Banging

BY Jon Bauer

Pus struck the mirror, a raspberry-ripple stripe of red running through it. He checked his fingers but it’d been a clean job. Anyone who said you shouldn’t squeeze spots was stealing the only upside of having them. He had them all right.

Then she started again with her banging. He swallowed at himself and opened the mirrored medicine cabinet he’d been looking into. Her parents were obviously your standard, middle-class addicts: codeine, valium, beta-blockers and diet pills all stood there like toy soldiers. And that was just the stuff they hadn’t taken on holiday. No wonder their daughter was a pain in the ass.

Talking of which, he walked, odd socks on thick carpet, to the locked cupboard door and said, Only dating for a month ain’t grounds for fucking around behind my back, honey.

He kept his voice calm, for maximum effect. Then he said Shuddup, to the banging door and her shouting. It sounded like Narnia in there, all those fancy-pants fur coats and white posture-wotsit pillows deadening her sound, like snow.

A flutter in her voice hadn’t escaped his attention, though. She’d cry soon, then he could calm down. Stop being PARANOID. Make-up sex.

He walked away, plodding heavily down the stairs to infuriate her with his nonchalance. At the bottom, with the garden flowers blurred through the front door’s privacy glass, he twiddled with a ridiculous knick-knack from a cabinet – a toad crocheting a patchwork leaf. Would probably cost about three days of his dad’s pay.

HE FUCKED ME BETTER THAN YOU EVER HAVE! OH YEAH, I LOVED HIS COCK SO MUCH. D’YOU HEAR ME!

He heard her. He was zipping his coat up under his chin. It looked like it was gonna be a cold one. With his shoelaces trailing, he slammed the front door and then closed the garden gate, like a good boy.