__The Wrong Girl__
By Aviatrix
His skin is warm, heat radiating into her palms. He's all long legs and quiet
muscle, strong hands and laughlines. Greying hair under her hands, but he's
not all that old and she leans into him like it's her first time.
And that makes sense, because there are still echoes of their
first time in every present coupling. Rainy midafternoon,
bloodstained couch, tentative and reaching and
loneliness-but-now-I've-found-you, and it's all there in his eyes.
[Their first time, she had suddenly realized that he even
fucked with an English accent; it struck her as funny and she had giggled,
in that almost-not-quite childish way, and he just smiled at her, like he
understood completely. It was a nice feeling.]
* * * * *
There are parts of Joyce in her.
He can see them, sometimes, in the angle of
her shoulders and the way she reads magazines backwards. There's a tone of
voice or a turn of phrase, and it's her, just her: he's in his past and his
hands are running over the hips of the wrong girl.
That night is etched into him, carved into his heart or maybe just the part of his brain
that controls lust. A parade of drunken images: smashed glass, chewing gum,
held hands, a gun. Exhibitionist thrill running through his veins. He still
half-remembers the feel of the cold car hood on his fingertips, the metal
rubbing and catching on his skin.
And so there's two nights, and although he's catalogued the details of both, they blur into each other.
Mother, daughter, blonde hair and identical pouts (lips in the same shape,
tongue with the same curl), smearing and shifting like traffic lights
refracted through raindrops on a windshield. One body stops and the other
memory carries on after it without a hitch; flawless but for the tiny
glitches in his mind, the ones that say "something is not as it should be,
something is not quite right here."
It doesn't really matter, though.
There is only one girl, here, now. She kisses like she's looking for something she lost, and can do tricks that he doesn't
want to know how she learned. She sits in his lap and rubs her nose in his
sweater and smiles, just for him.
She loves him.
She says nothing when he shouts the wrong name.
* * *