Six Feet Under

Chapter 19 // (Part 2)

Valeria Ramos

6:00 P.M.

    Camilo stopped stamping his fingers into the little black controller. "Okay, Val—you usually suck, but not this bad."

    "Fuck you, I do not suck."

    "Yeah you fucking do. I always beat you but not this bad."

    Camilo and I were playing Mario Kart on the living room sofa. He was right about the fact that I wasn't that great at it. With all of the practice he gets, playing it for hours and hours on end, staring bullets into the television screen—he is pretty much impossible to beat. But this night in particular, I was slightly preoccupied.

    "Turn that thing off and come sit down for dinner!" my mom called to us.

    Pots and pans had been sizzling and smoking for about half an hour from the kitchen, sending scents of sautéed vegetables and jasmine rice into our noses. Our mom's hollers, demanding us to sit down for dinner, were going on for a few minutes now.

    Camilo stood up from the leather couch we sat on and disconnected the game from the television, performing some kind of magic through bundles of wires and buttons. The game switched off and a television station turned on.

    It was a commercial for deodorant—or moisturizer, or something along those lines. Some unrealistically pretty girl was presenting the product to us—with pearly white teeth and unbelievably clean skin, running about the bathroom with a wind machine blowing through her hair. She showed off the product in her hand with a background of campy music. Camilo and I watched intently, until it blinked to another commercial, the next one advertising an auto-mechanic or something.

    "Damn, she was hot," Camilo said. "Don't ya think?"

    I shrugged. "I don't know. I guess."

    Camilo slouched his back into the arm of the couch, spreading himself leisurely across the cushions and laying his legs across my lap. He's done this to me since we were kids.

    "She kinda reminded me of Liz," he spoke again, laying his head in the woven palms of his hands. "With the red hair and everything."

    Just the simple mention of her name, Liz, it made the memory that I was so determined to repress bubble to the surface like a pot of boiling water. I closed my eyes and shuttered, trying to shake it away—but it just kept crawling back. Up my spine and through my brain until it was all my mind's eye could see, like watching a film in the theater.

    I felt like I had been caressed by a large ocean wave. Like I had been swallowed whole, and I was drowning in a sea of regretful desire.

    I could have sworn that my lips began to throb, or tremble. I felt it as if it was happening over and over again. The warmth, the dampness, the pressure. The way she swallowed my lips like she had never been so hungry in her life. I felt her smooth hands trickle across my jaw again, and how much I begged for her to stop being so delicate. I wanted so badly for her to grip the collar of my shirt with domination, drag me closer to her body and melt her lips across every inch of my skin.

    And now that her name rang in my ears, I wanted it all over again. I wanted it badly and I just couldn't stop. And the more I wanted it, the more I wanted to die—the more I wanted to evaporate into thin air and never have to think about it again.