The Mole

Don’t do that, Caroline. Don’t let your eyelashes flutter like that. Don’t bite your bottom lip.

Alan watches her face, he too biting his bottom lip, his fingers busy under the table. Caroline wears a dark green satin dress, from this view at the table, nothing more than a bra and the ever changing shine waves of material at her midsection. Her lips pull at the sides. A strap falls from her shoulder and she leaves it there, see-sawing on her perfect skin on her perfect arm.

Please don’t. Can’t you see that I’m here, across from you? Do you know what this is doing to me?

Alan dips his fingers in the ginger mayonnaise sauce and goes below again. I could see that his fingers are wrinkled from the wet. Caroline could breathe while I was watching this, but now she is tensed again, her body is quivering steel, like a cadaver in the back of a truck, rigid but vibrating. Then convulsions, and Alan, his mouth agape and his eyes dark, takes a stalk of asparagus from the cold, long-forgotten meal and puts it too between her legs. And it’s over for now. Alan takes a sip of the Côtes du Rhône, slightly chilled for the occasion, though certainly warmed now in his grip, rearranges himself on his seat and turns to me for conversation. I’m meant to ignore what just happened, meant to make light talk of heavy things with an air of casual omnipotence while Alan and I wait for our erections to subside. Before they work out a way to destroy me again.

“Lawrence,” Alan says, leaning forward, the Côtes du Rhône flopping in his glass, “I’ve been meaning to ask your opinion of the financial crash in Argentina.”

I interrupt him before he can talk down to me with a piddling question about whether it will effect us. He’ll give a little head waver at the end that means “I’ve just made your wife come and later, well, we’ll see, won’t we?”

“They never should have tied their currency to the dollar. Lazy economics. I told them that. Stability cannot exist when it’s based on the someone else’s variables, just as you cannot have a truly stable family based on imitating a better one. Order must come from within in its own pattern and crystallization.”

“You don’t feel bad for them?”

“No. If anything, this was the stroke of reality they needed. And it’s better for us.”

“I think it barely affects us at all.”

“Perhaps, but a mole, as inconsequential as it seems, can still become cancerous if it is not removed.”

“I find that quite cold coming from someone who used to live there.”

“I worked for the American people, not the Argentineans.”

Caroline’s arm moves to Alan’s lap and straightens. His face eases, a superior slack, and the mole itches again.

“I agree with Alan,” Caroline says, and turns her face to kiss him. His mouth opens for it, his eyelids half closed, but she only teases him, only breathes his exhales and returns them, her pouting lips wet with gloss and sex. He leans back in his chair, stretching his abdomen. The dinner, gelling gravies and melting sorbets, is trapped in her fingers and pushed away like it had been forced on her in the first place. Alan puts his hand around the back of her neck and she arches it. His lips hover, deciding where to land. When they descend, his top lip dragging over her carotid, she gasps, and Alan looks at me before his lashes enmesh with each other.

My meal is carried away by the tablecloth, our Côtes du Rhône with it, and an area of lacquered dining room table is cleared before me. Caroline sits on the other side, the lobes of the heart-shape bulging above. Her dress is bunched up in Alan’s fingers and her thighs are exposed, olive-skinned and long, like a grasshopper preparing to leap. Her arms shimmy in front of her and Alan’s pants are dropped. She pulls at his shirt, but he leaves it on, but open, one shoulder exposed.

“Fuck me, Alan,” she whispers in his ear, though I can hear it quite well. My erection stretches against my pants, altogether less roomy in there, though I do not allow it to be free. I cannot let Caroline have that part, that final humiliation. Alan’s arms fall to her hips, gripping the satin in strong fingers, he pumps. His fists tear at her dress, breaking the left strap. He seems angry with this and shoots me a look as if I’ve kept her from buying good clothes. He impatiently unravels her from the dress and I see the side of her breasts bounce as her arms come down. They are blocked finally as her hands grasp the table and she leans back for a better angle. Alan’s face is then exposed, superior slack in handsome matting, the better to fuck her with. A bead of sweat drops from his temples to his perfect cheekbone.

He pauses and hooks her inner thighs between thumb and forefinger. He lifts her and she helps him along, letting her legs drop behind her, settling into a crawl on the table. He steps onto it, the grease of their skin scuffing the shine, and kneels behind her. The asparagus spear, fallen out of her asshole, is twisted in the ginger mayonnaise and then returned. He balances it straight above his cock, organic blood flesh pulsing, and enters her, pushing the asparagus in as he goes. She falls to her elbows and splays her hands. A drip of mayonnaise hits the table and beads up. This, too, is part of it. They want me to clean it, put a napkin under them, but I don’t move because I can’t. My thighs can’t make that kind of coordination at this time, my knees aren’t interested in manifesting their purpose.

Alan’s cock and the spear of asparagus expose themselves, shiny and bubbling with agitation moment after moment, only to push inside again. Caroline’s hair waves and shakes, her breasts pendulum sweeping, over there. The dome of Alan’s ass, dimples appearing and disappearing, his brow furrowed and bottom lip drooping, over here.

“Do you want me?” Alan asks.

“Yes,” Caroline whimpers in the distance. “Yes, I want you. Yes.”

My body shivers and I grimace. I’ve just come in my pants, like I always do.

Alan’s back arches and he makes two final trembling thrusts above her, watching me.

“Do you want me,” he asks, in breathy breaks, “Lawrence?”

“Yes,” I answer, because I, after all, am the mole.