Who gets to be the hard-bitten detective?
You can. I’ll work on being unwittingly irresistible.
When I first started exchanging messages with C, we were careful and polite. Friendly. I liked his pictures. He liked what I had to say about them. I sometimes scroll through our saved chats trying to pinpoint where the turn was, when we started playing, when we said something that led to our teasing the other about where our hands were when they weren’t on the keyboard.
It’s impossible to say how it happened.
A zillion harmless words between two strangers keeping the other company, and then a night with a handful of reckless words.
It had felt so good.
It was a risk I could take.
Did you? he had asked.
I did, did you? I had answered.
Yes, he’d said.
And then we weren’t strangers, not exactly, but I didn’t tell my mom about him, either.
You’ve got that covered, I answer, pulling open the knot on my drawstring pajamas. You’re so irresistible I’m already tucking your hair behind your ears, clenching my fists to keep from touching you.
Where do you want to touch me?
Where are you touching yourself?
I’ve been touching myself since you said that darkrooms are kind of sexy. Now I’m hard, and I hate stopping to write, but I don’t want to stop what we’re doing.
I’ve never done anything like this before, cybering, cybering with a stranger, role-play cybering with a stranger. Then again, there isn’t anything I recognize about my life anymore, so why not?
Why not grab another pillow and push it between my legs so I have something to kind of roll against while I tell him how to hold himself tight at the base, and then rub his thumb over the top because when I write that, when I imagine it, it makes my clit feel three sizes too big and wet besides and that’s about a thousand times better than feeling afraid or lonely or angry.
Now faster. Lick your palm if you need to.
He doesn’t answer, but that’s how I know he’s listening.
Chapter Two
Falling
I’ve always been clumsy.
Five-seven-and-a-half is nothing to sneeze at, and by the time I was in high school I had the kind of hips that managed to find the corners of tables, doorjambs, and knickknacks balanced on decorative surfaces, such was their breadth.
The top half took after my hips, as Mom said, and I learned to keep water glasses at the twelve o’clock position of my plate, to lean forward when eating popcorn or anything sauce-laden, and that I would always have to brace my arm across my chest when going up and down the stairs. To reduce bounce and because it’s easy to lose track of your feet.
Oh, also, my ass. Who knows where that’s ended up, exactly. It’s made its own fabulous place in the world.
The summer before I moved here, Mom and I had laughed over the increase in my ungainly stumbles and butterfingers, chalking it up to nerves over moving so far away.
It seemed normal that I would spend the summer tripping and walking into walls, like my subconscious trying to say that I still needed my mom, or something.
When I got here in the late summer, I found out I had to take a driver’s test to get an Ohio driver’s license as I had accidentally let my Washington license expire. On the freeway just south of the university, with the officer from the DMV in my car, I got into an accident while changing lanes.
Thank God it was a sleepy, late Tuesday morning before classes were in session. I was going slow, too, because of a work zone. It still makes me so thankful that I get shaky to remember that no one was hurt. The officer was kind and perfect and talked me through breathing out my sobs.
I couldn’t tell them how it happened. At all.
My certainty that my lane was clear felt bone deep, and because it was a test, I was on alert. I had checked my mirrors, and my blind spots, and there was nothing there, except, there was.
A landscaping pickup truck with a huge neon green decal over the side.
I had stood in the shoulder of the freeway and looked at that huge green sticker on that big truck and I knew I hadn’t seen that truck. Then, there was this whoosh of knowledge that came over me, made me get chills even though it was August, and so hot and muggy on the shoulder of the freeway that we were all sweating through our clothes.
I hadn’t seen that truck.
I’d never been to the eye doctor. At all my physicals, when they do the thing where they make you look at the letters?
Twenty-twenty, every time.
I’d never been to the eye doctor, but then I ended up going to so many, that August and September, I’ve lost count.
Retinitis pigmentosa.
Now, it’s just December, and I lean against the cold window of the bus and watch brand-new snowflakes swirl in the icy breeze. We haven’t had a really good snow yet, one that’s left behind a lot of inches, and I’m looking forward to it because they’re rare in the Northwest.