Untitled excerpt three

Continued from below. If this is your first time reading, you should probably start on the first of the last three untitled posts (demarcated by a I.). But this should also make sense on its own, more or less.

III.

Drunk by the point that Jen found me in an empty hallway leaning against a closet door, still on the whiskey, more gulping and less sipping now. Why are you hiding from me? extending a hand down, Bakelite bracelets sliding down her thin, thin wrist, as if I just needed a lift up and I would be back at it. Hiding, no, a little bit of a headache. Well, she's in a bit of a pinch. There are two boys here and maybe she's been with both of them recently, a few times, nothing serious, but, well, first of all, they don't know about each other, obviously. Me, an echo: Obviously. And, to make matters worse, let's say they'd both been calling themselves her boyfriend, even though everyone knows she doesn't do boyfriends, and maybe, oh, just maybe there's a chance that she hasn't had the balls--me, snorting, You have been ball-less for as long as I can remember, but the sentence is far too long for a serviceable quip and she rolls on—hasn't had the balls to correct them. Who are they? One bearded, one blond. Go with the beard, I say, but it's an icy stare and I recant. A pinch, yes, sure, but how am I supposed to help? Just come with her, puhleeze, and she reached out her clattering, retroclad arm again. I begrudgingly met her fingertips, and pushed myself up, precariously, against the door. Much more swayed by the liquor than I thought. The floors may as well have belonged to an oceanliner, but I found my footing and let her guide me, her finger tips still joined to mine with an ethereal looseness, remembering but then forgetting to ask where were going. There was nothing to read into moments like these: no flint sparking between the surfaces of our hands, not even during these small instances of synchronization.

We had been together once, nearly two years ago. A shared handle in the garage apartment she was living in at the time, a handful of details that became elusive in the hungover morning. What I remember is the way her neck tasted. Perfume from a handcrafted glass bottle that I admired in her immaculate bathroom, a perfect, thin film of sweat, the gin evaporating through her pores. And how skinny she was, the slightness of her body uncanny. Not unhealthy, not a drug problem, just the way she had always been, endowed with a metabolism faster than God's. I was too careful with her, made self-conscious by my drunken clumsiness, terrified I would punch right through her eggshell frame, those prominent ribs gleaming white in the mottled starlight that crept through the open window. Always silent too. She never made a show of her pleasure, never opened her mouth to give voice to the sensations of her body. Couldn't tip her hand like that, but she showed it to you— she let it be clear through the tremors, the raking fingernails. Those were the only indications Jen could bear to give that she was, in fact, vulnerable: that she could be affected and, even more, that you might be the thing to affect her. Or maybe those were just the select moments in which she couldn't help but reveal herself in such a way, where a display of her humanity was inevitable, where, as her eyes glazed over in orgasm, she was forced to succumb to the idea that her dominion over the world around her was contingent. But, even so, Jen wasn't going to stay—I knew it before the undoing of clasps and buttons and I knew it in the smothering morning light that woke us. She had always been a proximity girl, more at home flitting in the borders of every boy's vision, permanently aloof but still charitable with her long smiles and genial kisses. I couldn't be resentful of the way she spread through the world like wisps of smoke filling evening air. In moments like these, I allowed myself to be called upon, to be steered down kid-crowded hallways into a room filled with pot smoke where these two new lovers sat (oh, God) side by side, blitzed, and watched her enter like they were encountering the numinous. She gripped my arm before we sat down in the circle, hard, as if begging me to anchor her, as if I was the thing only that could keep her from slipping away entirely.