Old Sheets

Hudson Wilding

After I told J.D. that Martha Lassiter was dead, all I could think about was Martha's son, Eddie. More specifically, all I could think about was Eddie's dick.

I thought about it as I groped for the blanket I'd kicked off in the middle of the night, as I poured milk into my breakfast tea, and as I picked my favorite bra out of the dirty laundry pile, gave it a cursory sniff, and put it on.

I thought about how Eddie’s dick curved a little to the left when he was aroused, how he made these throaty sounds when I licked it, and how it was probably all shrunken up and neglected between his legs as he sat at home drinking from a half-empty bottle of Jameson at eight a.m.

The thought made me hopelessly, repulsively aroused.

As I got ready to see Eddie, J.D. kept asking if there was anything he could do to help me prepare for my reunion, since he and I had been in bed together the night before when Eddie had called me up, drunk and rambling, to ask me to come see him. I kept telling J.D. I was fine, but when I came through the kitchen on my way out, a full breakfast spread was waiting for me.

“You have to put on your own oxygen mask first,” he said as I hesitated in the doorway. This was the kind of conversation that resulted from dating another twenty-something who'd had nearly as much therapy as me: we spoke in the same trite counselor clichés.

“This isn’t a plane crash,” I replied, begrudgingly sitting down to take a bite of burnt toast.

“You shouldn’t feel obligated to be there for people who have never been there for you.”

As if it were that cut-and-dried. There was no point in reminding J.D. that the Lassiters had been there for me. They’d fed my mother and me when we could barely scrape by on food stamps and gave us a place to stay after we'd been evicted when I was seventeen. To J.D., that all got erased by what had come later—by the way the Lassiters, along with the rest of my community, had shunned me when I’d left the Jehovah’s Witnesses after a crisis of faith.

As I shoveled in J.D.’s runny scrambled eggs, he nodded to the plastic Walmart sack at my feet. “What’s that?”

I didn’t even glance down. “Old sheets.”

“Old sheets?"

“For Goodwill. Keep forgetting to put them in the car.”

He reached out and put his hand over mine. As his hazel eyes swept over me, his brow furrowed slightly. It seemed he was just now registering what I was wearing: an old button-down flannel that had belonged to my father ages before and some bleach-stained denim.

“Is this a signature look from 2014?” he asked.

I didn’t want to answer him. I’d spent my years in art school perfecting a sleek black wardrobe befitting a promising young painter, but to wear anything more formal than a flannel and jeans to go see Eddie would’ve felt like I was showing off how much I’d changed.

While J.D.      was still assessing me, I cleared my throat and rose. "Well, I should go.”

He smiled so that his eyes crinkled—he always looked handsome when he did that—and squeezed my hand. “Well, if you need me, you know I’m here for you.”

I smiled back and said, “Thanks,” as I thought, I’m going to cheat on you before the day is over.

Sometimes my own disloyalty surprised me.

…

Eddie was opening the front door by the time I got out of my car. Wearing a Bright Eyes hoodie and badly wrinkled forest green pants, he didn’t look all that different than he had the last time I’d seen him, half a decade before. Then I moved closer and saw the dark circles rimming his eyes and how blotchy his skin had become.

“God, you look terrible,” I said. It should’ve been the truth, but Eddie was never more attractive than when he was at his most vulnerable. Sometimes, I got off just imagining him crying. After an earth-shattering orgasm, I worried about whether that was pathological, but I rarely thought about it before one.

As soon as I reached the top step, he enveloped me in a stiff embrace. His biceps made me think of the inside of a blood pressure cuff just starting to tighten, leaving me with a heady, suffocating feeling.

“I’ve missed you,” he said, his breath warm on my neck.

We’d never talked to each other like that growing up. As Witness kids, any friendship with the opposite sex was tightly chaperoned, and we’d taken to sharing coded speech full of biting jabs to get our real meaning across. Plain words were always saved for the people we had little interest in.

As he moved back, an awkward silence settled between us. His neck and ears turned red as he wiped his hand under his nose. How foolish I’d been, imagining this would be easy. That we’d just fall into bed with no words spoken, picking up where we’d left off. The only thing that hadn't changed between us was my physical attraction to him. He was twenty-nine now, but with the same two canines that had always bucked a little forward because his parents hadn't been able to afford braces, the same skeptical arch to his eyebrows that made everything he said seem a little sardonic, the same voice like wax melting against your skin.

“Jesus, Amie,” he said, “you keep looking at me like that, I’m going to wonder why the hell I called you.”

Some of the tension released from my shoulders. He never swore until he was at least a few shots in. “You were drunk, Eddie. That’s why.” I took a step forward. “Anyone else here?”

He moved aside so I could come in. "Wife's in California."

I decided not to ask why or for how long. It didn’t strike me as my business. As hard as I tried, I could never really think of his wife as anything other than hypothetical. I stepped inside. Everything looked like a knock-off from a spread in Better Homes & Gardens. The throw pillows, cheap but puffed and in place, the throw blankets artfully arranged to simulate nonchalance, not a speck of dust. It was depressing to contemplate.

I started to pull off my flannel and Eddie moved behind to help me, his hands brushing over my skin as I slid out of the sleeves. A touch like that—soft, tender—was misleading coming from him. He had never been a gentle lover, not even close. I wished he’d quit pretending and do what he wanted.

I turned to hand him the shirt and caught a flicker of sadness in his face before he pasted on a smile. That made me feel awful. He looked more tired than I’d ever seen him.

Moving towards the bar, he asked, “You want a drink?” Already, he was unscrewing the top from a bottle of Jameson.

"It's nine forty in the morning," I pointed out. "Maybe we should start with breakfast instead."

“Does it still count as morning if I never went to bed?"

I gestured to the couch. “Sit down.”

My hands started to prickle with sweat as I opened the doors of the bar cart and looked in. Ages before, Eddie and I had concocted a drink we christened the Nassau Steamroller, for reasons I'd long since forgotten. It was made up of cherry-flavored Pepsi, milk, amaretto, and whiskey. We drank it whenever we were alone together, enjoying it all the more for how ridiculous it tasted now that we were grown. I hadn’t thought of it in ages, but as I took stock of his liquor cabinet, I realized he might not have any of the ingredients anymore.

Eddie rose from the couch. “Up,” he said as he disappeared into the other room.

Up? I thought. Then I realized all the ingredients were already on top of the drink cart. I had no idea how I’d missed them.

When he returned, he had a gallon of cold milk. I noted that he wasn't wearing his gold wedding band when he handed it to me, but I didn’t comment on that.

The Steamrollers were done in a minute, and we both sat.

He put down his drink after a single sip. “I’m already a few in,” he said. “My head’s all cloudy from it.”

I savored the burn in my chest. “You could be tripping acid and I wouldn’t mind, as long as you don’t invite me to any upcoming Sunday talks.”

Eddie seemed to deliberate over something. “I’m not in much of a position to try to bring you back to the fold.”

“Caught watching R-rated movies again?”

His mouth jerked into a small, pained smile. “Something like that.”

I looked at him, but he evaded my gaze. When we were still teenagers, there’d been one night right after his father had left the religion when he’d texted me drunk and I’d become concerned enough to drive over. I’d found him up on the roof with a bottle of Svedka, tearing pages out of his Bible. We’d spent the rest of the night sneaking around the neighborhood, collecting loose pages of The New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures that the wind had carried away, afraid of what might happen if someone else found them. We never spoke about it again after that night, but I always remembered it. Our old partnership in sacrilege.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He gave me a long looking-over. “You still living in sin?” 

“That could mean about a million different things.”

“With that guy.”

“Funny how the only thing you want to know about my life is who I’m fucking,” I said.

“That isn’t true.”

“What do I do for work?”

“You’re an art therapist.”

I frowned. “I never told you that.”

“No.” He took another sip. “You didn’t.”

I tried to picture him after work some night, typing my name into the goddamn search bar to read my career profile. I couldn’t see it.

“You know, Mom always believed you’d come back. But I knew you wouldn’t. You’re more stubborn than the Devil himself.” He ran a thumb over his eyebrow. “I always knew I’d have to be the one to budge.”

I frowned. “Are you leaving, then?"

He took another sip of his drink. When he spoke again, his voice was small. "You already know the answer to that."

I wanted to point out the ridiculousness of his hypocrisy, claiming to adhere to a faith when, in secret, he broke all its most important tenets. But I already knew his reasons. The nieces and nephews he'd never get to see again if he left. The uncle who would fire him from the family business, the lack of real connections outside the religion to help him start a new career.

“Let’s not talk about it.” He leaned forward and rubbed his eyes, looking down at the sheets. “That’s not really why you’re here, anyway, is it?”

“I’m here because you called,” I said. Because that’s all it ever took: a single phone call, and here I was again, every single time he got drunk and vulnerable and decided to break the rules.

When he spoke again, his voice was soft, and he was still looking at the sheets. “What if we didn’t use them?” he asked. “Just this once.”

I opened my mouth, but at first, no words came out. “Is that what you want?”

“Would it be so terrible?”

I tried to imagine it. Fucking him like we were any other couple. Seeing all his expressions as it happened, taking in his entire bare body at once, not just pieces of it slipped out from under the sheets. What would it be like, to let him kiss me? To let him see me, completely? Even thinking about it was too overwhelming to contemplate.

He sighed and reached for the bag, taking the fabric out and unfolding it without another word, as if my silence were an answer. I finished my drink and set it down on the coffee table. When I turned back to him, he was already huddled beneath his sheet, looking at me through the two cut-out eyeholes. He looked just as ridiculous as he had when we were kids, breaking all the rules to dress up as ghosts in the attic while Martha Lassiter left us unsupervised after another Xanax-and-vodka cocktail.

…

Sex with Eddie was always good because he was selfish, which, for some inexplicable reason, never failed to make me come. He didn’t hesitate to push my face into the mattress with his hand, to rut his hips into mine, to finish when he felt like it, without asking, a million times, Did you come?

He knew how to have sex the way I wanted it: not searching for intimacy, but for self-destructive pleasure.

That was something someone like J.D. could never understand. To him, every kiss was supposed to be accompanied by harps and candlelight. For me, it was more like scratching an itch, all the more delicious because I knew it was bad for me.

Once I'd shrouded myself in my own sheet, fixing the eyeholes so I could make out slices of the room, Eddie reached over and pulled me onto his lap, facing him but still hidden safely away. Within moments, I was already starting to feel the heat of my breath collecting beneath the threadbare fabric, making me lightheaded. It didn't matter if I suffocated. As his hands moved up under the sheet and over my clothes, searching for the opening between my shirt and jeans, nothing else mattered at all but his touch.

...

Eddie and I lay on the living room carpet after we'd fucked, each of us shrouded in damp and sticky sheets. He had one hand on my neck, slowly caressing it. His fingers hesitated over the scar tissue there.

"Surgery," I said, answering his unasked question. "About a year ago, now, I guess. A tumor was pressing against my vocal cords."

"Oh," he said, very softly.

I waited for him to say something else, but he didn't. I almost told him how many times I'd picked up the phone to call him before the surgery. Scared of death. Aching for some sense of closure with him.

“I told my boyfriend that your mother just died," I said instead.

Martha had been dead for going on two years now. An overdose.

"I couldn't figure out another excuse," I explained. "It's not often I get a drunken voicemail from a guy he's never heard of."

Eddie didn’t reply at first. He blinked at me from behind the eyeholes of his sheet, then rolled over onto his back. “I understand."

“What did you do this time?” I asked carefully, thinking about his cryptic confession the night before on the phone, implying he'd fucked up again.

He exhaled sharply, the sheet lifting away from his mouth in a small billow. “I did a lot of things.”

“Do you think they're going to disfellowship you?"

“I don't know," he said. "If it had been the first time I got caught, probably not, but now it’s a pattern of behavior.” He was quiet for a long time. “She looked like you, for the record. The girl I was messing around with this time. She had your nose. Your cheeks.”

My skin flushed with heat as I met his gaze. It was such a dirty thing to admit, yet I wanted him to tell me more. I wanted to imagine him in the back seat of some car with a stranger, calling her by my name as he pulled her hair and bit her shoulder.

“What do you expect me to say to something like that?” I asked.

“Nothing, I guess.”

I didn’t respond. I wasn’t sure how to comfort somebody in the midst of something like that. I hadn't stuck around to answer to the congregation elders once I'd decided to break the rules. I'd just walked away. 

“Sometimes it amazes me,” I said eventually. “How different our lives turned out.”

He sat up and reached for his discarded jeans, wriggling back into them and pulling off the sheet. He wouldn’t meet my eye.

“Our lives don’t seem all that different to me,” he said.

…

I had one ritual with Eddie that he knew nothing about: stopping at the laundromat on the way home from each of our clandestine meetings, even now that I lived in a place with its own washer and dryer.

After seeing him, I needed the anonymity of a public laundromat, how it always felt so liminal, as if all of them existed outside of time.

I needed the gentle whir of machines around me and the bittersweet pleasure of inhaling his scent one last time as I put the sheets in the washer, knowing all evidence of our connection was about to slip down the drain, unknown to anyone but us.

…

When I got home that night, J.D. was rewatching an episode of The Twilight Zone on the couch. His dark, curly hair was still dripping from the shower, and he wore the old, oversized t-shirt I’d gotten him when we’d gone to Amsterdam to see his favorite band a year before.

Lingering near the doorway for a few minutes, I couldn’t decide whether I should stay to watch TV with him or go to bed. The room smelled faintly of weed and the leftover macaroni and cheese I’d made us for dinner the night before. It was all strangely comforting, the banality of the scene. I could almost forget where I’d just been, what I’d just been doing.

I finally decided to sit down beside him. He looked at me for a moment before reaching out a hesitant hand. I thought he was going to put his arm around me, but instead he picked a small piece of lint from my hair. He stared at it for a moment, then at me. I waited for an accusation. I ached for it. But he just turned back to the television and said nothing at all.

Bio

Hudson Wilding is an ex-Jehovah's Witness currently working for an education not-for-profit. Her work has been published in Menacing Hedge, The Dread Machine, and Not One of Us, among other literary journals. You can follow her on Twitter @HudsonWilding.