Chapter 1.1 from the novel Stay, copyright 2019, all rights reserved by The Omni Group, Inc.
When Kirk and Stavros meet in college, their mutual interests bring them together, their attraction binds them tighter and tighter, despite convention, secrets and Christina, Stavros's abroad girlfriend. Returning, enraged at the betrayal, she sets upon a campaign to cuckold him by seducing all of his friends. And his Black male lover.
(What if it didn't happen that way?)
When Christina meets Stavros in college, their mutual interests bring them together, but his possessiveness drives her to Paris, the Sorbonne, where she finally experiences a liberating passion with Jean-Marcel that Stavros and her abusive father cannot control. Forced to return by her father, she has to face that Stavros's possessiveness hides his secret: Black male lovers, including Kirk, a fellow, jealous and vengeful student.
(What if something else entirely was occurring?)
When Kirk meets a young boy on the beach as a child, he feels an immediate connection. He assumes years later that he and Stavros are fated soulmates throughout their down low, tumultuous relationship from Buffalo to Manhattan to Denver and Boulder, and finally back to Manhattan, again. Hiding his sexuality behind a sham marriage, Stavros assumes he will always be the only one for Kirk. Yet someone else has been following Kirk, slipping into the cracks of his affair with Stavros. From university to university, from state to state, from world to world. Someone who seems to become what Kirk needs and is slowly and intentionally permeating his life, each incarnation more knowledgeable and perfect than the last. Someone who intends to use him as a focusing lens to bring others, from other worlds.
(What if it was always a war across the multiverse, the three lovers fated to intertwine, unbeknownst to them?)
When Stavros and Christina meet in college, their mutual pain brings them together: his dead parent and secret sexuality, her abusive father and their secret sexual relationship. Then Stavros meets Kirk whom he can't forsake and she can't seduce.. Enraged and rejected, Christina launches a campaign of warfare with the imbued sorcery of her beautiful but damned, burning face. Unknown to her, Kirk is a favored child of African Orisha, who is destined to unlock the secrets of the Aboriginal dadirri to save himself and his future offspring.
Their fates designed centuries ago, their ancestors circling towns and cities, casting spells and wards, waiting, waiting for their conflict to rise like a mythic phoenix and termagant tinda doing battle over one man's lost soul.
A novel of speculative fiction that asks the question: Can love usurp fate?
Stay is available October 16th 2019 online on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and in select Barnes & Noble stores.(All constructive feedback appreciated! :) )
Christina's face was burning, as predicted, from the first slap and again, finally more, from the second slap. She ran screaming up the stairs, the echo it created outlasting her breath. Dark, hollow, cheap heels clopping loudly on the wooden stairs, her hands flailing in front of her. There had only been two slaps but the affront, the stinging, and the surprise, made the two seem like onslaughts. They were blows on many levels, she’d realize days later, two hundred miles away, rocking in her childhood bed, her often detached mother stroking her hair. The slaps were physical, social, psychic, private, intimate, and finally, erotic.
The last, the erotic, confused her the most because she thought that’s where she excelled, where she ruled, principally men, and yet one had walked into her field, her fog of sexuality, her very pink aura, casually assaulted her and turned away, walked away. Walked away from her. She dug her hand furiously into her panties, scratching her excruciating hip vigorously, furiously, trying to get at the burning, from top to bottom, finding that she wanted the burning top to bottom, that she thought about the burning, the Black man, burning her, from top to bottom.
The kitchen always smelled, but not good like one imagined it should, or the way fairy tales promised grandma’s kitchen could. Instead her grandmother’s kitchen would smell of garlic, bleach, artificial rose scent and never-ending baked bread. Day after day she would sit and watch the old woman knead loaves of bread for the family, near and far. Her frizzy white hair clipped back, her apron half on, her house dress faded from so many bleached washings, bleach her sacrosanct remedy to clean clothes, wipe off surfaces, do dishes with. Contradictorily instead of smiling or offering a sweet candy like she did when her daughter was around, she’d turn to her granddaughter and whisper the same proclamations to her over and over.
“You’re a whore. I can see it already.” She would spit at her granddaughter.
“Your face is full of fire, evil.” She would hiss in both English and Italian.
“You think you’re pretty but you’re not.” She would accuse the little girl.
“You’re just a hole, a dirty hole.” She would laugh mockingly at the child.
“Your face is full of burning fire and malice. Evil and sin. All I see is burning fire in your face, all over it, crumbling your flesh, crumbling your life and everything you try to love or touch.” She would pinch Christina’s arms and yank her hand, letting her blunt fingers get close to tearing skin.
“You’re evil.”
“Momma, are you and Christina down here?” Christina’s mother would say coming in through the back porch.
“Yes, honey,” leaning over the kitchen table handing her five-year-old granddaughter a butterscotch candy as her daughter rounded the corner. The little girl would hesitate to take the candy, terrified by the constant assault of words about her, her life, her face, the startling duplicity.
“Take the candy from grandma, Christina. Don’t be rude, take it.”
That’s how Christina learned to take it---dark, angry, evil, duplicity, sweet from the hands that were supposed to love you.
The slaps then weren’t a surprise. You can’t play at being a whore, at ruining lives, without some damage, even if that eventually was your own burning face. She stopped screaming then, screaming seemed silly, alone in her hallway. He hadn’t followed her up the stairs. He’d been satisfied to slap her twice then walk away. She took a deep breath, not as frantic inside as her first screams suggested. She found her keys in her jacket pocket, opened the door and went into her small apartment. It was even smaller now that someone had come into her aura, her sanctum. He’d ignored her reputation of cool and icy control, her disarming cute, impishly sexy, but still adult sexy, body; even resisted her practiced, coy, seductive smile. The pointed licking of her lips, her suggestive, offering gaze, all practiced since she’d been a teenager and he, a minute ago summarily judged her. Then slapped the shit out of her.
Twice.
That’s what really hurt. That her long weaved spell had been completely and thoroughly dismissed.
A thousand swords of revenge came to mind against the nigger who’d done this but in the end the fact that he had calmly strode over to her, declared why and about whom and then simply slapped her, with almost an élan and ease, terrified her the most. Someone was so invulnerable to her as to strike her down in broad daylight, in her own lobby and then not even pursue to rape or beat or even murder, that she could’ve understood, even welcomed. But to simply strike her for her sins, her transgressions, her callous disregard of the feelings and hearts of others, said that that jig was officially up.
The rest unfolded as she had imagined in the minutes before she picked up the phone and she played her part, watching everyone else play theirs. Oh, she’d cry and be hysterical on the phone to her parents in a few minutes, even start gasping hysterically in Stavros’s, the final angle to the triangles, arms, as she saw the glee in his eyes (yes, they were officially over, she knew now.) A man had stolen the one she’d abused for so long and then been sent by him to exact vengeance on her, she was finally getting her comeuppance even as Stavros, hours later, copiously supported her against her assailant. But the others, classmates, half-friends, would have the same smirking joy in their eyes at her deflation. She spotted the same dark delight, schadenfreude, in sidelong glances from Stavros. He above all others thought she deserved it for what she’d done to him repeatedly over the years. That clandestine agreement to the onslaught made sure she’d never rule over them again with her sex, dangled possibility and promise, or the torture-denial.
All that was left was to play out the scene for her parents and the (soon to be permanent) ex-boyfriend, Stavros, the betrayer, who was a confirmed faggot and nigger lover now, who had instigated this assault. The harsh words thundering only in her head now, hollowly because should she utter them aloud, mightn’t she get slapped a third time? From whom she wasn’t sure, but the power of a slap upon a woman was that it resoundingly suggested a line was comfortably crossed and could be again, by anyone, anywhere, anytime.
Still not having called anyone, she looked over her bathroom sink into the mirror and sure enough her alabaster skin was inflamed on the entire right side. Her face, as promised twenty years ago, was aflame. She ran into the other room and started packing, heading back to her parent’s house for the rest of her life. The roaring termagant she thought she was, proven to be a mere firefly who would vainly try to set off sparks in an even smaller town, yet wither away, bloated, dreaming of the Eiffel Tower.
.
Christina was a good girl who stood still and folded her hands and said please and thank you and excuse me. She sat with her legs crossed at the ankle, she smiled and knew when to speak to adults and when not to. She knew how to not put her elbows onto the dinner table and which fork to use. She knew how to pretend that her mother’s disapproval was feedback and not naked dislike. She knew how to pay attention to her father and then when it became time to contrive, how to avoid him.
.
Christina snuck into her mother's room and stole ten dollars to buy condoms in junior high after her friend’s older sister got pregnant. She wanted to have sex but she knew she didn’t want to get pregnant but even more than that, she dreaded talking to her mother about birth control. Her mother was a tall, thin woman, with raven black hair, pinched red nicked lips and never did her nails. She filed them down but she never went to the salon, never put on polish. She wore several rings, including her wedding and engagement rings but she never did anything to her nails. She’d caught her mother grimacing as she looked at Christina’s painted nails that she’d done with friends since the third grade. Her mother wanted to admonish her for one more thing the little girl had done wrong but it seemed excessive, even to her critical stance. She gave Christina that, she gave her the right to do her nails differently. Christina thought it a stain of her mother’s working class parents on her to be so bland when she was decades and plenty of money beyond them.
Christina waited until her mother was downstairs on the phone. She tiptoed across the carpeted floor, slipped into her parents’ bedroom and inched closer to the purse on the nightstand. She opened the clasp and moved aside a pad, lipstick, several handkerchiefs until she found the zipped inner pocket and found the clip of bills that her mother often took out at stores. She slipped out a ten and put the money back in and felt the small plastic bag on her thumb. She took it out and looked at the cocaine. Another one was full of several dark blue capsules. She knew it was cocaine because she’d seen it on TV. She stared at them both, tempted to try a pill. Then put both back. Unopened. Closed the clasp and backed away from a truth.
From then on she watched her mother carefully, realizing that the woman, resembling her, was lying constantly. But Christina could never tell when the stone faced woman was high or sober or tired, only displeased and occasionally amused at TV, a movie, her brother, something she’d read in a magazine. But if she were lying, her own mother lying, then was everyone else lying? Was every face a lie? Christina’s goal became to maintain her own lying face, through a soft, coquettish attractiveness that belied her confusion and anger and to discern the truth behind everyone else’s face.
.
Christina took only a pencil from the teacher's pocketbook during recess and found a stream of condoms, her obsession with sneaking into women’s purses having carried her through years of school. She found the most interesting things, the most interesting insights into the women around her. She used the pencil to drop in front of teen boys, then she would bend over and watch what part of her they looked at. Legs, breasts, ass? And use that. She learned early on, how to use one thing to get her another and then use that second thing to further control others. That was how she thought of control, a two-step investment process.
.
Christina took a man's heart in France, months after he first saw her. His name was Jean-Marcel and he saw her sitting in a café, judiciously studying a French novel for class. She was clearly American. She was reading---Le Deuxmieme Sexe by de Beauvoir (of course) and writing in a small notebook next to another novel, The Mandarins (of course). But he was mildly impressed, both were in French. He watched her, her thin, straight brown hair, her round face, and her slightly reddish pink cheeks. She was more sweet than beautiful but she looked to him ready, a step past innocence, ready for true adventure. Her sneakers were blue, cheap, and her jeans obviously off the rack. Espresso in one hand and a lit Gauloise.
As a fashion editor for a small magazine, Jean-Marcel was used to watching young women, dismantling them, reassembling and slowly teasing out who they really were. He was far more advanced than other men, his work giving him a deeper insight into women, notably girls like this one at least ten, fifteen years his junior.
This one was a student, her first time here.
A dullard boyfriend in the USA.
East coast.
From a middle class family, not rich.
Studying literature, French, of course.
At the Sorbonne, of course.
Not a virgin.
Perhaps ready for her first, true adult sexual relationship.
Painfully predictable, and therefore, pluckable.
He beckoned over the waiter and had a plie au chocolat sent over to her. Soon, when he had her nude, his wide hands lifting her hips, lowering and impaling onto his member, he would tell her that the sending of the pastry was the point herald to that stabbing moment. She was an American, she would be taken by that confidence, that audacity, the flair. A French woman, even a girl would find it horribly gauche but an American girl on her first trip over, alone, ripe for a French deflowering, would plie on him.
.
Christina strangled the life out of a cat when she was ten after it scratched her. She discovered strangling it in the backyard that she had access to the flames in her face, to the savagery, and it felt good. She then snapped its lifeless neck because it had suddenly scratched her. The cat had often avoided her, preferring her mother’s lap. But this calm spring day they were both in the backyard and Christina had reached over for the mid-sized grey cat and been casually mauled.
She lay it back on the porch, curled its legs under its body and looked at it. Looked at death. She looked at her hands, put them together. They felt warm. She touched them to her face, closed her eyes and let the flames seep through her skin to her fingertips. In an instant, when she opened her eyes, for a moment, triggered by the remnant of the energy left from the cat, she saw little flickers, little sparks on her digits. She tasted her fingertips and found as she slid them across her own sharpened teeth again and again, first skin split and then drips, drops, of blood welled and she sucked her bloody fingers. It was good. It was good to feel, to do, to have all that her grandmother cursed her with not only at her fingertips but able to be transferred, and then reabsorbed. Blood, her own, was the reward of death, of killing she thought to herself.
She knew then that she could use herself, this body, this shell that held blood and fire, to do whatever she wished to whomever she wished. She knew that she would never hesitate.
.
Christina shot a gun in the woods when she was fourteen, with her brother and his friends. It was a small rifle, it belonged to a friend’s father. But they let her do it. The boys helped her. The boys, half smitten by her, stood behind her, showed her how to hold the butt in the crook of her shoulder, how to breathe, breathe out and fire. She missed the bottles by less and less each shot until by the fourth shot, she finally burst one. She didn’t cheer so much as she sighed loudly. She was capable of something, of doing something, of making something happen.
“I want to go away to school,” she said to her brother.
He looked at her and nodded. “I’ll help you with your applications.”
Everyone but their mother wanted to get out of their home.
.
Christina considered suicide when she was seven as she watched her father, day after day, when he came home from work, instead of driving into the driveway, go a length further and then back the car into the driveway. He preferred to drive forward out, rather than back out. She realized that she could dash from the porch, to the asphalt of the driveway behind the car and if she did it quickly enough, he wouldn’t see her. He backed in without looking anymore, he was so accustomed to his own habit.
She waited. Weeks. Then on a Monday, exhausted with his long looks, with his hands slipping over her thighs at dinner, slightly under her dress whenever he picked her up, the flesh point poking her whenever he forced her to sit on his lap, she decided to use her life to make him wrong, more wrong than he could ever recover from. It was on that Monday that she decided this because that Sunday, starting Sunday school, the Pastor had taken her to the girls bathroom, gone inside with her, watched her pull down her panties and sit on the toilet. He didn’t say anything, he didn’t smile like he did with her parents present nor make little jokes and tickle her ear as he did when there were other children present. No, he just watched her. When she was done and stood up, he kneeled before her, took a piece of tissue and slowly, never breaking eye contact, wiped her. His index finger the spine of the tissue, back and forth. Forth and back. Rubbing his fingers in the tissue along her, back and forth, between her legs, long after she was dry. The possessive look in his eyes reminded her of her father.
It was then that Christina knew that men, her father’s age, the Pastor’s age, would always do these things to her and she couldn’t deal with that possibility. Rather than endure them forever and ever, she would end it. But she would hurt her father first, she would do something to him that he could never recover from, that everyone would know was his fault.
She stepped out on to the asphalt, timing her steps to when the rear of the car was turning back in, glanced back at the porch to find her mother standing there, watching her. Not calling for her to stop, not screeching for her husband to look but just watching. Waiting.
Christina stepped back from her plan, not willing to give her withholding mother the satisfaction, sensing that living would give her a greater leverage from the wave of shame she saw pass over her mother’s face at the knowledge of what she was willing to allow. She understood, at a young age, that she was trapped but that they were also trapped in their own blindness, their own dark shame. Her mother wanted her gone because of the absorption that her father’s attentions brought to her. She could use that.
.
Christina started taking little yellow pills when she was nine. She knew what birth control was. Her older cousin had told her. Shown her the pills on a dial compact. She knew where babies came from, how they were made, her and her cousin had stood over a mirror and looked at their bare genitalia. She had touched her vagina, knew how it worked, and knew what the men’s hands were creeping towards, stroking, back and forth, now slipping up, in. It didn’t look pretty or wonderful to her but she sensed from the amount of attention it was reaping in her life already that it was powerful so she regularly bought little yellow mints in a small plastic box, and until her mother took her for real when she was fourteen, pretended they were birth control.
By fourteen she knew enough to know she was right about men but not enough to know she was wrong about every man.
.
Stavros needed connection, so he fastidiously kept track of Kirk online, then by his cell phone number that hadn't changed in years because while Kirk's love-wound healed, scabbed over, Stavros' became infected with lies. First his lie-wife, then his family’s infectious bacteria oozed into the love, so that eventually he couldn't see one without the other, separate his need from love. Ironically, Stavros’s family, nor his ex-girlfriends, could clearly see the other love of his life, but his wife, Marie, like Christina, sensed Kirk. She couldn't name him initially, couldn’t conceive that the fissure in her marriage, was a man. The wisping haze around Stavros was his deflection at the love and desire of men, another man, preferentially, Black men.
Kirk's life on the other hand no longer made space for gaps in others, he had filled himself with bigger, deeper truths. The consequences of the continuous raping in his childhood, like Christina’s, both scents attracting a predator like Stavros, were twofold in Kirk’s adulthood, liberation and discernment. The seeds started out first, when they met as fear of abandonment and an expansive guilt-pity of abusers, which made him perfect bait, meat, and chum for the ravenous Stavros.
.
Kirk always found that he loved most profoundly, felt it most deeply when the lover was gone, the relationship over. It was almost like a band aid snatched off and the sharp stinging afterwards. The sting to him was the love and Kirk was left to examine breadth and depth of the wound underneath.
Wasn't that odd? To love only when they were gone?
His efforts of gifts, letters, dinners, were more for surcease of that pesky sting because once the object of his wound was present again, they would shrink. He thought seeing Stavros each time over the years, sliding into bed with him, would end those emotions, cauterize them. But unlike a flesh wound, exposure to the blade of Stavros, actually healed him. The time, the distance made the delusion and illusion recede. Stavros's hairiness, once a source of masculine thrill, now was excessive, smelled, was messily distributed on his body. His lips seemed bigger, cracked, dry, Kirk decided, as they kissed feverishly in the Brooklyn hotel room, probing with his tongue and stealing glances to confirm that yes, Stavros’s teeth were, thinner, yellower, more rat like. Had they always been that way?
How long had Stavros been smoking?
His shorter body once lean and muscular was now flabbier, looser, already that of an older man. Only in his thirties. Kirk found himself in motion, in contorted positions, further questioning the difference between love and pity. The sex became exciting not for the love, the passion, but for the risk, the taboo, the illicitness. The time coinciding with Stavros’s heterosexual dating, twice when engaged, and several times, when finally, married. Kirk convinced himself that he was part of some star-crossed lovers’ pact. That their emails were delectable hints at some secret reality that only they could recognize. For Stavros, like a serial killer’s trophy, often plainly out for the deceived to see, to chalk up to his expansive intellect. He thrilled when his wife Marie complimented him on books Kirk had given him, adult pop up books on architecture, DT Suzuki, detective noir fiction. She attributed Kirk’s brains to him.
Stavros became a habit to Kirk, like biting his nails, something that he knew he should stop but caught himself doing, responding to, because he had simply done it, responded to it, for so long.
.
David keeps doing it and I want to cry. It hurts too much. This isn’t love. This isn't love. David trying to bounce the ball to keep the thumping on the floor, the bed is squeaking. Thumping so that no one can hear the bed squeaking. The pain. It doesn’t hurt anyone else, why does it hurt me? Mommy explained that when she moans during her “special times “with Daddy, I shouldn't be scared, she's not being hurt. Mommy told me that. Mommy explained sex. Mommy explained all the things and their proper names.
I'm no longer there. David’s mother yells up to us and asks what we're doing. David’s been bouncing his basketball every so often to hide the bed’s squeaking. Bounce, squeak, thump, fuck. Bounce, squeak, thump, fuck. Bounce, squeak, thump, fuck. Bounce, squeak, thump, fuck. David stops, David yells down that I'm in the bathroom. I go into the bathroom and I fasten my corduroy pants. I don't think I can quite see myself in the mirror, I’m not tall enough. I hurt inside and down there. I feel like I'm going to fall out of my body, slide out like cocoa does from my butt.
I don't understand.
I go downstairs and become one of four boys, one in three girls, who are sexually assaulted as a child. I was molested before the age of twelve, up there. I don't know if a he or a she was up there. I don’t know if I'm a boy real anymore.
David goes out to play and I think I stay inside with my mother. David does his thing and then gets away from me. Like I'm dirty or something. Like I did something wrong. I think I love David. I don't know if I know what I mean by love but I think that was love. I don't understand why I don't like it like people on TV do when James Bond does it.
Bounce, squeak, thump, fuck.
.
Christina counted one hundred and fourteen men that she'd had sex with by the time she was thirty, she included her cousins, the priest she’d seduced as a child, even the initiation by her father. The fact that her husband had arrived in her life before her thirtieth birthday, notwithstanding, to the number. He had been right before the hundredth. Sex for her was about power, lost, and not gained. It seemed on the surface, mostly to the men, that she'd conquered them but in fact, it was loss. Within her, somewhere below her stomach near her left hip she felt a pain, not a true ache, but instead a gnawing, like some things were trying to get out of her. The pressure, the weight of a man, his unrelenting penetration quieted the gnawing. Before real, complete sex, as a child, she'd scratched her skin bloody, picking at that one side, imagining her inner self, an effeminate Jesus, spiked, nailed.
On his thirty-third birthday, Stavros wrote, online, of himself as a parallel to Jesus, having survived longer than the son of a God he barely believed in. Much like he barely believed in the dead parent whose car had crashed through both a pole and his childhood. He sat by himself, memories of his two loves, images of them on his computer both, distant, the white hot passion having dimmed the more, longer, they got to know him. His truth seemed to push others away, to dim him, so he focused on his best, truest weapon, impaling listeners with woe at his dead parent. There was no way to not be sympathetic for a child left behind, crying, forever bereft and with their sympathy came a form of control of their feelings for him.
In the end the death had brought him more than he would ever admit.
.
The trusted, yet exploratory fingers of first the priest, then her father, then male relatives, and finally peers, had calmed the gnawing, quelled it. But it left her with another itch, a sexual one, gnawing and penetration now road and vehicle tires, connected, inseparable from the other. Socially acceptable pearlescent skin and a skillful coquettishness kept her from being called a whore. The pity though, was that she was seeking it in many ways. The branding, her goal, to finally label that which her grandmother had predicted. She figured if she couldn't break the scarlet lettering, perhaps she could breakthrough to another self with it. If she could be deemed by family and friends a disposable whore, a nymphomaniac, even, she could claw free of the prisoner transfer from one small town to another for college and then two trips, one through school and another through marriage-honeymoon, abroad.
But privilege, Whiteness, was as much a trap, as darkness, as brown skin. She was vilified by friends, ex-lovers but never to her face, which is why the slaps meant so much to her, turned her on, thrilled her. Because they were truthful admonishment, they were direct response at her sexual conduct. In fact she found thoughts of Kirk calmed the gnawing, touching herself on the cheek, the hip, and occasionally her breasts, brought a gasp, a realization that her sizzling face could be satiated by someone.
From then on, she endeavored to use Kirk to get through herself. Through the fire. There were times, more than a dozen, where she cajoled men to strike her, some timidly; one to the point that he drew blood; twice from her husband in rage, and then again from her husband in passion (who thought it a way of initiating novelty and excitement to what he secretly felt was an acrobatic but fairly mundane sex life.)Extramarital affairs, several within first his casual friends and then his coworkers at three holiday parties, barely paused the thigh termites. The only respite besides violence was the pain of another. In college, Stavros’s pain at her betrayals, her savage embarrassments had made the pain dim. That was how he thought her initial devotion and attention was of love and not her own predatory hunger.
It was her proliferation, her scale that was the conscious, initial liberation for her. How many could she bed with the fire in her face, the gnawing in her side? She climbed all the way through men, even when in relationship with one, especially Stavros, with blatant affairs, several within first his casual and then closest friends, to feed the thigh termites. She used him to become more attractive to the guys around him, to safely be flirtatious, size them up, and decide which ones to seduce. She was afraid initially to take on men, adult men. Young adult male peers were controllable, manipulable. But men, older, hairier, like the ones who had guzzled her down as a child. Her twisted sexual tie to Stavros came when he wooed her, when she let him bed her, and he took off his shirt, his pants, his underwear, and he was as hairy as her father, as the priests, the mature altar boys, the old, groping men in her town. He thought her gasping, her whispery moans, her eager mouth on his cock was passion but his rank scent, hairy scratchiness was dark familiarity to her fire-pain face. Her perverted desire him for was what he reminded her of rather than whatever was. Which is why she both so easily missed what he truly was and was so quickly bored with him.
Journaling thoughts and bad poetry, she unraveled that it was the conflation of a love triangle, of race and secret sexuality in Stavros' past that made the slaps so permanent in her psyche. When she talked to Stavros, often behind his wife's back, and routinely with her husband's amused knowledge, she purposefully poked at his deficient manhood, at his disfigured hyper-masculinity, coyly bringing up gay-this or gay-that, her friends ventures of bisexuality, the most recent homosexual celebrity who'd come out. She practiced these jabs, artfully peppering allusions to Black men, whether fictional, social or political, so that in the subtext, the HTML of their emails, their phone calls on birthdays, she would keep their triangle alive and bubbling like a cappuccino of his pain, shame and secrets, the frothy foam.
Christina never told Stavros of the three other times she'd encountered Kirk in NYC over the years.
Christina carefully parked the car and went into the supermarket, dark sunglasses on though it was hazy out. She made her way directly to the meat section and picked up packets of beef shanks and pork. Then on to vegetables: carrots, shallots, mushrooms, onions, parsley, fingerling potatoes. Two bottles of red cooking wine, a small bag of flour, coarse salt and pepper corns, and garlic soaked in olive oil, butter.
She hesitated, staring at the rice choices. Risotto was always so difficult for her because it always tasted too wet, she hated mushy food but her husband liked it. She settled on a quick mix and bought heavy cream and more mushrooms. She swiped her card, proudly not paying attention to the total, she was treating her husband to Oso Buco and refused to give him anything but the best. Only two more stops.
Though the town of Phoenix, New York was north a few miles it had an excellent bakery and her husband’s favorite strawberry shortcake. She drove there and back in an hour just for two cakes.
Next she sent a quick text to her husband that she was just on her way to the supermarket and drove to a small house two miles outside of town to a man she'd met online months ago. They fucked on the couch for forty minutes then Christina went home to cook her husband's birthday dinner.
.
What I won't remember.
I think I'm ten years old.
We had gone to visit my aunt in upstate New York. She lives in a large house so far out that it's just highway and houses near her house. My aunt is there and her David. The rest of her children are away somewhere. David seems big then. How old is David? Only a few years more than I am, I think but David is twice my age. David's got a basketball and he's dribbling it around the hallway with me while our mothers are talking. David’s father isn't there. David can dribble the ball so much better than me, my hands just won't maintain control like his will.
David moves up the stairs, still bouncing the ball. I follow and go with him into his mother's room where David’s still bouncing the ball. David’s got to keep it going so our mothers can hear it. Does David tell me that? Or am I smart enough to figure that out? Are David‘s hands on me first? I don't know, it's fuzzy. There's no foreplay in rape, why should I remember? David’s kissing me. Like they do on TV. and I'm thinking how slimy David‘s tongue is but I'm not sure that it's bad. I'm not sure. I don't know what this is but it feels familiar. It would have to be so that I wouldn't run for my mother ten feet below, right?
Then I'm on the bed, lying flat, and my pants are down to my ankles. David's lying on top of me trying to force his penis inside of me. But it won't go.
Relax he tells me and I try to. I want to please David. I want David to be happy with me. I want to do what David wants but I'm not sure why. Do I like this? Am I enjoying this? If it feels good then I am. I know my parents do this, I saw them once. This is sex, this is love. This is how you tell special people that you love them in a special way. I try to imagine someone else doing this to me. David, my cousin isn't handsome. David's like a big dark animal. Greasy, David's so dark he looks greasy. David’s skin is like oil and when I look down at his penis it's so big. Not just compared to mine but compared to where David wants to put it. I can't see where he wants it to go but I know. I'm small there. Too small. But it worked before.
That's the nudging feeling, that I was able to do this before. That it worked before. How long has this worked?
I imagine David's James Bond. James Bond is handsome and smart and he loves women that special way that I am at now. I call David James. David's my protector, my secret agent. I don't know if I want to be a girl or a boy. Wouldn't this be easier if I was a girl? I don't want to disappoint him. I want to please David the way my Mommy pleases my Daddy. I want to be David’s girlfriend and at the same time I think I want to get away. I don't understand. I don't understand.
Pain. Agony. David's inside me. It hurts so much that he covers my mouth with first David’s hand and then David’s mouth so that I don't scream out and alert our mothers. I think there's fear in David’s eyes; David doesn't want to get caught. David's left the door open so that he can see from the side of the bed if anyone comes up the stairs. David's pushing into me. Harder and harder and I'm somewhere between confusion, pain and love. David's my cousin, I love David. David loves me too. That's what David is showing me.
Bounce, squeak, thump, fuck.
.
The consequence of the continuous childhood rapings of Kirk were twofold in his adulthood. For several years into his twenties he felt like glass shards churned right beneath his flesh. Emotionally they were barbed feelings----trust, fear, and anger---all of them co-opted by the fuckings from the past. If everything could be remembered, he suspected, that he might've had a chance against the murky, amorphous surging of feelings. But he later learned that the memory blanks, the holes, were the minds way of rescuing the child, the adult, from venom. Ironically what he was left with, savage and cutting, the crumbs of the crime, icy shards and tidbits to be grateful for because icebergs resided deeper.
The settling of those time to rape questions When had it happened? When had it started? When, when, when? had come in three pictures from his childhood. The first at four, cocky boy posed by a professional in store photographer in a delightfully, horrid plaid jacket; the second a few years later, he was accidentally caught next to a cousin at her baby shower, peeking from behind a chair; and the last a class picture, maybe eight or nine in a cream and brown winter sweater that he could almost remember owning. To any eye, boyhood pictures, but to him, time to rape markers.
The first photo his face was calm, joyful, eyes cool slits in a mock half slyness, smugly confidently. He had not been raped yet.
The second photo, David’s sister’s shower. By then, yes, Kirk sensed he was being lured downstairs to basements and upstairs to empty bedrooms to be a rag doll on the older teen’s dick.
The third photo, he could see his hair, an inch or two off his head was slightly unkempt, his eyes tired, sad, his smile lacking vibrancy, a victim’s effort to get through the days. By then Kirk had memories of the two cousins raping him whenever he was unattended or even more ironically, in their babysitting, care. His parents had paid his rapists for their pleasure, one cousin later admitting to Kirk's mother that both cousins had double-teamed her child.
Kirk upon hearing this had searched and searched but not even a thread of Team Rape existed. Part of a shrouded iceberg. But still Kirk cried, mourned, raged, for the boy who'd been held down, surprised, attacked so ferociously that he had no choice but to go through his memories and control, alt, delete the worst of those hours, those days, perhaps, even a whole year. All the other days, birthdays and school days and happenstance injurious memories existed but not the numerous, the totality of the rapes. For sanity’s sake.
The rapings also left a jumble puzzle about sex, relationships, truth.
If someone force fed a babe vanilla pudding for years, was that their favorite by default, design or just detritus?
The configuration of Kirk’s sexuality, the positioning, missionary, side saddle, wheelbarrow, doggy, with a man or in a woman or even a tangling trois, came into question not because of the questioning but, because of the abundance of vanilla pudding in his origin. Intrepidly, he tried chocolate and strawberry and butterscotch and mint and pistachio and flan and custard and of course crème brulè and twice, a lychee nut puree. For him the bifurcation was separating abuse from identity, from self. That abuse hadn’t ignited his same sex attraction, it had merely drafted it. Once he solidified that in his teens he could orchestrate and play his own funky music, with all of his instruments and sample several others.
Leroy and Hiram and Kim and Kaisha and Stacey and Arnold and Michael and Meagan and David and Paul and Marlene and Carlos and Kathy and Rachel and Nora and John and Joe and Nick and Jay and Lisa and Jasmine and Christina and Maria and Elena and Marcello and Sean and Rick and Dinah and Gary and Aisha and Morgan and Brian and Jim and Carlene and Danny (who changed his name, became a famous actor and won an Emmy), all before he was twenty-five.
Kirk found that pudding and creams and custards, and even transitional, mixed smoothies, were so delicious he had to write about them, secrete them, share the bounty with a reading audience and not decide on just one dessert much to Stavros's initial oblivious delight. It was no coincidence that Stavros found in Kirk and Christina the same pain thread, the same sexual liberation, which they then both hid from him, sharing the abundance of the bounty and experimentation with others. Never him. For Stavros they shared their loads of emotional drama and confusion, like seeking like. Others though, healthier, honest, fun, not trying to pity-seduce with a mangled dead parent, got the crème, the liberated scent that which had attracted Stavros. Mockery.
Kirk's abuse, much to his other partners benefit, unleashed sexual curiosity in him and a commitment to clarity and control about what he wanted to do and not. Secure in what qualified a no, he was open to exploring yeses with an abandon and interest that he found shocked partners if he were too forthcoming. He learned how to patiently attend to a lover, to let their moods and moves dictate the level of expertise he presented, he learned to give himself over to rolling though half a dozen bodies at a sex club in Manhattan to learn about sensation multiplied; he learned how to deny the passive aggressive, those who wanted him to make the first move, because having never measured, but been repeatedly told he was not only a well hung Black man but occasionally painfully girthy, he most deeply denied those intimidated by his confidence, his abilities. His sexual talents’ glorious meaty tip of the forgotten iceberg within his memories so he appreciated a partner's decided, deliberate and courage in the engagement, a full commitment to the connection. Exactly paralleling Christina but without all the baggage privilege and being the opposite race and gender brought her.
What Stavros didn't understand, on the edge of both sides of the two on a coin, all of his games, Kirk watched him play, and was torn between amusement and something else, something regretful. (Christina watched Stavros play and didn’t care.) Always trying to figure out if he was falling in love with Stavros or just pitied him. (Christina knew her love for Stavros was temporary, used his friends, admitted to him her transgressions to saw at the ties he tried to bind them with.) That doubt was the hesitancy and the impetus that drove him away from Stavros, and like the other Black man, the one before Kirk, and two women Stavros had loved, to the beds and arms of others.
.
I whisper that I love Eric. I call Eric James Bond and tell Eric how good this is and I wonder if I'm supposed to say these things. This is what the women groan and moan in the movies and I want to please Eric like the women do in the movies. Eric loves me, that's why Eric’s doing this. I love Eric, that's why I'm doing this.
This is love.
But it hurts, it hurts so bad I want to scream but Eric won't let me. Eric considerately goes easy during my rape but when Eric sees that I might scream anyway he speeds up, going faster and faster and I think about how big Eric’s penis is compared to David’s.
So much bigger than my own.
Inside of me.
Where does it go?
What does it see, if it could see?
What do I look like inside after this?
I tired of his weakness.
.
Everything was so fear based, so dependent upon Stavros’s dead parent, Stavros’s silly ex-girlfriend, Stavros’s brother, Stavros’s fear of creating anything meaningful in Stavros’s life. I was doing so much, being so much, trying out so many new things and Stavros was just standing there, staring at me slowly unfurl my wings and fly. He wasn’t even willing to be Icarus.
I used to love him but now I don't.
Jean-Marcel opened the curtains of the windows facing his king sized bed.
“Don’t,” Christina squealed, half laughing, half embarrassed. She covered her nudity with the sheet, a pillow.
“Non.”
He snatched the sheets from on top of her. He stood at the foot of the bed, over six feet tall, dark hair wavy, almost as long as hers, with a spotty goatee and mustache under his hawkish nose, his heavy square jaw. His face, a light tan tinge to his skin and epicanthic slant to his eyes, worthy of the Mongolian plains to the Far East. He had a very big face, powerful. Not a cookie-cutter beauty, he looked dangerous, leering, the hooded eyes took her in, innocent interest in one glance, a serpent, famished, in another.
He stood naked staring at her and she looked at the sunlight streaming between his torso and arms, between his thighs, over his shoulder. The hair skulking down his chest, rotating his navel, slipping lower into a substantial bush to surround a long member, menacingly uncut, with a protruding shaft vein. He stood silent, forcing her to look at him, to truly drink him in. They’d spent days in bed, ordering food, washing each other in the tub, her rushing to classes chatte sore, answering her parents and Stavros on her phone that she was with classmates when she’d been with no one but Jean-Marcel. Wanted to be with no one but Jean-Marcel. Could see no one in Paris, in the world, in her life but Jean-Marcel.
He slowly kneeled on the bed and grasped each of her ankles, pulled her to a spread eagle position on the bed, moved her arms from covering her pert breasts, nipples, thick and pink, flushed and tender from his gnawing.
“Montre moi.”
“What?”
“Viens.”
“How?”
“Viens pour moi.”
He placed her hand onto her mound and nodded. She was hesitant at first then began moving her fingertips, the palm of her hand, each time she moved too far or closed her thighs, he would part her legs at the ankle again, staring intently at her hand motions and then her face. She tried and tried until her hand ached and her face burned furiously. Unable, she buried her face in the pillow in shame. It was so much easier with the sex partner not caring, not examining her responses, looking to spot her genuine pleasure. It was so easy to fuck Stavros, he was so absorbed in maintaining his own illusions that he never considered she was projecting her own.
“Tu n'as jamais? Viens?”
“Oui. I think I have. Je ne sais pas.”
“I feel you want to. You bring me. You feel pleasure? Do you?”
“I do, I do,” she promised, crying. “I do like it with you.”
“Then we will find your pleasure, in a moment, a minute, an hour. Inch by inch. I promise. You will bring yourself then I will show you my pleasure and then we will go back to how to bring you as many times as possible.” With that he put his hand firmly onto her mound, and gently rubbed her clitoris with his thick thumb.
“Ok.” She sighed.
He nodded as if class were in session. “This is your clitoris. It is not a piece, a tip. It is like an iceberg. The tip of an iceberg. It is outside here but,” his fingers traced her flesh then his forefinger and middle finger gently went in a V formation, slowly, into her vagina, “but it extends like this inside, a mound above, then inside the flesh and then all the way in on the sides and then down. Like this. Feel my fingers, all of that, under your flesh, is your clitoris. Your pleasure is an iceberg, the clit just the tip that excites my ship. We will make pleasure with all of this.” He gently grasped her from the inside, held her firmly.
“All of it?”
“Tout.”
.
Stavros’s first suicide came as a no surprise to anyone, not even the Orthodox Greek priests that had suspected his truth but counseled him on heterosexuality, fidelity, faith and finally, fatherhood. Friends and family alike had all caught sight of his moroseness, his forced gaiety. The well-spring of soliciting self-pity, pity distilled, was that people did come to, secretly, pity him. Pity, though, was unctuous over time. It made friends and family and even his wife, tread lightly around his faults, his feeling, his foolishness. It made them tacitly agree and tither at his pedantic online political rants and soulful preachings, mewling, spiritual turmoil.
That turmoil felt vaguely like bad eighties pop music, with saccharin pleas and allusion to the day he surpassed Jesus and his dead mother’s age. The point not accomplishments in that time but to again remind, distress, incite melancholia, pity. His dead parent, always, never far, from his lips, if one sat in his presence long enough, roads leading back to the burning corpse, the lost possibilities, his lost art, lest the trapped listener forget, for a moment, about Stavros’s pain.
There was nowhere for his life libretto to go but a choral suicide, his death the culmination of a deal between Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. The dark duck winning by urgently wrapping himself in explosives and exploding to thunderous applause from the audience, even from his rival and nemesis. But he realized, much as the duck had, astrally rising to the hereafter, the last, best, grand piteous detonation could only be performed, once. As Stavros swung, dying from the end of the noose, pendulum like, back and forth against the brown bricks of the side of the building, he learned his truth and a Truth.
One, the Truth, was that spot on like the Daffy/Bugs cartoon competition he spontaneously remembered upon dying, one’s consciousness lasted for a moment, a minute, after the body’s death. That one’s last thoughts and observations were without eyes but full awareness.
His minor truth was that though he’d planned it to be a spectacle, he wanted to actually see people’s reaction at his death. He wanted not the usual secondhand pity for his pain, the full payment to his dead mother, he wanted humongous, pulsating, present anguish at the loss of him. He wanted to inflict the pain of his mother’s suicide upon others and see it, his pain, naked and twisting in their faces, in her face. He wanted to inflict pain upon her as she’d inflicted it upon him. The rest of humanity though, were the only available targets since her expiration and burial. He’d settle for Christina’s flame-pained face. He’d settle for Kirk’s brown face. He’d settle for his wife, Marie’s ignorant face.
I reached over thinking that Stavros was soaring with me but he was standing on the ground, crumpled feathers around his feet. He’d chosen to let the wings fall apart rather than spread them and join me. I looked at him and I felt sad…and guilty but I wouldn’t give up my wings, wouldn’t sacrifice this freedom even for his love.
That’s when he lost me. When I found out that my own wings were made of sterner stuff than Icarus’s and he hadn’t even tried to fly.
.
I used to love him but now I don't.
.
Either way I lose, Christina-Stavros-Kirk realized as they sat down, separated by time and space as each considered the parameters of their triangle the day they were all aware of the other.
To be a woman, who was troubled at the acceptance of her own self and yet would never accept a man in her bed desiring other men, was unacceptable.
To be a man, Stavros’s male lover, and have found yourself lovers to several of his friends and eventually fucking the woman you thought your competition, was overwhelming, disastrous to Kirk’s desire for a relationship with Stavros.
To be Stavros exposed to both, naked and writhing under the control of both, passionately enslaved to both, meant that losing either meant the diminution of the confusion, the emotional turmoil he so craved.
To be Christina, who could’ve been satisfied with Kirk as a secret lover the times she’d found him New York City, kneeling in a bar bathroom, slam poetry coming under the door like an epiphany---it’s over, yeah, it’s over---sore from lip to lip to hip, having given herself to a man she’d told the police, priest, and parent alike, had assaulted her, she felt truly, rudely, finally, fucked by a man.
Kirk came, the final thrust into Stavros’s ample ass, selfishly pulled out, cock and arms sliding away from his hairy lover’s body, feeling, condom-less, that he’d finally rewarded Stavros, who’d fucked them all in love.
Rudely fucked, Stavros lay satisfied, well fucked on his back, a Christmas Versatile, topping Kirk only on special occasions. He knew that it was the piercing pain that each thrust turned to graduating pleasure was what he missed with Christina, other girls, the beautiful girl he’d taken to the high school prom (that his own vulgar father had promised he’d have a “good time with”), several passing adult women and eventually, his uninformed first wife, Marie.
Christina clutched her husband, rocking under him, fantasizing about the dual power she had over Stavros and felt from Kirk, realizing that the feeling both brought to her mind and body were her longest sexual interests.
Kirk writhed with a girlfriend, Helene, for months, their relationship built on the fact that they were the escape affair from their same sex loves in Buffalo.
Stavros pretended to friends and family that he was fleeing New York City to get away from heartache. Though the truth was he’d memorized Kirk’s Boulder address and contrived Denver, to be closer to him.
No matter which one, either of them would choose, they knew, Christina-Kirk-Stavros, that to walk away, to cease contact wouldn’t just deprive one but themselves, of a dependence. Kirk-Stavros-Christina’s ego refused to unclench the rope in the fuckery tug of war. The love that included varying forms of public, puerile, polite flagellation was ultimately, a self-regarding one; a bludgeon against the third’s heart. Better to injure self to keep the dark ambrosia two of them had learned to sip from the cup of violation, away from the other, juice spitefully tainted with backwash. To each, Stavros-Christina-Kirk, the other was a worthwhile price to pay for the intensity of feeling, feeling something, anything, a repulsive thing like glass shards under skin, incisive termites chewing hip bone or the slake from death-adulation of pity.
Chapter 1.1 from the novel Stay, copyright 2019, all rights reserved by The Omni Group, Inc.
Stay is available October 16th 2019 online on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and in select Barnes & Noble stores.