Fucking Daphne (2 page)

The graveyard was my idea. It seemed gothy and sinister. But more than that, I thought taking her here would speed things along. Surely she'd make the connection eventually, right?

Apparently not.

It became obvious that she wasn't going to return my stare. I pulled away, letting my mouth hover an inch or two away from her breasts, promising more if she'd stop with the theatrics already
and just glance down at me. But her stomach was still writhing, her breasts still heaving, her head still tilted back like she was preparing to do a backward somersault.

“Seriously?” I asked, growing more incredulous. “You really don't remember me at all?”

We'd been together for most of the night, without so much as a glimmer of recognition in her face. But I was hoping that maybe, in this intimate context, she'd put the pieces together and realize why I looked so familiar. Maybe she'd notice how my eyes shifted from green to blue whenever I got excited, or catch a glimpse of the scar on my right shoulder blade and wonder why it looked so much like her own teeth marks. And then it'd all come rushing back to her, her eyes would well up with tears, and she'd say something about how much I'd changed; that's why she didn't know it was me. We'd spend a few minutes reminiscing, and she'd promise that this time would be different. Now that she'd found me, she'd say, she had no intention of losing me ever again.

And
then
we could fuck like vampires in a graveyard.

Daphne leaned forward and dug her nails into the back of my neck, trying to push my face back onto her breasts. But I was having none of it.

“We've met before,” I said more insistently, pushing her away.

“No kidding?” Even her sarcasm sounded impatient. “You mean we didn't just run into each other out in the cemetery and decide to fuck?”

“You don't understand.”

She rolled her eyes. I had the distinct impression that if I didn't stop yammering soon, she intended to punch me. “You want to play
gravekeeper. Is that what this is about?” she asked, her voice growing suddenly gruff. “Okay, fine, you sick fuck. I'm dead and you get to have your way with me before you put me in the ground. You want some necrophilia with a hot piece of corpse ass? Come and get it.”

“No, no, no. I mean we've met
before
today. I don't . . . ” Her hand was tugging at my belt, and I was finding it difficult to concentrate. “You don't . . . you're missing the point, I . . . don't you know who I am?”

She grabbed a handful of my hair and pulled me close. She looked into my eyes with such intensity, I could almost feel her peering into my brain.
This is it,
I thought.
This is how it's going to happen. There's no way she won't recognize me now.
I waited for her to say something, anything to drown out the deafening Congo drumbeat of my own heart.

“I want you inside of me,” she growled, and her hands disappeared into my pants.

Okay, fine, the reunion could wait.

When I first met Daphne, she was by far the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen in my life. I was only seventeen at the time, so I didn't have much in the way of comparison, but to my young mind, she was sex on a stick with a chewy danger center. She was like a Bond girl, but with more piercings and countercultural sass. She was the black sheep of her family, of her high school, of the entire goddamn south side of Chicago. She was the bad influence who introduced her female friends to things like punk rock, clove cigarettes, and abortions. She was a chipped shoulder mixed with book smarts mixed with an affinity for committing minor felonies, all wrapped up in a
mouthwatering, curves-that-went-on-for-days, ripped-jeans-and-a-Dead Kennedys-T-shirt package.

I was in love the moment I laid eyes on her.

It took a few years before she even knew my name. I had nothing in common with the bad boys she tended to socialize with. I was, as the S&M folk like to say, vanilla. While she was out in the high school parking lot smoking weed with her friends, I was in band practice, learning a new Sousa march that would ensure my virginity for a while to come. She wore black leather dresses and torn fishnets, and I wore V-neck sweaters and cargo pants without irony. We were members of different tribes.

For at least one semester, we were in the same history class. Though she sat just a few feet away from me, she never looked my way, even in passing. The fault was mostly my own. I went to great lengths to not be noticed. I said nothing during class. I didn't even move unless it was absolutely necessary. I was like a baby prairie dog in a teenage boy's body, and I suspected my classmates might be predators.

But Daphne shared none of my timidity. When she stood up in front of the class to do her oral reports—which were usually about pirates or ninjas or any other historical vocation that involved brawny men with large swords—I was captivated by her confidence. I'd close my eyes and listen to the words trickle out of her mouth, and pretend that she was sharing a secret with just me. She really liked the word “adventure.” Her reports were peppered with it. I wasn't yet worldly enough to make the distinction between reality and an active imagination, so I assumed that anybody who spoke with such conviction about adventure must know what they're talking about.

How she actually came to realize that I existed is still a mystery to me. Maybe I just struck her as somebody who might be fun to corrupt. I was the son of a pastor, so I might've seemed like a worthy challenge. All I know is, one day I was walking alone in the school's hallway, carrying my trombone as I made my way to the four-fifteen bus, when she appeared out of nowhere and kissed me hard. On the lips. I suppose that's where a kiss is most likely to happen, especially between two strangers, but to my inexperienced mind, she might as well have kissed my ear or a kneecap. It wouldn't have been any less surprising or romantic.

“What are you thinking right now?” she asked me when it was all over.

“I love you,” I whispered to her, and immediately knew I had taken our relationship too far too soon. If I thought I could've gotten away with it, I would have asked her to marry me right then and there. But somehow I knew that with a woman like Daphne, you had to play it cool—start with the kissing and then wait a few days before you bring up in casual conversation that you're not opposed to the idea of spending the rest of your life with her.

A few weeks after our first kiss, my father died of a massive heart attack. As the doctors explained it, he had an enlarged heart that had gone undiagnosed for too many years. The cause of death inspired some people, usually well-meaning outsiders, to put a positive spin on our family's tragedy.

“He died as he lived,” they'd tell me. “With a big heart.”

They were just trying to make me feel better, I suppose, but it managed only to piss me off. I didn't want to be cheered up. My brother and I stopped telling people about the enlarged heart and
began announcing that he had, in fact, died from bowel cancer. Try to make a sentimental aphorism out of
that.

“He died as he lived, with irritable, inflamed bowels.”

We buried him in a small cemetery near our home, and invited only a few close friends and family members to join us. I wanted to invite Daphne, but thought doing so might be a little too clingy and weird. At the burial, nobody knew quite what to say. We just stood there and stared quietly at the grave. Comforting each other seemed pointless. We were angry and numb and nothing would make any of this okay.

And then a beagle showed up.

At first we thought it must be somebody's pet. But he had no tags of any sort, nothing to indicate whom he might belong to. For a stray, he seemed unusually friendly. He moved from person to person, pressing his wet nose against their legs. He took a particular interest in my mother, trying to climb her and lick her chin. He sat and watched intently as my brother and I lowered our dad's urn into the ground. And at the end, he accompanied the mourners to their cars and waited for them to drive away.

I left the cemetery feeling strangely uplifted. Nobody else in my family wanted to admit what I thought was fairly obvious: The dog was my father reincarnated. But that doesn't make any sense, they told me. We're not Buddhists. We don't believe in that sort of stuff. Even as the logical side of my brain agreed with them and dismissed the idea as poppycock, there was a small part of me that wanted to think—that
needed
to think—my dad had found a way to come back for one final goodbye.

Over the next several months, I'd return to the cemetery almost every day. My mother and brother thought I needed to see my dad's
tombstone again and again just to remind myself that it was real and that he was actually gone. But I was looking for the dog. I hoped I'd find him up there, napping lazily near my dad's grave, waiting for me to come back. Sometimes I'd wait for hours, jumping every time I heard a twig snap, gasping when any forest creature happened to catch my eye. When he never showed up, I tried to convince myself that there wasn't anything magical about the dog after all. But that didn't stop me from looking, and waiting, and hoping against hope that he wasn't gone forever.

And then one day, I arrived at the cemetery and saw Daphne waiting for me. She was sitting on my dad's gravestone, smoking a cigarette and looking absolutely stunning in her newly dreadlocked hair and black baby-doll dress.

“Sorry about your dad,” she said. But it wasn't in a pitying way. It was in a casual, indifferent, “them's the breaks” kind of way. It was nice. I'd become accustomed to people treating me like porcelain, terrified that I might break if they didn't handle me with a delicate touch.

“Yeah,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “It sucks.”

She crushed the cigarette on her boot heel and threw it into some nearby crabgrass. “My mom died, too,” she said, almost in a monotone.

I just nodded. We both looked at each other, enjoying the silence and the mutual understanding that the last thing either of us needed was to be comforted.

“I think my dad came back as a dog,” I said finally. “I don't know if he's been reincarnated or what, but I'm pretty sure it's him.”

I regretted it the moment the words left my mouth. It sounded so silly and sentimental and, well, more than a little crazy. I half-expected
her to start laughing or screaming—maybe a little of both. And then she'd call me a freak and run out of the cemetery and that'd be the last time I ever heard from her.

But she didn't. She just sat there and smiled at me.

“You think he's still here?” she asked, with genuine curiosity.

I just shrugged. “I dunno,” I said. “Maybe.”

She slid off the gravestone and took my hand. “Well,” she said, “let's go find him.”

We spent the rest of the afternoon looking for my dad. We searched the graveyard and the forest preserve nearby, calling out his name and offering him bits of bacon if he'd come out of hiding. She told me about her mom and I just listened. And then I told her about my dad, and she smiled and squeezed my hand more tightly. The sun began to set and we still hadn't found him, but somehow I didn't care anymore. The hard clump in my chest had vanished.

We went back to her house and hung out in her bedroom for most of the night. If she had a father or siblings, we never saw them, and she never mentioned where they might be. We listened to her bootleg tapes of the Replacements and the Pixies and lay together on her bed, staring at the ceiling and talking about nothing of any real importance. She showed me her tattoos, and told me about the other tattoos she wanted to get soon. She ran her fingers through my hair and told me I'd look a lot cooler if I let it grow out a few more inches. And then, before I realized what was happening, we were naked and making love.

Actually, that's not entirely true. Some of what we did was definitely lovemaking, but some of it was just fucking. Our first time was very relaxed and romantic. It was all gentle kisses and soft
touching, and she didn't seem to mind that I had no idea what the hell I was doing. But round two was an altogether different story. Once I'd learned the ropes, she apparently decided that it was time to put me through my paces and see what I could do. Before long, I was well versed in fetishes like spanking, hair-pulling, filthy talk, light bondage, and even biting. The biting part in particular caught me off guard. To be fair, she gave me plenty of advance warning, but I didn't think she was serious until I felt her teeth sink into my shoulder.

“I'm sorry, sweetie,” she said, wiping away the blood with her forearm. “I didn't mean to break the skin. I just got a little carried away.”

“It's okay,” I laughed. And weirdly, I
meant
it.

If I could have, I would have stayed with her in that bedroom forever. Even though she'd taken a chunk out of my shoulder blade, I felt safe with her. But more than that, she made me feel like an adult. Not because she was the first woman who let me touch her private bits. Something about being next to her made it okay that my dad had died and my world had fallen apart. None of it seemed like such a catastrophe anymore. It was just another part of being alive.

When she held on to me, without ever saying anything that sounded like condescending sympathy, I knew that I was strong and fearless and nothing could touch me again. I wasn't a kid who cried over his dead daddy and hid alone in his bedroom. I was the kind of guy who stayed up all night with his punk rock girlfriend and listened to badass music and smoked cigarettes and talked about tattoos and did incredibly dirty things with the lights still on.

“We are the sons of no oooone,” we sang along with the 'Mats, our naked and sweaty bodies still intertwined. “Bastards of the yooooooung!”