Read Online Wasted Beauty by Eric Bogosian - Free Book Online Page B

ALL LOOSE. BEER MAKES YOU FEEL good and beer makes you pee. Beer is a good thing, probably the best invention mankind ever invented. Plus beer lets folks be themselves. Which is fun, especially with this Dallas guy. Because he kind of knows what he’s doing and that’s pretty damn cool. It’s like watching an arsonist light up an old dry building. Whenever I open my eyes, he opens his. And they just get bluer and bluer. He also seems to be thinking what I’m thinking. Is that possible? Is there such a thing? Wait a minute. Stop. I have something important to say, but I can’t remember what it is. “Your…your roommates.”
    Dallas pauses. “My roommates…?”
    “They’ll see us…”
    “We’re only kissing.” Dallas strokes her hair. Reba lets her jaw go slack as she kisses him. Like a guppy in a fish tank, she thinks.
    “Are we? Oh, right.” Reba is pretty sure they’re doing more than kissing but she can’t say exactly what that might be. Where has the cat gone? And where exactly am I? Still on the couch? Maybe I’m drunker than I think I am. Is that possible? Of course it is, silly. That’s the way car accidents happen. That’s how other things happen, too. Does it make any difference? No, it does not make any difference where the cat is or where I am or whether or not I’m drunk.
    Dallas says, “Do you want to go into my room? Is that what you’re saying?”
    “Isn’t this your room? I thought you lived here?”
    “I mean where I sleep.”
    “I don’t want to go to sleep. Wait a minute! Your room? As in bedroom? Where the bed is?” Everyone here is drunk. I’m drunk, he’s drunk and the cat’s drunk.
    “Yeah, you wanna do that? Go there?” Reba can see a figure over Dallas’s shoulder. The figure runs his palm along the cat’s arched back, then snatches it up and the cat says something, but Reba can’t make it out. Dallas turns toward the stranger and says, “Dude.”
    The stranger, holding and stroking the cat, says, “I have to talk to you, man.” Reba can’t see his face very well.
    Dallas says to Reba, “This is one of my roommates, Chud. His real name is Chad, but we call him Chud. Chud, this is…shit, I don’t even know your name.”
    “Reba.” Don’t tell him your last name.
    “Rena.”
    “Reba! With a ‘b’!”
    “Nice to meet you, Rena. Listen, dude, I still need to talk to you. When you got a spare minute.”
    Reba wants Chud to understand how to pronounce her name, but he’s left the room. Reba punches Dallas in the chest. “You got me drunk, didn’t you?”
    “You haven’t even had two beers, you can’t be drunk.”
    “I don’t know. It’s weird out here. Your roommate is weird. Let’s go to your bedroom.”
    “I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do. In fact, maybe you should be getting back.”
    “Don’t tell me what to do! I’m tired of everybody telling me what to do. If I want to go to your bedroom, I’ll go to your bedroom. If I want to jump into your bed and fuck your brains out, I’ll do that, too.”
    Dallas manages a serious twist to his lips and says, “OK.”
    Reba floats in an enormous black cloud. It roils and silent scratches of lightning flash every few seconds. In the cloud are voices of young men arguing. The blackness reformulates itself into walls and windows and the horizontal surface upon which she lies. Not the floor. But like a floor. Low. Flat. A foam mattress. She rolls onto her side, reaches out for Dallas and finds cool, vacant sheets. She considers sitting up and the world slips sideways.
    Reba waits for Dallas to return and touch her again. So far he’s done almost everything she’s ever fantasized about. He’s stroked her face, kissed her eyes. He’s put his fingers in her, put his lips to her nipples. He’s even massaged her toes, lifted her legs up over her head and kissed her ankles. He’s told her over and over again that she’s beautiful. Too beautiful for words. He said that he