Sexplosion

An excerpt from The Sisterhood of the Wick

SEXPLOSION

”You know, hashtags are a lot like
lingerie.”

Her hand found my wrist. “How so?”

“They’re meant to hint at something deeper. Both have the crosshatch pattern. Both are lateral moves toward another section of reality. Like a hashtag links a still-shot frozen in time and drawn from a longer sequence to a greater scope, lingerie and lace are code for temporary sluthood. Why did you wear this thing if you didn’t even give me the chance to see it?”

Her hand let go of my wrist. “Lingerie is meant to be felt, not just seen. In this
case, it’s also meant to serve as a thing to remember me by.”

I dropped my head onto the pillow and sighed. “Are you saying that I don’t get to see you again?”

“Why on earth would you look to devalue this sacred moment by replicating it over and over? Is the unique occurrence not powerful enough to stand on its own?”
She ran a hand through her hair, that hair so long that it became one with the
darkness of the room, emanating everywhere.

“I’m all for replicating,” I said, sitting up. “Not much for nostalgia, or even
memories. A creature of now, I am. The past, because it is in the past, might
as well have never happened. It only leaves consequence, like a duck leaves a
wake across a pond.”

“Am I the duck or the wake?” she asked with a kiss.

“You are the wake. A splendid wake, no less. But one that will vanish from the pond of my life’s chain of events the moment we leave this place.”

“Hence the lingerie,” she said. “It is meant to stay with you. It is yours.”

“I could hold onto this for another three decades, stuff it into a drawer. I could drape it over a towel peg in my bathroom. I could even frame it on a wall. Still, it would only come to represent its own being. The story behind it, how I came to acquire it, would fade over the years, quicker than you think.”

“Are you saying that I am forgettable? You have a knack for quiet insults.”

“I’m saying that everything is forgettable, ultimately. You will come to mean something wonderful that had once happened to me, but the particulars will all be lost. There’s a chance that the memory of you having black hair would disappear. Like a sumptuous feast that’s so enjoyable that you even take stock of its consumption to relish in its nowness, yet it leaves no trace. You can’t even look back on it because, great though it was, it leaves no impression.”

“I intend to leave an impression.” She kissed me again before turning over to sit up.

Guitar music out in the street rang with the timbre of a Stratocaster run through a clean setting on an amplifier. No distortion, but certainly not acoustic. The blues scale descended, a bit of melancholy mixed with hope. It must have been some loser musician serenading a girl sealed up inside one of the motel rooms.

Nicole Feldspar swayed her body to the music—her wide, athletic shoulders undulating as she worked her way into her bra. I dragged a finger down the long stretch of her back, which held the curvature of a violin. This made her look back at me, and I saw that Queen Nefertiti profile. Like with the lingerie, her beautiful face had remained unseen during our lovemaking, as if the two objects along with the act constituted too much beauty gathered in one place, like the two tablets of the ten commandments sealed away inside the blinding, gilded Ark of the Covenant.

“I must go, you know,” she said, standing up. A tiny triangle of light shot
through the gap between her thighs. Walking toward the bathroom, she paused. “Who’s the lucky girl?” she asked.

I sat up. “What are you talking about?” My feet became trapped by a tangle of
bedsheets that kept me from making sure this bird of paradise didn’t escape
from my grasp.

“The sienna,” she said. “The lipstick. Whom is it intended for?” Did ever a
cosmetics salesperson use the proper subject form of who?

“Myself,” I said.

She laughed. “You will wear it?”

“I’ve been known to Hoover it up from time to time,” I said. Maybe the guitar player outside was down in the street; maybe he was on the balcony in front of an adjacent room. The empty night, after all, caused his picking to echo out. His playing had an effortless sensibility.

Nicole stepped into the bathroom and closed the door before turning on the light. I raised my chin to see the strip of light over the edge of the bed. The faint
sound of her peeing made me desire her more than was sensible.

I put my clothes on, figuring I’d head down to my car and grab a fresh change of clothes and take a shower. As soon as I heard the toilet flush and the water
from the sink trickle out, I bolted up and flattened myself against the side of
the door. When she came out, I wrapped her in my arms.

There was a spurt of anger in her flailing out from my embrace. “You scared me,” she said. She froze, not knowing what to do or where to go.

That confusion was what I wanted. The more she vacillated, the more she would grow used to my presence and forestall her leaving.

“Have you seen the size of the bathtub?” she said. “It should take no more than ten minutes to fill up with hot water. I like it scalding.”

“I didn’t bring bubble bath,” I said.

“But first a shower,” she said. “A bath without a prior shower is just icky.”

I wanted icky but I conceded. The sequence of stuffing on my shoes, bolting to my car for my duffle bag, and ending in the shower passed like a memory engram belonging to another person, transplanted into my own brain. Caught up in the moment, the first act of love with her burned away like an acid eating away at a sheet of paper. It therefore had an austere sparseness to it, as if happening
to someone else or being just a watered-down simulation. The prospect of a
second union, therefore, made the blood rush through my body and head like an electric charge surging through high-tension wire.

Part of me wanted to finish the shower as quickly as possible; another part of me wished to prolong it, lest the moment of divinity begin and in so doing embark upon the inevitable march toward its own end.

Blasted awake by the water, I emerged from the bathroom to the sound of the guitar playing. The door was wide open. She was nowhere to be seen inside the room. All the sheets, blankets, and comforter had been dashed off the bed and lay in a heap on the floor next to a chair. Lying in the middle of the bed all by itself was the lingerie, whose color, because of the darkness, still remained a
mystery.

The souvenir of divine experience, shot through with import, took on the lineaments of a holy relic. Upset by the lie that we would share a bath, I stormed out toward the balcony. The guitar playing continued from somewhere outside.

Down below, a streetlamp cast a cone of light onto the empty intersection of the four-lane boulevard parallel with the motel and the cross street that accessed the freeway onramp. Scurrying across the light was a lone figure in a long coat and dark, knee-high boots that stomped away from the motel with an urgency that broke my heart.

I listened intently to the guitar playing Nicole’s exit music, me just leaning
over the railing, casting my soul into the cool night, the guitar music using
the freeway ambiance as background, melancholy and hopeful all at once, until the very loud snap of a mousetrap calibrated to cut a cow in half blasted from inside the room.

When I jumped and turned, a puff of smoke tackled my face, and was then gone. I struggled to find the light switch. Once I succeeded, I found there under the bright light, in the middle of the bed, a gaping hole a foot in diameter. There were no flames, just countless tiny shreds of cloth sprinkled around the cavity that made the bed look like a two-dimensional illustration of quantum physics, where a deep indentation interrupts the supposed immutability of the space-time
fabric with enough malice to turn that corner of the universe inside-out.

Hovering my hand over the crater confirmed the lack of residual heat. I leaned in for a closer look. Out from the hole snaked a strap belonging to a rag or garment that was so far gone from the blast that it melded into and became one with the innards of the eviscerated mattress. It was red.

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[An excerpt from my brand-new novel The Sisterhood of the Wick]

Available in ebook and paperback.