The Resort Affair

365 Days of Creativity

day sixty eight

He can’t give his heart to her, he traded it for silver.

In her veins is the blood of the man she couldn’t love.

"Damn it damn it damn it all.
You’re not supposed to be here. You’re not supposed to speak. I’m not allowed to love you, you might as well just leave.
So fuck it fuck it fuck it all.
I want to break your ribs. I want to eat your marrow and I want to learn to live.
It’s you, it’s me, it’s all of them. It’s this city and that town and the places I’ve been. It’s his voice that brings me back to you, and it’s your eyes that claw within."

The sun is drunk and the winds are high. The music stings with strings that break. The coffee girl snorts cocaine in the back while the barman serves liquid blow to men with faces that haven’t known razors in days. Women sip on drinks named after sexual positions while they remember the real ones they’ve done for men they once met in the hopes of keeping them around. But for all the open thighs and toe-touching the women now sit at a sopping bar with their elbow skin sticking and pulling to the surface while their lips still suck, but on a smaller, thinner poles of suicide.

It’s hot outside and the heat pours in waves like the tired pushes of a lover too-long on top. He walks with staggered steps, the shots of rum conquering him like the Leucochloridium Paradoxum that takes over a snail's mind, invading his limbs and eyes, forcing him to call attention to himself with his imitation of walking on a rocking boat. His blurred vision targets a lawn chair, and the sound of the piano player’s gravelly voice paves a path for him to the seat.

It’s two hours later.

The sun is lower, but still in command. It’s sobered up a bit, lessening the heat, and so has the man. He could walk straight now, but doesn’t. He likes the chair. It’s the perfect place between the bar and the rest of the pool deck, so all of the women have to walk in front of him to get their drinks. And they’re always getting drinks. The women go into the bar and he sees the tans. The golds and coppers and bronzes of skin pulled tight by scalpels and stitches, all burned and boiled, soaked in the sickening scent of coconut. The return trip is like a kaleidoscope. The vivid blues and radioactive greens, the warning-label oranges, and the pinks that could be blended barbies, all trapped within wide-brimmed crystal glasses with skinny stems that make the women look dainty and delicate like the dishes, no matter how fast they slam the frozen liquors back.

She sits across from him. The expanse of the salt-water pool stands as the barrier between them, a great lake of challenges and men on loungers with their wrists held upright so the rolex’s and country club rings don’t rot in the natural waters. She’s been here since before the 24 hour bar opened, this is the sixth Cuban she’s had in her mouth in the past two days, and the first cigar. Her lids lie heavy with fake lashes, barely leaving her room to observe him from across the pool. The sunglasses perched on her head just behind her boner-straight bangs cost more than her lifetime coffee supply, but less than her cocaine addiction. She powders her nose once every hour on the hour. Sometimes twice. Little piles, the smallest bumps that tickle her nasal chords and act like tiny little snorts of adrenaline. It’s due time for another speedbump, but the man has her attention. He hasn’t seen her past all of the metallic covered cottage cheese thighs. He won’t see the imperfections in the women, but she can spot them like red wine on white cotton. 

It’s time for a drink. She won’t touch fruit, and ice makes her throat dry up. You never know when you’ll be on your knees next and the most embarrassing thing when getting to know a man’s pride is not having the liquid to supply him with the joy. She orders a tequila that sounds like a type of motor oil. Her neck snaps back and forth and the glass sings a smack as it hits the counter.

This one, he notices, this one doesn’t add to his rainbow of calorie-filled pantie droppers. She cuts out the smoke and mirrors and heads straight for the hallway out of the fun house. Her thighs are smooth, not the well disguised ripple of the other bikinis. Her eyes under the shade of the cabana top look like two pits of tar, and damn if he didn’t love to get dirty. He felt himself shifting already, the booze in his blood made him brazened and bold, and he was beside her smoothly, or perhaps with a slight stutter to his step. His speech though, was impeccable. He said all the wrong things at all the wrong times, because that gave her a reason to correct him if she had the balls, or laugh if she got the joke. If she did neither, which most of them never did, he’d walk away. He wasn’t looking for love, and if he wanted to get laid he knew of many brothels that were cleaner than children’s hospitals and sexier than them too. They cost a lot less and took a lot less effort than fruity drinks and anorexically-veiled sexual repertoire.

She didn’t say anything. She simply stared from under the lashes that brimmed her peridot eyes like grass around a pond. Her lips were parted slightly, and her tongue played peek-a-boo, just subtly enough to almost make him think he was fantasizing it, but just sluttily enough that he didn’t care even if he was. She was brilliant and sharp and dangerous in all the ways your mother warned you about, and those she didn’t. You didn’t want to bring this woman home to mom, but you wanted to kill your mother so you could do whatever the fuck you wanted to this woman in every place you weren’t supposed to go.

Her pupils throbbed and pulsed while the man at the piano switched out for a woman whose words were like the moans that children’s ears get pressed to keyholes for. She watched him speak his lines of originality. His simple declarations of desperation. They would touch later, they would let the moon get stoned off the rocks of their body’s motions. The air would carry sounds and steams of their sex onto the ocean, and the salt of the waters would be replenished with the sweat off their skin. In a matter of a few hours, she would know him better than he knew himself. And then she would leave him. He wasn’t meant to be loved and she wasn’t meant to give it. They knew, oh they knew that they could have been happy, if only they weren’t anything like the people that they were, but instead they would be the best love affair the world ever had. And so he tested her like he tested all of them, but she couldn’t possibly fail if she didn’t give any answers. The only way to never win or lose is to never start the game at all.