Katherine P.F. Holmes is an English teacher and writer. Her work has been published in Litbreak Magazine, Capulet Magazine, Cauldron Anthology, and Illinois's Emerging Writers. She lives in Boston.

Alcoves

The booth is sticky with Lysol or spilled vodka. I keep still as a waxwork so the cracked leather wouldn’t sting my thighs and so that Felix can visualize his move. Here he comes. Passes his hand around my back, inquiring and oh so innocuous in our private alcove.

I pretend nothing’s happening and let Felix interpret, hoping he’ll reach past the Nice Girl façade and pull something real from me, something unsanctioned by this limited palette of non-emotions. There’s amusement, fatigue, and the mounting suspicion that I am ossifying into a shell with nobody home.

I don’t blush like I used to. I don’t orgasm. I drink chamomile with a shot of tequila and meditate on crushes from high school to feel young again, bold and beating. I am sixteen again, wiry and high-strung, and I fuck with gusto every Jim, Roy, and Ike that never wanted me until their faces cross in a moiré pattern of missed opportunity and I wake in my present body and feel obscene.

The Jukebox plays Pearl Jam. The bathroom icons are a cactus and coconuts. It’s a dive bar that leans into its sordidness. The electric beer signs hallow every potbellied man, tattooed crone, and billiards amateur who comes here often, who may never leave.

I bet Felix brings girls here to show them he’s grounded. I bet the pampered ones burrow into his clove-scented neck. I want to nose the stubble he left for me there, between the parted collar of his pastel shirt and the decisively carved chin. I want to find out the musk beneath the cologne and log my observations on a clipboard. Tonight, after all, is an experiment.

Felix and I met at the housewarming of a mutual friend, some girl I knew from college and had forgotten since. I had no idea why Anya invited me, but before I could tap ‘No’ on the spangly Evite, my mother’s rule came back to me. Always accept, or you’ll never be asked. Mom said it with such conviction that the consequence, it seemed, applied to all invitations.

I don’t know what future engagement I was afraid of missing. When Anya hugged me at the door, I realized I’d be quite happy to never go out again.

I floated off to the sectional, a Prussian blue basilisk that still reeked of packing tape, and watched the guests trickle in. Most of them ignored me. At one point, I poured myself some rosé. It was sugary. Then a poker game started at a folding table between the living room and kitchen, and I watched a guy lose four hundred dollars.

He tossed his cards on the table and pretended to be ruined, groaning and white-eyed like a warhorse shot in the nose. Good sport. If the others noticed him the rest of the night, how still he held his drink, how legato his conversation, they might have seen how casually he felt the loss, how readily he might have upped the stakes and lost again and felt some disappointment, yes, but mostly adrenaline. This was something new, something bad, a setback he could afford. He, too, was tired of security. I wanted to try again with him.

We’d met before the game. Felix strode into the living room and introduced himself as “Felix, Emerging Markets”, like the world was his last name. I said I was an artist, figuring that a man with his financial ambition and Brooks Brothers scarf would run.

He leaned toward me. “What medium?”

“Paint.”

“What’s your handle?”

He knew he smelled good. He’d clocked me on the sectional, all alone, oh no!, and decided that I was his next damsel in a tower; that he was the prince with the big, bejeweled sword; and that the glitter and phallic glory of his flourishes would bend me like a flower toward his throbbing—arms—which would not at all buckle by the crashing weight of a flesh-and-bone woman falling twenty storeys. Take me, Felix, Fixed Income Investor in Emerging Markets!

I sipped my pink poison. “No.”

He tapped N, then glanced at me. “You’re not on social media?”

To laugh or to vomit? I told him I didn’t care to network or chitchat. I didn’t care to learn his name. I didn’t care if he controlled the price of kasha in Belarus.

He said, “What do you care about?”

I wasn’t sorry when his friends roped him into playing poker, and by the time he lost I was riveted. His indifference proved that we were more alike than his wallet suggested.

When he rose from the table, I finished my drink and carried two glasses through the crowd. I hadn’t paid close attention to the women, and now I saw how fashionable they were, how exhausting. Plump and velvet-clad gods of their own religion.

How magnetic.

I pushed the second glass into Felix’s chest. “Do you know the difference between acrylic and chalk?”

The booth squeaks beneath me, burning my thighs. I press my teeth into Felix’s lip and imagine we’re somewhere that jobs, friends, and childhood prejudices can’t intrude.

My mom always wanted me to find love in people rather than art. She didn’t appreciate the hours I spent practicing circles and hands, transcribing Dad’s Italian records into shadowy cityscapes, concentrating so hard that my tongue stuck out of my mouth. In her language of well-meaning and emergency preparedness, she told me how friendships got you connections and opportunities. She meant husbands.

As if her marriage could tempt me.

Her first task every morning was making the coffee. She didn’t drink it, and I was too young, but Dad expected a full table—or, more accurately, she expected him to expect it. In order to leave herself time for the front garden, she’d start the coffee at around five a.m. I’d wake shortly after to the percolator’s aeronautic scream. And where was Mom? Hunched over the pansies at the end of the driveway. Menopause had turned her into a horticultural vampire; she could only be outside if the sun were low, and even then the hot flashes would dampen her shirt, raise a masculine odor from her neckline and hat. She never gardened without her Nantucket hat. The straw weave, she said, helped prevent melanoma. At five a.m.? She wore it for compliments. An early commuter might roll down his window and ask where she’d gotten such a statement piece. “Nantucket,” she’d say, and for a moment feel elegant.

As if that weren’t a gel pad under her knees.

I remember her staking black mesh over the hostas, her khakis soiled with dirt and musk. I didn’t want to disturb her, but her movements acquired a self-conscious grace. She knew I was watching. “Yes?” she finally said.

Always “yes.” Never “what.”

“Dad’s up,” I said.

“Again?”

She counted on him to sleep until seven, but he’d been restless lately. Maybe he’d intuited the swelling in his prostate.

She rose, clicking and cracking, from her mat. “Where is he?”

“At the table.”

She exhaled through her nose. “Wait till you’re married,” she said, then laughed.

She might have thought that her words slid off me like rain, but I remember them when I’m most vulnerable. Even now, with Felix’s hands on my back, my forehead itches. Dirt and coffee tinge the air. The instinct awakens to minister to him and thank him, earnestly, for the honor of his attraction.

Right this way, Sir. If you please, Sir, The pleasure is all mine.

I move into Felix like a pin impression. The slip of his mouth, the damp of his shirt, the pad of his thumb gently pushing my throat—on a physical level, I enjoy his advances. In my head, though, I’m fritzing. I need data and feedback. I need to know if I’m doing a good job because that’s what this is: a job. Secretarial hardwiring, and a capitalist disdain for my own limits, has trained me to gratify in the pleasure I give others.

Something moves off his shoulder, through the window at the end of the bar. A man on the sidewalk is looking in. He bunches his face like too-big trousers and stares.

Felix grabs my breast. It’s not not what I want.

I take a deep breath. Give him and the peeper more to work with. Is the bartender looking? He’s too discreet, sweeping peanut shells off the floor. He must deal with this every night. I am hardly the Whore of Babylon.

I’m not doing enough.

Felix’s thumb tests my nipple. With a diligence that somehow smacks of patriotism, he digs at my underwire, questing to know my natural shape, what’s flesh versus padding. I try not to recoil, having cheated a little. Everyone cheats a little. He’s measuring something else: how long I’ll hold out before slapping his hand down.

What if I don’t?

I can count his eyelashes. Mine, mine, mine. He’s lost in my thrall as long as I keep him there. When he starts to withdraw, I nip him.

He wheels backward, pupils gorging. He dabs his bottom lip.

What would Mom say?

Don’t think about her. Don’t think!

Whether there’s blood or not, Felix grins. “Let’s get out of here.”

We lurch down the sidewalk, crackling wet after scattered showers. A dumpster rattles down the block. I bet it’s the peeper with an Ann Taylor catalog, but when I look, it’s a girl.

She wears an old ski jacket, the sleeves too long. Her hair hangs in damp threads. Her cheeks are red from rain.

I veer toward her. She ducks between the black and blue bags left for pickup, and Felix—he must think I’m wasted—pulls me laughing to his side.

It’s a short walk to the brownstones. The massive front steps alternate between potted geraniums and stone lions. I must be staring because Felix tells me that the buildings have been divvied into postwar apartments that look nice on the outside but are as tired and shabby as any in the city.

Okay, Felix.

The stairs have identical gates as well. He stops before one and roots around for his key, accidentally turning out his left pocket. A Jolly Rancher falls to the ground. I wonder what move he’s making and what’s the success rate. When he bends to retrieve the candy and sheepishly offers me some, the motherly goo activates in my stomach. I want to take his sticky hand and march him off to the dentist.

His apartment is small. The spice shelves are pitiful. Bananas rust on top of the fridge. The sparseness makes me want to invade with tchotchke and Thanksgiving dinner. Then I notice the view, the night on fire.

“That’s a Japanese maple,” Felix says, taking out a bottle of Beaujoulais.

I open the window and draw one foot onto the fire escape. I won’t put weight on it. I’ll just straddle the sill and let the rain glance my knee and watch the tree churn like ruby sand or piranhas in feed.

Felix touches my shoulder.

He looks strong enough to catch me if I tip the wrong way. Let’s see if he’s the gallant prince after all.

I smell wine.

I climb back into the kitchen. Felix closes the window while I carry our glasses to the living room, almost as uninspired as Anya’s, but this one feels bigger. Allegorical. We met in a living room, now return to a living room… Maybe we only exist in living rooms.

I lie on the sofa and pull Felix down to me. His hipbones crush my inner thighs. My discomfort is his fervor. I am doing a good job.

I cross my legs over him, will the bruises to bloom, and trace the ingrown armor of his shoulder plates. Our lips move like feelers. His tongue permits mine. We want each other, more of each other. We begin to mesh, melting like crayons in the microwave. This is my favorite part.

Felix gasps like a diver resurfacing. “Wait a sec.”

I’m caught in the fusion, the romance, the red maple.

“Wait.”

If we wait, we’ll retract, and cool off, and reevaluate. Felix will see that I’m not a free spirit but a clinical analyst with a head full of dials.

I grab the back of his neck and crush my pelvis to his.

He sneezes.

The spray is cold on my mouth. His eyes fly open. “Oh my God.”

“It’s fine,” I say, pressing my tits to him.

Felix pats my arm. “Let me get you a towel.”

If I hold on long enough, the flesh contact and pheromones will take the edge off, maybe wipe his memory.

His biceps tense. “Please let go.”

I drop my arms in a bracket around my head, the ultimate posture of submission as my faces begins to itch. The phlegm is drying.

He goes to the kitchen. The faucet runs.

What’s the home version of a lobotomy?

He hands me a dish cloth, avoiding my eye. I wipe my face as daintily as possible. “It’s not a big deal,” I say. “Maybe we can—”

“You’re obviously great,” he says, and I am already relegated to that freak anecdote that he’ll tell future dates, future wives, anyone but me.

I chug the rest of my wine. We say goodnight at the door. I tell myself it’s a habit of safety, nothing personal, when the deadbolt clicks behind me.

The geraniums glow a dull infrared. It’s between late and early. I hope that girl in the coat made it home. If she sees me now, if anyone sees me, I’ll scream.

The lights are off at the bar. There is nowhere to sulk but underground. I head for the subway entrance across the street. When my foot touches the still-wet pavement, the traffic light turns from green to yellow. For a moment, the pavement is hammered gold.

The dawn layers down like a cocktail skirt, yellow with pearl sash and pale blue bodice. They affect a delicateness that refuses to be touched, that grows bolder and brighter and still refuses to be touched.

My neighborhood is so far South of the city that between the lindens, you’ll spot the towers and parapets. All the lots are square, tended and cut by teams of men in orange T-shirts, who buzz right angles into the hedges and line the flagstone walkways with cabbage. While the houses are crowded with intergenerational families, no one plays in the yard except collarless cats that sneer when you hold out your hand.

I wish I could go feline. I’d rub myself on the steps of that slate gray Victorian with the violet shudders and sporty mom. We’ve passed each other a thousand times on the sidewalk, at the door of the bagel shop, in line at the post office. If I knew her name, I would call her softly from the bottom of the driveway. She doesn’t seem like the type to leave her trunk open, full of groceries, but there they are. The bags twitch like children begging to be picked up.

She must have gotten sidetracked, the sporty mom, unloading the dishwasher or cleaning a spill between trips. When you attend closely to some things, you neglect others.

Let’s see what we have here.

Orange juice. Quinoa. Frozen fruit.

There’s no coffee in evidence. The husband must prefer tea.

On the other side of the bags, the interior of the car stretches on and on. The third row of seats has been collapsed to accommodate a lacrosse stick, an ice scraper, and a rumpled sweatshirt. I push it all aside. I am not drunk enough for trespassing. I know I’m not drunk enough.

Then I must not be trespassing.

The car takes my weight with a petty quiver. I fold into a ball and pull the sweatshirt over my head. It reeks. Must be her son’s. He wants to make Varsity but won’t. We’ll console each other through the seatback, the bench warmer and the bereft.

The last time I saw Mom, she was still in the period of recognized mourning where everyone sends lilies that clog the air and spot the carpet. While the cleanup and thank-you notes never ended, Mom wasn’t working with the same urgency as those final weeks, when she’d pored over Dad like a doomed flowerbed and prayed and soothed and made coffee that no one drank. The sudden dissipation of all that must have jarred her. No number of invented errands would compare to the imminent widow’s grim yet purposeful routine. I wonder what hurts more, the loneliness or the uprooting.

Something patters toward the car.

I have to explain. I have to lie still. I have to be ready to dodge the territorial broom.

Nothing happens.

I peel the sweatshirt off my face. No one’s there, but the patter sounds close. I scooch toward the groceries and peer over the flatbed.

A cat lounges on the asphalt below. She is small yet patchy. I can see grayish skin through the thinning fur at her temples. She blinks at me, lifts her leg on a crazy diagonal, and grooms with the carelessness of a locker room crone who has outlived self-consciousness, if elasticity.

I want that kind of carelessness, that self-serving tongue.