As far as Trent knew, Jeni was cuddled up in her childhood bed, hugging a defiled Polish sausage like a carnival prize. Not in his wildest dreams would he have imagined his beautiful girlfriend sleeping nude on a buttermilk charmeuse duvet, next to a hairy English teacher, with the thermostat set to 67. Nor would this blissfully ignorant lad have any good reason to. As far as I could tell.
Last night, Jeni told me she never slept under the covers during summer. This had been completely fine with her college roommate’s boyfriend, Aiden, who began to manufacture ludicrous reasons to knock on their dorm room door in the morning. These early days of Jeni’s Freshman year were fraught with arguments between her and her roommate. The girls across the hall started calling Adrianne and Jeni’s room “The Real World: Austin” and left their door propped open so they wouldn’t miss an episode.
Jeni decided to cool things down with Aiden when she met Trent. Jeni rode the highs of her blossoming relationship with Trent, adoring his politeness and Southern charm. And although the majority of his manners and customs lost their luster for their invariability, Trent’s sculpted torso and adorably cliched jock fashion sense did a lot to make up for it.
Weeks after Adrianne broke up with Aiden, one of the girls across the hall told Adrianne she saw him chain-smoking by their dorm’s southern entrance. Adrianne called Aiden and confronted him about this. She bought all of Aiden’s tacked-together lies, dirt cheap, and got back together with him. She started staying at Aiden’s apartment—more or less moving in—which caused Jeni to feel abandoned.
Jeni went over to Aiden’s apartment (unaware that Adrianne was staying there (though she easily could have deduced it, and probably knew but her brain took its give-a-shitter and broke it over its pink, spongy knee)). Jeni easily breezed her way into Aiden’s bedroom and gave “fucking the pain away” “the old college try.”
After a particularly taxing Social Psychology midterm, Adrianne was walking briskly up to Aiden’s apartment building and saw Jeni exit out the side door. A hard wind whirled through limbs long unburdened by fruit. Adrianne let her backpack drop to the sidewalk as she marched toward the front door. Aiden was not at all prepared for the next seventy-five minutes of his life.
The next day, Adrianne returned to sleep in her plain-ass dorm room bed with her backstabbing cotenant. Whenever Jeni said good morning, Adrienne didn’t flinch. When Jeni complimented Adrianne’s new denim jacket, nope, not the faintest tinge of recognition. One afternoon, Jeni needed to borrow a pen. She decided to test the extent of Adrianne’s silent treatment and realized it existed in the physical realm (or exquisitely deeper inside of the mental, depending on your perspective). Jeni asked to borrow a pen, waited ten seconds, came up behind Adrianne, reached around her, opened a drawer in her desk, chose a pen, and closed the drawer, and this elicited no reaction from her so-called roomie.
Getting the eternal cold shoulder from Adrienne was significantly worse than Adrianne not being around. It made Jeni feel like she didn’t exist. Like she was a ghost. To prove that she wasn’t, Jeni began fucking Aiden like he had a fast approaching expiration date.
Just as Jeni and Aiden’s tryst was beginning to sour, Trent dropped the L-Bomb. This initiated Jeni’s self-defined “four-week fuckfest,” a cycle of copulation and mourning so exhausting it eventually put her in bed with what she told Trent was a very contagious rhinovirus. On day four, Trent asked Jeni if she had gone to see a doctor and she said, “Yeah, they told me to sleep it off.” Her depression was so noticeably severe that on day six, Adrianne broke her silence, put her hand on Jeni’s arm, and asked her if she needed help.
In my bed, way far away from Jeni’s university, I kissed Jeni’s chin and her lips and put my hand on her shoulder and kissed both of her eyes. She pretended to snore, emitting a long nasally exhalation.
“That’s cold,” I said, which made her smile.
“What time is it?” she said, squinting against the morning light.
I looked over at Lydia’s alarm clock. “Breakfast time.”
“I hate that show. The puppet’s an asshole. What actual time is it?”
“Half past nine.”
“Oh, OK, good,” she said, stretching. “Why’d you let me stay up so late?”
“What should I have done, tell you to shut up and go to sleep?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Yes.”
“The steam’s gotta come out somewhere.”
“I was just spilling my guts to soften you up and break down your defenses, so I could have sex with you.”
“How’d that plan work out?”
“Poorly,” she said. “I had a dream that I sucked your dick—”
“That wasn’t a dream.”
Jeni slapped me on the arm. “Would you let me finish a thought?” she said. “I dreamt I sucked your dick and it shriveled smaller and smaller into a raisin, and I chewed it and swallowed it.”
“A raisin?” I looked down at my penis.
“How do you not have a hard-on, right now?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re in bed with a naked girl. If I so much as mention the word bed or bang around Trent his cock swells up like Popeye’s biceps. Don’t you think I’m sexy?”
“Sweetie, you don’t have to fish for flattery.”
“I’m not fucking joking,” she said. She put the pillow back between us but not in front of her face.
“I didn’t mean to say that to patronize you,” I said. “It just feels like one of those things that doesn’t need to be mentioned because it’s so glaringly obvious. You have the thighs of a dancer. You have the ass of an Olympic volleyball player. Your areolas fade into your flesh so seamlessly it makes me want to leave teethmarks. And don’t even get me started on your midriff. I’ve got a guy drawing plans to build a vacation home for me in your bellybutton.”
Jeni smooshed her forehead into the pillow. “I’d prefer a female architect. I don’t need another man in one of my holes.”
“I can barely hear you, kid,” I said. “Speak up.”
Jeni reached around the pillow and gently grabbed my dick, which was rigid.
Sex seemed like an empty gesture to signify how I was feeling about Jeni. I wanted something more from her.
“There’s nothing new under the sun,” said Jeni. “I guess we’re just gonna have to bang.”
“Are you hungry?”
“Why? You want me to swallow something?”
“No. I want to swallow you.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Close your mouth and don’t swallow. Think about butter melting on top of a hot chocolate chip pancake. Pour syrup all over it. Take a bite of the crisp bacon and have a sip of orange juice. Lick the creamy egg yolk off your fork; feel it coat your tongue. Now, in your mind, swallow the yolk and feel it slide down. OK. Are you ready?”
Jeni nodded, her eyes wide.
“I want you to bring your mouth to mine and pour your saliva in like nectar from a cup.”
Still holding onto my prick, Jeni put her lips inside my mouth. As her drool spilled in it combined with an influx of my own saliva and I gulped it down loud and squelchy. It made me think of creatures in a tide pool.
Jeni watched the last of our saliva disappear down my throat. She licked my lower lip, and kissed my neck and my chest. She drove her tongue into my navel. I let her suck me off to completion and swallow my semen. As we held one another, our stomachs gurgled. They seemed to be talking about the same thing.
