Read Online Lies You Wanted to Hear by James Whitfield Thomson - Free Book Online Page A

over in Ipswich. The cop was bald with a big potbelly. Matt showed him his BPD badge and the cop grinned. The cop’s eyes were crawling all over me as he and Matt made small talk, but if Matt noticed, he didn’t let on. Griffin would have reached over in mid-sentence and put his hand on my bare thigh. Eat your heart out, pal. She’s mine. The thought made me wonder where he was right now, what he was doing. Probably tiptoeing out of some woman’s apartment the morning after, on his way to someone else. He hadn’t called in a few weeks. There were nights I wished he would.
    The Ipswich cop patted the fender of the Thunderbird and tipped his hat goodbye. Matt said something to me as we drove away, but I was thinking about Griffin, remembering all the crazy places we’d made love: in a canoe on the Charles River, in the shadows at the far end of a subway platform, behind an armoire in a dusty antiques store while the shopkeeper and a woman haggled over the price of a Biedermeier chest. Sometimes I think we were hoping we’d get caught, as if we were trying to prove that our need for each other carried us beyond the usual boundaries of decorum and common sense.
    Matt and I had been dating for a month and were still making out like high school kids. I made no initiatives and asked for no explanations, waiting to see how far he’d go. Close, but (alas, Dr. Freud) no cigar. Sometimes it felt like a game, silly and frustrating, but the anticipation kept my hormones percolating. The chemistry between us seemed fine, but I began to worry. What if it wasn’t worth the wait? What if, after this great buildup, our lovemaking was a dud? Not a full-blown fiasco—one of those spectacular misfires we could both acknowledge and maybe even laugh about somewhere down the road—but something numbingly pedestrian, the sexual equivalent of Muzak or instant coffee, a vapid facsimile that only proves just how great the real thing can be.
    When we got to the beach, I spread a blanket out on the sand and took off my shorts, my white bathing suit cut high on my hips. When I’d tried it on in front of the mirror that morning, I noticed that if I raised my arms or twisted my torso, you could see a tiny portion of my tattoo, which was on my lower tummy near the bend in my hip. Griffin had talked me into getting the tattoo one night in Portsmouth. At first I thought he was joking, but he said he’d get one too. Neither of us was drunk or high.
    “You mean we each get a heart with an arrow through it? Mine says Griffin, yours says Lucy?”
    “Whatever you want. They don’t have to be the same.”
    We looked at the samples on the wall and leafed through a sketchbook of the artist, who said he could draw anything. I saw some birds and butterflies I liked, but nothing that caught my fancy. I wanted it to be unique to Griffin and me; I also wanted it to go someplace on my body that only he would see. Griffin went first, agreeing to get his in the same place as mine. He chose his birth sign, Scorpio, which seemed a bit trite. I decided on a pink and green Chinese umbrella. The needle burned a little but didn’t really hurt. The artist covered the tattoo with a bandage and warned me not to itch it or pick at the scab. A week later it looked beautiful. Even after Griffin left, I couldn’t say I regretted it—in fact, quite the opposite—but I still felt self-conscious about Matt’s seeing it and asking the inevitable questions.
    Matt tried to talk me into going into the ocean at Plum Island, but it was too cold for me. He had long, well-defined muscles and a thatch of dark hair on his chest. I watched him dive into the waves and swim far out. When he came out of the water, he toweled off and sat down beside me.
    “Would you like me to put some suntan lotion on you?” he said.
    I was lying on my stomach. “That would be wonderful.”
    He dabbed some lotion between my shoulder blades, massaging my neck and shoulder muscles as he rubbed it in.