More Than a Kiss (6 page)

"I'd
offer you a chair," Amy said, "but I don't want you to stay."

Amy
and Isabel giggled.

Chad
put his hands on his hips and stared down his perfectly shaped nose at her. 
"I want you to know, Amy," he said, "that you aren't making a
good impression on me right now."

"Oooh,
don't say such things, Chad.  You're making me sad," Amy said.  She didn't
so much drip sarcasm as she spewed it.  She giggled.  “Chad.  Sad.  I rhymed!”

"I'm
serious.  If you're going to be my number one girlfriend you can't go around
getting drunk and eating with your bare hands in the back yard like a feral
animal."

"Here's
a solution," Amy said.  "Demote me to number three girlfriend.  Or
maybe number ten.  Or how about you take me off the list entirely.  How do you
like them crackers?"

Chad
crossed his arms over his muscular pecs.  "Is this about the banana
peel?" he asked.

"Could
you possibly get any more asshole-ish?" Amy said.  “Of course it’s about
the damn banana peel.  It’s about the basic philosophy behind the banana peel. 
First, by throwing the condom on the floor where it would prove a safety hazard
you demonstrated what an inconsiderate fucktard you are.  Second, by telling
everyone the story you proved that you’re a gossip and will do anything for a
cheap laugh, and third just because I made the mistake of sleeping with you once,
much to my regret, does not mean I want to have anything further to do with
you.”

“Brava!
Tell it to him straight, sister,” Isabel said.

Chad
stared at Amy.  “You don’t mean that.  You’re not thinking straight.  I’m going
to give you a pass on tonight.”

“Ugh!”
Amy said, and pelted him with a cracker.  It bounced off the side of his
perfectly shaped head.

He
glared at her.  "Now you're throwing food at me?"

"You're
lucky I didn't have the block of cheese in my hands," she said.

Isabel
guffawed.  "I saw a gorilla do that once.  At the zoo.  He got tired of
this guy making faces at him through the bars and he picked up his feces and
threw it at the guy.  Splat!  Right in the kisser."

Amy
grinned at Chad.  "Be careful.  I may throw my feces at you next."

Chad
stomped on the cracker and glared at her.  "I've had enough.  I'm going
home to wait for your apology."  He stalked back across the yard.

"You'll
be waiting a long time," Amy called out after him.

He
disappeared through the door.  Amy and Isabel grinned.  Then they tossed the
cheese and crackers to each other and went back to nibbling.

Mirror, Mirror

"How
do I look?" Jordan asked.  She stood in the hallway, scrutinizing herself
in the full-length mirror that leaned against the "wall." 
"Wall" deserved quotation marks because the "wall" wasn't
really a wall.  The old, crumbly drywall had been taken down and all that
remained were two-by-four studs and bare electrical wiring.  This was the motif
for the entire second story of the house.  Whenever Jordan complained to Edison
about the "walls," Edison only said, "Sometimes it's necessary
to tear something down before you can build it back up."  That may be
true, but when it was going to be built back up was the problem.  So, the
mirror was leaning against the "wall" and Jordan was checking her
reflection.  She asked again, "Tell me the truth, Ed, how do I look?"

Jordan
did a complete 360 to give the full effect of her ensemble.  Actually ensemble
may have been too expansive a word.  Outfit was more suitable for what she was
wearing: khaki shorts, sandals and a white linen shirt.

"You
look casually sexy," Edison replied.  "Or sexily casual.  Depending
on who's doing the looking."

"Not
too casual though, right?"

"Right."

"Too
sexy?"

Edison
shook her head.  "I think you've found the perfect blend of casual
sex."

Jordan
stood with her back to the mirror and peered over her right shoulder.  "I
can't see my butt."

"It's
there, don't worry."

"Does
my butt make my pants look big?"

Edison
laughed.  "Your butt is perfect and you know it."

Jordan
grabbed her butt cheeks and lifted them up higher.  When she took away her
hands they bounced back into place.  She sighed and grabbed her cheeks again. 
This time she squeezed her cheeks together in an effort to make them look smaller.

"My
butt's too big," Jordan moaned.

Edison's
face lit up.  She pulled a roll of duct tape out of her pocket and held it
high.  "I could tape it.  I could tape anything you wanted.  I could make
your butt smaller and your boobs higher.  Or I could make your boobs smaller
and your butt higher.  Your choice."

"Do
you use it?" Jordan asked.

"I
have.  It works great.  Hurts like hell taking it off, though."

"I'll
pass."

"Whatever. 
It's here if you need it."  Edison put the tape back in her pocket.

Jordan
turned around and looked full on at her reflection.  "I just don't want to
look too planned.  Looking planned is the equivalent to looking desperate.  And
looking desperate turns women off."

"I
don't know about that," Edison said, "I kind of like a quiet air of
desperation.  It means they're easy targets."

Jordan
whacked Edison in the arm with the back of her bandaged hand.  "Ow!"
she exclaimed.  "Your arm hit my hand."

"Listen,
Jordan, reality-check here.  You're just going to see the Doc so she can take out
the stitches.  It isn't a date.  She has a boyfriend, remember the guy in the
photo."

"I
know that.  But I’m not competing with him.  I would just be presenting another
option so this could be the precursor to a date with a person who is offering
another type of relationship.  You have to remember most of us didn’t start off
gay.  We eventually realized it.  Maybe Amy hasn’t realized it yet.  That’s all
I’m saying."

"So
you are going to ask her out."

"If
it comes up organically."

"How
does asking somebody out come up organically?"

"You
know like if her stomach growls and I hear it.  I could say, 'You must be
hungry,' and she'd say 'I
am
hungry' and I could say 'let's go get
something to eat' and then she'd say…”

Edison
picked up, "And she would say 'I'm hungry for you, baby' and you'd say
'Here I am, come and get it.'"

They
laughed, but stopped abruptly when the door across the hall opened a crack and
one eye peeked out.

Meet
Irma Kalandarishvili. 
Irma
had black hair, black eyes, and an entire wardrobe of only black clothes.  Or
maybe she just had only one black outfit.  Jordan wasn't sure.  Irma was tall
and thin like a ballerina and her hair was slicked back in a severely lacquered
bun.  She never blinked.  Nobody had ever seen her blink.  She could've been
mistaken for a stick of licorice.

Jordan
had gone out on a date with her two years ago.  The date was horrible but the
sex afterwards made up for it.  Irma and Jordan fulfilled a hunger in each
other that other people couldn't.  It wasn't based on banter or intellect or
common interests.  It was purely animalistic.  So, Jordan and Irma became
friends with benefits except they weren't really friends.  And when Irma showed
up one day needing a place to stay, Jordan rented her a spare bedroom.

Irma
moved in and paid her rent on time with cash. Nobody knew where Irma was from –
Russia?  Germany?  Or one of those Slavickstan kind of countries?  Nobody knew
how she made her money or what she did behind the doors of her room.

Ever
since Irma had moved in six months ago, Jordan had avoided her.  She didn't
want to have a physical relationship with somebody that lived under her own
roof.  It had been fine to be fuck-buddies when your buddy didn’t live with you
but now it was different.  Jordan reasoned that it was too much like that old
adage, "Don't shit on the hand that feeds you."  Or something like
that.  She’d told Irma that but Irma wasn't giving up so easily.

Irma
eyed Jordan up and down and said in her thick accent that sounded like Natasha
from
The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show
, "You are dressing for big
date?"

Jordan
shrugged.  "Just a maybe date."

Irma
leered at her.  "If maybe date is not what dreams are made, you come to
Irma and Irma will
un-dress
you and show things you never experiment in
wild dreams."

Edison
said, "I think you mean
experience
in your wildest dreams."

Irma
looked at her coldly.  "No.  Irma mean
experiment
in wild
dreams." She looked back to Jordan and smiled wickedly before she ducked
back inside and closed the door.

"Someday
I'm going to scream in her face.  Just to see if she blinks," Edison said.

Jordan
laughed.  "She won't.  I think her hair is so tight in that bun she can't
blink."

Edison
laughed. "I don't get what you see in her."

"We
had an arrangement, that's all.  It worked in both our favors."

"What
an arrangement," Edison said with a huge eye-roll.  "If you two
aren't doing somebody else then you do each other."

"Operative
word here is
did.
We no longer
do
. But I'm sure you could find
the same type of arrangement if you wanted."

Edison
said in an imitation of Irma's accent, "Edison not want.  Edison want love
true not buddy fuck in experiment love."

"You
don't really believe in true love, do you?"

"Sure. 
Don't you?" Edison said, brushing a stray hair off Jordan’s shoulder.  She
straightened her collar.

"Nope,"
Jordan said.

"Nope?"

"No." 
Jordan looked at herself in the mirror again.  "I believe the concept of
true love is just an illusion."

Edison
looked at Jordan's face, at her reflection in the mirror, then back to Jordan. 
She imitated Irma's accent, "Edison think one of you is big fat
liar."

Happy Birthday to Me

Jordan
paced back and forth in the small room.  There wasn't much to do or look at
while she waited for Amy.  The décor left a lot to be desired.  One gurney-type
rolling bed, one rolling stool, and a small desk holding some medical torture
instruments.  The desk was on wheels, too.  What was it with doctors and
rolling devices?

There
were two doors.  One was the door that she had come in and the other door led
to another room identical to this one.  Jordan knew because she had peeked
earlier.

She
stopped pacing long enough to study the poster that was taped to the wall.  It
depicted a cartoon boy holding his hands over a sink.  There were bugs and
worms crawling all over his hands.  Cartoon germs.  She moved to the next
poster.  It was a drawing of the male anatomy complete with Latin-esque
labels.  Jordan leaned in close and studied the side view of the phallus.  It
was a sliced open view so you could see what the inside of the penis looked
like.  It looked all spongy.  She reached out and touched it with one finger. 
It just felt like a poster.

She
wiped her un-bandaged hand on the side of her shorts.  Her palm was sweaty.  It
was a cold sweat.  Nerves.  She didn't like to admit it, but Amy made her
nervous.  Not like she was scared of her, but like she was scared
of
her.  That didn't make sense unless you were Jordan.  And it made perfect sense
to her.  She was scared of Amy, all right.  Not scared of the physical person
of Amy.  More like scared of how Amy made her feel.

The
small room was giving her an acute case of claustrophobia.  The walls were
closing in, making her brain play tricks on itself.  She swore the cartoon boy
on the “Always wash your hands!” poster was talking to her. Which was markedly
better than the penis one talking to her. The cartoon boy told her she should
wash her hands.  Sweaty hands were germy hands and sing the Happy Birthday song
because that was the specified length for optimum germ removal.  She didn’t
know whether she should believe him or not but she had an instant driving
desire to rid her hands of sweat and potentially hazardous germs.

She
went to the sink, and turned on the hot water.  She didn't want to shake hands
with Amy and have a clammy, sweaty palm.  That would be the death knell of any
budding relationship.  Almost as bad as kissing and slobbering on her face. 
She held her hand under the stream of water and sang the Happy Birthday song
all the way through just like the cartoon boy in the poster told her to do.

When
she turned off the water, she heard a voice.  No, two voices.  They were coming
from the room next door.  One voice sounded like Amy’s.  Jordan pressed her ear
to the door that led to the room next door, closed her eyes and listened. 
There was a man’s voice, and Amy’s voice.

Here
is what she heard the voices say:

“No! 
Don’t!”  Amy said.

“Why
not?  You want it.  You know you do,” a man said.

“I
do not want it.  Especially while I’m working.”

“C’mon,
this is the perfect place.  That way if it makes you sick you’re already in a
hospital.”

“I
don’t have time,” Amy said.  “I have an appointment any minute now.”

“I’ll
be quick.  Here, open your mouth.”

“No!”
Amy screeched.  “Put that back where it belongs.  I don’t want to even look at
it.”

“Aw.
C’mon.  Just put a little bit in your mouth.”

Amy
screamed.  Metal clanged against metal and fell to the floor.  There was a
giant
thud
.

Jordan
immediately morphed into white knight mode.  She bashed open the door and
crashed into the room, hands held high in a karate posture.  She
hai-yai’ed
and did the whooping crane stance that
The Karate Kid
made famous.

The
frozen tableau she saw before her was this:  Amy was in a corner.  Jeremy was
holding a bowl in one hand and a spoon in the other.  He held the spoon, which
had some type of green sludge in it, only an inch from Amy’s lips.  A bedpan
was on the floor, still spinning from its fall.

“Unhand
her,” Jordan said because she was still thinking like a knight and Amy was her
damsel in distress.

Jeremy
clanked the spoon into the bowl and said, “Hey, you’re the lesbian hottie.”

Jordan
relaxed, deflating from the whooping crane stance to one of an embarrassed
penguin.  “And you’re Amy’s boyfriend.  Who’s trying to spoon feed her.”

Amy
laughed and slapped Jeremy’s chest with the back of her hand.  “He’s not my
boyfriend.  He’s my butthole roommate.  Who’s trying to make me eat my other
roommate’s experiment.”

“Um,
okay,” Jordan said.  “I’ll just be right over there.  In the next room.  Waiting.” 
She held up her injured hand.  “Stitches, you know.”  She saluted them.  “Carry
on.”

Jordan
backed out the door, smiling so big her face hurt.  She closed the door and
banged her head against it, muttering, “Dumb, dumb, dumb.”  She went back to
the sink, turned on the water and washed her face with her one good hand while
humming
Happy Birthday.

"Is
it your birthday?"

Jordan
gasped and turned.  It was Amy.  She turned off the faucet and looked around
for a paper towel.  "No, it's not my birthday.  I was just singing it
because the cartoon boy told me to."

"Cartoon
boy?" Amy asked.  She tilted her head to one side.  She squinted like she
was trying to figure out if Jordan had gone bonkers.

Jordan
gestured at the poster.

Amy
studied the poster.  She looked worried.  "That boy in the poster talked
to you?  You know he's not alive, right?" Amy handed her a paper towel.

"No!"
Jordan said.  "I mean, yes, I know that.  I meant the bubble over his head
said to sing…well you know."  She took the paper towel and dried her
hands.

Amy
laughed.  "I was just kidding."

Jordan
breathed a sigh of relief.  "Oh.  That was funny.  You had me going there
for a minute."  There was an awkward pause while she wiped her face with
the paper towel.  “Um, sorry about bursting in on you like that.  It sounded
like, you know…”

“Yeah,
I know,” Amy said, “But it wasn’t what you think.  And he’s not what you
think.”

Jordan
nodded.  She nodded too much.  It was like she couldn’t stop nodding.  She felt
like one of those toy Chihuahua dogs people put on the dashboard of their car.

"You're
nervous, huh?" Amy asked.

Jordan
nodded
quickly about three hundred more times.

"No
need to be.  Getting stitches taken out doesn't hurt at all.  Have a
seat."  Amy looked over her paperwork on her clipboard and jotted down
some notes.

Jordan
sat on the gurney-bed.  She could feel the coarse paper lying across the top of
it sticking to the back of her sweaty thighs.  Great.  She was so nervous that
she was sweating all over now.  Amy was going to think she had some kind of
sweating disease.

Jordan
closed her eyes and took three deep breaths.  She couldn't ask Amy out.  There was
no way this brilliant, busy, probably straight doctor would go out with her. 
Jordan was certain she would just make a fool of herself by asking, and Amy was
so nice that she'd have to make up an excuse and then they'd both know she was
lying and that would make everything really awkward and tense and then she'd
have to tell Edison about how stupid she'd been and she'd feel embarrassed
about it for months or maybe even years.

"One
down," Amy said.

Jordan
opened her eyes.  Amy was smiling and holding one tiny little black piece of
thread in some tweezers.

"That
didn't hurt, did it?" Amy asked.

Jordan
shook her head.  She'd been so wrapped up in the conversation with herself that
she hadn’t known when Amy had unwrapped her hand and taken out a stitch.

God,
this woman was delectable.  If she asked Amy to kiss it and make it better,
would she?  That was a wicked thought.  Wickedly delicious, that is.  Wasn't
that the jingle for Lucky Charms?  No, that was
magically
delicious. Jordan
closed her eyes again and thought of sex.  She had learned this trick while
going to the dentist.  Thinking about sex made having people poke and prod in
your mouth much more tolerable.  Now, she had Amy to think of having sex with. 
She knew she shouldn’t go there, but she went there anyway.

"Done,"
Amy pronounced.

Jordan
opened her eyes again and gaped at Amy.  She had taken all the stitches out in
less time than she could sing the Lucky Charms jingle.

"Wow,"
Jordan said for lack of anything better to say.

"Your
hand is healing nicely.  Now let's see how it functions.

"You
made it bionic, right?  'Cause I always wanted a bionic hand."

Amy
laughed.  "Let's just see if you can open and close it first."

Jordan
slowly made a fist while making bionic sounds.  A sudden shot of pain made her
stop and gasp.  "Ouch."  She looked at Amy.  "That hurt."

"It
will for a while. You did sever a tendon, you know.  Practice opening and
closing, making a fist, squeezing."  Amy demonstrated the motion with her
own hand.  She looked like she was milking a cow.  "You'll have to do some
physical therapy in order to regain full use of your hand."

Jordan's
world brightened a little.  "I get to come here and do therapy with
you?"

"No,
you can do it yourself.  At home."

"Oh,"
Jordan said when what she really wanted to say was "Damn."  She'd had
a little ray of hope there for a minute.  Hope that she'd get to come to Amy's
office and practice squeezing things.  Whoops, there were those magically
delicious thoughts again.

Amy
rolled her chair over to the desk, opened a drawer and rummaged around inside. 
When she rolled back over, she handed Jordan a little yellow rubber ball. 
"Squeeze on that ball.  Carry it around with you and when you have a spare
moment, squeeze it.  In a few weeks, you'll have complete use of your hand
again."

Jordan
gave it a try.  She could barely make a dent in the ball.

"Keep
at it.  You'll see."

She
stowed the ball in the side pocket of her shorts.  Amy rolled away to the desk.

I
want one of those rolling stools, Jordan thought.  I could get all around my
house and never have to stand at all.

When
Amy rolled back, she handed Jordan a stack of books.  Jordan accepted them with
her good hand and was shocked when she saw they were the books she'd written.

"These
are mine," Jordan said.  "I mean, they belong to you, obviously, but
I wrote them."

"I
bought them the other day.  I was wondering if you'd do me the honor of autographing
them?"

"Yeah,
sure.  Of course I will," Jordan said.  She was stunned.  She'd never been
asked for her autograph before.

Amy
handed her a pen.

Jordan
opened the first book to the title page and had a sudden thought.  "Who
should I make it out to?"

"Me,"
Amy said.

Jordan
bent over the page and wrote: 
Amy, will you go to lunch with me?  Jordan
March.

Jordan
nervously handed it over.  She watched as Amy read it and looked up at her.

"I'd
love to," Amy said. "When?"

"Now?"

"Right
now?"

"Do
you not want to?" Jordan asked, her heart racing.  Thank God, Amy didn’t
have her stethoscope with her –
she might admit
her to the cardiac unit for observation.

"No,
it's the suddenness of it that startled me."

"We
could do it tomorrow.  Or next week. Or some evening."

Amy
shook her head, saying, "We can't do it in the evening."

"Um,
okay, I understand.  You already have plans and…”

Amy
interrupted her, "No, I mean you wrote 'lunch' so we can't do lunch in the
evening."

Jordan
quickly wrote in the next book: 
Or dinner?

Amy
read it and laughed.  "What are you going to write in the third
book?"

Jordan
shrugged.  "Depends on how well lunch goes.  When would you like to
go?"

"Now?"

"Right
now?"

"Isn't
that what you said?  You wanted to do it right now?"

Jordan
shook her head.  "I'm confused.  Are we still talking about lunch?"

Amy
giggled.  Jordan liked it when Amy giggled.

"How
about if I meet you out front in five minutes?"

"That'd
be great," Jordan said.  “See you then!”  She hurried into the hall and
headed to the elevator.  She felt like skipping.  She felt like skipping and
singing and laughing all at the same time.