[the goal]

He’d always dreamed of something else–fantasized–about things he may have one day if he worked hard enough, and sat in just the right spot to have them fall in his lap. Things with smooth, rounded hillocks along the way to miles of flawless bronze. Things named Giselle or Adriana, with smoky vacant windows, long jet-black shutters, and plump doors opening on even smokier words, but usually just his name. One of them would say it as it climbed over his lap and brushed the back of its fingernails against the stubble under his jaw. After that it never made another noise except for the gentle smack of lips touching him everywhere.
Now, he knew well enough that probably wasn’t going to happen. Something like that just didn’t seem possible between his job stocking groceries, repairing and revamping cars, and kicking the shit out of guys he’d only met shortly before getting in the ring. He knew he could have a cute little thing if he had the time. But he didn’t. Up, work, eat, sleep. Life was a series of monosyllabic actions.
Except, at the point where he’d given up even the slightest hope of having time to work this goal out, the world did it for him. He didn’t know what to expect here. He never did get a helluvalot of handouts. But how could he refuse? It–she–wasn’t a model, but she didn’t need to be.
Though pale, when he lied underneath her, and looked toward the foot of the bed, her legs looked as if they went on for forever. They connected with a precise and soft triangle of sweetness and heat he could hardly keep his hands away from. Higher, she had a gentle sloping bowl of an abdomen, with a tiny T-shaped navel sitting empty as if someone had plucked the stem out of a cherry. And though she didn’t have the curves of the 2-D girls stashed under his bed, her nipples firmed at his touch and poked into the lifeline of his palms.
Her skin was the softest he’d ever felt, sugary, unblemished and creamy like the finest white chocolate. Her eyes an unsettling green. And her mouth, however plump like any girl he’d ever want, sagged constantly downward at the corners. It never said his name like those girls, though. He’d say, if he had to, that she uttered it with a certain level of disdain and condescension.
While he traced around her collarbone, she said it, soft but stern like a seasoned veteran.
“Polk.”
Time for him to back the hell off. Time for her to go.
He stalled, tucking some of her pin-drop straight raven hair behind a petite ear, and kissing with a tenderness he never knew he possessed before her.
“Polk,” she repeated, and sat up.
And she turned to look down at him then, those eyes matching her voice in the wrong way. Smoky, he insisted, not annoyed. Never annoyed.
“C’mon, kid,” he said. In those fantasies he never needed to speak. In the real world, he pleaded.
She reached over the edge of the bed for her pair of slim, dark wash jeans and the gray sweater she wore on the way over to his place. As she pushed a foot into one of the leg holes, she hesitated.
“You don’t tell anyone about us, do you?”
He peered at her, the foot now making its way to the narrow opening at the bottom of the pant and out. He watched her wiggle her red lacquered toenails as if they’d fallen asleep.
“No.”
“Oh,” she said, and breathing an all-too-obvious sigh, “Good.”
He made himself look at the ceiling while she pulled that over-sized sweater on and dug her feet into the red flats she liked to wear, but that he always thought looked like little girl shoes.
As she stood up to go, he found himself stumbling toward a last-ditch effort to stop her, keep her there, maybe entice her back into his bed.
“How you doin’? Wit your dancin’?”
She blinked at him and he saw a sliver of her salmon colored tongue peak through her lips.
“With my dancing?” she enunciated.
He felt the color rising under his skin but he had no way to hide it. No hair or clothes to camoflauge it with.
“Yeah.”
“I’m doing fine,” she said.
“Oh, yeah? That’s good. Real good.”
“Yes, it is,” she said, and he could tell she was waiting for him to give the okay. She didn’t need his go-ahead to leave. She could’ve walked out the door whenever she wanted. But she wouldn’t. And he had, like the times before, deliciously sinister thoughts of leaving her in an uncomfortable situation she would have to figure out a way of removing herself from, while keeping her in his company for as long as possible. But he didn’t.
“I’ll see ya around, den?”
“Yes. Bye, Polk.”
His mouth twitched and he watched her leave.
And unlike his fantasies, he did a lot of that.