Things went on as normal for the next few months after Bijendra’s going away party. I worked, in some way or another about fifty hours a week. Some of that was sitting in on his classes, organizing the mess he made of things his students handed in to him, some of it was straightening up after him at home. There were no more trips out of town. My crush didn’t come and go—it got bigger as the days went by. I thought about quitting and realized I was kidding myself. Sometimes he flirted with me and I reacted like a schoolgirl. Sometimes he ignored me, busy with writing or just in one of his moods, and I felt neglected. BJ called or he didn’t and it never seemed to matter; and he never seemed to notice that I didn’t care. Zach started asking me about my life, my marriage in particular, much more frequently.
Over coffee one morning, after an all-night editing session with his publisher, agent and editor on conference call, he asked, “Are you in love with him?”
No, but, I’m in love with you. I shrugged and picked at my biscuit.
He lifted himself up on the arms of his chair and scowled at me. “That’s not an answer.”
“Why?”
“Why isn’t it an answer? Because, for one thing…”
“Why do you want to know, jack ass.”
“I want to use you as a character model. I need to know things about your inner life.”
“Is your character in love? You’re God around here.”
Big, round blue eyes stared into mine. “No. She isn’t.”
“Well, lucky her. She’s all set, then, isn’t she?”
“What does that mean?”
I was suddenly confused and pissed off at him; it was all his fault. “I have to go.”
“Do you want me to take you?”
I shook my head angrily. “I want to take a walk.”
“Well, are you coming over tonight? We have…”
“I don’t know, Zach,” I snapped loudly, so that heads turned. “Jesus, can I have a fucking day off?”
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He was asleep with all the lights on when I walked into his living room at seven that evening. His wheelchair was parked parallel to the couch, vacant with the brakes locked. He was lying on his back in just a pair of jeans. His legs were close together and both feet turned slightly out; they were still as a corpse’s would be. Without his shirt on I could see the well-defined muscles of his chest, shoulders and arms. He had a bit of a belly, because there was some paralysis of those muscles as well, but his upper body was like an athlete’s. I wanted to touch it.
I walked over to the couch, quietly so he wouldn’t wake up. Other than the discarded chair in the corner that had come with the computer desk, there were no other seats in the living room, so I sat down in his wheelchair. When I was sixteen I had to ride in one from the ER to the X-Ray room and back; it had been the big ones they use for really fat patients. Other than that I’d never sat in one. It didn’t feel as strange as I had expected. I put my feet into the footrests and leaned back. With my elbows on the armrests, I brought my fingers together under my chin, like a temple. Then I said his name. He didn’t hear me, or chose not to.
“I’m not going away,” I said in a louder voice.
Slowly, he opened his eyes and turned his head to look at me. “What are you doing?”
“Impersonating you.”
He snorted. “I would never wear pink nail polish with that color shirt.”
He rubbed his eyes with a fist and then pushed himself up with his hands, making the muscles in his arms show themselves even more clearly. I’d wanted to touch them before; now I wanted to bite. As the upper part of his body was pulled into a sitting position, his legs just fell off of the couch. This was a little bit disturbing for me before I got used to it. The first time I had seen him do it my face had turned white and he’d laughed at me, then apologized and barely spoken to me for the rest of the day. I never was sure who was more embarrassed by my lack of sensitivity.
Zach used his hands to position his legs in front of him and his feet on the floor. Then he raised an eyebrow at me. “Are you going to get up or would you like me to sit here all night?”
“I thought we could get you some roller-skates and…”
“Katy.”
I sighed and stood up, stepping carefully around the footrests of the chair. “No sense of humor anymore.”
I went to look out the window at the lights of the city beneath his building. Secretly, I watched him from the corner of my eye. He scooted himself to the very end of the couch, to the point I was sure he was going to fall onto the carpet, then reached out to grab the armrests of the chair and lift himself over and into the seat in one motion. I thought he was more coordinated than I was; I was certain there was no amount of training that would teach me to be able to move that way with only half of my body.
Zach lifted his feet into the footrests of the chair and then wheeled over to the computer. He sat there for a moment, moved the mouse slightly so that the screen lit up. A blank Word document sent a bright glare onto his face. He was quiet, just sitting with his hands folded in his lap. I turned from the window and went to stand behind him.
There was uneasiness between us. It was my fault, for my reaction in the coffee shop earlier. Or maybe it was his fault, for the questions he’d been asking. Either way, it was there. I’d tried to dispel it with playfulness, but it was too stubborn. So, while he rolled his shoulders and made the face (squinted eyes, taut jaw muscles) that meant he was hurting I couldn’t quite put my hands on his shoulders. Instead I just stood there.
“Why does it bother you when I ask you questions about yourself?” he asked. A normal person would have let it drop, if not apologized. Not Zach.
“Are we on this again?”
He threw his head back so he could look up at me. “Yes. We are. Answer me.”
“That’s a dignified position. Why don’t you stay that way?”
“Why don’t you answer me?”
“You’re an asshole.”
He laughed. “You’re evasive. You’re supposed to be helpful. Do you not understand that, little girl?”
“Why? Why do I have to tell you things about my life? What about me is so goddamn fascinating to you that you can’t just imagine it? I do your dishes, I drive a Volvo; that’s the great drama. What is it you just have to know, Zach?”
He wheeled himself away from the computer, so that he was facing me. I took a step back and he came forward. I had the feeling he would have liked to grab me by the shoulders, Casablanca style, and possibly shake me until I became sensible. Instead, he just gazed up at me levelly; his eyes were cold but his cheeks were pink.
“You’ve got secrets.” His voice was calm, but the frustration was audible.
Yeah, like, I want to fuck my boss. “So? So does everyone. So do you.” I retorted.
He shook his head. “No, I don’t.”
He sat, I stood. For several more seconds we just stared at each other. Then he turned away from me, faced the computer again and put his hands on the keyboard. Before he could begin typing—or tell me to get out, which I was sure was coming-- a muscle spasm in his lower back made him inhale sharply and jerk back in the chair. I kept Baclofen, loose, in my pockets for this reason. I put one between his lips, telling myself sternly and for the hundredth time that this was not a sensual situation, and he swallowed it without water.
“Lots of practice,” he’d said the first time I saw him do that, when I’d winced and shuddered at the very thought.
After I medicated him I knelt beside his wheelchair and slid my arm in the tight space between his back and the back if the chair. I put my hands on his lower back, where the muscles were hard and tensed. His skin was smooth and it felt feverish. There was a knot where the spasm originated.
“This is going to hurt,” I murmured to him as I dug in one of my knuckles.
He groaned. “I think… that you… fuck… enjoy that.”
I was ashamed of the fact that I enjoyed the ten minutes I spent giving him a massage. In my defense, I probably could have stopped sooner, but he let me keep going. When I stopped, I leaned back on my heels and looked up at him. He sat back in the chair, seemingly exhausted; his forehead was still slightly damp and he was pale.
“Are you okay?”
He nodded. “Thank you.”
I shrugged. “So, ask me your questions.”
“What?”
“Go ahead. Anything at all. I don’t care anymore. I’ll be your subject matter. Ask away. What do you want to know? If I’m in love with Bijendra?”
Instead of a simple answer, of course, he got the entire convoluted story of our acquaintance. The story was so long that we each made three trips to the kitchen for beers and I went twice to the bathroom. He actually took notes, scribbling with a red pen on an index card. It ended with a shrug and an up-turned beer bottle.
“So, why shouldn’t I be, in love with him, I mean? Just because I haven’t seen him in… I don’t feel like counting.” I laughed, shrugged my shoulders for the umpteenth time. “What are you gonna do?”
Zach put down his pen, laced his fingers together and stretched his arms out in front of him so that his knuckles popped. Then he leaned back against the seat of his wheelchair and smiled at me. “You still haven’t answered my question.”
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He’d asked me to meet him at eleven, but he wasn’t in his office. I called his cell phone and there was no answer. Slightly concerned, I wrote a note for his eleven thirty appointment to reschedule (Zach was a terrible advisor) and drove the ten blocks to his apartment. I let myself in and found him at his computer. He was awake, alert, and sober; and very, very excited.
“I finished it,” he said.
“What? The book? You finished it, when, this morning?”
He motioned for me to come and look at the printer, which was spitting out pages rapidly. As I came up next to him he grabbed my hand and pulled me into his lap. I yelled out in surprise and he laughed. I stayed where I was, shocked that I was there, and he put his arms around me, holding me against him. I’d never seen him look completely happy before.
“You helped, Katy, you really did.”
I was on his lap, my arm around his shoulders and my legs hanging over the arm of his wheelchair. Our faces were an inch apart and I could feel his breath on mine.
There’s no way this is happening.
He slid his hand up my back, slowly, and into my hair. He made a fist, and pulled my face closer to his so that our mouths were touching. Our lips pressed together, his were salty and warm, then they parted and his tongue was in my mouth, on my lips and touching my teeth and tongue. I got wet quickly; I’d been waiting too long not to. Between my legs I felt him getting hard.
When he let go of my hair enough for me to pull back a little I said, “I, I always thought that you couldn’t…”
“Pills,” he said simply, then he pulled me back to him and buried his face in my neck and shoulder. I was pinned against him. All the time he spent wheeling himself in the chair and working out in the rehab center had made his upper body so much stronger than mine there was nothing I could do unless he let me move. I was completely powerless.
The more I thought about that the more excited I got. I started pulling at his shirt, tearing, desperately wanting to get at the smooth, hard muscles underneath it. He laughed at me.
“You can’t wait?”
I shook my head. “No.”
He wheeled us into the bedroom, the added weight of my body on his seeming to make no difference at all. In the bedroom he parked the chair beside the bed and I crawled off if him, onto it and out of my dress as quickly as I could. There was a time for roses and candles but that time was not now. I wanted Zach as soon as I could get him.
“You’re sure, Katy? This is what you want?” He looked at me with his blue eyes big and sincere.
Almost panting in anticipation, I said, “Yes, I do. I want to.”
Impatiently, I watched him lift his legs under the knees to put them onto the floor and then push himself off the seat of the chair. He swung over onto the bed, then scooted back away from the edge. As he pulled off his shoes and socks I removed his shirt and reached around to unbutton his jeans. He hesitated for a moment before he lay back on the bed.
“There’s a catheter,” he said. “Not, inside, but…”
“I don’t care.”
He lifted himself off the bed as much as he could with his elbows and I slid his jeans down off his butt, then down his legs. I’d never seen them before. They were too thin for his body, with less hair than I would have expected them to have. Gently I ran a hand down the inside of one.
He shook his head. “Can’t feel it.”
“Hmm.”
Inside the catheter, he was hard as stone. The catheter was like a condom with a hose on the end that ran down into a bag strapped above his right ankle. I peeled it off, found a sort of plastic paper clip near the top of the bag to close it off and prevent leaking, and un-strapped the bag. Then I dropped all of it on the floor and went back to the penis I’d so carefully unwrapped, like the best-of-all Christmas present.
He shook his head. “I don’t believe you just did that.”
I snorted. “I’m gonna do a hell of a lot more than that.”
I put his dick in my mouth, sucking the head lightly, then stopped to look up at him. I could tell he couldn’t feel it and didn’t want to tell me. I kept doing it, because it felt good to me, but I reached up with my fingers and traced circles around his nipples; with my index finger of each hand I wrote my name in a little circle, then erased it with my thumb. After a few minutes of that he was moaning and yanking at my hair again. I straddled him, slid his dick inside of me and leaned into his kiss. As he thrust his tongue into my mouth he rubbed my clit with his finger and I moved back and forth against him, squeezing his legs between mine and licking occasionally at his earlobes or collarbones.
After several minutes I had to stop, crying out and jerking his hand away from between my legs. I lay on top of him, both of us wet and exhilarated, tired and trembling. He kissed my forehead. I’d waited for months and…
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“Katy? Katy?”
“Zach? Huh?” I picked my head up. It was very hot and I was very embarrassed and very confused.
Zach was looking at me from his wheelchair. I was lying, fully clothed, on top of the sheets, in his bed. He had his head cocked and a concerned expression on his face. “How’s your head?”
Migraine medicine. Fucking barbiturate headache pills and their side effects—may cause vivid dreams, etc. I lay my head back down on the pillow. It smelled like his hair, clean and off limits.
“It hurts.” Oh, yeah; it hurts a whole lot, buddy.
“Look, I’m going to be working for awhile. I was probably going to crash out there anyway, why don’t you just stay here tonight, okay? You can have the morning off if you feel like it.”
I nodded into the pillow, too mortified to utter another sound. He looked at me a few seconds longer and then wheeled out of the room, stopping to whisper “sweet dreams” as he closed the door.