Chuck Maclean
Lips

As they pushed their way onto the Red Line, Charlie instinctively knew she was trying to miss her 9.20 bus at South Station. He could feel it like a premonition in the tightening of the space between his shoulder blades, the way the sound travelled up his spine when her Converse started to drag across the frost-bound platform at JFK—the right foot bent in, wearing a clean spot on the rubber toe. She had managed to stay an arm's length behind him, all through the station, so he'd have to wait for her every ten feet, watching while the crowd squeezed them out of a place on the T.

The door buzzer started to sound. She looked to him hopefully. But Charlie got them on the train anyway. The doors shut. And now they stood two feet apart in the middle of the car, trying, with the subway rumbling under Boston, not to touch one another. She said goodbye in her own way that morning and it wasn't allowed anymore.

"You remember your pills?" he asked.

"Yeah, I got my pills," she said, flatly.

The train swept them under ground, and after a moment of darkness, the running lights kicked on. He could see the Girl's eyes were down, avoiding his, focused on plucking the plastic stopper on her Dunkin Donuts with her short index finger with the bitten-off nails. The twang, twang, twang was the only sound in the morning car save for the screeching of the wheels on the frozen tracks. Her jaw muscles, underneath that alabaster skin, tightening to the rhythm of her plucking. Twang, twang, twang. Her face was soft, smooth—like the pulled-tight satin on the edge of a child's blanket. It didn't have the classical-cut features of the Girl with the High Cheek Bones, but for a time Charlie thought it was a face he could wake up to forever. His friends had called her gorgeous.

She was three years older than him, this Girl, which seemed important to him at 21—that three years being more than a tenth of his life, and hers. He had calculated six years separating the time in which they lost their respective virginities. Those years between them added a sense of the unknowable to the Girl. Things he'd never know. About her. About the men she knew. Things she had done, had learned.Things he'd no longer care about after 9.20, but at one time had irked him in his comparative ignorance. But it was that secret knowledge that made him feel comfortable with her—made her seeming knowing—as she eased him out of his Catholic guilt and propriety. It was that knowing that gave him the will, having grown up in a place poisoned by Blue Laws, to kiss down the parallel muscles of her spine and penetrate her ass with his tongue. He'd watched the backs of her velveteen thighs contract with her moans and it had nearly split his consciousness, to the point that he tried to shove himself in there immediately. "Nut-unh," she grinned, looking over her shoulder, coyly. "Just because you ate it doesn't mean you get to do that yet." She would ease herself into that later.

In the subway car, even with the distance between them, Charlie could smell her hair—a solid cord of thick, black Italian rope wrapped around the crevice of her neck like a scarf. It was too thick, too long, for her to bother washing on a two day trip up to Boston, and now it smelled—not bad, but in a human way, like warmth. It was only a slight hint at the distance between them, but the raw humanness of it was enough to remind him of the smell his mother would leave on her Harvard sweatshirt—not that anyone in his family ever went to Harvard—that he'd wear to hockey practice before he was big enough for a jersey. He'd skate around the ice, smelling his mother on the shirt and felt warm.

He watched the Girl flick her eyes at him on the train, their light green balanced against the china-white of her face and the dark hair of her long bangs. She looked away from him, as if embarrassed, and a pain stirred deep in him, a starving sensation—a question in the pit of his stomach. A feeling like a man laying down cash for something he knows he can't quite afford. Am I fucking up here? Two days before the Girl had arrived, Charlie had run into his Ex by Mass General, in the neighborhood where the Ex lived, and where he'd always remember separating the bones in his knuckles by punching the brick outside her apartment like he could knock down the whole West End like Mayor Hynes did in the 50s. His hand was purple for a week. Once the swelling went down, he'd sit in class listening to torts, pushing the floating bone chip between the middle and third knuckle of his right hand. Charlie'd told the Ex what had happened with the Girl. Why he'd left her. "She know you too well?" he thought the Ex had asked. So, he explained how the Girl with the High Cheek Bones was interested, how the Girl with the High Cheek Bones had respect for herself, how she'd never come up to Boston to stay with an Ex-Boyfriend just to see Springsteen at the Garden. It was all said in an effort to show his Ex how calloused he'd become since she'd left him. The Ex just shook her head. "You know," she said, "if you could just be vulnerable, you'd probably be a pretty decent guy." Then she forced a polite smile and walked away. He had no idea what she meant.

Charlie looked at the time on his phone in the subway: 9.05. The Girl would just make her bus, if the T could only get through Southie. Like she could sense his relief, her eyes met his, and she tried to keep her gaze level with the rhythm of the train—like she were trying to push something through the space between them, some sense of knowing/understanding. Charlie understood, and he looked away, aimlessly following the lines of her face down to the crevice above her lips, deep enough to lay his pinky between.

He considered her lips. Full. Wide. Dull pink. They were always plump. She never smiled showing her teeth, He'd heard, in one of the early 90s sexual thrillers he'd found buried in his parents' VHS collection—the type of tapes with three titles Sharpied onto the label, with shows taped off the TV during a free trial of HBO some whenever ago—that there was an old wives' tale about a woman's lips betraying the shape of her labia. Charlie remembered the first time he buried his face below her belly button, discovering the meaty lips and sucking them away from her body. The myth was true, at least in his comparative ignorance, and he tried to think back to all the other girls he'd eaten—and whether or not they had thin lips to match what they had.

The Girl had come quickly that first time. She was almost surprised by it—he was three years younger. And when she pulled him on top her, she yanked off his condom and asked him to choke her while he entered. Charlie paused mid-motion, inside her. It was his bullshit Boston tough-guy stance, when other guys were trying to posture, to tell how much he liked choking people—choke them until they stopped hitting back. The other guys would stop trying to be so tough after that.

The Girl saw his apprehension and casually explained, "It's too good to waste being bashful about." So, he'd wrapped his right hand around her throat, thumb feeling for her pulse, and squeezed—gently. She gasped, and when her face started to turn red, she thrust her pelvis up into him in a giving rhythm he'd never felt before. He had to quickly pull out, and came on the smooth rise around her belly button. "See," she said between breaths. "Nothing to be afraid of."

The subway screamed through South Boston, and the Girl pushed the corner of her mouth up sadly, still trying to hold his eyes. Charlie could feel the doubt in his guts like coffee on an empty stomach, and he moved to speak—until he saw something peeking out from the shadow in the corner of her mouth, like a dried-out clitoris at the top of a labia. A sore.

"What?" the Girl asked, watching Charlie's eyes cloud. His eyes were green like hers, and she'd seen them turn black, without an absence of light, once. He'd been angry. He'd revealed to her that if she ever wanted to get at him, to call him 'white trash'. And she told him he was—over and over again—him just sitting there on the hotel bed, watching her go off at the mouth. As loud as she screamed, all he did was stare at her with those wide open black eyes. Eyes that were staring at her now, pupils widening.

"What's that thing in the corner of your mouth?" he asked, quietly.

Confused, the Girl dug a compact out of her bag and spread the corners of her mouth wide apart. Her eyes sparked. She grinned, showing her crooked teeth again—one of the only times he could remember her doing that. "Oh my god," she giggled. "That would be incredible." And he could see from her perspective how it would be. And how he'd deserved that for all the bullshit he'd said and done. But all he managed to say was.

"You fucking bitch."

And as quickly as that came out, the Girl wasn't laughing anymore.

* * *

Charlie could never keep his hands off her, from the time they started dating. That satin skin. The knowing that he had the right to touch it, to touch this older woman. He could remember that yearning feeling of wanting to touch since he was a child, at swimming lessons at Morton Pond, and seeing the down on the edge of his swim teacher's bikini. The night the Girl got off the bus at South Station, Charlie pulled her close as they came through the door of his basement apartment. He waited for a sign to go further—whether he was allowed to still touch. But she just stared at him coldly, her bright eyes empty like snow-covered ponds, frozen all the way down. "You're a fucking idiot if you think that's happening." But he'd never stopped trying. And she never stopped asking about the Girl with the High Cheek Bones.

After the concert, back in the basement, Charlie thought back to what his Ex had told him days before. About vulnerability. He told the Girl that he honestly loved her—still loved her, always would, but it would never work with her living so far away on Long Island. The vulnerability worked.The Girl tried to put him in her mouth but he just laid her down like a gentleman and only let himself eat her. They fucked face to face after that, and he felt it, in her, when he wouldn't look away from her eyes. When she'd wound herself up with her hand between them, he buried himself deep inside her, and remembered how when he first remarked upon the thickness of her lips, she said he was lucky. "It adds to the sensation for a guy." And he ripped himself out and blew on the rise above her belly button.

"I do love you," he tried to explain. She just tried to put him in her mouth again after—as if Charlie were to let her, it'd prove something. That maybe if he let her, he hadn't slept with anyone else. It was as if the Girl thought he was a pretty good guy, and would never let her do a thing like that. He didn't. He just fucked her again.

They slept curled into each other, naked, under all the covers in the growing cold of November. The Girl was constantly whispering to herself about how he'd sweet-talked her and how she was dumb enough to listen. "If you think that was all bullshit," Charlie whispered, lips millimeters apart behind the slice of her ear, "you're a fucking idiot." The Girl only shook her head, and fell asleep—Charlie breathing the oil from deep in her hair, feeling the cold skin of her ass against his belly, like the satin on a child's blanket. What she said hurt because she didn't believe him. And it hurt cause she might've been right. But Charlie couldn't admit that to himself yet, cause he was a pretty good guy.

The next morning Charlie woke up with himself in her mouth. And he let her, knowing if he stopped her, she'd know what he'd done—that there were girls between the times they met. And he didn't want to explain. The Girl sucked him, waiting until she could feel, between the tiny fingers of her hands, the skin around his testicles contracting. She stopped then, and when he'd looked down at her, curious, she slapped him across the face. Lightning shot up from between the space between his shoulder blades, reverberating up his spine, tightening the muscles on either side of his neck like Frankenstein's bolts. "Fuck me," she dared. And he threw her down and came at her from behind.

"You better make me come before you go off, you piece of shit," she taunted. And his hands grasped firm around the wide spread of her ass, Charlie rammed himself deep into her, until he could feel her gumming the curve of his scrotum.

"I thought you loved me. Fuck me like you loved me," she called out, and he put it into her harder, until he thought he'd hurt her. But she only came, and when she was done, she laid there dead, grinning—until he finished on those parallel muscles above her waist.

"That was good," she said, "a good hate fuck to say goodbye."

Gasping, Charlie watched her slide off the bed, relieved, as if she'd proved something, won something. He watched her dig a bottle of fat black pills out of her purse. She'd been prescribed them when they started dating. She was prone to UTIs and was to take them after sex.

"You brought your pills?" he asked, like a goon.

"Yeah, I brought my pills."

"So, you knew we were going to fuck then?"

"What am I, a fucking idiot? Of course we were going to fuck." The Girl grinned, flashing her crooked teeth."We were going to fuck even without your loving me bullshit."

* * *

As the train neared South Station, Charlie stared at the sore in the corner of her mouth, and felt as if the Red Line were now bearing him into a future that was slowly disintegrating behind his back. He thought of the Girl with the High Cheek Bones. A nice Catholic girl. Clean. And how he deserved a nice girl because he was pretty good guy. He thought of that awkward conversation between them, him painfully trying to explain himself and her trying to draw it out of him quickly—like when he was eight years old trying to confess his impure thoughts to a too-eager priest. He thought of the hurt in the face of the Girl with the High Cheek Bones, and how quickly she'd leave him, like he were an unfinished cigarette in the gutter on Tremont Street—like a piece of smeared dog shit on the sidewalk you measure your steps to avoid. He could feel the judgment already, like he could feel the phantom germs racing across his genitals like fire ants.

He felt permanently scarred with dirt—like he was carrying a mark that proved he wasn't such a fucking pretty good guy.

"It's just a cut, Charlie." the Girl tried to explain.

But all that would come out of his mouth, like a chant, was:

"You bitch. you fuckin' bitch."

Charlie. "

"'That'd be incredible?'" he asked. And she tried to explain. But Charlie just dropped his voice and looked both ways, as if crossing the street, and finally whispered into her face.

"You cunt."

"South Station," over intercom of the subway car. The Girl's eyes darted to the sound of the voice, and back to him, softening suddenly, concerned.

"Charlie, it's a cut. It's cold out. My lips are dry."

"How do I know that?"

"It couldn't be anything else—I haven't been with anyone else. Have you?"

She finally asked the question. But Charlie just looked off, endlessly shaking his head to himself, like a man who changed his bet at the last minute and saw the first horse come in. The Girl stared at him, fevered, eyes wide, hurt. And the Red Line stopped.

"Charlie."

The subway doors sprung open.

"Charlie."

People pushed off the train. Others came on. But the Girl stood in the door of the subway car, staring at him, waiting, worried. Charlie just kept shaking his head.

"Please, don't let this be the last thing we say to each other." Charlie turned to face her. "You're gonna miss your bus."

And the Girl watched his eyes meet hers—his coal black eyes, unfeeling, like a body hauled out of the Mystic. She automatically stepped off the train, afraid, and watched him from the safety of the platform—her eyes were wide and vulnerable, beautiful in that creamy alabaster face with lips so gentle, only marred now by what she said was a cut. The Girl waited, hoping that he'd say one more thing.

But the doors closed. And Charlie said nothing. He watched her watch him through the scarred glass of the subway doors and the Red Line pulled away. Looking up at the doors themselves, he saw scrawled across the opening three words: "Fuck you, nigger."

And Charlie felt something collapse in him, and he knew now what those other boys felt when they heard how much he liked choking people—when they had to be alone with him, too.

_ _

Chuck MacLean is a shitbum from Quincy, Mass. He currently resides in Los Angeles. See also this January 2017 interview with him in New England Review of Books.

Back to Issue 20, 2017