By Meg Frances
Breath is between liquid and gas, is between death & sleep.
Zura chain smoked and you could tell. Every time his mouth opened, musky aromas rolled out like the inside of an empty humid sea shell, still rotting. He tasted just like his breath smelled. She went out with him because he always had a new car. Maybe he got them from his job as a valet or maybe he just stole them. It didn’t matter. He was an exciting guy with a big dick and a fast car. She was a girl with zero hobbies and an endless supply of wigs.
Pearl worked as a bartender and had a college degree. She was sharp, but unmotivated by money. Hussle was a word she would wear on a faux gold chain but would never really understand. She had ironically walked her hipster body right into student loan debt and unemployment. The bar was outside a popular subway stop where people came to blow off steam after 5 o’clock. Her boss touched her ass once so she had job security, even though she was late every day.
Zura was from a former Soviet country, she forgot which one. He was a regular that became a drunken hook up and then a sometimes lover. When he kissed her, she turned her head, pretending to be consumed by his touch. Really, she couldn’t stand the bitter aftertaste of him. She wanted the bull without the horns.
She fantasized about zipping one of those gimp masks across his thick, fetid skull. He wouldn’t be into it. All they had was straight vanilla sex. Zura was about as adventurous in the sack as a terrified virgin on her wedding night. Pearl put up with it because the sheer length of his flesh hit her G spot nearly every time. No matter how feebly he thrusted. Plus, she needed a ride home from work. And he always had a pack of cigarettes.
The arrangement made her super conscious of her own stench. She flossed, and brushed, then scraped her tongue, and finally used a half a cup of whitening mouthwash three times a day. She read once online that no matter what you did, if you had halitosis you just couldn’t tell. Even if you licked your arm and took a sniff. Only an outsider could inform you about what was happening inside of your own body.
Pearl would never be able to say something that mean to another person’s face, even someone she was fucking.
Spit on my pussy, yeah, make it wet! Spit all over it.
The first time they kissed, he noticed she was one of those girls who ate peppermints before. Zura hated the taste of mint anything: ice cream, gum, cigarettes. But this chick had perfect tits, a nice plump ass, and she was available whenever he was horny. Which was after a long, degrading shift at work.
He stared at her at the bar for a week before asking her out. They walked to another dive down the street, got wasted, and got naked in the back of a 2010 frozen bronze metallic BMW. She must have popped the candy down her throat while he was taking a piss. He had convinced her that there was a terrible but, like, the good kinda bad rap song from his country that he wanted to play for her. They both power walked down the block to where he’d parked it. Once inside, he pushed past the uncomfortable sensation of Arctic Cool as she went down on him, covering the leather of someone else’s pride in peppermint flavored spit.
His uncut cock was sliding down her like an oyster. Zura knew that the women in porn did stuff like this, but it was the first time a real live girl had put that much of her saliva anywhere on his body. It felt good, besides the tingle of the mint. He wanted to fuck her right away, he had never had a Black girl before, but she seemed to really be into giving him a soggy blow job, so he let it happen.
Once he felt lightheaded, he reached over to slide off her panties. Zura always had condoms; he got them for free from all the bars. He was forever impressed by the amount of free shit you could get in this country.
As he fucked her, the spittle made her ass slide back and forth like a swing. It intensified the sensation for both of them. They came simultaneously for the first and last time of their brief coupling. They both took this to mean that they had what stupid glossy magazines referred to as “good sexual chemistry.†Zura went home and slept like a spoiled monarch. Pearl texted her best friend, spilling all the deets before she sobered up.
Smoke is the other thing we do when we’re together.
She started smoking in the ninth grade after her crush, Gus Van Cleaf, asked her to bum a cigarette. Pearl told him that she was fresh out and then vowed to woo him through nicotine. The next day, when he asked her again, she gave him a Virginia Slim and a lighter shaped like a wine bottle. Both items were stolen from her bitch of a step-mother’s purse.
Zura began to take his grandfather’s cigarettes around the age of ten, which was late for a boy from his village. The only time he didn’t smoke was when he needed to breathe air to continue living long enough to smoke again. He assured all his girlfriends that it was a very Eastern European thing. You work, you smoke. You drink, you smoke. You drive, you smoke. You fuck, you smoke. He had never wanted to quit.
Pearl was the first girl that didn’t seem to care because she smoked just as much as he did.
During the months between her college graduation and her move to Brooklyn, Pearl had quit smoking. She tried to be the kind of person who wanted to run in the morning. Both experiences were failures. Moving to a new city was stressful and starting a new job was even harder. Honestly, she just missed the feeling of heat and tobacco sliding down her throat.
The fact that Zura never ran out of cigarettes was one of his best features. He always had a pack, no matter what. In his car, in his back pocket, in his hand. Pearl never paid for them when she was around him. He didn’t ask, she didn’t offer. Cigarettes were just another thing that they had when they were together.
When she got off work, he would be waiting for her under the subway steps. They would kiss, one on each cheek. Zura would light two, hand her one, and they’d walk to wherever he had parked the car.
They’d drive around for a while, absentmindedly flicking the dials on the radio, searching for a worthy song to finish slowly killing themselves to.
Eventually, Zura would pull onto Pearl’s street. She lived in the basement apartment of a three story walk up located in the heart of gentrified Brooklyn; her mother’s old sorority sister inherited it. This cushy real estate set up only further prevented Pearl from working harder than was necessary. She lived like a peasant and behaved like a bored princess.
If the Black Brady Bunch were asleep, meaning all the lights and TV glows were out, she would sneak Zura in. They would fuck fast on top of an air mattress as she had still not gotten her shit together enough to order a real bed. He always asked to take a shower right after he came, which she found to be curious but probably harmless. Maybe he had OCD? Perhaps he had a wife?
If the family was awake, they would keep driving until they located a dark spot on a quiet side street. It was like high school, with more frequent orgasms. Zura had no qualms with public sex, being from a part of the world where married people only copulated late at night so as to not wake their household full of extended family members, mothers-in-law, grandfathers, cousins, and so many children. That’s why the slaps of sex and dirty talk got him off, every time.
They always smoked right after. It prevented them from having to engage in awkward small talk.
Cum is sticky, hot and inevitable. Run it through your fingers.
When she came, she trembled. She sounded like the end of a boiling kettle. Afterward, she went back to thinking or doing whatever it was she was thinking or doing before. Some men wanted to make her cum again in some weird power play move; not Zura. He didn’t seem to care if she came at all. Men from his country said that they didn’t eat pussy, lest they be branded as what translated roughly into lazy lickers. She laughed when he told her this.Â
When he came, he yelled out words in a language she would never even attempt to learn. If there was a sock around, Zura would pick it up, using it to wipe the white congealed mess dripping off his dick. Pearl was on birth control so he sometimes came inside of her. She would then take two fingers and fish it out in the bathroom or, if they were in the car, run outside to pee.
To her, cum tasted salty and smelled of bleach. She never swallowed and looked sideways at any man who suggested that she should. One time when she was going down on her college boyfriend, Ned, he forgot to tell her he was close but she had to cough so she moved her neck just a bit and soon felt a shot of warm goo shoot up her nostrils. She made her preference clear from then on.
Pearl didn’t push Zura on the whole cunnilingus issue because that’s not what she needed from him. He wasn’t her only partner. What she wanted from him was a few free drinks followed by an enchanting night ride and a deep quickie.
To him, cum was something girls did when you fucked them hard enough. He had never tasted cum; not even his own. The warm feeling covering his hardness was something he felt was not of him. It turned him on when girls made those little moaning sounds, like meowing kittens, when he moved on top of them. He didn’t care if they were faking it. Everything looked the same from where he was standing.
Booze is what binds us. What makes me want to even want you.
The first time Pearl waited on Zura, he ordered a shot of vodka on a single ice cube with a twist of lemon. She was impressed. Most guys there wanted to chug hyperlocal IPAs until their faces turned red. Or ordered coke backs to go with their shots. He was a man who could drink and still parallel park in two moves.
When she was working, customers bought her shots, which she slid down the drain while replacing the contents with water or cider. Her boss liked for the girls to drink with the patrons, to flirt and relieve them of the contents of their wallets.
As soon as she got off, she imbibed nothing but whiskey gingers. Besides fucking and smoking, drinking was what they did best together. Zura would drive and Pearl would pour. They never got caught because he never swerved or hit anything. Alcohol was a lubricant as well as a salve. It helped to wet and calm.
It also kept things in perspective. Blurry lines felt clear because no one had ever taught them how to communicate with their sexual partners. Anything beyond swear words, glances, and hand movements felt corny. They knew the boundaries of their year long fling. Zura never called on the phone. She, in turn, never asked him what his day was like. They drank, smoked, fucked, and said peace.
Their tryst was simple and didn’t need much in order to survive. In January, after a year of pressure from all four of her parents, Pearl went out and got a real job with her real resume and really expensive degree. She moved in with friends and didn’t tell him where to find her.
In February, Zura drove to a different part of Brooklyn to find a new girl to entertain him. He got a haircut, wore his heavy black leather jacket, accentuated his accent and made sure to speak loudly around girls who just moved to the city from Iowa or Florida or wherever it is that they breed blondes with thick asses.
Breath, Spit, Smoke, Cum, Booze
Love is a formless pest. It crawls under your blankets like a bedbug brought home from a subway platform. It is wasted on the young and an exhausting enterprise for the old. Lust is ancient; it predates the idea of romance. Even spiders get hard-ons. The foundation of any relationship worth having or ruining is desire. We use our bodies and their senses to dig into the flesh of other people, pretending we can crawl through them to the other side of something worth seeing. As if astral projection comes from being fucked hard into other galaxies.
Like one could taste and discern the meaning of life by licking the covered, messy parts of other people’s bodies.
Meg Frances is a Texas born writer living in Brooklyn. Her previous work includes a book of poetry and short stories, FFing, published by Desperanto Press (2010). Other works of hers have been featured on Mad Swirl, Syzygy, Circus Freaks, Let It Bleed Issue 1, Outlook Springs Issues 3 and 6 , A Very Feminist Zine I and II by Las Odiosas, The Chachalaca Review, and most recently in the Love Like Salt Anthology. In Spring 2018, she was selected to participate in the Cave Canem Watch Your Tone poetry workshop. She is currently querying her first novel.
