She’s sitting on the other bed, draped in a sheet, looking at me. I’ve been with three girls, not counting her, but this was a different thing. I’m not a guy who gets sappy about sex. Sex is sex, but this was her giving me everything. And me giving her everything back. Nicolette being Nicolette, she wanted what she wanted, but she returned the favor in spades. This was me wanting her a hundred yards beyond happy the whole time. This was fuck-your-brains-out sex. The only words that come to mind are words that produce eye-rolls, words from the afternoon soaps I used to watch with my grandma when I stayed at my dad’s: secret passion, abandon, bliss, the four letter l word. There’s no cliché we didn’t hit, and hit hard.
There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for this girl. There’s a cliché I’d stake my life on. I’d slay the Nemean lion and clean out the Augean stable like Hercules. (Xena, Warrior Princess hung out with Hercules, right?) I’d wave a gun at a guy who no one in his right mind would consider waving a gun at.
I say, “That was beyond.”
She opens her eyes wider. “You’d better not be slut-shaming me. Now that I know where you keep the knives.”
“I’m thanking you. Oh God. Whoever that guy was, he should have held on to you.”
She looks pissed off in her playful mode of pissed off, not her lethal one.
“That is so sexist and wrong. I was underage. He was a creep. Worse than a creep. He totally had another girlfriend. His real girlfriend.”
She shifts the sheets she’s cuddled up in, and there’s a quick flash of a breast. This is a marathon of being uncontrollably (thank you, Grandma’s soaps), capital O, On. Holding up my end of the conversation is an act of pure will. That’s how bad it is.
I say, “Jesus, what happened?”
“It kind of blew up. One minute he’s got me in the back of his car, this red Camaro, stoned out of his mind, and he’s all in love with me, sure he is, and then—”
I’m so jealous of this creep, it’s ridiculous. I go over to the other bed, two feet away, and grab her. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to visualize it.” She makes her sour-lemon face. I ask her, “Was that wrong to say?”
“So, so wrong.” I think she’s joking, but you can’t always tell with her. “But I forgive you because now I redid it with a guy I wanted to give it up to.”
“Happy to oblige, but do you want to stop saying ‘give it up’?”
“Make me. I don’t know what I want. Figure it out.”
I spend the rest of the morning, until after checkout time with the maid pounding on the door, trying to figure it out.
Nick starts rolling her things into her backpack at the speed of molasses.
Then, not thinking, I slap her on the butt and tell her to hurry up.
73
Nicolette
Jack is shocked out of his mind. And also grateful. It’s very sweet. Everything about it. Every second.
Sweet and fierce.
Then the maid starts banging on the door, and he freaks.
I say, “What was that?”
“What?” Jack looks dazed and confused, but I know he’s not. “That? That was a pat on the ass. Sorry.”
“That was more like a swat.”
Jack sits down on the unmade bed. Buttons his cuffs. Looks insanely cute. Looks flummoxed. Then looks angry. “I would never swat you. That was a pat. You pummel people for fun, so you might miss the distinction.”
“Laugh at me all you want. But that felt slightly like getting hit.”
Jack sits there, pressing his fists into the mattress, looking like a guy who just got punched in the stomach for real.
I go, “Jack? What did I say? What just happened?”
“Let’s see.” He’s buttoning his shirt up to his neck. “Two minutes after . . . we’re together . . . like that . . . you think I’d hit you?”
“That’s not what I said! I said that was slightly too hard of a swat—that’s all I said!”
He’s packing up like a crazed shirt-folding robot. “I’ve hit five people in my life. You’re not on the list.”
“Who?”
He stands up. Looks away. As if the effort of counting the five is beyond him.
“My brother.” He won’t even look at me. “He was all over me when we were kids. My best friend, once. The drunk in the parking lot. That asshole I downed in my apartment.”
“That’s four.”
There’s a long pause. “And my father.”
“No way!”
He’s still examining the headboard, talking to the wall.
I can only imagine what happened next. I mean, I saw what happened next, I’m pretty sure. On his back.
I say, “If anybody hurt my kid, I’d kill him. If you take the guy out at the first swat, he never gets to carve up anybody.”
“Yet you look so much like a sane girl.” Jack can be so condescending sometimes. “Did anybody ever tell you about turning the other cheek?”
“Why would I do that? I’m already going straight to hell. Why not take some scum down with me?”
“You know that’s crazy, don’t you? Nicolette—don’t you?”
“You thought it was fine to get rid of me when you thought I was scum.”
Jack pulls me toward him by the upper arms. Hard, so not a romantic experience. He says, “I never thought it was fine.”
“I’m sorry!” I’m standing right in front of him, wedged between the two beds. “I was nicer before. But if someone was going to hurt my kid, or me, or my family, I’m not in a place where I’d turn my cheek. I’m in the place where I’d take care of it. You should know.”
“I know I should know!” Jack shouts. “Don’t you think I wanted him gone? But wanting someone gone is different from seeing him lying on the garage floor in a pool of blood because you fingered him.”