It Feels So Good When I Stop Read Online Free

wouldn’t lose his security deposit. Richie suggested I put the poster back up when it was time for me to move out.
    Gary also left behind a twin mattress because it had been there when he moved in. Perfectly acceptable shit-pit protocol: New Guy inherits Old Guy’s cast-offs, milks them for use, and leaves them behind for Next Guy. I removed the gray fitted sheet. The mattress fabric was stained so extensively, it looked like a batik tapestry hippie girls hang on their dorm walls. I flipped it over, and it wasn’t as bad. That was the side I slept on.
    The bathroom was a dewy terrarium of unplanned growth, and Richie’s room looked like the inside of a fourth-hand customized van he wasn’t planning on selling anytime soon.
    We hung out mostly in the kitchen because it was more spacious than the other rooms combined. It was connected to the rest of the apartment by a dark, lumpy hallway the length of a landing strip at an international airport. My rent was two-fifty plus utilities. I couldn’t see myself being able to afford it for too long.
    The property manager was a guy named Arn who had lived in Amherst most of his fifty-odd years. Arn was marginally sexier than Ernest Borgnine. His family had come over from the Ukraine when he was a kid, but he still spoke with a heavy accent. He lived alone in the casket-sized apartment someone with a flare for architectural discontinuity had added to the first floor.
    “Let’s see if Geppetto wants a hit,” Richie said. We were standing on the failing back porch, getting clobbered by purple-haired bong hits. Richie yelled down to the garage where Arn was working on fuck-knows-what. (He definitely wasn’t milling new crown molding.) A circular saw went mute. Arn’s bloodshot nose—followed by the rest of his bloodshot face—appeared in the garage doorway. Richie hoisted an imaginary broomstick-thick joint to his mouth and took a greedy toke. He knew how to make it look delicious because he meant it. The Arn man almost always cameth.
    We got high as pipers. The kind of stoned where you think you might puke. It was a good thing I was standing, because an all-weather patio chair that had looked so inviting minutes before was starting to resemble a wolf trap.
    “ ‘You’ is a real ball-breaking bitch,” Richie said.
    “Wha?” I asked. I hadn’t noticed the music at all until Richie pointed to the floor. After that it came at me like lasers in stereo. From the apartment below ours, Bono Vox bellowed that he couldn’t live with you or without you. It was a tough spot to be in. And though Bono tried to sound like a man in control of the situation, it was obvious that “You” held all the cards.
    “ ‘You’ should make up her goddamn mind.”
    “What if ‘You’ is a dude?” I asked. “All rock stars like a cock every now and then.”
    “Then ‘You’ should make up his goddamn mind.”
    “It’s definitely a broad,” Arn said, death-row serious. Those were the first words he’d offered up voluntarily, maybe ever. Richie and I weed-laughed. Arn failed to see the humor in any of it. He tried to scratch an itch deep in the geometric center of his head. Richie started imitating him. My chest burned from laughing and coughing. Arn finally left us there when it was clear we weren’t about to stop laughing. He descended the stairs like a deep-fried Slinky toy. Richie kept imitating him after he was gone, rubbing the roof of his mouth maniacally while making increasingly more retarded-looking faces. I begged him to quit it, but he wouldn’t.

    I WOKE UP on my stomach, using my foot to either feel the rug next to me for Jocelyn or defend myself from her. I must have been moving frantically in my sleep because I burned the knuckles on a couple of my toes. I was trying to decide whether or not I should sit up and investigate them when I heard a very un-Brooklyn, all-natural cracking noise. I rolled onto my side. A large maple tree filled most of the picture window,