When Jasper touches the tip of my nose with her tongue after we kiss, I know she’s serious. Sarita’s block party, Jasper says, a great time to get to know the neighbors over cocktails, these people we barely acknowledge on the street. A hinky affair, I think, but Jasper calls in a babysitter and we’re off.

It’s been two hours since we dropped by Sarita’s apartment, the rooms dim with candles and heady with sex, dark bodies moving in the corners. The whole time I’ve wanted to leave, and Jasper’s wanted to play.

“You worry too much, Ken.” Jasper’s thickish jaw works over a wad of gum as she talks, a powerful chewing, the muscle striation that I imagine I can follow all the way down her chest and into her heart. It’s been a year of trying, though, and I’m willing to spend more time, even to the point of this block party, even to this point of standing in Sarita’s bathroom with the hot water on, talking about Jasper fucking another guy.

“This is a big step.” It’s not as if we haven’t discussed it before, but the sight of Sarita’s bouncing breasts and brown nipples, her frizz of hair hung over into my golf buddy Paul’s face is raw and immutable fact, one I didn’t prepare for. It’s hard, for me to imagine myself here, let alone Jasper, queen of privacy, who’s already stripped to her panties in her drug-rush , beads of sweat running down her face and between her breasts.

“This’ll help.” Jasper reaches into her purse and hands me a largish white pill. Outside the door Sarita shrieks in ever-rising pitches. I swallow the pill with some fear, and she kisses my face all over, flicks the tip of my nose with her tongue in what is meant to be a ritual of calming. Except she’s, we've, never done this before. Billows of steam rise from the sink and surround us in warmth. It’s how I imagine a womb might feel, the sound of the water a tiny spit of rain in a great ocean of potential. We are there in the steam for a long time before we are joined by Sarita and Paul, looking for a shower, looking for us.

The way it is scripted, Jasper grasps Paul by the hand and pulls him toward her. Sarita does the same with me. The faucet is off but the seals need replacing, and each driplet echoes over the slick rasp of skin of skin. At one point we are on our knees, Sarita and I, like statuary at the feet of the Virgin, rubbing Jasper’s thighs and behind with our wondrous, wonder-bound hands as Paul, my golfing buddy, ministers to Jasper, his hand at the dark thatch between her legs, both of them, all of us, awash in pleasure.

The way it goes, Sarita abandons pretense and buries her head in Jasper’s crotch, pushing Paul aside and I am left dripping and limp yet with a rush of heat in my groin. I watch the pulse of muscle at Jasper’s throat, the throb of Paul’s penis waving about in front of me, and wondering what, exactly, that it is about the sound of water on porcelain that is so lonely, as Jasper cries out, again and again.

####

Rusty Barnes lives in Boston with his wife, two children, sister-in-law, cat, and 10,000 books.

His work has appeared most recently in the InPosse Review,with stories, poems and essays forthcoming in Buzzwords UK, Columbia: A Journal of the Arts, and Praxis.

You can reach him at rustybarnes23@yahoo.