Adam Peterson
PERVERTS
His bio on the app is one word—
PERVERT
She always reads the bios before looking at the faces. This is what makes her a good person.
But when she sees his face, she wishes she hadn’t looked at all. It’s soft and punchable, the whole, dumb heft of it left abandoned to judgment atop an orange polo shirt.
She scrolls through his other photos anyway. Somehow, they’re even worse. Face painted at a professional soccer game. Holding a suffocated fish beside a river. A woman’s arm around his waist, the rest of her conspicuously and maliciously severed.
Despite all that, he’s still her type. By which she means, he’s some white guy, smiling at her like he’s about to explain cryptocurrency.
And there’s the word.
PERVERT
They match while she’s making dinner. Dinner is an entire frozen bag of peas, boiled, then tossed with 3/8 of a stick of butter. She eats it straight out of the stainless steel mixing bowl.
Her roommate has declared this fucked, but she doesn’t see the problem.
Frozen peas are 99 cents a bag. It’s not like she eats them every meal.
Only some meals.
And anything you do only some of the time is okay. That’s how she feels about it.
hey sexy up for. A drink sometime
That’s his message. She reads it again and again as she sucks peas from a spoon.
Also, peas are fun. Her roommate doesn’t understand that. Her roommate doesn’t understand her. She knows it would be better for everyone if she moved out so the roommate’s girlfriend could move in, but she doesn’t want to move.
She also doesn’t want to be here. Or anywhere really.
hey sexy up for. A drink sometime
It’s hard to think of a reason to say yes.
It’s impossible to think of a reason to say no.
He picks the bar.
the dolphin; they know me.
She arrives early, early enough to think about it and decide the bar shouldn’t be named The Dolphin. It’s too foreboding. Somewhere someone has been stabbed. Not the right vibe for a place called The Dolphin, not the right vibe at all.
Can she make a joke of that? Have some material ready for when he arrives?
She considers the torn vinyl booths. The curse words clawed into the bar top. The reek of cheap cleaning solution that reminds her of visiting her great-grandma at the nursing home.
Fuckfist.
That’s what she would name the bar.
She thinks about how perfect the name is while she waits. It’s now past the time the date is actually supposed to start. She’s been here forever. That’s how it feels.
Maybe he’s not coming. Maybe he’s forgotten. It’s been three days since they made the plans. She has had peas twice since then, which is a normal amount.
She regrets getting here early. She regrets sitting at the bar. No one here knows her, but everyone knows her. She is the stood-up app date. She wears it as obviously as the expensive jacket borrowed from her roommate’s spot on their coat rack.
Existing is humiliating.
She should leave before it gets worse. Instead, she does nothing.
Doing nothing is the bravest thing to do.
That has to be true at least some of the time, she thinks.
She knows it’s him even though he’s not holding a fish.
He’s fifteen minutes late, but he doesn’t come straight over to apologize. Instead, he fist bumps the bartender, slaps another customer on the back. This customer introduces him to someone else and now everyone but her is laughing.
He wasn’t lying. He’s like the mayor of this place.
She decides not to tell him it should be called Fuckfist. April? he says.
Scott?
They hug. Why do they always want to hug? They’re not old friends. They are strangers. Maybe even adversaries.
He’s taller than she thought he would be, a little fatter too. She doesn’t mind. It just makes her think of snowmen. She imagines him melting. She imagines his funeral, everyone looking at a puddle and thinking, well that makes sense.
She almost laughs. She keeps picturing his funeral, so manically that she’s glad when the bartender comes over so she can stop thinking about it.
All she wants is not to think. If she can only arrange enough of these little distractions, she’ll be good forever. That’s the plan.
The bartender has a bit of a smirk on like, Oh that Scott. Always with the weird ones.
PERVERT
He orders a beer. She gets a Rusty Nail, and he wants to try it. He winces.
I hate that, he says.
It’s my favorite drink, she says.
There is a moment where he should apologize. Instead, he says, Do you know why it’s called The Dolphin?
I think it should be called Fuckfist, she says.
Things get easier once he starts talking, and there’s no expectation for her to say anything.
He tells her about growing up in Colorado. But not fancy Colorado, he insists.
She doesn’t know what this means, but she smiles and nods while he explains the difference. It seems to mean that he went skiing less than he feels he should have.
He contrasts this with his ex-girlfriend. She’s an artist or something, and it sounds like her family went skiing a lot. Like all the fucking time. Like they never took off their ski boots.
None of this has anything to do with her own upbringing, which was in a city where it didn’t snow. She was not rich. She was not poor. She graduated from college. She switched majors twice, and it took five and a half years.
Not much else has happened to her. She saw Bono once at a restaurant. One of her aunts has lupus.
She has no idea how to turn her life into a story, so it’s good he doesn’t ask.
That’s kind of like being nice. Oh, and his dad is dead.
This he says suddenly when she was still thinking about his ex-girlfriend. She imagines the ex-girlfriend owns many big hats, the kinds she herself has never figured out how to wear without constantly talking about how she’s wearing a big hat.
What? she says, even though she heard him. My dad, he repeats, is dead.
Before she can respond, he’s telling her about brewing beer. Then about his job in brand management. This funny thing that happened the other day when someone forgot to mute themselves on a call.
I’m sorry about your dad, she says, even though it has been at least ten minutes since he confessed to having a dead dad.
It’s okay, he says and tells her that everyone at work calls the guy who forgot to mute himself Butter Sandwich.
She must have missed part of the story.
That’s hilarious, she says, but she’s really thinking about funerals again.
It’s not that he asks her no questions. They’re just dumb.
What was her high school mascot? Does she have a favorite planet?
Does she know how clownfish mate? Vikings, Venus, No.
His answers are the Dolphins, Earth, and clownfish are all male until the leader of the school becomes female, and this tells us a lot about contemporary—
Is that why they call it The Dolphin? she interrupts. What?
The bar, she says. Your mascot was the Dolphins. It’s a coincidence, he says. I don’t own the bar.
Me either, she says, but, boy, I wish. What? he says.
She should leave. This was a bad idea.
If she goes home now, she could eat the last third of a sausage she has in the fridge while watching reality TV. Then she’d have that to think about. Who is being unfair. Who is trying their best.
Do you want, he says, to go back to my place?
They walk to his apartment through a summer rain. It’s cold even though it shouldn’t be. She focuses on passing cars that make moist explosions of the night’s puddles. Bodies that form unhinged shadows inside apartment windows.
No one follows the rules, she thinks.
When they get to his building, he unlocks the door and holds it open for her. It’s the first considerate thing he’s done. But then he pushes his wet body against hers as he crowds into the tiny entryway and opens his mailbox.
I don’t know where to go, she says.
Second floor, second door, he rhymes like this is clever and not just directions to where he lives.
On the stairs, she looks back to see him flipping through his mail. He has flyers, some bills, and what looks like a birthday card. She asks him if it’s a birthday card, and he says no.
Okay, she says.
Somehow his apartment has too many walls even though it’s a small studio. There’s a low bed and, beside it, an overturned plastic crate as a nightstand. A tiny sink with a few inches of counter taken up by unwashed dishes. A dorm-style fridge/microwave combination with a French poster of Rashomon above it.
Sorry, he says, kicking his clothes across the floor. I didn’t think we’d be coming back here.
What does this mean? He asked her when it hadn’t even been going well.
PERVERT
She drops her bag and begins to lift her dress over her head. What are you doing? he says.
She lets the dress fall back down and stares at him, unsure of what exactly is wrong.
Don’t you want to, I don’t know, talk? he says. Why? she says. About what?
We could get to know each other, he says but not in a way that suggests it’s something he wants. She doesn’t want that either. She can’t imagine he has a more interesting story than the dead dad thing.
She takes off the dress anyway. Then her bra. Finally, her boots. She leaves on her tights and socks. The apartment is cold, and the floor is covered with dog hair, though there are no other signs of a dog.
Did something happen to a dog here? She’s too naked to investigate.
He’s trying not to stare at her, but there’s nowhere else to look in the small room. He settles on the Rashomon poster. She suspects he hasn’t seen the film, is positive he doesn’t speak French.
Come here, she says and almost adds, Big boy.
He does what he’s told and gets close enough to where she can put his reluctant hand on her breast. He squeezes it twice then drops it.
Tell me how you want it, she says.
He doesn’t seem to know how he wants it.
She has to push him down on the bed. He lands on his laptop and inspects it for damage before setting it on the crate.
She unbuttons his jeans and tries to reach into his underwear, but he pulls her hand away.
Just a sec, he says and gets up from the bed.
He goes into the bathroom, closes the door, and starts to pee. It echoes around the room. It almost doesn’t sound healthy.
That turns me on, she says. What? he calls through the door.
Hearing you pee turns me on, she shouts. It doesn’t sound healthy, she shouts louder.
When he comes out, his pants are still unbuttoned, and she grabs him before he can sit on the bed. She pulls down his underwear and puts his soft penis in her mouth. The feel of it almost makes her laugh.
She takes his penis out of her mouth and looks at it hanging there, wet and stupid, retreating a little in the cold.
Look, she says, like a dolphin.
Her cousin came to stay one summer when she was a girl. She doesn’t know exactly how old they were. The memory is hazy, first and third person all at once, somewhere between the girl she doesn’t recognize and the person she is now.
In the plastic playhouse her father put together, they practiced kissing.
Kissing and some other stuff.
No one ever caught them. Nothing bad happened.
She saw his wiener once. That’s what she thought of it as then. Only the once, but she did see it. The wiener.
Why she tells him this story, why she tells him it right now, she’s not entirely sure. Maybe it explains something important she hasn’t had the chance to say.
Maybe it’s the most interesting story she has that isn’t about seeing Bono. Either way, hearing about her cousin’s wiener is not making him hard.
She spins him around and pushes her face into his ass. She gets her tongue almost all the way there when he jumps away.
Jesus, he says. I don’t want that.
I do, she says and to prove this is true, she claws for him again.
He pulls his underwear back up and sits on the bed beside her. She’s really freezing, and she’s imagining having to walk home in the rain.
There’s nothing at home but being home.
I need things to move a little slower, he says.
She crawls over his lap and bends her ass up, wiggling it a little in a way she assumes men like but never felt the need to ask.
If I’m being bad, she says, you can spank me.
She waits like that, but no spanks come. He’s treating her like she’s disgusting, and not in the way she suddenly needs. Needs more than being at home eating a sausage and watching reality TV.
She rolls over. His face is all squishy with sex panic. Choke me, she says.
I think I need to eat something, he says.
She rolls off him and gets under the covers to try and stay warm while he microwaves a bean burrito. He eats it quickly then drinks a large glass of water from a plastic cup. She hopes he has to pee again. Instead, he sits down on the room’s only chair and stares at the Rashomon poster.
Maybe you should go home, he says.
You invited me over, she protests. Big boy. That now seems like a mistake, he says.
She should have known this is how he’d be. From the second she saw his picture. He’d done it all as a joke. Said PERVERT as a joke. Typed hey sexy as a joke.
Are you making fun of me? she asks.
Of course not, he says. I just don’t think things are working out.
She pulls the covers over her head. It smells like SpaghettiOs. Her dad used to make her SpaghettiOs when she was sick. He probably still would if they lived in the same city. Her dad is alive and still married to her mother. Her dad is objectively better than his dad. She shouldn’t feel that way, but she does. She refuses to feel bad about it.
I don’t want to go, she says from under the blankets. I really think you should, he says.
She can already imagine how he’ll report on this date to his friends. All the boys from Dolphin High who keep a group chat for stories like this one and not to hear about how Tony fell in love with Veronica, twenty-four, three miles away.
They don’t want that. She doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want that.
Fuck Tony and Veronica who are now so vivid in her mind she can taste how bland the catering will be at their wedding.
PERVERTS
She pulls the blankets off her head. No.
No what? he asks.
No, I’m not leaving, she says.
He slouches in his chair. It’s my apartment, he says. His belly falls over the top of his jeans. A tiny trail of blond fuzz leads to nowhere.
He can’t make her leave, this fat, little baby.
She stands up and pulls down her tights and then her underwear. She kicks the underwear off with her foot, not in a sexy way but just to see if she can make them hit the ceiling. They do, and she feels like she can do anything.
This isn’t okay, he says.
No, it’s not okay. It’s not okay at all what he’s doing. Tricking her into meeting him and then making her act like this just because he’s afraid.
Because she knows what he wants if he would let himself. It’s what she wants, too.
They can have it. Whatever time they can seize of bliss and oblivion, nothing and everything, honesty and honesty.
You don’t have to hide, she says as she moves toward him. You pervert.
Even seated, he’s still too tall for her. She has to push his head down against her until his face is right where she wants it, between her legs.
You fucking dirty, perverted baby, she says and grinds his face into her pubic hair. Now tell me why they call it The Dolphin.
Afterward, he falls asleep almost instantly. She watches his dumb, round head. Maybe she could love it. Who knows?
Not her. Never her.
She imagines putting a pillow over that face, pressing down, how good it would feel. The funeral after.
Just as a joke.
Just as a way to get through another moment.
She closes her eyes and tries to return to that place outside of herself. Already, it’s gone.
What else is there to do but find another way back.