposed her, brought her jeans all the way off and kicked her legs apart so she was spread out and easily enterable. Then entering her, pressing at her until he worked his way in, and she felt him inflate inside her, thicken and fatten, before he began pushing. Whining and pushing, light little puppy yelps each time he bucked. No rhythm to it. A chaotic and spastic pulse that ended quickly, after only a minute or two, with a final catastrophic jab.

Then the quick diminishment. His body softening, his hands becoming gentle. He released her and she stood up. He handed her the jeans he’d removed. He looked at the ground sheepishly. She smiled and put her pants back on. They both sat down, behind the cruiser, leaning into each other and the bumper. At length he finally spoke.

“Too rough?” he said.

“No,” she said. “It was fine.”

“I was worried it was too rough.”

“It was good.”

“Because last time you said you wanted it rougher.”

“I know,” she said. She twisted her back, one way, then the other, felt the spot on her cheek where she’d met the trunk of the cruiser, the spot on her neck where his hand had been.