Consent

By Ken Israel

She knew that Darrel would not call before ten o’clock, which gave her ample time to tease her hair into bronze ringlets, play around with different metallic shades of lipstick and shoes to match her new Bebë red lace skirt. Her boyfriend (was he technically her ex?) had bought it for her some weeks ago. He’d always bought her things. It felt good to wear the dress now, to wear it like this. Not for him. It felt good to say her ex; mature, lofty somehow. Somehow daring.

“I have enough things, hon,” she said leaning into the mirror, staring, frowning somewhat. They would grow more yet. Maybe a little more. At eight thirty her phone lifted into its discordant melody that would continue for the rest of the night. She’d missed so many parties for Paul, it seemed all her friends and acquaintances and wishers-well were more than eager to help her make up for lost time. She felt the familiar knot begin to galvanize in her stomach; as if she were standing at the edge of a cliff preparing for a rapturous fall and stark spinning oblivion, and dangerous advances, some broken, some welcomed.

After some investigation of who would be where, she finally decided on one of the parties that the nearby fraternity house Sig Ep would be hosting for its weekly Friday night mixer. She turned in front of the mirror, examining the shapely slope of her hips and buttocks, tightening her stomach, pleased, exited the dorm room through a thin constrictive maze of hallways and out the giant glass doors. The stars were out, all pleasantly twinkling, and the full face of the moon lighting everything. The leaves on the southern quad of campus moaned, leaning off the branches with such expectation like they might explode into the air. She walked up a dirt path between the rows of trailer modules where the foreign language classes were, up a steep ravine that slowed gently down the other side to the parking lot where the taxis waited to take the students to various parties.

Voices rang the air as she descended. The faces were wild and ruddy and she had to fight off the terrible urge to smile.

She was careful not to get too drunk, or perspire. Boys watched her stride across the patchy lawn and nod to Brother Charlie at the door, and head around back. The boys watched her catch the eye of her girlfriends, who were similarly beautiful but not quite as sensuously dressed. But close. The boys watched, and she smiled at a few of the cuter ones, and snubbed a few of the cuter ones, and drank, and talked to her girlfriends until her cell phone rang and it was Darrel.

“Hey baby,” he said in his throaty voice.

“Hey, what you doing?”

“Coming to get you!”

She laughed and rolled her eyes at her friends, who looked at one another. She checked her watch. “Well you better come faster,” she said dangerously, looking at her friends again and feeling their faces, the faces of the boys watching, and the face on the other end of the line.

Her ex was a boy named Paul. A senior, two years older than she, serious (too serious) and charming in a melancholy way. He drove with both hands meticulously placed on the steering wheel; he spent his parents’ money on opera tickets and expensive dinners at ethnic restaurants and gifts for her of course; he had a preternatural hatred for her fraternity acquaintances. He was suspicious when she went out with her guy friends, questioning her constantly.

He liked to say: “Where are you going, where have you been?” He would say it like that too, fluidly, and then smile his lofty smile, as if he meant something. He always meant something else. He never came out with anything. Later that night, he would no doubt ask her in the tired, somber voice that he’d recently begun using: “where are you going, where have you been?” At around ten thirty she stepped around the corner of the frat house to smoke, and to dodge a particularly childish freshmen who kept haranging her, and there was the luminous cherry red Mustang Cobra and Darrel, pulling up to the curb in front of the house.

She smiled, and the smile fell. He had a friend in the passenger seat, an older man, older than Darrel even, too old to count, maybe even in his thirties. She dropped her beer bottle on the ground and walked towards them, preparing her indignant frown. She could make out Darrel vaguely behind the tinted windshield, his wicked tooth-ridden grin. He revved the engine hard, and she stopped.

Then he drove right up onto the lawn, tires slopping up grass and dirt. She squealed and ducked out of the way, and hit the hood of the car with her palm as it slid to a stop in the damp grass.

“Oh my God,” she said between uncontrollable giggles.

“Get in, hurry!” Darrel swung the door open, laughing boisterously as some of the brothers came poking around the side of the house, deciding what to do. “You can sit on my friend’s lap!”

She stood with her hands on her hips for a moment, but the man in the passenger seat wouldn’t move, and her smile felt strange all of a sudden. He was slender and dark, black and Hispanic maybe, chewing a toothpick and eyeing her uncomfortably. She had to crawl over him to sit in the middle, with Darrel yelping for her to hurry up, and they peeled out tossing clouds of dirt and grass into the crowd that was gathering in the front lawn. A hostile yell came from behind them, barely audible, though it sounded like one of her friends. This was good. She slid away from the man in the passenger seat, who gnawed his toothpick and stared out the window at the boys in front of the house, turning his head uncomfortably around to stare all the way as they left.

“You’re such a jerk!” she said, slapping Darrel’s thigh.

“I’m all yours baby.”

The man in the passenger seat made a noise of some kind, and she scootched closer to Darrel, squeezing his big muscular arms, watching the shade of his handsome face in the fading moonlight.

Darrel took them onto the parkway and they drove south a short distance, into the more urban areas surrounding the campus. The buildings suddenly became squat and dark. The stars had disappeared, and the moon was now a faint blur behind clouds. Darrel talked about his plan to open a bar in the area. He’d been reading books. He’d been learning.

“People look at me like I’m nuts,” he grinned into the hue of streetlight. “Like I’m an ex-con, and, oh yeah, I like to read too.”

“Yuup,” came the response from the back seat, where the other man (whose name was Andre) now sat.

She didn’t like when he talked about jail. He didn’t belong there. His friends had sent him there, telling the police he’d started a bar-fight. He’d only done it to protect them. He spoke viciously about disloyalty. He hated it with a fury that she admired.

She had been watching the route and becoming increasingly on-edge. They were in Paul’s neighborhood. She could imagine his house around a curve as they passed Michigan Street. Then, as she’d been dreading, they finally pulled off into a small shopping plaza, winding around the far corner to “McHenry’s Pub.” She suddenly became conscious of her dress, regretting she’d worn it.

They parked, and Darrel turned to her expectantly.

She thought a moment. “I’m only twenty, I don’t know if I can...” her voice trailed off.

This only seemed to excite Darrel even more. “Don’t worry, honey.” He got out, shut the door and strode across the parking lot, his head turned to a group of loud boys sitting outside on a bench. They glanced up and quickly away. When he reached the front of the bar, he snapped his head to the bouncer, a giant black man with a tight black shirt and trunk arms. Darrel gestured for the man to lean down to him, and the man complied. Her eyes glistened at the certainty of his gesture. The man was twice his size, and Darrel was no shrimp! Then the two were talking, and she knew that she would be let inside.

She felt her shoulders unclinch. She must have been nervous about the bouncer. Now she was warm and light again. Darrel had that strange power. She opened the window and let in the dark air, filling her lungs, eyes shut, and sighed. She turned around to Andre. “So, how do you know Darrel?” she said, smiling her brightest soft smile.

Andre kept his eyes outside the window. “’Bout six months,” he said.

“No, I mean how do you know him?”

Andre turned to her slowly, and took the toothpick out of his mouth. “Bout. Six. Months.”

Her eyes fluttered away, and she found herself nodding like she understood.

The door to the car opened and she started suddenly.

“All done, hon,” said Darrel, now wildly giddy and animated. “Didn’t I tell you I’d take care of it? You thought I was bullshitting didn’t you? Huh?”

“No, I didn’t,” she said.

“The hell you didn’t.” He turned to Andre. “Hey, she say I was bullshittin’ or what?”

“Yuup.”

“No I didn’t,” she said, trying very hard to show that she was in on the game, that it was all a game. “I did not you sneak.”

Andre tapped the headrest, and she reached back and playfully smacked his leg.

“Hey!” he barked, in a way that made her face numb. “Let’s go,” he hit the headrest again, and she quickly got out and pulled the seat forward so he could follow.

“Hey, now,” Darrel said, holding up a finger to Andre. “Relax, son.”

The three went into the bar. She walked close to Darrel, who smelled even more strongly of cologne now. The bouncer gave her a quick look, and looked away when she smiled and nodded.

They went in and got a table, and Darrel ordered them all shots. She drank the first one down, and then another. It happened very fast. And then she got a Kamakazi. Darrel was loose and excited. Even Andre had begun to lighten up, showing his big wide teeth and the clefts of his dimpled face. At one point Darrel and Andre stole her drink, hiding it behind their backs and passing it back and forth so that she couldn’t see. Finally she grabbed Darren and tickled him.

“Hey,” he said, smiling and showing his hands.

She turned to Andre, who handed her the drink with a strange grin, batting his eyes at Darrel. “Here you go,” he said coldly, and got up to use the bathroom.

A group of six men entered the bar, loudly, sitting at a table in a corner off behind her. When Andre returned from the bathroom his eerie face lifted and the great white teeth were engulfing. He went over to the table where the men were sprawled in the booths, lighting their cigarettes. There was much excitement and jostling at his appearance there. The men were large with thick hammer-like arms and veiny necks. They were a mix of black and Hispanic and some she couldn’t place; they were exotic to her. All of them wore tattoos. A teardrop on the cheek of the thinner one, something in Spanish on the neck of another. One of them had some kind of writing all over: on his face, right on his cheeks, his chin, his ears even! And the earrings looked almost like shrunken heads. This one was the largest. Long, with an angular skeleton face, dark as a moonless night. He was the only one that did not smile when Andre appeared, but gave a brief nod.

God of the savages, that one, she thought, hearing Paul’s voice. They wore dark greasy shirts and big jeans of different dark shades. They had stubbly faces and deep set eyes that scanned everything. Andre pointed over to her and Darrel, and the six sets of scanning eyes lay on her deep and hard, and she turned away. Darrel nodded to them briefly, and seemed uncomfortable.

She asked if he knew those men.

“No.”

She hesitated a moment. “Well, how does Andre know them?”

“Why don’t you ask Andre,” he said blankly.

She noticed another drink in front of her, and wasn’t sure if it was hers, or where it came from. She slid it away from her slowly, glancing over at Darrel. He was staring into another corner of the bar across from them and to the left, stiffened up, muscles tense.

Her slow eyes carefully studied the faces until she found the small, hunched, boyish form nestled into a booth, sitting cross-legged and holding a cup of coffee, a closed book in front of him. He was looking at her.

And Darrel was looking at him.

She quickly crossed her arms, hiding the dress, before she knew what she was doing. She stared for a moment, nodded, uncertain. He and Darrel had met once or twice. Paul hadn’t liked him. “Crooked” was the somewhat pitifully outdated expression he’d used.

“Oh, my God,” she said, shielding her face with a hand. “I can’t believe Paul’s here.”

Darrel breathed stiffly through his nose. He was watching him, staring inquisitively, as one would watch a child doing something interesting.

“I don’t even want to deal with this right now,” she said, grinning, looking amused. Under the counter her hand was wringer her dress.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.” She scrambled for something to say. “He’s always popping up everywhere I go, like he’s following me or something. God. And he keeps calling me. Why is he here?”

“Yeah,” Darrel nodded decisively, as if he’d just come to an official diagnosis. “Yeah, he won’t harrass you while I’m here, trust me.”

“He hasn’t been harrassing me...” she felt her heart beating thickly, and her face turn flush. She wished she’d said something else. She lifted her eyes slowly, and Paul was sitting rather anxiously, looking at the book. She had a sudden urge to hide, or make Darrel go away. She remembered the dress.

Paul would not look back up at her. She felt the force of Darrel’s cold gaze, and she could feel the eyes of the men behind her with Andre, now silent. Paul seemed so tiny, shrunken into his corner. He darted his eyes up in her direction every now and then, and they were instantly shot back down. She gazed intensely at him, warmly. He seemed so afraid, maybe if he could only catch her looking. She had a way of looking at him that would draw him out. His thousands of little foxholes he was always ducking into. Only she could do it. She recalled the quiet voice, and his blushing cheaks when she would put a firm hand on his thigh. Even after 16 months together, he would blush like it was the first time.

“Yeah,” Darrel said, just loud enough for Paul to here. “Try and come over here.”

“Maybe we should go,” she said, trying to sound casual and a little uncomfortable. The voice was scared, though. She could not hide scared.

Darrel took his eyes from Paul for a split second to look at her strangely. “No. Honey, no! We don’t leave. Is he bothering you?”

“No, no, he’s not, really. He’s- I don’t know, it’s like, it’s a little awkward.”

“Don’t let it bother you. Trust me, that’s what he wants. Don’t let it.” He spoke with a coaxing sincerity that was paradoxically forceful and agitated.

She thought of her father and blushed.

There was a faint cold whisp of air: Andre, taking a seat next to her. He was tremulous, like a pipe under extreme pressure, she could almost hear the gushing, the crackly stretching of metal. Her heart began to palpitate and she felt the wet heat of her palms.

“Hey, can we go,” she managed to say. “Honey. Let’s go, please.”

Darrel looked at her, then at Andre. Frowning. Then down at his beer, talking in the measured hiss of barely subdued frustration. “Let’s not make this ruin our entire night, okay? Just, don’t let him get to you. That’s exactly what he wants. That’s why he’s sitting there looking at you like he’s- and you’re letting him.”

Now Paul had seen Andre. She suddenly felt a spike of anger. “Look, can we just go, or what?” Her own voice surprised her.

“Jesus Christ.” Darrel drank the rest of his beer, ordered another one. “We’ll leave soon.”

She didn’t feel stupid around Darrel, like there was something always behind everything that he said that was only meant for him. Not like Paul. With his pursing little expression, the way he always gazed up at the sky when she asked him something to which he thought he had to come up with some profound response.

“Virtue...” (She began replaying all his little platitudes) “All it boils down to is intentions. ‘I didn’t intend for it to happen that way,’ you always hear. The only real virtue is awareness.”

She’d actually liked that one.

But there was always something timid and uncertain behind what he did or said. His ridiculous driving habits. That way he had when they were first going out of always stopping in the middle of foreplay to ask if it was okay. “Is this okay?” “Are you okay with this?” Just do it to me already! she’d felt like screaming. The way he would talk about how terrible the world was in that ambiguous, vaguely intellectual manner, and then refer to some story he’d read or some painting he’d seen, like if he could just reference that little terrible thing then he would be safe from it.

She felt safe around Darrel. It was a strange sensation. That no one could hurt her, no matter what she did, while he was there. Darrel knew the world from being in the world and being kicked down by it, and not giving up. Not by reading about it from upon high, so high above it that it was all a vague blur, and pointing down in its general direction and saying: “Terrible! Terrible! Terrible!”

After a time, Darrel and Andre began talking, began to loosen up again, as if they’d forgotten about Paul, sitting awkwardly in the corner across from them uncertain what to do. He obviously wanted to come over and talk to her. He looked like a scared rabbit. She drank another Kamikazi and snorted through her nose. Darrel wouldn’t have that problem. He’d come right over, sit down next to her, gaze into her eyes, tell her she was with the wrong man, who didn’t deserve her, and that she should come back to him. He would say it forcefully, as if they were the only two people, and she would go. She would consent, and they would go and talk about movies and he would stare off in that way of his, like rising up into trees and skies, like a big bright colorful balloon, and she would be inside of it, and understand what it meant to be inside, and she would be safe.

She became conscious of her head starting to spin.

Darrel pointed at her and said to Andre, “Hey, check out this girl’s dress.” He was grinning again and rubbing his stubbly cheeks, his playful, boyish grin. “You know, I’m going to have to beat up every guy in the bar now with you wearing this dress, getting hit on all the time.”

She tilted her head and opened her mouth. “Okay. You can handle it, I’m sure. Or were you just bullshitting.”

Darrel leaned back on his chair, “OH. You here that, man! Okay, I see. That was a good one. Think you’re clever, huh?”

She could tell he was tipsy. His jostling was no longer smooth and humorous. There was a metallic distortion to it now, something artificial, but more. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck.

Andre went back to talk to his friends, who had grown quite loud. She and Darrel sat and talked. Darrel had cut himself off drinking, and she saw this as a good sign.

“Hey,” she said, “It’s getting kind of late.”

Darrel looked at his watch, then her, then glanced over at Paul, still sitting indian-style at his booth and refusing to budge. His own sort of defiant stand.

To her great relief, Darrel nodded. “Give me a second,” he said, and went over to talk to Andre’s friends.

She sat, looking into her drink. She did not remember ordering it. She remembered the drink she’d pushed away, but it was gone. Had she drank it? Eventually, inevitably, she looked over at Paul. He was looking right at her, with a sort tender smile barely suggested on his lips, his eyes bright. She smiled back.

“Let’s go,” Darrel said, in a tone she hadn’t heard yet. He turned to Paul and smiled a wicked smile, waving. “Bye, bye.”

He looked back at her expectantly, grinning, and she turned away and headed out, finding her legs wobbly and nearly falling. Darrel caught her with a big, vice-like arm, and they walked awkwardly towards the door. They passed the men, Andre’s friends, on the way out. None of them acknowledged her, but the big one, the long black man with the tattooos covering his face, the savage king, gave Darrel a look, and nodded. Darrel nodded back, and nodded to Andre. She watched uncertainly. Andre grinned devilishly at her. She tried to think about it. To understand what was happening. Something was happening, wasn’t it? Wasn’t something happening?

Darrel led her to the car.

“Where’s Andre?” she asked, slurring the words a bit.

“He’s going to hang back for a while. He’ll meet us up later on.”

They got into the car, and Darrel revved the engine for a while, then pulled away. She had the urge to ask where they were headed, but she could not find her voice. She turned her head around anxiously, watching the bar, putting her hand on the window.

The bar door swung open and Paul hurried out, walking quickly along the brick wall towards the parking lot to the side of the building, disappearing around the corner.

“Hey!” she said, snapping upright.

The car shook and jolted forward, and her head threw back. She watched out the back window as the bar door swung open again, and several low shapes appeared, advancing terribly, then sank away behind the brackish distance of street lamps and bushes and buildings and trees as she was sped away.

They were silent in the car. The distant sense of something happening. She watched the road hop up and down and sideways, and became dizzy. She tried focusing on the dials on the dashboard, the numbers hopping and sliding back down, then shooting off another way. Had she really drank that much? She let her head fall back. Darrel seemed uncharacteristically tense, rapping his fingers against the stearing wheel, and humming some vaguely familiar tune shakily through his teeth. He didn’t look at her.

There was a chirping sound and Darrel picked up his phone. “Yeah?” he said. Then his shoulders relaxed and he grinned. “About fifteen minutes.” This he said quietly. He put the phone down and snorted, leaning back, with one hand draped over the wheel. The other he slid up her leg.

The powerful hand tightened around her thigh. She remembered the hand, the immutable vice that thrilled her with its singular presence there, perfectly placed, tightening slowly, and her relenting to its force. That awfully thrilling force. Just the hand and nothing more, just there inside the thigh, certain, dangerous and warm, sneaking closed, sending its overwhelming shivers.

She found it difficult to speak. “What’s up with Andre?”

“What’s up with this boyfriend of yours? He harrass you a lot?”

“No,” she tried to straighten up, sank back down again, feeling light. The vice was there, not holding her, but there, tightening. “He doesn’t. He knows me.”

“He calls you all the time doesn’t he? Doesn’t he follow you around?”

“I don’t know.” She felt as though she were sinking into the seat like quicksand. Her lips began to quiver.

“Well, he does, honey, trust me. I know these kind of guys. Trust me, I know how to deal with them.”

“I mean, you don’t have to.” Her voice trembled, and she felt her heart race, the first strange tickle of teardrops welling in the eyes. She couldn’t make sense. She clutched the side-bar.

“He hurt you. I mean,” Darrel clenched his teeth. “These guys really get under my skin. You know, I’m not a violent guy by nature. Some of my friends are, you know? Like fucking Andre,” his voice raised to a near yelp, “You know what I mean?”

“I hurt him, too,” she managed, barely the shadow of an echo of a whisper.

Darrel hissed, shaking his head. “Girls.”

She stared up at the angular face, the streetlamps illuminating it at regular intervals and the high drone of the pavement under them, like an alarm. The moon was blanked out completely, and the stars. She watched the headlights bulge and tear into the pure night, the flooding street with its vague broken white lines. The wind turned fierce outside the windows, yawning and moaning, howling when the Mustang jarred and rumbled. It wanted in. The windows rattled as if they would shatter at any moment, exploding, cutting her so deeply that the scars would reach the bone. Her eyes drifted over to the speedometer. 90.

“He was my best friend.” She said this in a tone she had not expected, a slow dark and staring voice, deep and forceful. She braced herself, somehow aware of something that might come. But there was only the unbreakable vice on her thigh, tightening, and the rattling windows and the soft voice.

“Don’t you know I’m your friend, honey,” said Darrel. He said this like it meant something, smiling his big toothy smile off into the darkness in front of her.

© Ken Israel