The necklace he made me hit against a weird pulse.
‘When should I come?
’ ‘Tomorrow. Saturday. Day of action.’ Elijah smiled. His jaw was like a sculpture. His white turban stood. ‘You come and I’ll fuck your tight pussy all night.’
Blood pounded so hard through my body, pumping and crooked like wires of light. I was going to scream his name when I was coming. I wanted my hands tied behind my back. Just like those sucked and slapped girls in my video clips. They always had to look the men in the eyes when they were coming. The guys wanted to see how much they were destroying them with their big hard cocks like hammers and pipes.
‘You’ll be there, yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
I was breathless. Elijah walked away. I held my virginity up in my fist.
GAYL: Shit. I got nothing here. I’ve got nothing to say.
§
‘I think you were actually degraded by this guy,’ Lee said to me in the ravine near my house. A greenish light full of flies lit us up. I’d told her the whole Key West story, minus the part about the slap. ‘And it’s like you’re still operating within a pattern of systemic degradation.’
‘Systemic degradation? Degradation, you mean, because he pissed on me?’
‘On your head. Uh, yeah. Where your brain resides. My other point being that you and Aaron don’t do stuff like that, so why’d you do it with that guy?’
‘How do you know me and Aaron don’t do that?’
‘Because I know. I would know that kind of shit. Aaron talks to me, right? We’re pretty close.’
‘I mean, where would it have been better for Elijah to piss?’
‘I’m not naive, Myra.’
‘What’s wrong with some piss? It comes out of everyone.’ I was trying to make her laugh. The ravine was electrically green. ‘I mean, the shock of it shocked me. Fuck, come on, Lee. Why are you upset?’
Lee rolled another joint. ‘You didn’t ask to be pissed on.’
‘Yeah, so? Come on. How the fuck are you supposed to ask someone to piss on you?’
Lee sucked in like a horse. ‘A woman can ask for anything she wants.’
She didn’t pass me the joint.
‘Yeah, well, I don’t know ... ’
Lee looked at me, eyes bulging, fluorescent. ‘You don’t know what?’
‘I found out I liked it even if I didn’t ask for it. You said that. You’re the one who said it was okay for me to want these kinds of things to be true.’
‘Well, that’s not what I was saying. That’s not what I meant.’
‘Can I have some, please?’
Lee held in her smoke for as long as she could and then breathed it out slowly, like the line of a song in the air.
‘You didn’t know this guy’s motives, am I right? I mean, you still don’t know why he did it. Not just the piss, but like why did this guy want to be with you in his place when he already had a girlfriend. What about her? I mean she was there, right?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t lie, come on.’