Folie à Deux (8 page)

“Oh shit, I burned the toast,” I say when it pops. “Oh shit,” I just cursed in front of her I say in my head and I burned the toast. She assures me that she likes her toast exactly that way. I continue to apologize which convinces her I don’t believe her contrived forgiveness.

She responds, “If you were to call my mom right now and ask her how her daughter likes toast she would say, ‘Black.’”

I think, “If I were to call my mother and ask her to guess where I am I bet she couldn’t.” But I say nothing.

The only way I’m going to survive this day is to detach from the enormity around me. I’m able to discuss school, my holiday and her holiday as though my presence in her apartment at ten-thirty on a Wednesday morning is quite normal. All the while thoughts of my parents at work, my younger siblings at daycare and my teammates supporting one another creep in, reminding me of my other life.

We eat breakfast, eggs sunny side up, toast, and crumb buns with one orange juice and one cranberry over normal conversation. When we are long finished eating and seem to have run out of topics, she asks, “So would you like to sit someplace more comfortable?” Had I not already disconnected from the dysfunction such a question would have made all newly found comfort disappear. But the carved off piece of me is able to say, “Sure, that sounds like a good idea.”

“Leave the dirty dishes. I’ll take care of them later,” she says as she demurely places her napkin on the chair.

She walks in front of me, stops abruptly at the loveseat and turns. She delicately takes the diamond earring between her thumb and forefinger and says, “That looks so nice on you. I love
you.” She pauses and shifts her attention between my ear lobe and my eyes, “I don’t know, Jimi Cunneely, you are one handsome man.”

I giggle because I’m not a man and I don’t think of myself in the terms with which she perpetually describes me. It feels as though she is trying to convince herself of these attributes, not me.

She leans in and kisses me, this time with her whole body. I feel her thighs and breasts press against me, slightly taller than her, she tilts her head upward. Instantly when I feel the warmth in my pants I pull my hips back only to feel her palm crushed flat on the small of my back. As her hand pulls me her hips push and the pressure causes a sensation of pleasure intertwined with pain I’ve never felt before. She lets go of my lips for a second to produce a barely audible moan that arouses me even more. She rises on her toes as if searching a better vantage point, pushes her whole body into me but I have long forgotten where I am. I fail to recall that there is a loveseat behind me, so while this has been calculated by her it causes intense panic until I fall back safely.

Before I can process that I did not hit the ground she is straddling me and in one motion, grinding. Her moans are louder now and her hips moving not so much faster but harder. It causes quite a stir as my body and mind try to decode the gratification of the throbbing. What feels good in my body makes me feel bad in my head. I’m not supposed to see her like this. I enjoyed it when it was a fantasy I heard out of the mouth of someone else but this is too real. My nerves or my anxiety or my body’s inability to direct any part of me except my dick is keeping my hands on the cushion beside me. She forcefully places them on her back. I play the same game as I did earlier with her thigh. I feel vulgar as the words that scream through my head are all the
slang terms used in the locker room. I’m too overcome to keep any composure regarding the language I use to describe the narrative of what is happening.

She rises for a second to pull her sweater out from underneath which I know means she wants my hand on her bare skin. I discover her flesh, warm and soft. Her back tight and muscular. I start by touching her tenderly, but then to keep with the pace I move my hands faster, grabbing muscle with a slight massage. She pulls her mouth from mine and latches onto my left ear saying in a throaty voice that startles me, “Your hands are strong. That feels so good.”

Without thought and almost as involuntarily as the beating of my heart, my hips rise in rhythm to meet hers sending a shock wave up my body I feel in the back of my neck. Her first couple moans I mistake for heavy breathing but my thrust leads to unmistakable clamor born from unbridled bliss.

My hand dares touch her oblique. She buckles, as if tickled. Time again has no value and can’t be quantified. She says to me after what seems like hours of grinding, “We should stop.” But she doesn’t. I think she wants me to ask why. She leaves her statement dangling but I’ve had little, if anything to do with the planning of this entire day so I’m not about to exert any now. It seems like another thirty minutes of the same when she jumps off and says, “Ok, ok, I have to stop this now.”

I’m no longer concealed by her body so I instinctively fold my hands in my lap as if she doesn’t already know I’m hard. My mind, still being elsewhere doesn’t react as she wants so she asks, with frustration, “Do you know why we have to stop?”

“I don’t,” afraid my response invites her to climb back on, which I may want.

“Because if I don’t stop, I’m afraid I’m going to overstep my boundaries,” she offers through the slowing of her breath. I’m reminded of her saying how upset she is that she’ll never be able to act on her feelings. I cannot guess what she is implying but I know there is definitely a right response to this statement. I don’t know what it is so I remain silent, muted by confusion.

Right now I’m tired. I wrestled and lost a match I should have won. I’m drained of the mental energy I’ve been forced to wield for survival and mostly because I’ve had to hide my ambivalence to exist. Too tired to reply, “Yeah, you’re right”, is the best I can do.

I look at the clock to find we have spent more than three hours on the loveseat. My penis feels beat up from rubbing up against the inside of my underwear and her pants for so long. My back aches. The same atrophy that formed in my back, settled in my mind from detachment. After I waken my muscles and repose myself for the first few seconds I feel a rush of indescribable guilt for being a part of what just happened.

I remind her that she needs to drive me to school so I can catch my ride home but when I think of my mom, I no longer want to leave. I’m not faced with having to account for my whereabouts. There is a certain security involved in being here because this is still happening. Questions have not yet been asked. Lies have not yet created tension for however long they will hang in the air between me and my interrogator. For some inexplicable reason, I relish the avoidance of having to deal with this but I tell her anyway, “We probably should get going.”

Because she is sitting next to me she only has to tilt her head to rest it on my shoulder protesting, “I don’t want you to leave yet. I’m having such a nice day with you.” Her playful objection weighs on me like another trap. It’s always with bait that is too
simple to ignore but too complex to evade either. It wasn’t a nice day for me. From the first waking dilemma of the tournament and everything since, I unfastened me from me.

“I did too,” I say quietly, as if speaking too loudly would confirm it doubly. I’m upset enough that it leaves my lips in the first place.

“Ok, let’s get you back to school,” she finally says with overt reluctance.

“So I want to ask you something,” is the common phrase helpful in preparing me to expect absolutely any ensuing question. The topics that have been broached with only that preamble run the gamut. It’s used on the phone, late one night with my brother already asleep in the bed next to me. “I’ve been thinking about something very serious and important to me,” she says.

I try to concentrate but my fear of what may come is crippling. “We said we loved each other on December 20
^th
,” her pause allows me to reflect on that random fact momentarily. “So what do you think of making love for the first time on our one month anniversary?” She asks as though we’re planning a picnic or some event that will have more emotional value if the calendar reflects one number instead of another.

I thought I was ready for anything but I’m not. Like a standardized test, the questions become increasingly difficult as time rolls on. Unfortunately, I can’t skip the ones I don’t know and continue. The choices are too multiple to eliminate. My odds never improve.

She soft peddles once faced with my silence, “I hope I didn’t overstep my boundaries by asking you that, it’s just been on my mind so much since the day at my apartment.”

“Oh no,” I falsely assure her. My answer is the absolute truth because boundaries have been so blurred that I couldn’t even
begin to define what I should accept as normal. She is a teacher and I have gone multiple places with her that I never should. Clearly, the margins are on a sliding scale. They have been covered over with so much debris, kicked up in the last month that unearthing them is a hope I’ve long abandoned.

“That sounds fine.”

Fine is the best adjective I can imagine, fully aware that my input is a formality. Before she can question my word choice, I remind her that I’m a virgin. Not to endear myself but to pre-forgive my shortcomings.

“Oh Jimi, I know and I think it’s beautiful that we’ll be sharing that wonderful gift with each other,” spoken more like coercion than comfort.

From somewhere that has abandoned refinement, to eliminate the stresses of my life I say, “Listen, Carla, I don’t want to come across as though I think you lied, but how have you never had sex before? It just seems odd because I can tell you thirty people in our school that have lost their virginity before they’ve even turned eighteen.”

I speak quickly before she can interrupt but am certain she receives all of the disbelief that I intended. She responds with stories of insecurity about her weight and the size of her breasts. She describes how she dislikes being looked at by men because being objectified is disgusting, the irony completely lost on me.

I think it best to avoid any follow up questions because I can sense by the few sarcastic barbs that she is upset by my accusation. Some of the men in her stories are teachers that I know, others are nameless and faceless, but endearing only because we’ve shared a kiss and maybe a dry hump with the same woman. She speaks of defending her chastity as though it were the last virtue she would ever possess, not giving it to just anyone. Her
explanations work on so many levels because they not only make me blameworthy for doubting her but the backhand to this conversation solidifies me. She subliminally reminds me that I hold a special place in her life, that I, alone, am worthy to bestow her virginity after a lifetime of undeserving suitors.

I feel terrible so I apologize and backpedal, “I can’t imagine that among all the men who would clearly want to be with a woman as special as you, not one of them was good enough.” It appeases her because it prompts the familiar conversation about our destiny to have met here and now. She launches into, “How thankful I am that I waited for you, Jimi.” My attempt to reenter her good graces has worked, yet I don’t understand how I feel ugly inside for being the simultaneous source of her happiness as well as displeasure.

I have no success extracting some truth on this topic but opening it has diverted the flow of pressure, albeit momentarily. We set a date based on our one-month anniversary which I didn’t even know begged a celebration. She redirects, “Is there a day this week that you can skip wrestling practice and come to my apartment? I’m so lonely by myself. It cheered me up to have you here for a whole day.” Her nasally voice sounds so much like begging I actually pity her.

“Um,” I run through the schedule in my mind knowing that I have a match on Wednesday immediately regretful when I realize mollifying her makes me an accomplice. “Well, the days we have matches we can leave right after school and don’t have to be back until six. I have a match this Wednesday,” I offer.

She asks in the playful voice to which I am now accustomed, “Well, do you have any plans after school on Wednesday? Oh say, between two-thirty and six?” How do I say no when she is being coy, knowing I just provided my own alibi?

“That works for me,” unsuccessfully replicating her boisterous tone.

She is nothing short of giddy on Wednesday from the first time I see her. It seems she wears a new sense of anticipation for the world to see although impossible for anyone but me to know. It amazes me how comfortable she is walking to her car with a student after school.

Each classmate we pass on our exit makes me increasingly jealous that I can’t stay and be a kid alongside them. This is a phenomenon that will occur time and again for years. Other kids will see me with her, see the attention she dotes on me and I’ll catch an envious glance or a curious stare. They don’t think I perceive it and they’ll never know that I crave her ignorance to their existence. I wish desperately that I was also a face in the crowd to Carla, coveting their insignificant place in her life.

It’s cold and dreary, a typical January day; conversely the conversation on the way to her apartment is light and inconsequential. I notice things I didn’t on our first trip, certain houses that overlook the lake and different landscaping. Because I know where I’m going the trip seems shorter but that’s only due to the absence of curiosity. I know we’re not going to have sex because we have already set a date so I’m anxious to find out what we explore. Instinctively, I sit on the loveseat in the same spot where we spent the majority of our last day. She walks past saying nothing as she enters the bathroom.