Dirty Diana

Chapter 12

Chapter 12

—

That night I sleep at Jasper’s place. I hear him get up in the middle of the night, and when he doesn’t come back, I wander out to the living room. He’s standing in his jeans and no shirt, his hands in his pockets, looking out the sliding glass door into the pitch-black backyard.

“Want to go for a walk?” I thought my voice might startle him, but he turns and smiles at me like I’m handing over the keys to a cage.

“Sure.” Without bothering to put on a shirt, he pulls on his coat and boots. I dress quickly, and we call for Pippi, asleep on Jasper’s bed, to see if she might want to come. She lifts her head, barely, then snuggles back into the quilt.

The New Mexico night is so dark that it takes my eyes a few moments to adjust before I can make out the ground beneath my feet. The new moon is just a sliver of light over the mountains, and heavy clouds obscure the stars. I hold on lightly to Jasper’s elbow, and then he takes my hand and presses it firmly beneath the warmth of his arm.

Jasper owns a small gray house nestled in the foothills. There’s a trailhead not far from the end of his street, but we stay on the sidewalks, following the row of cottonwood trees. It is already April, but still we pass the occasional tree wound up in unlit holiday lights. The air smells of chimney smoke. For several blocks, neither of us speaks. I watch the fog of our breath and listen to our work boots on the pavement, the soft swishing of our nylon coats. In the distance we hear the high-pitched howls and yips of coyotes. I consider telling Jasper about the art grant I applied for. It’s small, only a few thousand dollars, but it would take the pressure off a few months’ rent. Introducing my money stress, though, would only kill the moment. It’s so peaceful, everyone else in these houses asleep in their beds. I slide my hand from beneath his arm, link my fingers through his. He gives a gentle squeeze, and I know he is right there with me. I am wide awake.

We stay away from downtown and gallery row and instead make slow laps around his neighborhood. We pass an elementary school and stop next to a chain-link fence. Just behind it sits a rusted swing set that looks like it belongs on the set of a movie, one where two impossibly fetching actors come on a night like this one to confess their love for each other. Jasper drops my hand and leans against the fence. “Thanks for the walk,” he says, his voice soft.

I look at him and try to picture the knotted thoughts that keep him up at night unfurling now, hopefully dissipating in the cold air. I try to do the same with my own worries about money. About work. About Jasper and whether this feeling between us can last.

“It’s beautiful out,” I say and focus only on the sky, which looks like rain. He smiles and lifts my chin, kissing me gently.

“This is my new favorite night,” he announces, and now I smile too. What a good idea to take him for a walk, I think. Am I some kind of goddamn healer? Maybe.

“Heads or tails?”

“Sorry?”

Jasper holds a coin in his palm. It is slightly thicker than a quarter.

I take it from his hand and laugh. “Of course.”

“What?”

“Of course you don’t carry a regular quarter in your pocket.”

He looks wounded. “It’s an Eisenhower dollar,” he says, his face grave. “My grandfather gave it to me just before he died.”

“Oh, I’m sorry—”

“I’m kidding.” He nudges my shoulder. “The lady at the 7-Eleven gave it to me with my change. I think it’s actually an arcade token.”

He flips the coin. “Heads,” I call. He looks up at me and shakes his head, sorry. “You’re going over first.” I laugh and step my foot into his cupped hands. He hoists me over the fence, then gracefully hops over after me.

Jasper sits on one of the three swings and motions for me to join him. I take the swing next to him and we sway back and forth. The night is quiet and so are we. Coyotes yip again in the distance and a tease of that sinking sensation returns. A feeling that Jasper and I won’t last. Despite what feels thrilling when we’re together, something picks at me around the edges and won’t leave, like someone offstage whispering a forgotten line, telling me all truly good things are ephemeral.

I need to know that we are not doomed. I stand and move to his swing and he pulls me onto his lap. I lean my head back so that we’re cheek to cheek. Breathing the same air. Then I shift so I can see his profile, his dark lashes, the outline of his full pouty lips. It’s impossible to be concerned about anything else besides how soon we can havesex.

There is no one else out. The playground is empty. We’ve kicked off our boots and the sand is cold on our feet.

“I miss you,” I tell him.

“I miss you too.”

“Do you know my favorite movie?” I ask.

“Mmm. Something…Italian?”

I smile. “That narrows it down.”

“Japanese?”

I push against the sand to give us a little swing.

“ Die Hard Three, ” he says with a grin.

“Nope.” I shake my head. “It was a trick question. I don’t have one.”

“Why are you tricking me?”

“Why don’t you know my favorite movie?”

“Because you don’t have one.” Jasper kisses me. The warmth of his lips on mine pulls me out of my spiral. He does know me. Better than anyone ever has. I look up at the sky, eager to drink in this expansive feeling. Jasper kisses my throat with small, sweet kisses, pulling down my T-shirt so he can suck on my breast. I hate that sex can fix anything with us. It has too much power. It can make any moment extraordinary. Just enjoy it, I tell myself but a part of me still believes I am postponing the inevitable.

Jasper takes my nipple in between his teeth and bites it with just enough pressure. I close my eyes as his mouth moves back up my neck, the kisses becoming more intense. The first raindrops fall, wispy and wet against the sand at our feet. Headlights wash over us then disappear as Jasper sucks hard on the side of my neck. I think of the bruise he’ll leave. We are past the point of it leaving a mark. Fuck it. I’ll wear turtlenecks all summer if I have to. He pulls his mouth from my neck and whispers in my ear, “I want to fuck you now. Is that okay?” The rain falls harder, in steadier, fatter drops. A warm sensation spreads through my groin and I feel Jasper growing hard beneath me. I lift my hips and, never leaving his lap, slide my pants down my thighs. He pulls my underwear aside and I take him in my hand, caressing the head of his penis up and down the wettest part of me. I tease him as I guide him closer to my vagina, but pull him up so he’s rubbing against my clit instead.

“Is this okay?” he asks again, breathier this time. I don’t answer. I give him what he’s waiting for and press the full weight of my hips into him, grinding into his pelvis so he can be as deep inside me as possible. He shudders inside me. “Jesus, Diana. You feel too good.”

The swing starts to sway as I lift myself up and down. It’s a new sensation entirely. The rain soaks into us both, our skin slippery. Jasper wraps his fingers in my wet hair, holding on tight. He twitches inside me, fighting the pleasure so he can last longer.

I squeeze my legs around him and he stays deep and warm inside me as I slowly circle my pelvis into his. My movements are exaggerated, like a slow turning clock. We have all night, I think. Each circle I turn, Jasper moans in my ear and I’m overcome with the sensation of wanting him everywhere. Deeper. Closer. More of him.

Jasper pulls my head back and slips his tongue inside my mouth, kissing me hungrily. I lift my hips again and the cold hits us both as he slips out of me, glistening wet and even harder than before. We are soaked and swollen and pulsing.

Then with agonizing slowness, he presses himself back inside me. The pressure is more intense, so intense I feel like I might break. “Diana,” he whispers into the falling rain. “Hold still,” he pleads. I hadn’t noticed that I was unconsciously moving my hips in those same small circles. I try not to move as he pulses inside me, about to burst. “I want more,” I beg. He enters me millimeters at a time, pulling himself out most of the way, then slowly back in. The moment he reenters me feels better than anything ever has and I grasp his knees for support to make sure I stay open. Over and over. “Just like that,” I moan, again and again, loud enough to wake the neighbors but I don’t care. We are so connected. So in love. So warm. I feel myself contract around him as he continues to gently thrust inside me. “Touch me,” I tell him, grabbing for his hand. He spreads my legs apart and glides his fingers around me, sometimes deep inside me, sometimes circling with more and more pressure. “I’m going to come,” I gasp as the orgasm overtakes us both, rippling through my entire body. We press our bodies together for balance, the rain falling harder.

Both of us dripping in ecstasy, Jasper takes me by the hand and we run through the driving rain to the school’s overhang. He pulls me to the ground and we lie together, still barefoot, fighting to catch our breath, sheltered from the heavy drops.

Jasper wraps his arms around me and I burrow my face into his chest. His heartbeat is loud and his breath grows steady—so steady that after a few minutes I think he’s fallen asleep. But then he kisses the top of my head and says again, “Thanks for the walk.”

—

For the next several weeks, we get up every night at nearly the same time and take long quiet walks around the neighborhood. When we get home, we have sex on the couch or in the shower or against the kitchen counter, never displacing Pippi from the bed. Our desire for each other is constant, bottomless. Some nights Jasper cooks for us, pancakes with honey, omelets and thick buttered toast, strong coffee. We stay up eating and talking and then both drift to our work. Jasper in the darkroom and me at the kitchen table. Partly because Justine liked it, and partly because I’ve been turned down for the art grant, I’ve gone back to the painting of Clea and tried to improve it.

One night while I’m working, Jasper comes and sits beside me, lining up my most recent sketches in a row. He touches the edges of each one and says they remind him of sexy recipes somehow, the way the text and image are combined. After that, I can’t stop thinking of laying them out like a book, rather than hanging them on a wall. Being with Jasper has inspired something more unrestrained in my work. My sketches come more quickly, like my hand can’t move fast enough to keep up with the pencil. Maybe it’s spending so much time, so uninhibited, around another person. But there’s something else too—it’s being with Jasper up close and watching him work. His energy is infectious and easy to get drunk on. Sitting at the table, I ask if he’ll photograph the sketches for me, in sharper focus and better light. He smiles and says, “Happily.” I spend the next few weeks assembling the photos into a book proposal and mailing copies to publishers for consideration.

—

“Is that orange ochre? Shit! That’s not orange ochre. That’s yellow ochre.” Justine’s standing over Melodie’s shoulder. “Stop! Stop what you are doing!”

Melodie drops her needle as if it had burst into flame. She’s been working on this section for a solid three hours. Justine’s been here for at least two of those hours and is only now noticing. “I…you said…”

“No, no, no. This is all wrong. Diana—tell her.” She grabs the fabric panel from Melodie. Increasingly, every time Justine decides something is wrong, I’m the only one she lets fix it. I hate it. Melodie will start to resent me, if she doesn’t already.

“Diana.” Justine holds the fabric panel up to the window. Melodie’s work is precise, and Justine’s piece as a whole is abstract fields of liquid color, so if this patch was meant to be orange ochre as opposed to yellow ochre, well…“Look,” Justine says, jabbing at Melodie’s work. “Look at that.”

In the sunlight, I recognize how yellow it is, but I also see the familiar strain on Justine’s face. This is not just about the color. It’s the familiar way Justine metabolizes stress around a deadline.

“I see what you mean,” I say, treading carefully. “But I still think it’s beautiful. The way the yellow vibrates against the black.”

Justine sighs, as if I’ve let her down too. “Start again.” She pushes the piece into my chest, picks up her bag, and leaves.

If hands could weep, my hands and Melodie’s hands would be weeping. I massage my palms. I could argue with Justine. I could run after her and tell her there isn’t time, we’ll never finish. But there’s no point. Justine knows we’ll get the work done. We always do. I set the panel on the windowsill and squint my eyes. I turn the fabric in every direction hoping to see something other than the truth: Justine’s right, the color is all wrong.

—

In the early morning, Alicia comes over to listen to me complain about the art grant rejection, about not hearing from a single publisher yet, and then about Justine. “She’s vibrating. Like stress-vibrating at a high level, even for Justine.”

It’s my day off, and I’m still in bed. Alicia brought two cups of coffee and my favorite donut holes. And because my apartment is always drafty in the morning, we’re eating under the blankets. Alicia scoots closer to me and lets me warm my ice-cold feet under her legs.

“Maybe she’s just trying to keep you all captive so she doesn’t have to hang out with Boring Mark alone. What do you think he’s like in bed? I bet he’s a premature ejaculator.”

Alicia usually picks on Mark with a little more gusto, but there’s a noticeable lack of enthusiasm behind her joke. And no one likes to sleep in more than Alicia. It’s not like her to come over so early.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

She pulls the covers up over her head.

“Alicia!” I try to pull them back but she doesn’t budge. “Now you’re scaring me. What is it?”

“I got into grad school.”

My stomach lurches. “You applied?”

She nods.

“Where? Are you moving?”

She nods again.

“You said grad school was a waste of money. That everybody comes out of film school making the same kind of movies.”

“I know. But I need structure. Deadlines. I think it’ll be easier for me there.”

When she throws back the blankets, her face is shiny with sweat. “I’m tired, Diana. I thought when I moved here, big things were going to happen. I don’t expect to be famous or crazy successful, but after all these jobs and hustling, I don’t even have a foot in the door.”

“I don’t—” I start to argue that I don’t either. “Where?”

“NYU.”

Behind us, the radiator clanks, and above us, my neighbors’ radio spits ads. Alicia turns on her side and I do the same, so we’re lying face-to-face.

“How long have you known?”

“I found out three weeks ago.”

“Oh.”

“But it took me a minute to make up my mind. It’s not happening for me here, Diana.”

“We haven’t been trying for that long.”

“I still haven’t finished a short or worked on a professional film. There’s no real film scene here. I’m just working longer hours at jobs I don’t like and making less stuff. My dad says he’ll pay for school and that as long as I’m enrolled, he’ll help me out.”

In high school, I used to sit on the floor of the bookstore and read self-help books without buying them. I remember reading that “envy” meant wanting what the other person has but not wanting to take it from them, whereas “jealousy” meant wanting what the other person has and not wanting them to have it either. I feel ribbons of heat run through my entire body, envy and jealousy coursing through my veins, up to my head. She has a net to catch her. A soft place to land. She has a plan and somewhere safe to be.

I swallow to quiet the thrum of blood in my ears. This is good for her. She’s leaving without me. This is good for her. She’s leaving. “It’ll be weird here without you.”

Alicia brightens. “You could come too?”

“To New York?”

“Why not? I can float you until you find a job. There are a ton of catering jobs there.” She sees me wince. “I’m not saying you’ll cater forever. You’ll keep painting—it’ll just be until we get our big breaks.”

I cling onto her optimism, like I have for years, but I also want to shake it right out of her. “I can’t leave Justine right now. She has three big shows in the fall.” Alicia knows I don’t want to leave Jasper, either, but can’t bring myself to say it yet.

“Justine doesn’t give a shit about you, Diana. Don’t stay for her. She’ll be fine. ”

Despite her optimism, I can see that she’s afraid too. “ You’ll be fine without me,” I tell her. “It’s going to be life-changing.”

She narrows her eyes, studies me closely, then smiles. “You’ll change your mind.”

I laugh. “Probably.” Then with a deep exhale, “Barry’s going to be fucking crushed.”

“He’ll replace me.”

“Barry loves you.” We both know that by “Barry” I really mean “me.”

She nods. “I love him too. But I need something good to happen, Diana. Something that makes me feel like I’m not crazy for wanting what I want.”

“You’re not crazy. It’s a smart move.”

We sit up and sip our coffee in silence.

—

Three nights later, I wake in a cold sweat. I dreamed the most obvious dreams of rejection. Manila envelopes full of my work being opened then thrown in the trash. Even asleep and inside the dream, it all felt too long and too boring, but still the sting of rejection felt real.

I pick up Jasper’s heavy silver watch from the nightstand. Three twenty-seven. I shut my eyes tight in hopes that I’ll fall back to sleep. I try to focus on the sound of the rain hitting the roof. It’s no use. My body is tense and wide awake. I kick off Jasper’s quilt and pad quietly into the living room. The door to Jasper’s darkroom is shut tight, so I knock to be sure it’s safe to enter. Immediately the handle clicks in response and Jasper ushers me inside.

“What are you working on?”

“I thought I’d develop the Las Cruces roll. I had an idea that I might do a river series next.”

He stirs the paper in the developing tray, and I watch the Rio Grande appear, snaking through a canyon, its surface glistening like wet tar.

“Wow,” I say. The image is breathtaking. I rest my elbows on the counter and watch him work.

His latest roll isn’t just his usual landscapes but portraits too. A closeup of weathered vaqueros; a group of Mormon teenagers sitting on haystacks. His subjects trust him. They allow him glimpses of who they are. They give and he takes, and they’re fine to walk away from one another afterward. Nobody worries that anyone will leave too soon.

“Do you like it?” Jasper asks, shaking chemicals from the image of a rodeo cowboy lying on the ground, his hat covering his face.

“I do.” It’s my favorite yet.

“Diana?”

“Yeah?”

He studies my expression. “You’re sexy when you’re worried.”

I smile. I’m sexy when I’m laughing. I’m sexy when I’m painting or driving or drinking a glass of water. I’ve never been with someone who found me so endlessly sexy. These past couple days, I’ve been down—the combination of not getting the grant, the stress of money, and my sadness over Alicia leaving has had me in a kind of freeze when it comes to making anything. But inside Jasper’s darkroom, the outside world is far away. He lifts my chin so I can’t avoid his brown eyes. My body melts almost immediately. “I’m really, really worried,” I whisper. He kisses me gently until I can’t help but smile.

“I have something for you.” From the developing tray behind him, he pulls out another photo, this one of my unfinished Clea piece.

“I didn’t know you took this.”

He hangs it to dry and we both stand back, letting our eyes focus in the dim light and bring the painting into sharper focus. “I thought maybe seeing it like this, with a kind of distance, might help you figure out how to finish.” He’s right. Even in the dim light, I can see the roses are too much the focus, and the man’s expression is too stiff.

“Thank you.” I wrap my arms around his waist and nuzzle into his warm chest.

I love and hate that my body is so constantly ready for him. The immediate sensation between my legs. Sometimes a throbbing. It’s become an expected physiological reaction, like shivering in the snow.

Jasper lifts my chin and gives me an easy smile. “Are you tired?”

When I tell him, “not at all,” he replies, “I don’t think I’ve ever made love in here.”

The darkness makes me think of outer space. I show my eagerness by pulling him tighter against me. Then I move my hands to the front of his pants, unzipping them slowly and slipping my hands inside. He groans, soft and low, in my ear. Then in one quick move he lifts me up and holds my legs around his waist. He turns us in a circle and sets me down on the counter. His turn to undress me. He pulls down my pajama shorts, slowly. For a second I feel embarrassed, wishing I’d worn prettier underwear, something with lace as opposed to faded cotton. But now he’s moving his hands so slowly, so deliberately, that I almost grab the underwear and pull them off for him. But he leaves them on. I feel myself get wet. I want him inside me.

But he makes me wait, as if we have all the time in the world. He fingers the edges of my T-shirt. He slips it off and kisses my breasts. Then his lips move down my bare stomach, slowly, all the way toward my hips. He presses his hands against the fabric of my underwear. Igrab his hand, I need him to touch me. I lead his fingers toward my wetness and he smiles, aroused by my desire. He stands and undresses me completely. Then he hitches my hips farther back on the counter.

He kneels in front of me. I inhale in anticipation. He dips his head between my legs. He kisses my inner thighs, lightly, and I run my fingers through his hair, careful not to grip too tightly. His tongue makes slow circles inside me. He sucks on me and the pleasure is so intense I think I might break open right here in his darkroom. A wave of desire runs through me and he lifts his head. He kisses my stomach again as he slips his fingers inside me, moving with more urgency. I take my hands from his hair, afraid I really will pull too hard. Instead I hold the edge of the counter. And when his mouth is on me again, sucking, I’m gone. I’m not here, I’m not in the room. I throw my head back and moan as I come. Jasper lifts his head and kisses me again, this time all the way up to my neck as I try to catch my breath.