open transom

by scott lucero

The table, having only been kept balanced with a folded-up flyer for some free concert, toppled. She saved the shots but that pitcher of beer soaked my lap before I could jump up. The few people who remained at the bar just stared at me. She snorted with laughter. In between snorts, she tried to act like she could dry me off. But her laughter took over and I didn’t really need her hands all over my cold and wet crotch. Not yet at least.

I took one of the shots, threw it back, and said “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

Her boyfriend lived nearby. She assured me that he had some pants I could wear and that he probably wasn’t there. She didn’t know where he was. She said she didn’t care without a trace of sadness.

Autumn was starting to blow in; you could feel the cool shift. I zipped my Army jacket a little closer up and I watched her bob and weave down the road. Every once in a while she’d bump into me, or I’d bump into her. Every once in a while she’d laugh at my predicament. Laugh so hard her apologies were hardly audible.

The apartment building was bright with fluorescent lighting and hot from the steam heat. She leaned against the mailboxes and smiled that crooked, drunken smile at me. Unzipping her coat, she stretched her neck and blew out a big sigh. Her green eyes glistened from the booze and the cold. Her blond hair touched the collar of her coat as she dug her hands into her pockets.

“I lost the fucking keys,” she blurted it out.

“Really? You think he locked the transom?”

We’d done something like this before, a million times. Slip off from a party or the bar and sneak into his apartment through the open transom above the door. We trudged up the stairs, pausing only so she could laugh at me and my dripping pants. I jiggled the door, to see if he forgot to lock the door. No luck. So I cupped my hands into a stirrup.

“You ready?”

She nodded as she put her hands on my shoulders. I leaned the door as I heaved her up. Her body ran over the front of mine. I felt her breasts press and drag over my chest and I paused as they slipped by my face. I could smell her perfume and baby powder.

“Hey now, watch it,” she cracked. Her fingers gripped the transom ledge as her crotch lingered in front of my mouth. I took a deep breath. She smelled like vanilla.

“I need you to boost me,” she moaned out, “I’m stuck.” So I grabbed her ass and pushed her as hard as I could. Up she went and she went through the open transom head first. The next sound I heard was her crashing behind the door.

“You okay?”

Laughter. She’s laughing, she must be okay, I reckoned.

The door swung open and she was rubbing her head. She looked at me and mouthed the word, “ouch.” As we walked in, she threw her coat on the couch and went into his bedroom.

“Here, put these on,” as she threw a pair of his jeans my way. I hung my coat over a kitchen chair and went to his bathroom. I threw my underwear in the garbage and buttoned up the fly of his jeans. They were looser than mine and broader in the ass, but they’d do the trick.

She was grabbing some glasses and a bottle of something out of the fridge. I reached in his ice box and grabbed a bottle of whiskey and followed her into the living room. There, in the dark of her boyfriend’s apartment, we drank and talked. I sat on his couch and she was sitting there on the floor at my feet, her legs tucked up under her. The only light was from the green glow of the stereo and the faint glimmer of the streetlight.

She was drinking cheap champagne out of a Scooby-Doo juice glass and I was taking hits off the pint of Seagram’s. As we drank, our conversations always got more personal and more intimate.

“He asked if he could shave me,” she said.

“Nuh-uh.”

She covered her mouth, laughing, and shook her head yes.

“What did you do?”

“I let him shave me.”

“You didn’t,” although I wasn’t that incredulous. I just wanted details.

“Yeah, I did. It was pretty exciting at first. He was slow and he never cut me. He just lathered me up and shaved me bald. It was smooth. And he kissed it. It kind of turned me on, really.”

“Kind of?”

“Yeah, but it really itched later. A lot. Drove me crazy.”

“I bet.” This is the way it was with us. She’d tell me story like that. Something sexy. Something that would drive me crazy and get me hard as a rock. And I think it turned her on to tell me, too.

“Who was the first person to see your dick?” she bubbled out. “I mean sexually,” she punctuated that with a swig from her bottle and a finger pointed at me.

I looked down at her, sitting on the floor between my legs, while she smiled sexily and sipped a little champagne. I tried hard to shift so she couldn’t see my hard on.

“Well, the first girl to see it was a sister of a friend of mine. She delivered the newspapers in the neighborhood and had always flirted with me, mercilessly. And once she’d stroked it through my jeans when we were younger. But when I was sixteen she was fifteen and I saw her walk up to our door. It was the middle of the day. Summertime. No one was around. I stood in front of the screen door and when she got to the door she smiled big and bright at me. Just friendly. I grabbed my cock through my jeans and said, ‘You want to see it?’ She looked around and said, ‘Yeah, sure,’ but she sounded like she didn’t believe me. And I pulled it out.”

“You did not.”

“Yes, I did. I even stroked it a little.”

“No way.”

“Yes, total way.”

“Did you ever show her again?”

“Every chance I could for the next two years.”

“You ever do anything else with her?”

“Nope. Just showed her my dick.”

“That made me sort of wet,” she whispered.

We paused and kind of ignored what we’d been talking about.

She put her hand and head on my knee and let me stroke her hair. She talked off to the stereo, like it was the first time she ever said it out loud, “I don’t know why I never fucked you.”

We sat there like that, in the darkness, and my hand rested there in her hair and her hand pressed against my thigh and we didn’t move; we didn’t make a choice. I knew that this was my chance; that this would be the only opportunity I would ever have to be with her; that this was the night I could be with her like I had wanted for so long.

But I knew other things, too.

I knew that it would lead to hurt feelings and broken hearts; that this night would bring only suffering. I knew that eventually I’d let her down and we’d end up more lonely for each other than we’d ever been. Neither one of us moved, not for the longest time. And I swear to God she didn’t even breathe.

Finally, she stood up and leaned her legs against the edge of the couch, and said, without looking to me, “I’ve had too much to drink, I’m...sorry...I should’ve never…I didn’t mean.” My hand reached for her hand and she squeezed back without looking at me. We sat there for a minute or two longer, both of us trying to make the final decision.

When she smiled that same crooked smile down at me, I whispered, “It’s getting late, baby.” She nodded her head and she wiped her eyes with her fingertips, and zigzagged off to his room.

I took a long hard draw on the bottle and watched her as she went into his bedroom and changed with the door cracked open. I watched, in the glow of the streetlight, while she slid down between his dirty sheets. I watched her breathe and I watched one nude leg slide out from the sheets. And when her breathing deepened and got softer with sleep, I slipped on my shoes and, before I eased out the door, I locked the transom and whispered goodbye to the darkened room.

Once I got outside, the sky was lavender with early morning. I lit a cigarette and took another swig off his bottle. I wasn’t two blocks away before I regretted locking that god damned transom.

Scott Lucero is a writer and teacher from eastern Kentucky , where he lives with his wife and their two children. His work has appeared in PLUCK! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture, Kudzu, VerbSap, and will appear in the winter 2007 issue of memoir.