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  “He still hasn’t contacted me, and so things are still complicated until he does,”

  “You know, you don’t have to wait for him to contact you,”

  “I don’t want to look desperate, you know? Besides, remember? I already tried texting him before and never got answers. It must look creepy as fuck, having five messages from me over five months, all unanswered,”

  “Well, if I was The Guy? I’d feel blessed to have a girl like you blowing up my phone,” he said, pouring something that looked like a slushie into a glass and adding a dollop of whipped cream on top with chocolate shavings added as well. I didn’t even know that whipped cream could be used in drinks. “Here. You sorority girls like those Crappuccinos, right?”

  “Frappuccino,” I corrected him, rolling my eyes.

  “I know, you know I like giving you a hard time,” he said with a smirk, tipping his fedora. Ugh, it was such a stupid habit! I hated that fedora, it was so stupid looking, but all the bartenders at Club Grit wore them, and at least it was from Goorin Bros (as Jason wouldn’t shut up about, especially when we watched Breaking Bad and Walter White’s hat was shown on screen) so it wasn’t as cringe inducing as the cheap boardwalk fedoras that most of the guys in the club wore, neon white in the black lights of the club, except when examined up close: stained and gross with blotches of liquids that were better left unknown.

  I took a sip of the drink. It did taste like a Frappuccino, except grittier. I mixed in the whip cream and it became much smoother.

  “So, which was your favorite?”

  “I’ll have to go with...the chocolate daiquiri. But, you have to blend in the whipped cream or it’s like a snow cone,” I said.

  “Duly noted, we’ll call it the Becca.”

  “Don’t you fucking dare,” I said with a glare. I rolled my eyes as he walked over to the blackboard and picked up a chalk marker, but my eyes wandered down to his ass. The pants he was wearing were so tight that I knew if he wasn’t wearing his half apron, covering him from the waist down, that his prominent bulge could be seen through the dark denim. The uniforms at Club Grit were altogether far too revealing and sexual, for the men and for the women, in cut out bodycon dresses, but right now, I was enjoying the view.

  “So which of these lucky men are you taking home tonight?” he asked, leaning on the counter. “There’s Sparklepants over there, he looks like a real adventure.” He was pointing at a guy who was decked out, head to two, in bedazzled Ed Hardy, from a baseball cap down to his shirt, pants, and shoes. How he’d gotten past the bouncers at the front, I’d never know.

  “Gag me with a spoon. Next,” I ordered.

  “There’s Mr. Corporate, if that’s your type,” he said, pointing at a guy in a white oxford shirt, pit stains showing, grinding on a girl that looked like she was too young to be at the club to begin with.

  “You know I’m not into man purses,” I said, pointing out that there was a strap leading to a “miniature messenger bag”, a.k.a. a man purse or “murse”, on the other side. “Next.”

  “Well, m’lady, if none of these men are your type, I can offer myself, as your white knight,” he said.

  “God fucking damn it Jason, stop using memes,” I ordered. There was a point where his sarcastic analysis of his douchey job became too close to home and he started sounding like one of the weirdo pick up artists with names like Danger or Disaster who wore fluffy top hats and eyeliner to the club. “But yeah, if you’re free tonight...”

  “Well, there’s this little thing called work, that normal people do, Becca, but I’ll be sure to oblige you after my shift is up...which is in about five minutes,” he teased, and I wanted to lean over the counter, shut him up with a kiss, but wasn’t about to risk his job over that. Being at Jason’s bar, watching him make drinks and laugh and talk with people? It was like being at a strip club, where I could look but couldn’t touch, and where Jason was the only man on display. The other bartenders treated this job like it was just a normal job like working in a factory like my dad had or working as a secretary like my mom, but Jason? Even though in private, he joked about how the job was terrible, a stereotype for an artist like himself to be a bartender, to the patrons of the club, he was nice as pie. Even though we joked about people I called “ratchet” and he called “trashy”, if they were at the bar, he was as gracious a host as a Southern housewife, and he knew how to play “the game”, out earning all other bartenders in tips.

  I went to my phone to text Kim and Sam, to let them know I wouldn’t be going home with them that night, when I looked and saw I had a text from the one person I’d wondered about for the past school year, non-stop. The one person I couldn’t stop thinking about, except for when I was around Jason.

  Keanne Slims: One Unread Message.

  Chapter Two:

  I DIDN’T HAVE TIME FOR THIS. Out of all the times Keanne could have texted me, he chose now? He’d had months to contact me and right now, I was with Jason and didn’t want to think about anyone else. I turned my phone off, all the way off, not bothering to text anyone. I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up: Jason had taken off his apron and was carrying a small black backpack which had the other parts of his uniform in it, including his fedora. His hair was freed from the confines of that awful felt hat, and I got to rub my hands into it, pushing it back like a comb, feeling its silkiness, the texture protected from the all-too gritty atmosphere of Club Grit that made my own hair feel gross afterwards.

  Jason grabbed a cab voucher from behind the bar and we headed off into the night. I zipped up my fluorescent yellowish green American Apparel hoodie over my Lilly dress and Jason opened up his backpack, pulling out a pair of rolled up flats.

  “You’re a size eight, right?” he said.

  “Yeah, but those aren’t my shoes,” I said. Was he trying to pass off stuff from his sexual lost and found as mine? Or as a present? That wasn’t about to work on me.

  “Yeah, I know. I saw these at CVS, they’re flats for after dancing and stuff, and I thought you might want some relief so I got them for you,” he explained, emphasis on the last two words. I felt the lining of the shoes in my hand. They were new, brand new, and although they were inexpensive, they felt like the most luxurious spa slippers in the world as my toes slipped out of my tight white platform heels and into the flats.

  I started to slip and Jason took a knee, catching me, stabilizing me. He was my rock and I was Cinderella, as he slipped off the white platforms with their glass-clear plastic tops, the kind you’d see on a stripper, not a princess, and put on the flats, black with a leopard print lining and bow at the tip, like a kid’s pair of ballet slippers. He slipped the shoes over my feet gently, raising and lowering each as if they were precious porcelain he couldn’t risk dropping, before rising again.

  And then? The moment was over as Jason hailed a cab and helped me in first, opening the door for me, before slipping in, giving the cabbie his address, and we were off to his apartment. He opened his bag up to get a voucher and I noticed two of the pink papers inside his bag.

  “I thought you only got one?” I asked with a frown.

  “Yeah, I got one last night, one tonight, so you’d have one for tomorrow morning,” Jason explained.

  “So how did you get home last night?”

  “There’s this thing called a bus,” he joked. The cab pulled up at his place: an apartment complex mostly filled with college students that went to California State University – Los Angeles. He was the only person I knew who lived here, and we took the elevator to his fifth story apartment. Jason made enough to afford to live alone, without a roommate, and enough to afford a big screen television, which, as we entered, he turned on instead of the lights.

  “So, I might have lured you here under false pretenses,” he stated.

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yeah, really. I know that more than anything, you want to rip my clothes off and toss me onto the bed,” he said facetiously, but little did he know how tru
e that statement was. “However, I did just get the Breaking Bad boxed set in the mail, and there’s deleted scenes that I haven’t watched yet.”

  “Why not? Too busy?”

  “Or, just maybe, I was waiting to watch them with you?” he said. “It’s your choice. Sex...or Breaking Bad.”

  “Sex,” I said, pulling him by the hand to his bedroom, but he pulled me to the couch instead and sat, forcing me to sit as well, in front of the large screen TV which was already open to a DVD menu with a bald Bryan Cranston glaring at us, the screen flanked by two large shelves filled with DVDs and many boxed sets. In front of the couch was a plain pine wooden coffee table, and a plush grey area rug filled this section of the studio apartment, with its open floor plan allowing for us to talk from “room” to “room” without yelling.

  “Trick question, you’re still too drunk for sex,” he said, giving me a kiss on the cheek as he got up to go to the kitchen, covering me with the throw blanket he kept on the couch, a plain black blanket that was plush, a contrast to the stuffed tufted white Chesterfield sofa.

  “It’s not rape if I want it,” I groaned, leaning down onto the couch and screaming into a pillow. We’d had this conversation so many times: Jason would count how many drinks I’d had, add three for the VIP section part of the night and for me miscounting, and wait until I was sufficiently sober to let me have sex with him, even if that meant he sat with a raging hard-on as we watched chick flicks.

  “Well, I don’t want it til you’re a bit more sober, okay?” he teased, bringing in snacks from the kitchen. He’d made kettle corn in the microwave, its sweet and salty scents filling my nose, as well as hot chocolate (just classic Swiss Miss). The doorbell rang and he answered: Chinese food, delivery. He must have ordered from the cab, on his phone. The piece de resistance? A small dish of rock candy, blue, of course. A gift I’d gotten him for Christmas, instead of chocolates or some other stereotypical couple’s gift like a white teddy bear with a red heart for a chest holding a matching Mylar balloon on a stick, because I didn’t want it to be weird.

  But it had gotten weird. And this was the point that I realized it.

  Friends with benefits didn’t have Breaking Bad marathons together.

  They didn’t order Chinese food from cabs.

  They didn’t insist that I sober up a bit before we actually get to the fucking.

  So why wasn’t I running? And why did this feel...right? When I had a message on my phone waiting for me, from Keanne, of all people, who had chosen tonight, of all nights, to make things even more complicated?

  I leaned on Jason as we started the deleted scenes. At least an hour went by and as we watched TV and we started another episode, switching positions so his head was in my lap at some points, at others, mine in his, I felt myself thinking more clearly about things. The food helped, soaking up the alcohol, and as one scene drew a close, another began, as I leaned up to kiss Jason.

  While I ate the pork and scallion pot stickers, Jason kept one arm around me, using his free hand to hold up the sauce for me to dip my dumplings into. When I sipped my hot chocolate and it was too cold, he didn’t even ask me before he went to warm it up for me again. Jason and I never talked about this, about how our relationship was slowly changing, and how this was so different than how we’d first met, drunk, on his night off, but both at Club Grit, where we ended up hooking in the backroom, and eventually moved the festivities to his apartment. We didn’t talk about the fact that we no longer had sex drunkenly, and about the fact that he knew more about me than most of my ex-boyfriends had, that he treated me better than them too.

  We also didn’t talk about how the fact that I was about to do what I was about to do wasn’t random, that it was routine, but still full of passion, and that he could read me like a book and figure out when I’d do it.

  At least, that was the only explanation I had for the fact that although my head was in his lap and seconds before, I’d been watching Jesse call someone a bitch on the widescreen, that he met me halfway, around the midpoint of his chest, in the kiss I was going to try and initiate on my own.

  His lips were salty but I tasted the sweetness of marshmallows and chocolate in his mouth before much longer.

  My arms slipped but he kept his left arm wrapped around my back, cradling my own left arm, and lifting me up as he used his right hand to brush a lock of hair off of my face where it clung to a remnant of the pink MAC lip gloss I’d last applied in the limo on the way to Club Grit. Jason leaned down and kissed me hard, his chin still smooth from being shaved before he’d gone to Club Grit for work, but his lips rough, chapped by the fact he had to sample so many drinks during bar set up, when he experimented with his new recipes, and by the fact that when he was asked to take a shot by patrons, he almost always had to partake. It was club policy, but it meant that it took Jason a while to get sober.

  However, in all the months I’d known him, he had never once had “whiskey dick”: the inability to get an erection due to having consumed too much alcohol. He’d also never gotten drunk. He said it was because he’d built up an immunity, of sorts, as a bartender, but he was able to hold his liquor better than any of the other mixologists on staff, many of whom didn’t make it past the first few weeks of club life, either getting too sloshed to work or worse, dabbling with harder drugs. They could be fun, but at work? Never. That was another thing Jason and I had in common: even though we both drank at work out of obligation, we didn’t go for the harder stuff. That’s what the girls at Omega Mu didn’t know about me: all the times they’d offered me drugs, I’d secretly either thrown the pill away or wiped my share of the powder off the table. I’d seen what drugs could do to people and I didn’t want to touch them, not even cigarettes.

  Although I knew it was wicked of me, I slipped my hand over his pants and felt what I knew by now to expect: that his member was hard, so hard I could feel it through the thick denim of his designer jeans. I wanted to undo the silver buckle of his brown leather belt and take him then and there, but before I could reach up to do so, Jason grabbed my wrist gently but powerfully enough that I couldn’t pull away easily. Not that I’d want to: having Jason hold me and control me was rare, and when he did take charge, I never questioned his authority.

  “You ready?” he whispered into my ear, still gripping my wrist, but he already knew the answer as he moved his hand from my wrist to my palm, enlacing his fingers in mine as he rose from the couch and led me to the bedroom.

  Jason was so caring usually, but whenever we went from friend mode to friends-with-benefits mode, he changed: he became dominant, taking the lead sexually and physically. It wasn’t something you would have thought he had in him, if you talked to him at Club Grit about relationship problems and he lent a caring ear, but it was as much a part of him as his “nice guy” side.

  The open layout of the apartment allowed us to get to the bedroom without breaking our physical flow with any opening of door knobs. We made a beeline to his bed, the white plush carpet pressing in between my toes as he led me to the bed, before turning me around at the foot of it and pushing me down.

  Jason didn’t bother to take off my dress. The first place that his firm, warm hands touched were the bottoms of my feet, which he rubbed and pressed, because he knew my body better than anyone. He knew that by doing that, I’d giggled, lose my balance, and end up on my back, allowing him to trace two asymmetrical lines up my thighs, until he reached the place between my hips and him.

  As he pressed down on my wetness, he rasped into my ear once again, and asked me, “How much do you want me?” My only answer was to try and steady myself on my elbows to kiss him, but Jason pushed my arms out and away to force me to lie down before letting out a low chuckle. “You minx. I know exactly how much you want me, and the question isn’t whether I’ll deliver, but how far I’ll go.” As he teased me with his words, he spoke in a calm monotone, like a dulcimer’s dulcet tones merging into one melody, the only dynamics that of physical punctuat
ion, as he continued to press his fingers against me, through the thin cotton lace of my panties.

  Even though he was the king of the bedroom, it was Jason who got down on a knee, as if he was a prince pledging his fealty to me, except it wasn’t to me, but to my pleasure. That was the only promise he could make and right now, it was the only one I could accept.

  His fingers were warm but as he hooked a finger around each side of my lace thong, shimmying it down, a shiver went down my spine as I felt his rough fingers against my smooth, soft thighs. We’d been together, or at least, sleeping together, for months now, but each time was like the first time. Each time, he surprised me, and each time, I let myself be surprised.

  Jason hadn’t even taken my thong panties past my knee before he leaned in to put his head under my skirt, like a shameful Frenchman eating an ortolan, hiding his shame from God underneath a napkin, except he had no shame, only pride, as he let his warm breath over my already wet sex, which absorbed his heat readily.

  Even though all I could see was Jason bobbing his head up and down under my skirt, I could feel him all too well. His warm tongue wandered into my love canal but it wasn’t enough to fill me, nor was it enough when he slid two of his digits inside of me, his phalanges not phallic enough for me. Where was the bulbous head of his cock that I so desired? The only similarity was the fact that, once wetted, his finger’s ridges and roughness were textured to feel more like his cock, but they were a poor substitute.

  It wasn’t that Jason was bad at what he was doing. On the contrary, he was the only man who could please me this way, orally, without trying to make it into some cheesy porn production, like men who expected a pussy to taste like cherries and for a woman’s orgasm to result in a rain of glitter like some ersatz New Year’s Eve party in my pants. It was just that Jason was so good at sex, that no matter what else he did to try to please me, it wouldn’t be enough. Nothing would ever be enough.