Lana
Kelly Wolfe is the most sexual woman I have ever laid my eyes on. She’s voluptuous, filling out her bikini bottom and bra with ease, big without seeming large; she fills space without overfilling it. She’s taller than me by about three inches and her hair is a rich brown which falls in loose waves down past her shoulders. She wears a silver shark-tooth-shaped pendant and heels which raise her almost to six feet. She oozes sexuality; she’s the only person I’ve ever met in real life where that phrase actually makes sense. Over the next month, we work together in the morning shift, and if we have to split tips, I still make almost as much just from how skilled Kelly is at the job.
During the lengthy quiet periods, we sit in the middle of the booth, opposite each other at a little foldout table, and she draws and I write.
It turns out Kelly is a freelance illustrator. When I ask her what she freelances for, she barks, “Whatever they pay me for, honey. Tattoos, book covers, whatever they pay me for. But as you can tell, I ain’t no runaway success, otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here with my tits almost out and my ass squeezed into this stringy horrible bikini.”
I giggle, and she tilts her head at me over the top of her pencil. “You find my suffering funny?”
“No,” I say. “I can sympathize.” I tell her about my creative writing course.
“Well, shit,” she says. She leans back in her chair and studies me for a few moments. Her face is round and gorgeous. Finally, she pushes her notepad across the table to me. “See if you can think of something for this charming fellow to say.” Then she leaves to serve a customer.
I laugh when I see what she’s drawn: a caricature of one of our regulars, a banker. The man has a deep dimple in his chin, but Kelly has given him a big ass for a chin instead. The man has bushy eyebrows which have become skunks resting above his eyes. I tap the pencil against my teeth, something which brings me back to my college course: tapping my pencil against my teeth and hoping the click-click-click will get the creative writing gears turning. Then I draw a speech bubble and write: I’ll pay for sex. Then I scratch it out and write: Can I borrow your bra, baby? . . . I’ve lost my suitcase and I need something to hold my money!
I shrug, and then go and serve a customer.
It would have seemed crazy to me before Kelly started, but I’ve actually come to enjoy working over the next month. I enjoyed it before, in its way. I still can’t deny there’s a certain thrill sitting in the booth with men looking up at me with obvious attraction. But now I really enjoy it, look-forward-to-getting-here enjoy it, just so I can see Kelly and we can mess around between customers. I learn that Kelly is fierce as well as womanly, fierce like an older sister, the older sister I never had.
One day, I’m sitting in the booth when Chester returns, showing no sign that he remembers reaching through the booth and making my stomach churn with acidic vomit, showing no sign that he remembers ever making my skin crawl with the legs of a thousand spiders. He just sits there, cap pulled low over his ears, shading his face, vest as stained and flabby as ever. “Coffee,” he grunts, and I freeze. Not just that I stand still. I feel as though ice has encased my bones and is holding me in place. The only thing that doesn’t freeze is my mouth, which falls open in disbelief. Disbelief that he would show up so nonchalantly, brazenly asking for a coffee after what he did.
Then I see Chester’s eyes go wide and look over my shoulders.
“Is something wrong?” Kelly asks, using her Friend Radar, as she calls it. She said to me once: “I know whenever one of my girls has a problem, babe. It’s like an alarm bell in my head.” Now, she says, staring down at Chester with all the weight and threat of a lioness: “This is him, isn’t it? This is the man you told me about. Oh, hello, Chester. Yes, Chester, I know what sort of man you are, what sort of little man. Oh, yes, stare at me with those big hateful eyes. Stare! Go on, keep staring at me! Better yet, get out of that car! Get out of that car and I’ll come out and meet you and we’ll see what kind of man you really are! No, I mean it!”
Chester’s cheeks tremble, anger and uncertainty dancing across his features, as he watches Kelly waving her arms and half leaning out of the booth.
“Am I not being clear?” Kelly hisses, leaning so far out of the booth now I hover my hand near her legs, ready to yank her back in. “You molested my friend, Chester, and you’ve returned to the scene of the crime, Chester, and now I’m going to slap you’re redder than your fat ass.” Each time she says his name, she pokes a righteous finger at him.
Chester stares at her for a few moments, and then puts his truck in reverse, backing down the road and then pulling a one-eighty and screeching away.
Kelly moves back into the booth, dusting her hands together like somebody does after a job well done, and then looks down at me, her features softening at once. “Are you okay?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say, and I mean it. I laugh. The laugh gets louder and turns almost manic, and then Kelly is laughing with me. “You were so angry,” I say, and then burst into teary laughter all over again. I stand up and mime-point a stern finger at the coffee machine, snapping, “Don’t you dare talk to my friend like that, Chester! You are evil, Chester!” Kelly grabs onto my shoulder for support as the laughter whisks us up.
After it passes, both of us dabbing at our eyes with napkins to make sure the tears haven’t ruined our makeup, we sit down at the foldout table, making sure to keep an eye out for customers.
“Seriously, though, are you okay?” she says.
I nod. “I’m fine. Thank you.”
Kelly squints at me. She has this almost magical ability to look past the face you’re presenting and see your true face underneath. It made me uncomfortable at first, but now I welcome it. It’s relieving to have somebody who knows your moods, or at least can guess at them, without you having to come outright and say it. It gets rid of a lot of awkwardness.
“What is it?” Kelly persists. “It’s something. Is it Chester?”
“No, no. It’s—him.”
“Oh—him.”
We both know who him is. I’ve probably mentioned Kade to Kelly twenty or so times, first detailing how we met and our passionate night, and then in passing.
“I guess seeing Chester brought that morning back to me.”
“And the night.” Kelly has a wicked smile on her lips.
“Yes, alright,” I say, rolling my eyes, “and the night.”
“You’re like a princess in a fairy tale,” Kelly says, scribbling something in her notepad. The notepad is full now of our Twin Peaks Comic Book, a collection of characters who drive through the Twin Peaks, with Kelly’s sketches and my captions. “Waiting for your Prince Charming to come into your life once again, to set everything straight, to make sweet, tender love to you.”
We both giggle.
“Oh, no.” Kelly grins like an in-the-know courtesan, both dirty and elegant. “You want something more than that, you sick, depraved girl?”
She slides the pad across to me. It depicts me, boobs and ass enlarged for the purposes of the illustration, leaning out of the Twin Peaks’s booth window with a handkerchief in hand, looking forlornly off into the distance. She hands me the pencil.
“And the caption.”
I don’t have to think. I write: Come back. Just one more time.
For the rest of the morning, we serve customers, giving us little chance to talk further. But the whole time I’m thinking about Kade. Chester—Kade. That was the morning, wasn’t it, when my outlook changed, when I realized I could take control, could go to bed with a man and have the best sex of my life without attaching countless strings. And yet, one string would be enough, just one—just enough to pull him back to the Twin Peaks for one more meeting.
Because Kade has been haunting me this past month. He’s there when I close my eyes and there in the back of my mind and there hovering at the peripheries of my vision. His naked, muscular body, his massive cock, the sensation of him biting on my neck, the feeling of his pectoral muscles pressed hard into my breasts.
Sometimes when I’m sitting in the booth I have to cross my legs just at the thought of him.
I want him, one more time, two more times, three more times, four . . .
Often, I mutter to myself just before sleep takes me, Mom’s shopping channel quiet through the walls: “I want him. I want him. I want him.”