Maidenhead

Aaron unzipped his jeans. It took him three tries. His cock moved around inside his shorts. He held it still and closed his eyes. I thought of Elijah on his bed, cock hard and ready, and Gayl leading me away to the bathroom to prepare me. She’d told me that Elijah wasn’t ready to fuck me yet but that I should be patient. When it’s time, she’d said, it would blow my fucking mind. I moved Aaron’s hand. I took his penis out of his shorts and put it in my mouth. I didn’t want to but I did.

Aaron was instantly happy, moaning, ‘I just want to be your boyfriend, Myra. Myra, let me be your boyfriend.’

I was sucking him but pushing him out. Why wasn’t Elijah ready to fuck me? I was prepared! I didn’t want a boyfriend. Aaron was inside my mouth and pushing off the mattress and my head now felt like a light bulb too. I was just about to stop when everything inside of him filled up my mouth – everything sour and alive that hated me.

‘Sorry, man, sorry, Myra, god.’

It was like he hadn’t just come. I wiped my mouth. Aaron helped me do it with the sheet.

‘I’m sorry, you didn’t know, I’m really sorry, fuck, Myra, you didn’t know.’

I didn’t want his help with my face. ‘I do know about that,’ I said. Aaron wanted me to be his girlfriend, all romantic and drippy.

‘What the fuck?’ Aaron’s voice went up high.

‘Yeah, I’m with someone else,’ I said, confirming Lee.

Aaron looked around for the pipe in his sheets. ‘So this American Rasta has got a big dick? He shoves it down your throat? You let him cum all over your face? Go on. Tell me all the gory details.’

‘Fuck off!’ I yelled. ‘Why should I tell you about that?’

Aaron was going to cry. ‘Lee is a way better girlfriend than you.’

I stood up to leave. Being a girlfriend is a travesty.

LEE: Some guys are not in the space to ever know that a girl they are with has sex without their permission. Guys don’t know how to deal with the fact that a girl is free, that she has an autonomous life and an autonomous past and also that the problems in her life aren’t meant to be solved. Guys are problem-solvers and girls’ problems aren’t solvable. Girls’ problems are their life.

GAYL: Yeah, true, man, I think you’re right about that. Myra doesn’t even know the meaning of travesty.

§

When Elijah came into my bedroom he didn’t laugh at all. He picked things up and looked at them closely, like my pillow with the purple silk ruffle and the books I read when I was a kid. Elijah flipped through a folk-tale picture book with stories from around the world. In his scuffed white angel-armed robe he looked like the grand teller of all tales.

‘Why’s there no Africans in here? We got fairy tales too.’

Elijah stopped at Little Red Riding Hood from France. I remembered that story really well, my mother read it to me every night for a while when I was seven. In that French version, the wolf kills the grandmother and he makes Little Red Riding Hood drink her grandmother’s blood from a bottle. The wolf gets so close then to getting Little Red Riding Hood in the bed but she escapes, I remembered, by saying she had to pee. The wolf was suspicious so he tied Little Red Riding Hood’s ankle with a rope so that she could pee outside and he didn’t have to get out of bed but he knew that he still had her. Me and my mother liked that part. We called the wolf ‘jailer lazy.’ So of course Little Red Riding Hood tricks the wolf – she takes the rope off her ankle and ties it to a tree so that the wolf just thinks she’s peeing for a really long time. But when he pulls the rope, he can’t get her back. Little Red Riding Hood escapes home to her mom.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon. My father and Jeff were supposed to come home late at night. There was time for a few things to happen.

I felt brave when Elijah was in my room. ‘I only know a little bit about you,’ I said, happy that I had him here, that Gayl was out of the equation. ‘I want to know more about you, I mean.’

Elijah sat down on my single mattress still looking at Little Red Riding Hood. He seemed oversize in here. He wanted to talk, not kiss. And not fuck fuck fuck.

‘We were working on the way up north,’ he said. ‘Tobacco farm, other stuff, the dregs. It’s why we took so long to get to you.’

‘A tobacco farm? Why?’

Elijah showed me his hands. There were four oval calluses along the top line of his palms. Faith, who used to clean our house, I remembered that she had calluses there too.

‘We hear there’s more work up in Brantford, near here.’

‘You’re going to leave?’

‘We’re on a path of work,’ Elijah said. ‘And Brantford is only an hour from here.’

‘Oh.’

Elijah put down my book of fairy tales. ‘What’s wrong, Angel?’