CHERRY BLOSSOMS // Revisited // Montréal // 3.14

Winslow was laughing and playing patty-cake with Odie in the car’s backseat. Geoff could see them in the rearview. His little girl was cackling so hard, so high, she couldn’t breathe. No one had ever played patty-cake with her before. Odie loved new games and if it meant horsing around and slapping hands with her new best buddy, she was all about it.

“Patty-cake, patty-cake, baker’s man,” Winslow sang to her, and she giggled, a piercing sound over top of their clapping hands.

Geoff hunched his shoulders up to protect his ears. Stuck in traffic on the Gardiner, by Palais Royale, almost home. It had been a good show. A good show, but the afternoon had been ruined for him. He couldn’t shake Nia’s text. Couldn’t stop thinking of what it meant. She’d seen it. She’d interacted with it. Had she sucked it? Did he fuck her? What if he fucked her ass? Maybe Rocco was too big for that. Geoff squeezed the wheel.

“Build me a cake as fast as you can!” Hands clapping and slapping.

He’d decided not to bug Nia. She said she was going to not even think about him till she got back. That was hot. His bad wife. His independent woman. He liked the idea. He hadn’t quite known that meant she wouldn’t text him at all . . . that she would ignore his texts. But he’d been getting off a little on the frustration. It led his mind to horrible places, and he liked those places, liked the blackness it spread through his belly. He’d replied to her text, told her he loved her. He was glad about that. Felt good about that. Went back to the show, wondering what all of this was like for Nia. He met everyone that wanted to see him, signed books, pressed his trembling, sweaty palms to theirs and smiled through the wonderful pain. He went back to Evergreen and hung with Jenny for an hour, with Odie by his side. Did his Q&A. He took O through the show for a while and bought her some books. Bought Marshall’s book for her when he stopped by to see him and say hi to Katie. By then, though, his resolve was tarnished. Weakened and brittle. He returned to his table and sat with Winslow. His shoulders were heavy and his smile was not coming easy. Since then, he’d texted Nia three more times.

G-Force: worried. Why won’t you respond? You ok?

G-Force: I’m dying here. Are we doing the right thing?

G-Force: Are we making a mistake? Txt me back

Nia was too smart for him. Nothing. No response. He told her he liked this, and she was making him enjoy it, no matter what his current mindset might say. Or maybe she was still in bed with Rocco. Not even looking at her phone. Taking load after load on her chest. Jerking that thing off all over her precious tits. Maybe they’d worked their way through that whole dozen box of extra-large Rough Riders. Maybe she was falling in love.

“Roll it, pat it, mark it with a—”

They both said their own initial, Odie saying O, Winslow saying double-U. Odie laughed, said, “What? You can’t use double-U, it doesn’t fit.” Winslow said, “The beat?” Odie just said, “O,” again and slapped Winslow’s hands. Winslow laughed, saying, “We can’t keep using O over and over.” Odie said, “Let’s do Dad. Dad’s a G, but he’s supposed to be a J. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

* * *

Nia and Rocco rode the elevator in silence. It was like a closet. With Rocco’s bulk in there with her, the cab would only stand one more person safely on its black and white checkerboard floor. Nia checked her phone. She was aware of Rocco next to her, leaning against the smoky, gold-veined mirror, running his hand over his chin and shaking his head as he watched the lit numbers above the control panel climb to ‘4’.

It dinged, came to a stop, gave a slight heave and a groan, then the doors clattered open and they stepped out, Nia in the lead. They walked the hall to the end, to the double black doors that would take them to their rooms.

“Come in for a glass of wine,” he said.

She paused, thrust an arm out, and peered at her Gucci. “I suppose,” she said.

Rocco snorted, then nodded. He grunted and opened his room with the keycard and held the door for her. She walked ahead and took her seat in the maple chair between the two tall, narrow windows. She watched Rocco come in, throw his things on the walnut dresser, put out two acrylic glasses. He went to the mini-bar and took a half bottle of wine and poured. She could see his struggle for control. He was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Right now he wanted her to see his control, see she didn’t have him. She knew she had him. He would transform.

“I know your fuckin’ game,” he said as he handed her a glass of wine and sat in the chair opposite her.

“What game?”

“Right. You think I don’t know you?”

“You know me.”

“You think Dino and me don’t talk?”

“I’m sure you do.”

“We talk,” he said, a mean and knowing smirk turning up one corner of his mouth and slitting his eyes.

“I bet he says all sorts of terrible things.”

“Ha. Sometimes he does.”

“Sometimes? He only sees things one way.”

“His way.”

“You think I’m playing some game?” she said coyly, raising up one eyebrow, condescendingly skeptical. She swayed her hips in her seat, making her legs shift from side to side, her knees touching and her thighs rubbing together. The stockings made their soft sheer sound, a pale flash of thigh cut by a stocking strap visible below her skirt hem.

“You think you’re something,” he said, his two big hands with their strong thick fingers suspending his plastic wineglass in front of his face as he scowled at her over it.

“I don’t know what you mean, Rocco,” she said.

A smile broke his face. He sipped his wine again, regarded her, eyes traveling from her face down her body and she knew he was looking at the revealed flesh of her thigh.

She smiled and said, “All right, why don’t you just tell me what you think it is I’m playing at.”

“Nia, look at me,” he said, and leaned forward, lowering his wine to his lap. “I don’t play games.”

She took a long sip of wine, eyes on his. “You don’t play games, but you really love the theatre.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“You have a flair for the dramatic.”

“I do?” he said, his voice a mean grumble.

She rolled her eyes, looked out the window and tilted her head back so he was sure to see her fine long neck. She said, “No one has ever seriously said to me, ‘I don’t play games.’”

“I don’t play fucking games. I’m not— Look, why don’t you fuckin’ leave.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” she said. She lingered a moment, casually slumped in the chair, free hand twirling a long lock of her raven hair while she finished her wine. The room was dead quiet, but she could hear Rocco’s breathing as he stared her down. She let her legs move side to side, parted them slightly, let him see the bare inside of her thigh above her stocking if he’d like to look. Then she put her wineglass down on the table next to the flowers, smiled and raised her eyebrows, lifted herself from the seat.

Rocco watched her. His leg bounced double-time as his frustration built to anger. His jaw muscles jumped and flexed, his brow dipped in a low scowl.

“Good night,” she said, and sauntered to the partition, swaying her hips as she walked, filling the room with the click of her high heels on hard maple.

“Wait,” he said behind her, and she smiled—then didn’t wait.

“Nia,” he said again—a growl; a warning from a vicious animal, a predator.

She turned and saw his standing shape—black, intimidating—against the nighttime blue of the streetlight city out the window. A century-old building behind him, its facade lit bright with the flickering grey video of WWI soldiers lurching over the wall of a trench. Rocco took his shirt off.

She waited, watched him cross the room to her, come into the light slashing pale amber from the open door of the bathroom. He came to her, looking like a man wanting trouble. The light cut across his big hard body, drawing deep black shadows under his slab of a chest. His belly was thick, smooth, covered in hair that led a trail from a thick thatch just above the button on his jeans and scurried up over his chest.

He said, “Where are you going?”

“To my room, Rocco.” She kept her eyes on his, but reached behind her and put a hand on the partition door’s lever.

“No, you’re not.” His hand went over her shoulder and he placed his big palm on the door, stopped her from opening it. She could smell his animal smell, his musk, his pheromones.

“Rocco, I’m fuckin’ married—what do you think is going to happen here?”

“You’re fuckin’ beggin’ for it,” he sneered.

“I have a husband.”

“Who, that little homo?”

“Fuck you. What do you know, you—”

“I know that daughter isn’t his.”

Cold death fell on her. A ghoul from an icy tomb, its hand piercing through her heart and turning her body to ice. Her knees buckled, and she fell back against the door. Horror struck her face. She tried to speak, but her voice was a groan, a creak from an exhumed coffin.

“How do— What are you—” She turned and her hands went over the door blindly, both of her weak pins-and-needles hands scrabbling along its black surface like they had no idea where a doorknob would be. “You . . . how . . .”

Then her head whipped back, Rocco’s huge hand clutching a fistful of her hair, pulling it right out of her scalp. She screamed, threw her hands up and she clutched his wrists with her hands in claws, her face clenched in pain. Rocco threw her on the bed.

* * *

Could you really burst a condom? Probably. Nia had said to that girl at the sex store that she hoped he didn’t burst those big condoms. Joking and all. But did a boy with a big cock split a condom open inside her one time? Is that why she thought of that? What if Rocco split his condom? Maybe that was what her text could mean. Maybe she was in the hospital getting an AIDs test because he fucked right through that tough condom with his gigantic cock. Nia was on the pill, but she wouldn’t want his bare cock in her. What if she did? Holy fuck. His Nia was dirty—what if she said, “Condoms are for sailors, Rocco—please fuck me bareback, big daddy.”

Fuck!

He would never get to sleep. Why couldn’t she just tell him how it was going?

Fucking two in the morning and he was going back to the show in six hours. Fuck, Nia. Just a half day tomorrow, but he sure would like some sleep, sweetheart. He checked his phone again in case he’d drifted and missed an incoming text. Nope, fucking nope. Oh, look at that, the clock on my phone (right above a smiling picture as his screensaver of Geoff and Odie and Nia under some cherry blossoms) says it’s now two-twenty-seven in the goddamn morning.

“Ah, Nia,” he groaned and tossed himself over again, threw his arm over his forehead. There was, under all this malaise, a sexual tension that tightened his belly. An excitement. Something hard to qualify, but it was something he knew would be memorable. He laughed, looked at the ceiling in the moonlit bedroom. Yes, one year from now, he would look back on this evening with wanton desire. This painful moment would be forever sexualized for him. Loss, fear, regret, shame, lust, happiness. Simultaneously. Too many emotions stuffed into his 160-pound frame. The emotion stuffed and stuffed and it was finding a weakness in his belly. Soon it would burst out of him. Most likely out the tip of his cock when she got home and pressed her lips to his.