As the small crowd got more anxious to return to their apartments, and the firemen found themselves more and more surrounded by questioning groups of restless humans, I ducked around the side alley of the building and made my way to the back side door that led out to the garbage bin shed. The stench from that small shed smacked my nose harder than the odor of the fading electrical-smoke and firetruck exhaust. It smelled moldy, mildewy and pissy in that shed, no matter how often it got hosed down and scrubbed.
The back side door was wide open, so I just walked right inside and headed up towards Maggie's apartment to get my things. Within minutes I'd collected everything I needed, and came back down the stairs, expecting the whole time to see Fireman Hawkeye, but somehow my sneaky retreat had gone undetected. I held my dufflebag close to my side and wanted to say goodbye to Maggie, but the dufflebag seemed like it offered proof of my misbehaving and inability to follow simple demands not to enter buildings until given permission.
I stuffed the dufflebag under a car parked near the curb in front of the apartment building.
Walking in long, determined strides, I headed towards Maggie, and as I came around the corner and saw her face, time slowed down to that feeling you get when a moment in time has decided to record itself for you, to play back to you over and over again when the mind is ready to reflect.
A breeze blew my hair back slightly, gently, slowly. Her eyes stared at me as she reached up to touch her own swath of blond colored hair. Some nearby residents walked in front of her, momentarily making the image of her disappear behind a blur of blue jeans and black concert tshirts, and then there she was again, like a singer that pauses to catch her breath and then resumes on a perfect note. My hands came up to catch her face in them as I took my lips to hers and felt the soft dimple below her nose, as her chin rose to take the kiss in as far as it could go. I let my hands fall, felt the kiss end in my veins with intense longing, turned, and headed back to the front to get the dufflebag from under the car.
Somewhere along the way I'd ended up in a cab. Shortly after that I ended up at a mall. And I'm not sure how I ended up with all my things in my buddy Kevin's car trunk with a pillow and blanket in the back seat to sleep upon, but somehow that is where I ended up living for about a week. A daze of sorts had overtaken me, leaving Maggie more brutal to my heart and mind than I ever thought it would be. I think, in hindsight, it wasn't because I'd left her, but because I'd felt forced to leave for all the wrong reasons. For the wrong man.
I woke with two fleas jumping on my face, the back seat of this car often a transporter of stray dogs and cats to local shelters and hospitals. My friend Kevin often rescued collar-less strays found starving or hurt on the roads and streets of this overpopulated city. I felt my face for any flea bites, but there didn't seem to be any. I silently thanked Gosh, a temporary stand-in for God. Throughout my life I'd had substitutes for God. Mental places my prayers and wishes would go. It felt like until I met God or knew God or understood God I shouldn't be asking the guy for favors or have him listen to me mentally speak my hopes for others.
Kevin had given me a key to his family's house, and once they'd all left for work I'd let myself in and do a quick, neat 'shit, shower and shave'. Cleaning up after myself so as not to leave a single piece of evidence I'd been around. The house was immaculate. Not a dusty spot on anything. Not a streak on any glass. The bathroom always smelled like it had been wiped clean that morning. I marveled at Kevin's mom, a woman who spoke little English. She'd raised 3 boys and one daughter, and worked about thirty hours a week. Her husband worked full time, and in full Portuguese tradition he'd only do yard work. Housework was for women, he'd often say. Kevin told me he agreed with his father, because when the last child was born, a daughter, Kevin's father had done a load of laundry while his wife was recovering in the hospital and Kevin had worn shirts with large bleach stain blotches over all of them until he outgrew the clothes. Kevin summed up that men should not do any housework because his father had ruined about 3 of his favorite concert shirts.
Kevin mistook my cleaning-quirk to be one of a sense of duty, years before when we'd met at a yard-sale my friend's mom was having. I had been wiping and dusting down all the items, to make them more presentable while simultaneously giving myself an OCD-fix, and Kevin was there to help her move everything for the yard sale out of her garage.
Because it's a man's duty to help women move stuff.
I guess Kevin's mom knew my friend's mom. We'd flirted all day, and then he had asked me to go out to eat with him and to see a movie. So I'd gone. As we were driving back, I felt so awkward, being on a date with a boy so close to my age. I was, at age 16, so very comfortable around grown men, it sometimes felt odd to be in the company of a male younger than age 30. Kevin was 19. And the date aspect of it felt odd as well. I wasn't sure what exactly the expectations were. It was so easy to know with men who gave you money. I respected the way the transaction took away any of the guessing, wondering, and replaced it with accountable services and sexual pleasure.
So, as Kevin pulled over to the curb to drop me off where I'd lived at the time, I did the one thing he never expected from a female who, in his mind, knew it was her duty to clean. I jumped into his lap and told him I wanted him to fuck me. Now. Boy, was he mad when I did that. He'd pushed me off of him and scolded me. Told me not to act like a whore, which of course made me laugh.
"Kevin," I said and unbuttoned my shirt and untucked it from my jeans. "I am a whore." Then he'd just grabbed me and fucked me silly in the front seat of that car, not even giving himself, or me, the comfort of the back seat. Not that it would have mattered, as comfort was not to be had in any aspect of what the situation had turned into. He wasn't comfortable with me like this. The woman I was in his mind was not the woman I was.
He fucked me, he came, and then he sat there and punched his dashboard.
"What's wrong?" I'd asked.
"Now I can't marry you, or want things with you. You're just a slut," he'd said to me.
"Ok, but what's wrong?" I'd asked again.
"What, this doesn't bother you?" he looked at me angrily. "You have no problem just throwing yourself at me like this? You just met me, just today, not even twenty four hours ago, and you've got no problem taking off your clothes and just letting me have my way with you?"
I stared at him and waited until he didn't look so pissed off. Then, right as he was about to say something else, I put my hand to his cheeks, turned his face to look directly into my eyes, and I said "Hey, you didn't seem to have a problem with it, so why should I? If I wanted to, I could still think thoughts about wanting you after what we just did in this car. And you know what? I probably will. You're a good fuck."
And that's about the time I knew I'd said to much, but before I could stop myself from speaking I had to stop Kevin's hand from smacking my face. I held it there, so close to impact, and then I kissed his fingertips. He was fuming. More angry than I'd ever seen anyone. I went to get out of his car, but he reached over to stop me by strapping the seatbelt around me.
"Let's go for a ride and talk about what in the hell just happened," he said, and we drove back into the late, late night.
I told him all my secrets. I explained to him how and why. And instead of ditching me along some highway to hitch-hike my way home, he told me all of his secrets, and we became good, good friends. Now, two years later, I stood drying off in his bathroom, my personal belongings in his car, while he was at work a block away, managing his father's landscaping business.
I dressed and headed out, to wait for night to fall so I could earn some money to get a new place to live. Sometimes I got lucky and daytime clients would appear, as if by some sixth sense. How they knew how to find me was always a mystery to me. I was never in the same place each day or night.
I was sitting on the stone wall near the avenue when a car drove by and somebody yelled "Capri!" The car went around the block and then pulled up slowly and the window went down, revealing Joe, the Vietnam Vet. He smiled at me so genuinely, and I lifted myself off the flat slate rock and then had to steady myself from all the excitement of seeing him after weeks of blurred events.
"Joe!" I said happily and walked to the car and leaned myself inside the window to kiss his cheek.
"Renee," he said as he put his hands around my hair and head.
"Capri, goofball," I said and he laughed.
"Capri goofball is right," he teased. "You busy?"
Nodding my head no, I walked around the car and got inside the passenger's side. One of the girls I had been working with waved to me from the wall as I gave her a wink and a smile goodbye, to show her I knew I had no worries and was in safe hands.
I held Joe's hand warmly and firmly as we drove down Acushnet Avenue heading towards route eighteen and the south end where Joe's building was. Blocks and blocks of old churches and bakeries, Portuguese restaraunts and gas stations. The music was Bruce Springsteen's Dancing in the Dark and then Carribean Queen by Billy Ocean, I think. We were talking, laughing, singing parts of the songs together, Joe and I. There was no mention of money, no mention of sex, but things just were naturally leading that way without need of mention.
I didn't ask to go to his place, he just knew to drive there, and even as we got out of the car and walked into the building, there was no asking of "do you want to come in for a bit" or any of the other formalities that occur in the business and even during more typical male and female couplings. We were both so deeply in synch with each other that no matter what angle we came at each other from it just happened, made sense and became what it became.
And he became naked very, very quickly. And he was holding me firmly on my shoulders and my sides, touching my breasts like he owned them at times and at other times like he was feeling them for my heart. He made me gasp and buck into him. He made me moan so deeply I sounded inhuman. He fed me his tongue and took my lips between his teeth and gently bit them until he made me smile in the midst of it all.
Our laughing filled each other up, our sex overflowed onto bare skin and bed sheets. What a fucking beautiful mess we made of ourselves and everything around us. Sticky and hot, long sips of soda with ice clinking in tall glasses, our meeting again after such a long seperation from each other was as comforting and as needed as a big gulp of air after swimming underwater from one end of the pool to the other.
His cock felt so smooth, slick and firm inside me, I recall the sensualness of that feeling as vividly as it felt at the time. The longing I had secretly harbored for it, keeping the feeling concealed from even myself, wanting sex with him became a stowaway inside of me. Now I'd confronted it and I let him know. "You feel so good, Joe," I sighed as I ran my fingers on his shoulders and pressed my cheek to the side of his arm. "You feel like your penis was made to fit inside of me that perfectly."
"Don't," Joe said. "Shhh. Shhh."
"Don't what?" I whispered.
"Don't make me think about you this way."
I knew what he meant. I lay quietly and wondered about what lines we were crossing and what it would mean. How it would work, how it could work, and that which would make it impossible to work. Then, it came to me.
"Joe," I whispered again, and he tilted his head to the side to look at me. "You are a good, good friend, Joe. Above and beyond the business of this, you are a good man and I think you are a good friend to me."
Joe contemplated this a moment before answering. He almost caught me off guard with the amount of seriousness in his voice. "And you are a good friend to me, and I think we should talk about you living out of a car and consider some alternatives to that. I think you should stay here. You can help with housework in exchange for a bed to sleep in. Any of this will continue to be business," he said, and pointed to our genitals, which made us both cock our eyebrows at each other simultaneously and then slightly giggle under our breaths.
"I don't think that will work, Joe. I work late nights," I replied.
"I don't see how I can drop you off back at some wall or at some guy's car," Joe said bluntly.
"I'll take a cab, it's ok," I said and he put his hand around my waist as if he thought I meant that I was leaving in a cab right then and there. "Or I can stay tonight like the other night and we can just talk until we fall asleep."
"Or we can do this until we fall asleep," Joe suggested and turned me onto my stomach and breathed heavily into my ear as he ran the tip of his penis over the highest part of my thigh down to in between my legs. I rose to him, turning to look at him with a sly grin and then reached my hand down to guide him inside.
The sun was about to rise and we'd not slept at all. Joe was drifting in and out of being wide awake and frisky and doing some kind of partial-snore, when sleep is begging to be had. All I could think about is how great I felt all over and how cozy and perfect it felt being between these sheets on this bed with Joe, the smell of his semen and sweat, the warmth of his skin, and the firm hold of his arms around me. Intermingled within the safety of him, I caught the scent of myself, a mix between faded light perfume and orgasm liquids and fluids. I kissed Joe's arm up and down to the tips of his fingers. He held me tighter and pressed his penis to my back, a happy groan of contentment sighed from him into my ear.
And off to sleep we both drifted as the rest of the world began to wake up.