Swagger

“You know, Whit, I’ve slept with a lot of guys – I mean, like, a lot of guys – but I’ve never…you know…”

Whitney looked up from the tray of iced coffees she was fixing and stared at her friend. They were standing at the counter, just left of the barista, in Starbucks. It was eight in the morning, and on the way to work, Whitney – as always – had stopped to pick up a few coffees and scones for her boss and the other higher-ups who worked at The Paper. As an intern, it was part of her job at the ‘zine to get refreshing caffeinated beverages for the people she worked for.

Katherine, her roommate who worked a much easier job at the local bookstore, walked with her to the coffee-shop this morning. She’d decided to pick up an extra shift at the store and, in turn, had to leave for work much earlier than usual. So, really, it was no problem at all. Besides, she wanted some time alone to speak with Whitney. A time apart from their other roommates, in which she could discuss her very personal problem.

“What are you talking about?”

“You know,” Katherine answered, wriggling her eye brows suggestively.

“Oh! Really?” The expression on Whitney’s face brightened. Her face pulled out of its normal “morning droop” and she actually smiled.

“Yea.”

“Wow. Not even with Nick?”

Katherine watched as Whitney uncapped the four cups of coffee. She added sugar and creamer to each cup before re-lidding all but one.

“Especially not with Nick.”

Whitney made an ‘o’ shape with her mouth and nodded sullenly. “Well that’s surprising. I would have thought…you know…Nick. He’s got quite the reputation.”

Nick did have ‘quite the reputation’, Katherine thought. It was one of the reasons she’d agreed to go out with him when he asked. Yet the memories of their time together were nothing but unsatisfactory. Nick was all hype, she’d concluded after their third date. All hype.

He was pushy and forceful and rough and ‘passionate’ but in all the wrong ways. His hands were too cold and clammy; his breath too hot. He had no sense of his own weight and on several different occasions had nearly squished her.

His kisses were wet and slobbery and sloppy and weird and altogether suffocating. It was like the boy had the lung capacity of an Olympic athlete. He never needed to just pull back and breathe. But Katherine did! She needed to breathe every few minutes, at the least, and even when her fingers had pulled roughly at his hair – an attempt to dislodge his lips from hers – he didn’t seem to get the message. It only managed to spur him on.

When he’d finally found focus elsewhere, his lips had traveled down to her neck, Katherine had to take deep gasping breaths to refill her lungs and get the blood flowing again. While he sucked and bit at her throat, she discreetly wiped at her mouth with the back of her hand. Was it normal for a guy to salivate that much?

Finally, after ten excruciating minutes of ‘foreplay’, Nick had finally found his mark and once inside he pummeled forward. His movements, the ones that he was so famous for, were jerky and arrhythmic and, quite frankly, it hurt a little. His hands groped at the back of Katherine’s thigh and under the small of her back. His grunts echoed in Katherine’s ear and his sticky breath condensed on the skin of her shoulder.

Before the sun had risen, Nick was gone. Katherine hadn’t been able to sleep at all until he left. She’d feared that he would roll over in his sleep and accidentally kill her and, so, she had just lain in bed waiting for him to wake up and go. At around four in the morning he did, stating an early class as the reason, and only then was Katherine able to fall asleep.

She woke up the next morning with sore thighs and a hickey the size of Texas on her neck. Her sheets stunk of sweat and her hair was a tangled frizzy mess. Right after stripping her bed, she stripped herself of the remaining clothes and hoped into the cool shower. She needed to wash the scent of ‘Nick’ out of her skin.

“What the hell are you doing?” Katherine asked. Whitney had started licking around the edge of each covered cup of coffee. When she got to the last cup – the uncovered one – she took a big sip, swished it around her mouth, and then spit it back into the cup.

“What?” Whitney asked as she pushed the cover onto the last cup and picked up the tray. “My boss is an asshole.”

“Do you do that every day?”

Whitney shrugged. “I guess. Not everyday everyday. Often – What? Don’t look at me like that!”

“That’s so disgusting and unsanitary.”

“Whatever. Just get the door for me, please.”

As the two left the coffee shop, Whitney could see Katherine looking at her. She was giving her that disapproving look and if Whitney hadn’t been so used to it, it might have made her a bit regretful. Not that it mattered anyway. Who was Katherine to chastise her about being ‘unsanitary’?

“Oh, come on, Kat! It’s not that big of a deal. It’s not like I have rabies or anything.”

Katherine rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Whatever. You’re fucked up.”

“Yea, well, at least I’ve had an orgasm before,” Whitney said childishly. A huge smile broke across her face and she laughed quietly to herself.

“Low blow, Whit.”

Whitney stifled her giggles and nodded. “You’re right. Sorry.”