smell her citrus-scented perfume, a trace of mint on her breath.
“Well then,” she says. “Before we get started, I think you have something for me.”
Over the telephone she never specified an amount, and so Nick brought only what he could afford, a hundred dollars. He hands My-Duyen the money—three tens, four fives, a fifty—and she counts it out, nodding amicably.
“This’ll do,” she tells him, and places the folded bills into the nightstand’s drawer. “Now we can relax.” She scoots closer to him, caresses his arm with the tip of her finger. “What is it you came here for?” she says.
“How do you mean?”
She gives him a slow, off-balance smile. “What would you like to do to me, Jack? What would you like me to do to you?”
“A letter of what kind?” Annie said, palming the lemon wedges into a pile.
“I want to make him jealous,” said Nick. “Tell him we’re getting married and he isn’t invited to the wedding. Tell him we’re a thing, you and I, even though we aren’t. Generally, I’m not such a vengeful dude, but wouldn’t it feel good to make Ricky feel bad?”
Around her, Nick often talks in a manner to which he isn’t accustomed—feels more confident, almost cocky, though he can’t say why. She’s out of his league for sure, but he’s never been intimidated by Annie’s appearance. Nick knows he isn’t handsome, not in any classical sense, but he’s reasonably desirable, he’s always thought: dark-haired and tall, with a genial, long-toothed smile he’s cultivated in adulthood. Every now and then he catches himself wondering what her ex-boyfriend looks like—wondering who Annie finds more attractive, him or Ricky.
“You’ve never even met him,” she said. “He’s actually not a terrible person. He just did this one terrible thing. When I think about it, I was really happy with Ricky. Happy in a way I’m not sure I could ever be without him.”
Nick and Annie have had dinner together outside of Salty’s, have shared nightcaps at nearby bars, though only as friends. Whenever he takes her hand her fingers wiggle free of his grasp, and when he tries to kiss her she turns sharply away. “Not yet,” she always says. “It isn’t the right time. A new boyfriend’s the last thing in the world I need at this point in my life.”
In truth, Nick’s attempts to hold her hand and to kiss her have been somewhat strained. Despite his feelings for her, he isn’t sure he’s attracted to Annie—isn’t sure his interest in her is carnal. She’s an attractive woman by anyone’s standards, but she isn’t Asian, and there are too many times when he looks at her and feels no shiver throughout his body, no hunger for sex, only a contentment so deep that the second they part Nick longs to be near her again. He’s never quite certain, then, if love—romantic love—is the right thing to call whatever takes hold of him when he thinks of her, when he’s around her. He can make no sense of his preoccupation with Annie, any more than he can make sense of his fixation with Asian women.
Annie took his empty beer bottle, tossed it into a recycling bin behind the bar. “Another Redhook?”
“What’s stopping me?”
She got Nick his beer, placed it on the round cardboard coaster that read “Salty’s” in big turquoise letters. Then she set to tidying the bar. He watched as she worked through a row of foam-stained pint glasses, plunging each glass into a sink full of soapy water, rinsing it under a faucet, then leaving it to dry on a long white towel. Heady from his third beer of the night, Nick said, “I love watching you move.”
Annie rolled her eyes, drying her hands on the tails of her shirt. “I miss the guy,” she said, and sighed. “I’m an idiot, but I miss him.”
Nick took the coaster from beneath his beer, flicked it back and forth against the tip of his thumb. “Writing utensil, please,” he said, and held out his hand.
Annie gave him a pen. He laid the coaster down on the bar, blank side up. Dear Ricky, he wrote.
Sex, he wants to say. I came here to have sex. But somehow the word seems crass, despite the urgency of his desire and the fact that he’s with a call girl. Perhaps because of all the candles, Nick feels as if he’s on a date, as if they’ve reached some decisive juncture that might require him to initiate foreplay. He should know how to act in the presence of such a woman, he thinks: he is, after all, from Las Vegas. But as a teenager he could never bring himself to solicit a prostitute, no matter how much he wanted to, no matter how many of them he would see walking the streets downtown. He wonders what about him has changed, how it was that he picked up the telephone earlier today and dialed this stranger’s number. “Are there options?” Nick asks. “Is it up to me what we do?”
“You’re the customer,” My-Duyen says.
“I guess I’m not sure how we’re supposed to begin here.”
“Let’s try a different angle. What are you into?”
“Anything, I suppose. I mean, within reason.”
My-Duyen laughs, as though his answer were the punch line of a joke. She rests a hand on the small of his back. “How about this. You undress and get under the covers, and I’ll take it from there. We’ll skip the massage, OK?”
“Yeah,” Nick says. “Good.” He never expected a massage, and finds it unusual that she maintains the pretext of her yellow-pages ad. He takes off his clothes and slides into the bed, watching as My-Duyen shimmies out of her dress. Naked before him, she pulls the comforter down to his knees, the sheet domed over his crotch. Then she pulls the sheet down too, and his swollen penis is exposed. It looks bruised, as if it’s been slapped around or stepped on, the shaft a rash-like red, the head darkened to a purplish hue.
My-Duyen’s breasts hang sublimely from her body. Between her thighs is a vertical strip of pubic hair, the skin shaved clean around it. She lies down next to him, her leg brushing his, and suddenly Nick feels as if his insides are being liquified in a blender. It’s the same way he’s felt roaming the aisles at Big Al’s, an adult bookstore on Broadway, where he goes several times a week to flip through the pages of Orient XXXpress or Kung Pao Pussy or Filipino Fuck, surveying the glossy images before rushing to the Burger King across the street, slipping into the men’s room, and masturbating in a stall defaced by graffiti and glory holes, sometimes evacuating his bowels just after he comes.
“Asian Sensation,” he says, the words tumbling accidentally from his mouth.
“What?”
“That’s what you called yourself. Over the phone.”
“Oh, right.” She props herself on an elbow, flattens her hand across his stomach in a tender sort of way. Looking down at his erection, she seems to think for a moment, then says, “Tell me you love me, Jack.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Just say it.” Her voice quivers. She lowers her face. “For me.”
What reason could she have for asking him to say such a thing? Is she putting on some kind of act, he wonders, a show of emotion meant to heighten his excitement? “I’m not sure I understand,” Nick says.
She still isn’t looking at him. “Three simple words,” she says, nuzzling up to him like a cat, curling her warm body into the crook of his arm.
“It’s my first time,” he tells her, trying to change the subject, though he isn’t sure why he’s chosen this, of all things, to say. Under normal circumstances he keeps his virginity a secret, hiding it from the world as he might some sordid deed from his past. “I’m a virgin,” he says.
“I figured as much. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” She reaches down and takes hold of his erection. “Pretend I’m your girlfriend and we do it all the time. Pretend you’re going to fuck me,” My-Duyen says, “because you love me.”
Nick’s