Dirty

  For two weeks I stuttered along this way, my concentration knitted together by strands of habit rather than any effort on my part. My work didn’t suffer, only because the numbers came so easily to me, but everything else did. I forgot to mail bills, pick up the dry cleaning, set my alarm.

  The spring days were still easing into night early enough that sometimes my ride home on the bus was done in darkness. I sat in my usual seat, the one at the back, my coat and briefcase folded neatly over my lap, my legs crossed high up at the thigh. I stared out the window and imagined his face and the smell of his breath, and then, with the rocking of the bus to aid me, I began to get myself off.

  At first, just a gentle squeezing of my thigh muscles done in time to the thump of the bus wheels on the pavement. My pussy swelled. My clit became a tiny hard nodule pressing against the soft fabric of my panties. My hips, hidden by the coat and briefcase, rocked on the plastic seat. With both hands folded sedately on my lap, nobody looking at me would have any idea what I was doing.

  Streetlights cast bars of silver on my lap and made swiftly moving lines of light that slid up my body and away, leaving behind darkness interrupted a minute later by another streak. I began to time my pace to the passing of the lights.

  Sweet tension curled inside my stomach. My breath caught and held, then hissed out between my parted lips when it began to burn inside my lungs. I kept my eyes fixed on the window and the sights outside it, but I saw none of them. I saw the ghost of my face reflected now and again in the window glass. I imagined him looking at me.

  My fingers curled on top of my leather briefcase, holding tight. My foot moved up and down, up and down, squeezing my thighs together, rubbing my clit in a small but perfect motion. I wanted so badly to touch myself, to stroke my fingers in circles around that hard button, to slide them inside and fuck myself while the bus sped on toward its destination—but I didn’t. I rocked and squeezed, and each lamp we passed urged me that much closer to climax.

  My body shook from holding so still when it wanted to writhe. I had never done this before, this furtive dance toward completion. Masturbation was done at home alone in the bath or in bed, straightforward and swift, a release of tension. This, here, was almost against my will. My thoughts of him, the movement of the bus, my celibacy, had all conspired to set my body burning with a fire only orgasm could quench.

  Sweat slid down the line of my spine and into the crack of my buttocks. That touch, that light tickle, so much like the feeling of a tongue along my skin, sent me hurtling over the edge. My cunt tightened as my body tensed. My nails scratched thin lines in the leather of my briefcase. My clit jumped and spasmed, and bolts of pure bliss radiated through my entire body.

  I shook in silence, drawing less attention than if I’d sneezed. I turned the gasping sigh into a cough that barely turned heads. In another moment looseness pervaded me, and boneless, I slumped a bit in my seat as the bus eased to a stop.

  My stop.

  I got off on trembling legs, certain the smell of sex had to be clinging to me like perfume, but nobody seemed to notice. I exited the bus into a spring mist, and I lifted my face to the night sky and let it kiss me all over, not caring that it flattened my hair and dampened my blouse.

  I had made myself come on a public bus thinking of his face, and I still didn’t know his name.

  For better or worse, that solo touch on the public transportation eased some of my need. The numbers came back to me, filling my mind with their steady stream of plus and minus. I threw myself into my work, landing several big accounts that had been the responsibility of Bob Hoover, now too busy getting lunchtime blow jobs from Mr. Flynn’s secretary to handle the load.I didn’t mind. More work meant greater opportunity to show the higher-ups I deserved my title, my corner office, my extra vacation time. It meant I didn’t have to invent reasons to stay late at work so I’d need to choose between going home and facing an empty house or heading out to some meat-market bar and testing my strength of will.

  “Sex,” Marcy declared in the lunchroom, “is like this chocolate éclair.”

  She’d brought me a powdered sugar doughnut. “Full of cream and makes you feel like you want to puke after?”

  She rolled her eyes. “What the hell sort of sex do you have, Elle?”

  “None, recently.”

  “I’m shocked.” Her tone made it clear she wasn’t. “But no wonder, with an attitude like that.”

  She might have big hair and trashy taste in clothes, but Marcy could make me laugh. “Tell my why sex is like that éclair, then.”

  “Because it’s tempting enough to make you forget everything else you’re supposed to do.” She licked some chocolate off the top. “And it’s satisfying enough to make you glad you did.”

  I sat back in my chair a little, watching her. “I take it you had some sex last night?”

  She made a mock-innocent face, and I realized something. I liked her. She fluttered her eyelashes. “Who, little ole me?”

  “Yes, you.” I put the doughnut back in the box and snagged the last éclair. “And you’re dying to tell me about it, so stop wasting time and get to it before someone else comes in and we have to pretend to be talking about business.”

  Marcy laughed. “I wasn’t sure you’d like to hear about it.”

  I studied her face. “You think that about me, don’t you. That I don’t like sex?”

  She looked up from her gooey plate, her smile sincere, and something passed over her expression. Something a little like pity. It made me frown.

  “I don’t know, Elle. I don’t know you well enough to say, really, but you act like you don’t like much of anything sometimes, except work.”

  Hearing something you already know shouldn’t ever be a shock, but it usually is. I wanted to answer her right away, but my throat had closed and my eyes burned with tears I blinked against to keep from falling. I put one hand on my stomach, which had lurched at her words in recognition of the truth of them.

  Marcy, despite her appearance and occasional dumb-blonde performance, is anything but stupid. She reached at once for my hand and closed her fingers over mine before I could pull it away. She squeezed my hand and let go fast enough to keep me from startling.

  “Hey,” she said softly. “It’s all right. We all have buttons.”

  Right then, at that moment, I had the chance to make Marcy my friend. A real one, not a business acquaintance. I have stood on the edge of so many things, so many times, and I most always back away. If there is a time when telling the truth will open a door, I lie. If a smile will forge a connection, I turn my face.

  But this time, surprising myself and probably her, I didn’t.

  I smiled at her. “Tell me about your date last night.”

  She did. In detail enough to make me blush. It was the best lunch I’d ever had.

  When it was time for us to go to our separate offices, she stopped me with another squeeze of my hand. “You should come out with me sometime.”

  I let her squeeze my hand because she was so earnest, and we’d had such a good time. “Sure.”

  “You will?” She squealed, the hand squeeze turning into an impromptu, full-length hug that made my entire body stiffen. Marcy patted my back and stepped away, and if she noticed that her embrace had turned me into a wooden effigy, she said nothing. “Great.”

  “Great.” I smiled and nodded.

  Her enthusiasm was infectious, and it had been a long time since I’d had a girlfriend. Any sort of friend. I caught myself humming later, at my desk.

  Euphoria doesn’t last under the best circumstances, and when I pushed open my front door to find the light on my answering machine blinking steadily, mine vanished.

  I don’t get many calls at home. Doctors’ offices, sales calls, wrong numbers, my brother Chad…and my mother. The red number four mocked me as I dumped my mail on the table and hung my keys on the small hook by the door. Four messages in one day? They had to be from her.

  Hating
your mother is such a cliché comedians use it to make audiences laugh. Psychiatrists base their entire careers upon diagnosing it. Greeting card companies stick the knife in further by making consumers feel so guilty about the way they really feel about their mothers, they’ll willingly pay five dollars for a piece of paper with some pretty words they didn’t write, echoing a sentiment they don’t feel.

  I don’t hate my mother.

  I’ve tried to hate my mother, I really have. If I hated her, I might be able to put her out of my life at last, be done with her, put an end to the torture she provides. The sad fact remains, I haven’t learned to hate my mother. The best I can do is ignore her.

  “Ella, pick up the phone.”

  My mother’s voice is a nasal foghorn, bleating her disdain as a warning to all the other ships to stay away from me, the reason for her disappointment. I can’t hate her, but I can hate her voice, and the way she calls me Ella instead of Elle. Ella is a waif’s name, an orphan sitting in the cinders. Elle is classier, crisper. The name a woman called herself when she wanted people to take her seriously. She insists on calling me Ella because she knows it annoys me.

  By the fourth message she was detailing how life didn’t seem worth living with such an ungrateful excuse for a daughter. How the pills the doctor prescribed for her nerves weren’t working. How she was embarrassed to have to ask Karen Cooper from next door to go to the pharmacy for her when she had a daughter who should be quite capable of taking care of her, but for the fact she refused.

  She had a husband who could go for her, too, but she never seemed to remember that.

  “And don’t forget!” I jumped at the suddenness of her voice ringing out from the small speaker. “You said you’d visit soon.”

  There was a brief moment of hissing static at the end of her message as though she’d hung on the line, convinced I was really there and ignoring her, and if she waited long enough she’d catch me out.

  The phone rang again as I looked at it. Resigned, I picked it up. I didn’t bother to defend myself. She talked for ten minutes before I had the chance to say anything.

  “I was at work, Mother,” I managed to interject when she paused to light a cigarette.

  She greeted my answer with an audible sniff of disdain. “So late.”

  “Yes, Mother. So late.” The clock showed ten after eight. “I take the bus home, remember?”

  “You have that fancy car. Why don’t you drive it?”

  I didn’t bother to explain yet again my reasons for keeping a car in the city but using public transportation, which was faster and easier. She wouldn’t have listened.

  “You should find a husband,” she said at last, and I bit back a sigh. The tirade was close to ending. “Though how you ever will, I don’t know. Men don’t like women who are smarter than they are. Or who earn more money. Or—” she paused significantly “—who don’t take care of themselves.”

  “I take care of myself, Mother.” I meant financially. She meant spa treatments and manicures.

  “Ella.” Her sigh sounded very loud over the phone. “You could be so pretty…”

  I looked into the mirror as she talked, seeing the reflection of a woman my mother didn’t know. “Mother. Enough. I’m hanging up.”

  I imagined the way her mouth pursed at such harsh treatment from her only daughter. “Fine.”

  “I’ll call you soon.”

  She snorted. “Don’t forget, you promised to come visit.”

  The thought made my stomach fall away. “Yes, I know, but—”

  “You have to take me to the cemetery, Ella.”

  The woman in the mirror looked startled. I didn’t feel startled. I didn’t feel…anything. No matter what my reflection showed.

  “I know, Mother.”

  “Don’t think you can weasel out of it this year—”

  “Goodbye, Mother.”

  I disconnected her, though she still squawked, and immediately dialed another number.

  “Marcy. It’s Elle.”

  Marcy, bless her, revealed nothing but pleased surprise at my desire to take her up on her invitation to go out after work. It was exactly the reaction I needed. Too much enthusiasm would have made me rethink; too little would have made me cancel.

  “The Blue Swan,” she said confidently, like she was reaching for my hand to lead me across a bridge swaying over an abyss. In a way she was. “It’s small but the music is good and the crowd’s eclectic. The drinks are pretty cheap, too. And it’s not a meat market.”

  So kind of her, really, to keep assuming I was afraid of men. She didn’t know I had once slept with four different men in as many days. She didn’t know it wasn’t sex that scared me.

  Her kindness made me smile, though, and we made plans for after work on Friday. She didn’t question my change of mind.

  Still staring at the woman in the mirror, I hung up the phone. She looked as if she was going to cry. I felt bad for her, that woman with the dark hair, the one who only ever wore black and white. The one who might have been pretty if she’d only take care of herself, if only she weren’t smarter, if only she didn’t earn more money. I felt sorry for her but envied her, too, because she, at least, could cry and I could not.

  Chapter 02

  A figure in black waited for me when I got home from work on Thursday night. Black sweatshirt, hood pulled up over black-dyed hair. Black jeans and sneakers. Black-polished nails.

  “Hi, Gavin.” I put my key into the lock as he stood.“Hi, Miss Kavanagh. Can I give you a hand with that?” He took my bag before I had time to protest and followed me inside. He hung it neatly on the hook by the door. “I brought your book back.”

  Gavin belongs to the neighbors on my left side. I’d never met his mother, though I’d often seen her leaving for work. I’d heard raised voices a few times through our shared walls, and it made me conscious about keeping my own television turned low.

  “Did you like it?”

  He shrugged and set the book on the table. “Not as much as the first one.”

  I’d lent him my copy of C. S. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy. “Lots of people only read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Gav. Do you want the next one?”

  At fifteen Gavin was a typical Goth wannabe with his Jack Skellington wardrobe and liberal use of eyeliner. He was a nice kid, though, who liked to read and didn’t seem to have many friends. He’d shown up at my door about two years earlier, wanting to know if he could mow my grass. Since I had a patch of grass about the size of a small compact car, I didn’t need a lawn boy. I’d hired him, anyway, because he’d looked so sincere.

  Now he spent more time borrowing from my library and helping me strip wallpaper and sand floors than he did on my sad excuse for a lawn, but I liked him. He was quiet and polite and far cheerier than any Goth kid should have been. He was good, too, with tasks I found too tedious to tackle, like scraping the wallpaper paste residue left behind when we peeled off two decades worth of home decor from my dining room walls.

  “Yeah, sure. I’ll get it back to you by Monday.”

  He followed me to the kitchen, where I put a box of chocolate cookies on the table. “Whenever you get it back to me is fine.”

  He helped himself to a cookie. “Do you need any help stripping tonight?”

  We looked at each other as soon as the words had escaped his lips, and I blinked. He looked stricken. I had to turn around so as not to embarrass him with my laughter.

  “I’m done,” I managed to say. “I could use some help priming the drywall, though, if you’d like to help.”

  “Sure, sure.” He sounded relieved.

  I pulled out a frozen pizza and put it in the oven. “How’ve you been, Gav? I haven’t seen you for a few days.”

  “Oh. My mom…she’s getting married again.”

  I nodded, pulling out plates and glasses to set the table. We didn’t always talk much, Gavin and I, which I think suited both of us fine. He helped me renovate my house, and I paid him
with cookies and pizza, with books and with a place to go when his mother was out, which seemed to be quite often.

  I made a noncommittal noise as I poured milk into the glasses. Gavin got up to get the napkins from my cupboard and set out two. He washed his hands before he sat back at the table. His black polish had chipped.

  “She says this guy’s the one.”

  I glanced at him as I set out grated cheese and garlic powder. “That’s nice for her.”

  “Yeah.” He shrugged.

  “Will you be moving?”

  He looked up, dark eyes wide in a pale face. “I hope not!”

  “I hope not, too. I still have an entire dining room to paint.” I smiled at him, and he smiled back after a moment.

  I didn’t have to be a mind reader to see something was bothering him, nor a genius to figure out what it was. I could have played the part of mentor. Asked him sympathetic questions. We didn’t have that type of relationship, though, the sort that shared secrets or heartfelt revelations. He was the boy who lived next door and helped me around the house. I don’t know what I represented to him, but I doubted it was a guidance counselor.

  The buzzer went off on the oven, and I served us both sizzling slices of pizza. He added garlic powder. I used the grated cheese. We ate discussing the book I’d lent him and debating whether or not the next episode of the cop show we both liked was going to reveal the name of the killer. Gavin helped me load the dishes in the dishwasher and put away the leftover pizza. By the time I came downstairs after changing my clothes, he’d already spread out and taped down the tarp to protect the floor and opened the can of primer.

  We listened to music and painted for a few hours until he had to go home. Before he went, he browsed the shelves in my living room and picked out another book.

  “What’s this one about?” He held up my battered copy of The Little Prince.

  “A little prince from outer space.” That was the easy answer. Anyone who’s read Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic story knows there’s far more to it than that.