The Dirty Ones

There were balloons. So many lavender balloons. Maybe thousands of them. And they flew in lepidopterists from Central America with hundreds of glass-wing butterfly caterpillars, which were timed to hatch inside the atrium the day of the party.

It was the most magical evening. A dream party, really. Which is stupid because everyone knows that there’s a nightmare behind every dream.

Right?

“OK,” Connor says, wiping his hands on one of my flour-sack dish towels. “Thirteen to seventeen minutes from now we can eat.”

He grins at me and just for a moment I see him that night of his parents’ party. Fresh-faced and clean-shaven for the first time in months. His tuxedo the blackest of blacks and his lavender tie the color of the balloons. We were in the atrium just staring up at the reflective transparent butterflies as they floated in the night air like creatures of some dream world yet imagined. One landed on his tie, gently flapping its wings. And then there was a swarm of them surrounding him. Surrounding us. All six of us, because Louise wasn’t there. She was never there for stuff like that. We were the chosen ones. Like this party was for us and everyone knew it.

“Is this all of them?” Connor asks.

He wandered over to my bookshelf while I was daydreaming and is plucking a book from my stack.

“Most of them,” I say. “I lost track a long time ago. The novelty of collecting my own books on my own shelf wore off after… oh, book thirty-two, I suppose.”

He shakes his head at me, but walks over to the couch, still holding the paperback, and plops down just a mere foot away.

He’s got no shirt on. Just a pair of cut-off sweat shorts. He apologized for that over and over again, but he didn’t figure he’d be spending the night at my house tonight, and if I have a t-shirt that will fit him, he’ll gladly put it on.

I don’t. Have a t-shirt for him, that is. No men have been staying over and leaving garments behind. So he’s shirtless.

“What’s this one about?” he asks, holding up my book.

“Sex,” I say.

“Come on. I know you better than that. There’s a great story in here. What is it?”

“Read it and find out.”

“I’m gonna read it out loud if you don’t tell me.”

I smile at him. Because that brings up some of the good times. When he used to read to us. Me and Sofia, mostly. Camille was never into that, but that’s her loss. Connor is a fantastic narrator. I could listen to him read a grocery list. Or the dictionary. And sometimes, if I was in a mood, he’d do that to make me smile. Just pull out whatever. A philosophy textbook, an essay I wrote for lit class. A poem from my notebook.

Not that notebook. The ones I used to always carry around. The pretty ones.

And he read a book once too. I just can’t think of which one at the moment.

But if I ever get the chance to have him read to me again, it’s not going to be one of my books. “It’s about a girl and a guy. Two guys, actually.”

“Two?” He laughs.

“Yeah,” I say, blushing a little. “My girls like two at a time.”

“OK. Go on.”

“And she is… broken.”

“Aren’t they all?”

I squint my eyes at him.

“I mean, in these books, right? Dark romance. The girl is always broken.”

“Oh. Yeah. Yes. They are. They have to be to do the crazy shit I make them do, right?”

He nods. “So why is she broken?”

“Oh, you know. The usual. She was kidnapped and sold to human traffickers—” He laughs. “It’s not funny. Shit like that really happens.”

“I know. Sorry. Go on.”

“And of course, there’s gotta be some good old Stockholm syndrome to make the story sexy. Everyone knows Stockholm syndrome is sexy, right?”

“Naturally.”

“So she falls for her kidnappers and they have lots and lots of dirty sex and then they save her and have a HEA.”

“HEA?”

“Happily ever after,” I say. “Duh.”

“Right, right.” He stares at me for several eternal seconds, smiling that gonna-charm-the-housewife-yoga-pants-right-off-you smile. “Anything else? Like… is there romance? Or it’s just dirty sex in a slave dungeon?”

“No, they have to have a date. Every romance has like… a date night, you know. Where everything’s perfect. But of course that’s right before that big, black moment when it all falls apart and looks hopeless. So all that happens too.”

His charming smile fades. Slowly, like those butterflies must’ve after his parents’ party. “Sounds a lot like real life to me.”

I nod. “I guess that’s why people like it.”

“Is that why you write it?”

“It’s my job, Connor.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Somehow I don’t buy that excuse. I mean, you could write mysteries, or thrillers, or poetry. But you write this.”

“I guess… I was just groomed for it.”