Usually there was an errand Jake’s boss required that would take him away. But some nights, like this one, Jake was free. By the time he made it through the door she was up on her tiptoes to kiss him and remove his jacket and toss it over the wire dummy. When she veered to the bathroom he followed, his eyes on the short gauzy skirt she wore, the green and white stockings. He said it was amusing how she made her own clothes. The mere idea of Evie set to a chore, her face busy in concentration, her idle hands made tense and precise. His amusement bothered Evie when she remembered all the garments she lost during the eviction. Clothes she’d made herself, gone because Jake didn’t speak up sooner. But how could he have known all that?
Evie held out awhile after the first time, when she’d rubbed off on his leg because he wouldn’t go inside her. His discretion threw her off. It was strange compared to how things usually happened on her block. The next time, when he tried to move his hand more liberally up her thigh, she twisted away. She kissed him these early days, let him do with his hands everywhere but between her legs. Evie didn’t understand where this fresh modesty came from. New barriers were erected. Ones she’d never had before. Chastity had never been her thing, not even as a girl. Now she’d gone virgin somehow. This wasn’t something Evie understood, but she was game if Jake was. When she resisted, it was his turn to say dopey things. “I was wrong about you. You’re a nice girl, aren’t you? Stuck in the wrong part of town.” What was she supposed to say to that? Nobody had ever talked so dirty to her. “Whatever you want,” she said, then slapped his hands away. This made him even hotter. She could feel the way he boiled. His face red. His blushing.
Above her, bathtub bottles lined the window, varicolored salts and powders inside the clear glass of apothecary jars. Evie mixed potions in the water then turned to undress Jake. She was pleased undoing his buttons, in whisking away his pants before they pooled on the damp tile. She led him to water and held his hand until he was submerged. She undressed herself then, sat on the stool to cleave the stockings from her legs. She turned away to pull the blouse over her head, crossed her breasts with an arm, and stepped into the water to nestle between his legs. The water was scalding, but Evie didn’t care. She liked it best when the water burnt. Their bodies turned red where they were wet. She rolled over after a while to kiss him, to let his hand skate along her jaw to her shoulders, down her back to the rise of hips, back and forth, until she finally let him inside. She gasped when he slipped the threshold at last, because a man always liked the sound of air escaping her lips at the moment he pushed inside.
There was conflict in the way they made love. Like neither of them had ever done this before. Jake never came, for one thing. They did it long, hard, slow, fast, in various modulations and strengths. They tried different things. Sometimes the water went tepid, but they didn’t care, moving slow, barely going, because the discipline this took made his eyes roll back in his head. Still he didn’t come. It wasn’t bad that he didn’t. It was just peculiar to leave off unfinished. His member red and raw, still apt, if agitated, vibrating.
Evie didn’t mind what she looked like below, even if her parts were as much of a mess as they felt. She’d earned that.
She posed naked in the parlor mirror to put her hair up, arms and elbows raised as she wrangled wet curls. There were shadows in the hollows of her armpits where soft hair grew. She turned her hips from side to side to examine her body—the neat puff of hair on her pubis, the way her nipples pointed cockeyed as she swayed. Jake came up from behind, fully dressed, to put his hands over her breasts.
“The nipple on that one always was wrong,” she said, her mouth turned.
“This guy?” he asked, squeezing the left one.
“No. The other.”
He turned her around to have a look, but she walked away before he could see the defect. She put on her robe and sat by the window to cool off. The night was going fast.
“You think I’m a fool, don’t you?”
“Of course,” he laughed. “They’re tits, yeah? They’re good.”
Evie played like she was angry. She wouldn’t talk. She looked out the window at some man rushing up the avenue. The street was always busy after suppertime. A perfectly legitimate man, normally good for something, would have a few drinks at dinner, and that indiscretion, before long, would lead up the steps to a madam’s parlor. The guy would be lost to a wicked imagination the rest of the night. It was no secret how that happened.
The way things went between a girl and guy was a funny thing to Evie all of sudden—secure in her rooms with Jake—but she didn’t let on her good humor. For Evie, playing sad was part of the game.
To raise her spirits, Jake told a joke about a pastor’s wife who ate only lamb meat. “Don’t you get it? Lamb meat!” A grin broke through. She let him hug her from behind, his arms over her shoulders to reach inside the fold of her kimono. She wasn’t really mad at him.
Evie turned her face up to his. “Are you okay? You’re all red. You’re sweating.”
Jake’s cheeks were red. His neck and chest too, something more than blushing. His hair hadn’t dried after the bath because he sweat.
“You made me this way.” He laughed in a dull sort of way.
“Shouldn’t you go? If you’re coming down with something?”
Jake looked ill—and he must have felt miserable from the way he tried to keep her from examining him—but he acted like his condition was a joke. He wanted to stay, he said. Workers in the machine didn’t get many nights off during an election. If he spent this one sick in bed, he’d never get it back.
“But maybe you’re right,” he said. “I’ll get some wine. We’ve got to keep up our strength.”
In the kitchen, after he put the corkscrew to a bottle, Jake rifled in paper sacks on the floor that were half-filled with tins of canned meat. There was deviled ham, beef au jus. What remained of the food he sent over.
“What’s the big idea? Don’t you like canned meat?”
“I’m sure it’s fine,” Evie said. “But I don’t eat the stuff. I’m a vegetarian.”
This seemed to strike Jake dumb as he stood there with the wine. How many wisecracks about eating meat were spinning gleefully in his brain? He didn’t let slip even the first of them. The corner of his mouth turned up as he drank. “I didn’t know you had principles.”