Read Online Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles by Ron Currie Jr. - Free Book Online Page B

smile melting. To what end, Ron?

S o Emma demurred at first, but what I said sank in, intrigued her as much as it frightened her, I think, because after that conversation the sex grew, by turns, more and more violent, and more and more compelling. Her hands used to trace gentle paths along my sides, but now they hooked into claws, raked the corridor between my shoulder blades. She’d close her eyes and let her mouth form a delicate, gorgeous sneer that I wanted more than anything to jam all manner of appendages into, roughly, without regard; I was willing to slough skin against her teeth so long as I could hurt her in kind. She’d grab my cock and squeeze it in her fist, and I’d respond by flipping her off of me and onto her back, putting my hand around her throat and easing my weight down onto it while she snarled defiance.
    Our talk turned brutal, too—I’ve said nicer things in bar fights than in bed with her.
    We upped the ante every time we took our clothes off, until, on a still frigid night in January just before I left for the island, she straddled me, rubbing my pubis against herself and moaning, and then she reached back from above and punched me on the jaw, a clean, solid shot, her rings on, easily one of the five hardest punches I’ve ever taken.
    The moment her fist made contact she drew her hands back to her face and said, from behind them, Oh my God I’m sorry!
    But I didn’t give her regret time to take hold. Still reeling, operating on instinct, I reached up and grabbed her hair and pulled it, hard enough to take a dozen strands away on my hand.

C harlotte stayed on for a while, and I let her—out of stasis, out of loneliness, out of a desire for someone other than me to make breakfast. Rick and the other two specimenz flew back to the mainland. Charlotte told me that, before they left, one of the specimenz had asked her what on Earth she was doing, what she was thinking.
    I wondered the same thing myself, but wasn’t interested enough in the answer to actually ask.
    In fact, I wasn’t interested in anything at all, during those first two weeks. My state of mind could best be described as one of pure indifference. I didn’t care if Charlotte was taking up space in my casita, or in my bed, and I didn’t care if she wasn’t. She was there, so I slept with her, but if I’d woken up the next day and found myself alone I wouldn’t have given half a thought to where she’d gone, or why.
    For her part Charlotte maintained a calm, detached air, which didn’t seem to mesh with the fact that she’d blown off school, her friends and family—her entire life, really—to shack up with a complete stranger, albeit one who’d written a book and carried himself with the messy, tragic bent that a certain kind of woman seems to find appealing, at least until she approaches thirty or so, after which she recognizes it as self-indulgent nonsense and steers clear with the same zeal with which she used to pursue.
    Maybe it wasn’t fair to generalize about Charlotte, an actual individual person, in this way, but she didn’t give me anything else to go on at first. I passed hours without speaking and she rarely tried to penetrate my silence, opting instead to read (she’d started with
The Corrections
, but put it aside and began sifting through the copy of my novel that I’d brought, which annoyed me in a distant way), to scribble in a notebook, to deepen her tan in the porch hammock. While I stared through windows at the Caribbean she moved casually around the casita, washing dishes, combing her hair, paying no attention to me at all. For whatever reason she’d decided to behave as if we enjoyed the intimacy of a longtime couple, as though we were a younger version of David and Penny—the sort of domestic arrangement people gradually and inevitably melt into, in which they only truly notice the other person in his or her