abandon all reason / avoid all eye contact

short fiction no. 1

*

I take two pictures of myself with my seatbelt on while I wait for him to change. I could make an art installation out of these alone: Selfies From Men’s Passenger Seats. In the first photo, I lean forward and to the right, angling toward the sun. In the second I lean further back, not on purpose, and catch a glimpse of him behind the open trunk, arms outstretched above his head, mid-dressing.

“Yo,” Morgan says.
“What?”
“Come look at this.”
“I’m already buckled.”
“Just come here.”

I don’t know how we missed it on the way back from the trail. He’s parked too close to the muddy cliffside for me to get out through my door, so I have to repeat the dance I did earlier, undulating over the driver’s side and out through his. At first glance, it looks like a misshapen hunk of white sheetrock, blasted clean by the sediment and sun. I refuse to get closer when I notice the delicate articulations of bone.

“What the fuck is that?” I ask.
“Dead dog,” Morgan says.
“What? No way.”
“I mean, probably? Look at it.”
“God, no, I don’t want to look at it, can we please just leave?”
Morgan drops to a squat to examine it closer, almost archaeologically.
“What are you doing, oh my God.”
“I’m just trying to see what it is.”
“So it’s not a dead dog?”
“If you let me conduct my experiments,” Morgan says.
I squeeze my eyes shut. “You don’t seriously mean you’re going to touch it because I swear to—”
“Relax,” he says, “I’m not gonna touch it.” He unfurls himself back to standing and walks over to me, snaking an arm around my waist. He kisses me. He tastes like peanuts and chocolate and dried cranberries.
“We’re in public,” I say, smiling into his mouth.
“So?”
“So you never kiss me in public.”
He pulls away. “That makes me sound like an asshole.”
“You’re allowed to have boundaries,” I say.
He tosses his keys in the air and catches them, jerking his head back toward the car. He takes the driver’s seat shirtless, in jeans, Magen David glinting against his collarbone.

**

Our waitress greets us with an expression stricken like death. “Hey, Morgan.”
“Oh. Hey.”
I finish my full water glass, trying to disappear down my throat with it.
“Been a while,” she says.
“Not since—”
“The birthday party,” they say in jagged unison. Morgan and the waitress force laughter.
“So do you guys, like, need a minute, or.”
“Yeah, maybe another minute or two.”
Morgan bites down on his straw without drinking.
“Old flame?” I ask, convincing no one of anything.
“Friend of my ex’s.”
“Ah.”
The string lights come on above us on the patio.
“So does she—”
“Hate me? No,” Morgan says. “I think I told you, it was, you know, like, amicable.”
“Yeah, totally.”
The music, a missive from my lost youth, gets inexplicably, aggressively louder.
“Should we leave?” I ask.
Morgan glances over his shoulder. “I mean…no? No. No, that would be crazy. No, we don’t have to leave.”
“You just said ‘no,’ like, so many times.”
“I mean, do you want to leave?” he asks. “Because ultimately, you know, I just don’t want to make you uncomfortable—”
“—It really makes no difference to me either way, I’m not the one who knows her so—”
“—I feel like it could, like, you know, cause a whole thing if we were to just suddenly—”
“—like obviously it feels weird, but it’s not, like, you know—”
“Just back with some refills of your waters,” the waitress says, dropping two full glasses on the table and taking our empty ones away. “Did you decide on anything? Drinks? Morg, you still a gin and tonic guy?”
“Just a couple more minutes, I think,” Morgan says. He’s smiling with an expression I’ve never seen him make before.

***

He puts his hand on my leg for the whole car ride back to his apartment. It’s farther than mine was from the trailhead, but there’s no point in negotiating, and anyway, now I have an excuse to spend the night. I’ve slept over only once before, awakening before him after a typical fitful night of sleep next to a new body. I tried and failed to use his artisanal coffee machine. I smoked half a preroll he’d left lying on the bench seat of his kitchen table. I took his dog, Spud, out to the melancholy patch of grass on the sidewalk to take a shit. I collected the shit into one of the shiny pink bags he leaves by the front door—Spud the girl dog had to have gendered accessories even with her androgynous name—and wished he would wake up to see me doing it. One of his neighbors came outside and waved. I waved back, wondering if they knew I was a new girl, a different girl, from that distance. I still didn’t know his ex’s name, only that we looked nearly identical from the back.

When we get back to his place, he kneels in front of his record player and puts a record on from his college days, ergo my high school ones. I noticed it the moment I stepped into his house on our second date; it was the only record Elliott owned. Morgan puts it on almost every time I come over, in spite of the vast record collection stored on the shelf beneath the speakers. Those first few songs are still an uppercut to the mandible, but I never said anything, and now it’s too late.

I know what Elliott would think of Morgan. He would pretend they were friends, and then he would shit talk him to me on the car ride home from the party, going fifteen miles over the speed limit and chain-smoking out the window. Elliott always hated other academics. He hated any man who seemed like even a potential threat to his own intelligence, but he especially hated other academics. Morgan had been published more, worked at a better school, had a podcast that was starting to draw interest from non-linguists. In Elliott’s mind, that would mean he was watering himself down, turning into Malcolm Gladwell or something, but of course Elliott would have given his left nut to be Malcolm Gladwell, he just knew he didn’t have the curb appeal. He was too fixated on being the most obscure person in every room, alternately despising and delighted how often it came back to bite him in the ass.

It’s harder to gauge what Morgan would think of Elliott. I haven’t heard Morgan talk shit, though admittedly it’s only been a couple months, and we only have two friends in common—Genevieve, his sister-in-law and my former roommate who set us up, and Callum, a friend of his from grad school who I slept with once. I assumed Morgan knew about the tryst, but the more time passes, and the more he cheerfully mentions Callum without any apparent agenda, the more clear it becomes that he does not. I can’t imagine Morgan hating Elliott. It seems beneath him. Elliott’s effusiveness was as bottomless as his hatred. Morgan is controlled. Morgan is finite. Morgan is understandable, eventually, if I can only get a better look inside.

****

After he finishes, I lope to the bathroom to wipe my face. I look at my reflection in the mirror and survey my surroundings to see if anything has changed. Same bar soap. Same prescription acne medication. Same stack of bleached towels clearly left over from his childhood in upstate New York, mostly Mets-related. No new infusion of skincare products, no abandoned perfume or fruity shampoo, no “lost” earrings.

He’s already pulled his underwear back on when I fall against him. We can hear Spud whining through the window screen.
“Not yet, baby girl, give us a minute,” Morgan calls. We always end up in the same positions. Him smiling dumbly on his back. Me using my wrists and elbows to search for purchase and comfort on my stomach.

I always forget how eerily quiet it is in the Valley. Living this far out is the only way he could afford the space, the commute is a nightmare but he’s thirty-five and single and a homeowner in Los Angeles, which is practically unheard of. His lawn is always dead and dying, and there isn’t decent food for five miles in any direction, but it’s silent in the evenings and he never has to look for parking.

“What can I do better?” I ask, propping my head on his chest. He’s working out, constantly, and every time I see him he’s a little bit harder, a little bit colder to the touch.
“Hm?”
“How can I make that…a more pleasurable experience for you?”
“Jeez, we back to doin’ reviews, are we?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “ I just want to make sure I’m doing everything I can.”
“You’re doing great,” he says. “I would tell you. And I’d say you can tell me, too, but I think it’s pretty clear I’m hitting it out of the park.”
“You’re a jackass.”
“Is that what we’re calling it now?” he asks. He runs his hand down my arm, then interlaces his fingers with mine. These are the only moments where he’ll ever hold my hand.

*****

Morgan falls asleep first. I stare at the blinking blue abyss of my phone.

After combing through all my other suspects—Shea, the girl Morgan dated before the last girl; Lillian, the girl who hooked up with every boy I was obsessed with in college; Robbie, the guy Morgan’s last ex cheated on him with—I look at Elliott. I’m still blocked on everything, but I have burner accounts—the shitty boutique that went under shortly after I quit, the account my cousin’s girlfriend uses to post pictures of her cats and her macrame. Elliott is satisfying to look at, because he posts so much. No one is watching, but he acts as if they are. He props his camera in every video as if en media res, even though I know he’s filming multiple takes. He enlists friends to take photos of him in coffee shops, in bookstores, standing against brick walls and smoking. He posts stories seemingly every half hour, baiting people with his outrageous and insincere takes in desperate ploys for engagement. When we were together, I found his transparent need for validation refreshing, but it was ultimately what made me realize I had to leave him.

I notice Morgan tossing and turning and wonder if the glare of my phone is causing his restlessness. I put it to sleep and set it on the rug, not daring to root around in my bag for my charger. Spud pushes her nose against the door and climbs into bed, a boiling hot mammalian shield between us. He nestles against her. Finally his breathing slows. From outside the window he forgot to close, I hear the gentle crush of tires over gravel.