Chapter 16: People I wish I’d never met. Things I wish I’d never done.
Back to the future: One year after that tense fucking conversation in Phoenix. I’m twenty-nine.
I’m traveling the last week in September, playing a game in a big, dirty city that looks like all the other big, dirty cities I play in, and for once I’m actually sharing Jenny’s nostalgia for small-town Ohio. Or for Rosemont. If any place ever felt like home, it was there.
The team goes out for drinks after our win, and I get invited, but I turn them down. Instead, I head back to the hotel and talk with Jenny for an hour before I take my shower.
Things are better than they were a year ago — at least, that’s what she tells me. To me, it feels about the same. It feels like we were always magnets before, drawn together despite all odds, stuck together with an inevitability that felt as predictable and permanent as the laws of physics and JFK conspiracy theories. But now, it was like our magnets had reversed their polarity, and we kept pushing away from each other no matter how hard we tried to come back together.
Our hour-long conversation is familiar and strained at the same time. We fill it with safe mundanities, reviewing things like weather, errands, plane flights, basketball plays. (We don’t know it then, but the conversation we have ends up being a lot like the one we’ll have in Soul Mountain, ten years later, when she comes to see if I’ll finally talk to her again.) She tells me about her new classes — because she’s going back to school now, working on a degree in Early Childhood Education so that she can become a kindergarten teacher — and I tell her about the weight-lifting regimen Coach has put me on.
“So when can I look forward to some six-pack abs?” she asks, and it’s supposed to be teasing and flirty, but it falls flat somehow, like our whole conversation, and so I just say,
“I don’t know,” and there’s a long pause heavy with unsaid words, and finally I decide I’ve had more than enough of this. “I need to hit the shower. I’m stinking up the hotel room.”
She lets me go. I shower. I call Alex when I get out, but she doesn’t pick up, and I imagine she and Graham out somewhere, having a late dinner or catching a movie, and for some reason, the thought stings.
So I decide maybe I’ll hit the bar after all, see if my teammates are still there.
#
“What do you have on tap?” I ask the barkeep, a cute young thing with way too much eyeshadow and a long brown ponytail streaked with blonde highlights.
She rattles off my choices, and I pick one and put a stool beneath me, because even though I don’t see my teammates anywhere — maybe I got the bar wrong or they decided to go somewhere else in the end — I’m here now and I’ll stay long enough to at least have a fucking beer. Or two. Maybe three. Drinking by myself in a bar might be depressing, but it’s less depressing than watching TV in a hotel room by myself.
I sit there nursing my beer, my back leaned against the bar rail so I can people watch.
Which is how I spot the top of a blonde head, a long face ending in a square jaw, winding its way through the crowd and towards the bar. Towards me.
“Motherfucker,” I mutter under my breath.
She walks straight up to me but doesn’t look at me; hails the barkeep with that attitude of superiority she’s always fucking had, orders herself a beer. It’s only after she knocks the cap off the bottle and refuses the glass offered to her that she leans sideways against the bar and looks me up and down.
“Where’s everybody else?” Rhianna-Fucking-Jerkins asks me, sweeping a hand around the sparsely populated bar as if I didn’t fucking realize the rest of my team isn’t here.
I shrug, stare straight ahead.
She laughs. “What, are we pretending we’re in high school now? You’re going to pout and act like you don’t know me?”
I look at her. “Why would I be the one pouting? I beat you tonight. Again.”
“You beat me? I out-scored you, just like I always do. Shut you out of the paint, just like I always do. Almost succeeded in fouling you out. Like I always do.” She straightens a little, like she wants to remind me that she’s still got two inches on me. She gives me a cocky smile.
Rhianna is to Anika as Thor is to the Incredible Hulk: One’s a blonde goddess and the other’s green with envy.
I roll my eyes. “And you did foul out. Like you always do. You’ve got no grace, you rely solely on brute strength and size, and my team won. Like my team always does when my team plays yours.”
Rhianna frowns and shakes her head. Sore loser. She takes another sip of her beer. “Not my fault we have a shit-for-brains point guard. She turns the ball over like it’s going out of style.”
I can’t help myself. I give Rhianna a really smug fucking smile. “Your point really did screw you guys over pretty good tonight. I’ll bet it makes you nuts.”
She arches an eyebrow, studies me as the beer goes back to her lips, and after a long pull, the bottle comes away with lipstick smeared along its neck.
Huh. So Rhianna Jerkins wears lipstick when she’s not in uniform. Not that I’m staring at her lips. Not that I think the color looks good on her. Without a jersey on, in boots instead of high tops, she looks kind of feminine. Like a Valkyrie instead of Thor.
“I’ve been stuck with bad guards ever since UConn,” she admits, changing the topic away from the night’s game. “What about you? Ever wish you still played with Woods?”
I break eye contact, watch a group of women laughing around a pool table. “Meh. We were good together on the court. But I like being in Phoenix.”
I’m lying through my teeth, of course. And somehow Rhianna seems to know it because she lets out a low chuckle and nods at my empty glass.
“Loser buys,” she says. “Let me get you another.”
#
My fidgety fucking fingers are shaking so hard that the door card slips out my hand and tumbles to the ground before I can fit it into the slot.
“Fucking Christ,” Rhianna says behind me, hot, alcohol-saturated breath too close to my ear. “Get it open already.” Her hand slides up the back of my shirt, and her palm is as hot as her breath, but it makes me shiver anyway.
I manage the door after two more tries, and the woman behind me doesn’t waste any time — she’s shoving me forward, ripping at my shirt simultaneously, pushing me against the bed until I stumble and land hard on the mattress back-first.
She’s straddling my waist in the next moment, hands working at the zipper of my jeans, and I sit up, grab her by the shoulders, wrestle her down to the bed, fumble at the buttons of her shirt with my fidgety fucking fingers.
“No you don’t,” she laughs, and she rolls me over, pinning my wrists to the bed on either side of my head and dropping her weight onto my torso. “When are you going to learn that I’m bigger than you and stronger than you?”
Her mouth dips down into the space where my throat meets my collarbone, and I’m expecting a kiss. Instead I get a bite. A hard bite. And it fucking hurts. I try to buck her off, but she’s right — she’s stronger. And heavier. And she laughs against my neck and I don’t get far before I give in and just let her pin me.
“I hate you,” I say, and she bites my earlobe, and it hurts even more than the bite to my collarbone, and I tilt my head back and suck in a sharp breath.
Rhianna kisses me with such sudden intensity that our teeth clack together, which draws a giggle from her that bubbles into my mouth. She pushes herself up with hands that are still holding down my wrists and looks me in the eye.
“You might hate me,” she says, “but you love this. Don’t you?”
And I can’t think of how to answer, maybe because I’m drunk, maybe because shame and guilt burn in my chest as I think of Jenny, maybe because I’ve never been with anyone else except my beautiful, Tinkerbell-sized wife, and in our eleven years of being together, Jenny’s never been able to pin me on my back, even if she wanted to. And I’m pretty sure she’s never wanted to.
I arch my head and shoulders up — not trying to throw Rhianna off anymore, just trying to get to her mouth so I can shut her up. I take her bottom lip between my teeth and pull, making her yelp, forcing her to follow me back down to the pillow. The kiss that follows is long and wet and sloppy, smearing thin strings of saliva against my cheeks and my chin.
I hate it and I love it and I need to stop right now and there’s no way I’m stopping this and I can’t believe it took me until I was twenty-nine to be with someone besides Jenny.
Rhianna ends the kiss long enough to sit up, pull my bra off, then drops her sharp fucking monster teeth to one taut nipple.
It hurts. In the best possible way.
“God, I really fucking hate you,” I gasp out.
Her mouth works its way down my torso, alternating between biting and sucking and kissing in a way that I know is going to leave a trail of purple bruises behind, bruises that will still be there when I get back to Phoenix, but I can’t bring myself to care. She lets go of my wrists at last, and I use the opportunity to put both hands on top of her platinum blonde head, push her down towards my hips. She laughs, but her hands start working at my jeans again, tugging them down over sweaty underwear.
A surprisingly gentle, slow series of kisses follows the line where my underwear meets my abdomen. Rhianna looks up. “I’m about to fuck you so hard, Singh, you’re going to wish you never met me.”
I close my eyes, rock my hips up to help when she starts pulling off my underwear.
“I already wish I’d never met y — oh, fuck.”
A hot tongue slides against me, and I go breathless and silent.
But before my brain even has a chance to fully process the tongue sliding against my wet fucking clit, there’s a long finger pushing hard inside me. Then another finger. Then a third. Somehow, she manages to squeeze even her pinky finger up there, and now I’ve got Rhianna-Fucking-Jerkins whole fucking hand working its way inside me. It hurts, and I think about telling her to stop, but it doesn’t hurt enough that I want her to stop. And I can’t help it — I find myself wondering why Jenny’s never tried this, given that her hands are so much smaller. Rhianna’s face becomes Jenny’s. Jenny’s morphs back into Rhianna’s.
Lips and tongue and hand all work together, and I’m thinking about taking back what I said earlier. Maybe Rhianna has some grace, after all. A little, anyway.
Her hand pumps in and out of me — pleasure on the knife edge of pain.
“Jesus-motherfucking-Christ,” I groan. “I still — God — I still… oh, fuh… I still hate you.”
“Stop talking, Singh.”
It takes me longer to climax than usual, maybe because of my guilt, maybe because it almost hurts, maybe because of the booze. At any rate, I don’t waste any time once she’s finished me. As soon as I catch my breath, I roll her off of me, pin her to the twisted, sweaty sheets below us. I straddle her bare chest, my knees biting into her forearms.
“Payback’s a bitch, you know,” I say.
Her smile is sultry. “It had better be.”
I’ve always been gentle with Jenny. She’s smaller than me in every way, in every place and every crevice of her porcelain body. I’ve never been rough with her in bed, because I’m afraid I might break her. And I have the feeling she wouldn’t like it, anyway.
But with Rhianna…
I flip her onto her stomach, use my knees to push her legs apart, use my hands to knead at her ass. She lets out a small moan of pleasure when I reach inside her and wiggles her legs wider. It encourages me at the same time that it irritates me, so I push harder. Her hips jerk up, slap against my bare abdomen, and that does it — something inside me goes wild. I’ve never done anything like this with Jenny before, and I love it. I push my fingers so far inside Rhianna that she practically swallows my knuckles, and she only groans louder. I move faster, deeper, and pretty soon I’m panting along with her, bracing myself on a forearm as my tits alternate between sliding and sticking to her sweaty back. Unlike with me, it only takes Rhianna a couple minutes to tip over the edge, and when she does, she clenches her thighs together so hard that she practically breaks my fucking hand.
I collapse on top of her when her legs finally relax, pull my aching, pruned-up fingers out and wipe them on the sheets beside her.
“Still hate me?” she asks, words muffled by the pillow beneath her face.
“More than ever.”
#
When Rhianna leaves a couple hours later, I take another shower and put on fresh clothes, kicking the dirty, sex-and-bar-smelling ones into the corner. I fish my phone out of the pocket of my discarded jeans before sitting on the foot of the bed, open the screen to my list of favorites. My thumb hovers over Jenny’s name. It’s one in the morning where she is; there’s a chance she might still be up.
Tears swell in my eyes like water balloons; a fat one breaks, rolling down my cheek and splashing onto the phone. It blurs Jenny’s name. I sniff hard, wipe the tears from my cheeks with the heel of a hand.
I press my thumb against the screen, knee bouncing up and down as three rings pass in painful slowness.
“Anika?” Alex says, voice gravelly with sleep.
Words don’t come out right away, just a pained cry.
“Anika? Are you there?”
“I fucked up, Lex. Jesus fucking Christ, I just fucked up really fucking bad.”