TAKING IT SLOW by CBPena

TAKING IT SLOW A story from the anthology THE GIRL WHO WAS AFRAID OF WAVES

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CBPEÑA

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eople like being in relationships that work, and yet at the back of their heads, find fault, no matter how ‘perfect a relationship is. After intending to finish the book, I am presenting myself with the challenge of actually finishing the stories one at a time, hopefully one story in a week, with the intent of finally finishing the anthology in two and a half months. This first story from the anthology tells of Emily and her boyfriend, and how perfect and imperfect their relationship is. I’ll leave the rest for you to figure out. Enjoy.

CB Peña

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TAKING IT SLOW

t took Emily an entire five minutes to finish brushing her teeth. She turned on the tap, let the water gush into her glass and kept the tap open until the water reached the brim. Meticulously, she twisted shut the faucet ring, and gargled a few times. It’s grown into a routine now, she thought, feeling as if she was dreading what was to happen next. The rest of the house took no heed of her. She grabbed a small towel out of the top right cupboard and patted-dry her mouth that frothed with toothpaste, bubbles and spittle. Her mother used to tell her that wiping the bubbles with her hands were considered rude in some countries, even unlawful. She let out a chuckle, thinking how empowering that must’ve made her mother. Bossing people around like she owned everything in the house. For the most part, technically, her mother did own everything in the house, much to the dismay of her father who often went out at night, trying to earn a quick buck, and yet ending up spending it on some gin or a pack of Camel. Amazing as that sounded, Emily didn’t care. Not a bit, sadly. Emily was just three years old when her mother decided to become a part of the workforce, again. She was once a legal secretary when her father found her, searching for a seat taken over by some douche bag in the local theatre. Being the gallant man that her father was, he offered to punch out the living daylights out of the other man, and ask her mother out for a date the week after. When Emily was born, her mother took no heed in putting her on formula milk. She had little time to breastfeed, yet never really 4 | CBPeña

went back to working until three years later. Growing up, Emily saw how her mother retransformed herself, from housewife to office executive, and taking more and more responsibilities in the firm she worked for, when she left Emily on the front porch at 9 a.m. and returned eight hours later. Emily got her golden locks from her mother, whom she combed with no fail, a few times before she went to bed. Eventually, she would grow to hate the habit, since Emily often tried pestering her mother by peeing on her combs and brushes during the day. As a child, Emily often pulled on her hair at roots end, every time she was agitated. Her father disliked it when Emily cried, and so he made sure she had everything she needed and wanted, as the child grew up. In primary school, Emily was bullied quite a lot of times, being the lanky, nerdy girl that she was, carrying her science and math books in old school bags torn at the seams. She never really did understand why her mother failed to buy her a new bag at the beginning of the year. Emily figured she was just too busy to buy her a bag. Her father knew better; he started a drinking problem when Emily was nine, and he’d call for a nanny to take care of Emily every weeknight. High school was worse for Emily. After being coerced to give a blowjob to Martin the Nerd—the local zit-infested redhead whom Emily secretly admired for acing all his Math quizzes—she found herself being dumped in public by the very same man, called a whore in the process, and stereotyped as the least to give sexual pleasure to men when she grew up. The yearbook committee was audacious enough to have this printed on the horrendous book: “Emily Rubens, Most Likely to Suck At Sucking.” Emily decided to move states after that. A few years later, Emily had a new name, and a psychological certification that she was fit to apply for university. The bathroom light bulb started to flicker. Must be that darn switch again, Emily snickered to herself. She really needs to get that fixed this month. But what was a girl to do. She needed a man in the house to fix it. Emily looked at herself in the mirror and smiled. No, she wasn’t giving herself one; she was checking whether any of the chives were still stuck in her teeth. None left. Good. The rest of the small bathroom was quaint. Cherry-blossom pink walls with peeled off wall décor, green floor tiles that would start to pass for mould, and a flickering light bulb whose switch needed 5 | CBPeña

changing. A year before this, she had bought a white wooden cabinet that she hung on the wall to keep all the toiletries and her medicines. She eventually tore down the small cabinet after it started to gather mites and black ants. She never really did get to differentiate one from the other. They were the same really. Pesky. A few steps out of the bathroom led to a small living room, whose only divider from the kitchen was a countertop that held the rest of who Emily was: a little black plastic picture frame she won from an office party a few years back; an ashtray that kept her sane through last night, and the nights before that; and a stockpile of books and magazines that she never did have the time to read. The kitchen wafted with fried eggs and the dizzying heat from the outside. She left the windows open all night to let the air out, but it never wanted to leave in the first place. She purposely left the dishes in the sink— all three plates, two pairs of spoons and forks, a salad bowl and a cigarette butt. Who would have the time, after last night? Her living room was no different. A rundown TV slouched in front of a dusty red velvety couch welcomed guests into this, her receiving area—not that there were many guests that dropped by to say hi. Left of the couch was a low side table that had yet another ash tray, and a lava lamp that a former colleague gave her for Christmas. The lamp was busted now. In the dark, it looked like a blobby mess that made farting sounds too faint for anyone to notice, yet still obvious enough to be the white elephant in the room. All these Emily took no heed of. She looked at her watch: it was 9:30 a.m. and her hair needed to be blowdried. She turned on the ignition and took a sharp right out of the car park that was in front of her house. She never really did fancy a garage— not that she could afford a house with one. Shifting into second gear, she made her way through the busy streets. Emily never really liked remembering names of roads. She just remembered how the streets looked like, both in the morning and at night. Lest you want to get lost and spend the entire night looking for your blasted flat. Emily lived on a quaint little road overlooking the river ducts that cut through the city like her Aunt Myrna’s varicose veins. Now that lady was something, she thought. Four years in incarceration, and another three in probation. And that didn’t stop her from marrying 6 | CBPeña

the third time. Kudos to the men. Her car’s alarm clock started to buzz with a dreary whizz that only Emily could bear. She remembered how her mother always complained about that. She also remembered how she kept herself hidden in the closets when Uncle Joe dropped by the house to knock down her sister. Uncle Joe wasn’t really her uncle. He was just another old man in her sister’s list of strangers. It just so happened he was her regular on Wednesdays. The rest of the week was another story. A lot of honking. Traffic was bad. It was a little over 10:15, and she was running late; David didn’t really like tardiness. Emily took a few short breaths and heaved a long sigh. The traffic that morning was horrendous, and she was starting to become a regular in all the conundrum. While Emily treaded through the morning bottleneck that started to build-up along Sine Avenue, David kept a watchful eye over his silver Rolex, minding how many ticks it took for the young inexperienced-looking waiter to reach his table, and how many seconds it took him to take his order—a Moroccan latte and a thin slice of blueberry cheesecake. Later on, as the waiter came back with his drink and cake, he would observe how the young man steps on an old moldy quarter that an older man had dropped from his side pocket. The waiter loses his footing and spills the coffee all over an older woman, who was busy flirting with a 20-something trainer. The slice of cake splats on the floor, flinging bits of blueberry on David’s neatly shined black shoes. Back in the car, Emily started grumbling about the long queue that she was in. This wasn’t New York, and yet this was happening— now. She thought about David and how irritated he must have been by now. She wouldn’t know about the cake and the coffee though, because by now, the waiter would have made a fresh cup of latte and took another slice of cake from the display case. He would have been scolded by the manager-on-duty, who in turn was all apologies to the older lady, but not to David. Emily looked at her watch—it was 10:35 a.m. David always knew he would find Emily somewhere, somehow. As a child, he was a chubby boy who knew that one day—crazy as it sounded—a girl was made for him, regardless of what his older brother would tell him at night before they turned off the bedside 7 | CBPeña

lamps. His brother would always leave his orange hair unkempt, then pinching him by the cheeks and forcing his lips to pout like a trout. Growing up, he topped all his assessments, and had little time for socializing. When he did, he very seldom hung out with boys his age. Instead, he kept his bedroom door locked and masturbated all afternoon, as he flipped the pages of his older brother’s stash of Hustler. Sweating, he would turn one page after the other, his right hand over the leaves of the creased magazines, and the other hand grasping his groin like his life depended on it. Throughout his younger years, he would grow a fondness to masturbate in public places, after once seeing a homeless man jerk off in front of a 7-11 outlet near his church. He gained a fascination of the freedom this man hand, gripping his groin and splashing his secretions unto the windows, much to the dismay of the dark-skinned storekeeper. David has always been a man of few words. But what he lacked in words, he made up for action—no, not his incessant masturbation. He became active in curricular activities in high school, shedding his pudgy home, and donning a more chiseled figure as he hit 16. By this time, David was already the head of the school’s debating team, and juggled his weekdays with chess club, choir practice, and dating a classmate who would eventually be the prom queen that stood next to him on stage, during the dance. “It took you quite a while to find the place, didn’t you?” David said nonchalantly, sipping his latte, leaving behind a frothy moustache that he casually erased using his long tongue. Emily looked at that tongue and she was reminded of last Friday. “I was caught in traffic,” she started, calling back the young waiter, whose pimply face Emily found disturbing, “I’d like an apple pie and a cup of jasmine tea, please.” “Anything else?” the waiter asked in a condescending tone, obviously avoiding eye contact with his manager who now manned the counter. It was a quaint little coffee shop with small white chairs to accompany the glass-topped tables. As cars passed by in front of the café, Emily took notice of how few customers there were at 10:50 a.m. “A glass of cold water would be nice,” she finally uttered, casually glancing at David who was busy reading a men’s magazine that 8 | CBPeña

had its front cover slightly torn from the rest of the magazine’s spine. The waiter left, tapping his yellow pencil on a small notepad that bore undecipherable words that looked more like doodles than a list of orders. “So how was last night?” started David, breaking the ice. “I didn’t hear from you over the weekend.” He continued flipping the magazine’s pages, occasionally stopping to look at a particular page that had women clad in brassieres and a lot of nude make-up. “I had to take my granny to the doctor’s last Saturday,” Emily replied, pausing for a few moments before she began talking again. “She’s been complaining about this radiating pain from her right hand up to her right shoulder. I slept the entire Sunday.” “What did the doctor say?” David said, not making any eye contact at all. “The doctor said she was having some form of advanced arthritis,” Emily sneered, growing a bit listless about the idea of talking about her grandmother. She was lying though, because she spent the entire weekend at a cottage near the creek upstream. A rather young friend she met by the bar invited her for a drink but when she woke up, it was Sunday, she was naked on the soft polar bear rug, and she was stroking his thin, curly blonde chest hair while her head rested on his right shoulder. She took heed and went off, stumbling a few times on her way, while she managed to put on her coat and boots before she reached her car, Back at home, she showered, and smelled herself constantly while she scrubbed herself with the sponge. Then she remembered she forgot her panties in the cottage. “I hope she gets well,” said David, finally putting down the magazine. “Sweet woman, your grandmother.” He then took a sip of the latte. “Yes, I know,” replied Emily. She was finding it difficult to bite off the apple pie though. It was like it didn’t want to be eaten that morning. “The doctor just gave her some painkillers and told her she’d be fine.” Finally the crust crumbled and she tasted the honey-infused apples that hid in the pie’s core. “So how goes that project you’re doing with the new team? Any developments?” he finally looked at her, seeming interested to continue conversing. “It’s fine,” she said, cutting the conversation then and there. The project was indeed doing well, Emily thought. So well that she wasn’t a part of it anymore. Her officious boss had offered the job to someone 9 | CBPeña

else, and had left Emily with a few designs to do for the rest of the year. All the office work was starting to bore her now, and her architecture degree was not helping. David was of course oblivious of all this. Deep down, he didn’t really care much about Emily’s boring work. At the back of his head, he knew he was just in it for the sex, and that fact that Emily provided him with a reason to drop by this very café once a week, and remain incognito from the voluptuous brunette who was a waitress at the French restaurant that stood just across the street. Emily was just too predictable, never doing anything to go beyond what they had, and for David, that was just perfect. Knowing that such a boring relationship was existent for the sake of being, gave him comfort and assured himself of the cloak that he needed to hide everything else that he did after his office hours were through. Last weekend was particularly exciting for David, and in the silence of his heart, he thanked Emily’s grandmother for being ill and taking her off his shoulders for at least a few days. This gave him the opportunity to meet up with Cassie at a roadside hotel a few miles outside town. Cassie was a college fling whom David bumped into a few months ago during a convention his boss asked him to attend in San Diego. She had not changed a bit: Cassie was just as sweet, and as gullible as she was in college, when she headed the university pep group with the same enthusiasm she had every time she had an orgasm in David’s arms. Oh how he loved swinging her to and fro on the bed, David imagined, trying hard not to smile with the mere thought of his hands running through Cassie’s raven-black hair as she gyrated on top of him, smelling her sweet rose oil perfume that mixed with sweat and warm water, as they had sex after a quick warm shower. David knew that Emily could never be a Cassie. He took a sip from his cup, remembering every syllable Cassie howled as he thrust her with his full manhood. Emily took a pen from her bag and wrote something on the tissue paper that lay under the cutlery. She had to remember to drop off the last of the plans for the new interiors she was doing with her boss over the weekend—lest she wanted to do it the hard way and fuck him first to make sure she gets the plans approved before Sunday, or at least that’s what Suzanne, the blonde vixen on the fiftieth floor says. Her boss was quite a peculiar fellow, a fan of failure analysis, as he 10 | CBPeña

calls it—looking at people to blame, at what cost, and which level. It was bad enough that he was scolding everyone in the office; he would scold people even during the weekends over the phone, during company events, and in one occasion, during a Bar Mitzvah. She called the young waiter back and asked for some sugar cubes for her cup. “I’ll have another tall black,” David said nonchalantly, motioning to the waiter without looking at him. Then, turning to Emily he said, “Are you doing anything special tonight?” Emily took another bite from her now hardened apple pie and responded, “No, nothing in particular. Did you have anything in mind?” She tried hard to sound interested, although quite frankly. She knew where this was leading. David had a habit of asking her to sleep over his apartment whenever he felt horny, and Emily knew he was just using her for the sake of having relationship, that was really just a booty call. Emily was thirteen when her classmate Lloyd offered to take her to the movies. She liked how Lloyd fumbled in his words, and how he panicked whenever they met in the corridors, and so Emily thought it was nice of him to ask her out in the first place. She never really got out much either, since her father insisted that she stayed home while he was out drinking. Beth, the nanny her father got for that night, was just a few years older than Emily, and she knew how it was having a drunkard as a father who was a fanatic of curfews. And so, after her father left for the local bar that night, Emily rushed out of the back door, running towards the cinema house that stood lonely on Fourth Street and Main, never looking back. A few years later on, she’d wish she did. When she got there, Lloyd had already bought tickets. He was particularly fidgety that night, as he handed in the tickets to the quiet guy at the door. “Two,” he said, not making any eye contact with either him or Emily. The doorman was just as odd; he had a face riddled with pimples, and looked like he was just a few years ahead of Emily. She recognised him as Mark, the kid who lived a few blocks away from her house. She heard rumours that he liked lingering in parks alone at night, smoking weed behind the bushes, and masturbating while people strolled passed by him, unknowing of the ejaculations that were happening behind the lush greenery. Emily was actually expecting him to at least hold her hand as 11 | CBPeña

they walked into the musty, old movie house that her father warned her about, but was adulated by many for its dubious recognition, but apparently, she was in store for something else. Sitting down, Emily found it odd that Lloyd left his seat just a few minutes after the movie started. “I’ll just go get some more popcorn and some straws for the drinks,” he said, oddly in a rush. Rushing for straws and popcorn? The film started, and she felt someone sitting beside her, thinking it was Lloyd. He held her left hand gently at first, but by midway of the film, she felt a slight tug. His hand moved somewhere between his legs and he started massaging his crotch with her trembling fingers. The zipper came down afterwards, and she felt her hand slide gently into the slit, feeling in between her fingers a hairy mesh of pubic hair and a thirteen-year-old boy’s penis. She raised her head to see through the dim projection to see it wasn’t Lloyd after all: it was Martin from Section Three, grinning behind his mash-up of wires and rubber bands he called braces. “Suck ’em or I’ll tell your Pa you went to the movies with a boy,” he said quietly under his breath. Emily trembled as she did what she thought she did a few minutes later. Walking out of the theatre, she wiped off her tears, and the blood that smeared her lips. She’d bitten off a part of Martin’s foreskin, but not after he’d pulled some of her hair off. The rest was history. “I was hoping you could drop by the apartment later, around eight,” he said, sipping the last drop of his coffee. His tall black came soon after. “I bought a new bottle of wine you might want to try. I’ll make you dinner.” “Dinner sounds nice,” Emily forced a smile at David and then, went back to listing down everything she needed to do for the day. “I’ll just need to drop off a few things at the satellite office before I leave the office. I’ll just knock.” “I gave you keys. Why don’t you use them?” David said, sounding a bit annoyed. He put down the magazine. “I keep forgetting your keys in my key bowl,” she said, without batting an eyelid, although in reality, she lost his keys in the subway, during rush hour when her bag was snatched right after this burly guy smacked her in the head with a half-filled soda can, while she dug her tote for her keys in the office car park. “Besides, I love knocking at your door, pretending to be room service.” 12 | CBPeña

David chuckled, mumbling the words ‘room service’ under his breath. These short talks were getting even more boring by the minute. But David was happy to know that he would get to fuck Emily tonight. For the least, he was glad someone was actually dropping by tonight. Emily, on the other hand, found the idea horrendous; nonetheless, she felt it her duty to do otherwise, her being his girlfriend. Besides, David wasn’t a bad fuck; he just wasn’t a good one. The waiter came back with the bill, and David slipped out a fifty under the tab. He looked at Emily like he was waiting for her to fall into her arms and burst into praises for buying her brunch. Emily was quite busy thinking of what other things she needed to finish that day, and was the least bothered nor appreciative of David’s gesture. The man, slid his wallet back into his jacket, and brushed off a few crumbs that had fallen off at him as he ate the cheesecake, as Emily munched her way through the apple pie, whose crust felt more of a croissant than a pie. “I have to go,” Emily motioned, gathering her things as she stood up—not much of it though; just a planner, the tissue paper, her pen, and a small purse she bought herself for New Year’s— sipping the last few drops of her coffee before gulping down some water. “I’ll see you at eight.” She left without even waiting from the acknowledgment from David. But being David, he didn’t really care. What he did care about was the brunette that served coffee in the café across the street, who was now keeping an eye at him while she served a French couple some buttered croissant sandwiches that looked stale enough to pass for an eraser. David didn't mind the croissants. That wasn’t what he was having for after-lunch. Emily, on the other hand, rushed off in a flurry of excuse me’s and thank you’s as she breezed through the shop, taking the nearest lift that led to the car park. There she would meet a young man who had waited for her to wake him up in the cabin, but never did. She would kiss him a few times out of surprise, but would decide to continue the kissing inside Emily’s car on her way back to her flat. This guy would eventually glide his hand in between Emily’s thighs—much to her atonement of her daily irk over David—as they drove around the nearest motel they could find. No, Emily’s flat couldn't wait. At least not for Emily.

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Carlo Venson Peña © All rights reserved 2013 No part of this book may be reproduced, printed or distributed without written consent from the author. http://carlovenson.wix.com/cbphotography | CBPeña Written in14 East Coast, Singapore