Out now with Trident Press: https://www.tridentcafe.com/trident-press-titles/100ccs-corey-lof

 

Another morning and maybe I’d groan and sidle up beside her, hide my morning breath behind closed lips and walk my fingers up the inside of her thighs until she wakes up. She’d point her chin to whatever patchy bug-ridden ceiling we lay under and, eyes closed, pull my hand from between her legs and place it between mine. She’d make a casual pass, guide my hand through a few strokes, as if to say, it’s okay, go for it, and then slip back into half sleep, maybe walk her fingers back and forth between my legs. Both of us with our eyes closed, both breathing through our nose, hiding the ashtray dog breath neither of us wants to endure nor subject the other to. On another morning—one that didn’t follow a sleepless night or a day in which we fought, then barely spoke—I’d kick the blankets down to the bottom of the bed, bury my face in her chest and come all over the both of us. We might lay there for another minute or two but eventually we’d get up to wipe ourselves down and the morning would begin. I used to do this a lot, but now less and less. And definitely not tomorrow, after no sleep, and today. . .

—

The moon saved us. It was out in full, outlining the tops of the mountains and lighting up the leaves of the banana trees and palm trees clear down to the ocean. We went straight up to the deck and climbed into a hammock that really wasn’t meant for two. We weren’t at the stage of falling into each other yet, so we lay shoulder to shoulder, half-hanging out. There was a bit of hand touching and holding but it was all very self-conscious. I felt bad. We weren’t talking.

I don’t think I said anything until I said, Okay, as a sort of verbal cue to let her know I was going to kiss her. I said, “Okay,” and leaned over and looked her in the eyes until she closed them. Things loosened up from there. I remember looking up from between her legs and seeing the underside of her chin and chest all moonlit blue.

—

We fucked in the early morning dark and got up with the sun.

—

I feel guilty, forgetting the whole thing, as my gaze follows Xi’s hands over her ass and up and down her legs. She catches me and laughs, flattered, then the kids call for the woman, and she looks towards the door.

I get up, go outside, and smoke a cigarette. The woman walks from room to room with a bucket and a mop. The three kids follow. The gate buzzes, and she puts down the bucket and runs.

Xi’s in bed when I return. I get under the blankets and, once again, forgetting it all, feel the warmth of her moisturized body wrap around mine.

—

Wake up in a seemingly windowless room. Wood blinds closed tight. Fall back to sleep. Wake again, in a limbo of skin and sheets, tied in knots, communicating in moans, shifting positions when limbs go numb, for hours.

Light breaks through the blinded windows.

Xi’s up and I’m up and with us: a vague sense of anxiety about the coming weeks, money, time, rehearsal—that sound and how it persists—

Slink through the room, repack what we can, avoid each other's eyes when we can. Hide here, in my notebook, when I can.

—

I go inside and take a piss and when I come out Xi’s on the bed with her legs pointing up at the ceiling, heels bouncing off the wall. “What I’m doing is amazing,” she says. “You can do it too.”

I get on the bed beside her, put my ass where the bed meets the wall and point my legs up in the air.

“This will reverse what we’ve been doing. It’ll change the direction of blood flow and bring oxygen to your legs and your feet. We need to do it for five minutes.”

I relax and let my blood flow. I take in the coffee-colored walls and the textured white ceiling. This moment, sitting upside down on a bed in a motel room somewhere in the middle of Colombia, replenishing my own blood, feels more like a film I’m watching than the life I’ll look back on as my own. So much time on the road has a way of separating time, dividing mornings and nights so much they feel like separate lives. In my early twenties I got off on waking up not knowing where I was. Now, there’s only the all-too-fitting image of spinning wheels.

I pull out my notebook, but before I open it, Xi flops her legs onto mine, like they’re something other than her, something fallen from the sky.

“What are we going to do with these?” I run my thumb over the top of her foot, and press its sole with my fingers, but when she sighs and settles in for a full massage, I let it go and open my notebook.

Things Xi does that I love:

Smiling, Xi wiggles her body so she’s lying perpendicular to mine, then raises both feet to where my hands are.

When the sky is completely dark, or awash with light pollution, she’ll still stand there in awe, pointing out where the constellations would be.

 

She digs her toes in between my hands and the notebook. I put the notebook aside and raise my hands above my head. She extends one leg to follow them. I take hold of it above my head and turn my face into her open thigh. She wraps her free leg around my neck and draws me in.

—

After sex I could sleep, but I know I need to eat.

—

We continue South down the straightaway 45. There’s the sun cape, some road magic, and the easy air of two people who haven’t fought since their last orgasm.

—

“We’re pieces of shit.”

“You’re a piece of shit. I haven’t smoked anything.”

“You suggested it.”

“Goddammit.” She’s already stoned. Everything is a joke.

“And now you can never leave the room.” She climbs onto the bed and builds a cage with her body over mine.

“I really want a cigarette.”

—

We fuck and it’s nice, but neither of us have eaten and I need a smoke.

—

We ash into a coffee mug on the edge of the sink and ignore the moldy grout lines between the tile. The foot massage spreads to the calves and then to the thighs, and with every pass I reach deeper into the hot water, further up her leg, until she stops me.

“Okay,” she says, dropping the last bit of joint into the mug. “I want to have sex.”

But the tub is too short and thin.

“My knees,” she says, trying to straddle me. She manages to sneak a foot on either side of my hips but now my knees are in the way. I can’t extend my legs unless I sit up.

We switch. She lies down and I get on top of her and it works, practically speaking, but it’s cramped and the tap juts out of the wall between our faces. She has to crank her head one way and I the other. I bend my knees and stick my feet straight up out of the water. It takes all my energy and focus to grip the wet edges of the tub and hold my upper body in a sort of plank above her.

“What is this face you’re making?” she says.

“I’m having a hard time focusing.”

“You look like you’re trying to push a car that you’re mad at.”

“I keep thinking I’m going to knock myself out on this tap and drown us both.”

She laughs. I strain to stay above her.

“How do I get out of this?” My hips are wedged between her legs, which are wedged into the side of the tub.

She laughs again, then lifts herself up to try to kiss me but clips her brow on the tap. “Mother fuck—”

She jerks her head and hits it on the edge of the bath.

“Ok. Just push up or something. Get off me. This is over.”

—

After our first night together, rather than pack my bags and get on a bus to the airport and get on my flight to Miami, where the plan was to bum around some more, hitchhike north, I flattened the day in a hammock, then in the afternoon went to the beach, and found Xi, said I was sticking around, and wanted to see more of her. Two weeks later we moved into a tent together, and from there to a hut, then to a house, and for four months we slept and showered in sync and only pulled our bodies apart to work or use the toilet.

—

We take a few more shots of Arrechón. We light up, drink, and blush. I don’t know if it’s the Arrechon, this kid with his puffy nipples and perfect skin, or what, but I feel a surge of life. I want to sweep the table clear, pick Xi up and lay her out on it. And I want Flaco here, cheering us on, maybe more. I’m unsure what I want his involvement to be, but he’s here now.

As if sensing my desire, he pours us another round of Arrechón.

“Tienen bebés?” Flaco asks. He talks real smooth, breathy. Tilts his head and looks up out of it at both us.

“No.”

He tells us he has two with his wife, they had one when they were sixteen and needed and wanted to wait but as the story around here goes: you get into the Arrechón…

“Second baby was made right there.” He licks his lips and points to a bush across the street. A garbage bag tangled in the lower branches.

“In the bush?” Xi forces down another shot.

“Not the phrasing I’d use for my wife’s you know, but yes, we made a baby right there, as they say.”

“Made a baby,” Xi says.

“You know how it works?” he asks.

“I don’t believe you.”

“I’ll show you how we did it,” he says, shaking the Arrechón bottle in the air before emptying it into our cups. “If he’s okay with it. And if you are, of course.”

“I’m not,” she says.

But we barely make it out of his sight and into the room before Xi’s on her back with her one leg up, foot on the concrete wall, both arms out straight, hands on my chest, holding me off. “We can’t,” she says. “We can’t fuck,” but she calls me closer with a come-here thrust of her pelvis. “I’m ovulating.”

I hover above her. “We don’t need to,” I say. “I don’t want to.”

She hits me in the shoulder, smiles, bites my neck.

“Maybe just a little?” she says, kneading into my skin with her fingernails.

“Just a little?” I feel the heat of her through her shorts. She pushes them down, slips one leg out and leaves them hooped around the other at the knee. She pulls her panties to the side. I all but slide in. She stops me—halfway.

“Just a little,” she says, making small thrusts with her pelvis. A quarter, to halfway, to a quarter—

“Just a little,” I say, but after a second, I let the whole of my weight down onto her. She clings with her limbs, trapping me, all the way.

“I hate you,” she says, after I come.

I try to laugh it off.

“That was too much,” she says.

“It was just a little.”

“It was too much.”

—

On my way to the liquor store, Xi points out a pharmacy. “Should I buy a pill?”

“Do you think you need it?”

“We need it.”

“Okay.”

—

We rent a cabana near the lake. One night before the start of Semana Santa, Holy Week, when the whole town is booked out. We park the bike, unload the bag. I don’t know why, or what’s going on, but a few minutes later, we’re in the room with the thick brown curtains drawn. We use a coconut oil we find in the cupboard, our flattened foam bed. A fleece blanket competes for possession of her shoulder, her neck, her ears. There’s hair in my mouth. We both try to take charge, but fumble between positions, ignoring what the other wants. I clock my shin off the corner of the bed frame and fall to the floor. She looks at me over the edge of the mattress.

—

The man yells and something else smashes and the woman wails, right there on the other side of our door. She might as well be in our room. She screams at the man and I ask Xi what she’s saying. “She’s telling him to hit her. She’s calling him a coward and telling him to get up and do something.”

“We can ignore this right?” I crawl into bed beside her, but she’s already crying. “We don’t know what’s going on,” I say, and we don’t, but we know it’s possible now, we can see the bridge from here to there.

I put an arm around Xi and we lie on top of the blankets and hold one another while the fear of what we’re capable of doing to each other and ourselves hangs heavy over the room. I hold her, afraid to move, afraid to do anything.

—

In bed, over the foreign whispers of our sad grandmother host, we talk to the ceiling.

“I think I’m over this pill thing,” Xi says with a hand on her stomach, “but now I feel like my period is coming.”

—

“‘Does she come with the bike? I’d take that piece of crap bike if it means I’d get to ride her too. With that skinny ass? They probably ride about the same.’ That’s the kind of thing people were saying as we pulled into town and that’s the kind of thing people were saying as we walked around. I didn’t want to explore the town anymore because I didn’t feel like getting raped by the eyes and words of another group of these greasy—boys. They’re boys. All their bellies and mustaches and years on this mundito de mierda but they’re all just boys, ignorant and disgusting, filthy fucking boys.”

“They called your ass skinny?”

“I guess that’s all you are too.”

—

In the morning, before we leave the room, we stand by the window, without touching, without talking. The sun is out but its light is muted by the grayness coming off the streets and the gravel parking lot. But the grayness is here in this town. It is not us. We are out there, in the mountains, on the road.

We get on the bike and we go and everything is behind us. Everything is fine.

The bike’s engine warms up and the road rolls through the mountains and the sky looks like open arms and the trees are smiling. I feel like maybe we could fly, like the open air is calling us, like on one of these ridges I could keep going, keep going up, because if I’m chasing anything it’s this, this movement, this renewal, or the possibility for renewal movement creates. But over the ridge the road turns and we turn with it. Our chain skips and the engine pops, and we say nothing. Our wheels never leave the ground.

—

In bed we talk about Mono as if he were our baby, our child, and move toward each other in mourning.

“We walked him into a trap,” Xi says with a helplessness in her eyes, but her body opens up over the bed’s rainbow-colored sheets.

“We did,” I say, climbing on top of her. “Or I did.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t know,” I say, and push through the thought of Mono and the lingering feelings of last night. We push through and she cries out, at first with just a breath, then a quiet moan, and then louder, and louder, until her head rams into the steel wall at the end of our bed and she screams.

“Oh shit,” I say. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she laughs, but her face is scrunched up from the pain.

“I’m sorry,” I say, even though she’s laughing, even though it was an accident.

“It’s okay,” she says. “I’m okay. Come here.”

But I keep saying it. “I’m sorry.” A laundry list of apologies runs through my mind, but all I say are those two words. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I say, for the other night, for tomorrow, for hitting your head. “I’m sorry,” I say, finally, for having apologized too much.

But she just says, “It’s okay,” and, having sensed something deeper in my flood of apologies, smiles a sad and confused smile. “It’s okay, come here,” she says, and pulls me down into the crook of her arm and laughs. She rubs my head like I was the one who’d hit the wall. “That hurt,” she says. She rubs my head and she laughs until I have no choice but to start laughing with her.

—

Night comes and there’s nothing to talk about. Tomorrow we’ll be on our way back to the coast.

We move tentatively through the hut, rain landing on our low roof, and we move tentatively around one another, a hand here, a lean there, until we collapse into the covers—hot breath along the neck, behind the ear.

—

That night we shared a hammock. She was on top of me, turned away, and I was inside her. My teeth were in her shoulder and my fingers in her mouth. She was arching her back more with every breath, her shoulders barred across my chest, ass pushing into my groin. We had just found a groove when someone from the hostel took cover in the storage shed to smoke a cigarette. We stayed as still as we could, all knotted up together. We held our breath. They never turned around, but their being there excited us both. I could feel her pulsing around me. It was putting me over the edge. I tried to focus on the light of their cigarette against the black and starry sky, but it was no use. When they finally left, Xi took my hand with both of hers and shoved it deeper into her mouth and I came immediately.

“You owe me,” she said.

I moved my fingers around in her moth then brought my wet fingers down between her legs.

We stayed like that, in the same hammock, until morning.

—

She pulls down the neckline of her blue long-sleeve, exposing a slight redness above her collar bone. It’s hard to tell if it’s from the sting or irritation from the heat. Her whole face is red.

“It feels alive, like it’s, how do I say? Like, boom boom.” She mimes holding a heart and watching it beat in her hands.

“Pulsing.”

“Yes.”

“Does it sting?”

“No,” she says with an odd sense of grievance in her voice. “Maybe it’s just the heat.”

Her head is tilted, her neck strained. I run a finger over her collarbone. She keeps her neck bent and her shirt pulled down and looks at me.

I inch towards her, bring my face to the skin of her neck. I feel the heat of it and the heat of my own breath coming back off it. She doesn’t resist me or twist away. Instead, the tension in her neck releases. She brings her hand to my abdomen and scrunches up a portion of my shirt, pulls me closer. I bring my right hand around to the back of her head, lace my fingers through her hair. She holds her breath. I make a fist, hold her head back, and graze my lips over her jawbone. I slide my left hand up her shirt. She gasps for air. I let go of her hair and she leaps with her mouth towards mine—

A car drives by and she pulls back, pushes my hand away and lets her shirt fall.

“We should go,” she says.

—

A car pulls up, and three women get out.

“A delivery,” says the one with his arms over the chairs.

The women are plainly dressed and look tired, like they’d already been to bed, like someone has woken them for this.

The one with his arms over the chair touches cheeks with one of the women and guides her to me. She doesn’t bother to hide her yawn. She sits in my lap, tucks a bit of my hair behind my ear.

The other two find their spots around the table.

Everyone looks at me, and I look at the one with the angel wings. I pray for the legs of my chair to snap, for something disruptive to happen, but nothing does.

With a manicured finger to my cheek, the girl turns my head toward her. Her eyes are light green and smile softly from the tired sadness of her face. She’s beautiful. Her breath smells like bubblegum. She moves her hands in a practiced sequence across my chest and over my collarbone and up my neck.

I let the unlit cigarette drop from my lips and I do what I never do.

I stop them there. I place my hands on her wrists, and I guide them away from my face and my body. I say, “I need to find gas and get back to my bike.”

I wait for her to get her footing, and I stand up slowly. Without looking at anyone—though I sense the one with his arms out like angel wings smiling, he’s the only one who doesn’t protest—I grab my bag and I say, “Thanks, but no thanks.” I say, “I don’t need this.”

—

I nudge the door open, stay where I am in the threshold, watching her in the mirror, waiting for her to look up and back at me. She doesn’t.

She says, “If you’re going to come in, come in. Close the door.”

I step in and stand behind her at the sink. She looks at me in the mirror, not sure what to expect. I wrap my arms around her, my left forearm across her chest, gripping her right shoulder. She frowns, softens. I rest my face against her neck. The smell of cheap hotel soap. She runs her fingers through my hair and leans her head onto mine.

She stays in the washroom while I shower. When I’m done, I towel off and then there’s her shoulder and her neck, the smell of her moisturizer now and the way her skin clings to mine over the bed. We shed the day in layers and move together into the darkness, deeper, until it turns to light and blooms with the colors inside our eyelids now flashing across each other’s faces, the walls. We finish on the edge of the bed. I’m on top of her, her head in my hand and my hand on the floor.

—

We didn’t talk about the night before. It would have had to become a battle, a war, and we weren’t ready for that. One day we will. I’ll tell her everything and she’ll ask if everything is really everything and I’ll say, “Yes, really,” and she’ll say, “Really?” again, but softer, rhetorically, and she’ll look at the ground then back up at me and smile with her lips closed, assimilating herself, this life she’ll live, with yet another uncertainty. And I’ll wish I could say more, give her more, but there are no assurances in words.