“Matt is dropping the baby off at his mom’s house.” Frankie pulled out a chair but didn’t sit. “He should be back pretty soon.”
“How old is your baby?” I asked.
I tried not to stare at her body. Although Jenny had said they were interested in me, I didn’t want to make the mistake yet of interpreting their friendliness as anything more than curiosity.
“Jett’s about ten months old,” she said. “He just took his first steps last week.”
I didn’t know if ten months was an exceptional time to learn how to use your feet to move your body. I stared at her poreless, makeup-free skin, thinking of what to say.
I wondered how she felt about seeing me this close, an arm’s length away, where she could see the mistakes in my makeup or the pimples underneath, could smell my breath or skin or hair. I wondered if she felt the same pulse of heat about our bodies, the way I felt it. My hand searched along the bottom of the table for something to pick off, paint or cardboard or wood splinters. When I didn’t find anything, I picked at the skin of my thumb.
“Oh,” I said. “That must be exciting.”
She nodded and smiled. Her eyes lit up affectionately. “He gets more mobile every day. It’s always changing,” she said.
I wanted to get close to Frankie. I always wanted that with girls, especially when they were older or seemed cooler than I was. I wanted to become her best friend, to feel her from every angle. As a result, I became nervous. I didn’t want to fuck it up.
“There’s a show tonight,” she said. “We can go out when Matt gets back.”
“Cool,” I said. “Sounds good. How do you two know Jenny?”
“Well, Matt and Jenny go way back,” Frankie said. “Knew each other in middle school and everything.”
The cuticle of my thumb began to bleed. I nodded.
“I met Jenny when I started dating Matt,” she said. “What was that, sophomore year? Or freshman?” She asked as if I would know, like we were longtime friends with an intertwined history. Dust motes circled beneath the overhead light. “God, it’s been so long, it’s like Matt and I are practically married.” She laughed like she was trying to prove something. I laughed, too.
Eight years later, I’ll look her up on social media and retrace the constellation of each event. I’ll laugh as I scroll through picture upon picture of their life after me—both hers and his, status updates and in her bio: To have and to hold. Married since 2003, a decade plus of matrimonial bliss. The year of our life together erased. As if she’d never called me Lilith, like she did the first night she saw me naked. As if nothing I’m about to tell you ever actually happened.
ABSORBED INTO THE BODIES OF MEN
MATT CAME HOME. HE and Frankie stood in the hallway, arms around each other, unmoving. His eyes locked onto mine, and it was like this that I saw something familiar in him for the first time, some flicker that made me burn between my legs. I quickly looked away.
“Hey,” he said. “Cool to see you on the other side of the cash wrap.” He reached his hand out to me to shake and instinctively I put my hand out, too. What happened when our skin collided is what happens to sweat on a summer body, the way the heat turns everything wet into a hot, sticky vapor. His thumb reached up and over the whole of my hand. I touched him like chalk against a chalkboard, like I could feel each part of me dissolve against his skin. As if I wasn’t standing in their front room, shaking hands with a strange man, like this was some job interview to get fucked.
Matt moved out of the entryway and into the kitchen to grab some beers. When he stepped away, Frankie kept her eyes on me. Did she want to be my friend? Fuck me? That was the first time she looked at me as though she might unhinge her jaw and eat me, which was both arousing and unnerving. She grabbed my wrist harder this time and led me back to the kitchen table.
“You want a beer?” Matt asked.
“Anything harder?”
“We don’t have any liquor right now,” he said. “I can get Patrick to bring some later.”
I wondered who Patrick was—a fourth player? Matt’s walk to the table was slow, setting Frankie’s beer down first, and then mine, next to the one he’d finished. I stared at the bottle and watched the way his hand slid from the neck down the body, gathering the slick condensation.
“So, like, I heard you’re a tattoo artist,” I said.
“You could say that, yeah.”
“What kind of stuff do you tattoo?”
He leaned into the hand pressed down on the table, so his hip jutted out a little, almost brushing me. “Small stuff,” he said. “I do it from home.”
Frankie pointed to the art on the walls. A screaming mouth that reminded me of Cool World. A lot of attempted graffiti, cartoon teddy bears with angry teeth and stoner eyes. The kind of shit every white boy from Colorado Springs drew in high school. I pretended to be impressed.
He was wearing cologne, as though he cared about the closeness of our bodies. It was subtle and understated, like watered-down scotch. “I can tattoo you for free if you want,” he said. “Whenever you want.”
When I was very little, before my dad died, a cashier at McDonald’s asked me if a happy meal on the counter was mine. My family had already gotten their food, so I said no and wandered back over to my table. My father grabbed me by the shoulders and looked me right in the face. His hair was this tousled shoulder-length mane, brown already going gray, and at the time he’d had a mustache. He said, “Whenever someone offers you something for free,
