Free Open by Lisa Moore Page A

expectancy. She had licked under his arm, and that cool trail he’d felt for days afterward, while washing dishes for his mother, dopey with the steam rising from the sink and the heat of the oven, or while lazing on the living-room carpet before Gilligan’s Island and Get Smart with the slippery velvet of the golden retriever’s ear in his fingers. The cheeks of her bum, breasts like saucers of snowflakes, smoky breath, the bitten-down fingernails with chipped blue polish. He’d held her arms over her head, both of her wrists in one hand. He’d lowered her bra with his teeth, uncovering a nipple so it peeked out from a crush of eyelet lace, and he could feel with his tongue the roughness of the cotton and the softness of just the very tip of the pink, pink nipple. When his tongue touched her there she squirmedagainst him. What a shock her mouth was. A hot, working muscle, a current, a force.
    After they had taken off each other’s clothes she went into the kitchen for a drink of water. They had a fridge with a door that made crushed ice, and it was the first time he’d seen one. It was super-modern, a reflective black that matched the other appliances. She held the glass under a spout in the door of the fridge and the machine growled and the glass filled with slush. She drank the whole glass and filled it again, stopping to grin at him, wiping a drip from her chin with the back of her hand. She was wearing a fat mood ring, and it was dark green, which meant, she said, that she was fuckable. He lifted her, taking a cheek of her bum in each of his hands, surprised by how light she was. Her legs wrapped over his hips and her back was pressed against the door of the fridge. With each thump they heard jars rattling, glass clinking; something smashed, the engine whirred, her hand slapped the black door three times. A Reddi-Kilowatt magnet scuttled along the gleaming surface to the floor.
    Rachel spilled the ice over his chest, it felt like flankers spat from a fire and a line of it glittered in their joined bellies, it dug into his thighs. It crunched in their pubic hair, and when he came it felt like his veins were running with blue antifreeze, so cold it made sweat spring to his forehead. He kissed her mussy hair. Her bum squeaked against the black door as he set her on her feet. Her mouth was cold from the water, like an igloo.
    She switched on a fluorescent light and they both began to giggle. The copper cooking pots hung over the stove in order of diminishing size, there was an Esso calendar with a picture ofa terrier, a red and white gingham apron tossed over the back of a pine chair, a box of Ritz crackers. Their nakedness boinged forward like something on a trampoline. Nothing in the room had been altered by their sex. The kitchen immured their glittering, star-struck bodies in a sheath of bland fluorescence without giving them a thought.
    The marmalade cat eyed Lyle through the kitchen doorway. She came into the room and raised her tail. She rubbed herself against the fridge, jutted her chin, and then crossed the black and white tiles to weld her static coat to Lyle’s bare calf. The street had turned a perfect, uncanny white. An errant draft raised goosebumps on Lyle’s arms. A rectitude stole over him with the chill. There was a sinister note in the freedom he felt in her parents’ kitchen. Rachel had been digging in the cupboard and had taken out a tin of chocolate chip cookies. She piled them on the counter and fit the lid back on the illustrated tin; it was the Norman Rockwell of a little girl with a pink bow in her hair and her drawers lowered for a spanking, ink hand prints on the wall behind her.
    Ravenous, Rachel said, her mouth filled with cookie.
    A paranoia shot through him, made his heart take off the way a cartoon heart, the Road Runner’s, might stretch through his brown fur and hang in the air while the rest of his spindly body fell miles and miles to the dusty earth. Lyle couldn’t get his