Mind Games Read Free

knee.
    “Cubby—”
    He creeps it up teasingly. His hand is smooth except where the weightlifting calluses scratch my tender skin. His hand makes my whole thigh feel alive. I inhale softly.
    He says, “Are you sure?”
    I’m feeling a lot less sure as his fingers slide up under the hem of my skirt.
    “Because if you’re not
really
sure …”
    I give him a saucy look. “That’s a winning salesperson’s pitch?
If you’re not really sure?”
    He moves his hand again: a squeeze, a shift. “I’m just setting the stage for my pitch.” The hungry way he looks at me makes my blood race. He moves his hand closer. I find I’m feeling better. He leans over and kisses me, tasting like Mongolian barbeque, pressing his fingers to my panties in the perfect spot. I inhale sharply. He is a connoisseur of perfect spots, and I am a connoisseur of him and his perfect life.
    “Let’s do it right here,” he says.
    “Cuthbert Montgomery!” I scold. “We’re in a traffic jam!”
    “The windows are shaded.”
    “Not
that
shaded.”
    “Come on,” he cajoles.
    “Car sex in public? You’ve got to be kidding.”
    “You are such a square.”
    He’s close. I’m
trying
to be a square.
    Saved by the honks. The line is finally creeping.
    “Patience is a virtue,” I say, adjusting my skirt. He puts the car into gear and I sit back.
    I was always the kid who followed the rules, cut perfectly in the lines—not because I was normal, but because I came from the town’s weird family. People who grew up normal think it’s something to be rejected. They’re wrong. Normal is a precious kind of freedom, and if you don’t have it, it’s all you ever want.
       Two hours later we’re sitting across from each other in Cubby’s luxurious whirlpool bath, accommodating each other’s shins and feet and discussing the merits of standing sex, which we just had. I liked it, though my standing leg got tired. Cubby had to bend his knees a bit, but it gave his quads quite a workout. We’d moved to the couch partway through.
    “You know what this whole thing means, of course.”
    “The standing?” I ask.
    “Winning the top salesperson. The trip. It means we’re going to Belize in December.”
    “You’re asking me to go?” I’m stunned. It’s seven months away. I can’t believe he’s asking me something so far in the future.
    “Yeah, I’m asking.”
    “Then I’d love to go with you. I would love that.”
    “Clear your calendar.”
    “God, how exciting. I’ve only ever been to Canada.”
    “Belize is no Canada, baby.”
    “I bet.” I rest my head on Cubby’s knee, trying not to picture dirt-floor clinics and bright tropical bugs darting across rusty surgical instruments. “I bet.”
       I wake up alone in Cubby’s king-size bed after a nearly sleepless night. A note on his pillow:
Off at b-ball
. His Saturday game. Out the window, the sky is a brilliant blue over the smokestacks and less fancy neighborhoods north of the river. Mongolian Delites is over there somewhere. And I know that if I were to clamber over the bedside table and press my cheek to the window, I’d see a slice of Lake Michigan. We joke that that qualifies Cubby’s condo as lake view.
    I plop my head back down. I’d woken in the middle of the night, panicked that the extreme anxiety I experienced at the restaurant might have triggered a slow leak. Anxiety worsens vein star syndrome, so you get anxiety about anxiety. I sneaked into Cubby’s home office and went online and discovered the following horrible news on veinstar.org: a new MD forum posting refers to “persistent” tingling. My tingling is persistent—persistently intermittent. That’s a kind of persistence. After that I’d just crept around the dark condo in various states of panic.
    This morning, of course, I’m fine. It’s easy to see, in hindsight, that you were being a crazed hypochondriac, but when you’re in it, it seems so real.
    I pull the covers over me, wondering