Little Baby Faulkner

11

All night I tossed, turned, my throat burned from cocaine and Charisma slept in the middle of this bed made for one—tonight holding two—she left me the one-quarter area closest to the front window and with Charisma's constant bodily rearrangements and the latent effects of the coke I had snorted earlier that day in the Pacchia bathroom..well..I didn't sleep at all.

I thought about that time we had fucked in this exact bed with her parents one room over while I was supposedly visiting Charisma to cheer her up from being sick. But I had left my apartment with the intention of fucking her and that's exactly what I did: fucked through her "no's" and "slows" and all kinds of passive ways of telling me to stop. I didn't cum in her but I got that pretty little taste I had been looking for: ice cream on the tip of a tongue. Back then we would have called it "date rape" if we had been keeping score. Today you would call it "sexual assault"—but Baker wasn't about to call the police on me. Mainly she tried to get me off her, and it was just an annoyance.

I thought of that night on this night. This night where I tried multiple times to get on top of her only to be pushed off and back onto my tiny strip of her bed. She told me "no" and "not tonight" and told me that her parents would hear:

"Matthew! Do I have to send you downstairs?"

I slip my wrist down her cargo pants, inside her white cotton Hello Kitty panties with that pink Hello Kitty placed right where it should be: the entrance to her glorious red cunt. I felt her unshaven (but lightly haired) fur mountain thing and worked my thumb across her clitoris while my index one slipped inside her puss, hot and wet and when she squirmed I felt the tightness increase and when Baker pulled my hand out of her twitch, I brought it to my face and breathed in..deep..deeper..deepest. The girl smelled fine. She presented her clan well. Her species. Her sex. Proper diet and never any soap down there—that's the best care a woman can offer her VJ and the best care her VJ can offer me is: let me inside whenever we will not wake your parents, scream your passion at top volume so I know how you really feel—how I'm making you feel—encourage me, lavish me with affirmation, give me yells, intonations, reflections that my neighbors will hear. Will hear. Will hear what it is I do to you, how my cock makes you feel between your legs, squirming against an unstoppable force: the return to greatness of my penile matter doing some exploring up your treasure, your glory, your hole.

I thought these thoughts all night, remembering our sex, getting my cock hard, thinking of jerking off kneeling over your body, jizzing on your Hello Kitty spot. That spot that was right above your sacred place. Always thinking how every girl carries her pussy around with her..in all the times and in all the places. Like my friend Mike suggested that everyone is carrying shit around inside their body at all times: every girl, every guy, everyone murdering someone and everyone being killed, every girl you want to fuck (shit!) and every girl you are fucking..we're all walking around bowels full of shit—everyone cooking in a restaurant, everyone eating there. And I thought about how right next to me, this girl I loved, this sexy kid/girl who I wanted to fuck (always and forever) had shit up inside her colon, her rectum, inside all those tubes we only see sometimes when you die. When I was fucking her, she had shit rammed up inside the rear pipe, and I was pushing those back tubes around with every moment of fucking her. With every poke, every slide, I was agitating her shit muscles increasing her need to squeeze her abdominal muscles and let out the stinkiest smell of shit that (even though Charisma must have shit tens of times near me throughout our relationship) I had never actually smelled. That was a courtesy she did for me: never shit in front of the guy. If I was in a relationship with her—if Charisma was my partner—she would shit in front of me. If I was her partner, I would sit on the sink while she shit and we would talk about having kids or something.

That was part of how Baker and I were: we never talked about having kids—not the two of us! Me pulling out was a given. The rhythm method was a given—there's no way either of us was going to waste the experience with condoms. If Charisma was out (if I ran into her at a club), she was good to fuck. If she called me, she was good to fuck. We never discussed anything. I never saw her blood. Just clean, dry-as-powder, hot ass wet-inside full-thick smells-like-a-goddess fine ass pussy. Took her to my loft in North Dayton, stripped her panties off, laid her down soft, and fucked. No stoplights. No traffic symbols inferring our movements. None of that first-time hesitance. Just lust: quick, certain, and dead. Dead in the sense that we fucked the moment we got into the pad, on the floor, hallway door open, everyone else on the floor too scared to look inside. You know how it makes a man feel, to fuck him on the floor right inside your apartment, either truly needing to get it that bad or pretending to: either one worked, either one played out the same on my carpet, inside my ear, my mind, my conscious need to be needed. Charisma always gave me that. Generous with the clues, her audio turned way up in her brain, sounds..sounds I have never forgotten and when I'm on that ledge someday I can think: at least I made Charisma scream like that.

I looked over her body. Her waistline, her breasts held in place by a white sports bra. I ran my fingers through her blonde hair (uncolored) and thought of what a pure female she was, pure along that axis. She breathed with her mouth closed—I had never heard her snore, never smelled her breath. Her teeth were small but straight. I thought of the guys I knew who had fucked her. Never was she fucked by my best friend from high school (Julian)—although he wanted to. Julian took my stories about fucking Charisma with surprising morality and guilt—the same way he took my news of getting with half his friends. I slept with Diedre and did stuff with Tuesday—both girls Julian wanted to fuck. All he could do is complain about some girl named Jade from Portland. So I'm lying here, thinking of Charisma, and when I first told Julian about it. I described the pussy. Described the feel of it. Described the sounds she made. Julian's only concern was that when I first got with Baker, I was cheating on Ashley. Ashley: was a partner. Baker: was a fuck friend. I looked at her pure white skin next to me as she slept in her childhood bedroom.

I wondered what she thought of me. How did I get to be here in this room? She joked that it was because I was an artistic genius and she wanted to sleep with one. I thought she was joking. In fact as soon as she said that I almost corrected her to say that I was not a genius. On second thought, though, decided to let the idea sit with her, even if to me it was a fallacy. If that was truly all she wanted, she could find that somewhere else—right? There had to be a hundred of me throughout Dayton, all equally genius in art. Her dad was an artistic genius, painting landscapes on his plates. But Charisma thought I was a genius and her father was an amateur: the way she asked me to look at his paintings it was like I was doing Manny a favor instead of a meeting of equal minds. Someone years later on Twitter after reading one of my books went to the trouble of saying I was "one in ten million." Be sure if it, she said. I did some calculations on how likely that would make me to meet another one of those one in ten million (unlikely) and it has stuck with me to this day that she went out of her way to say "one in ten million" instead of just going for the standard one in a million which sounds more like a regular phrase not meant to be interpreted literally but to simply suggest rarity where one in ten is said to mean an actual figure.

Still: who wants to fucked because they're an artistic genius? I'd rather be fucked because I'm devastatingly hot or a really good fuck.

That's what I wanted in Charisma: ass that sizzles like hotcakes. Hot the way you fry an egg on the pavement. Fly. Sex. A girl who sucks your dick underneath your table at a restaurant. Who sits on your lap while you're trying to drive a car—playing with both your lives. Who gets you off during a school assembly, risking both your academic standings. Who catches you in the photo hallway, grabs between your legs. I didn't care how much of a literary genius she was—that's because I didn't care how much of a literary genius I was. Never even thought in those terms. Still don't now.

"What are you ruminating about?" Charisma said, propping up her torso on her forearms.

"I'm thinking about the first time I saw you: either in JROTC or maybe the gym. You were walking from one side to the other and I felt compelled to follow you. Even though I never talked to you. I just had to see you for one second longer. Didn't care who saw me looking. But I had to be with you from that point on. I didn't even think I'd succeed. But from that point on, I had to try."