Beneath The Skin(27)

“I get off in another hour,” she says, biting her lip again.

Laura? Mandy? Grace? Gina? Jen? Emily? Cassandra?

“Oh, that’s cool,” I reply vaguely. Sarah? Susan? Darcy? Tracy?

“I thought, maybe …” She brings her lips to my ear and lowers her voice to a sigh. “After I get off … maybe we both could get off …”

Kelly? Olivia? Lena? Ramona? Ashley? Amber?

“I think I … I might need to, ah …”

“I’ve been thinking about you for weeks,” she moans, her tits in my face, her soft hand on my shoulder, and her breath tickling my ear.

The next moment, Dmitri’s in front of us to save the day. “You’re up, buddy.”

She pulls away from me, giving Dmitri the stink eye before flipping her hair at me and saying, “I’ll be back with those nachos.” Then, with a frosty, pointed wink, she hightails it to the bar.

I come up to the lane, my lucky blue-and-orange ball held up by my hand wearing the lucky blue-and-orange fingerless glove. My wrists still ache from the unrelenting cuffs earlier that bound them for hours.

There are worse aches to suffer.

I stare at the ten pins that await me at the end of the lane and I think about the waitress. I may know some of the staff by name, but hers completely eludes me. And I wouldn’t find that so bothersome if it weren’t for the fact that I think she and I have shared a bed. Or was it a closet? Or was it the kitchen scullery? Or was it in a car out back? Or was it back at school in a classroom? In a shrubbery? On a rooftop? In a dormitory? In the bed of a pickup?

Behind a privacy screen in the art room?

“Brant? You waiting on the pins to drop themselves?”

I stand here on the approach and I stare at those ten pins that await me, and it’s like those pins are ten random chicks I’ve screwed and then utterly forgotten. And whenever I knock the pins down, the machine just sweeps them off and replaces them with ten more. Ten girls gone, ten more on the way. Tens and tens and tens.

Girls and girls and girls.

“Brant?”

I pull back, breathe, then send that ball screaming down the lane. It takes the pins down with a furious clatter.

All the pins but one.

That one final pin stares at me defiantly. It’s so opinionated, that stubborn pin. It acts like it knows everything about me without even having dinner with me yet. It claims to get what I’m all about. It accuses me of being a woman-objectifying man-whore. It cuffs me to a block and shows me off to the world as the pussy-lickin’ slut I am.

I snatch my ball from the ball return, angry, and march up to the approach. Then I launch it down the lane with crazed conviction.

The ball barely grazes the remaining pin.

The pin wiggles. The pin dances. Then the pin settles, staying in its place, unfallen.

Dmitri comes up to my side and throws an arm over my shoulder. “You win some, you lose some.” He messes up my hair as I stare down the lane at that pin, frozen in place, disbelieving. “I say we pretend the nachos made us sick, then dodge big-tits waitress and head home for a round of Call of Duty. How’s that sound?”

“Perfect,” I grunt through gritted teeth, fuming over that stubborn, shiny, beautiful pin.

That pin named Nell.





NELL



Everyone else in class has left already and the studio is gorgeously silent. My apartment suffers from the noise of nearby traffic, police sirens, and a rhinoceros or two that live directly above me. Not to mention the six rock star hopefuls that live in the box across the hall from me and who rehearse no less than four times a day. I know all their songs by heart and against my will. I’m Bleeding Picklock’s number one fan and can’t stand them.

So it’s a welcome relief to have a peaceful, quiet studio all to myself. My hands are riddled with charcoal scratches from an angered cat that made me bleed every shade between black and grey. That angered cat rests in two dimensions on the wide paper before me. She’s a hungry cat, as her own tail is curled around her body, resting in a food bowl in front of her. And it’s to that tail that she’s stuck a fork, slicing off a piece of it with a knife to eat for dinner.

I think I’ll call this one: Eating Pussy.

“So did I do well?”

I don’t turn around. His voice comes behind me from the door, and I know exactly whose voice it is without daring to lay my eyes on his sexy face. I keep the charcoal pencil pressed to the paper, adding details to the fur on my hungry cat’s ears.

“I’d say the crowd that gathered,” he goes on, “was quite receptive.”

I bring a blackened, dirty finger to the paper, blending a shadow.

“Might even need an encore,” he says, the smile evident in his voice. “You can’t just be a one-hit wonder. They have those in the art world, don’t they?”