Chapter 2: The Towel Drops
The radiator clanked somewhere behind the wall like a prisoner rattling chains, and Marisol thought the sound was almost too perfect, almost scripted, as if the motel itself had been waiting for them. She stood at the foot of the bed with her arms crossed, watching Danielle work. The fluorescent tube above the vanity buzzed and flickered, painting Danielle's auburn hair in shades of copper and shadow as she moved with the kind of unhurried confidence that made Marisol's throat go dry.
"You're just going to stare?" Danielle asked without turning around. Her voice carried that familiar teasing edge, the one she used when she knew exactly what Marisol was thinking and wanted her to say it out loud.
"I'm assessing."
"Uh-huh. That's what you call it."
The towel had been Marisol's idea. A joke, mostly, when they'd walked him into the room and Danielle had announced that their guest needed to freshen up. But Albert had taken it seriously, had disappeared into the bathroom with the motel's thin white towel wrapped around his waist, and when he'd emerged, dripping and silent, he'd stood at the edge of the bed like a man awaiting instruction. Like he'd been waiting his whole life for someone to tell him what came next.
Danielle reached him now. Her fingers found the tucked corner of the towel, and she pulled it loose with a single deliberate motion. The fabric pooled at his feet.
Marisol stopped breathing.
She'd seen penises before. Obviously. She'd seen them in pictures and in person, had handled them with varying degrees of enthusiasm, had even, on one memorable occasion in graduate school, written a paper on phallic iconography in ancient Roman art. But she had never seen one like this. Ten inches, maybe more, curved upward with a slight leftward lean, thick as her wrist and flushed a deep, almost angry red at the tip. It twitched in the cool air of the room, and Albert made a small sound in the back of his throat, something between a gasp and a sigh.
He didn't move. His wrists were bound to the headboard with Marisol's silk scarf, the one she'd bought in Florence three summers ago, and the irony of using something so beautiful for something so crude wasn't lost on her. His chest rose and fell with shallow breaths, and his eyes—those tired, gray-blue eyes that had looked so defeated on the side of the highway—were closed now, as if he couldn't bear to watch what was happening.
Danielle wrapped both hands around him.
She did it slowly, deliberately, the way she might handle a piece of equipment she didn't fully trust. Her fingers barely met around his girth, and she let out a low whistle, the kind she usually reserved for expensive climbing gear or particularly impressive rock formations.
"Well," she said. "That's not nothing."
Albert's jaw tightened. A muscle jumped in his cheek.
"Danielle." Marisol's voice came out rougher than she intended.
"What? I'm complimenting the man."
She stroked him once, root to tip, and Albert's hips bucked involuntarily against the restraint. The old bed frame groaned. On the muted television, a woman in a torn nightgown was running through a forest, her mouth open in a scream that neither of them could hear.
Marisol crossed the room.
She didn't think about it. That was the thing she would remember later, in the quiet hours before dawn—how she hadn't thought about it at all. Her feet just moved, carrying her past the rattling radiator and the cracked vinyl chair, until she was standing on the other side of the bed, close enough to smell him. He smelled like cheap soap and something older beneath it, something like sweat and salt and the faint ghost of cigarettes.
She reached out and cupped his balls in her palm.
They were heavy, warmer than she expected, and covered in a light dusting of gray hair that matched the silver at his temples. She rolled them gently between her fingers, testing their weight, and Albert shuddered. His eyes flew open.
"Ma'am," he said. Just that. Just ma'am, in a voice that cracked on the vowel.
"Marisol," she corrected. "I told you my name."
"I remember." His throat worked. "I just—"
Danielle stroked him again, a long, slow pull that made his breath catch, and Marisol felt his testicles tighten in her palm. She watched his face, the way his brow furrowed and his lips parted, the way his eyes darted between the two of them like a man trying to track a tennis match.
"You don't have to do this," he said.
Danielle laughed. It was a bright, careless sound, utterly out of place in the dim room. "We know."
"I mean—I'm not—" He swallowed hard. "You don't owe me anything."
"Albert." Marisol squeezed him gently, and his sentence died in his throat. "We're not doing this because we owe you."
"Then why?"
It was a fair question. Marisol looked at Danielle across the broad expanse of Albert's chest, and Danielle looked back, and something passed between them that didn't need words. They'd been friends for twelve years. They'd held each other's hair back through bad breakups and bad tequila. They'd driven across three states to see a meteor shower and gotten lost in the desert for six hours. They'd never done anything like this.
"Because," Danielle said, turning back to Albert with a grin that showed too many teeth, "we wanted to see what would happen."
She stroked him faster now, her hand moving in a rhythm that made the bed creak and Albert's breath come in ragged gasps. Marisol matched her pace, kneading him with her fingers, and together they worked him like a machine they were learning to operate. Albert's head thrashed against the pillow. His bound hands clenched and unclenched above him, the silk scarf pulling taut against the rusted brass of the headboard.