Maile

Joelle Byars

I’ve always been a sucker for a woman with a square jaw. Bonus points if they have the shoulders of Sarah Connor from the original Terminator or thighs like that woman who can crush a watermelon between her legs. What can I say? 

I guess I have a thing for women who look like they can throw a punch. 

    I saw her Saturday at a nightclub behind Ala Moana mall. I hate clubs, but my best friend, Isaac, and his wife just broke up the night before and he wanted to celebrate his new found freedom with tequila shots and strange pussy. I can’t blame him. His wife was a total bitch. 

    He found out she was cheating on him with some loser from Riverside who moved on island to “find himself.” As if that didn’t make him enough of a walking cliché, he lived in a beat up car he bought off some Army dude down in Wahiawa that was getting deployed. It was a 1999 red Chevy Impala with two busted windows and my buddy found his wife right outside the driveway in the cul-de-sac with one foot on the arm of the driver’s door and the other propped up on the center console. I don’t know how he didn’t beat the shit out of the guy—God knows I would have clubbed him like a baby seal—but somehow he just knocked on the roof and told her he wanted a divorce before walking back inside. He called me right after. I picked him up and he was still stone-faced, wouldn’t give an inch in any direction. Wouldn’t talk. Barely breathed. Once we walked back into my shitty 100-square-foot Waikiki apartment he broke down and wouldn’t stop crying. He didn’t stop until after he got out of the cold shower to go to the club the next night because, “Bitches gotta see me looking fresh, right? Not all puffy and shit.”

    “Hell yeah, man. Let’s get it.” I don’t know what it was, something about him always made me act tougher than I was. More of a man’s woman. Like Sean Connery with tits.

I’d never felt heartbreak before and I had no idea what he was going through. Even if I did, it’s not like it would feel the same way. Having your wife of nine years fuck a hippie in an old car is different than having your girlfriend of three months tell you she’s “just not feeling it anymore” or having the “friend” you’ve been sleeping with ghost you before you see her dangling off a 5-O stunt double’s bicep on his boat at Ala Wai Harbor. So I just let him be, let him take the reins and tell me what we were doing and where we were going. If I couldn’t make him feel better, there’s one thing he could count on: I’m always game.

    We took turns taking long pulls out of a tequila bottle on my bed. I sat cross-legged, something he asked me to stop since I was wearing a short dress and he could clearly see my underwear. 

“Eat me.” I pulled my dress up higher so it was over my hips entirely, making him blush and look away. “It’s just underwear. If all goes well for you tonight you’ll hopefully see more than that, huh?” I hit him in the arm with the tequila bottle and tilted my head upwards to goad him into drinking. 

“Fuck you.”

“In your dreams.”

    We finished half the bottle and ordered an Uber to get to the club. It was exactly what I expected. Crowded, loud, shockingly wet. Isaac looked good, desperate, but good. The colorful lights hid the bags under his eyes that he wouldn’t let me cover with concealer and hit all the right angles of his high-pointed face. He was tall, usually he stuck out in a crowd like a lone stalk of corn in a pineapple field. I’d never asked but if I had to guess I would say he was probably six-foot-four, which complemented his broad shoulders and respectable physique. He was paranoid about what he ate, everything keto and raw since his trust fund could afford it, but he still loved beer which, ironically, kept him from a six pack. I knew after I fed him a couple shots and found him a pretty face in that crowd, he’d have no problem for the night.

“Hey, man. Drinks on me tonight, okay?” I shouted at him.

    “What? No way, you can’t afford that. I got it.” He screamed back directly in my ear causing me to retreat.

    “How about you shut the fuck up and find a girl you like?” He laughed at me and pulled his hands up in surrender before turning around and scanning the dance floor. I barreled through the already-drunk bodies and waited for the bartender to get within a couple feet of me so I could shout over T-Pain, “Four shots of tequila!” The bartender nodded and handed me my shots a couple minutes later in exchange for fifty bucks after tip. 

I take two shots in each hand and lift my arms over my head to make sure no one can knock the liquid diamonds onto the floor. I found Isaac and bumped him hard with my hip to get his attention, the shots still above my head. He took two of them and we raised our right hands to each other, making plenty of eye contact. I made the mistake once of not making eye contact when he raised his glass to me and he threw a fit, “You know breaking eye contact means seven years of bad sex, right?”

I shrugged and told him, “You know me, I’m happy with whatever I can get.”

We threw back the rest of my fifty dollars and he kept scanning before he pointed a girl out. “What about her?”

    “Fuck it, go for it.”

    “She has a friend.”

    “Let me deal with that. Follow me.” I led him through the sea of mashing parts. Girls who looked barely old enough to graduate middle school wearing little more than pasties and a sparkly g-string rubbing against whatever body was closest to them. I stopped listening to pop music in high school and stopped clubbing around the same time, I was surprised how many songs they played that I still recognized. I was relieved, that would be in my favor. Isaac started to get lost behind me so I grabbed his hand and pulled him behind me until we got close enough that I could push him right behind the girl he spotted. Across from the girl was a whole other type of woman. 

    She had oiled her hair just enough that her dark curls stayed in place with minimal frizzing. It looked like she planned for all the sweating, something I was terrible at, and wore hardly any face makeup so it wouldn’t melt off her the same way it melted off me. I saw defined ab muscles peeking out of a black skirt that had risen up enough to show the bottom of her ass cheeks and her tight white halter crop top stopped just under her boobs. She had strategically not worn a bra and I had to pretend not to notice for the time being. Best part was, she had a square jaw with just a little bit of a cleft chin. Like Demi Lovato, but stronger. 

    I got behind her and started dancing, keeping an eye on Isaac who had already started putting his index and middle fingers down the top of the other girl’s booty shorts. I stopped looking at Isaac after that and only stared at the contour of the girl’s hips, the way the white fabric stuck to her back when she moved her curls to the side, the look in her eye when she glanced over her shoulder at me. 

    I got nervous after a couple songs. She wasn’t going anywhere, if anything she was dancing on me harder than when I first walked up. I’d put my hand on her hip and she didn’t move away from me. I was waiting for her to move, to dance on one of the million attractive guys there or grab her friend’s hand and head for the bathroom. 

I started to panic a little, still rhythmically grinding as if nothing was happening in my mind. I should have had more tequila. What an idiot. I asked myself what I would tell Isaac to do. Stop being a fucking pussy and go for it. Feeling like I could vomit at any second from the nerves, I reached my right arm across the front of her body before touching her left cheek. She followed my lead and turned her head back toward me and let me kiss her.

In that one instant, my mind went blank and my heart fell out of my ass. I didn’t care about the nerves anymore. I didn’t care about anything. I only cared that she kept kissing me. Until she moved my left hand up to her chest. 

Then, I only cared about more. 

    The music bled together, I don’t know how long we stayed there. Touching. Dancing. Kissing. Panting. I looked up and saw Isaac with his tongue so far down the other girl’s throat I worried for her ability to breathe. The girl I was dancing with looked over at her friend and pulled on her friend’s shorts. She stepped away from me and yelled something I couldn’t hear over the horrifying Flo Rida notalgia bomb playing through the speakers. I just saw her friend nod and somehow allow Isaac to dive back into her mouth. She looked like a pelican who’d taken on too much water.

    The girl that had been dancing with me grabbed my hand and led me to the door. I tried to get Isaac’s attention but he wouldn’t look up from mining that girl’s tonsils. Fuck it, he has his phone.

    When we got to the door the cool rush of the trade winds hit me, causing me to take a deeper breath than I’d planned. “Where are we going?”
    “My hotel room. Is that okay?”

    I was shocked she’d let me get this far but I didn’t want to ruin it. “What’s your name?”

    “Minnie. What’s yours?”

    “Like the mouse?”

    She rolled her eyes a little and it made me want to take it back. “Yes, like the mouse.”

    I tried to cover up my obvious mistake. “I’m Olivia. What hotel are you staying at?” 

    “Ala Moana Hotel, do you want to get an Uber?” My change of topics seemed to work. 

    “We could have walked there by the time anything gets here. Come on, follow me, it’s right down the road.”

    “Wait! I forgot something.” She rushed back to the stand where security checked IDs and softly asked him for something I couldn’t hear. I saw him hand her a little black cylinder and she walked back to me. “You can never be too careful, right?” She looped the fingers of her left hand in mine and held the little pepper spray container in the other hand. She pulled me toward her and kissed me. “Lead the way.”

    We talked but said nothing on the five minute walk to the hotel lobby. There weren’t any memorable details or distinguishing factors, just us giggling and progressively walking faster and faster to the hotel, eager to get where we were going. We nodded to security on our way in and kept giggling to the elevator where she hit the button for the tenth floor. 

    As soon as the doors closed, she pushed me against the side of the elevator. I ignored the pain from the metal hand rail that cracked my lower vertebrae and instead just focused on her face. She looked me up and down before lingering her gaze on my lips for just a second before kissing me.

    When the doors opened, she didn’t stop. Her hands grasped the fabric at my waist and pulled me out of the elevator with her, breathing me in like air. Somehow she managed to get us back to her door, I was too distracted to notice which way we went. The door opened and shut behind us as we stumbled in, my hands pawing at her skirt helplessly. 

    She grabbed my wrists and pulled me to the bed, throwing me on the ugly patterned quilt before she stepped away from me entirely. “I should tell you something.”

    Fuck. “What is it?” I tried to sound as comforting as possible, hoping it would keep anything bad from happening. 

    “I’ve never been with a girl before.”

    My eyebrows raised only slightly before my face relaxed again. “Do you want to be?”

    “I think so.” She refused to make eye contact when she said it. 

    “Okay, how about this, we go slow and you tell me if you feel uncomfortable and we’ll stop. Alright? No hard feelings.”

    She smiled at me slightly and I leaned forward to grab her hands and pulled her to me. Putting one hand on her hip, I took the other and cradled her square jaw so I could kiss her. I moved slowly that night and she followed my lead. Careful to check in with her, we kept our hands on each other until we both woke up in the morning with both of us naked and her face nuzzled in my chest. 

    Double fuck.

    I watched the light change in the room from the cool periwinkle of dawn to the warm yellow of day. The doves cooed outside until the traffic was heavy enough to drown them out. The entire time I studied Minnie’s face. Her nose was angular with two little hoops in the right nostril. It looked like she’d filled in her brows the night before, but in the daylight I could see they were naturally that full and dark. When she had her head to the side like this, her cheeks looked almost sunken under the high cheek bone that structured her face. I kept studying until she began to stir.

    “Good morning.” I brushed the kinked curls from the side of her head. They smelled like sweet vines. 

    “Yeah, whatever.” She grunted and rolled over to lay on her back, one arm over her eyes to block out the light. 

    “I take it you’re not a morning person?” I chuckled as she twisted the arm over her eyes just enough to show me she was flipping me off. 

    “What time is it?”

    I rolled over and looked at my phone that I’d put on the bedside table. I had a couple missed calls from Isaac and even more text messages. They were all about the same: “Where r u?”, “Is the apartment clear?”, “Fucker answer me”, “We r going there now”, “U better not be fuckin in there.” 

    “It’s nine-thirty and change.”

    “Shit, I have to get up.”

    “Why?” I texted Isaac back, hope you had a good night. I’m coming home soon.

    “My flight leaves at six tonight. Do you know where your friend and my sister ended up?”

    “Oh… um yeah. They went back to my apartment. I can go home and get my friend’s car and drive your sister here if you want.”

    “That’d be great. Thanks, it was nice.”

    “Do you have time for a coffee or something? There’s a coffee place in the lobby, we can go there. My treat.”

    “You know, I better not. But I had fun.” She looked at me and her smile was forced, though I couldn’t see it, I could feel it.