TWO WOMEN

I.

"This isn't a short story," I said. I set the carton of eggs onto the tiled counter and turned to face her. A grin slowly worked its way across my face, "You can't expect every shadow and passing car and cranky store clerk to have some meaning. Sometimes working at Safeway just sucks and so the cashiers take it out on the people they're helping."

She righted imaginary glasses, raised her chin and said, somewhat more slowly than she normally spoke: "That doesn't take away from the fact that this experience was a bad omen."

I walked over to her, took the bag she was carrying out of her arms, set it on the counter beside the eggs, and wrapped my arms around her such that my fingertips reached my own shoulders. "Was it an omen that spake of grave fortune? Of death by squeezing, perhaps?"

She headbutted me in the neck. "Your deliverance of death is weaker than my bullheadedness."


II.

Her face is a pentagon, the point of which is the valley of her chin. Straight lines mark the corners of her mouth, but gentle slopes make her nose appear as though it were warmed, softened, and placed just so between her wide-set eyes. Her skin is pale, but healthy, with freckles creating indecipherable patterns across her cheeks and over the bridge of her nose. Against pure whiteness, the iris of her eyes is a raw, stolid brown: the color of a refreshing meal and a firm hug after a long day of work. And framing the smooth features and structure is a neatly collaborative network of flowing brown hair.

She towered over me, the full weight of herself held in her hips on my hips.


III.

A fly ran itself into the window with little, fleshy tck tck tck sounds. The pillow was stiff, wedged between my arm and my head on the bed. Idly, I touched my penis while she took a piss. The sound of a woman pissing always fascinated me. Blindfolded and far from home, I could pick the sound of my woman pissing out from a lineup of a hundred pissing women. Problem is, this lady isn't my woman. My woman would walk back into the all-too-brightly lit hotel room wearing a long t-shirt and a wide smile. This lady walked back into the room with an unlit cigarette in her mouth and jeans on. Earlier, her breasts had seemed too rigid to be real, but seeing them now, with their polite downward slope, I started to wonder what was the case: did she get implants at such a young age that the added weight has caused a premature surrender to gravity, or are her tits real, but filled with the same grit that got her in bed with me?

"What's a nice lookin' girl like you doing here?" I'd asked.
"You don't look like the kind of guy who's into nice lookin' girls," she'd replied.

And she was right. Which is why I shorted her twenty bucks. Which is why she's got her clothes on but isn't leaving. She's staring at me, watching the fly run into the window.