Paula Bomer - Nine Months

Now he looks at her strangely.

“Please?” she says, weakly.

“Sure.” She can hear a bit of nervousness in his voice. “I do have to be going soon.” He starts looking around himself, as if he was waiting for someone.

She wants to scream, Fuck You! Pussy! What are you afraid of? Be a Man! Help Me Out! But instead, she says, “Thanks. Just for a minute.”

Then she looks at his face. He’s chiseled. It’s as if she ran into Colin Farrell here on the side of 95 in deep New England. Except this guy’s taller, and smells. And he probably gets his cut arms from doing real work, not from hanging out with his personal trainer. God how Sonia hates actors, the whole concept of them, pretending to be real people. But she loves men. She loves real men.

“Come sit next to me.” Her voice comes out smooth, a little deep.

“Are you married?” He’s standing in the doorway of the driver’s seat, she’s already scooted over the bench — this truck has a bench! — to the passenger’s side. He’s got one leg crossed over the other.

“Not really. My husband … my husband died. Just sit next to me.” Oh, boy, thinks Sonia, this guy is young. All the cigarettes and booze in the world can’t kill this hard, strong youthfulness underneath. Good lord, he could be nineteen.

“Wow.” He sits next to her. “Is he the father of your child?”

“Shh.” She puts a finger up to his lips and looks into his eyes, leaning a bit closer. He wants it, too. Or so she hopes. Prays. Dear God, please let this guy want to fuck me . “Don’t talk about it. I’m not so pregnant yet,” she says, rubbing her hands gently on her smooth, rounded belly. “I’m still toward the beginning. Not yet the middle. But feel this,” she says and takes his hand — God, the feel of his hand, so rough, this man is a laborer —and places it firmly on her right breast.

He looks away, out the back window. With his free hand he slams the truck door shut. It’s dark out now.

She reaches out to his face and she’s kissing him. He tastes sour, stale and dry. She’s nervous but she keeps at it and he’s kissing her and squeezing her breast. She lifts up her tank top and pulls up her bra over her breasts and takes both of his hands and puts them on her tits. Oh, God! This is so wrong ! Now his mouth goes down on them and she moans — her nipples are so hot and painful, she almost comes just from his mouth on them, she’s bucking her hips up toward him now.

Suddenly, he pulls back. “I can’t do this,” he says quietly. Then he grabs her breasts again and she sits on top of him and grinds against his erection. His dick is big . Everything about this guy is huge. His big arms are around her body now, now her neck, on her side. She hoists herself up and starts the awkward undressing, the ripping, the just a minute , the I got it, I got it , the wait, not yet .

First she’s on top and he’s inside of her, but she can barely get him all in there. Then he pushes her down on the bench, she stretches one of her legs over the car seat and wham . He’s fucking her. It hurts some, in that good way that fucking hurts. She hates to look in the eyes of Dick when she’s fucking him, but for some reason, here in the dark with this stranger, she looks straight at him. His eyes glow like cat’s eyes in the dark. His mouth is loose and open. He looks right back at her and then spits on his thumb and puts it on the base of her clit and pushes very, very gently. This man knows pussy. He fucks her hard, his other free hand on her hipbone and her breasts start shaking in her face and she comes, the vision of it all, the sordidness, the feel of it. It’s so awful. It’s so right. God. God! To get fucked in a truck on the side of a highway by a man who doesn’t give a shit about her, about what’s for dinner, about their social life, about, about … how the kids are today. And when he’s about to come, she screams, “Don’t take it out! I can’t get pregnant! I am pregnant! Don’t pull out! Come, come inside me !”

Which he does.

AFTER, SHE WASHES UP in the bathroom again — she wipes the seat carefully this time — and when she comes back out, his truck is gone. Which is all fine and well. She heads toward the Passat. She opens the backseat doors and one by one, throws her sons’ car seats on the grass. She grabs her cellphone out of her purse and tosses it in the garbage can. Then she gets back in the car and drives, drives on, she sings to herself, deeply now, her voice coming out without that squeal, in her car without children’s car seats and maybe she is free, really free, for the first time in a very, very long time.

What does it mean to have no plans? To be on the lam? Sonia stops at a branch of her bank in Connecticut. She withdraws everything in the savings account. Seven thousand dollars. Then she keeps driving. It’s dark, she’s not a great driver in the dark, that’s what living in New York City does to you, but she has a feeling she’s about to get better at it.

She checks into a hotel, a cheap Holiday Inn Express in Brighton, on the outskirts of Boston. Brighton still had a sort of Irish and immigrant vibe to it when Sonia lived in Boston, all those years ago, when she was actually free, free because she was young and had no real responsibilities, not free as she was now, because she was abandoning very real responsibilities. Ironically, when she was actually free, it felt just like life, not like freedom. But now that she was stealing it, it felt exhilarating and much more real and visceral. She felt it, coursing through her body.

Nineteen. At first, she hadn’t been very good at being young. She was too earnest, too serious. She read anti-pornography feminist tracts and existential philosophy. She painted dark, morbid figures, writhing in pain and blood. Then she met Katrina. Katrina changed her life.

Katrina. Beautiful, fabulous, irresistible Katrina — men were sucked down into Katrina as if she were some wild, inescapable drain. And yet, she had a big nose, occasional acne, tiny breasts, and she was barely 5′4″. How? Katrina, who had painted swirly, psychedelic things. Elaborate sixties druggy paintings while listening to scratched-up Robert Johnson records. Katrina, who taught Sonia that being female wasn’t weak. The woman — girl, really, they had only been nineteen, the both of them — that taught Sonia that lying on your back with your legs spread open was a kind of power, especially if it felt really good. The one that taught Sonia how to wear a short skirt, how to shake her ass when she walked in said skirt, and how to turn every eye in the room, even if you don’t have tits, because Katrina didn’t have tits, either. What was it about her? Fearlessness. Confidence. She used to say to Sonia, “You are only going to be nineteen once in your life. Just once. Why not enjoy it? Why not really make the most of youth and freedom?” And she was right. She was so fucking right. Prior to meeting Katrina, she threw herself at her painting with a humorless dedication. After meeting Katrina, her whole relationship to life, and to art, changed. After meeting Katrina, she started getting seriously laid. She started fucking with abandon. Whomever she wanted. Little art boys with their hairless faces and permanently hard cocks. Rock drummers were a specialty for a while, too. And her instructors, oh yes, her instructors. Particularly Philbert Rush. Tall, startling dark hair sticking up on the sides of his head like a cartoon of a mad scientist, handsome largely due to his arrogance, not any conventional good looks, a great deal older, thin and grumpy. Loved pussy in a way no twenty-year-old can. Katrina had no time for older men, but Sonia had time for all sorts of men. Yes, Sonia started to enjoy herself, really truly and wildly, enjoy herself for the first time in her life. And had that been the last? Was that it? Had Sonia peaked in college, like some girls — cheerleader types — peaked in high school?