"You need a ride?"
I didn't need a ride, and they knew that—I was less than five minutes from my apartment, in fact. And while I was cold and exhausted after trudging the half hour from my job in the freezing Maine night, I hesitated. This, after all was deeply unexpected—and, I realized as I stood stock-still and stared into the cheap blue car—not without danger.
Inside the car were two women. Jennifer and Christine. I'd fucked them both.
My life was a mess, that's the short answer. Expanding a bit—left by the love of my life, alcohol, and a rapidly decreasing interest in my own well-being. And the internet, of course. Jennifer was first, of the two of them and of my late night online trawling. She was a night nurse at an old age home, and was morbidly overweight. We talked about that, and about what we were looking to get from each other. After a week, I drove to her apartment in the middle of the day. She was fat, enormously so, with pale, stretched skin and long, curly, crispy hair framing her large, sad face. She sat on her couch in her tiny apartment and drew me down next to her. We kissed hard and long, my hands finding her breasts and her sex under the loose garment she'd draped over herself. When she led me to her bedroom, she disrobed and spread herself out before me. She said, "You can do anything you want to me," and closed her eyes. And so I did. I left soon after.
Christine came later—some six months so. There had been several women since—met the same way, not lasting beyond the one, negotiated encounter. I was taken aback when, in the course of our communication, it turned out she knew Jennifer. They'd been roommates, in fact, a year before. Jennifer had confessed that she'd had a roommate with whom she'd occasionally take to bed alongside a man they'd pick up—I assumed that was Christine. Jennifer had, worryingly, come to my workplace once since our afternoon, bearing a mix CD she'd made for me. I thanked her but never listened to it—she didn't come back. So paranoia suggested all manner of nefarious possibilities, But then I remembered that I didn't care what happened to me anymore, and I arranged to meet her.
Another small, neat apartment. Another fat girl (although not so large as Jennifer). Another night of reckless, impersonal fucking with someone who, like me, was looking for physical connection, no matter how illusory. She had health problems, and permanent dark rings under her small, blue eyes, and lank blonde hair. She smelled like soap and sweat and, after our first rough coupling she immediately took me in her mouth and begged me to tie her up as soon as she coaxed my cock back to life. And so I did. I left in the morning after she pulled me on top of her pale, full body again and slipped my morning erection inside her.
That was a month before. And now they were here, together, beckoning me into a car on a dark Portland street nearing midnight. Recognizing them, I looked from one face to the other. I tried to read their eyes and couldn't. I thought briefly about what could happen to me if I got in that car and calculated how many things could go very badly for me. I thought it was possible I could die.
And so I got in the car.
I sat in the back seat next to Jennifer without a word. When the door slammed shut, I suddenly felt myself sink into something like torpor in the heat, and the contained aroma. The car smelled like shampoo, and body wash, and cigarettes. When Jennifer leaned in close, I smelled he fruity tang of alcohol, too. She looked into my eyes, her mouth open in a slightly glazed smile and said, "Hello..." I looked into her eyes, feeling my own inexplicably heavy, and said, "Hello, Jennifer. Hello, Christine" in a noncommittal, affectless voice I didn't quite recognize. Jennifer's eyes shifted away at the sound, just for a moment. And then she kissed me hard, thrusting her fragrant tongue into my mouth.
She smelled sweet and fragrant, the cigarettes and booze on her breath making me dizzy as I felt myself sink deeper into the car's sprung seat. At one point I glanced ahead and saw Christine, who hadn't spoken, watching us in the rear-view mirror. I couldn't read her eyes any better now than before and allowed myself to be pulled back to the attentions of Jennifer's thick, nimble tongue. We drove on for a while—I didn't bother to identify where we were going, giving myself over to the abundant embrace of the woman in the backseat.
I closed my eyes and allowed her tongue, and her insistent hands, to explore me at will, only breaking out of my fugue state when I heard the crunch of tires and the car slow to a stop. I opened my eyes to see Jennifer smiling at me. She kissed me once more, then hove her bulk with effort from the car door, letting in both a blast of frigid air—and Christine, who took Jennifer's place and, wordless and smiling, pressed her face to mine. I said nothing and took her tongue into my mouth, tasting the slight variation in the taste of her as she kissed me. Jennifer drove us into the night.
When we finally stopped, it wasn't, as I'd imagined, at Christine's house (which was closest). Nor Jennifer's for that matter. It was a small white house in a neighborhood I didn't recognize, and which was silent and lonely in the now howling snow. Some of the initial anxiety tried to crowd into my mind then—but it felt distant, and feeble. Someone else's. Christine, too, smiled and kissed me once more, and then exited the car. Jennifer followed, shutting the driver's door behind her. I sat and listened to the wind rock the tinny little car and the heavy snow whap its sides. I watched the snowflakes spatter wetly on the windshield until it was nearly fully covered. Then I grabbed my backpack and stepped out of the car.
