Tara Ison - Ball - Stories

I hate fucking men who get moony or coy about it, who act as if there’s an element of accident that you’re here, doing this, as if you both tripped and wound up landing naked in bed. Eric was brusque and unsheepish, as fearless of sex as a porn star. He had the hard, tapered male torso I like, skin so fluid and seamless your hand slides, slides. My own skin is starting to dry, slightly — I shouldn’t go in the jacuzzi too often — I’ve noticed fine, thin wrinkles when I twist the loosening flesh of my upper arms, I’ve grown a little self-conscious of my babyish pout of belly. But the sex was an endlessly wet, vehement, pounded smooth kind of sex that wiped out doubt.

During the first surge of it, on Eric’s living room sofa — a velour playpen-style couch still smelling faintly of frat house joints and beer — Tess had stretched out drowsily at the far end, behind Eric’s hunching, jarring back, out of his view. We reeled to his bed afterward, while he was still solid and driven and I could still jolt at a slightest touch of his tongue, to start all over. She picked up her ball and padded after us, climbed upon a bolster we’d thrown on the floor, and went back to sleep. I’d had Tess for a little over four years by then but had never fucked anyone with her in the room before; I typically went to the guy’s house and left afterward, because, after all, Tess would be home, waiting for me, needing to go out. I liked my bed all to ourselves. After the second time, I got up, awkwardly — my legs felt permanently locked apart at the hips, hinged wide — and fumbled for clothing, but Eric grabbed an ankle and pulled me back onto the quilted bedspread. Mock-wrestle, mock-struggle, and Tess jumped up on the bed with us to play, her mouth full of periwinkle ball. He had me pinned on my side, was fumbling with himself, aiming, when Tess dropped and shoved her ball at him— Get out of here, dog, go on , he said — wedging it under his thigh— You want to play with my ball? Here, look, here’s a ball! You want to play? Please, please! — and kept shoving, desperate for his attention, his affirming and engaged throw of the ball. I tried squirming upward, trying to glide, grasp him inside me, distract him, but one more ball-shove from Tess— Would you get her the fuck out of here ? he snapped at me — and he jerked out a leg, catching her just at her midsection’s arching curve, and hurled her off the bed. She yelped, I saw in the streetlamp’s light through the window an apricot blur, and heard her smack the wall, heard her flurry slide to the ground.

I was up and to her in a second— Hey, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do that, okay ? — and she was fine, just bewildered. She poked her damp pink tongue in my ear and hiccupped like a little human baby, and I cradled her, rubbing her tummy. She was fine, but I wanted to cry. Eric kept apologizing, coaxing me back, and when I looked at him in disgust he finally said I was overreacting, just being neurotic, I shouldn’t indulge her so much, I was probably going to wind up some weird old lady living alone with forty-seven poodles. I carried her out of the bedroom, slamming the door behind us. Then I didn’t know what to do. It was almost three, I knew Dayna was asleep, and I didn’t want to go wake her up, explain what had happened. She’d be furious; worse, she’d be smug. And Tess’s ball was still in the bedroom with Eric; I wasn’t leaving without it. I wasn’t going to leave her without a ball.

I carried her into Eric’s roommate’s bedroom — he was staying at his girlfriend’s, Eric had told me — and crawled with her into the unmade bed, into unwashed sheets with that odor of careless, straight, young bachelor guys. She dozed on the greasy pillow next to me, in her spine-defying, shell-curled way, her nose in my face. I tried to go to sleep. My jaw ached; I scratched away some flakes of dried semen on my cheek, craved a drink of water, but didn’t want to get up. My insides still felt stretched open, rooted out. My hips kept twitching in the rhythm I’d found sent him over. I’d already gotten to know the thick vein in bas-relief on the left side of his cock, and the exact, utmost length within me his fingers could go, and I wanted all of that back. I wanted that obliterating lust, heated and direct and unrefracted as rays of light through a magnifying glass, focused to burn you down to death. I heard Tess yawn, and I craned to face her, needing the comforting, starfish scent of her breath.

I waited until she was asleep, then got up, stealthily closed the roommate’s door behind me, and crept back into Eric’s room. He’d thrown half the bedspread over himself and lay sleeping, sprawled out and mammoth and lustrous. I molded myself small up against the length of him and felt a flutter of pulse down his arm; I crawled on top of him and slid myself around until he grew big and hard and I could grip at that vivid, affirming burn one more time.

In the morning we glanced disdainfully at each other and rolled quickly out of opposite sides of the bed. I retrieved Tess’s ball and hurried to free her from the other room; she kissed me wildly, whimpering, as though she’d feared something had happened to me in the night, that I’d left her forever. He watched me nuzzle her for a moment— I guess that’s the deal breaker, huh? he said — then shrugged and went back into his room. Dayna looked at me like a resigned, just slightly reproachful good loser when I came in, then shrieked a greeting to Tess, whipped her up to a leaping, hurtling frenzy, and swooped around the room with her. We spent the rest of the morning cleaning up the party’s dismal mess and playing Ball. Eric called me at home the next day, and I invited him over for the following Saturday night; he came bearing a single iris for me and a bag of pricey lamb-and-rice treats for Tess. He let her climb onto his lap, and she spread herself out happily for him, unguarded, unself-conscious, arching her head and exposing her throat to his fondling, stroking hand. He threw the ball for her that night, again and again. But after that I usually insisted on going to his place and leaving Tess with Dayna, where it was safe.

I WAS CAREFULnever to sleep with him again, even after a year. I didn’t want to get slack, or too accessible, and actually sleeping together was hardly the point. The only time I did fall asleep, after that first grotesque night and morning, was just an accident, a slip. Tess was across the street with Dayna, and the plan, as always, was the requisite dinner with Eric while we watched a movie or a rerun of The Simpsons , then sex, and then I would leave. I just wanted pizza or Chinese delivered, something quick, because the dinner was not the point either, just a feature he liked to insist on, but I got to his apartment and smelled onions cooking, mushrooms, the acrid snap of garlic. He was making dinner. His roommate was out, and he was making an evening, trying to, out of a Lyle Lovett CD and a head of romaine lettuce and a jar of Ragú sauce spiffed up with fresh onions and mushrooms— Hey, come on, I really like to cook, my mom told me to add all these veggies , he said, nodding — and a gleaming bottle of red zinfandel. A boiling pot of spaghetti fogged the kitchen with starch; the table was set with melamine plates and paper towel napkins folded in big squares. Fine, okay. I started on the wine, had half the bottle down by the end of salad, and listened to him talk about some old college girlfriend, some Shannon or Nicole, whom he’d been with for a couple of years and really cared about but just was never ready to commit to and how he’d heard the other day she was getting married and he really did hope she was happy but it still really hurt, you know, and it was probably time he started really thinking about what he was going to do with his life, about what he wanted in life, and what did I think about all that? And what I was thinking was that it was getting late and we’d never had sex yet on his kitchen table and can we get going? And that Tess was waiting for me over at Dayna’s and I’ve finished my spaghetti and can we get going? I tipped the last of the wine into my mouth, got up, slid off my underwear from under my skirt, and he shut up. I sat on his lap, straddling him, pushed his hand down in the crotch of space between us, used my hand against the buttons on his jeans, and his breathing quickened. I traced the rim of his ear with my tongue, worked myself against his fingers, everything I knew would do it, and it did, his cock jutting out from his split-open fly and the table edge gouging my spine when he lunged forward at me. I leaned back with my elbows on the table, skirt raised and legs open, for him to get me up and onto it, but instead he picked me up— Uh uh, not here , he mumbled — clutching and carrying me like a sack of fragile groceries, kissing me before we even got to his room. He fell with me on the bed, fell onto me with a great, weighted crush, but when I squirmed to get up on my hands and knees for him he gently pushed me flat again, face down, nudging my legs apart, Good, I like that , I said, do that, and then twisted my shoulders around so that while he thrust into me from behind, lying on me, he had my face against his, or his face in my neck, still kissing me. That kind of twist was a strain, everything went taut and seized up until it hurt so I couldn’t stand it anymore; I finally had to pull back away from him, turn away. I pressed my face down into the pillow but he wouldn’t let me do that, wanted my arm around his shoulders or his neck, holding on, wanted me facing him, and twisted me back. It took a long time. He kept slowing down and every time I was about to come he wouldn’t let me, he’d just stop, still looking at me, and when we both finally came in the middle of a kiss that was like breathing straight into each other’s lungs we stayed like that, still, all twisted up around each other. When my spine and the rest of me finally relaxed, went aimless, all of my muscles eased into place and I strayed off to sleep. Eric still on top of me, holding me. A branch hitting the window lurched me awake well after midnight, and my first aware thought was a glad one, Thank God that woke me up so I can get out of here.