Read Online See You in Paradise by J. Robert Lennon - Free Book Online

You sound so far away.” Duh!
    “I’m on my cell. In a—whoop!—car.”
    “Isn’t it illegal to talk on the phone while driving?”
    “It’s illegal to drive drunk, too, dummy. But I’m not driving.”
    “So what are you sending me?”
    “Sposeta be a surprise.”
    “Is it delicious?”
    “Yyyyes!”
    “So you eat it?”
    She snorted. “No, dipshit. You do.” And with that she hung up.
    Well. That was unproductive. He figured if she was sending the present now, he’d get it in what, two weeks? He opened up his browser and a couple minutes later Mandy Mounds filled the room with her delighted squeaking. He’d just got his shorts off when his door flew open and Cynthia came roaring in, hiking her sundress up to her waist. “You got yourself all ready!” she said, climbing on, and for ten or so minutes it was difficult to distinguish the sounds she made from the ones coming out of the speakers. Then they were finished and lay on the bed, unable to stop perspiring. At the computer desk, Mandy Mounds said, “More! More! More! More!”
    “’Scuse me,” said Cynthia, and she staggered naked across the room to switch off the computer. But first she paused, turning her head this way and that, checking out the competition. “I got better legs,” she said.
    “Sure.”
    “And her boobs look like saddlebags.”
    He didn’t have much to say to that. She turned everything off. “I bribe Daddy’s people. They bring me down here whenever I want.” She hopped back onto the bed, sending him several inches into the air.
    “But this is the first time you’ve been down here.”
    “Right. Hey, you wanna go to town?”
    “There is no town.”
    “Who told you that?” she said.
    They went to the other side of the volcano. The fat white guy drove them there. The little jeep shuddered and rumbled around lava flows and fallen trees, tossing them from side to side, against the doors of the jeep and each other. Cynthia laughed the entire trip, until they arrived at a little tent pavilion at the edge of what would have been a tourist paradise, if any tourists were there. Instead there were handsome black people in loose-fitting clothes, dancing to the music from a little amplified calypso band, and beyond them was a bar that was little more than a rusted metal cart covered with bottles and plastic cups, and beyond that was a dirt road leading to a lot of little houses. Cynthia paid the driver with a thick stack of bills, which he folded and stowed like a pro, and told him to wait. He said, “I’ll be easy to find,” and lurched into the fray.
    They danced and drank all afternoon, and then ate parts of some kind of giant pig roasting on a spit, and they ate some kind of spicy thing wrapped up in leaves, and some sort of reeking but impossibly sweet fruit, and then they danced and drank some more, and the people, the villagers, didn’t seem to mind them being there. Cynthia paid for everything and then some, handing people money at the slightest pretext, the band for playing something more up-tempo, the bartender for giving her a clean cup, a random bystander for letting her get ahead in the roasted-pig line. Soon after dark she took Brant by the hand and led him into the woods, where she fell to her knees at the base of a palm tree and puked, and then when Brant bent over to help her up, he puked as well. Then they sort of fell over on their way back, then they seemed to be asleep for a while, then they got up and found the jeep, which the driver was asleep in. They woke him up and he drove, drunk, back to the cottage row. Cynthia and Brant stumbled into his cottage and collapsed on the bed and woke up at noon. They tried sex but were too queasy to finish.
    All day Brant lay half-in and half-out of sleep. At some point he opened his eyes to find Cynthia staring at his face, as if looking for something she’d misplaced. When he woke again, she was gone. Brant noticed the voicemail light blinking on his phone. He