Lips Like Red Thread

The bedroom is a bed drawn in pencil on a clean sheet of paper. White bed, white sheets, white all the way out past the mattress. Someone took an eraser to the world and left the bed, and him on the bed, and Lina.

Red hair spilled down one shoulder like wine across a white tablecloth. A red mouth. Freckles from her throat to her ankles like the speckles on a brown egg.

She smells like rain on a hot car hood and American Spirits. She tastes like honey cut with gasoline.

Out of the dream, she belongs to Kate. Lina is the best friend, the one whose smile pulls her red mouth thin as thread, who sleeps in the guest room whenever the wine runs past midnight and leaves her lipstick on Kate's coffee mugs, who borrows Kate's silk robes and returns them smelling of hotel soap and some man's cologne.

In the dream there is only Lina.

She straddles him naked and sits back on his thighs. Her freckles run down her stomach and over her breasts and across the insides of her thighs. His tongue could spend a night crossing them. Her nipples are the pink of rosé held up to a window. She takes his wrists and sets his hands on her breasts and holds them there.

His cock lies hard on his stomach, and she settles her cunt on it without taking him in. Wet and open, she slides up the underside of him and back until his spine lifts off the sheet. Her mouth makes his name. The white takes the sound before it reaches him. Her nails go down his chest in parallel lines; the lines open, and red thread rises out of them and beads.

She reaches between them, takes him in her fist, and stands him up. She fits the head of his cock into the wet mouth of her cunt and holds him there at the first give of her. She smiles her thread-thin smile and starts to sink.

He wakes.

The sheet is stuck to his chest and his cock is hard against wet cotton. Kate sleeps beside him with one hand curled under her chin and the other on the Murakami she fell asleep reading. It is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle with a corner folded down at her page. He has given her bookmarks for two birthdays, and they live in her desk drawer with the rubber bands.

He lies still with the dream on him: the weight of her on his hips, the wet of her along his cock. The ceiling fan turns over the bed. Its motor ticks every time the bad blade comes around, and the pull chain swings in the air from the open window.

He rolls toward Kate and kisses her shoulder. It tastes of Dove soap. Her nightstand is the same every night, and he could draw it with his eyes shut. The melatonin she dissolves under her tongue. The water glass. The hair tie. The Burt's Bees she puts on in the dark without a mirror.

He swallows. The dream stays in his throat and tastes like somebody else's mouth.

It goes on for three weeks. Every morning he wakes hard and stands at the bathroom sink running cold water over his wrists until his hands ache and his cock gives up on her.

Kate climbs on him one night with the lamp still on, because she likes to see his face. She wets her palm, takes his cock in her hand, and fits him into her. She sits down on him a little at a time the way she lowers herself into a hot bath. Then she rides him steady and kind with her hands flat on his chest. Her dark hair hangs down around his face.

He shuts his eyes and the hair goes red. Under his lids Lina grinds down on him. The freckled thighs on his hips are Lina's, and so is the cunt clenching on him, and so is the thread-thin red smile. Kate says his name. He says hers back late, because his mouth has already started an L.

She stops with him all the way inside her and tips her head.

"You okay?"

"Yeah. Don't stop."

She starts again, slower. He opens his eyes, finds the small white scar below her left ear, and holds on to it like a rope until he comes.

In the shower he leans his forehead on the tile and jerks off with his eyes shut. She is there again, freckled and wet. She makes the sound dream-Lina makes when she comes; it starts low in her chest and comes out long and guttural. It is a sound he made up for a woman who has never touched him.

At the dinner parties Kate throws, the real Lina talks past him. Her eyes slide off his face to the wine rack, the window, the other guests. When she does look at him, she gives him the smile she gives the kid who bags her groceries. She turns before he can answer it. Her sweater has slid off one shoulder. The blade moves under the freckles, and a loose red thread from the couch has caught in the knit of her sleeve.

Once, in the kitchen, she reached past him for the wine opener and her forearm brushed his. She snatched the arm back and held it against her stomach. She didn't look at him for the rest of the night.

He comes to in the kitchen doorway with his fists in his eyes. The clock on the stove reads 2:22.

Lina leans against the sink with a glass of water in her hand.

"Lina?"

Her face is bare and her mouth is red. Her hair hangs loose and damp. She wears one of Kate's Dartmouth sweatshirts, which stops at her thighs. When she shifts her weight, the hem lifts and shows a bare hip.

"Hey."

"What are you doing here?"

"Kate called me. She's worried about you. Sleepwalking. Nightmares." She tilts her head and studies him the way a veterinarian studies a limping dog. "I came to check."

"How did you get in?"

She holds up a key on a plastic strawberry.

The light over the sink is a tube in a sleeve yellowed by old grease. It pins everything flat and turns the counter, the faucet, and the skin of his arms the color of the tile.

Tik. The faucet drips into the steel basin.

"Where's Kate?"

"Asleep. She took one of your pills." Lina nods down the hall toward the bedroom. "She's out till morning."

"I don't take pills."

Lina smiles. She sets her glass on the counter and steps close enough for him to smell her: rain, cigarettes, and the green apple shampoo from the bottle with a fern on it that lives in their shower.

"You've been dreaming about me."

He keeps one hand on the doorframe.

"Do you think about me when you're awake?" She runs one finger along his jaw. Her nail leaves a white line on the skin. "When you're fucking Kate? Do you picture me on top?"

Her finger travels down his throat and his chest and stops at the waistband of his boxers. "She told me. About the dreams. You say my name in your sleep."

"I don't. I wouldn't."

"Liar."

She cups him through his boxers. He has been hard since he saw her at the sink.

She drops her voice. "Poor Kate. She thinks you love her. She thinks you're faithful."

"I am. I do."

"You're hard for me in your own kitchen while your girlfriend sleeps thirty feet away."

She squeezes, and his grip on the doorframe tightens. She strokes him slow and even through the cotton. With her free hand she hauls the sweatshirt up over her ribs, takes her own breast in her palm, and rolls the nipple between her fingers until it stands up. Her eyes stay on his face the whole time.

He looks at the sweatshirt. The green cotton has folded back on itself, and the fold has swallowed DART and left MOUTH upside down.

She strokes harder. His hips jerk forward once on their own. Her thumb finds the wet spot spreading through his boxers and circles it.

"Just once." She presses her bare stomach to him, and her nipple drags hard across his chest. "Make it real."

He could pull the sweatshirt the rest of the way off. He could bend her over the counter. His free hand comes up with the fingers open and closes on her hip and a fistful of Kate's sweatshirt.

Creeeak.

Down the hall the bedroom door swings open. Kate stands in the gap with her hair flattened on one side and squints into the light. "Babe? What are you doing?"

He jerks back. His hands close on nothing. The kitchen comes back around him: the hum of the tube light, the drip, the tile cold under his bare feet. Only the smell of green apple stays.

Kate pads down the hall and stops at his shoulder. She looks past him at the counter and the sink. "Who were you talking to?"

"No one. I was sleepwalking."

She looks down at the front of his boxers. Her fingers go to the scar under her ear. "Were you about to...?"

"No. Jesus. No. Bad dream."

Kate stays at his shoulder while the faucet drips. Then she walks back to bed, and the bedroom door shuts behind her.

He stands in the doorway until the stove clock lets go of 2:22 and his erection goes down.

Lina's glass is gone from the counter.

He opens the cabinet for a glass of water. The glasses sit in a row with their logos facing out, and the one on the end is warm. He tips it toward the light. On the rim, matte, and visible only at that angle, is a red mouth. Kate wears Clinique Black Honey, which goes on sheer and dark as cherry juice and barely marks a glass. She orders it by the box from Sephora and lines the tubes up in the medicine cabinet like shotgun shells.

He runs the faucet over the rim until the red comes off, dries the glass, and sets it back at the end of the row with its logo facing out.

He goes back to bed. Kate has turned to the wall, and her breathing is slow and even. The Murakami is face-down on her nightstand among the melatonin, the water glass, the hair tie, and the Burt's Bees. Everything is where she left it.

On his back, he watches the fan. The pull chain swings. Somewhere across town a siren starts up and drags itself away.