Rufi Thorpe - Dear Fang, with Love

Daniel took a sip of his milk shake, raised his eyebrows, nodding, but then when he swallowed, he didn’t say anything. We sat there for a while. It seemed like maybe I was wrong. Maybe he wasn’t even interested in me and he was thinking about how he wanted to get home and go to bed and digest his vanilla milk shake in private. But then he said, “Would you like to come to my place and get a massage? I studied Zhi Ya massage when I lived in China and I haven’t gotten to practice in a little while.”

Granted, it was an incredibly weird come-on line, combining the oldest and most blatant sexual overture with a weird professional explanation, but at least I felt like I knew what was going on. Sure, I said. Let’s go to your place and you can practice your acupressure thing on me. All the way there he kept chattering on and on about the principles of Zhi Ya and his time spent in China. He had made a vow, a personal commitment, he explained, to live in seven countries and learn seven languages before he turned forty. He had already lived in Chile, China, and now Saudi Arabia, and he claimed he was fluent in Spanish, Mandarin, and Arabic as well as English.

Like my dad and me, he was living in a little rented apartment instead of a regular hotel room, though his was just a studio with a tiny kitchenette in Užupis. He didn’t have a washing machine, he explained, and he was going to have to figure out where a Laundromat was soon. It was clean enough in there, though it smelled like boy. I wondered how old he was. I was thinking that since he had already lived in three countries and learned three languages, he was probably close to thirty, but he didn’t have any wrinkles. He had me lay down on the bed, and I went to take off my shirt, but he said no, he could do it through my clothes. I was almost offended. Who stops a girl from taking her top off? But this was his weird-ass rodeo and I figured he was in charge of making up the rules.

I was wearing a white T-shirt and jean shorts and flip-flops. I kicked off my shoes and lay facedown on his bed, which smelled even more like boy. He climbed on top of me and straddled my hips. “You have really nice calves,” he said. “You can tell a lot about how a woman is going to look naked from her calves.”

I just made a noise into the covers in order not to have to answer. He was rubbing me now, and it was clear he wasn’t lying about having been professionally trained. He definitely had a system and within ten minutes I was no longer having conscious thoughts and he was making things hurt and things feel good I didn’t even know were there. He spent a long time pinching around in my armpits and then he made a noise like he was really satisfied with himself. “That was a good release,” he told me, as though I had done something.

When and in what way this was going to turn sexual was entirely a mystery. I could feel he had a hard-on through the thin, almost crunchy fabric of his running shorts. It was rubbing all over my back when he moved to work on my shoulders. “Maybe I should take my top off,” I suggested again.

There was a silence. He was breathing kind of heavily. “If you want to,” he said. So I reached down and tugged my T-shirt up and over my head, still lying on my tummy, but I left my bra on. “Do you have any lotion?” I asked.

He scrambled off me and went to scope out the bathroom. I could hear him opening cabinets and then opening his mini-fridge. “I have butter,” he said.

“Like cocoa butter?”

“No, like dairy butter.”

Whatever, it didn’t matter. I didn’t say anything, just shrugged, and he clambered back on top of me and began to rub the cold stick of butter into my skin. It felt good actually. I was sure that now that I was half naked and covered in butter, things would begin to speed up, but they didn’t. He just kept rubbing me for maybe an hour, and then he announced he was done.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“You’re really strange,” I said, directly into his mattress.

“What?” he said. My voice had been muffled by the covers.

“I said you are really very strange.”

He laughed and climbed off me. “How so?”

“You live in all these countries. You speak all these languages. You are clearly ambitious, but not about anything normal like money or a career. For fun, you go on history tours with a lot of old people by yourself. You give out massages that should turn into sex, but they never do, and then you climb off and you say, ‘How do you feel?’ I’m just saying, you’re strange.” I had rolled onto my side, and he could see my breasts spilling a bit out of the cups of my bra. It was a good bra.

He laughed again, sitting on the bed beside me, his massive hard-on clearly visible in his running shorts. I felt almost resentful of the size of the hard-on since it seemed increasingly that I wasn’t going to have the chance to actually see it. I had only ever seen three penises before, and none of them had been as big as his looked to be. I was just curious. He rubbed his forehead with his hand for a minute, and then looked up at me, his face suddenly candid. “I guess,” he said, “I’m just a little worried about how old you are. I’ve been avoiding asking.”

“That’s a good instinct,” I said. “You should keep doing that.”

He let out a sigh, shaking his head like he’d lost a big bet. “So does that mean you aren’t twenty-one?”

“I am not twenty-one,” I agreed.

“But you are eighteen?” he said.

“Like I said, you are better off not asking,” I said.

“Oh fucking crap.”

I nodded in what I hoped was a knowing way. I had gotten the impression that most men wanted to have sex with “barely legal” girls, so I was really hoping this wasn’t a deal breaker. I had never read Lolita, I had never even seen the movie, but I did have a vintage movie poster of it in my room and I got the gist. Lollipops and everything. “I’ll be eighteen in a few months,” I said, in as husky and sexy a voice as I could manage.

He hid his face in his hands for a minute and I knew he was deciding, and I was positive, absolutely positive he was going to decide in my favor, but when he looked up, I knew. There was pity on his face. And I hated him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re beautiful, but you’re just a baby. You’re a baby!” He held out his hands, gesturing at my body like it was beautiful but also like it made him sad. I was like cake he couldn’t eat. That was what his look said.

I was so angry it made me start trembling. I grabbed my T-shirt from the floor by his bed and whipped it on.

“Don’t be mad,” he said.

“I’m not mad,” I said. “Thank you very much for the massage. You’re talented.” I wanted desperately to get the power back, but I wasn’t sure how. What was just revealed was that I was willing to have sex with him but he wasn’t willing to have sex with me, and it was humiliating. I hadn’t really wanted to have sex with him in the first place! I just wanted to get back at Fang and forget about Judith and have an adventure and see a new penis. But he was weird. What a baby, to order a vanilla milk shake.

“I’m sorry, Vera,” he said.

I didn’t want him apologizing to me. “For what?” I asked.

“For leading you on, I guess.” He shrugged. He no longer had an erection, I noted. I was standing now, in the middle of his room, and he hadn’t stood up with me. Evidently I was supposed to find the door on my own, which was fine, it was just right there, but it was still awful, like I was a servant being dismissed.

“You didn’t lead me on,” I said. In order to keep my voice level and unemotional, I pictured a steaming pile of dog shit. It was a trick I had learned in therapy. I could talk about anything in a level voice by now. Really, I wanted to punch him in the face. It suddenly seemed stupid to me that he had such a cartoonishly huge dick. It was probably what made him feel so entitled.