The Waitress, pt 1.

He watched her, grinning.  There was something scrappy about her, she was from Virginia, maybe. Working class parents, hand to mouth, whiskey evenings.  “What’s your name?”

“Paige,” she said.  

“I’m Max.”  

His drink came up and she jumped up and brought it over from the bar for him and then sat next to him again, mopping up the condensation on their table with the edge of her apron.  

“Paige the sweetheart,” he said.

 He was looking at her tank top, the twisted strap of it, and then she did what he wanted to do, running her fingers thoughtfully along her neck, and Max thought simultaneously of Katerina, how she’d loved to brag about being his last fiance.  He was always getting engaged, all throughout college; never had girlfriends, just a long conga line of fiances-  he thought of Katerina and then how his cock would feel inside the tight, wet interior of the waitress, the soft hungry jellyfish spasms inside her sponging tight around him, his balls slapping her ass like a flag snapping in the wind.  

   Paige the sweetheart, the smirker, the cheap whore, easy, he thought what her face would look like without a jaw like the girl he’d seen in Stanland, blown off by the door of a bombed truck, just sitting there in the dust in shock, swaying slightly, her face unhinged and dripping, eyes brown, trachea amazingly unhurt.  The inside of a girl was as wet and full of shapes as his mother’s fruit jello.  

    “How you like Charleston?” Paige said.  
​
   The images still coming.  The more of his past he pushed away, the more of it he seemed to create: that is, it bubbled forwards through Max’s fingers, swelling, threatening, cold and wet, uncontainable.  “It’s pretty cool,” he said.
 

---

Marta, by Alessandro Vetrugno.

    Then they were at her apartment, sloshed on vodka.  He’d realized what it was about her.  That bony ass, it was like his babysitter’s when he was ten.  And she had a surprisingly clean place and dorky pillows everywhere that made his heart squeeze a little.

   The damp close air of the room, her windows shut up all day.  You could tell how someday- the writing was already in the air- she’d be a divorcée, living on her own in a dump just like this one.  The fridge smelly and empty- the place dark and burbling.  There was a humidifier left on somewhere, and the space was small enough that he could smell her bed in the dark, sour.  

   He walked to the air conditioner without turning on the light and stood against it, holding his hand in the cooled air.

   Looking at her, waitress, college-girl, she was probably a Communications major, what’s her name again.  

   She’s standing there framed there in the light from the door.  The streetlight.  Strands of her hair damp against her neck.    

    She closed the door.

   For a moment they circled one another, their eyes adjusting to the dark, to what they might do.  He’d had an easy air of possessiveness over her when they were with the others.  Now that they were alone, here, the two of them adults, they were both a little shy, self-conscious.  She stretched her mouth, he popped his neck.  It was hard to look at her directly.

   “You wan’ a joint?” Paige said, finally.

   “You go ahead,” he said, coming up behind her, his hands circling her waist as she picked up the twist of soft paper.

   “There’s somethin’ about you,” she said, “I feel like there’s something different about you- you’re real mysterious, you know?  I keep wondering what you’re thinking.  Guys around here, they’re not like you.”

   He kissed her neck, saying nothing.

   “Do you even think I’m pretty?” she said, suddenly.

   “I think you’re delicious.”  He couldn’t think of anything else to say, and then he was silent even though he knew she wanted- she needed- more from him.  

   More words.

   Girls, Max believed, were used to expressing themselves.  It was their way of being in the world.  

   Evaluating, backpedaling, worrying.  It was why they were easy to talk with; when you began a conversation with one, most of them usually just continued with the same stream of thought they’d been on anyway, only this time out loud.  Always assuming that you were interested in whatever boring shit they’d been thumbing over in their minds.  

---

   He believed it took them no special effort, as if women were natural conduits or something. ​

      Now, whether or not what they had to say was interesting, that was another story.  He’d said as much to the marriage counselor, a kooky bastard he hadn’t minded, truth be told.
 
   The guy had just given him half a grin, using of course the side of his mouth that Katerina couldn’t see as she turned and started in on him.  ​

---

You self-satisfied fucking prick all you care about is your fucking self    

   Paige the waitress, her bony ass in his hand was like a kid’s, and he thought of Katerina the first night he’d snuck her into his mother’s basement.  

   Kat’s ass was big and tight the way he liked, the two of them kissing each other hungrily in the driveway, waiting for the AC to roar on to cover the sound of the garage door opening, of his leading Katerina inside, down the creaky carpeted hallway to his room.

   The minute they were inside it, his hand was coming towards her in the dark, going lower now, a pilot touch, tracing warmly over the strip of skin exposed between Katerina’s scanty top and the front of her jeans.  Her naked pelvis was deliciously hot in the cool air, permissive.

   “Take deeper breaths,” he said, like his buddy told him to, and she had.  He’d learned how to make her consciousness bloom inside the boundary lines he gave it, girls loved that, being dominated, defined: they were like water diverting into a creek bed.

   “I’m gonna make you feel so good,” he said to her.  Letting his fingers spread, his hand lifting slightly as she inhaled, pushing down when she exhaled, and her want of him rose into his fingers, Katerina curled towards him like an opening flower, wilder now, a jungle flower.  He felt his consciousness slipping over hers, harnessing her, he was going to carry her along, take her down the dark ecstatic river, make her scream.  Exhilarated, his yearning for her uncharted interiors.  Her pelvis tip-pressing up into him, and each place his body met hers hummed.  

   Now she was firmly on her back, now he lay between her legs.  Folding over her, pressing his face into her neck.  So white and clean- the word for it-

   “Your shoulders are like snow,” he said, shyly.  The words coming out sweeter than he’d meant them to sound.

    And the girl who would be his girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend, and then his college girlfriend; his last fiancé and then most finally of all, his ex-wife, a pillar of salt, that’s what she was, not snow at all, but he hadn’t known that then: Katerina touched her shoulder, wanting to feel what he saw in her, and then she smiled at him.  Mockingly.  

   “Warm snow?” she said.
 
    He pressed the side of his face against Kat’s.  “Very warm.  You’re melting.” He felt her sigh, and then, ever so slightly, she moved away.  

   “You’re thinking about your boyfriend?” he said.  Too eager, seventeen.  Just let me hold you, let me take you there.

    “I never feel this way with him.  Anyway, he’s not here.”  Katerina’s wicked laugh.  “And you don’t know him!  It’s fine, he’s no hero.  Me, I’ll tell you the truth about me, you think I’m just some sweet little slip of a thing, mm-?  Little 4.0 band-theater-babe-in-the-woods, mm-?  Do you know I used to fuck Lauren’s father?”  Saying this as if she wanted her words to slap him.  

   “Well, it was more complicated than that,” she said.  “Her mom was putting me up because things got crazy at my house.  That was fun, me and Lauren and her mom.  It was a little art house, a real sisterhood for a minute.  Supportive.  But then Kendra, the mom, she got uterine cancer.  It happened fast.  And she died.”

    “Jesus, I didn’t know. Lauren-?”

    “It was terrible.  Then I started fucking Kendra’s husband.  Ex-husband?  Widow, I guess.  That happened fast, too.  You know, he was lonely, I’m hot, I’ve always loved older guys.  We tried to keep it a secret as long as we could.  I’d sit there next to him on the couch, and Lauren would be in the chair looking at us, and I would wonder if this was how Kendra had felt.  She was so cool, you know, I’d always looked up to her.  It was like I’d just slipped into her skin.  Real creepy, kinda.”

    “Bad girl, huh?”

    “I wanted to do it.  So I did.”  Katerina said, shrugging her lovely shoulders.  “She and I, we aren’t friends now.  But maybe we wouldn’t have been anyway, and I got to have the experience that I wanted to have.”  

   His smile had been faint, observing.

    “You like my story?” Kat said, rolling away.  “You like bad women?”  

Was it that simple?

    “I like interesting women.”


​                                                     From All Babes Are Wolves.  
                                                Rest of the chapter next Thursday :) 

Hsin-yao Tseng.