Alice Close Your Eyes (5 page)

He reaches under the hem of my skirt and runs his hand up my
thigh until it comes to rest on my hip. With his other hand, he takes off his
glasses and sets them on the bedside table.

You wish you had that knife now. Don’t
you...

What would happen if I asked him to stop? Would he take me
home? Apologize? Get angry and call me names? Would he stop at all? I’ve told no
one about him, or where I would be tonight, and he knows it. He could hurt me,
kill me, carry my body out to sea and no one would ever know what happened to
me. I would be the face on the milk carton.

My train of thought stops there.

No. I could never be the face on the milk carton. Those missing
people have families to search for them. No one would look for me.

I would be gone. Gone.

He strokes me, down my thigh and up, sliding his palm along my
waist. He tugs at the strap of my underwear and winds it twice around his thumb,
pulls it tight until the fabric nips and pinches between my legs.

I close my fist around the front of his sweater. He leans over
this obstruction to kiss me again, one hand cupped around the back of my head,
one between my legs, slipping along the edge of my underwear. His kiss is firm
and insistent, slanting to stroke the inside of my mouth with his tongue. He
tastes like burned marshmallow on a young stick, toasty and green.

His teeth close over my lower lip as he traces me through my
underwear. I twist and clutch at his shoulder, trying to catch my breath. But
his mouth is demanding, and he has found, with his thumb, the bump of my
clitoris. I choke back a moan of anxious greed, and raise my hips to meet him,
sinking my fingers into the damp fringe of hair at the nape of his neck. I trace
his stubbled jaw and the edge of his lip, feel the muscles below his ear bunch
and release as he kisses me, the steady strength of his pulse against my
thumb.

He tugs my underwear aside. My thighs tighten reflexively, but
he’s already kneeling between them; he’s got his foot in the door. His back
stiffens, two fingers slipping through my folds. His tongue moves past my teeth,
deeper, seeking, and I know he’s worried, the way all men worry when they get
this close to the prize.

Don’t stop me. Don’t pull back, don’t take
what I need. Don’t get in my way.

He eases my panties down to my ankles and slips them off. Sits
back on his heels and looks at me, with my skirt around my waist and my
underwear crumpled in his fist, pressed to his nose. His gaze never leaves
me.

“Take off your shirt.” His voice is quiet and direct.

I peel off my T-shirt, trembling from the blast of adrenaline
and the force of him. The room swims around me. The bobbing floor beneath us
feels insubstantial and unsafe, as though we might suddenly sink beneath the
water and never realize it had happened. I want him to hold me and give me
something solid to keep me in place.

But he wants to look at me.

“And your bra,” he says. “Take it off.”

The music has changed. The singer chants an impatient bridge,
punctuated by a pop-slide in an eerie minor key as the bra straps stutter down
my arms. The chorus rises, driving and sensual, a low hum of synthesized bass
guitar buzzing underneath the melody. A breath of night-chilled air drifts over
my breasts, crinkling the tips, tightening my skin.

A slow smile creeps across his lips when he sees the hoop in my
left nipple. He rises and strips to his boxers. And this time he doesn’t have to
speak. I shimmy out of my skirt and sit with my knees pressed together,
shivering, untethered, enduring his long visual exploration. His face is
half-hidden, divided down the center by shadow and light.

Now look at you...look at
you....

I let him ease my thighs apart. His gaze falls, locked between
my legs. A groan rumbles in his chest when he sees the tattoo low on my abdomen,
just above the smooth mound of my pubis: ~
Make it
hurt
~ He passes a thumb over the letters, then dips again into the
slippery heat between my legs, his fingertips circling, deepening, nudging at my
cunt. He kisses the tip of my breast and flicks the silver hoop with his
tongue.

“What are you about, hmm?” he says, and sucks my nipple into
his mouth. The metal ring clicks against his teeth.

But I can’t answer. I arch my back and turn my face aside. A
coil of desire constricts at the base of my belly.

He eases me back, lays a chain of kisses around my breast, down
my ribs, into the shallow dip beside my pelvic bone and finally to the liquid
heat between my legs.

Our floating room begins to spin. I am strangely disembodied,
as though all my senses, all my pain and pleasure and naked want, are
concentrated under the warmth of his mouth. I claw at the blankets and bunch
them in my fists. But when I sink my fingers into his hair, he catches my wrists
and pins them at my sides, muttering under his breath, his teeth grazing my
clitoris. With the anchor of his mouth to hold me in place, I wind around him
like a tetherball on a rope, in dizzying spirals that lift me to his mouth.

“Come on, baby,” he says. “Right now...”

His voice vibrates against me, and in the last moment it is his
breath, the lightest touch of cold and heat, that topples me. I leap under his
mouth, my wrists still pinned to the bed, my cries sailing into the night. He
follows me, groaning with pride and dark male glee. His tongue flattens over me,
dips inside me, drinks me in so thoroughly that I soar up again, simply from the
idea of being consumed this way.

As the room spins to a halt, I realize my eyelashes are wet
with tears.

Jack kneels between my knees and rolls on a condom. The light
skims across his body, painting long, striped shadows in the grooves of his
abdomen. He slides inside me without a word, without preamble, driving his hips
forward, pulling me to him with one hand splayed against the small of my back. A
breath snags in my throat at the size of him.

He stops, the muscle in his jaw flexed and quivering.

“Jesus,” he says. “So fucking tight. Be still.”

After a moment, he begins to move, his hips rolling to the
undercurrent of music and the elemental motion of the water beneath us. I wrap
my legs around his narrow waist and pull him closer. We fall into a deep, slow
rhythm. Each gliding thrust is an incantation in a language I don’t understand.
My whole body strains, listening. And from the back of my mind, from some small
and lonesome and untouchable place, I seem to hear my own voice chanting in
time.

I want to go home, I want to go
home.

* * *

It rains again that night. Jack turns off the music so
we can listen to the drops on the roof and the surface of the ocean. The sound
forms a soft cocoon around us, a background noise to the steady thrum of his
heartbeat under my ear.

“Tell me a secret.” His voice rumbles as if from the inside of
a bass drum. “Something no one else knows.”

“I like to keep my secrets,” I tell him.

He slips out from under me and raises himself up on one elbow.
He pushes the covers aside and runs his hand down my body, brushes the tip of my
breast with his knuckles.

“I can’t figure out if you know what you’re doing,” he says.
“But you want to be careful with me. I’ll fucking eat you alive.”

He lowers his head to my breast. His mouth opens over my
nipple, warm and demanding. His erection hardens like a newly forged sword
against my thigh.

* * *

We stop at a café near the marina for breakfast. We are
both starved, and devour plates of eggs and pancakes and large cups of coffee in
silence, as though we’ve been lost at sea for days. Then we go across to the
corner market, where we buy cigarettes and a pack of gum. And condoms, which
Jack purchases without comment while I pretend to admire a rack of key
chains.

He pulls up in front of my house and walks me to the door. I
stand on the step and put my arms around him, press my lips to the stubbled
underside of his jaw. He takes my face in his hands and kisses my cheeks and
eyelids and the tip of my nose.

I don’t ask him inside.

I know he’ll call before the day is out. The phone rings four
times. On the fifth ring, I pick it up.

“Baby,” he says. “What have we started?”

CHAPTER SIX

I have always liked cemeteries. There is a calmness about them, a purposeful tranquility. I like the names, carved in marble or set in brass, the dates still visible after a century or more. My favorite headstones are embellished with epitaphs written by the family left behind, which seem a humble and endearing attempt to sum up a life like the log line of an epic novel:
The heart of man is restless until it finds its rest in Thee... Now twilight lets her curtain down and pins it with a star... Little Boy Blue has gone away.

One of the first things I bought when I received the advance on
Zebra Crossing
was a matched pair of gravestones for my mother and grandmother, to replace the cheap brass plaques that had been set in the ground to mark the places where their ashes had been interred. My mothers deserved proper headstones; they deserved to stand upright, not laid like pavement in the grass.

I have brought my scrub brush and thermos of soapy water. I kneel before my grandmother’s grave and scrub away the dirt and bits of moss that have accumulated in the crevices since last month. I pour water over the granite surface, watch it gather into tiny pools at the bottom of her name, then trickle away and disappear into the grass.

At the edge of my mother’s grave is a spider on a half-formed web. It’s a beautiful thing, pale gold, with long delicate legs and a slender body covered with fine hairs. I put my face down close, peer into its many glassy eyes. Its front legs pluck gently at the dew-jeweled threads. A single drop of water falls to the rung below and hangs there, clinging to the corner, where the cells of the web are joined by a tiny silken knot.

With the back of my scrub brush, I destroy the web and smash the spider into the grass. I pour water over the brush to clean away the bug’s remains, then more water over the headstone. When I am finished, I run my fingers through the carved letters, over the cold arc of granite and the carved stone rose at the center.

* * *

Later that night, Jack comes back for me. We head north, straight up the boulevard, past the tiny Vashon Theater crouching beige and humble on the left, and the much larger vine-covered brick yoga studio on the right, past the auto shop and the Episcopal church, until the town peters to an uncertain end and we leave it behind. After a few minutes, Jack turns onto a narrow dirt road fringed with pines, through which the Puget Sound shines in the twilight. He doesn’t stop until we’ve reached the empty mouth of a trailhead, where the moon sits like a pearl on a sheet of hammered pewter.

Below us is the beach my mother took me to about a month after Nana died. The weather was chaotic that day, blustering and weeping from a swollen sky. Holding hands, my mother and I wobbled through the high loose sand, then turned our shoulders to the sea.

For a while, we walked in silence, bundled into our hoods, hands buried deep inside our pockets.

“Things are going to be a lot different now,” my mother said.

I nodded. Things were already different. We came up against the bewildering absence of Nana every day. Breakfast was cold now, and late. My braid had unraveled to a ponytail, and the week before the batteries for my favorite doll had died, leaving her with an open, frozen mouth where she used to chew from a little plastic spoon. Now the doll’s mouth seemed to be screaming mutely, endlessly. I had put the doll under my bed, then in my toy box, before finally wrapping her in a rag and burying her in the garbage can on the curb outside.

“Nana was good at this,” my mother was saying. “For me it’s harder. We’re—I’m going to have to figure out what to do about money. Maybe get a second job. I don’t know.”

“I can get a job,” I piped, aware this was childish. But Nana would have expected me to find a way to help.

My mom took her hand from her pocket and laid it on top of my head. “You’re a little young for that, squirt.”

She took my hand. Hers was cold and thin as a bird’s wing. She smiled down at me, her face dewed with raindrops, melted somehow, as if all the bones under her skin had dissolved. It was the expression of the smallest on the playground, the soft, malleable face of directionless fear.

Jack and I get out of the truck and stand together, blinking at the moon’s smug roundness, listening to the clicks of the cooling engine.

“Makes you feel small, doesn’t it?” he says.

“And alone.”

“You’re not alone, you’re with me.”

I look up at him. His face is all planes and lines, and skin like a tarp stretched over the bones. He lights a cigarette, holds it between two fingers while he plucks a strand of hair from my cheek with his thumb and ring finger.

“First star,” I say. “Let’s make a wish.”

He smiles from inside the cage of his glasses.

“Careful what you wish for, little box thief. You might get it.”

“What do you imagine I’m wishing for?”

“Comfort. Same as the rest of us.” He peers at me through the smoke. “Or maybe not. Maybe it’s something else for you.”

He produces a stack of blankets from the backseat, lets down the tailgate and makes a nest in the truck bed, between the wheels of his pickup. I wait, smoking his cigarette, tracking a satellite across the sky. Nana used to worry that satellites and meteors could come down and crash on our heads.
You’d never see it coming,
she would say with a shudder and a sidelong glance at the sky.

Nana was pretty superstitious all around. Not only didn’t she step on the lines and cracks in the sidewalk herself, she kept me from doing so. No black cats, no number thirteen. As if she always knew the end would come at her fast.

When he’s finished, Jack helps me up and we settle together against the wall of the cab, our legs tangled on the blankets, my head resting in the hollow of his shoulder. The moon rises and retreats as though pulled by an invisible string into the starry sky.

“I like your house,” he says unexpectedly.

“Yeah? You’re the first person to see it inside.”

“It looks like you.”

“A hot mess.”

“Emphasis on hot.”

“I’m surprised you’d like it. Being an architect and all. It’s not exactly an original.”

“Not outside, no.”

“Have you ever lived in a house you designed?”

“No. I’ll build one for myself one day. I’m making payments on a plot of land south of Portland, near the coast. Waiting for zoning to approve the plans.”

“I’d like to see them.”

“Yeah? They’re in the truck.”

“Well, break them out.”

Prompted by my interest, he lays out the blueprints and describes the design—a modern Craftsman, with a wall of windows overlooking the sea, which will extend all the way through the bedroom, to open that side of the house to the ocean breeze and the patio. Lots of golden wood, he says, lots of glass. But for all the house’s delights, it’s the kitchen that enchants me most. A long soapstone counter faces the open window without obstruction, inset with a deep, wide sink and built-in cutting board.

I run my fingers over the delicate lines of the blueprint.

“You did all this?”

“You sound surprised.”

“Shocked. I can’t imagine where you’d even begin.”

“With an idea. Like writing a book, I’d imagine.”

“That’s not at all the same thing.”

“No? Why’s that?”

I shake my head, spread my fingers wide. “Well, because a book is only ever an idea, and then a refinement of the idea. What you do requires mathematics, physics, logistics. Books are just an arrangement of words, anyone can do that.”

“Bullshit. I couldn’t.”

He rolls up the blueprints.

“I’ve been reading
Zebra Crossing
. It’s more than an arrangement of words.”

I’m surprised, and touched. I’ve never known a guy who’s read my work after meeting me. It’s usually the opposite: the minute a man hears I’m a writer, he’ll bolt in the other direction to avoid having to read a book in which he has no interest.

“I think that’s the first time I’ve seen you smile,” he says, watching me.

I resume my poker face and clear my throat.

“This house looks expensive.”

“Yeah, it will be. But a lot of the materials will be repurposed and I can do most of the work myself. It will take a while, obviously.”

I want to know where a carpenter will find the money to build a house like this. It feels intrusive to ask, but Jack reads my mind.

“My family has some money,” he says. “My dad owns a chain of liquor stores back East. He settled me fairly well.”

“He’s still living?”

“Yeah.”

I frown, trying to get the lay of the land.

“We had a falling-out,” Jack says. “He basically shoved some money at me and told me to get the fuck out.”

“But if you have money, why do you work as a carpenter?”

“Well, it’s not Hilton money. And a man should always work, whether he needs to or not.”

“Only, not as an architect.”

He takes off his glasses, folds them and sets them aside. Then he slips one arm under my legs, the other around my shoulders, and shifts me in one fluid motion so I’m flat on my back.

“Carpentry is good for upper body strength,” he says.

He stretches out next to me. Twines our fingers together and turns them this way and that to see the effect, a herringbone pattern in brown and white. His hands are rough with calluses, wide and flat and strong. Mine seem like a child’s in comparison.

He tips my face to his and kisses me. His mouth is firm against mine, but supple, seeking. He catches my lower lip between his teeth, nuzzles into the ticklish skin under my jaw. Goose bumps blossom on my neck, and I tuck up my shoulder to make him stop. Smiling, he smooths them away with the palm of his hand and begins to unlace the neckline of my peasant blouse.

“Beautiful,” he says as he uncovers me. “Like an anime doll that fell into a rag bin.”

I can’t help laughing.

“Why does no one like my clothes? This is style.”

He draws the fabric aside and runs a finger along the lace edge of my bra. “I like your clothes just fine, so long as they’re on the floor.”

He unhooks the front of my bra and pushes the cup aside. Then he settles over me, his warm tongue curving around my nipple, his dark hair curling around my fingers. I watch his mouth, entranced by the contrast of his darker, stubbled skin against the pale swell of my breast. He takes my silver hoop in his teeth and tugs gently as he gathers slow handfuls of my skirt and finds the bare curve of my hip, grinning at my thigh-high striped socks.

“I take it all back,” he says.

I get to my knees and take off my blouse and his shirt, my skirt and underwear, run my hands over his chest and the hard slope of his shoulder. I unbutton his jeans and reach inside, wrap my fingers around the solid, dew-tipped length of his cock, and move down his body to take him in my mouth. His skin tastes clean, faintly salty, like the back of my hand before a shot of tequila. I weigh his testicles in my palm, run a thumb across their wrinkled surface and follow the fat speed-bump under his dick with my tongue as I take him to the top of my throat. We fall into a natural cadence, his hand at the back of my neck.

He leans against the cab of the truck, holding my hair aside, watching. His face is impassive, but his body begins to shift. His breathing picks up. The texture of his skin feels smoother and more taut. I want him inside me and worry that he’ll finish in my mouth, but he stops me, pulls me away with one hand tangled in my hair.

He digs a condom out of his wallet and rolls it on, motions for me with his fingers. I straddle him and ease down the length of his cock. I close my eyes. I have never had sex outdoors before, never felt the night wind on my bare breasts or felt this cool lick of air on my clitoris as I am spread apart. It’s electrifying. The heat between my legs crackles like molten lava spilling into the sea, hot meeting cold.

Jack groans and holds me in place. “Jeeeesus,” he says. “Wait, baby...”

I am still, imagining what distraction he turns to at times like this. Work, maybe. Measurements and angles, building codes and deadlines and the drying time of a slab of concrete. I wonder what this feels like to him, how wet, how tight I am around him. Already my cunt is clenched like a fist, contracting in upward ripples as if to draw him deeper inside me.

I open my eyes and he opens his. His gaze sweeps over me with dark appraisal, a fierce masculine pride, proprietary and urgent, and my body answers with an almost painful thrill from someplace low and deep inside my belly. He lifts me up and presses me down, fixated on the connection point between us, his hands splayed wide over my hips.

I lean forward to brace myself on the rim of the truck bed. The tips of my breasts graze his bare chest. He guides my nipple to his mouth, pulls me closer with one hand around the back of my neck, the other stroking my ass, sliding between my legs.

My breasts grow heavy, tingling, wet from his tongue and cold from the night air. My breath whistles past my teeth. He flexes his thumb against my clitoris and lifts me with each thrust of his hips, up and down. I feel him growing thicker inside me. I open my legs, arch back, leaning on my hands with my breasts raised like an offering to the sky. The stars seem to circle overhead. The night air moves over my skin like a cool cotton sheet, catching at my breasts, sliding across my thighs.

He turns his thumb so the tip is pressed right into the cleft of my clitoris, and that feels so good, unbearably good, as though he’s tripped a wire inside me, cut me loose and catapulted me into a rush of pleasure that shoots through my limbs and right to the top of my head. I come and he is chasing me with long hard strokes, clutching at my hips as if he can find more of me if he tries. A deep groan stutters from the back of his throat. His abdomen contracts under my hand.

It takes a few minutes for him to soften, for me to get my bearings and enough strength in my thighs to crawl away. He wraps the blankets around me and we share a cigarette as the moon beams down upon us and the crickets resume their song.

* * *

“Watch yourself,” Jack says.