C’mon. He didn’t touch me, just pointed through my open window. Down there.
We took our beers and walked down to the shore. My boots soaked up muck from where the water lapped the weeds. He was tipsy, lurching as he pressed forward.
Now you see that, there? Down by the edge. He picked up my hand then, pointing it toward where he meant. See that black lump?
I did see it. It was long and fat, and it smelled like raw chicken left out in a garbage can. I walked closer, him clutching my arm like an invalid, stumbling as I steadied him, stopping less than a foot from the decomposing alligator.
A cloud of bottle flies lifted and resettled on the flesh. It’s not safe, I said, pulling him back. Anything dead at night next to the water will attract live gators.
My father and I stuffed gator heads. Most of the time we just lacquered the skulls, dipping the open jaws into the clear coat, replacing the eyeballs with plastic replicas, though they looked real enough once we pressed them into the sockets.
I never seen a dead thing like that before. He let go of my arm and crouched down by the gator, jabbing it with a piece of fallen palm scrub. He fell forward, steadying his hand against the side. Oh shit. Didn’t mean to touch it.
I could hear the boys out in their boats and wished I were back by the fire, with Brynn, sipping Fireball. Wished that Milo had just stayed home; that she were running her fingers along the back of my neck instead of my brother’s. When Milo asked what I was doing that night, he had a look on his face like he expected me to tell him to get lost. Like he knew I didn’t want him there. I couldn’t tell him no. Beer combined with the rum I’d had earlier made me feel depressed and hopeless, so I decided I should get much drunker. I took another pull from my bottle and helped Thomas to his feet.
You’re really pretty, you know that? The hand he’d pressed to the gator slipped into the fuzz of my hair, petting the frizzing strands at my temple. I let him do that for a while as I watched the lights flicker out on the water, past the shore, the boys still yelling.
We went back into his van and I let him touch me, briefly, under my shirt. He grabbed my breasts through my bra, twisting at my nipples. I closed my eyes and thought of Brynn, but I stopped him when he tried to undo my pants. Instead I undid his, examining the fleshy contents of his sour boxer shorts. Everything smelled musky and unclean. He didn’t seem that excited, either; mostly soft and shriveled. He made some crying noises, eyes squinted like a baby. Midway through, he leaned out his open window and threw up whatever he’d been drinking. I wiped my hands on my jeans and left him there to sleep it off, walking the long, twisty road back to the campsite.
Brynn was still perched on the log, taking swigs from the bottle. Milo sat beside her with his arm draped across her shoulder. He nuzzled his face into her neck and his free hand was wedged between her thighs, thumb rubbing circles on the bare skin. It kept happening, the two of them pawing at each other. I wondered if it was her way of being with an acceptable version of me, a masculine one she could take out in public. I wondered if she liked how his hands felt better than mine. If he kissed better. Milo turned to me and smiled. Lipstick stained his teeth.
Well, she asked, looking up at me. How was it?
6
Lucinda wanted to spend the night, every night. She wouldn’t ask, just curled up next to me after we fucked, both of us sweaty and broiler-hot. It was strange to wake up in the morning and see another body sprawled beside my own. I was so used to sleeping alone. Now there were legs twisted in my sheets, stray hairs in my brush a different color from mine. Damp toothbrush from someone else’s mouth and the cap left off the paste. She peed with the door open. Cleaned her ears with my cotton swabs and left them sitting out on the countertop, stained waxy yellow.
“Tell me your best childhood memory,” she asked, licking a stripe up the underside of my breast. “What was your favorite food growing up? How big was your house?”
I couldn’t answer these questions without talking about Brynn; without making Lucinda feel like she was a bigger part of my life. It was easier to find better uses for our mouths and let the blunt edge of sex shut us up.
No matter what time of the night we stumbled back to my awful apartment, she was there the next day, making breakfast from whatever I had in my fridge. Stuff I’d thought was expired became gourmet; delicious meals scrounged from scraps. I never said thank you, never told her I was happy to see her in the morning when the sun lit her dark, curly hair. It added too much to the feeling of intimacy, to acknowledge her doing that loving, domestic stuff. If I thanked her, it made what she was doing into something expected. Better to pretend it wasn’t happening. Then it wouldn’t matter when it inevitably stopped.
“You want eggs?” She leaned over me in the morning, her mouth already half-open, ready for a kiss.
“I don’t have eggs.”
“Sure you do. I know I saw some.”
“I know what I’ve got in my own fridge. There aren’t any.”
“I’m gonna look.”
I snuggled into the dirty comforter and waited for her to leave the room. Tried to wrangle my messy thoughts into something that would provide distance, the space I would need to reacclimate to how I was before she came over.
Once morning lit my apartment, I knew I shouldn’t have her there. It was filthy, not a place for someone as promising as Lucinda, a woman whose underwear always matched, whose clothes were so clean I hated to let them fall on a carpet I hadn’t vacuumed in months.
When I finally stumbled out wearing a T-shirt and some saggy shorts, I found her in the kitchen, scrambling eggs on the only skillet I owned, making toast on the stovetop using the coils from the sad, terrible burner that worked only half the time. She poured coffee for me, black, just how I liked it. Setting the cup so softly on the counter that it barely made a sound, she ran her fingers through the long length of my hair. I closed my eyes and let myself be pet, a kind of feeling I could sustain for only a minute before I’d tense up again. Remembering other hands.
We could play house all we wanted, pretend like we were something larger than the six hundred square feet of my ratty apartment. But when it came down to it, I had nothing good to give and she was already giving it up for someone else. I knew there had to be somebody. It was how she stood with that woman from the gallery. The one who looked a lot like me. Their body language—how women who are fucking lean into each other like magnets. Bodies ready to connect again. The woman had nodded at me more than once. Short hair. Dimpled cheeks that made her look younger than I thought she might be. Forties, probably. Eyes that scanned over me and landed on something prettier, usually Lucinda. This woman had a type and it wasn’t me. But I never really liked myself either. Always out looking for someone who’d remind me of somebody else, somebody different enough to make me forget I had a body of my own.
Lucinda liked to wear my cast-off shirts around the apartment. They swam on her in a pretty way, her legs long and dark beneath the hem. Looking at her in my clothes gave me a feeling so sharply pleasurable that I worried it would show on my face. I squashed it as a radical invader, a thing I wouldn’t let live inside of me. After she left I’d sniff the shirts, her clean, sunshine smell embedded in my clothes. A reminder that this good thing existed in my life.