Win Some, Lose Some

  Back in my room, Mayra pushed me onto the bed and crawled over the top of me. Her hand slid down my side, over my hip, and then she gripped my thigh for a second before wrapping her fingers around my already erect cock.

  “Shit,” I mumbled. I closed my eyes and pushed the back of my head into the pillow.

  Mayra leaned over and covered my mouth with hers, and the sharp taste of mint flowed between us as we kissed. She pulled back long enough to grab another condom from the nightstand, insisting that she wanted to try putting it on herself. It didn’t work out very well and ended up kind of twisted at first. Eventually she got it on right and rolled it over me.

  Mayra got up on her knees, straddling my hips. I swallowed hard as I realized her intent and then gripped the sheets on the bed as I watched her position me at her entrance before lowering herself. She hissed; I groaned, and we slowly became one again.

  At first, Mayra just lay her head on my chest as we both reveled in the feeling of connectedness. I cupped her face in my hands and kissed her slowly, trying to keep my focus on the feeling and taste of her mouth and not the subtle movements of her hips and how those movements encouraged me to move with them until I burst.

  She sat up and leaned back, and it felt like electricity flowing through my cock and up my spine. I groaned again, arching my back and thrusting up into her. Mayra began to move with me, sliding up and down over my cock as her breasts bounced in rhythm with the strokes. I reached up and gathered them both in my hands, pulling slightly at the nipples as Mayra moaned.

  “That feels incredible,” she breathed.

  “What about this?” I asked as I dropped my hand down her belly and started massaging her right above where we joined.

  “Oh, God! Oh, Matthew!”

  I kept my fingers against her clit and moved my hand with her. My other hand went to her hip, giving me a bit of leverage to push up. Mayra’s hands were braced against my chest as she leaned over me, and her hair fell over her shoulders to tickle my skin as she moved. She dug her fingers into my skin as she began to pant out my name like a chant. She shuddered, and I followed a moment after.

  “Ahhh!” My fingers dug into her hips, and I pulled her down against me, shoving as deep inside of her as I could go. As soon as my grip loosened, Mayra dropped her head to my chest and wrapped her arms around my shoulders.

  I couldn’t decide if I liked it better on top or bottom, so I thought we should try for the best two out of three.

  ~oOo~

  Whereas normal, daily tasks are difficult to master, undertaking activities considered only problematic for most people is nearly impossible for me. If it hadn’t been for Mayra’s constant reassurance, I might not have been able to face the transition from high school life to college.

  With my eyes squeezed shut, I tried to keep myself grounded. I didn’t need to get upset. I didn’t need to freak out and panic. I could get through this. Mayra was just in the other room. Everything was all right.

  It didn’t work.

  My hands started shaking until the photo album I had been looking through dropped from my grip with a thud. I tried to lower myself carefully but ended up stumbling a little and knocking a small candy dish off the coffee table before landing on my ass.

  “Matthew?”

  I couldn’t answer her. Even when I felt her arms around my shoulders and felt my face pressed against her skin, my vocal cords just wouldn’t work. I kept my eyes closed and tried to focus on breathing slowly, which was made easier by the sweet smell of Mayra’s skin and hair.

  How long anxiety attacks lasted was always a mystery to me. They seemed to simultaneously last both forever and a fraction of a second. I only knew that when I could focus again on where I was and what I was doing, I was still wrapped up in Mayra on the floor of the living room, and a photo album from my childhood was lying open on the floor.

  A picture of my parents holding me as a newborn was on the displayed page.

  “I miss them,” I said quietly. “It’s been so long. Why do I still miss them?”

  “It’s only been a year,” Mayra said. “That isn’t very long at all. Besides, you’re getting all uprooted right now. It makes sense you are going to be thinking about how things were before. Isn’t that what Dr. Harris told you?”

  “Yes.” I tucked my head back against her and sighed. I listened intently to the slow beat of her heart beneath her chest and the gentle sound of her breaths. “Can we make love yet?”

  Mayra snickered.

  “You don’t get out of it that easily,” she said. “I told you a minimum of three boxes packed first. You’ve been in here for an hour and only have half of one filled.”

  “I don’t like doing this.”

  “I know, baby.”

  “Can’t we just commute?”

  “It’s more than a two-hour drive, Matthew,” she reminded me. “You know that isn’t going to work. We’ll be able to visit on the weekends. Maybe we can have Henry, Travis, and Bethany all join us for dinner here once a month or something.”

  “Which day of the month?”

  “Um…how about the second Saturday?” Mayra suggested.

  “Every month?” I asked.

  “I can’t promise every month,” Mayra said, “but we’ll try.”

  Mayra had gotten very good at not allowing me to manipulate her words—that’s what Dr. Harris called it—to serve the facilitation of my own issues. Sometimes it pissed me off, but most of the time, it reminded me that she was trying to make everything smoother for me. I needed a lot of that this week.

  On Sunday, we would move to Columbus to attend Ohio State University.

  Not surprisingly, I had been a basket case as the day grew near and had all but refused to pack anything to take with us. After about the tenth time I had managed to convince Mayra to do something else—anything else—she started bribing me with cake. When the cake stopped working, she started bribing me with sex.

  Cake had the potential to make me full, but I never seemed to get enough sex.

  I pressed my lips against her collarbone and then nuzzled the fish-shape with my nose. That wasn’t quite enough, so I brought my hand over to poke it with my index finger, then my middle finger, then my ring finger…

  “That’s enough!” Mayra giggled. “Pack.”

  “I can’t right now,” I said. My arms tensed and my back straightened. I was prepared for her to push me to get more done, and I needed her to, but that didn’t make it any easier. What she suggested surprised me.

  “How about a quick break?”

  “In my room?”

  “No,” she said, “that never ends up being quick.”

  “I could try.”

  “Not falling for it.” Mayra twisted a little on the floor to get me to look toward her. “TV for a bit?”

  “Okay.”

  Mayra sat on the couch and I put my head in her lap. I could feel my muscles relaxing as soon as her fingers wound around my hair.

  “You need a haircut,” Mayra told me.

  “That’s how all this got started,” I said, reminding her.

  “Oh really?”

  “I think I loved you then,” I told her.

  “Because I cut your hair just right?”

  “Uh huh.” I nodded and looked over at the screen to focus on a rerun of House, which Mayra just loved. I thought most of it was kind of cheesy. This episode was about a guy who had a whole lot of money, but his son was dying. He convinced himself he couldn’t have both money and happiness, so he dissolved his company, gave away the assets, and his son survived.

  Cheesy.

  It still served its purpose, though, because throughout the episode, I pretty much forgot about packing and moving and going to college. As soon as it was over and the news started, I knew I would have to actually get something accomplished if I didn’t want to sleep alone tonight.

  The problem was, Mayra’s fingers in my hair felt really good, and I didn’t want to get up. I closed my ey
es and listened to the hum of the newscaster’s voice.

  “…but authorities aren’t sure if he is a viable suspect.

  “In Butler County, time is running out for the person who possesses the winning lottery ticket purchased back in February. The six-month timeframe to claim the jackpot expires tomorrow.”

  “How can you buy a lottery ticket and then never check the numbers?” Mayra asked.

  My stomach kind of twisted up, and the recollection of the smell of kitchen trash hit my nose. I had no idea why—the trash can in the kitchen was empty. It seemed more like a memory than a real smell, though.

  “I mean, the whole idea of it is the excitement of watching the little balls pop out,” she went on. “You have to watch those and watch your ticket and get excited. That’s the beauty of the game.”

  “I never thought about it like that,” I said. “The odds against winning are so astronomical, I never really gave it any kind of consideration.”

  “It’s a game like anything else,” Mayra explained. “It isn’t about winning. It’s about the feeling you get when you have that ticket in your hand, and you are wondering if you might have the winning one. Right then, it’s still possible. It’s thinking about the possibility that is fun.”

  “I’ve never bought one,” I said. The gnawing feeling came back to me, and a flash of an image of paper in a plastic bag along with a memory-smell of duck sauce invaded my head. “I do have one, though.”

  Shit, shit, shit. I hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

  “One what?”

  “A lottery ticket.”

  “You do? Why?”

  “Um…when that guy hit my car, he gave me a lottery ticket and told me that we were even,” I told her. “He just didn’t want to pay for the damage. Travis looked him up, but he moved away without any forwarding address and didn’t have any insurance anyway. It wasn’t worth trying to track him down.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Right before we started working on that honey bees project.”

  “In February?”

  “Yes.”

  “And this guy was from around here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Matthew?” Mayra sat up straighter and moved to one side of the couch, making me have to sit up, too.

  “What?”

  “What did you do with that ticket?”

  “I threw it away,” I told her.

  “Threw it away?”

  “Yes.” I nodded, and then my ears heated up as I looked away. I had never told Mayra why I had her dump out the trash with me in the garage and hadn’t really thought about it since then anyway.

  “What are you so nervous about?” Mayra demanded.

  I sighed. I could see in her expression that this wasn’t a topic she was going to let drop. I would have better luck trying to convince her we didn’t need to pack anything.

  “That day…um…that day I called you in the morning and asked you to come over, and we were in the garage…do you remember that?”

  “You wanted me to dump the trash all over the place with you,” she said dryly. “I almost bailed on you then, you know.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Go on,” Mayra prompted.

  “I was looking for that ticket,” I told her. “I threw it in the trash, and it was trash day, and I heard people at school talking about how no one had brought in the winning ticket yet.”

  Mayra’s eyes got wide, and her mouth dropped open. For a moment, she just stared at me while I rubbed at my thumbnails over and over again. It occurred to me that I had intentionally not allowed myself to think about the ticket in the kitchen drawer or the implications of having a winning ticket in my possession. There were too many unknowns. Too many possibilities. Too many considerations for my mind to be comfortable with the possibility of such a major, life-altering event.

  I would never have considered the lottery ticket game Mayra had described as fun.

  I couldn’t bring myself to think about it, so I started to shut down again.

  Mayra sat on the couch looking at me while I fiddled with my hands and pretended nothing was happening. It was the only way I was going to get through this.

  “Is it?” she finally whispered.

  Of course, she wasn’t going to let me just ignore it.

  “Is what what?” I asked. Maybe if I pretended not to know what she was talking about, I would get off the hook. I wondered if I got the remote off the side table and started flipping channels if I would get lucky enough to find that True Blood vampire guy she likes so much. Then she’d stop thinking about it.

  No such luck.

  “Is it the winning ticket?” Mayra snatched the remote before I could get a good hold of it.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “I never checked.”

  “You had me dig through piles of trash for a lottery ticket that you never checked?”

  “Um…yeah, I guess so.”

  “Why didn’t you check it?”

  “I forgot about it,” I admitted. “It’s in that little drawer in the kitchen, which is full of stuff I don’t know where else to put. It’s disorganized and I don’t like looking in there, but Mom always kept that kind of stuff in there, so I never straightened it.”

  Mayra sat up and grabbed my hand.

  “Matthew, it could be the winning ticket!”

  “The odds are—”

  “Fuck the odds!” she yelled as she stood up, startling me. “We have to find out!”

  I glanced at the television, remembered the House episode, and started thinking about the guy with all the money who was about to lose his son.

  “What about the show?” I asked. “What if you can only have a certain amount of good luck?”

  “What does that mean?” Mayra asked.

  “What if I can’t have both?”

  “Both of what?” Mayra demanded. I could tell she was getting frustrated, but I didn’t really know how to answer.

  Still staring at the television, I didn’t think the episode seemed cheesy anymore.

  “I’m going to find it,” Mayra exclaimed, and she started to walk out of the room and up the stairs.

  “No, Mayra! Please!” I ran after her and latched on to her arm just as she reached the kitchen.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  Mayra slowly turned back to face me, and I let go of her arm. My hands went into my hair and tugged a bit. I had no idea how to figure this stuff out in my own head, let alone explain it to her. I decided to start with the basics.

  “That drawer is a mess,” I told her, knowing as soon as the words were out of my mouth that such tactics weren’t going to work. Mayra raised a brow at me and tapped her toe a couple of times. I decided to just come out with it. “Because it might be the winning ticket.”

  “That’s the whole point, Matthew!” Mayra tossed her hands up in the air. “It might be worth over a hundred million dollars. Do you realize that?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Mayra stood still and just looked at me for a minute, her hands now placed firmly on her hips. My mind wandered to the previous evening when my hands were on those hips as I pulled her against me.

  “Matthew…” Mayra’s voice dropped down a bit, and she turned her head to look up at me. Her eyes held warnings about getting distracted.

  I sighed.

  “In the show we were just watching,” I said, “you remember how the dad thought if he kept all that money, he would lose his son?”

  “Yeah?” Mayra’s brow furrowed as she looked at me quizzically.

  “I can’t take that chance,” I told her. “No amount of money in the world would be worth losing you.”

  “It’s just a TV show,” Mayra said, pointing out the obvious. “Even in the show, there was no real proof that getting rid of the money was what made his son better.”

  “But what if it’s true?” I asked. “Even if there is any chance—even a chance as small as actually winning the lot
tery—that I could lose you…”

  I shuddered.

  “Mayra, it just isn’t worth it.”

  “You aren’t going to lose me,” Mayra insisted. She took a step toward me and wrapped her arms up around my neck. “Why would you think that?”

  “It would change everything,” I whispered. “Nothing would be the same—not ever. So many things could happen.”

  My mind flashed through the possibilities as quickly as my mouth sputtered them out.

  “If it’s the right one, and I claimed it, people would know. Even if you would do it anonymously, people would still find out. They’d want to ask me about it, or they would bug you or Travis or Beth about it. They would find out where we live, and they might even find Megan. Everyone would think you only put up with me because I was rich, and they’d say you knew about it or something way back in February. People would be asking for money all the time, and I’d want to give it to them. Then it would be all out, and other people would ask. They would need it just as bad as someone else, and it would be too late then. I’d have to figure out who needed it the most, and then I might screw it up, and…and—”

  “Shh, Matthew, shh…” Mayra dragged me over to the couch and pulled me down beside her. “Relax, baby—it’s okay.”

  I hadn’t realized how panicked I had sounded or that my hands had started to shake again.

  “It could change everything,” I told her. “It could change me. It could change you. It could change us. I can’t take that chance, Mayra—I can’t. I can’t be without you…I can’t…I can’t…”

  “Shh,” Mayra said again. She held me against her shoulder, and I tried to keep the rising panic spurred by all the possibilities from consuming me.

  For the second time in an hour, I flipped out while Mayra comforted me. It only solidified my opinion that there was nothing worth risking my relationship with her, and I was, by no means, going to find out if that ticket was the winning ticket with the intent of cashing it in before midnight tomorrow.

  No way.

  Eventually I calmed though I had to admit a lot of it had to do with my own refusal to discuss it anymore. I made Mayra swear she wouldn’t go digging for it herself, and then I untangled myself from her arms and placed the old photo album in the cardboard box next to the couch.