Chris Cook

Proper Kicks

I’m lying down, watching my prick wilting, fingerwalking my hand down to scratch at my pubes. She’s on her back, legs pulled up, facing the headboard. Eyes at half-mast, but she always looks like that, a bored teenager in an adult’s body. Clicking away on her phone, me still breathing hard. The only sounds in the world.

She puts her phone down and wrestles herself up on her elbows. Her eyes find the ashtray on the bedside table, and she groans and leans forward to grab it. While she’s sparking a good-sized roach, I swing my feet over the side towards the other table where my shit is. There’s maybe sixty milligrams of Percocet ground up on a torn magazine cover, and five more tens still to go. She passes the joint and blows a cloud of smoke that surrounds my head. I take in a lungful and hold while I break out two lines with an old credit card.

It’s a proper kick, what an old friend from school called a Perc shotty—take a hit of weed and do a bump. I’m lightheaded from holding my breath, and now the pill hits my brain along with the bud. I fall back into her lap, smashed and grinning like a spastic. She smacks my forehead and gives herself a kick.

“Silly little boy.”

Her eyes always tear up when she snorts shit. I first noticed it watching her do a bump with black eyeliner on. For some reason it got me all hot and bothered. Maybe next time I’ll give her the makeup and put a choke chain on her. God knows she’d get into it.

I love watching her smoke. One eye closed like a wink, sucking it down so slow and rolling it around in her mouth, digesting it, drooling it out. The same way she sucks cock. My eyes wander to the tattoo on the meat of her thigh, an Oriental dragon crawling up towards her prize. I’m sure she doesn’t know shit about Oriental mystical whoosits. Silly bitch. I love her.

Christ, I could live in this lap. It’s something you see a lot in the city—scrawnyass man with a fat girl. It’s that cushion, that tender loving care you can only feel when you’re pressed up against all that warm flesh, and when you fuck you can watch her whole body ripple, see that small patch of zits bounce around on her funhouse ass. I think it’s some misplaced maternal shit. Gimme something to squeeze up against on a cold day. A good solid ride.

“We should get a bounce house.”

She coughs and sticks the joint between my lips. “What?”

“Yeeeaaaaah,” I say, stretching the word out with my smoke. “One a those big inflatable bitches that kids jump around in.”

She lights two cigarettes and gives me one and I drag deep, arching my back to open my lungs.

“Why a bounce house?”

“Think about it.” I draw a picture in the air. “Fuckin’ in one a those things.” I giggle. I’ve always hated the sound of my laughter, too high pitched like a kid’s. And I can never control a laugh.

“Shit,” she says, “we could get one an’ charge people to fuck in it.”

“You’re a genius, babe. I’m picturing it now—evening with the sun going down, us stepping out into the twilight, fishbowling and fucking in a bounce house. Then we put up a sign on the sidewalk, Open For Business. Ten bucks a throw, two-for-one Fridays and Saturdays. Group discounts. Maybe even make enough to hire some poor kid to clean up the spunk in between customers.”

“You’re a motherfuckin visionary,” she says.

“What can I say?”

“Shit.” She slaps my shoulder. “I saw one a those, on that street by the Big Y.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, some kid’s party I guess.”

“Is it still there?”

Her eyes go distant for a moment, computing. When she’s stoned like this, you can look in her eyes and see the machinery at work.

“I think I saw it this morning. So yeah, could be.”

I’m picturing it now.

I take the magazine and divvy up the lines. She might be the host, but it’s my shit and I’m doing the cutting. The powder burns my sinuses and I snort it back and run a finger under my nostril. A blob of mucus comes away thick with medicine, and before I can move she’s got her mouth on my digit, milking up every grain. Later, I think I’ll put some on my dick.

When she’s got her line up and away towards her brain, I slide off the bed and find my clothes.

“What’s up,” she says. I’m pulling my boxers on and grabbing a stained undershirt.

“Get your clothes on, babe.”

Her eyes are so pretty, squinty and red but bright, too. There’s still some real, untarnished beauty in there. Like, I wanna fuck her eyes.

“We goin’ somewhere?”

“Let’s go get us a bounce house.”