Skin on Skin (10 page)

She turned her head to the side, jaw clenched. He put his mouth right next to her ear and whispered. “I love you, Lauren. And I mean it.”

Lauren’s entire body froze in shock. “What?”

“I love you,” he said. His hand came up to rest against her cheek and gently forced her to meet his gaze.

He was so close she could see every individual lash, feel the hot puff of his breath against her mouth. His hands shook a little as his thumb traced her bottom lip. “Lauren, every morning for the past seven months, I wake up and I can’t wait to get to work. I can’t wait to see you and talk to you. And even when we don’t talk I like knowing you’re there, working beside me.”

The tiny kernel of hope in her belly sprouted a tentative shoot.

“I’ve wanted you for so long, but I kept my hands to myself because I didn’t want to mess up our friendship. But after we made love, I knew I could never go back to the way it was.”

Made love. She tried not to read too much into that.

His dark eyes were suspiciously bright. With tears? Was that actually possible? Lauren felt the familiar sting in her own eyes.

“I love you, Lauren,” he said. “I think I have for a long time, but I was too stupid to figure it out.”

She sucked in a breath and leaned back abruptly. “Tony, I—”

Part of her was terrified to say it back, to take the incredible risk of actually having a relationship with him. What if he woke up tomorrow and resented the confinement of monogamy?

As though reading her mind, he pulled her close, burying his nose in her hair and taking a deep inhale. “Believe me, Lauren. There’s never been anyone like you for me. There will never be anyone like you.”

It felt so good, to be held by him, to bury her nose in his shirt and smell the warm scent that had driven her crazy from the first moment she’d met him. She could feel the faint tremors in his arms, hear the slight catch of his breath. He was as nervous and unsure as she. The realization broke down the last barrier holding her back. Even a lifelong player like Tony could get his heart broken, but no way was she going to be the woman to do it.

Wrapping her arms tight around his shoulders, she tipped her head back and pressed a sprinkling of kisses to his neck, his jaw, wherever her lips could reach. “I love you, too,” she said, half-laughing, half-crying between pecks. “All that stuff you said about being happy every day because you knew you would see me,” he clutched her harder, “it’s the same for me. And I quit because I couldn’t stand the idea of being with you every day, knowing I couldn’t have you.”

“Oh you can have me,” he said, his voice lowering an octave as he pressed his hips firmly against hers. The satin of her robe did nothing to hide the firm bulge in his jeans, pressing into the notch of her thighs. “You can have me any time, any way you want,” he paused, the teasing glint fading from his dark eyes. “For as long as you want me.”

“How about forever?” She asked, trying to keep her tone light and failing miserably.

He lifted her up onto the counter and slid his hands under the lapels of her robe. Streaks of heat emanated from every place he touched. “That sounds like a good start.” Her head fell back, eyes drifting shut as his mouth traced a hot wet trail down her neck. She wrapped her legs around his hips, pulling him tight against her.

His big hand closed over her breast, a low, satisfied sound rumbling from his chest as he cupped the heavy flesh. “I was hoping you were naked under here.” He quickly undid the knot at her waist and pushed the silky material down her shoulders. “I’ve missed you so much this past week,” he murmured. His fingers traced her curves slowly, almost reverently.

Heat pulsed between her thighs, along with a surge of power at the thought that this man who could have any woman he wanted, was shaking with need for her. Her fingers flew over buttons and zippers until Tony’s clothes lay in a heap on her kitchen floor. Somehow they found themselves on her rickety old bed that squeaked and groaned as they rolled across it. Somehow he managed to slip on a condom without taking his hands and mouth off of her. He slid his cock along her folds, drawing out thick moisture and teasing her until she grasped his hips like she meant business. “I love a woman who takes what she wants,” he teased. With one long, smooth stroke he was inside her, his dark eyes shining as he smiled down at her. “But most of all, Lauren, I love you.”

With special thanks to C.M.

T
here was a note stuck to the cactus. I stood for a moment in the kitchen as solitary and still as the only two objects that inhabited the room: the cactus and the rickety table upon which it sat. Staring at the cactus, with the clownish yellow post-it attached to its pallid midriff, I felt lonely in my new apartment. I had slept there the past three nights, but it still felt unfamiliar, like a stranger’s bed.

I hurried to the note. It was from my cousin, Verónica, of course.

She had brought home the cactus the day I moved in. Three days ago.

“It’s to remind you of home,” she’d said, placing the plant smack in the middle of the kitchen table, which we had hauled in from its rotting place on the street the night before. “In case you get homesick for Tucson.”

I smiled politely at her hospitable gesture. Droplets of drizzle from outside were caught in the unbrushed fur that covered the cactus. I had never seen a cactus quite so
hairy
before. Not in Arizona. Despite its furry appearance, this was not a plant you wanted to pet. Its hair was wiry and white like a crazy old man’s, and its needles sharp and brittle as a bone. Yet, to my horror, my cousin was quite literally, and lovingly, stroking our new living addition to the apartment from head to base and back again. Not only was this
loco
because the damn thing was sharp, but also because, well, the cactus was fairly phallic. I mean,
really
phallic. A prickly prick, and a well-endowed thirteen inches at that. It even had a nicely shaped head to top it off.

As I watched my cousin jerk off a cactus in our dingy kitchen, her vampy nails clicking as they ran up and down the spines, I panicked. I had moved hundreds of miles from home, where rent was free, living with my parents, and where a twenty-four-hour bus line didn’t stop right outside my bedroom window, and into this dank, basement apartment with my hypersexual cousin. I had to remind myself it had been my idea to move to San Francisco and in with my cousin for the summer.

But over the past three days of cohabitation, I had come to see the cactus as benign. Like a gay, male roommate whom I was glad to see waiting for me when I came home damp and disheveled from carrying groceries.

I set down my grocery bags—mostly cleaning supplies for the moldy apartment—on the kitchen table and carefully peeled off the post-it.

There was an address. The three-letter word BAR. And a stick figure drawing of two girls drinking from bottles labeled childishly with skulls and crossbones. By the curly doodles of hair on one of the girls and the prominently penned
chi chi’s
on the other, it was immediately apparent that the illustration was of me (
chi chi’s
) and Verónica (hair) getting drunk.

It was four o’clock in the afternoon.

The wooden number 9 on the otherwise unmarked door of the bar had swung upside down from its loose screw so that I mistook it for a 6.

I paced up and down the sidewalk, pockmarked by blackened gum and cigarette butts, searching in vain for number 229. I peered into brightly painted
taquerías
that exhaled their rich aromas to lick at my taste buds. I passed storefronts lit up by twinkling gold crucifixes and paused in front of markets selling rain-specked orange and yellow fruit. It had started to drizzle, and I pulled the fake fur–lined hood of my jacket over my head.

Summer in San Francisco was not quite what I had expected. The sky seemed permanently drained from blue to an anemic grey.

A man in a baggy jacket walked by me and slung soft-spoken Spanish my way. Just as I decided it was time to give up and head back to the empty apartment, a door behind me burst open.

A young man stumbled out onto the cold sidewalk. He wore a thin, white undershirt but didn’t appear cold. His jet black hair was curiously slicked back like Elvis and his jeans were cuffed up at the ankles. He was white, but his eyes were dark like a Mexican’s, heavily fringed with black lashes. They flashed at me with indiscriminating drunken desire.

I shivered for him. The sight of his tattooed biceps exposed so nakedly to the wet and the cold gave me a strange maternal desire to cover his bare arms. He stared back at me blankly, answering my private yearning with indifference, and smoothed the front of his jeans to straighten himself out. Then, without a single glance back, he walked away and turned the corner out of sight. The smell of beer and cigarettes in his wake drenched me like an aphrodisiac. I had found the bar.

Tequila makes me slippery. Shot glasses slip through my fingers. One shatters to the ground but only scares the bar dogs that trace the floor like shadows. My tongue moves in and out from English to Spanish. I can talk to anyone when I’m drunk: Verónica’s friends with their hair coiffed in bizarre 50s hairdos and streaked with cartoonish colors. They crowd a large table with their unisex, tattooed arms. Their shiny quarters fill the jukebox with rockabilly tunes. I ask the boys about their ink, boldly touching the saturated skin, and shyly admire the girls’ arms flowering with color that blushes up to their collarbones.

My father always warned my brothers not to get tattoos where a judge could see them. Unbeknownst to him, my oldest brother, Tito (coincidently, the name of this bar) had CHICANO tattooed in old English letters across his stomach.

Verónica had immediately spotted me in the doorway where I stood squinting through thick, bar air for the sole face I knew in this town. As she pulled me into a booth close to the door, strands of her black hair stuck to my lipstick. She tugged me close to her in a drunken embrace until I nearly ended up sprawled on top of her.

“This is
mi prima
!” she announced, struggling back up to a seated position. I was squeezed between her and a boy with a closely shaved head.

“I’m Nacho.” He immediately handed me a fresh beer from the table stockpiled with shot glasses and bottles. Out of all the boys at the table, Nacho was the only one who reminded me of the boys I knew back home. Low-riding khaki pants, button-up plaid shirt, small gold-framed picture of Jesus dangling around his neck, and dangerous eyes that knew how to give a girl their full attention.

“Lola. Thanks for the beer.” I felt the girls at the table watching me, their eyes turned up at the corners with a sharp curve of eyeliner shaped like a hawk’s beak. They knew, and I knew, that, before the night was over, Nacho and I would be hooking up.

“Verónica tells me you’re from Tucson.” He spoke to me politely, his voice softly accented with a
cholo
incantation. This was the type I fell for despite my better judgment, and a muscle in my heart instinctively tightened against him. Everything about him was crisp: his ironed clothes, the edges of his flushed lips, his square jaw, his attentive manner of speaking to me. His cheeks were freshly shaven and radiated a scented afterglow. His mustache and goatee were neatly trimmed.

“Yeah, I’m just here for the summer.”

“Well, maybe I can convince you to stay longer than that.” He winked at me with all the charm of the devil.

“Lola! Lola!” My cousin was screaming in my ear.

“You have to meet my best friend! Teresa, this is my cousin Lola.”

I had never seen a Chicana get her hair so blonde. It was practically white, with Marilyn Monroe waves and a rack to match.

I immediately wanted to be her and momentarily forgot macho Nacho at my side.

“Nice to meet you.” She wore a black-and-white checkered pencil skirt that made her waist look tiny, like a wrist you could encircle with one hand.

Teresa sat down next to two heavyset girls in shrunken cardigans. She seemed bored talking to them, but they eagerly leaned in to hear whatever she was saying, their bouffants bobbing slightly as they nodded agreeably.

“Lola, here!” Verónica had only been paying attention to getting drunk. She handed me a double shot of tequila and stuck a lime in my mouth.

Tequila makes me slippery. Veronica and I slipped around on the dull vinyl seats as we laughed about things that we immediately forgot or never understood in the first place. We have the same laugh. We always have, which used to confuse our parents to no end. I had thought maybe our vocal chords had outgrown each other after all these years, but I was wrong.

“What are you, twins or something?” Nacho only made us laugh harder. We fell into each other, wasted. Verónica’s face was too close to mine, and the scent of her hair spray made me dizzy. She looked like a gypsy with her curly masses of black hair. Night to my day, she was as pale as the moon, whereas I was the color of sun-baked earth.

A warm hand slid beneath the hugging waistband of my jeans. It didn’t surprise me. It touched the softest skin of my belly before slipping out again. I felt Nacho’s breath dampen the back of my neck. I tried to ignore him and echo Verónica’s laughter, but she had turned to talk to a boy wearing Buddy Holly glasses.

Watching my cousin flirt had always commanded my awe and admiration. It was like watching a rodeo and realizing that roping a cow really does require a large amount of skill and raw talent. My cousin could turn any raging bull into a big, dumb cow that would buckle to its knees as if slaughtered. It didn’t matter that she made eyes with every man in the room—she had a way of making each man feel special, and their cocks undoubtedly twitched with the quickening beat of their hearts. It made me proud to be her cousin, except for that fact that she had left me stranded for a guy who was, in my opinion, more oaf than
umph
. I had no choice but to turn and meet Nacho’s gleaming eyes. And when a man looks at you like that, there’s no turning back.

Nacho followed me to the bathroom. My ass twitched like tackle at the end of a fishing rod. The seam of my jean’s tight crotch pressed into the private grove of my body, rubbing me pleasurably as I headed, tailed by Nacho, to the back of the bar.

There were two separate bathrooms, a single toilet in each, and Nacho and I had the privacy of our own room. It was tiny and painted a bordello red. There was something momentarily sobering about the audibly leaking toilet and the bare bulb dangling from a ceiling so low that it looked as if a child had scrawled graffiti across it. I studied the back of Nacho’s broad shoulders as he bolted the door behind us. Something about those expansive shoulders made me feel that he was twice my size even though we were about the same height. I stepped forward as he turned around. Our bodies decisively crashed into each other, shortly followed by our lips.

By the way his hands firmly grabbed my waist, I wouldn’t have guessed him to kiss me so gingerly. I squeezed the warm back of his neck, emboldening him to kiss me deeper. He did. Immediately, his open mouth was all over my neck, feeding. My body stiffened, catlike in its desire to be rubbed all over, but Nacho only gripped my jutting hipbones tighter to hold me in place, where he wanted me.

With his head at my neck, I luxuriously ran my hands over the soft bristles of his buzzed hair. They rose underneath my fingertips like goose bumps,
tiny erections of the skin
. My hands circled the crown of his head where the forgiving lightbulb had cast a faint halo. When my hands got dizzy from running laps around his head, they fell, exhausted, to his shoulders, which stretched out in opposite directions like a shoreline. I let his tongue pick up the rhythm of the race up and down my neck.

Pleasure knocked my head back against the door. Nacho was on his knees, gnawing the shy flesh of my stomach. I looked down and my pleasure doubled, seeing a man like that on his knees, eyes closed, lost in the creases of my skin. I was desperate for him to get in deep, for his lips to make out with the swollen lips of my pussy. I hurried to undo the top of my jeans.

Nacho glanced up at me a bit surprised as if he had read my dirty thoughts. He teased me by rubbing his hand up and down the fold of fabric that securely covered my zipper. Nonetheless, I felt a surge in my pussy as the heel of his hand pressed into my clit, still heavily concealed by denim. The roughness of the fabric and the firm push of his palm started getting me off. Nacho stood up to thrust his tongue back into my mouth.

I knew how wet a tough boy like this could get me, and I wondered if he could feel me seeping through my jeans. He had me pinned against the door with one hand pushing into my crotch and the other cradling and deliciously squeezing the bottom of my ass. I writhed hard against his broad palm, increasing the friction against my cloaked clit, wanting nothing more than for him to fuck me against the door painted such a permissive red.

“You want this, don’t you,
chica?
” Nacho slammed his hand between my legs with such pointed deliberation that I thought I’d come on the spot. I moaned yes, and his crotch responded by pushing into mine. I felt his hardness struggling against the crisp material of his work pants.

There was a banging on the door that wasn’t from us.

“Lola? Lola?!? Are you in there?”
Verónica, not now.

“I have to piss. And we got to go! You have your first day of work tomorrow.”

If there’s anything that’ll kill the mood, it’s the word
work.
Nacho was still dry-humping me, ignoring my cousin’s rapping. I pushed him away reluctantly.

“I got to go. My new job starts in the morning.” His tongue tried to silence me. I succumbed to it, then spit it out.

“Really, Nacho, I got to go.” This time, I really pushed him back. He looked at me in disbelief as I unbolted the door. The slapping bass of old time rock’n’roll hit me hard as I emerged. Only the fat girls in their little sweaters were left at the table tittering over mixed drinks.

Verónica had me by the wrist and was dragging me out the front door. Dogs scattered like ashes at our feet. It was dark outside. It could have been nine at night or two in the morning—I had no idea. I was too drunk to remember to turn around and smile at Nacho, whom I had left in the bathroom alone to contemplate his hard-on.