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To call the dinner invitation something of a surprise would be wildly understating it. Not the dinner part, specifically, because Zosia has been eating with Carol and Manousos as a matter of practice every day for the last two weeks. Every day since their little plan with the radio and the Carlsbad Caverns had worked and Zosia—the real, genuine Zosia—had emerged like a child from a complicated birth, red and screaming.
It’s just that, usually, the conversations at these dinners happen between Manousos and Carol, and Manousos and Zosia, and never between Zosia and Carol. Hell, Zosia asks Manousos to ask Carol to pass the butter, like they are a dysfunctional family in the middle of a garden variety squabble.
In fact, Zosia has only spoken one full sentence to her in the last two weeks, in the ten or so minutes when she was lucid but before she’d fully awoken to the reality of their situation—it was, Carol remembers, in the back seat of the car coming back from Carlsbad, and Zosia was pulling the wig off her head and throwing bobby pins out the window.
In the front passenger seat, Carol was sweating, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It hadn’t yet. It would soon.
“Carol,” Zosia had said, and then, with more familiarity: “Carol. Your eggs. What about your eggs?”
Carol swallowed. “We blew them up. Uh, not with the atom bomb. If you remember the atom bob. We’re still figuring out what to do with that.”
Ten minutes later, they’d had to pull over for Manousos to break them apart because Zosia was trying to crawl into the front seat to beat Carol senseless. And now, well. Here they are.
Her choice to remain in Albuquerque and, indeed, in the Martins’ house, whose windows look into Carol’s back yard, is an equal surprise, as is her willingness to gang up with them in their plot to save the world. Zosia has no ill feelings toward Manousos, but has a habit of slapping Carol just about every time she sees her. Which, fine. Fine!
Carol has spent so much of the last 70 or 80 or—fuck it, who’s counting, really—days pondering the myth of Zosia, falling in love with a fascimile of her, being frightened of her, wanting her desperately. By the time that they’d awoken her from that long, deep slumber, Carol had no pretensions that this new Zosia would be the same as the woman, or women, or collection of people, who had claimed to love her.
But, she felt like she owed it to her, all the same. Life is a series of debts in the end, and Zosia is Carol’s. One of many, and the largest by far.
The thing is, after all that, she still doesn’t know who Zosia is. She observes her, has gleaned a series of puzzling and unrelated facts about her. Knows that Zosia can speak Spanish. Knows that she knows how to operate a ham radio. Carol has seen her and Manousos out in the desert hitting baseballs with the Walton boys’ old bat, and she’s got a damn good swing.
Carol has no idea how much of this is Zosia and how much is leftover from her nexus with the Others, although she suspects that Zosia has discussed this with Manousos, and sworn him to secrecy. As she’s said. Zosia doesn’t speak to her much.
This kind of pairing off, in the past, undoubtedly would have caused Carol another deep, unhealing psychic wound. It’s easier and harder all at once when you’ve got nobody to blame but yourself. Cleaner, maybe.
For two weeks, Carol lies awake at night and feels a shame so complete that she almost wishes she could join the Others, just to have it become a drop in the bucket. Dilute it into something less painful. Then she remembers that the shame, the specificity of it, is part of what they are fighting for at all, and stares at her ceiling until dawn.
Even still, their small bubble manages to remain amicable. Manousos improves his English, Carol improves her Spanish. They fight. They fight a lot, actually, and mostly about things that don’t matter. At least once a day, Carol finds one of Zosia’s Polish cigarettes, which she is apparently bulk ordering from the Others, either in a couch cushion or cracked into the carpet underneath her feet. She asks Manousos once why she leaves them lying around all the time.
“Have you tried asking her?” Manousos asks. Carol rolls her eyes.
“I don’t know, Manousos, have you tried sticking a bundle of dynamite up your ass and lighting the fuse?”
Probably more importantly, they learn an absurd amount of shit about radio waves, about how to replicate what they’d done to Zosia to the whole world.
And Zosia— Zosia spins at her periphery, a top twirling just out of sight. Having spent her time in solitary confinement, Carol comes to understand Zosia’s need to stay close to them. So, she does her best not to speak to her, not to look at her. Not to ruin it for her.
She doesn’t see Zosia at all the day of the dinner invitation. Carol wants to ask Manousos as she is certain he has heard from her, but stays true to her private pact with herself to leave it alone. If Zosia wanted Carol to know her whereabouts, she would have told her. And Carol can’t stomach the idea of making assumptions about what Zosia might want or not want anymore.
The knock at the door of Carol’s house comes about 6 PM, when it smells like red sauce and Carol has her nose in a book about electromagnetic fields. Earlier in the day, she’d asked Manousos if he’d ever listened to the Magnetic Fields, and when he’d said no she had dug her vinyl press of 69 Love Songs out of the cabinet and played it for him.
Manousos had picked up his Spanish-English dictionary and declared it maudlin. They’d fought about it pretty much up until Zosia knocked at the door.
“Oh,” says Carol, startled, when she opens it. Any time she and Zosia are even marginally alone together she feels a tension crawl up her spine like there’s somebody behind her with a gun pointed at her head.
“Why do you look so surprised?” says Zosia. That creepy—well, now Carol thinks it’s creepy—wig is gone and her bob is tucked behind her ears. Real Zosia wears sweaters and jeans just like the other one. Carol doesn’t dwell on it.
“I wasn’t expecting to see you, I guess,” if Zosia is going to act casual about uttering her second-ever sentence to Carol, so is Carol.
“Who else would be knocking at your door?”
“I don’t—uh—”
Zosia rolls her eyes. “I want you to come over. To my house. For dinner.”
“Uh,” Carol blinks. “I think Manousos is already making spaghetti.” From behind her, Mansusos slinks into view with a dish towel over his shoulder and a wooden spoon covered in red sauce.
“Spaghetti?” He says to Zosia. She shakes her head.
“Not Manousos,” she says. “Just you.”
Carol laughs uncomfortably. When Zosia’s face doesn’t change, she stops, stricken. “I can’t just leave Manousos alone for dinner. What will he—” Without looking away from Zosia’s expression, which is, as it always is when she is looking at Carol, saturated in disgust, she reaches behind herself and snaps at Manousos, gesturing him over. When she glances over her shoulder at him, he’s slowly backing out of the room. “Manousos!” She hisses, but he’s already gone.
“He seems fine to me,” says Zosia curtly. Carol manages a grimacing smile.
“Okay, dinner at Zosia’s, just the two of us. What could go wrong?”
Outside, the air is dry and the sun is just beginning its descent over the horizon. Three paces in front of Carol, Zosia walks with a brutal confidence. Carol can only imagine that, in the before times, she had entered rooms and people had taken notice. Even in the after times, even after everything, Carol is taking notice.
When they get to her front door, which is already hanging open, Carol says: “Zosia, stop. Stop for a second.” She knows better than to try and touch her, and Zosia, anyway, does stop and turn. “Look, I know I’m not multilingual or an expert at operating a ham radio. But if you kill me, it’s going to be a lot harder for you and Manousos to get to the bottom of this. I mean, who else has the fucking self loathing to sit and analyze 400 pages on radio wave theory in a week? I haven’t touched you. I don’t look at you. I don’t talk to you. Except for right now, but—you’ve put me in kind of a tight spot. Not that I’m blaming you! Or anything. I’m just trying to say, you don’t have to kill me. Really. There are other options.”
Zosia stares at her for a moment. The woman has eyes like a fucking dairy cow, even when she’s clearly repulsed. “Just go inside, Carol.”
“Okay.” Carol says, and goes inside.
She tries not to be too obvious about her snooping. But she’s never been into Zosia’s house before, and it’s clear when she walks through the living room that Zosia has been living and sleeping in there—sheets on the couch, plates on the coffee table, stacks of books. There are also musical instruments and a tennis racket. It’s unclear if these are the Martins’, or if they had arrived there via drone delivery.
“The dining room is through there,” Zosia gestures ahead and Carol nods.
She settles herself in one seat at the long table, and Zosia takes the spot across from her. Behind them, a clock ticks steadfastly along. Carol tries to stay true to her word for a moment and keeps her eyes on the table. But after a full minute of deeply uncomfortable silence, she looks up and finds Zosia’s gaze.
Zosia, lovely even in her obvious hatred, seems to be daring Carol to say something. Probably she wants an excuse to slap her again, which, again, is fine. Carol has made peace with her various floggings both past and future.
“So, uh. Not a lot in the way of dinner, huh?”
Zosia raises an eyebrow. “You expected me to cook for you?”
This is good, actually. Carol suspects that Zosia likes it when she blunders like this, so she keeps going. “Well, it was an invite for dinner, and there’s no dinner, so. I can cook.”
Zosia leans slightly forward. “I’ve tasted your cooking. I’ll pass,” she sits back in her chair. “I’ve got Ritz crackers and cheese, if you’re really hungry.”
“If you wanted to stare at each other in uncomfortable silence, we could have done that over Manousos’ spaghetti. That’s all I’m saying,” Zosia rises with a clatter of her chair and swans around the corner into the kitchen. Carol hears cabinets shutting and drawers opening. “The guy is a freak but, I have to hand it to him, he is a damn good cook.”
Zosia emerges with an opened box of crackers, a block of cheddar cheese, and a butter knife. She throws these items down onto the table and resumes her seat. “Shut up, Carol,” she says. “I don’t care about what you think about Manousos’ cooking.”
“Okay, less controversial topic. Politics, maybe?”
“You just say whatever pops into your head, don’t you?”
“Pretty much. It comes with being a writer.”
“‘Writer’,” Zosia says, putting the word into air quotes. This makes Carol inwardly flinch, and she considers not giving Zosia the satisfaction of seeing a blow landed. But, hell. She owes it to her.
“I know you think I’m a piece of shit,” Carol says. She puts her hands into her lap and begins to pick violently at her cuticle. “I am a piece of shit. And I’m a hack. And a rapist. And a—”
“Oh, poor you! Poor Carol!” Zosia takes the cheese from in front of Carol and begins to saw off a hunk with the butter knife. “Your self pity exhausts me.”
“You’re exhausted? I’m exhausted. So why am I here? Because this seems to me to be a purposeful exercise in misery.”
Zosia puts a jagged hunk of cheese into her mouth, chews, then makes a face as she swallows. “American cheese is shit.”
“Well, why did you get store brand?” Zosia gives her a look that would melt asphalt off of a parking lot.
“I think we need to clear the air,” she says, still glaring. “About what happened between us, before I woke up.”
Of all the things Carol was expecting this to be about, this is pretty low on the list. She wasn’t previously aware that this was air that could be cleared. Zosia has made it very clear multiple times that she remembers exactly what happened between her body and Carol and has also made it clear exactly how she feels about it, and Carol.
Carol, selfishly, recoils at the thought of rehashing it. Of laying all of her shame and humiliation and selfishness out on the table with the Ritz crackers and shitty cheese. It’s easy enough to admit what she owes to Zosia when the pain is something familiar, much harder when they are talking about embarking on a foreign road.
“Okay,” Carol says. “Sure, if that’s what you want.”
“Are you always this passive?”
Carol squints. “Passive?” She says, unable to help the edge of frustration in her voice. “You think I’m passive? I have been trying for three goddamn months to save the world.”
“You let yourself be seduced by an alien hive mind replicating human emotion.”
Carol scoffs, rolls her eyes, and before she can think better of it says: “Well, it looked like you.”
There’s a pause, and Zosia’s face hardens. She rises, leans over the table, and slaps Carol across the face. It lands hard and the sound echoes. She sits back down.
Carol remains for a moment with her head tilted, then touches her abused cheek. It’s hot, beginning to welt. “Okay,” she says. “I deserved that. I know that I hurt you.”
“It didn’t hurt,” says Zosia. Her brow furrows, her face twists. “It felt good. You were good at it.”
The statement drops out of the rafters like a pro wrestler and cracks Carol over the head with a steel chair. She is still rubbing her jaw and wondering what to say that won’t result in another beating. Zosia looks as confused and horrified as Carol feels.
“I didn’t mean to say that,” Zosia continues, her voice missing some of its previous bravado. “It’s leftover from—some stuff stuck from—” She clears her throat. “Sometimes I tell the truth when I don’t want to.”
The room is spinning. “Oh. Yeah, okay.” Carol puts a clammy palm to her forehead. This is junior prom all over again, and she’s just had too much vodka soaked punch and thrown up on Scott Sambur’s shoes. “It's fine to have complex—to have complicated—I read this article in the Times once…”
“The New York Times wrote about this?”
“It was more about consent, or like, grey area—Jesus christ, I’m so sorry. I really don’t know what to say. This has never happened to me before.”
“You don’t say.”
“If you want the truth,” Carol puts her hand back into her lap. She picks at her cuticle and it bleeds. “I wanted to believe that it was a little of you in there. That it was real. That you wanted—” It all sounds so stupid coming out of her mouth now, to Zosia’s unimpressed face. “—I needed to believe it. ‘Cause for a second there, it seemed like things were never going back. And I was lonely. And then it was like—like I got addicted to the delusion. How it made me feel. Like things were normal, like it was real.”
“You never asked,” Zosia points out. “You could have asked. About me. About who I was—who I am. It would have told you the truth, no?”
“Yes,” Carol admits, quieter now. “It would have told me everything, if I had asked.”
“You’re a coward,” Zosia says, and Carol can tell she’s enjoying it. In another life, this might be the face Zosia makes when she’s winning a board game, or an argument, or watching a good movie. Carol doesn’t begrudge her this. “And you’re pathetic.”
Before Carol can open her mouth to respond, there’s a thud outside of Zosia’s front door, and the hum of a drone buzzing off into the distance. Zosia stands, nonplussed, and Carol hears her open and shut the door. When she returns, she sets a paper bag down on the table and goes back to her seat. Carol eyes it askance.
“Groceries?”
Zosia shrugs. “Open it and find out.”
Carol’s second guess is a gun, to kill Carol with. She has no third guess. Strap-on with dildo and harness included would have been guess ten thousand, underneath birthday cake and lawn fertilizer. Carol retrieves both items, still packaged in their boxes, and weighs them in her hands.
“I didn’t realize that you and Manousos had gotten so close,” she says finally, setting the objects aside and keeping her face in a carefully neutral arrangement. Carol suspects that now is not the time to show weakness.
“I mentioned earlier that some things from before…lingered. From the joining.”
Carol pauses. “I suspected. But I wasn’t sure. You’re weirdly good at making coffee.”
“I was always good at making coffee. But American coffee is also shit.”
“Again. Store brand. I’ve got no idea why you and Manousos get food like we’re still paying money for it.”
Zosia continues as if Carol hasn’t spoken. “Not everything stuck, but some of it did. I can speak ten languages, I can read fifteen. I can play three different instruments, and I’m pretty good at baseball. Not great, but pretty good,” Zosia looks at Carol, hard. She is never quite able to keep neutrality on her face for long; it always inevitably crumbles into disgust. Except her expression is something different, then, something more searching. “I didn’t keep most of the memories. Other people’s memories. I get flashes of big things, births, deaths. Except about you.”
Carol feels the confusion slip onto her face. Nervousness creeps up her spine again. “Me?”
“I know everything that anybody has ever thought about you, Carol. Every memory. Every feeling. Helen. Your ex-girlfriends. Your dentist. It’s like I have a Carol encyclopedia in my head.”
Carol had thought that she was done experiencing fresh horrors. What a nightmare it is to realize that she is not. “Oh, god.” She says
“Oh, god,” Zosia agrees. “Lately I’ve been trying to focus on the bad ones. All the book rejections you got before Wycaro. That time you were riding bikes with your friend and you fell off and gashed your knee so badly you could see the tendon. Your friend could tell how embarrassed you were to cry in front of him. You walked the whole way home pretending that it didn’t hurt that bad. Five blocks.”
Carol is sweating and feels a little nauseous. She almost shoves a Ritz cracker into her mouth to have something to do other than stare at Zosia in shocked, horrified silence. “Joey,” she says quietly. “My friend’s name was Joey.”
“And then I started trying to think of the sex stuff. Your mother walked in on you once sitting on your hand on the living room floor and grinding while you watched something on TV. What was it? She was so horrified that she didn’t remember.”
Carol wrinkles her brow, then snorts. “It was Little Women. The one with Winona Ryder. I was thinking about—well, nevermind. Funny that she doesn’t remember, because that was around the time I got sent to Camp Freedom Falls. There was no way for me to exactly plausibly tell her I’d been thinking about a man.”
Zosia seems a little taken aback by this, and Carol realizes that the detail had probably been a little too humanizing. She wants to comfort her, to assure her that she is humiliated by the revelation that somebody other than she and her mother remembers that moment. Before she can, Zosia barrels on.
“And then there’s Becca Wertz,” Zosia says. Carol stiffens at the name. “In college, sophomore year. You had tried being with men for years, and it had never stuck, and you were ashamed and frustrated. You told her that. She knew you didn’t find her attractive, but she figured that you were vulnerable enough to do it anyway, and she was right. You used one of these, then, right?” She reaches and picks up the box with the dildo. Carol says nothing. She knows that it’s a rhetorical question. “You’d never done it before. You could barely get it in. Becca had to help you.”
Carol shrugs and clears her throat. Her skin feels itchy. “I was nineteen. I’d never—”
“I’m not finished,” Zosia says, and sets the box aside. “You finally managed it. In missionary. On that single bed in her dorm room. It was uncomfortable for her for a minute, and she was worried that her roommate would walk in. But you got the hang of it. You weren’t bad at it. And then, when the two of you were really getting into it, you asked her something.”
Carol tenses. “Zosia—”
“You asked her to ask you to come inside of her. Right?” When Carol says nothing, Zosia leans forward. Those bovine eyes drill into Carol’s face, which is blushing. She hasn’t blushed since her mid-twenties. “I know what your face looked like when she said it to you. I can see it in my head right now.”
The silence that follows is uncomfortable in a profoundly different way than those previous. Zosia looks less hateful, almost excited. A child finding a toy at the bottom of a box of cereal. “Okay,” Carol says, and her voice cracks, like an adolescent boy’s.
“You never asked anybody to do that for you again. Not even Helen. You were together for almost twenty years. But this, you never mentioned. Why?” This, too, is a rhetorical question. But Carol answers it, because she understands that she must complete the humiliation ritual.
“Because I was confused and embarrassed. Embarrassed isn’t even the right word. The feeling of shame was…bone deep.”
“Bone deep,” Zosia breathes. She sits back in her chair. “Do you feel violated? That I know that about you?”
“Yes,” Carol responds, without hesitating. “Does that make you feel better?” When Zosia says nothing, she points to the boxes still on the table. “So these were just—visual aids?” Honestly, the dramatic flair is pretty endearing.
“Oh. No. We’re going to have sex,” Zosia says, then gestures to the crackers. “Are you done with dinner? Because I’m about to put these away.”
Carol’s mouth forms an o as she tries to process the words in a way that makes sense. When she cannot, she opts for asking a clarifying question. “Okay, yeah. But what do you mean by…have sex?”
Zosia stands and begins to gather the crackers. “You’re going to fuck me with that, in the bedroom, when I’m done putting these away. I tried to get one that I thought I would like, but never in a million years did I think I would be asking a middling romance author to fuck me with a fake dick, so finding the right one might be trial and error.”
She calls out the last part from the kitchen as she puts the things away. When she returns to the dining room, Zosia stays standing. Carol realizes that she expects Carol to stand also and…go with her to the bedroom.
“You look upset,” Zosia says.
“I’m not upset,” Carol responds. “But you hate me. Famously, you hate me.”
“I feel a lot of things for you, actually,” Zosia replies. “It’s just that everything except for hatred is against my will.”
“That sounds…that sounds really hard.”
“Oh, enough with the therapy speak, Carol.”
“Okay, well you tell me what you want me to say! What do I say about this weird fucking situation we’re in together? Because I am willing to bet that no two people in the history of the universe have had the conversation that you and I are having right now.”
“You assaulted me.”
“I did.”
“Are you sorry you did it?”
“I am. I am very, very fucking sorry I did it.”
“Would you like to apologize to me for doing it?”
One thing that Carol hasn’t realized that she missed, after months of speaking only to the hivemind, is what a maze people can be. What a bear trap. Zosia is looking at her now in a way that Zosia has never looked at her. Not before, not after.
“Of course I do,” she says. She wonders if she has Zosia’s welted handprint still on her cheek. “I just don’t understand.”
“Why do you have to understand? Why would you imagine that this has anything to do with you at all?”
This obviously has everything to do with Carol, but she knows better than to say so. She picks up the box with the dildo and frowns at it. “Did you just ask them for—whichever one was closest?”
“I asked them for one they thought I’d like. They have—well, I thought they’d know.”
“Sure. Okay. And why with a—you know what, I’m not going to ask. Do you really think that this is going to make you feel better?”
“I’ve tried hitting you,” says Zosia. “Yelling at you. Thinking about every time you’ve ever been hurt or felt embarrassed. None of that makes me feel better. So why not this?”
For an unbelievable second, as though they are two people discovering a shared language—yeah. Yeah. Carol gets it.
*
Zosia leads her into a bedroom that she has clearly never slept in, and sits on the foot of the bed while Carol struggles to get the toy and harness out of their boxes. Cardboard and hard plastic casing goes flying around the room.
“So what instruments do you play?” Carol asks as she pulls down her jeans. Zosia raises an eyebrow at her. “You said you could play three, so which ones?”
“Guitar, violin, and oboe.” Zosia pauses. “Those are just of the ones I’ve tried.”
“What about piano?”
“I haven’t asked them to give me a piano yet.”
“Oh. You should try. They’ll give you pretty much anything.”
“I know.”
“Right,” Carol finishes with her jeans and goes to pull her tank top over her head. Zosia stops her.
“Don’t,” she says, reclining back onto her elbows on the bed. “I’m going to pretend that you’re a man.”
“Oh,” Carol’s brain churns like a windmill. She flutters her eyelashes when she thinks. “Okay. Should I take my underwear off?”
“Sure.”
Carol slides her Hanes for women down her legs and tries not to think too hard about her untrimmed bush. She takes the dick from the floor. “I tried playing the piano when I was a kid,” she says as she pulls the harness up. “I was shit at it, though.”
“I know,” Zosia says. Once Carol cinches the last buckle, she lays flat on her back. Removes her jeans, leaves her underwear on. “Come here.”
Carol does. The mattress dips under her weight as she puts a knee on it. She leans down to kiss Zosia, and Zosia tilts her head away.
Carol hovers over the space where her head was, eyes still closed. “Zosia.”
“Carol.”
“What’s the move here?”
“I said sex, I never said kissing.”
Carol opens her eyes. Sighs. “This thing is like seven inches. It’s going to hurt if I just…whack it in.”
“Whack it in?” Zosia sits on her elbows, scowling. “Aren’t you supposed to be a best selling romance novelist? Whack it in?”
“We don’t have to do this,” Carol replies. “There are actually a lot more reasons not to do this than to do it.”
“God, I’m so sick of hearing you complain about every single fucking thing. Even this,” Zosia replies. “Just kiss me then, jesus christ. It doesn’t have to be a production, Carol.”
Carol doesn’t point out that this is a production based on the very textbook meaning of the word. She lays on her side beside Zosia and kisses her instead, softly at first, and then more firmly upon Zosia’s reciprocation.
In the last two weeks, she hasn’t let herself dwell on Zosia’s body. The way it felt, the way it moved. The small curve of her breast, the eager squeeze of the inside of her. The fact that she knows any of this is both a violation and proof of Carol’s own catastrophic selfishness.
If Zosia is pretending that she’s a man, maybe Carol can pretend that this is the first time. Or maybe it’s wrong to even allow herself the comfort of that thought.
“You kiss like a boy,” Zosia says, breaking apart but not moving completely away. Her eyes are still closed. Her voice is low, breathy. “It’s wet and you grunt like a pig. You’re too eager.”
Carol, hovering above her, pauses. Her mouth quirks into a smile. She tamps it down quickly. God help her if Zosia catches her in a moment of fondness. “Anything else?”
“You should spend more time playing with my tits.”
“Okay,” Carol agrees, then leans to kiss her again. Zosia sighs prettily when she presses her tongue into her mouth and even reaches up to squeeze one of Carol’s biceps. When Carol rolls on top of her and pushes her sweater up, Zosia mewls and pitches her hips. The tip of the strap pushes against the inside of her thigh, then the middle of her underwear, then Zosia is the one grunting.
She circles Carol’s hips with her legs and grinds herself against the hard length of it, and a happy sound follows when Carol’s lips find a pebbled nipple and suck. Carol could almost put her entire breast into her mouth, and wonders if that level of desperation would be unwelcome or delighted in by the woman underneath her. If Zosia would bask in Carol’s pitiableness like a pool on a hot summer’s day.
For a moment, Carol is lost in time. Zosia’s skin tastes the same, is as soft as it ever was beneath her hands. She tries not to compare the sounds she makes and the way she moves to
the Other Zosia, but fails. Everything that Zosia does now is simply more than it was before; uglier, louder, especially crooked. She tugs Carol’s hair a little too sharply where the hive’s touch would have been calculated and gentle. Her knee jabs Carol’s ribs. When Carol comes back up to kiss her again, leaving her breast covered with love bites and her own mouth swollen, their teeth clack.
Oh god, it’s all so much more—how had Carol not realized that there was more to have? How had she not remembered? Zosia moans—an especially long, irregular one—and Carol moans, too. Her movements are sloppy. When Zosia’s hips angle right, they bump the base of the cock into her clit.
“Does that feel good?” Carol murmurs, jolting, pushing, her body becoming insistent. “Baby? Yeah?”
She realizes her mistake in a microsecond but still doesn’t freeze before Zosia does. Panting in her mouth, she takes Carol by the jaw and holds her face. She doesn’t open her eyes. “Talk to me like that again, I’ll bite your nose off your face. Get on your back.”
Carol goes with eager pleasure, happy to have made it out with only a threat of minor dismembering. She watches with dumb, lovestruck eyes as Zosia straddles her hips and spits in her palm, reaching behind her and stroking it up and down the toy.
She reaches a hand out to return the favor, and Zosia smacks it away. “Don’t touch me there. Only if I say you can, and I’ll never say you can,” she says, giving Carol a sharp tug as if Carol can feel it. Carol retracts her hand, properly scolded, although she cannot.
She’s a little surprised when Zosia proceeds to slide her panties to the side in one quick, efficient motion and lines the toy up against her cunt. Carol sits up on her elbows, feels the hair sticking up at the back of her head.
“Are you sure you don’t need—”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
“Jesus, I’m not telling you anything. I’m expressing concern that—oh, okay.”
Zosia’s hips slide down and she takes the whole thing in one smooth, unbroken motion. A spoon with ice cream disappearing behind somebody’s lips.
Instead of telling Carol to shut up again, or threatening to bite off another part of her body, Zosia puts her whole hand over Carol’s face. Pushes her head back down. Her palm smooshing against her nose, the tips of her fingers up against her hairline. A thumb against her cheek. Carol gasps into it when Zosia starts to move.
She can tell, although she can’t see, that there’s no performance in this. Zosia certainly isn’t riding it for Carol’s sake, or for anybody’s sake but her own pleasure. Her movements are jagged and harsh, the weight of her body on Carol’s almost suffocating.
“You’re just lying there,” Zosia pants after a minute of this. She slows her movement to some lazy circles and moves her hand, just enough that Carol can blink up at her. Dark, mussed hair, rosy cheeks. She tries to keep her own face as neutral as possible, suspecting that there is a limit to which she can be caught enjoying this.
“I wasn’t sure if—”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Zosia says, replaces her hand, and begins to move again. Carol chases after her, timid at first, and then with more fervor when she isn’t slapped away or insulted. When she thrusts up for the first time, taking Zosia’s hips into her hands, Zosia makes a strangled noise that she’s probably horrified by. Carol chokes back her own moan.
Every movement beats the base of the strap against her clit, and Carol swallows that, too, back. If this were any different, she might be chasing her own pleasure instead. She might be wrapping her arms around Zosia’s waist, burying her face into her hair and inhaling.
As it is, she’s on her back, being smothered by Zosia’s hand. It only takes a handful of strokes, of them working together, for Zosia to make noises like she’s close. Those are the same, a string of guttural ah, ah, ah’s—Carol hates that she knows this. She hates how much better it sounds like this, the way it’s meant to be heard. The Magnetic Fields in vinyl press and not trapped on a CD.
Zosia’s hand moves from her face again. This time, her eyes are open. This time, she’s looking down at Carol’s face. The hand moves to rest against Carol’s throat, not squeezing. Almost gentle, if gentle had been the sort of visitor that would have been welcome in that room. Her other is between her legs, half obscured by her underwear. She can see Zosia’s knuckles tenting against the grey fabric while she rubs.
For a hysterical second, Carol thinks she might kiss her. She is, after all, famous for her delusions. Zosia stares at her for a moment. Her thumb strokes the column of Carol’s throat.
“Does this feel good? Can you feel it?” She asks, obviously a trick question. She grinds her hips down once, extra hard, to accentuate her point.
Carol doesn’t have to lie. There’s a tight coil in her lower stomach—she’s always been a quick trigger, and now she knows that that remains true under the most harrowing of circumstances. She nods.
Zosia opens her mouth to say something, but whatever it is is cut off by a sharp moan. She tries again. “Good. I want you to—oh,” Carol thrusts up, squeezes her hips. She’s so lost that she’s forgotten all the bad parts. Such is her way. “I want you to come inside me. Yeah? Can you do that?”
Carol can’t swallow back the ugly sound that breaks free of her. She can no longer control her face—god, was she ever supposed to? Zosia is still staring down at her, and her expression isn’t one of hatred, or disgust, or repulsion anymore. She doesn’t look like she’s about to slap Carol, or choke her. For a beautiful fraction of a second, she looks almost—
Zosia’s body seizes up. Her eyes close. This Zosia, the real Zosia, looks like she’s crying when she comes. Looks like she’s in agony. Her hand clenches around Carol’s throat and she gasps out: “Fuck—fuck—fuck you. God, fuck you,” although this is the least convincing fuck you Zosia has ever uttered, and Carol knows because she’s heard the real deal.
Carol’s own orgasm is close at hand. She waits for Zosia’s body to slump against hers to go after it. But she gets lost for a moment in the slide of Zosia’s sweaty skin against hers, in the moment of accidental vulnerability. Zosia’s dark hair on her face, her breasts against Carol’s breasts, even covered by their shirts. She smells like eucalyptus and cigarettes. At a certain angle, it could almost be a hug.
And by the time she remembers that she’s supposed to be trying to come, Zosia has rolled off of her. The bed is large—king sized. This had probably been the Martins’ master bedroom. Zosia lays a long ways away from her, panting.
The tight coil in Carol’s stomach slowly unwinds. Even still slightly tweaked from being denied an orgasm, she starts to feel stupid just laying there with the strap jutting up from between her legs.
A minute passes by, and Zosia is still laying in silence, eyes closed, palm on her chest. Carol clears her throat and she opens one eye, glancing over at her.
“Do you need something?”
“I…guess not,” Carol sits up on her elbows. “Are you—do you feel better?”
Zosia stares at her for a long while. “I’m finished. You can go.” When Carol doesn’t roll off the bed right away, she arches an eyebrow. “If you thought you were getting another orgasm out of me, you’re stupid.”
Carol rolls her eyes, although she shouldn’t be surprised. She hadn’t exactly been expecting great huzzah’s in her honor. “You and Manousos should have a charm off.”
“Goodbye, Carol.”
“Bye,” Carol rolls off the bed and shucks the straps down her legs, which feel like jelly. Her slick is dampening the tawny hair between her thighs. She turns so Zosia doesn’t see it.
“We’re never doing that again, by the way.”
Carol runs the math in her head. “Yeah, that feels healthy.” Using a hand to cover her modesty, she reaches down to grab her underwear.
“Don’t.”
She pauses, fingers hovering mere inches from her panties. “Uh?”
“Don’t,” Zosia repeats. She’s back to laying flat, hands folded on her stomach, eyes closed. “Leave them here.”
Carol laughs. Zosia does not. “What do you want my underwear for?” Zosia says nothing. “Can I take my pants?”
“No.”
“You keeping trophies now, Ed Gein?”
“You should join the charm off with me and Manousos.”
“I’m not walking home with my ass and bush hanging out.”
“Who’s going to see you?”
“Uh, Manousos?”
“You can take a throw pillow off the couch.” Zosia says with finality, magnanimity, and without opening her eyes. “Bye, Carol.”
*
Carol shuffles home with a pillow clutched over her cooch that says Bless This House. She thinks that she might make a clean getaway, but Manousos intercepts her in the living room. He has a dab of red sauce at the corner of his mouth.
“Hi, Manousos,” Carol says, tossing her hair out of her face and making an effort to stand tall. To his credit, Manousos’ eyes drop to the throw pillow only once before gluing to Carol’s face.
“Carol Sturka,” he says.
“You’ve got a little,” she gestures to the corner of his mouth, with the sauce, and he gives her an incredulous look before wiping it off. “Listen. I’ve got to, um. Go change. Would you mind…making me a plate of spaghetti?”
He blinks. “Okay.”
“Okay. Thank you. Gracias.” She smiles tightly at him. They stand in a beat of silence. “I have to turn around to go to the bedroom and I don’t have another pillow. So.”
Manousos covers his eyes with his hand and turns toward the kitchen. He bangs into a lamp. Carol winces. “A little to the—yup—there you go.”
*
Much later that evening, Carol goes to her back yard with a book and insomnia nipping at her heels. Before she can sit down, she looks and sees a cigarette on the lounger.
She rolls her eyes, picks it up. Sits down. Carol stares at it for a moment, then reaches to the coffee table where a lighter rests in an ashtray. The set up is for guests, really. Smoking was never Carol’s vice. She puts the cigarette to her lips and lights it anyway, inhaling. Christ, it tastes good. It tastes like—
Her eyes go to the Martins’ house on instinct. It used to bother her that they could see into their yard. Now Carol sees the second story window glowing yellow with light and feels something else entirely.
She sees something else, too. A silhouette that comes closer to the window and reveals itself to be Zosia. She stands for a moment, staring down at Carol.
But soft! what light through yonder window breaks? Carol thinks with a touch of irony. She meets Zosia’s gaze, then raises a hand in a tentative wave.
Zosia keeps staring. O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied? Carol thinks with much less irony. A second later, Zosia tugs something off to the side. The curtains fall, and Carol is alone again.