Ted was having a hard time piecing the previous night’s events together as he sat on the edge of the bed and surveyed the room: His board shorts were still hanging on the ceiling fan as it managed to rotate. The fan was a wounded soldier--desperately trying to cool air thick with humidity yet it had no chance. He saw Kathy’s g-string underwear peeking out from the cold tile of the bathroom floor. A flashback of holding her head and hair while she vomited in the toilet came back to him.
Drinking is involved, he thought. Drinking is always involved when Kathy and I go out. He chuckled. Hell, no matter what we’re doing, one thing you can bet on is that we’re drinking.
Ted got up, scratched his balls from under his boxer shorts underwear and he began walking to the bathroom, tentatively. With each step he remembered a piece of the night.
His work was crazy-busy. Friday night and the weekend beach crowd had arrived. He started off his evening with Bradley the bar-back and a few lines of coke as they prepped the bar. Then there were the fellows from his old high school that showed up and he did a few melon ball shooters with them. A couple of hotties, teenage girls with fake IDs and big tits, insisted he join them in their round of Sex On The Beach shots. He regrouped with Bradley in the back and snorted a handful of lines before the local restaurant crew showed up after their shifts ended. Kathy was one of them. Kathy, a seasonal employee down at the shore for the summer waiting tables--putting off the impending real world job prospects that loomed come fall. Just like him.
She showed up already drunk from sneaking drinks on her shift. Ted knew it was easy for her to get flirty and have people slip her drinks, sexy as she was. Hell, he did the same thing. How could he complain about it?
After Kathy showed up with two of her co-workers in tow, Ted took his 15-minute break right after midnight and snuck out back to smoke a joint with her. They giggled after a few tokes then dusted off the cherry half way to save the rest for later. Ted stole some kisses from her before slapping her ass and saying he had to get back to work.
“I will tag that shit later, baby,” he said.
“I know you will, baby,” Kathy said. “I know you will.”
As Ted sat down on the toilet to piss – an action that always mystified Kathy – he realized that shortly after the joint things began to get blurry. He remembered giving Kathy and her friends a few drinks to placate them after last call. He remembered closing up the bar and counting his till. Back in the kitchen Bradley was still cutting up lines, this time with the Mexican dishwasher, and Ted thought, What an odd thing to see two people strung out on coke wanting to talk but yet unable to understand each other. He remembered telling himself that he must remember that and he felt himself smiling as he pissed because he had just remembered something that he wanted to remember.
What he didn’t remember was the bar that Kathy and he and her friends went to afterwards--an all-night rave-type place with a DJ pumping out sound until the sun came up. He vaguely recalled finishing off the joint with Kathy and her co-workers before they started making out and bumping and grinding on the dance floor. And how hot it got him to see her like that; to see her feeling up another woman’s body, to see her kissing someone as he imagined she kissed him.
He recalled now making out himself, yet the face he saw wasn’t Kathy but a hot red-headed number, one of the underage girls who ordered Sex On The Beach shots and thought it cute in a rookie-drinker way to make sexual innuendos to the barkeep as you order the shots.
Ted got up from the pisser and looked back out the bathroom doorway at Kathy, still sleeping like a baby on the bed. He noticed she had one pillow over her head as if to muffle the sound of the ferry’s horn, which would go off every half-hour after the one that must have awakened him this morning.
He couldn’t remember what happened after that, much less how they got home. Ted cracked the blinds in the bathroom window to peek outside. Both of their cars were in the driveway, no visible dents. He let out a sigh of relief.
Ted then stood in front of the mirror and fingered his tattoo around the collarbone and up his neck. Kathy had hated that he got a tattoo. Much less this tattoo. And Ted figured she would. As a matter of fact, Ted was prepared when he got it that nobody would clearly understand why somebody would get a noose tattooed around their neck. Kathy thought it was morbid and gross. Ted tried to explain to her that it was more reflective of his affirmation for life, that life can be taken away from you in an instant and you should respect that. She didn’t understand.
It was also a way to commemorate his botched suicide attempt, which unbeknownst to Kathy, was a direct result of the things she had done. And he was reminded of that every day that he stood in front of a mirror.
Ted and Kathy had met at the beach through their families when they were kids. By the teenage years, they fell into full-on crushes during summer vacations. It was the summer between junior and senior year that the deed, the deal was done. When they both arrived in late June, Kathy’s body has blossomed since the previous year. Gone were the braces and junior high geekiness, replaced instead by a sexy girl – all full of curves, a plump ass, perky tits. They spent that summer exploring each other’s body.
It was the summer that Ted fell in love with Kathy. Of course he never told her. And as much as Kathy liked Ted, she figured him just another hard-up teenage boy wanting to get into her pants. She did end up blowing Ted that summer and it was something that Ted, still to this day, would jerk off too. Her mouth on his hard cock, the sound of her slurping up his semen, the way she held her head high afterwards like it was some great accomplishment. Ted had trouble remembering a lot of things, but this he wouldn’t forget.
The summer after their freshman year in college, Kathy told Ted about all the guys that lusted after her, hit on her, proposed to her, felt her up in the dark corner of bars, forced kisses on her--and Ted secretly lusted after her himself yet tried to feign disinterest while writhing inside at the thought of what she was saying.
He wasn’t sure why he asked the question because he knew the answer wouldn’t be the one he wanted… but he asked anyway: “When did you lose your virginity?”
Kathy paused. She seemed lost for a moment. She spoke.
“Remember when we were at the beach the summer before senior year in high school?”
Ted nodded. He didn’t remember much but he nodded.
“Well, do you remember that college guy who stayed across the street from my family?” she said. “His name was Kevin Kirk. He was my first.”
Ted was dumbfounded. How could she have lost her virginity to that guy? I mean, they had spent almost the entire summer together making out on the beach, groping each other in the Funhouse’s wall of mirrors on the boardwalk, and writing letters to each other for months--after the fact--talking about what they had done that summer. Never once did Kathy ever mention this at the time. It crushed Ted, this sudden insight. It was then that Ted decided that life wasn’t worth living for. To this day, he thought, I never told you the real reason I tried to O.D. on sleeping pills. Ted wanted to hang himself but was too chicken-shit to do it, he recalls. And slitting his wrists seemed such a messy prospect even if he wasn’t going to be the one to clean it up. So pills it was. After the tattoo, nobody would remember that he attempted to check out by taking a handful of Unisom, no. They would see his tattoo and think of other things. And to Ted, it was all about what everybody else thought.
Kathy thought of herself as damaged goods. Anytime anyone gave her the slightest bit of attention, she was putty in the hands that groped her. Kevin was older and smarter than all those high school boys she knew. He talked about art and books and music and things deeper than Mr. Shannohan’s third-period biology class. She felt bad after she gave it up to Kevin because she thought he thought she was someone special. But after he fucked her on the closed mini-golf course during the Fourth of July celebration, he barely said a word to her the rest of the summer. He ruined me, she thought. Destroyed me. Especially when, by August, she would see a stream of beautiful young co-eds coming to and exiting from his place. She could hear the music and the sound of coins clinking glasses during rowdy games of quarters.
I just wanted to be loved, she thought. Is that so bad?
So Kathy spent her senior year hell-bent on finding love--or, at least, luring someone that would love her. It occurred to her that Ted might just be that person. But she didn’t love Ted. She liked him a whole lot, she often reflected, and they had a lot in common but she had doubts as to whether Ted was the one. The One. And how were you supposed to know who was The One anyway?
Kathy woke to the sound of the ferry’s horn and looked up to see Ted standing in front of the bathroom mirror and studying the noose tattoo around his neck. What a fucking drama queen, she thought. Enough already. Either kill yourself or stop talking about it, she thought. She didn’t say anything. She pulled the sheets down and slipped her legs off the side of the bed.
Just as she had done so she noticed teeth marks on her calf. It looked as if she had been bitten by something. Or someone. She leaned down to further inspect the wound while mulling over her previous thought: Why is Ted so preoccupied with suicide?
Kathy got up to go relieve herself in the bathroom. It never occurred to her that Ted was madly in love with her and that her unattainable love was driving him to the brink. She just assumed he was much like her: too scared to be alone but too selfish to be committed. She also thought about how those fucking teeth marks showed up on her leg, because she was feeling them now. It wouldn’t be the first time she couldn’t remember what happened the night before, and it was not the first time she found errant bite marks on her body.
She heard Ted start the shower and she waited a few minutes to join him. While waiting she slipped her hand down between her legs because her pussy was still tingling. She felt a lump of jism and figured Ted had fucked her while she was passed out. She lit a cigarette and smoked it while she walked to the bathroom. She snubbed it out on the bathroom sink, exhaled, and opened the shower door.
Ted’s face was soapy and it was obvious that he was almost done showering. Always washing his face last for some reason, she wondered. Kathy bent down as Ted cleared the soap from his eyes and she started blowing him. She looked up and saw another face: Bradley’s. Last night came back to her. She had gotten really drunk early-on at work, sipping margaritas while on her shift, and when she got to Ted’s bar, she was shit-faced and ugly. Ted didn’t notice. The joint they smoked on his break almost made her puke. So she begged for some blow but Ted denied her saying it wasn’t his.
She had slipped away from Ted and found Bradley where, in her drunkenness, she unbuckled his belt and blew him just to get a few lines off of him. A girl has to ante-up after all if she wants to get something, Kathy remembered thinking. So Bradley and she sauntered off to the walk-in fridge, where they ended up doing lines: he off of her tits, she off the stiff shaft of his cock. She vaguely recalled screaming out to him to bite her nipples, slap her ass and fuck her hard. Bite me. Bite me. Bite me.
She lost her train of thought after that, forgot about her dick-sucking and was snapped back to reality by Ted saying, “Ouch!” Then, “Why the fuck are you biting my dick, bitch?”
He turned off the shower and left the bathroom without a towel.
About the author:
Greg Barbera is a 37-year-old writer living in Durham, NC. He secretly wants to do a coffee table book with pictures of nothing but clouds. www.bodhihana.com/houseofg
© 2009 Word Riot
