Here, In This Place: An Origin Tale

WHAT HAPPENED THAT DAY

CONTINUED

It had been good to see Dan, but it was good to see anyone. His life was so lonely, that was the only way to describe it. He knew that now. At the moment he didn’t even have a partner at work. His last one had been Dick Hartigan and he’d thought the two of them didn’t get on, but now he saw that he just hadn’t opened up to him any. Those last few years with his mother had made him odd and inward and difficult. There had only been time for her, and then she was gone. He needed to talk to his sister. He needed something. He wondered where Dan was going and what he was up to. David thought, whatever’s going on, he probably has friends. He always did. Of couse, David had too., before he’d built these walls.

Driving around town had taken him all over the place today. Once a cop, always a cop, he hadn’t even been on duty when he’d pulled Dan aside. Now he stayed on the east side, driving south until for a while he actually passed out of Lassador into Sherman Heights and somewhere on Capitol Road he turned west. This was as far from his idea of Lassador as he ever got, a broad road over hung with trees. He left Capital Road for Van Buren and then took Mackey Street and somewhere, eventually, Jackson Street in Sherman Heights touched Beech Road, and then moving up a block there was Mackey Street which, after a mindless drive became his Mackey Street and his home.

Desolately he undressed with the curtain open. A light went on and he saw Claire watching him. He removed his tie slowly, and began to unbutton his shirt.

 Suddenly, almost violently, the curtain closed, and David wondered where his gun was. Did Claire have a boyfriend? What was going on over there that he had been too bored or too stupid to question? He stood in his room with the window open, wondering, and then he heard from downstairs what it took him a moment to recognize was a knock at his door. Better safe that sorry, he made sure his gun was still in his holster and trotted downstairs to answer the door. It was Claire at the keyhole, and he felt embarrassed. He wouldn’t have been able to speak. What he had done across windows made him hot with shame now. He over came it, unlocked the door and let her in.

She reminded him of Suzie, his girlfriend from high school except, and this was funny, more innocent. He closed the door behind her and she greeted him.

“Detective.”

“Claire,” his voice was a croak. He wondered, and he was certainly not someone who hadn’t had girlfriends, why he never seemed to know what to do around women.

And here she was, taking of her blouse, and she laid it on the chair that hadn’t been vacuumed or dusted since his mother died. And then she slipped off her shoes, shimmied out of her skirt, and David began to unbutton his own shirt, pull off his undershirt. When she took off her bra, he took down his pants and his briefs.  Dick hard, breath bated, he stumbled toward her. With a gentle hand she pushed him toward his lonely sofa and he sat down, mouth open, legs apart while she mounted him, touching the stiffness of his penis and pulling it inside of her.

 

“She’s cheating on you. I told you she’s fucking cheating on you,” Domenico said fiercely. “You can’t fucking let her do that. You gonna let her get way with it?”

“And do what?” David demanded.

“Davey,” Domenico, gesticulated like an old man in mobster movie, “you can’t let her go fooling around with other guys.”

They were on the soccer field outside of the long brick two story plus mezzanine that made up Saint Ignatius Catholic Boy’s High School, in their red soccer shorts and white tops, and practice was just ending and there was Suzie with her group of girlfriends. Harry and Corey were kicking the ball back and forth and killing time. Dominico was was one of those Sicilians so dark, so loud and so aggressive,  David with his Anglicized name felt absolutely Aryan next to him, seemed to always be having to prove how Italian he was. He shoved the soccer ball into Dom’s chest a little rougher than he meant and crossed the field. Suzie, who was standing near an old soccer net saw him, and she said something to her girlfriends, apparently knew from the way the tall fifteen year old going on sixteen was coming toward her that this was a private conversation.

“Hey, honey,” she said, and David felt like he was being mocked. She’s never said that. What the fuck where they: fifty?

He came at her with all the pretended fury of Robert DeNiro in…. well, in a Robert Deniro movie, his floppy hair shaking about. In later life he’s embarrassed to remember effecting a Jersey accent. He really didn’t know who the fuck he was yet.

“You cheating on me?”

“What?”

“I hear you’re cheating on me.”

“From who?”

Suzie, black haired and merry eyed, looked like this was the silliest thing she’d ever heard, like she was a mother talking to a ridiculous child.

“People are saying you’re fucking all these guys.”

He forced the word fuck out with a strong f. It was foreign to him.

“That’s gross, David,” she chided. “Besides, you and I aren’t even doing that.”

“Maybe we’re not doing it so you can do it with them.”

David Lawry was aware he had an audience. He knew at least Dom was watching him and maybe so were Harry and Corey now. From where they could see, he was standing over her, demanding, and she was, if not cowering, then smaller, giving account. And it was time to give account. After all, he’d heard about Suzie a few times by now.

“Swear to me you’re not fucking around,” David said. He had been about to roar in a dramatic Sicilian impersonation, “Swear to me you ain’t fucking aroun’!” But whatever his grandparents were, he was just a white boy. He knew that.

“Swear to me.” He sounded more like Ferris Bueller than Don Corleone.

Suzie raised her hand, like someone who was about to make a promise, and then, knowing her actions were out of the view of others, she lowered her hand into David’s shorts, slipped them in his jockstrap and held him hostage there. That’s how it felt. David had been an altar boy. He didn’t have a dirty imagination. The first time she’d done this to him he’d been surprised and embarrassed. She felt him, stroking him, and all the weight of him went down to her hand rubbing him. He leaned over her like a swaying tree, his face changing.

“You think I’m cheating on you,” Suzie said as the lightness of her hand stroked him speechless. “You think I’m fooling around? You really think that?”

David’s voice shuddered as she touched him. She knew when to stop, knew the bead of semen that would drip soon, saw his body trembling, his mouth open, his eyes distant, heard his breath change.

“No,” David said weakly.

Slowly she removed her hand.

“That’s right.”

 

All of the guys had seen Suzie giving him a handjob, but none of them had seen it. All they saw was him under a goalie net, leaning over, giving her the business and then they stopped talking and David moved away, looking surly. He wasn’t surly. He was confused. This wasn’t the way he imagined sex to be, or himself to be. This wasn’t even like those times when Suzie had finished him off in the car, or when he’d finished himself. A moment ago, he’d been growing in her hand, slowly carried up and up toward orgasm. As he went back to join his friends, his heart hurt and he realized, mad at himself, that he wanted to cry. He felt abused and fucked with. Touched in the wrong way, but mostly he felt lied to, because the very way Suzie avoided his accusation made him know it was true.       

 

Claire laughed low in her throat and a chuckle escaped David too, as she ran her hand over his dark hair, fallen in her face.

“Well,” she murmured, as they resituated on the couch, and she caressed his shoulder, “we finally got that out of the way.”

David hadn’t been able to speak and he was still catching his breath. He turned to his side, and looking over her said, “It’s been a while.”

“Since a woman knocked on your door, walked in and took off her clothes?”

“No,” David said, laughing, “I can honestly say that’s never happened.”

“You responded like a champ, though,” Claire said.

Then she said, sitting up, so that they both sat naked and disheveled on the couch, “I’ve been wondering what being fucked by you would be like.”

David turned red.

“You’re one of those good guys who doesn’t like the word fuck even when you’re doing it.”

“I’m really not a good guy.”

“No, you really are,” Claire said. “I think that’s your secret.”

“Whaddo we do now?”

“You’ve never had a one night stand?”

“Is this even what that is?”

“I’m not sure what it is.”

“Do you know what my secret is?” David said. “My secret is that what we did is the first time I’ve felt something in a long time. And I’d kind of like to keep doing it.”

Claire smiled, looking almost innocent.

“There’s a bed down the hall,” David said. He had been about to say upstairs, but it seemed ridiculous for there to be a king sized bed, and him ask a woman to hop into his little one in his little childhood room.

“Should we go to it?” Claire asked.

David stood up, shaking his hair out of his face, and held out his hand.

 

They laughed and talked about life, and David was able to admit to someone he had not known that he had been passionless and dull, that he didn’t believe in himself, that he’d loved his mother more than he could say and now that she was gone he had no one. He’d forgotten all about intimacy and forgotten all about passion too. It had been so long since he’d felt vulnerable with another human being. Claire, for her part, was a divorcee whose son was in boarding school of all places. She worked in Rawlston, at the college, but had grown up on Reacher Street and only casually talked to Dave until now.

“You’re a good listener,” she told him.

It hurt Dave, and even though Dave wanted to cry, he didn’t. She saw the hurt in him, though, and asked about it.

“It’s just,” he told her, “I… Deep inside I believe I’m a bad person.”

He had never been able to say that, and since Suzie, he’d never opened himself up to a woman. Or a man, really. Even as he shuddered in her arms the first time he came, he opened for Claire, and they made love well into the evening. He wanted her to come. They had come together so powerfully, with so much abandon, David realized he’d stop feeling free or safe a long time ago. He was with this woman. He was totally with her as he lay on his side, still trembling, his hand on her hip.

 

The light shone on rowing shoulders, straining back, flexing buttocks. His knees gathered strength as he thrust deeper. As his body, white in the sunlight moved, under him he heard cries that urged him on, that made him fuck harder and harder. Hands buried themselves in his dark, thick hair as, in the warm morning they fucked in the old bed in the large loft. Red fingernails, they were always red,  raked his ass and made him shudder. He’d told himself not to come, but as Dan Rawlinson’s neck arched, and he closed his eyes to the daylight, orgasm pulsed through his whole body, and still, as he thrust into a woman he could no longer trust, in a bed where another man had done the same thing to her the day before, and knowing he would hate himself as soon as he ejaculated, he was hard as ever, and Eileen Waverly didn’t stop shouting, and he didn’t stop fucking her.

Toward the end, toward the moment of lift where he had always trusted himself to her, he felt the strangeness of this personal moment with someone whose person he no longer knew, the oddity of clinging to flesh he didn’t trust, kissing a mouth that kissed another’s, his dick swelled in a cunt that he hated, that he thrust into with more violence. He felt the crisis rising up out of his balls, rising, shooting, tensing all of his body like a was a teenage boy again, shaking him. She’d seduced him, talked to him nicely, waiting for this moment when she would hold him in her arms while he trembled and shook, while he was at his weakest, and she would, as he lay gasping from getting pussy he longed for, still hard in her, still winded from orgasm, be hers again.

No wonder men hated women. He didn’t hate women. That would be stupid, but he hated Eileen. It was because this thing that was supposed to be so powerful wasn’t powerful at all. It was trembling and eye bulging. It was body freezing and nut shooting. Embarassed, still dripping, he lifted himself from her inelegantly, winded, confused, angry while he was still hard. He turned his back to her, his face to the distant wall.

“That…” Eileen began, “was…”

“I need you to leave,” Dan said in a dead voice.

“What?”

He didn’t look at her.

“I got weak, and I apologize. You made an ass out of me, but then I let you.”

He sat up, and slipped into his underwear quickly so she couldn’t see him naked.

He pulled on his jeans and he wanted to be angry, but he was conscious of being very very sad.

“I’m gonna go out… to the bookstore or something. And when I get back,” he turned to her, and he didn’t look angry. His dark eyes were very soft. His face, rounded, looked hurt, “I don’t want to see you here. Okay?”

The red haired woman on the bed, gathered her knees to her chest and nodded.

“Okay.”