Thump. Thump.

He rolled his head on the pillow to align heavier eyes. Even in the dimness he could see her crawling out from under the bed at the footboard. The long cut of the luminescent dress created an ungovernable bundle, while the bodice was left unzipped. She straddled him with a brush of sooty thighs, letting the musty folds of tulle and satin unfurl in a puff; a pungent animal-sweetness wafted off her body. He did not delay but reached under the hem to rub the cinders deeper into her skin, like vine charcoal into smooth toothless paper.

She acquiesced.

His thumbs pressed firmly into hip crests, releasing her upper body in a hinge to swing down. The melding lines of her dark face fanned in all directions, even as they converged on his eye in a fountain of thick, gummy lashes.

Dewy kisses dabbled his chest. “Do you think I’m pretty?” she inquired with unanticipated girlishness.

Her eyelids were sown shut in a swoon—in a mask. Yet he felt womanly designs coursing through her dawdling head. “Yes,” he answered.

More words trickled over his side, following the path of either a scalpel or plucked petals. “As pretty as her?”

“Prettier,” he droned, shoving down the bodice to feel her fleshy breasts tumble out. The feathery edge of them rolled along his wrists in a nuzzling, cozying-up way.

Erica rode up to let him nibble on her jawbone. An engorged vein in her neck throbbed against his bottom lip, ready to pour its heart’s blood down into his throat. The soapy scent on her skin was at first alkaline on his tongue, and then milky like lactose sugar.

“Will you paint me?” she cooed.

His serrated breaths now plumbed to find her sternum—some hard place for incisors to meet resistance.

Her arms stiffened as levers, allowing her to tilt into his abandon. “Will you?”

She could surely feel his heart thundering up through her palms and wrists, and into her upper body. He glimpsed her content face atop the ladder of flesh, yet did not mind her seeing his un-analogized desire. “I will buy you nice things,” he mumbled.

“But will you paint me, my sweet boy?”

The faint grotesqueness he earlier perceived in her body was absent in the clutch. Under his fingertips and teeth, under the distorted lens of his hungry eye, she was too teased-out to be the same object. Somewhere amid her disinclined bones and overly yielding edges, the particular was giving way to the universal, leaving him to grapple with the cruel puzzle of it. Erica at once had no face or story—no place or time. She could have been any woman in the dark; and for him, seduced by his own mask of anonymity, she was deliriously every woman he ever wanted.

“Well…?” she insisted.

“Yes,” he moaned. “I will paint you.”

Erica rudely broke away and slid down to his knocking knees. Covered with tiny welts and slathered like a teething ring, she asked calmly, “Condom…? I didn’t see any in the medicine cabinet earlier.”

He floundered for air on the pillow, convinced he was drowning beneath her. “I must have you!”

“This is love, then?” she inquired through sultrier veils.

Every muscle and sinew in his body was torqued to crack bone, from his barely workable jaw down to his cramping thighs. The silky parchment of last minute paperwork funneled down into his ears without complaint. He was emphatic. “Yes!”

“Say the words,” she implored in a cooler tone. “Tell me what’s in your heart.”

Michael felt himself falling through a hangman’s door, and into an altogether darker reason. He catapulted up off the bed to arrest his descent, clasping Erica by her elbows and spinning her over onto her back in a seamless move of binding wills.

“Say it!” she whimpered.

He was a combustible vapor hovering over her—hotly exuded from her lungs. Pushing Erica down into the crackling, phosphorescent satin, her head was abruptly under the hoisted gown and banging erratically against the headboard. The lover felt the deception unraveling as he galloped after it.

THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!

He endeavored to concentrate the girl like acid under him—endeavored to dissolve his body into hers, and, with it, irretrievably, his omnipresent mind.

THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!

The form of her gapping mouth sucked for air under the liner of the dress like a fish in a net. If it was wet before, it was now a parched lunar crater. The cloaked pantomime was quickly out of step with the words.  “I-- kn-w-- y-u- l—ve- m-- tho-gh it -s –n-t-- e—sy - f--r - y--u - t- s—y…”

Michael squinted at the table clock blinking beside him.

“B--t - y--u h-ve – g-ven -- m-- th- - ch-ld -- - wh-ch— n- one c—n -- t--ke aw—y…” the activated answering machine blared.

A flashlight beam intruded, splintering around the doorjamb and throwing marbleized swirls of tulle, like wispy smoke rings, to the four corners of the room.

THUMP! THUMP! THUMP! came the knock.

“Hello…?” came another voice—a man’s voice. “Hello in there...?”

The phone message fought for attention. “Mmmaaaaaaacccccckkkkkkuuuulllll!”

The gibbering voice trailed off over the wire with the last slam of the headboard—the last bang on the door.

Erica groaned under the crimped tent, drawing up handfuls of flesh to wring out the rest. What remained intact of his body was oozing down into a puddle in the shallow of her stomach. Her fisting heart pounded under the bodice, and pumped his blood as well as hers.

On extricating himself from the pouf liner of the dress, he catapulted up with a wobble. His brain was still connected to the end of his spine, but like so much dead weight that refused to be shaken off in the pitch of battle. The battered organ was rapidly retracing neural pathways and reabsorbing its script, albeit with a touch of surreality.

“Shit!” she said, pushing the dress down over her bare legs. “I need a cigarette.”

The soft edge of his pleasure turned brittle.

Erica stroked his perspiring back, feeling his skin clinch under her caress. A sticky wad of chewing gum was pulled from the headboard and plopped back in her mouth. “I wish I had a cigarette,” she again lamented.

His words were cropped close. “Someone was knocking on the door.”

The lover joined him in an upright position. “What?”

“Didn’t you hear him?”

“No!” Erica exclaimed. “I hope it wasn’t my boss!” Her moist fingers scampered down his forearm to point. “The suitcase! On the bureau!”

Michael was rubbery on his legs. He opened the lid of the case to pull out Erica’s jumble of under-things.

Wasting little time, the girl dropped to her feet with a slap and wiggled out of the gown; the iridescence fell away with a shimmy of flesh. “Quickly!” she barked, moving around to his side of the dark bed with more directions. “No time for panties.”

Michael directed the lacey straps of her bra over her extended arms. They skittered easily over stiffened follicles, though negotiations were required to latch her into her double D cups.

The snap of the fastener punctuated her imperative. “Hurry!”

Pantyhose were unfurled, whereupon a knot of nylon was rustled up one sticky leg and then the other. The crotch was wrong side out, but such details mattered more to him than to her. Another white dress was opened at her feet; the curvaceous girl raised a toe to squeeze into it. Gum smacked in his ear with the last arduous inch of zipper.

“Shoes,” she said.

The nude man sank to the cold floor to aid in the finishing touches, listening to her briskly brushing her hair. He looked up disapprovingly on seeing sparks fly off her damaged ends. “You need a better conditioner,” he complained.

Her bemused expression most resembled a frown. She reached over to unplug the phone, slowing only to wind the cord around it. “Who is she?” she plumbed. “The woman in the message?”

Michael was fishing for his socks.

“And the child,” she continued. “Was there a child?”

“The fantasy is over,” he cautioned her.

“Is it?” she snipped. “Has it ever been anything other than a fantasy between us?” Tossing the phone machine into the open suitcase, she snatched the wedding dress off the floor with greater care. “Too much of your feeling is locked up in pictures and things,” she griped under her breath. “They're like safety deposit boxes, with bits and pieces of your heart scattered everywhere. It’s like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall with you.”

His tone was plaintive behind her—even despairing. “I think about you all the time.”

“You only think about me when the lights are out. Only in here.”

The whirling girl at last moved to unblock the door; no one was on the rainy landing. Less anxious, she turned back to see him still nude on the bed; his expression was one of a rebounding libido. The sight of her shapely bottom in the skirt reestablished a little distance. Erica came back to the bedside with a three-quarters smile, scuffing his nose in a prelude to a salacious kiss.

Her Dentyne gum was red-hot sugar in his mouth.

He pawed at her in his judicious, passive/aggressive way, although her derrière needed little coaxing to pop out of the size-too-small maid’s uniform. Impatient to spoil him a few seconds longer, she let him unhook a couple of buttons at her neck. A plucked nipple rose over the lace of her brassiere to dance on his thumb. He caressed the morsel of encouragement, and noted how tiny stretch marks, like ultra-fine grain of veins in feathers, extended down from her collarbone to twist around the blood-bruised petal. Erica studied his study, as she was always a third person in the room. She was soon tucking herself back in, reminding him the tightrope over their stolen bed was short.

Her fingers smoothed his mussed hair. “I want you to throw away everything, Michael.”

Boyish eyes darted to her face.

“The journal, the pictures of other women, everything…”

His emotions ran in all directions in the motel room, but all overshot her by degrees.

“You’re my naughty boy,” she purred. “Always my sweet, naughty boy.”

He pressed his ear to her warm chest to cuddle, while his hands less innocently slipped inside her hosiery to finger furrows left by dress pleats in her powdery skin. When his lips moved at hers with an aim to entice her back onto the bed, Erica was the one to be levelheaded. She glared at him with mock scolding, but was slow pushing the skirt back down over her hairy pubes and see-thru white nylon. Reaching down with a furtive wink, she fetched his underwear off the floor and allowed him one more unobstructed view of flesh: this time of cleavage. The briefs were flicked over his lap with a giggle. Even in the darkness, her pale complexion was flushed from her cheeks to her bosom like cinnamon candy, and stood out prominently against the white uniform. She wore the scarlet proudly and twirled around, as if to dance. Her squeaky cleaning cart was liberated from the narrow bathroom and pushed to the doorway with a grind and a glint. “The suitcase, sweetie!” she told him. “Don’t forget the suitcase!”

With her still humming on his skin, Michael scurried into his twisted-around pants and grabbed the luggage off the bureau.

Erica was already outside, but pulled up in the doorway to remind him. “The pillow case, too…”

The man doubled back to pull the cover from the mounted camera. By the time he returned to the landing, his lover had pushed her cart down to a utility closet to stash it away.

The black sky crashed down, first clattering loudly on the tin terrace, and then, mutedly, on the deployed nylon panels of the maid’s umbrella; the lanky lover stayed close with the suitcase until they reached her car. Climbing in, wistful Erica drew a valentine heart in the condensation covering the windshield; a trickle of water zigzagged to the dashboard. “With all that heavy petting,” she swooned, “we almost didn’t need the room.”

Michael was disconnected from her reminiscence, and wiped away moisture from the passenger window. The motel’s neon sign, like a star blown free of cloud cover, lit up the fence of a boarded-up amusement park. The smell of mildewed carpet and stale cigarette ash in the floorboard made the lover feel faintly sick, but these things, like so much minutia of their improbable tryst, still needed time to be processed. The maid maneuvered her way onto the highway, where rain crunched like glass under the tires. She squeezed his hand to pull his thoughts away from the gravel shoulder; the tender gesture caught him off guard.

Where there was little chronology in what they shared, there was a deep-wired catalog: one he came to know not through experience, but through revelation. It was the love of an amnesiac who strays into familiarity in search of a perfect stranger. Aspect by aspect, her alien body came to replace benign features of his childhood: Bright crayon colors, which had partitioned a simpler world, dulled to become first, tacky dots of magazine ink, and then, with disbelief, an unrelenting moonscape of monochromic grey. From here, it was an eye adapting to darkness: a prisoner adapting to an austere cell. He plunged deeper into the subtleties: inguinal wrinkle, femur dimple, pubic wrinkle, abdominal crease, mammary crease, median lumbar dimples, lateral lumbar dimples, gluteus crease, welts, blisters, vaccination scar… It was with strangeness he came to love the topology. Somewhere the monster was lost in the sum of its parts. Somehow the mythical Minotaur became the mythical labyrinth built to confine it. In the process, he lost his fear. His monster was no longer chasing him. He was chasing his monster…

“This is love, then?” she asked one last time.

Her grip on his hand weakened. He lifted her knuckles to his nose and drew off the scent of antibacterial soap she was required to use for work. He turned the fingers over with a peck, seeing lastly the ring and remembering…

“I love you.”

She leaned over the console with a different kiss, leaving him to glance up from her lips, over the glove compartment, as something dark slammed into the front of the car.

Chapter Thirty/ Back/ Contents Page

Copyright © 2007 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.