Vile Men Page 5

  “Nobody needs to see how much I don’t want to be here.” I flatten my hand on the counter and meet her gaze.

  “Am I being that obvious?” she asks.

  “You’re not being forced to stay here, are you?” Closing in, I reach for the charm of her necklace, this resin cube with a flower locked inside, delicate petals frozen in limbo. I take the plastic in my hand, holding her gaze until her cheeks darken to match her glass.

  “You smell really good,” she says.

  My grip tightens around the charm. She glances away and takes another sip, the red dying her tongue as she stumbles over her words.

  “You smell masculine, but like not like shitty cologne.”

  My fingers relax. I drop the necklace and watch her as she takes another drink. She smiles and then bites her lip over the expression. “I haven’t spoken to anyone all night,” she says. “Maybe you should just take me home.”

  The honesty soothes boiling pressure all the other women have ever left. I gather a breath of conditioned air and brace myself, gripping my fingers around her waist.

  “Was that too obvious?” she asks.

  “Maybe you should tell me what your name is,” I say.

  She lifts her hand and whispers in my ear like she’s some kind of secret.

  Ellen and i take a cab back to my place. The entire ride she’s a giggling heap of drunken anticipation, her name a sticky mess of two syllables, lingering in the back of my skull. My tongue dries, sticks to the roof of mouth. I can’t speak. I’m frantic, handing the driver my card, searching the depths of my pocket for my keys—sliding the right one into the lock. My breaths echo inside the heated darkness of the house when I pull her inside.

  In the bedroom she clings to me, lets me pry her clothes off. She kisses aggressively, her mouth brimming with slurred words.

  “God, I’m so drunk,” she says, her desperation so hard her tits heave. “You can do whatever you want. Do whatever you want to me.”

  I kiss her back, but it’s not long before she fades out, before her grasp slips from my shoulders and she passes out heaped on top of the sheets. I grab her frame and I shake her. A damsel moan slips from her mouth. Her head turns against the pillow. The overhead fan blows her dark curls over her pale face. She’s a gone girl. She’s sleeping beauty lost in consequence.

  There are rules for this sort of scenario.

  There are rules, but not everyone follows them.

  I pull away from her, tendons flinching, making sweaty fists before I climb off the bed and draw a slow breath.

  I throw the sheets over her naked flesh and spend another night sweating on the couch.

  In the morning she gags in the bathroom. There’s a chill in the house, a lowered sense of unease. I wait for her, staring at her purse on the coffee table. It’s a small package of burden, glossy black patent leather that reflects my face when I lean forward.

  She appears in the hall and I knock the purse over. It topples over the edge of the coffee table, falls somewhere on the other side. Her face is flushed, her cheeks red, hair greasy from the night. She’s not the same girl. She leans against the wall and crosses her arms, her smile looking hesitant from behind her faded lipstick.

  “What did I do last night?” she asks, her voice shaking.

  She’s a danger in this moment, seconds ticking away at the situation she’s wound me into. She stands there reminiscent of other women, only she’s asking me for answers instead of cornering me into her version of the truth.

  “You passed out,” I say. “I slept here. It seemed only decent.”

  She sighs, wipes her palm over her mouth. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I only really remember the cab ride. I remember walking through the front door.”

  You can do whatever you want.

  I shrug. “It could have been worse.”

  She swallows, turns her gaze to the floor.

  “You alright?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” she says. She wipes her lip and takes a seat beside me. “I’ve done this enough times to know that it’s a shitty way to meet people.”

  “It’s the easy way to meet people,” I say. “Nobody ever said it was foolproof.”

  She laughs. “Well, you seem like a nice guy,” she says.

  I try to be a nice guy, yet my gaze proves otherwise, slipping over the scar on cleavage, just over her right breast. It’s an old scar, long and faded into her skin.

  “I’ve been with far more vile men than you,” she says.

  She catches me looking at the scar, but she’s not like Jill. She turns her body away, makes herself a bigger secret, something to be unwound. The light reflects on her skin, makes it look creamy like over-milked coffee. She smiles, hesitant, her bare lips still glistening. She’s smitten in the shadows, charmed by all the lies.

  You’re a nice guy. You’re a nice guy.

  I am. I offer her a ride home. She goes to look for her purse and I take her arm, suggesting that she probably left it at Mark and Cheryl’s house. In the air-conditioned solace of my truck she tells me about her miserable job selling engagement rings at the jewelry store. She tells me how she ends every evening in the bathtub with a bottle of wine.

  “The darker the better,” she says.

  She thanks me when I drop her off in front of her townhouse unit. I lean in, inhaling her scent—a wet garden, the scent of rain, something to tame this dry desert heat. Her skin makes me think of Mark’s coffee—two creams, two sugar. He drinks it back every morning and always complains about being dehydrated every afternoon.

  “I’d like too see you again,” she says. “Is that okay?”

  You shouldn’t drink coffee.

  “I’d like that,” I say, and I smile because I’m a really nice guy.

  Mark tucks a fresh cigarette behind his ear before hauling out the two red gas containers from the bed of his truck. They’re older cans, plastic cans, bombs that could explode in the right circumstance. I’d tell him about all the articles I’ve read about smoking around gasoline, but he’s never been the sort to heed warnings.

  “Cheryl and Ellen used to work together a while back,” he says, drawing the nozzle from the gas pump. He slips it into the opening of the first can. “Every party she’d have a bottle of Shiraz, wouldn’t share it with anyone. Cheryl would always tell me stories about the dudes she was fucking.”

  “What does it even matter?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “She’s actually a blonde, you know?”

  The way he says you know makes him sound like my drunk dad.

  “Not sure why a blonde would ever want to ruin her hair like that,” he says. “I’ve never seen the appeal of brunettes.” He fills the container, transfers the nozzle to the second gas can. Then he looks at me. “How was she? Was she any good?”

  My tongue’s stuck, dry in my mouth, thinking of her, of the things I could have done.

  “I don’t share that kind of shit,” I say, because gentlemen never tell.

  “You probably should,” he says. “You make it seem so fucking easy.”

  I look at him.

  “All those bar stars,” he says. “Your landlord.”

  “It’s nothing,” I say. “It’s them. It’s not me.”

  He sighs. “Cheryl was the only girl who ever threw herself at me, you know.”

  I bite my lip, watching him as he twists the cap back onto the gas can. He returns the nozzle back to its holder. Then he pulls the cigarette from behind his ear and retrieves his lighter from his back pocket.

  “You’re asking for it,” I say.

  “What?” he asks, lighting the end of the cigarette.

  “You’re going to die of cancer,” I say.

  All of the most-watched videos have MILF in the title. It’s the same word my friends used to describe my mom when she was bent over gardening in her denim shorts. Cut at mid-thigh, they weren’t even attention-seeking. But all the women in the videos look like girls starved for attention, nothing like my mom, who didn
’t even flinch when my dad started getting drunk, started calling her a cunt all the time.

  She said she was going to leave him: that she was going to take me away.

  She divorced him and took me on a whale watching tour, said we were getting a fresh start. She kept commenting on how fresh the ocean was, but the ocean looked so angry, its edges sucking at the boat, lapping at it like a massive tongue. Its surface was like the back of a scaled demon roaring at me. Mom laughed beside me, thinking everything was supposed to be a lesson, saying, “You don’t want to get thrown in there, Jonah. The ocean will eat you alive.”

  I take a sip of gin, feeling like the sissiest man God ever spoke to, and I shake my head, shake it all away because it’s disgusting. The gin cools my mouth, vapour on my tongue, creeping down my throat.

  On the screen there’s a MILF that looks like Jill. She’s tackled onto the floor, her dress pulled up. The guy spits in her face. He slaps her, calls her a whore. It’s all good until the MILF starts to moan, her back curving with her lips. The ice in my drink is already gone. The heat’s been affecting me my entire life. I’m sweating rivers, stroking myself until my dick gets sore. A groan comes up my throat and I throw the glass across the room, dousing the wall with the smell of gin and relief. All I want is to pour another drink but I just fucking can’t with this kettle boiling in my lungs.

  When Mark gives me an envelope of cash on payday I take it directly to Jill. I pick through her mail-box. She subscribes to Cosmopolitan. The cover is a slew of bold capitalized words: NAUGHTY, SAUCY, SEXY: 69 NEW WAYS TO GET ANY MAN, all the self-help she needs. She’s yelling at her kids, her voice sounding through the door. I knock and she answers with paint all over the front of her shirt. I hand her the mail, the envelope of rent money on top. She rifles through the bills, counts them out in front of me, shaking her head as her kids scream, complaining about how there isn’t enough red paint, the colour on her shirt, and she winces like she’s in pain.

  “Not a good day?” I ask.

  “No,” she says. She smiles for a moment, but then her fingers twitch over the magazine. She stares down at the cover and sighs. The girls, they’re making a mess of the papers and brushes while the red bleeds over the edge of the kitchen table.

  “Sometimes don’t you just want to kill them?” I ask.

  She doesn’t answer. It’s awkward. It’s fucking awkward, but I force myself to smile. Does she not remember, or is she just denying that she admitted it, that she hated being called Mommy.

  “You know, my mom raised me by herself,” I say. “She survived.”

  “Really?”

  “I was probably worse than the two of them combined.”

  She looks down, her voice low. “It’s hard. It’s really fucking hard sometimes.”

  “I can imagine,” I say, even though I can’t. It just feels good to pretend, because all I can think of is that afternoon my mom was trying to refill the mower with a shitty plastic jerrycan, and I was whining, throwing a fit. She flinched, dropping the can, the plastic cracking. There was gas everywhere and she fell to her knees and started heaving, pleading, “Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, I can’t do this anymore.”

  Jill finally smiles. “The kids go to their dad’s on Friday,” she says, taking a step forward, sliding her presence into my personal space. “It’s a relief, getting a weekend to myself.” She mimics the model on the magazine, every issue just a chest pressed forward, hip cocked, hand placed low, fingers pointing down like an arrow guiding me.

  You’re losing control.

  “My mom never had any weekends to herself,” I say. “She never had the chance to get away.”

  “Did you know your dad?” Jill asks.

  I shrug, shifting my gaze, glancing down at the magazine. “He didn’t really respect women.”

  She doesn’t answer. She bites her lip and her pale face goes paler. She shifts, but she still holds her cover pose. My gaze drifts to the red on her torso. It fuels the heat in my chest. My shoulders tighten and I draw a breath. My tendons flinch. My fingers curl.

  You’re making fists.

  “I hope your weekend goes well,” I say before walking back to the truck.

  On the way home I stop at the grocery store to buy a bag of ice for my drink, and I stand at the checkout counter, clutching the bag in both hands like it’s a shield.

  I pull Ellen’s purse out from under the coffee table. I pry it open and lay all of its contents on the table: her receipts, lotions, a manicure kit and her birth control. There’s a charm on her keys, a capital letter “E” embedded with white rhinestones. Her lipstick’s in the bottom corner of the bag. It’s a shade called Berry Queen, bruised red, the slant on the stick curved to her lips. I draw the colour over my wrist, a line all the way down, back and forth, asking for attention. The lipstick goes on thick, greasy. The shade makes my lungs burn, makes my fingers start to shake.

  I rub my fingers over the red and wipe it on my jeans, on the couch, the heat spreading.

  The pressure builds inside my tightened fists. I unzip my pants and jerk off, picturing her leaning in front of the mirror, putting it on. I picture her kneeling between my knees, the greasy consistency of her mouth like hot oil burns on my dick.

  You have to stop.

  I keep stroking, thinking of her smile, of the void she had with her lipstick faded. My hard-on throbs in my grasp and I stroke until I’m exhausted and drenched in sweat, sitting on the couch useless and stupid and unable to get off.

  I try to convince myself that this isn’t cancer.

  I wait until the perspiration cools my flesh and I draw a full breath of air, taking a sip of gin, its flavour diluted by the ice, chilling my throat all the way down.

  Everything’s going to be okay.

  I buy her a hundred dollar bottle of wine using the money from her wallet. It’s Shiraz in the most bruised shade of purple I could find. She pulls it from the gift bag at the end of our date, leaning awkwardly in the passenger seat of my truck.

  “You didn’t have to do this,” she says.

  “I wanted to.” Easing in, I push her necklace aside and touch the scar on her chest. There’s a silence in the haze. She stares at the wine, answers the question I can’t ask.

  “I used to mess around with this guy who was into knife play,” she says.

  For the first time of the night I actually meet her gaze, raising my eyes from the mottled flesh across her chest.

  “He was more of a knife-enthusiast, I think. It was like he got off on just having one around.”

  “Was it bad?” I asked.

  “I had to get stitches.” She looks away, stares down at the bottle, at the darkness inside. “It was stupid, getting involved with him. I always kind of had a thing for fucked-up people. I don’t know why.” She shrugs her shoulders and then rubs her finger over the scar. “You do so much stupid shit when you’re trying to figure yourself out.”

  “Do you regret it?”

  “Usually I tell people that the scar’s from a drunken accident.” She clutches at the neck of the bottle, makes it seem like she’s about to open it. “I tell them that I tripped and fell on my wine glass.”

  “That almost sounds more believable,” I say.

  She laughs with me. She laughs at herself. It’s strange, because her honesty doesn’t seem like some kind of Cosmopolitian trick to lure me in. Still, I follow her when she lets me into her house. She takes me to her bedroom and I have to fight the urge to punish her for it.

  Mark reaches into his cooler after work. Instead of beer it’s cola. He says the caffeine is just as good, but I know exactly what was behind the change. He takes a swig and cringes, complains about the carbonation as he pushes the mower up the ramp and into the back of his truck.

  His back is burnt.

  The mole looks even bigger, looks about ready to swallow him whole.

  The next time I see Jill is when she drops by my sweltering house in the early evening, asking me for rent before it�
�s even due.

  “I think you owe this to me,” she says.

  “Owe what?” I ask. “Tenants don’t owe landlords favours.”

  She sighs and takes a step closer, presses her way into my space. “I think our situation is a little bit different than that, Jonah.”

  There’s sweat on her chest, but this close I can smell the perfume she’s sprayed there. It’s vindictive, the tips she gets—the lessons she learns inside the glossy pages of her magazine. Her eyeliner must be waterproof, because even in this heat the black doesn’t smear. She draws a breath that’s slightly laboured. Her chest rises and I turn my head. I grip at the door frame, pressing down too hard, my blunt nails digging into the trim she’d never bothered to paint over, trim where she once traced the lines of her daughters growing up, growing taller, growing older, growing into women who will continue to manipulate men like me.

  She puts her hand up, drapes her fingers over my shoulder.

  “I’m seeing someone,” I say.

  “What?” she asks.

  “Her name’s Ellen.”

  She doesn’t react, and that’s when my fingers start shaking. The breath I draw shudders in my throat. I think of Ellen, of the position I’ve put myself in. I think of what little respect Jill has, digging her pastel pink nails into the fabric of my shirt, trying to steal me back, trying to make me property.

  Little sluts.

  Greedy whores.

  All the things they say about women are true.

  She meets my gaze, blinks her dark eyes, her lips making a subtle smirk. “Jonah, I just need you to be a friend to me right now. I’ve got two kids. I’ve got stuff to pay for.”

  “Then go and fuck somebody else,” I say.