Life on the Preservation, US Edition (25 page)

“I’m just the ride,” Ian said.

“So,” Kylie’s grandfather said. “What’s this survey?”

“About happiness,” Kylie said. “For school.”

“Well, I’m happy as a clam,” he said.

“I’m a clam, too,” Kylie’s grandmother said. “A happy one.”

“Thank you,” Kylie said.

“You’re very welcome. That wasn’t much of a survey. Gosh but you look familiar.”

“So do you. Goodbye.”

Kylie’s grandfather called after Ian: “Nice Indian you’ve got there, kid. But it needs a tune-up. Heard you a mile away.”

“We’re leaving?” Ian said under his breath to Kylie.

“Yes.”

B
ACK IN HIS
apartment with a bag of Thai take-out, Ian hastily kicked the laundry, dirty and clean, into the closet and shut the door. He couldn’t do anything about the overall dinginess, though. He never thought about it before, and only considered it now because he was seeing it through Kylie’s eyes. At least the take-out noodles were displacing the usual stale odor of old laundry and unwashed dishes.

He switched on a couple of lamps. It was always dark and gloomy once the sun moved past two pm and no longer penetrated into the narrow alley his windows looked out on. With plastic forks they ate noodles, ginger chicken, steamed vegetables and rice straight out of the little white buckets, trading and mixing. Ian sat in the wicker chair he’d bought at Value Village. It crackled like a pile of straw. Kylie sat on the bed.

“Do you live around here?” Ian asked.

Kylie shook her head, a brown noodle dangling wormishly from the corner of her mouth. She slurped it up, finished chewing then said:

“I grew up in Oakdale.” She nodded at the Nihiljizum poster on the wall next to the bed. Badass in a black hoodie, facing away with head down, a rusty scythe in one hand, Stratocaster in the other. “Is that a good band?”

“I doubt it.

“Can I use your bathroom?”

“Uh huh. It’s that door.”

To give her privacy, Ian turned the radio on, KPLX, alternative noise. Kylie was in the bathroom a long time. He finished eating and took his half-empty carton into the kitchen, threw his plastic fork in the trash and snagged a bottle of Fat Tire out of the refrigerator. Kylie came around the corner and said, “You have a lot of pills in your bathroom.”

“What?”

“Pills. How come you have so many?”

“I don’t know,” Ian said, instantly cranky.

“I wasn’t snooping. I wanted toothpaste and there wasn’t any out. This dentist in Oakdale? He used to tell everyone that a smile is your first hello. Isn’t that dumb?”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway, are you sick or something?”

“In a way, sometimes.”

“Aren’t you the big mystery man.” Kylie grinned.

“No mystery,” Ian said. “I have trouble sleeping sometimes, so I bought sleeping pills. I never take them, though. The others are anti-depressants and anti-anxiety drugs. I don’t take
them
, either. I guess I’m just a pill collector. It’s kind of comforting to have them. I don’t know. My secret stash.” He almost said ‘escape kit’. He shrugged, and laughed self-consciously, wishing she hadn’t noticed the pills. Wishing she hadn’t made him think about them when for once he was feeling good.

After a moment, Kylie said, “You’re weirder than I am.”

“Not by a mile.”

“Ian? Why do you have so many different
kinds
of sleeping pills? Some of those, I’ve never even heard of.”

“I don’t know. I don’t really keep track of them.” Ian put his beer back on the rack and started to close the refrigerator.

“Don’t you want that?”

“Not really.”

“Have it. I want you to.”

“Why?”

“It reminds me of someone.”

“Who?”

“I’ll tell you later, I think.”

“There’s a lot of shit you’re planning to tell me ‘later’.” He retrieved his beer and started to go back into the living room, expecting Kylie to either do the same or step aside so he could pass her in the narrow kitchen. But she didn’t budge, and he found himself practically knocking her over. She pointed her chin at his chest, looking up at him.

“Don’t be mad at me,” she said.

“I’m not.”

“You are, a little.”

“I just don’t like talking about the stupid pills.”

“I don’t care about them. Let’s get back to where we were, okay?”

“Where’s that?”

“We were at the part where I wanted to kiss you again.”

Ian couldn’t think of a verbal reply, so he leaned down and kissed Kylie.

“Hmmmm,” she said.

In the living room he started turning off lamps.

“Leave one on,” Kylie said. “That little one on the desk. So I can see you.”

He left on the green-shaded library-style lamp. When he turned, she had shucked her leather jacket for the first time since he met her. Under it she wore an olive green t-shirt, her nipples poking the cotton up like little army tents. This was diverting, until he noticed the ragged scar around her right wrist. She saw him looking at it and held her arm out, the inside of the scarred wrist turned toward him. “It’s not what you think.”

“What am I thinking?”

“That I did it to myself, on purpose.”

“It doesn’t look like that kind of scar,” he said.

“It’s not.”

“And you’ll tell me about it... ‘later’.”

“If you’re good. Come and sit beside me now.”

She patted the mattress next to her. He approached the bed, intending to sit beside her. Instead, he found himself on his knees. He unlaced her left sneaker and pulled it off her foot, slipped her sock away, kissed her bare foot tenderly.

“I’m so dirty,” Kylie said.

He stopped. “What do you mean?”

“Not
that
kind of dirty. I mean dirty. I haven’t had a real shower in ages.”

“I don’t care.”

Ian removed her other shoe and sock. He felt uninhibited, which was not the way he usually felt with girls. Always he was painfully shy, self-conscious, passive. Even when his body’s desire finally impelled him over the brink, a significant piece of him hovered above his desire, watching his body thrash desperately for release.

With Kylie, he was
present
. Everything was now.

When she started to strip her undershirt off, he said, “Wait.”

“All right, Ian.”

He undid the snap of her jeans, dragged the zipper down, revealing lavender panties. They didn’t quite match her eyes but almost. He looked up at her, and she caressed his cheek. “Ian, what if we were the only real people in the world?”

“We are.” He tugged her jeans and panties off, kissed her smooth inner thighs, held his mouth above her sex, his heartbeat drumming away his mind. Kylie lay back on the bed cover. Ian let his tongue emerge to touch upon her in the most delicate way. Kylie moaned.

Much later, in an unwinding timeless place, Ian rocked into her body, drawing back and plunging, Kylie holding herself just so for him, and he felt his old resistance rising, his fear of surrender, but he was too far gone, and when he came it was with his whole being, and he cried out like someone in pain, and then he simply cried, and holding her and being held by her, he fell into exhausted sleep.

K
YLIE LAY ENTANGLED
with him, breathing the mingled scent of their love-making, feeling the life-breath of his body rise and subside. And she couldn’t help it: she fell asleep, too.

M
UCH LATER,
I
AN
opened his eyes. For a moment he seemed to be looking back at himself. It wasn’t a
good
moment. He closed his eyes, felt dizzy, then slowly opened them again. This time he was looking at the ceiling. He listened to the rain falling in the alley outside his window. One by one he gathered into himself the important physical inputs. The cornered light from his desk lamp, the whispering rain, the sheets airy on his naked body, Kylie beside him, the heat that radiated from her, the scents of her secret body. Each sensation braided with the others and tied him more firmly to the present moment.

He moved the sheet aside and touched the perfect slope of Kylie’s hip. The irresistible sexual encounter had occurred. Now he was supposed to retreat as rapidly as possible to the sanctuary of guarded autonomy. If it were her apartment instead of his, he would have gotten up without waking her and left. Except this time, this one time, he didn’t feel like doing that.

His hand glided over her hip and waist, hovering, barely touching the perfect skin.

“Beautiful,” he whispered.

“Thanks,” Kylie said.

“Hey–”

“You’re beautiful, too, Ian.”

“I prefer to think of myself as a macho he-man.”

“Oh, you
are
. You rescued me like Indiana Jones.”

“Indiana Jones is a punk.”

She snuggled her head against his chest. “Ian, what time is it?”

He twisted around to see the clock. “Almost eleven-thirty. Why?”

“It’s a countdown.” She sounded nervous.

“Something going to blast off?”

“Us, I hope.”

“We already did that, didn’t we?”

“Hmm.”

Ian felt himself growing hard again. Kylie must have felt it, too. She adjusted her body a little.

“Is the second time as good as the first?” she asked.

“That was your first time?”

“First with you.”

“Sometimes the first is a total disaster.”

“Mine wasn’t. Mine was perfect.”

“I meant your first time with anybody.”

“Was your first time ever with anybody a total disaster?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s okay, Ian. Before you, it wasn’t so great for me, either. You have no idea how un-great it can be. But it’s you and me now, and we
are
great.”

Ian began stroking her back, trailing his fingers down to the rising separation of her buttocks, urging himself over her.

“Ian?”

He kissed her throat.

“Ian?”

“What?” he said to the little hollow place at the base of her neck.

“I want to wait a bit, is that okay?”

He stopped kissing her, which required a certain amount of willpower.

“Sure,” he said. “I’m sorry. I mean, I don’t know what I mean.”

“Just a couple of minutes.”

“No problem.”

“I
want
to do it now,” Kylie said.

“I know,” he said, and, surprisingly, believed he
did
know. She was resisting her body’s urgency as much as he was resisting his own.

“Will you get me a drink of water?”

“Yeah.”

He removed himself from the bed and went into the kitchen, feeling her gaze upon him. When he came back with the water she never stopped looking. He held the clear bottle in front of his erect cock.

“No peeking,” he said.

Kylie giggled.

“What’s funny?”

“It looks like you’re holding a bottle with a really big penis in it.”

Ian blushed, but said, “Maybe if you rub the bottle a genie will come out.” A fading, cynical piece of himself thought:
what an asshole thing to say
. But he ignored the cynic and, shamed, it didn’t speak again.

“I hope so,” Kylie said, about the genie.

He slipped back in bed, pulled the sheet up to his waist, and handed her the cold bottle. She took a couple of swallows. He watched her and wanted to touch her again. She passed the bottle back to him and wiped her chin.

“Warm me up, but not too much yet.”

Ian stroked the backs of his fingers over her belly. He caressed her thigh, letting his thumb brush her pubic hair. Kylie opened her legs a little. “Are you religious?” she asked.

“What? Not really.”

“You have that cross on your back.”

“Yeah. I don’t know. I like the
idea
of Jesus. I don’t even know why I got that tattoo.”

“And you can’t see it unless you use mirrors.”

“That’s how God is, probably.”

“What if there isn’t a God?”

“What if there is?” His thumb parted the moistened folds of her vagina. She moved against him.

“I guess we’ll see.”

She stretched over him, her breast brushing his cheek, picked up the clock and set it down again. When she lay back she was smiling. She took his engorged cock in her hand, and he felt the urgent throb of his blood.

“You’re beautiful,” she said. “Would you rather be a God or a genie?”

“I don’t care.”

She cupped his balls in her cool hand and squeezed gently. “Ah,” Ian said. She closed her fingers around the shaft of his cock and stroked slowly up to the swollen head.

“Gimme my wish, genie.”

“You’re sure we’re good on the countdown and everything?”

“Positive. Now gimme.”

H
E WAS PLUNGING
, lost and found, immediate. Then his body began to tingle in a way unassociated with the sexual act. The room darkened. He was staring into Kylie’s face, and shadows began to spin before his eyes. He couldn’t
see
her. Shorted, flickering memories sparked in his mind. Kylie pulled his face down to hers, fingernails digging into his scalp. She held him, her strong legs locked around his rocking horse hips.

Stay, stay, stay...

A dramatic light shift dispelled the darkness. At the same moment, Ian shuddered and cried out with his ejaculation.

She held him on top of her, stroking the back of his neck, petting him, their bodies heaving, fragrant with sex and sweat and revelation.

Ian remembered everything.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

C
HARLES
N
OBLE SAT
with his new friend, Curtis Sarmir, in a Pioneer Square nightclub called the Contour.

“The whole sexual preference notion is absurd, of course,” Curtis said. “No one insists straight people
prefer
hetero sex. As if it’s all a matter of taste, good and bad. The implication is derogatory. Don’t you agree?”

“I’m hardly an expert in sexual matters,” Charles said, then giggled, then stopped abruptly.

They had been drinking Cosmopolitans.

“Good God,” Curtis said. “No one’s an
expert
, precisely.”