Old Story

WHOLE

“You’re playing with fire, El.” She says. She eyes him over the rim of her beer bottle. His eyes light up and I know she doesn’t need to tell him – he can feel it. Lit is a good word for it. He is slumped over in a doorframe looking like the life has been drained out of him, but I know he feels alive and electric. He tosses both of us a secret grin and raises his bottle for a mock toast.

“Really, if you fail your drug test, you’re going to jail, El. You know, jail? You remember the jumpsuits from last time…”

He cuts her off, shushing her, shaking his head and closing his eyes. El gathers her into his arms and she melts into him. Such a charmer. This is Tuesday night, or Wednesday morning, rather. I never used to do this before I met Jill and I’m hoping that my GPA is strong enough from my years of being antisocial to support my misbehavior now. Eli is her ex, but now they’re just friends. Really. Occasionally they have sex like friends do. The truth is, Eli “occasionally” has sex with most of his female friends. I know – I’m one of those friends. I wonder briefly if he still has feelings for her, or if the platonic sex has dulled them.

He glances at me over the crown of her head with a flicker of interest. Last week we were all three standing in this very kitchen – more drunk than we are now – and we ended up sleeping together. God, my mother would be sick. The next morning when Jill and I were taking the “walk of shame” across campus in his billowy t-shirts, she said quietly: “I feel powerful.” Indeed. Our hair had looked like someone spit into it and god knows what else. Where the hell was all this power coming from? I’ll tell you, when you’re twenty-one, power doesn’t stem from how well you tend to your body. That morning it was sunny and cool. His t-shirts smelled like clean boy. I’d encountered the danger of drinking instead of doing my homework and the sun still rose. Hell – I wasn’t wearing any underwear and if that doesn’t make you feel powerful, I don’t know what will.

Tonight, I know that same power crackles in this kitchen. He lets go of Jill to pop off the top of another bottle with his forearm, never passing up an opportunity to prove that he’s a man. Oh El, I am fully aware after last week, I want to tell him. He moves into the next room leaving Jill and I alone for the moment. We stare at each other drunkenly, trying to focus. She crosses the room and puts her arm on my shoulder, bowing her head. I brace myself, us, on the wall.

“What?” I say.

She chuckles and shakes her head.

“For some reason, this all seems very familiar.” She quips.

I nod and we are quiet for a moment. We hang together on the kitchen wall like two unfinished portraits. She puts her head on my shoulder. I wonder if it is a gesture of our friendship or because she can no longer support it. Either way it is a crack in the dark shroud that her power stems from. She’s been doing this longer than I have, measures her life in twelve packs, sex and parties. I know the truth; even parties get old, but if she quit now, what would be left? I still stay home sometimes and watch movies, take bubble baths, sing in the choir. Once, they did these things too. I know that if I quit choir or didn’t watch any more movies, something about me would be missing and I would have to replace it.

El pokes his tousled head around the corner. He jerks it towards the living room.

“C’mon ladies, that’s enough girl talk…I’m bored in here.”

Jill taps into some reserve of her strength and pushes off the wall. We link elbows and proceed, connected, into the living room. Someone brought pot and the air is burning, thick with a pall of heavy smoke. Eli announces his arrival to the room, raising up his hands and inhaling satisfactorily. I don’t know anyone in the room and I don’t remember them arriving. It’s as if they have always been here. Time does stand still in this apartment. Eli’s best friend is there, a guy named Nick. Jill is in love with Nick. I know she loves him because it’s how I know Jill is human and has depth. He is the only constant in her life besides partying. Or rather, her infatuation with him is. I know he doesn’t love her back, but when she asks if I think he does, I say yes. I want her to have him; he reminds her that there is something else.

My beer has been empty for a while and I’m losing my buzz. I let it drip out of me like I’m a leaky faucet. What rushes in in place of it is hot and insistent: shame. I know my take home test is due in the morning and I haven’t done it. My encroaching sobriety illuminates this face like a ray of sunlight. I try to sort out various excuses to give my professor in my head.

Sorry, Professor, my roommate broke her leg. Too traumatic.

Sorry, Professor, I had food poisoning. Too common.

Then I remember someone told me once that honesty was the best policy with professors.

Sorry, Professor, but I’ve been drunk and/or high for the last forty-eight hours straight.

Somehow I feel like my professor would rather hear about my roommates broken leg.

Eli snaps me out of my reverie and appears over my shoulder, breathing stale air into my ear. He smells like sin: pot, cigarettes, liquor, sex and something else. He smells like boy. Something in me stirs when he puts his hand on my hip and snakes the other around me to hand me a shot of liquor.

“Natalie Sue is on my team.” He announces to the room.

They’re picking teams for a drinking game, I hadn’t noticed. Jill is with Nick and she catches my eye and nods, almost imperceptively. It is with that nod that I know she has given Eli to me, relinquished the right given to her by having had him first. I wonder briefly if guys know how truly orchestrated “random sex” really is.

The room is like a picture of a carnival and I wish I weren’t just standing there looking at it like it was. I take a shot; it tastes like piss. The truth is, I really hate liquor but it’s a means to an end.

“Let’s play,” I say, stepping into the middle of the room. I start to arrange the cups for beer pong, concentrating so as not to spill. It was a strong shot, the lights are already beginning to swell and waver enticingly.

“We’re gonna win, you know that right?” says Eli as he gives me a high five but holds onto my hand.

Jill is standing as close to Nick as she possibly can and still remain inconspicuous. She’s at the point now where she thinks she looks hot but she really doesn’t. Her blonde hair is limp and dull. She looks tired; she is tired. Her belly is so full of beer that it sticks out of her t-shirt. She’s hanging on Nick’s every word and I suspect they’ll have sex later. Not because he cares about her or wants to be close to her, but because no other girl is paying attention to him. He’s been hitting on me all night, a testament to his lack of sensitivity, and I’ve carefully brushed him off each time letting Jill observe me observing her infatuation. Nick’s cute, he flirts a lot and I’d take him in a heartbeat. I did once at another party, a fact that is unknown to anyone but the two of us. But it’s Jill who will walk home with me in the morning and cook a greasy breakfast to stave off the hangover. It’s Jill that wants to see me succeed in spite of our bad habits, maybe to prove something to herself.

Eli and I are both Aries: fiery, impetuous and full of judgment and as such, we understand one another. I know my temper turns him on so when we don’t win I pitch a miniature fit for his benefit, watching his reaction out of the corner of my eye. He’s eating it up. I’m too drunk now to think of stopping, so I go in for the kill. He’s laughing at my tantrum, his head thrown to the side like an overjoyed cartoon. I reach out and grab his chin, turning his head towards mine as if he were a child who refused to listen. His eyes fix on me and his laugh fades, but his grin lingers on his face.

“You think losing is funny, El? You promised me we would win.”

I pause and let my hips brush against him. Now it seems like it is only us in the room. He studies me to determine his next move and I let my mouth twitch so only he can see. Permission. Slowly El reaches up and his fingers close on my fingers that are still holding his chin. He pries them open and traces an unintelligible alphabet into my palm.

He smiles coyly.

“Would a consolation prize do? Mama taught me right, everyone who plays is a winner.”

I pretend to think about it, feeling the eyes of the room on us. People wonder about us. We are an odd pair of sloppy seconds. I know Eli is dangerous. Still the air between him and me is electric and I crave it.

Jill appears at my side and I am suddenly aware of the lack of space between Eli and me. Nick has wandered off and Jill is interrupting per the unspoken code of womanhood that says that she must provide me with an opportunity to bow out of my current situation gracefully. Pre-sex intervention, we call it. The connection between El and me broken, I begin to feel the effects of five and a half hours of undiluted debauchery. I slump against his chest, suddenly unable to support my own weight and he catches me. Jill is leaning down to look at my face, snuggled into Eli’s t-shirt. She is fighting her own drunkenness valiantly for my sake. She looks me in the eye for a moment that seems to last forever because she is determining whether or not she should take initiative and put me to bed. Without Eli. She raises her eyebrows, a question mark, and I can only close my eyes. Jill straightens and hauls me off of Eli’s chest. I protest weakly and she ignores me. After all, she is the veteran here.

We stumble into Eli’s roommate’s room looking for a place to lie down, but the bed is occupied. For a moment Jill pauses in the hallway between the roommate’s room and Eli’s. Two paths diverge, indeed.

“What do you want to do, Nat?” she asks. She grabs hold of my chin like I’d just done with Eli, but the meaning is different, urgent. Her ability to maintain sobriety is wavering and she wants me safe before she descends from on high once more.

“I don’t care, just find me a bed.” I slur. I wish I remembered how I’d gotten to this point in the night, or where my purse and car keys were. “Where’s my purse and my keys?” my brain vomits, even though it doesn’t matter at all where they are since I’m definitely not going to use them. I feel the scratchy braided rug under my bare feet and I know I’m Eli’s room, but everything is black. Jill shoves me on to the bed and makes sure that none of my limbs are hanging over the edge. I start to drift from the apartment wading through my impossibly deep, watery consciousness. I see the blur that is Jill taking off her shoes and climbing into the bed next to me. Impulsively I catch her arm.

“Jill, my shoes, where did you put my shoes?” I ask, worried.

“They’re safe, Nat. Go to sleep…”

The clock radio by Eli’s bed says three thirty AM. I sleep.

* * *

When I wake up, Eli is standing by the bed in his boxers and undershirt, obviously trying to figure out how best to move Jill’s and my combined dead weight so he can lie down. I can’t tell from the way I feel whether I’ve been sleeping for fifteen minutes or a day. What I do feel is the weight of being sober bearing down on me. The clock is blinking 6:32 a.m. and I open both eyes and prop my head on my hand to look at him.

“Sorry, the other beds were taken.” I say, and offer him a grin. In the grin is also an apology for copping out of the friendly sex that I knew he wanted.

“S’ok.” He grins back at me. “You wanna scoot over?” he says.

“Yeah, sorry” I poke Jill in her side and she stirs, mumbling unintelligibly and shimmying over. Eli climbs in and Jill wakes up. For a minute we are shoving one another and attempting to get comfortable and then we are all still. We’ve all been here before, but now we are trying not to touch any part of each other and the bed seems much smaller because of it. Eli turns to me so our noses are almost touching. Jill is awake now and sits up, rubbing her eyes, glancing backwards at El and me with our noses touching in the bed. She climbs over us and stumbles out of the room, closing the door with a snap behind her. Eli and I look at one another and shrug.

“What’s with…” I start and Eli swallows the rest of my sentence with his mouth.

Then we are kissing, but El knows well enough to take it slow. I run through the rather short list of things I know about Eli in my head so the situation starts to feel less random.

He has two sisters; he likes greasy diner food; he wants to be a scientist…

He pauses and we just stare at each other.

Small scar on his chin, one eye is slightly lower than the other…

After what clothes we had on are left lying on the floor, he touches my eyebrow where there is an indented scar.

“Chicken Pox?” he asks.

I nod. Somehow knowing these small things about one another is comforting to me, as if he were an old friend. I touch the scar on his chin and he attempts to look down at what I’m pointing to.

“Roller skating.” He explains without my asking. I laugh, trying to imagine him as a little boy, cracking his chin on the roller skating rink even while I am curled naked in the sheets with him.

“Not funny.” He says with a straight face, trying to be serious. I laugh at him more and he kisses my cheek. I kiss his scar, drinking in this stitched up part of him that contains a preserved moment of his childhood. He moves so he is straddling my body and I hold my breath. Truthfully, I don’t like the actual act of sex as much as I like the before and after of it, but it too is a means to an end. He kisses me again and asks

“Is this ok?”

“Have I given you any reason to believe otherwise?” I say.

“Well, no, but the randomness of it…”

He seems unsure and I take his face in my hands.

“It’s ok, thanks for asking.”

This is the most real moment I’ve ever had during a meaningless hookup, I’m sure of it. He is quiet for a very long time. So long that I start to worry if I should have told him that it wasn’t ok. “Maybe he thinks I’m cheap now,” I think. Finally he collapses beside me and folds me into his arms. I shift my weight so I can look at him. He stares at me as if he can see what is behind my eyes, gauging my confusion and sudden feelings of inadequacy.

“I can’t do this…I don’t want this to be the first thing we ever do.” He says finally. He hasn’t stopped staring for at least two straight minutes and it’s making me uncomfortable. Eli grimaces, waiting for a reaction, but I have none. This is not the Eli I know. Suddenly I feel like I am in bed with someone who knows something I don’t and I am intensely aware of my own limitations, carelessly surpassed hours ago. I twist and try to pull my skin off of his but he holds me there.

“I love hugging you.” He says, haltingly, stumbling over his honesty, but somehow I am affirmed and I relax against him.

“I love…hugging you too.” I say. And I do.

* * *

Later Jill creeps into the bedroom where the sunlight is casting striped shadows on our bare bodies. She is unafraid of nakedness, having exposed her darkest secrets to both Eli and I last week. Jill climbs into the bed next to me and shakes me gently. I open my eyes and look at her, asking her silently not to comment. She doesn’t but her face says everything. She lowers her voice to a whisper and I lean my head down to hear her.

“I had sex with Nick last night, and we have to get out of here right now.” She whispers urgently. I look at her for a long time. Here in El’s warm bed, the sun is coming through the shades, and she seems impossibly small, like a child who has done something that she regrets. Her face is begging me for forgiveness.

“It’s ok.” I tell her, and I grab her fingers and squeeze. I mean it, too. She gives me a tight smile and looks away. A pregnant moment follows where she is no doubt processing my forgiveness.

“I feel dirty.” She says quietly, without explanation. I try to determine whether she is referring to the fact that she hasn’t showered and smells like booze and sex or to the state of her soul. A little of both, probably.

“Me too…” I say, referring only to my sticky hair and skin.

Jill slides out of the bed and tosses me a shirt on her way out the door. Clutching the sheets around my chest I sit up and shake out my hair. Eli stirs and stretches like a cat. He props himself onto one elbow.

“You leavin’?” he asks.

“Yeah…” I say, trailing off. I examine a bruise that has mysteriously appeared on my arm from last night. “Jill needs to leave before she’s forced to come to terms with what she did last night.”

He grins.

“What…or who?” he says.

I toss a pillow at him and he laughs, covering his face with his arms. I hang my feet over the side of the bed and start to pull on my jeans. Eli sits up behind me. He puts his hands on my shoulders and kisses my cheek, saying nothing, and rolls out of bed.

Jill is waiting for me at the door, looking antsy.

“Finally,” she sighs. “You sure took long enough.” She tries to look irritated but I know she’s full of it.

“Shut up. As if El and I last night wasn’t oh-so-carefully orchestrated and carried out by you.” I tell her. She laughs.

“I’m pretty sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, Nat.”

“Whatever. Putting me to sleep in his bed? Better yet, leaving me in his bed? Admit it, you’re the mastermind here.”

She shrugs, smiling. “Alright, I admit it.”

We are walking our tried and true path back to campus. The day is impossibly blue and bright. People stare at us knowingly. Jill gives one of them a cheeky grin and a wave.

“By the way, what the hell are you wearing?” I ask, referring to her miniskirt, leather boots, and extra large football jersey.

“Dunno. It was in the laundry pile,” she says simply. “Hey, are you hungry? I could go for some fast food. My treat.” She waves her credit card in front of me.

I agree and we change course for the restaurant. She links her arm with mine. I know now that we are nothing if we are not whole at this moment.