even said those words to her, to which she replied, “Kissing is art. So is fucking. You need to fuck me.”
She opened her legs and pulled me in, and it did feel like art. It felt like magic too. And religion. And eternity. And even though I was inside her, I could feel her inside me too.
After we made love, October turned on the room’s old clock radio to a station that played mellow classic rock, and the crackly static of terrestrial broadcasting made the music sound even more mawkish than it already was.
We lay in bed, talking, listening, and laughing at everything.
We laughed at the things we saw in the paintings on the wall above the recliners. One was a painting of a mountain range, but I saw a menacing Jesus and October saw a goat man.
“What’s a goat man?”
“A man who is half human and half goat, obviously.”
We laughed.
The other painting was of a wave about to crash onto a beach, and we both swore we saw the wave moving in slow motion, both thought that once it broke onto the shore the recliner was going to get all wet.
Hilarious.
We laughed about the man at the cafe in Willits who used to be a lobster, and how his story all of a sudden seemed plausible.
We got hungry and ate the miniature lemon pie with our hands. I couldn’t stop laughing about how good it tasted, and October laughed at me laughing.
We even had a conversation about Cal and the predicament we found ourselves in. On our foggy, drug-induced ride, we both professed our unending love for Cal and came to the conclusion that if he loved us back he would want us to be together.
“We need to tell him,” October said. “Tomorrow.”
I nodded and agreed because at the time it made sense—but so did the idea of a man who was once a lobster.
We kept floating into outer space on the songs, and then we’d come back to Earth, laugh at something else, and float away again.
“You know what I could really go for right now?” I said after I finished the pie.
“A beer.”
I nodded.
“Told you.”
We laughed.
Almost two hours later we thought we were coming down from the high, only to have another wave hit us. I wanted to be inside October again; she was warm and slippery, and my body was so sensitive I almost had to pull out. But then I lost myself in a vision of us being ancient Egyptians, fucking deep in a pyramid, surrounded by torches, and after I came I was so tired I wasn’t sure if we’d just had sex or if I’d hallucinated it.
Minutes later, as I teetered on the edge of sleep, October gasped and said, “Joe!”
I half opened my eyes, but they wouldn’t stay that way; words wouldn’t come, and I groaned so she knew I was listening.
“I forgot to draw you!”
The radio was playing an old Elton John song, but the last sound I remember hearing before I drifted off into dreamland was the sound of us laughing again.
When I woke up, October was still asleep and I was hungry. I took a quick shower and went to the lobby for the free continental breakfast. The same lady who checked us in the night before was there, wearing a blue short-sleeved shirt with little American flags all over it. She barked “good morning” through a raspy smoker’s cough and handed me a tray.
I wasn’t sure what October would want to eat, and I piled the tray with random options—two little boxes of cereal, milk, a banana, a cherry Danish, a bagel, two packets of peanut butter, a handful of bacon that I scarfed down on the way back to the room, and two cups of coffee with half-and-half.
My head was all messed up, and I didn’t know how I was supposed to act. At first I felt light and alive, still coasting on the euphoria of the night we’d had. But then I made the mistake of looking at my phone while I waited for the bagel to toast. I had a text from Cal that said: How are things? How’s my girl?
Kill me now, I thought. I was reprehensible, and I wished for bolt of lightning to strike me dead so that I didn’t have to face the consequences of what I’d done.
October was in the shower when I got back. I sat on one of the recliners, drank my coffee, ate a banana, and considered