tongues touched delicately as she took my cock in her hand. She ran her tongue from my mouth to my ear. Her breathing was excited and heavy, though I knew she might be exaggerating it for my benefit. She stroked my cock, pulling the foreskin up and down, until I said, “If I don’t lie down I’m going to fall down.”
She pushed me toward the couch, and I sat on it. She knelt on the floor between my legs and took hold of my cock again. I looked at her, the blonde curls falling everywhere, her long limbs and muscles. I saw her in silhouette, but I knew enough to fill in the blanks and I sighed as I came in her hand.
I reached for her shorts, but she stopped me by taking my hands. “Later,” she said. “You’re tired and you need to eat. Let’s feed you first.”
She stood up and turned on a lamp. I closed my eyes against the sudden glare of light. I got up and hurried to the bathroom before my come could dribble off my stomach. I grabbed a piece of toilet paper and wiped my stomach and the head of my cock.
I pulled my shorts up and went to the kitchenette. Janine was chopping avocados in half. “Stuffed avocados okay?” she said.
“Yeah. I’ll help you.”
“No need.”
“It’s okay. I feel like it. If I sit down while I wait to eat, I’ll just fall asleep.”
Miles Davis played on the stereo. I chopped garlic and cheese, scooped the avocados out of their skins and mashed them while Janine scrambled salad in a bowl. I put the puréed avocados back in their skins, mixed with the garlic and cheese. Then I put them in the oven.
I got a bottle of water from the fridge. “Pour me some,” said Janine. I did. Then we sat on the couch and I drank the rest of the bottle and she nudged me anytime I started to doze off. When the avocados were ready, we ate them with the salad. We didn’t say much. Comfortable silence. She sat with my legs in her lap.
I took a bath, then we went to bed. I had just about enough energy left to finger her until she came. Then I slept.
TWO
Janine was a trust fund baby. I was a trailer park kid, and in the months before we met I didn’t even have a trailer. I was living out of my car. After getting out of uniform, I’d lived in the complex at Park Lee, but within a few months I’d run out of money and I still had no job. I couldn’t make rent on the place, so I got evicted.
I’d bought the car the week after I’d come back to Phoenix. I couldn’t really afford it, but if you live in Phoenix you need a car. It was a 1976 Oldsmobile Cutlass that belonged to one of my neighbors. It looked like a wreck and it guzzled gas like you wouldn’t believe, but its engine was in surprisingly good shape and it ran pretty well. My neighbor sold it to me for eight hundred, which was a little bit more than it was worth, but he needed the money and couldn’t sell it for less, and I was tired of asking people for rides.
Living in the car wasn’t much weirder for me than living in the apartment. I’d spent nearly fifteen years in the army and didn’t know anything about civilian life. I’d joined the army as a kid because I didn’t know what else to do. That was my reason for joining, but not for staying for almost a decade. I stayed because I liked being a soldier, and still consider it an honorable profession. Pacifism is a beautiful ideal, but if you say no to fighting then you say yes to concentration camps, torture, oppression. You say yes to Auschwitz and Dachau. You can’t go up to an Adolf Hitler or Idi Amin and say, “Look, this isn’t very nice. Why don’t you knock it off?” You’re going to need guns to shoot them with and bombs to drop on them if you’re going to stop what they’re doing.
But to be a soldier with any dignity, you have to believe in the things for which you’re risking your life and taking away other people’s lives. And I didn’t anymore. I didn’t feel like a warrior defending my country—I felt like a member of a uniformed gang, hired to