"In Unison"
Jared, drunk and stoned, is taking a piss inside while girlfriend Lisa, 16, less drunk\more stoned, sits outside under the poolcage pulling marathon hits from her mother’s glass bong, waiting anxiously for Jared to come back out and join her in celebration of another night when the house belongs to just them, a large space for them to act insanely in for a night or two before Lisa’s wayward mother stumbles in, pilled-up, drunk, and ready to inflict her pain on someone. It is not long before she, Lisa, lost in thought, blanks on why Jared went inside to begin with and quickly stops thinking of him or her mother or much of anything at all if not the stars above, onto which her eyes are now locked like deadbolts, indefinitely.
The last few lonely drops fall like tears from Jared’s dick as he wonders if he and Lisa will fuck tonight. He hopes the pot has rendered her sluggish and horny, not entirely due to his brutish will to dominate a flimsy nymphette two years younger, but rather because, to him, Lisa is most beautiful when she is spent, when a certain narcotic presence becomes her, when her lazy green eyes are both weary and desperate like twin invitations, two winning pleas for him to swallow her completely.
Now hardening with drunken blood, his dick struggles to rise like a veteran boxer refusing defeat, and he proceeds to stroke it determinedly until its cruel-looking, a destroyer of anything not it. He imagines Lisa, the lazy lover, the broken doll, Queen B, arsonist of his lost being. Motion is charged and violent until arrows of jizz dart militantly to the beige wallpaper and slime to the floor ominously before he looks to his gooey, shrinking vessell and finds it sadly repulsive like an undercooked eggroll, an earthworm’s abortion.
Lisa, with clumsy execution, yanks open the sliding-glass door to the interior of this mildly affluent home she shares with her addict mother. She yells for Jared and he responds through the door. The scattered quality of his voice renders Lisa aware of his secret masturbation, and with it, his panic of her knowing. She laughs to herself, amused by how sex-crazed Jared gets when he smokes weed, yet finds it odd that he was driven to the bathroom to fulfill what she could have easily fed him, and she thinks that maybe she should have given him head or something earlier, that it must be her duty to please him when she senses he is in need of her cunt or her mouth, and since he is far too reserved to vocalize such things, that she must initiate these acts even when he does not ask for them.
He’s now wiping the cum off both himself and the wall. Though he expects Lisa to show some semblence of concern or anger for his crude behavior, Lisa herself is not in the mind to fight. Tonight is a recurring occasion when she feels less a girlfriend and more a true counterpart to Jared, a partner in conversation, mishchief, intoxication, and, of course, sex, but sex with Jared is not like sex with other boys, no, their sex is transformative in the way it approaches a level of total disorientation for both parties. For instance, when Jared is fucking Lisa, her brains feel something like scrambled eggs, and for him, the act of conquering her like this is less a display of dominance than it is a means of reaching oblivion, in the way one must feel strangely elevated mid-fall from a skyscraper. Lisa understands, solemnly, how unlikely it is that she will ever find another cock so seamlessly able to obliterate her during sex, while he, perhaps unknowingly, will never meet another girl with whom he feels the same furious longing he has for Lisa.
(She opens the door and asks if he was masturbating and he answers yes and casts his head down but she just laughs and kisses him and says you better have been thinking of me and he says of course I was and she asks if he wants her tonight and he answers non-verbally and they go into the bedroom and she sucks him and fucks him and swallows his cum and when it’s over he says he loves her and begins to cry like he always does after they finish having sex and then she says I love you too and embraces him tightly and falls asleep while he watches her and strokes her hair and thinks to himself please don’t ever leave me.)
Jared’s eyes are fixed to the ceiling. They connote no more than unrevivable despair for many reasons he is unable to articulate, and he wishes for sleep since sleep is the only fleeting simulation of what it must be like to not exist, and like death, it happens most naturally, most easily when you are not focusing on it too much. He tells his mind to stay quiet but this is, of course, an impossible prospect, one which only sleep and death can regulate. He looks over to Lisa and it is then when he finds potential to rest. He closes his eyes.
Naked, Lisa gets up. She studies Jared’s sleeping face, kisses his head, and leaves the room. Outside, the neighborhood hibernates, only the glare of a single streetlight signifies life but it is enough. She begins walking down the length of her street, unabashed by her nudity. From nowhere, headlights surge through the dark, shine onto her. She squints, the driver’s face obscured by shadows. Keeps walking, car moves past her to a stop-sign and stays idle. Lisa turns around and so does the driver. Soon the car is directly beside her and even sooner a window rolls down, revealing the driver, an innocuous male figure tuned noteworthy by the semi-automatic in his hand. She freezes. The driver shoots. Lisa falls to her death.
Jared wakes up. She lies next to him, her sleeping breath inaudible. He stares at her closed eyes, projects his own waking dreams into them. The mere presence of Lisa is always a relief after he dreams of her death, and this relief also happens to be coupled with intense arousal, as Jared regularly wakes with a glass-cutting erection. He has often desired to have sex with Lisa while she is asleep, but to do so would elicit too much guilt unless he were to consult her beforehand, but, of course, he understands how unlikely it would be for this to actually happen since Lisa, and since no one, really, can truly rest with the knowledge that, boyfriend or not, another person is going to fuck them while they are unconscious. But Jesus, Jared thinks. Look at her. I have to be inside her right now. After a good long while of weighing the possibility, of chewing it up silently, he settles on using his fingers instead of his penis. Hers is the only vagina he has truly admired in 19 years of life. Its impossible softness always comes as a shock. How can a human being have such an angelic cunt? Shouldn’t cunts be less perfect than this, more fishy and complex? He digs around for a while, gently as to not wake her, while likewise jerking himself off.
--
Lisa walks with her mother. They have done this before, but only here, at night, alone and unbothered.
“I love you more than anything. You know this, don’t you?”
“Yes”
“You know that your father is a liar and a cheater, right?”
“Yes, I know.”
“Do you understand that the men I bring home are meaningless compared to you? Do you understand the reason mommy brings those men home is because mommy is unhappy with herself? Do you understand they have nothing to do with how much I love you?”
“I guess so.”
Jared gains momentum. He finds more pleasure in the covert fingering of Lisa than in the routine service of himself. He wonders if she is somehow able to experience sexual pleasure while sleeping, if maybe what he is doing to her is translated into a dream language, if maybe she is dreaming of herself with him, or someone else, and if it is with someone else, if she is enjoying herself. God I hope not.
“My greatest wish is that someday you will find a trustworthy husband. One who you can trust with your precious little heart. Is there a boy in your life?”
“Yes”
“Do you love him?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Does he love you?”
“I think so.”
“Have you two had sex?”
“Yes”
“Was he your first?”
“Yeah, besides blowjobs.”
“Was he gentle?”
“No, but I didn’t want him to be. I wanted him to do it like he would normally. I didn’t care if it hurt.”
The moment Jared spills his load onto the bedsheet, he feels like a dirty criminal. I am a horrible person. I am a sick person.
“So he’s slept with many other girls?”
“I don’t know. I don’t like to talk about it. It makes me jealous to think of him with others, and I don’t like myself when I am jealous.”
“Did you feel loved when your virginity to him?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Did he make you climax?”
“Yes, I do everytime we have sex.”
“How big is he?”
“He has the biggest dick I have ever seen.”
“I thought the same thing about your father. We used to screw like rabbits, and then, well, you know the rest of the story. Sex is not everything, you know.”
“It’s not like that, Mom. He cares for me.”
“I certainly hope so. There are many bad apples in this world, Lisa. And many, if not all of them, are men.”
Jared turns to his left side, then to his right. Only unrelenting thoughts and discomfort prevail, as is custom for him, whether or not in bed. He thinks it must already be 5 in the morning and he has gained only 3 hours of sleep, and he thinks how depressing it is that the only dreams he has left in him are ones as ugly and diseased as he considers himself to be. He imagines what his life will be like during days when he does not look young anymore, when girls like Lisa are no longer attracted to him. He comes to the solid conclusion that these days will most likely, in spirit, resemble all the other days he has lived, and that all these other days, at least since freshman year of high school, have been hell for his brain, and how much can a brain withstand, how much more of this constant churning can a person possibly endure without the aid of psychoactive drugs or sex with a beautiful young girl or sleep, all of which, excluding the latter, he has, in nineteen years, already exhausted to the point of what might be addiction, or at least a daily regimen without which a functioning life would be inconceivable.
He gets up.
“When I met your father, he seemed to promise everything. I was blinded by him. I could not see the truth. There are very few dependable men in this world, Lisa. Very few who keep their promises. You must stay alert, before they’re able to hurt you. Just look at me. I’m a total mess. I want better for you.”
“I’ll be okay, mom.”
“Just tell me he is not just using your pretty little body for sex. Tell me he is one of the good ones."
“He’s one of the good ones, Mom. I promise.”
He’s in the bathroom, surveying the medicine cabinent. Settles on a pillbox belonging to Lisa’s Mother, full of some drug designed to make people sleep. Takes the first. Then another, then another, and then-
“I won’t be here forever, you know?”
“I know."
“Someday you might have children of your own. I pray you will not make the same mistakes I made. I pray that you will have a happy family, with beautiful children and a man who loves you. I pray that you are never hurt. You are my pretty little angel. I love you.”
-he walks back into the bedroom and lies down next to her, kisses her freckled cheek, tells her he loves her, that he’s sorry, and finally: a deep sleep, deeper than usual, and dreamless.
Lisa’s mother walks off, disappears, leaving her daughter alone in this empty space of night’s invention. It is here where she will wander aimlessly without company and wait for Jared to arrive through a fluid perimeter, arms outstretched for her, handsome and sturdy like a prince.
