691 Suburban Dr By Natty Soltesz
The other message on my phone was from a number I did recognize – it was Jordan, my ex-boyfriend. But in some ways it was just as surprising. I hadn't heard from Jordan since I'd broken up with him five months prior.
"Hey it's me," he said in his laid back, sullen tone. "So like, my landlord says I can't have cats? So you can actually have the cat, if you want him. I can bring him over or whatever. Just like...let me know."
I deleted the message from Jordan and saved the one from Darrin, then I turned off my phone. I was partly excited to hear from Darrin, and partly anxious. The message from Jordan edged my anxiety to higher levels. I wanted to go home. I imagined myself heading up to my third-floor apartment, shutting the door behind me, and twisting the deadbolt. It was funny, the instant satisfaction that twisting that deadbolt gave me since I'd moved on from my ex and gotten my own place, the sound of it especially: a solid thud that meant nobody could get near me unless I wanted them to. I imagined myself folding my laundry, watching a movie; dealing with people later.
But that was not to be, because when I pulled up to my apartment house I saw a blue Nissan with a Ron Paul 2012 bumper sticker parked in front – Jordan's car. And there was Jordan, on my porch, the cat carrier sitting next to his feet.
"What are you doing here?" I said. Jordan stood up. He sunk both hands deep into the pockets of his sweatpants, making them ride low enough to wear I could see his flat, hairy stomach.
"Didn't you get my message?"
"The one you just left? You didn't say anything about coming here."
"Well, like, it got pretty serious. My landlord said it's me or the cat. So I just figured I'd come here, he's giving me all this shit about it." I looked at Mr. Donald's fat orange face in the carrier and my heart swelled. I'd missed that fucking cat. I'd had a more intimate, loving relationship with Mr. Donald than I'd had with Jordan in some respects, but Jordan had insisted on taking him when we broke up. So I'd steeled my heart and wracked it up as severance pay, swallowing a heaping helping of guilt in the process. I'd broken up with Jordan, see. It had all been my decision and, therefore, my fault.
At least that was one way of looking at it.
Jordan shifted on his heels and looked at me. As much as I wanted the cat I was annoyed with his presumptiveness.
"What makes you think my landlord allows cats?" I said.
"Does he?" Jordan asked.
I sighed. "I don't know," I said, and took the cat carrier in hand. "Guess I'll find out."
"You mind if I come up?" Jordan said, moving a step toward me. "I'm, like, thirsty."
"Yeah but it's gotta be quick, I got stuff I need to do."
"What stuff?" Jordan said, following me up the steps.
"Just stuff. None of your business," I said. I picked up Mr. Donald's carrier. He mewed. "Can you carry my laundry?"
Jordan picked up the basket and followed me wordlessly up the steps. It struck me how different our dynamic felt after just five months of being apart. The first year we moved in together, especially, I was the one always following Jordan around, and more often than not he'd put out the same pissy attitude that I was giving him now. I liked it better like this. It felt more accurate.
I unlocked my door and sent Jordan up the last flight of steps to my attic apartment. I've always loved the episode of "The Brady Bunch" where Mike and Carol let Greg turn the attic into his own teenage paradise, and I was going for that lost 70s look. A good chunk of my post-breakup free time was spent going to out-of-the-way thrift stores and grabbing the most hideously kitschy stuff I could find.
I set the carrier on the kitchen floor and opened the door. Mr. Donald poked his fat orange head outside, sniffed the air, and then cowered back in the carrier. My ever-present guilt welled up once again, this time for having uprooting my cat's whole world as a result of leaving Jordan. For almost the entire five years Jordan and I were together we'd lived in the same house, and Mr. Donald was comfortable there.
When I say Jordan and I were "together" you should understand that that is a relative term. Jordan never once, as far as I know, referred to me as his "boyfriend." In fact it wasn't until the last year of our relationship that I started referring to him, publicly, as my boyfriend. The fact that we broke up soon after that should tell you something.
I met Jordan Graziano when he came to my house one evening to deliver me a pizza. I shit you not. Clichés are clichés for a reason.
I had spent the day moving into a house I was renting in Turtle Creek, about fifteen miles outside of the city. Me, my friend Kate and her boyfriend Charlie had just finished hauling in the last of my boxes of books when the pizza showed up, along with the very archetype of the ratty, skinny, unselfconsciously sexy pizza delivery guy.
He wore a red t-shirt caked in flour and marbled with grease stains. His chest hair poked out from under the stretched-out collar. He had two-week's worth of stubble on his unsmiling face and a nose that looked like it had once been broken. I gave him a $7 tip and he tipped his head back at me. "Thanks, bro," he said, and grinned before he sauntered away.
I ordered five pizzas over the next three weeks, and he showed up most of the time. I asked him to come in the house on the second delivery and while I rummaged around for money, I saw him glance at the gay porn magazines I'd left faux-haphazardly strewn on the coffee table. He didn't take the bait that time, but I still got a great big "I know what you're thinking" grin before he left.
The third time I used the tried-and-true method of wearing skimpy clothes. In fact I wore a pair of high-cut basketball shorts with no underwear underneath. Hey, at least I didn't let my bath towel drop by accident.
I came back from the kitchen with my money. Jordan had set the pizza on the coffee table - right on top of the porn mags - and was looking at my bookshelf, which I'd just populated with books that evening.
"Ayn Rand, huh?" he said, pointing to my copy of The Fountainhead.
"Oh yeah, I had to read that for an econ class in college. I keep meaning to get rid of it."
"Why? She's awesome."
"Well...okay. I guess she's just not my cup of tea." Jordan put the book back on the shelf and grabbed a huge volume of Tom of Finland drawings.
"Wow," he said, leafing through black and white drawings of enormous men with enormous tits holding enormous dicks. "You like this?"
"Yeah," I told him, the money still in my hand.
"These guys' dicks are crazy," he said. I could see a big tube forming in the front of his sweatpants. Boldness felt like it was in order.
"How's yours compare?" I said. Jordan looked at me and motioned down to his crotch, like Why don't you check it out and see?
So I got on my knees and did just that. And no, it wasn't a Tom of Finland cock – none are - but it was heavy, hairy and smelly, and felt pretty damn good in my mouth. He set down the book and used his hands to work my face on his cock, dropping lots of deliciously porny phrases like "Suck it, bro," and "You suck dick better than my girlfriend."
He did have a girlfriend, I found out later. They didn't last three weeks after he moved in with me.
That's right - Jordan the pizza guy just kept showing up - texting me when he was delivering a pizza nearby, stopping by for blowjobs and a place to smoke up. I'd stopped smoking weed by that time but I had some fun times in between his legs, bobbing his knob while he toked his bowl.
Then his roommates were moving so he needed a new place, and I told him to move in with me. The rest is history, I suppose.
And now here he was, in his requisite sweatpants and t-shirt. He still looked good and he still knew it. I handed him a glass of water and he took a gulp.
"Oh, do you have my guitar? I can't find it," he said.
"Yeah," I said, remembering. I'd almost sold that stupid guitar when I realized he'd forgotten to take it. Not once in five years did I see him play it. "It's in the bedroom closet." He followed me into my bedroom.
"Cool paint job," he said. I'd done a retro stripe mural that wound around all four walls of the room.
"Thanks," I said. I held his guitar out to him. He shifted forward and took it from me, wrapping his fingers in the handle of the dusty black case.
"Have you been, like, horny at all?" he said. He looked at me. The way he said it, the way he looked at me – it made me want to cry.
Sex had been the thing between Jordan and me, our common currency, the thing that happened where we felt most connected, most like a couple, even if I was the only one who ever said we were a couple. When we fooled around, I know both of us felt something more than just lust.
Once – just once – Jordan told me that he loved me. The awful thing was that it was true for him, I think, but also apparently the scariest thing he could imagine.
I didn't get the intimacy and love that I needed from Jordan, so I consoled myself with sex. But then Jordan began to withhold that. It didn't matter how much time we spent together – I got shut down every time I made overt sexual overtures toward him. It got to the point where I couldn't handle the rejection anymore, the feeling of being utterly repulsive to him one day, and the closest person to him the next.
I don't know if I ever believed Jordan was gay. However sometime around our third year of being together he started openly dating a girl. It was the most emotionally brutal two months of my life and, in retrospect, the beginning of the end.
There'd been a time when Jordan saying something as direct as "You been horny at all?" would've sent me first into paroxysms of relief and then straight to my knees. I had spent days praying for a sign that he still liked me, that he didn't think I was a back-alley Dumpster where he occasionally discarded his cum when he couldn't find anywhere better to put it.
Now here he was. In my apartment. On his own volition, with some dumb logistical thing as an excuse. He wanted to have sex with me, and I just didn't care.
"No," I said. "I haven't been horny at all."
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