Eleven years ago I awoke to my bed oscillating in the middle of the night. It was never like her to say nothing, but it was an erotic surprise. I could see in her tenebrous outline that her hair was down when she slipped me inside her warmth. It had been so long since Jaclyn hadn’t fucked me without her hair up and out of her face (very practical but not as attractive). On this night she was on a power trip. I coursed my hands up and down her delicate skin in hourglass patterns, but she grabbed ahold of my wrists and pinned them over my head, leaning in with all of her weight.
She grinded and strode me for the better part of an hour. Something felt different that night. It felt fucking fantastic and also a little alien. Where this sudden passion sprung from I couldn’t say, because lately we’d been either arguing or avoiding one another. She’d been talking to a guy at work, though I couldn’t prove it. Maybe this was some scheme to make up for it all and start over, and a perfect concoction it was. All the resentment drifted out under the windowsills and spiraled up to the sky undulating Cassiopeia in her rocking chair.
I don’t know what it was but after the first time I came inside of her, she just kept going. My dick remained hard and she grinded faster. It was like the blur of a vehicular accident. Noticing detail was just not something I was equipped to do at the time, however I did notice that at moments she’d suddenly slow her pace and look over her shoulder. I told her to stop and keep going, but she cupped tightly her hand around my nose and mouth in a move of suffocation, and whispered no more than “shhhhhh”.
She quietly demanded that I come again, and it drove me into a frenzy, and I went just the moment she “allowed” me. Right as she came she wrapped her arms around my neck and nestled her forehead against mine as she gyrated and shivered. The bed was soaked. I was soaked. Again, she put her finger to my mouth, and muttered only “shhhhhhhh….don’t say a word”. God damn. If my girl wanted to be this from now on, I was game. But then she started quickly slipping on her clothes.
I asked her aloud where the fuck she was going. It was pitch dark in the room, but the glint of the moon bouncing off the mirror elucidated Jaclyn a bit, and suddenly I felt blurred. Everything seemed to be spinning in some cyclonic, disorienting haze when I noticed her grinning at me from the corner. She scuttled from the light and those big whites of hers seemed to drift toward me in midair. She leaned over me and said something strange - “thank you”.
It was unusual that Jaclyn wouldn’t snuggle with me after sex, especially sex as splendidly foreign and psychosomatically charged as that was. Instead she cracked the door and peeked out, like she was sneaking around, and exited softly. I stared at the ceiling for a while, and then, completely naked, I shuffled off to the living room where I found Jaclyn with her hair in a tortoise clip. She looked at my nudeness and giggled with instinctive, exasperated laughter. “Why are you naked???”, she asked. I asked her jokingly why she hit and quit it, telling her with levity that that is a man’s job.
She looked at me like I had three arms…or two dicks. Suddenly I felt some shade of vulnerable. Her confused expression sent shockwaves through my blood and permeated my temples. My head started to spin and the room, everything tangible with straight lines - the TV, boxes, chairs, picture frames - they all went fuzzy around the edges. I felt drunk and disbelieving. As soon as Jaclyn’s perfume reached down my throat I suddenly felt acidic bile coming up it - going into vomit labor.
Her scent, which flooded my thoughts with a million memories, all organized and sorted, had spurred a psychological windstorm that blew them up into skyborn thermals in every centrifugal pattern as violently imaginable as two men competing for a spot on the Joker’s team with broken, jagged halves of a pool cue. It rendered me absolutely icebound, the stark contrasting aromas of Jaclyn’s begonias and my assailant’s body odor. During a jarringly, almost turbulent sexual experience those nuances tend to fly out the window.
But still, I had to be sure, but also careful how I asked it. I couldn’t just say to her “was that you fucking me or a homeless junkie stranger with big teeth???”. Instead I asked if she’d been on the couch all night, and her answer sent chills up my spine and forced the hackles on the back of my neck to stand at the attention of cemented sentinels - “I’ve been doing laundry”. “For how long?”. “The better part of the last hour”. Holy shit.
“You look like you’ve seen…the devil himself”, she said. All I could think about were those elongated teeth. I covered my genitals with my hand and ran back to the bedroom, her wetness now dried and cracking over my entire pelvis, I instantly imagined a swarm of maggots. I felt used and dirty - the antithesis of boyhood imaginings. The sexy, much older neighbor sneaking in to ride you like a pummel horse. No, it’s not as glorious as most young men would think. I cocked my nine millimeter and got dressed. I forced Jaclyn to go get in the car authoritatively enough that she agreed to withhold all questions.
I didn’t want to call police because of the terror of the shitstorm something like this would cause in an already otherwise turbulent relationship which I wasn’t yet ready to abandon. I searched each room with heart - throbbing precision. I checked the doors. And then I heard it. A creaking of the floorboards in the attic. Our attic didn’t pull down. The house was very old, and at the end of the hall was an old, rotted wooden door leading to the attic. And it was ajar.
I decided I didn’t want to kill anyone that night, so I called police. When I saw her face I shuddered. She wasn’t the hourglass shaped, tanned Amazonian I’d thought she was when she had me grinding against her cervix. Her hair was frazzled and matted. Ruffled up like a lion’s mane. She was thirty - four but looked, by the fault and fracture across her face, the crow’s feet holding up her dilated eyes, the contours of her sunken cheeks and deep dark eye sockets, to be about fifty. She was filthy. Crudded in dried dirt. Smelled of petrichor and onions.
As the hauled her away, asking if I wanted to press charges, I said yes, and that was when she smiled at me. Her teeth weren’t white. They were luminescent as elongated kernels of corn. On her way out, she said something that truly terrified me - “I got you”. And she giggled that dreadful, shrill cackle. Suddenly all the pieces fell into place. The attic was filled with empty food containers. They said she’d been living with us for over a month.
It tore our relationship apart at the already splitting seams. I got tested and found out that I now have HPV. I’ve since had a bit of trouble peeing, and have been forced to see a urologist. I ended up with a bladder infection in which thankfully went away. This woman, named Georgia, was released from jail years ago, and I’ve never known where she went. Jaclyn and I broke up. She just couldn’t handle this whole mess. She always asked why I’d let something like that happen if I wasn’t sure, and not even I can answer that question.
Ever since, I can no longer sleep with my bedroom door unlocked, even if I’m by myself. I still have nightmares, one recurring - I’m in a strange house on a bizarre, ominous plain somewhere out west surrounded by snow - capped mountains. It’s a tiny little ranch house made of plywood, something with the saloon design of a ghost town in the day’s of the western frontier and gold rush. Inside the house is nothing but two rooms divided by and imitation wood wall. On one side is a TV and stereo system, and on the other, a long room with green shag carpeting leading to a set of stairs.
When I approach the stairs, which go up in a set of four to a handing, turning and then continuing its ascension up another four, the pungent odor grows in potency. The steps look like they’re alive, but when I squint, I notice in the dim source of sourceless light that they’re just wriggling maggots. And from the top, I hear a shrill, jagged voice whispering to me one little phrase - **“Got ya’. Thaaaaaank you”. God I wish I could outgrow it.
Sometimes when I’m with my new girlfriend, and we’re in the middle of it, I see those teeth swimming around her face, and I see darkness around her eyes. Georgia. I don’t know that she’ll ever leave me.