J -Lou Renard
J has a hole in his pants. Shredded at the edges like it was pulled apart by teeth. A few gratuitous inches above his knee. Is it put there intentionally? Evan runs her finger around its rim, and wonders if his dick would fit through. She asks him where he’s from. Detroit, he tells her, has colder winters than New York. She believes him, though the conditions here are clear: neither of them are expected to tell the truth. For Ev, belief has always felt like a guilty pleasure.
He goes to Burning Man every year. Smooth and buff as Doctor Manhattan. Keeps a regimented diet: no sugar, no alcohol, lots of 2C-B. His apartment looks out onto the park. He tells her he gets off on the way her name tastes. Lena: it’s swanlike, elegant.
Ev likes to bend into the role a bit. Walks around the apartment nude and blithe, flipping through expensive coffee table books. Perches odalisque in the windowsill, ass on the heater grill, draped in a cashmere blanket, while she quizzes the man on what he’s read. There’s a catalog from the gallery she used to work at. She picks it up with obvious distaste and recognition. What? he asks, and she goes Oh, I have beef with them, mysteriously, like maybe she’s fucked someone there. Maybe she isn’t as far from his world as he thinks she is.
Ev learned recently that someone her ex was fucking also had an arrangement with J. Some people have a type. J’s was high-femme boy pussy, but he didn’t know it. He also had an obvious infatuation with dolls, and Ev hadn’t worked out if it was a repressed gender thing or unadulterated chaser behavior. Probably, as in most cases, a mixture of both.
But Ev didn’t push it with J. For him, she was simple: she put on makeup and carried herself a certain way. She didn’t ask him to use any pronouns at all. If he chose what wasn’t expected, she would be mildly surprised and somewhat pleased. Besides, there was rarely the need for a pronoun in these situations—something Ev could almost appreciate. Lena, of course, shares Ev’s best quality: she’s an excellent listener.
In another life they could have been friends, or lovers. In this one she pulls a ginger beer and fresh mint from the stocked fridge and makes a virgin cocktail while he snorts the pepto-pink powder, and she takes a sip before walking over and curtly grabbing his dick over his pants. She sticks two fingers in the hole above his knee while she makes her way from his collarbone to his chest with her lips, making small, pressured circles on his outer thigh where the edge of the hole stretches.
There is a hole in his pants, and she’s making it wider. She feels the fibers pulling—strange, weren’t these pants expensive? —and tugs it. She can crouch at various levels for long periods of time; an advantageous skill when she reaches the upper crease of his pubic V, too high up to get on her knees yet. She pulls both fingers out of the hole in his pants. It wasn’t subtle before, but now it’s obvious. She quickly undoes his belt and pulls down the waistband, tongue still slick with ginger and mint. The carbonation settled her stomach. He tastes clean, like an underripe avocado. He gently tugs her head back and pushes her on her knees, bending his, starting to move in and out of her mouth. He has a hole in his pants. She pauses to take them off his feet all the way. He kicks them across the floor. He tilts her face up; she sticks her tongue out. He pushes far enough inside the back of her throat that she gags. Her tears shine like pearls of heaven. Bernini’s Saint Teresa is toothless. He has a hole in his pants. The enduring symbol of the O appears before her. Something shimmery, a quivering spiderweb. When she looks up at his face, she sees his aura. It’s deep purple, all bruise and velvet. Sucking his cock becomes a meditation. She knows her face looks messy and he likes it. She can feel the tip slip down past her gag reflex, the familiar urge to vomit, then the familiar control. He feels her gasp and pulls out for a second. You okay? he asks and she goes, Yes, genuinely, and resumes sucking him off with new fervor, as if to prove it. After a moment, he weakens in her mouth. She pulls her lips away, trailing gossamer arcs of spit.
For Ev, the essence of clit is thing that throbs. His clit is the color of the brick on her building, the walls of the courtyard outside the window that glow briefly at a certain hour. He has a hole in his pants. But there’s no reason to put them on now. They are both naked, and she giggles and wipes her face a bit with the back of her hand, stands up, takes a sip of the ginger beer. It’s cold on the back of her throat.
-
Lena, he tells her. When he goes soft, he always makes a face like a puppy next to a shredded bag of trash. It’s part of their routine, now: he’ll slow down, and she’ll reassure him that it’s perfectly fine, that sex is all about the journey, appealing to his Burning Man pseudo-hetero sensibility, while he re-ups on the drugs. Then the sex will get increasingly complicated.
Last time, he handed her a dildo of comical proportions, the kind that makes her dysphorically aware of her capacity to stretch enough to give birth. But when he said the last girl I brought here made it look easy she pictured her ex’s lover and rose to the challenge elegantly, yeast infection and all, stretching herself in front of him until it was in to its baseball-sized silicone balls. And it turned her on too, the ache of fullness.
Twice, he’d called another girl over. The first time was fine, fun even. Ev helped arrange it, and she knew the other girl, who was trans, and immediately attune to the established dynamic Ev had with J. The girl picked up on when Ev was getting tired or being a little too girled and took over. Ev felt an immense sense of relief having her there, knowing that her act was being acknowledged as an act. It was a gracious, even precious encounter, coy truth folded in the cloak of anonymity. Afterwards, they split an Uber back to Brooklyn and debriefed with a full psychiatric diagnostic panel for J, and Ev got a second take on the is-he-or-isn’t-he-a transsexual question.
The second time he called another girl over, Ev almost cut things off. She’d been there for twenty minutes before he put on that puppy face and it wasn’t ‘cause his dick went soft. Leeeenaaaa he’d crooned, and she instinctively went to the cabinet where he kept his drugs to pull out a pre-roll. I called another girl, is that okay? he said. It wasn’t. Ev was in a mood and wanted to be railed hard for an hour and leave. But she gritted her teeth and smiled like nothing was wrong and said Of course.
When the unexpected guest showed up, one of the first things she made clear was that she did not eat pussy, that she was “very straight,” but okay watching Lena suck J off. She was very professional. Lena found herself admiring the woman’s tricks, particularly the way that she deflected J’s blurrier advances. But she also felt the unwelcome, familiar twinge of that impossible standard, woman, being cast over her, a nebulous gaze awkwardly interwoven with comparison and solidarity.
J and the woman pulled out a full-body set of leather cuffs, the neck, wrists, and ankles linked together with long, tuggable chains. Fuck it, thought Ev, at least this way she could leave it to the straight woman to take the lead. The whole thing was laughably pornographic, like the GIFs that popped up on Tumblr when she was twelve. The woman’s hands felt detached on her body, medical, almost, in a way that wasn’t unpleasant but reminded Ev distinctly of the High School party feel-ups she’d had with her straight friends. At some point she squirted, an anatomical feat she’d recently unlocked and enjoyed flaunting on someone else’s sheets. She was grateful when the whole thing was over, though she and the other woman still texted each other when they got home safe.
-
After that, she only saw J once, and he disappointed her. Maybe the presence of someone who was actually straight and cis had thinned the mirage. For all of his pomp, Ev knew the type of man she attracted, and it was usually the type who wanted more than what she was willing to give. When J sensed this, he became violent. Not enough to really hurt her, but enough to make her cut their visit short, and walk a handful of blocks down to a brighter-lit avenue before calling a car home.
Passing over the bridge, the night crumpled like a rotting apple. Something bacterial gushed up in her, a craving for specificity. She wanted to text her ex, but they weren’t speaking. The specter of a pillowed touch brushed her neck where it was still red.
A hole opened in the core. It widened and then wrinkled into collapse.
Lou Renard is a fata morgana.