Six legs, six arms, thirty fingers, nine holes, the math was tough to contend with, but we did our best, and when Nikki chomped down on my nipple and Craig crushed my fingers under his ass, I didn’t complain—it was all too interesting, too new, to stop.
You never like the bare facts, Dex, not when it comes to this. You like to forget that you’re an animal, too, that you burp and fart and shit and every month you bleed. You think it’s not nice to talk about those things, and not much nicer to do them, except in the dark where no one can see. So you probably don’t want to know that Craig was hairy like a gorilla, at least until he let us shave it all off, just to see how it would feel. You might want to know how he looked in Nikki’s lace panties, but you don’t want to hear that his dick curved ever so slightly to the left and his sac had an old man’s complexion. Or that he apologized as soon as he shoved it in, and again when he took it out, like he thought I was going to cry or cry rape, like he literally couldn’t believe this was playing out as it seemed.
We were acting out our parts, that first time, waiting for the soundtrack to kick in and for things to go slow and romantically blurry instead of herky-jerky ugly real. We were waiting for sepia tones and candlelight, but eventually we got used to sticky clothes and awkward pokes and the pock sound Nikki’s thighs made when they slapped together too hard, that and the sound of grunting, and mingled laughter.
Don’t feel stupid. You couldn’t have known. No one knew, and when school finally started, Nikki and Craig wouldn’t speak to me in public. I liked that they were ashamed of it. The secret was part of the fun. I liked it when Nikki prowled past me in the hall, like she didn’t know that I could ruin her life with one well-placed rumor. I liked her snot-faced, nose-up public self, because I was the only one who knew how that face looked when Craig’s fingers were inside her, plying their clumsy magic.
By then, they were doing that in front of me; turned out we all liked to watch. Sometimes it was watching I liked best. There’s something about two people fucking, the way they forget to hide their secret selves. Even after all this time, Nikki and Craig were putting on a show for each other, Nikki playing “excited!” and “turned on!” or “boooooored,” depending on her mood, but never straying too far from “granting you the greatest favor of your life,” Craig doing “gettin’ me some” every time. But there was always a moment. She’d forget to suck in her stomach; he’d forget to gaze lovingly in her eyes; they would each forget the other was there, and the sex became masturbatory, the alien body incidental, just another tool to abuse. I liked turning transparent and immaterial, watching them lose control.
Nikki liked to watch, too, but not for watching’s sake. It brought out her inner Mussolini. She didn’t watch; she commanded, directing us in her own private puppet show, bossing us into positions meant more for her pleasure than ours.
I don’t know what Craig liked the best, especially once the novelty of two girls going at it wore off, which it did surprisingly quickly. Sometimes I don’t think he liked much of anything.
We all took a turn; sometimes, instead, we just drank and talked. The abandoned station was a magic place, a sacred one, where secrets were swallowed by the trees. We were different people in the woods; we were our own shadow selves. Nikki told us about the time her inbred cousin raped her at a Thanksgiving dinner, squashing her against her grandma’s lace-doily quilt and tasting of sweet potatoes and gravy when he forced his mouth against hers to shut her up, as if she would have screamed. I told them how the Bastard wanted to send me away once the baby was born, that I’d read it in the letter he wrote to his pastor back in Jersey, some Billy Graham wannabe with a local radio show. I told them how I’d also intercepted the pastor’s response, godly advice on how to erase me from the family picture for the good of the Bastard’s reputation and spawn—then, because we’d sworn an oath of secrecy, not truth, I told them I didn’t care. Craig told us about the time in junior high he got a blow job from some poor guy on his JV basketball team, then got so freaked out that he spread word that the kid had been sneaking peeks of the other guys in the locker room and had tried to cop a feel during a wrestling bout. After they gave the guy his third beat-down, he transferred to a school in another county.
“Didn’t even feel guilty about it,” Craig said. “Does that make me, like, a psychopath?”
“Probably,” I said. Nikki laughed and laughed.