The intensity of her expression makes me smile a little, teasingly. Cleo seems, to me, like exactly the sort of girl who would enjoy a nice surprise. “So I need to promise never to surprise you?”
She nods, chewing her lip. “Unless it’s good. Like that.” She nods to where she tucked the brick under the bed.
I’ve got nothing good at all, so I promise, “No more surprises.”
She seems appeased by that, as if she’s moved past whatever serious moment had its claws in her.
“Sixty-five percent,” she says lightly, grabbing a leather book bag from one of the bed’s posts. “Because that deal of yours is so not happening. I can barely add two plus two. You’ll see.”
I reach down to work the bag’s strap from her fingers.
“Don’t think that wins you any points,” she warns. She grabs a water bottle off the dresser, stuffs the letter she had earlier into her bag, and sprays the room with linen-scented air freshener, while I check out her art again. I like the bold brush strokes and the way that she blends color. The texture of the paper adds a 3D effect.
The one I’m looking at now is Sylvia Plath. The colors are a translucent sort of jade, pale gold, and, in a few places, milky white. Running jagged and clear, horizontally, through the middle of the canvas, is a line I recognize immediately and, after a long second, place as a line from the poem, “Daddy.”
“So I never could tell where you put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you...”
Where in the Wordsworth-inspired painting, the colors are a blunt amalgam, making any intention beyond the feeling of discord difficult to discern, the colors here are elegant; almost ghostly. They fade in and out of each other, like billowing clouds backlight by glowing light.
The pale spots—clouds—are beautiful. Blooming. Swelling into whatever they will be. The painting stirs a feeling of inevitability, and catches something at the bottom of my throat, so it’s hard to draw my next breath.
I look up and find her staring at me with a poker face. “Criticism?” she snips.
I shake my head. “It’s lovely.” I want to say more, to rave about the particular feeling she just thrust into my chest, but I can’t find the words. I’m only good with words on paper, so I just stand there, hoping that I look sincere.
“Thank you,” she says eventually. She sniffs, standing a little straighter. “I don’t like fake compliments, you know.”
“Then you’ll be glad to learn, I don’t like blowing smoke up asses.” I hold her gaze for a moment, just to show her I mean it. Then I hold out my arm, and she slides her tiny hand between the crease of my forearm and my bicep.
I walk her down the creaking stairs and out onto the porch, down the stairs into the lawn, then through the lamp-lit, car-filled parking lot. A balmy, grass-scented breeze tosses her dark hair, filling my nose with her light, sweet scent.
“That’s your car, right?” she asks, as we approach the Escalade. A street lamp shines off the hood, making the black paint look like wet ink.
I nod. It belonged to my father first, but that’s just another thing not to mention. He’s not someone I care to talk about.
“You know it’s called the Sexcalade,” she says as I steer her around the hood and toward the passenger’s door.
“What?” I stop with my hand stretched toward the handle.
Cleo gives me a smirk that has a distinctly chastising tilt to it. “People call this thing the Sexcalade. Because the last four months.”
“The last four months.” I repeat the words once more in my head, trying to make sense of them. The last four months are significant to me personally, but I don’t associate them with sex. In fact, I’ve never had so little. I pull her door open, and in her soft, prim, Southern drawl she says, “Before that, you didn’t ever seem to go out hooking up with people.”
She hoists her small self neatly into my passenger’s seat, and I press my lips together. So that’s what people think. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I got noticed.
After I dismissed Gina, my last submissive, I thought I could termina
te all sex. I made it all of thirty-seven hours before I admitted that would never work. So I started bar-hopping.
I always took the women I picked up to hotels. I couldn’t fuck them how I like, because word would get around—as evidenced by Cleo, looking smugly down her nose at me right now. I fucked them hard and fast and sent them on their way. They may have told their friends I like it rough, but they couldn’t say they didn’t enjoy it.
All those liquored, perfumed, ropeless fucks weren’t satisfying. By coincidence, about the time I started to feel restless, I was sniffing out my “rival.” She’s been my distraction ever since. Everything about her, from her slow, casual gait to the way she throws her head back when she laughs—like a bad actress on a sitcom—strums some cord inside me.
I think I knew earlier than I’ve been willing to admit that I need Cleo in my windowed room.
I walk around the car without corroborating her story about the “Sexcalade” and slide behind the wheel. I can feel her watching me. I ignore the urge to meet her eyes as I back out of the spot.
It doesn’t matter why I was never seen out socially with women, then suddenly was. She doesn’t need to know. Keeping Cleo in the dark about me is the only way I can know her.