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Roommates

A. A. Garrison

    Ben crouched intently over the toilet bowl, as if it held something of great interest. It had happened again. Teresa. Just yesterday he’d told himself never again, he was through with her. Then she’d come around tonight, horny as always, and he’d done her. His stepmother. Again.
    He vomited with a sound like an unclogging drain.

***


    The next morning, Ben slouched at the breakfast nook, entertaining a super-size bowl of cereal. He’d vomited himself hungry, it seemed.
    Across the kitchen, Teresa fussed with coffee and toast. She was blonde and tall, almost Ben’s six feet, and pretty in a priggish way, with high cheeks and a slender, heart-shaped jaw. She was English, and it showed: she wore her hair short and gelled, in that style popular amongst uppity Brit women and butch lesbians. She was thirty-nine, barely a decade older than Ben.
    She ambled from the counter, her curves alive beneath her blouse and skirt. “There ya’ are,” she said to Ben, and slid a steaming coffee under his nose. It smelled strong and good. Ben thanked her, and they ate in silence.
    It was always like this. They never talked about the fucking during the day, even with their eyes. The two just went about their lives: Teresa swanning around with her friends and spending Dad’s insurance money, and Ben leading his stagnant existence — like they weren’t embroiled in a quasi-incestuous affair. It was profound, really, the power of consensual denial.
    It had started six months ago, when Jim Milton, Ben’s venerable father, had died. It was sudden, a car crash on an otherwise mundane winter night. Dad, sober since Regan was in office, had been hit head on by a drunk with more DUI’s than he had fingers. Naturally, the drunk had walked, while Jim died on the spot. The first few days had been expectedly grim — Jim was only fifty-two, and well-loved by Ben and Teresa, his second wife — but the real havoc had come long after the fact, in the following months.
    Ben and Jim had been close, and not in the superficial way that’s thrown around all too often; the men had maintained a real relationship, were genuine friends. Behind this was a solidarity of both alcoholism and the death of Ben’s mother when he was twelve, and it was glue between them. The two were close enough to argue openly, then sit in a comfortable silence, if that says anything. Dad was Ben’s anchor to the world, the man who had seen him through losing first the woman they’d adored, then the vice they’d held nearly as high. So when Jim had gone in the ground, Ben had lost his compass — or, rather, his compass had become queered, like in the Bermuda Triangle.
    He compared it to going off to college at seventeen, the anomie of being away from home — except a nightmare version of it, one that would never end. Ben had spent the preceding five years as a struggling musician, pushing papers at Dad’s candy company by day and trying to Make It Happen by night. As of Jim’s accident, however, Ben hadn’t played a note, or done much of anything — besides his stepmother, of course. The accident had sapped whatever energy that had survived his exhausting five years of clambering for a record deal. He’d been faltering since even before the accident, when he was discovering the music industry to be both saturated and unforgiving. Ben was talented, no question there — he was a virtuoso on a half-dozen instruments, and able to compose in any scale and key, entirely in his head — but he had witnessed too many musicians of his caliber end up working day jobs, with nothing to show for their toil but bitter chips on their shoulders. That had been disheartening enough, but as soon as he had gotten The News, his music was over, and he’d known it then and there. For him, he’d buried not just his second biological parent, but every prospect of fulfilling his dream. During the funeral, he’d fought a screaming desire to join his parents in the ground, one that still waved hello every so often.
    The culpable nature of Jim’s death had compounded things, to put it lightly. The drunk who’d hit him was some forty-something rummy from the next town over, driving on a revoked license, his floorboards carpeted in beer empties. To Ben’s astonishment, the man had gotten off on a manslaughter charge and a slap-on-the-wrist three months in the pen — a rather poor exchange for the thirty-odd years he’d stolen from Jim, Ben thought. The sentencing had left Ben black with anger, and a savage desire to strangle, neither of which had helped things any. There was also a lunatic compulsion to get off the wagon, which Ben had been riding faithfully for all five of his hardscrabble years spent playing (the music had come at Dad’s suggestion, to replace his drinking-time with something productive; Jim’s substitute had been the now-thriving candy company). Ben had abstained from the bottle, at least, though that was about it. Nowadays, Ben’s activities included sleeping late, reading corny paperbacks, and biding his time in front of the TV. And Teresa.
    It had happened so fast, him and his stepmother, adding a sick dimension to his newfound hell. She and Dad had gotten married ten years ago, when Ben was nineteen and Jim was finally letting go of his first wife, Brenda. Teresa and Ben had always been on good terms, if a bit detached; she seemed decent enough, but there was a constant barrier between them, and they’d mutually kept their distance. To him, she’d always been “Teresa,” never “Mom”; but that was okay. He hadn’t really seen much of her those first five years of her and Jim’s marriage, having moved out before she’d moved in. It wasn’t until he’d sobered up and moved back home, so he could play full time, that he’d known her company at all, and even then there was a strict reservation between them — light-years from anything sexual, in any case.
    Then Dad died, and everything changed.
    They’d known a brief camaraderie immediately afterward, the two being bereft and heartbroken in the big house that Teresa now owned. There’d even been a couple hugs and almost-personal conversations betwixt them. But this never went far, especially as time wound on: where Ben had never really pulled out of his slump, Teresa had, and within a couple months. He supposed, a little sourly, that Dad’s insurance money had played a hand in that; Jim had years ago taken out a policy on himself, when the candy company had started moving, and thanks to double indemnity, it had worked out to nearly a half a million dollars after taxes. The money had been split between Ben and Teresa, per Jim’s will, and after those two dark months, she had begun spending her share. New car, shopping sprees for her and her friends, spa excursions, trips home to Mother England. She’d even gotten a poodle to carry under her arm, though that hadn’t worked out. Ben had thought Teresa’s indulgences a distraction from grief, maybe a kind of latent shock — when he thought about his stepmother at all, that is. They’d by then returned to their formal arrangement, the two little more than roommates, and disinterested ones at that. In the course of a day, their exchanged words could be counted on two hands.
    It was springtime when they first had sex, four months after Jim’s death. It may have been altogether different if not for the home’s single shower. It was a fact of life in the Milton household; Jim had built the place after Brenda’s death, and, being only him and his son, he’d seen no need for more than one shower. And he was right: they hadn’t needed a second, even when Teresa had come into the picture, since Ben was away at college. It only turned problematic upon Ben’s return home. The woman was fond of no less than two showers a day, each with an eternity of primping and preening afterward, and one of these came just before bed, which conflicted with Ben’s set-in-stone bathing time. So they had long ago worked out a system: Teresa would go first, then call out when she was finished. It was simple, and it worked, both before and after the accident.
    However, one night when Ben had gotten the call and gone upstairs, he’d found Teresa still inside. The door had been cracked, just enough to see through, and there she was, nude, and directly in line of sight of the door, prettying herself at the vanity. She had been facing away and bent slightly over the sink, her substantial breasts dangling, the light touching her coin-slot pussy. Ben had frozen at the sight of her: it was the first he’d actually considered Teresa a sexual creature. Between her being his father’s wife, his surrogate mother, and almost ten years his senior, his perception of her had never deviated into the realm of the erotic, so much that it was a shock to see her so exposed. In his mind, she had existed as an androgynous It, maintaining only a smooth patch of skin where genitals should be, not even on his radar as a potential sexual receptacle. But that had changed as he saw her that night, candidly disrobed in the invasive vanity lighting.
    Ben had lingered in the hallway, tattooed by a wedge of peach-colored light. She hadn’t noticed him — or had pretended not to — and he’d gotten a good, long look, watching her do her hair and brush her teeth. Though she was beautiful, and viscerally sexy, he hadn’t been particularly attracted to her, not yet; still, he hadn’t look away. When she’d finally pulled on a robe and started out, he’d sidled from the door in time to be at a plausibly safe distance, leaning angelically on the railing. She’d gone to bed, and Ben had taken his shower.
    He hadn’t really thought about her afterward. For him, it had been like observing some exotic creature in its natural habitat, still outside the arena of infatuation. As for the cracked door and her exhibition, he put it down to carelessness. A part of him contested this, of course, noting that she had called him well before she was ready (and that the door had been open a tad too much to be innocent); but he ignored it. He had enough to worry about without his stepmother tendering herself for him. Unfortunately, after a repeat performance the following night, it became hard to write it off to accident.
    It had happened the same as before: Teresa calling him up, and Ben climbing the stairs to find the bathroom occupied and the door cracked. He had at first stopped by the stairs, wanting nothing to do with her little game, but the next thing he knew, he was once more voyeuring her through the door, standing at length as to be a phantom. The scene had been identical: Teresa freshening up before the vanity, nude as the day she was born and bent over in a way that looked uncomfortable. Something inside Ben had answered the sight, and he’d greedily looked her over — not so much because he liked what he saw, but because it was there, and had been previously denied his scrutiny. Also like before, he’d stepped away before she left, and the two exchanged goodnights and went their separate ways.
    The third night had been the same, as were the next three, each aliment to Ben’s new fascination. He’d found himself fantasizing about her throughout his long and empty days, what it would be like to have her, the forbidden fruit. Also, he was helpless but to accept her apparent interest in him, whatever it may be; he’d broken up with a longtime girlfriend just before his father’s death, and had been celibate since, rendering him desperate for a woman’s attention. It was a vicious combination: blue balls, loneliness, and a pretty-good-looking English bird flaunting all she had, topped off by an excess of free time. It had eroded his better sense, no different than a drug.
    Still, his budding attraction had been anything but kosher, and he knew it from the start. Besides her being his legal mother, he had no real draw to Teresa, or anything beyond an animal desire to plant himself inside her, any port in a storm. It wasn’t even an Oedipus complex, or a fashionable propensity for older women; it was just some sick obsession materialized out of nowhere. Above all, it was maddening, being torn between the mind’s moral reservations and the body’s cravings. Aggravating things further was his wreck of a situation; starved for anything resembling pleasure, a part of him leapt at any hint of gratification, however thin or deviant it may be. It was ugly, and he hated it ... yet he’d felt unable to fight it, perhaps wielding a knife in a gunfight.
    This had gone on for a tortured week before turning physical. Ben became sexually frustrated, which was only heightened by his existing perdition, and he started dreaming of Teresa, bent over in her unladylike way; the visions soon spilled into his waking life, manifesting in lewd little daydreams. Life with her became awkward. More than once, they had made eye contact and something had passed between them, and it was clear to Ben what was on her mind. He had fought it valiantly, trying to repress his urges, to wait on the stairs instead of by the door; but it just wouldn’t stop. He tried masturbation, a hobby he’d abandoned in his teenage years, but that had only stoked his fires. So, when she called him upstairs on the seventh night, he’d barged in on her.
    He couldn’t remember actually deciding to go through with it. He had seemed to exit his body as he mounted the stairs, seeing himself in third person, and then he was elbowing open the door and stepping through. Teresa had twirled around, feigning surprise and doing a poor job of covering herself as Ben regarded her stolidly from the jamb. A pregnant silence had fallen, and after a long, speaking look, Teresa had lowered her hands, her face loosening into the dopey countenance of a child doing wrong. Simultaneously, Ben had started forward, his pants bulging.
    So fast. It was how Ben would always remember that night: how fast they’d gone from no prior physical contact to outright fucking; how fast they’d come; how fast he had been out of the bathroom and in bed when it was over. Teresa had again bent over the vanity, though now cocking a leg as to present her sex, with an air of rehearsal. Without a word, he’d proceeded to unleash himself and go to town, moaning sultrily. It would be the template for their every future encounter: either impersonal missionary or from behind, strictly vaginal, and sterile as their daytime relationship. They never kissed, never talked, never so much as met each other’s eyes. The sex was mechanical and utilitarian, more like a perverse doctor’s visit than a romantic engagement. They’d come, mutually, in less than five minutes, filling the house with bestial echoes. Then it was done, and, still wearing her shamefaced look, Teresa had left Ben to his shower, commencing their standing policy of It Never Happened.
    There was a release in it, though, no denying that. Especially that first night: he’d taken her brutally, thrusting and pounding like the house was on fire. It was the culmination of all the unpleasantry that had transpired since the accident — or, really, in his last decade: falling into the bottle while in college, his long battle for sobriety, his seduction and disillusionment with music, and, last but not least, Dad’s death (or murder, as Ben saw it). As he had slipped into Teresa for the first time, making her yelp like a bit dog, he had sensed all that pent-up hardship feeding the sex, pushing it to new heights. And when he’d finally popped, he could almost see it all spraying into her, the release raw and primal, like some ungodly birth. That had been the peak of it, however: not moments afterward, he’d felt empty and dirty, and sick with remorse, no less than if he’d killed the woman. And it had lingered, too, lasting into the night and the following day. It was both the best and the worst sex he’d ever had.

***


    And now it had happened again. Again. He’d lost count of both how many times they’d been together and how many times he’d sworn off her. The thought made the cereal do cartwheels in his stomach, and he turned abruptly from his bowl, patting his chest.
    Teresa looked up from her morning paper. “You okay, Benny?” she asked. She had always called him that, Benny, with her quick English lilt — Bini.
    “Yeah, fine,” he said, and spooned up another bite. Teresa nodded back to her paper, and Ben again had to marvel at their tacit agreement of ignorance. Just last night she’d been couchant in his bed, breasts flouncing, crying, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” And now ... that had Never Happened, as if their fornication was confined to some parallel universe, not existing unless acknowledged. Ben thought, Life is strange, and started back into his breakfast.
    But it did have to stop, eventually. He knew that. The sex was killing him, infecting him like a germ and leaving him perpetually drained. Yet his body would always respond when she succubussed into his room at night; he never had any problem performing. It reminded him of his drinking days, when he would depart on ruthless weekend benders. He’d feel like utter shit come Monday, looking like something run over by a truck, and you would think the last thing he’d ever want was another drink. But when the next weekend came around (or the next afternoon, as it was near the end), his inner dipsomaniac would jump at the thought, making him jones and salivate. It was different with Teresa, though, worse, because she wasn’t a bottle, couldn’t merely be put down. She obviously wanted this — wanted him — and now that he’d been giving it to her, it felt like his duty, like he’d be letting her down were they to stop. Also, he’d have to tell her no, and he didn’t know how that would turn out. What if she reacted badly? Kicked him out of the house? Or even blackmailed him ...?
    Ben studied her over the table, so blonde and kempt, a world apart from the vixen she became in their other universe. She was in highbrow pinstripes, looking like a frigid businesswoman rather than a borderline pervert. She had an incredible sexual appetite, he had to give her that; he’d never been with a woman who could go at it each and every night for months on end. And she always brought her A-game, too, like a whirlwind that can fuck. He could now understand why Jim had married her. The thought made him squirm a little.
    And what if he was to tell her now, right that moment? It was tempting. Ben had his willpower up, jibing with the caffeine from his morning coffee. He turned the idea over in his head, evaluating the consequences ... then decided against it. Oddly, it wasn’t because of any fire-and-brimstone that might result; the opposite, in fact. He all too easily saw her replying with a blank stare and saying, “Why, whatever are you talking about?” After all, their sex had Never Happened.
    He let it go, but then another thing pressed over his tongue: Why? Why him, her stepson? Or ex-stepson, if there is such a thing. Teresa wasn’t exactly in her prime, but she shouldn’t have any trouble picking up a fuck-buddy, especially with that fat bank account of hers. He again almost said something, but backed down a second time: to ask her would acknowledge their sin, and he didn’t know if he wanted that. Leaving it like this, it almost hadn’t happened, as if they could ignore the whole thing into nonexistence. It reminded him of that passage in 1984, about perception and shared reality.
    Ben silently finished his cereal, got up, and started the dishes. Teresa finished soon after, deposited her dishes in the sink — it was Ben’s turn — and then bade him farewell and left for the day. He heard her BMW purr from the driveway, and then he was alone.

***


    The morning crawled past, and a jeering loneliness reared its head, becoming enemy. Ben had been alone these last six months, but the difference today was that he felt alone — a world apart from merely being so. There was a morbid sense of being cut off, set adrift in a degenerate personal sea that no one shared. His problems crowded him everywhere he turned, each a brick in his wall. His friends had respectfully allowed him to withdraw following Jim’s death, and except for a few polite phone calls, they might as well not exist. Ben would every now and then think of calling them up — Rod, mainly, a sometimes-bassist he considered a good friend — but it was just too awkward, not to mention delicate. He didn’t trust himself not to blab about Teresa, and he couldn’t risk having that in circulation, not for all the companionship in the world. He felt removed from society, perhaps humanity; it was how he imagined a convicted child-molester must feel.
    After watching TV since breakfast, as usual, he clicked it off and put his head in his hands, curling into Dad’s old oxblood couch. It was time to change, he decided. No more stagnating, no more wallowing, no more wasted days. And no more Teresa. He was going to pick himself up, go back to his music and life as a first-class citizen. The alternative was simply insufferable.
    These bursts of volition struck every so often, always when he was at his lowest, as though something was coming up for breath. They had, however, slowed down as of late: After his recidivism regarding Teresa, any attempt at change stirred a poison voice in his head, reminding him of his myriad failed resolutions. This time was no different, and the voice chimed in like an evil radio broadcast: You said that yesterday, it pointed out. You’ll do her again, and you know it.
    Ben shrugged it off, kneading his temples. The voice was wrong, and he could prove it, by resuming his job at the candy company, for starters. Dad’s second in command, a pleasant man by the name of Tom Harrison, had left Ben with a standing offer to have his job back “when he was ready,” with an intimation of promotion. Ben, apparently ready, reached for the phone.
    He grabbed the handset, raised it ... but his fingers refused to punch the keys. He was seeing his glorious return to the office: him mobbed by white-collar bodies and caffeinated smiles, each spouting empty consolations and kissing Jim’s ass, a forest of flowers and fruit baskets and Shoebox cards clogging his desk. Bullshit city.
    Ben hung up without dialing. Maybe the job was a little much right now. Maybe he should tackle the music first.
    He quit the couch with a leathery squeak, then padded from the living room and into the basement, where he’d constructed his studio. After a dark stairwell, the basement was a wide, low-ceilinged room partitioned in two. The larger half was the sound chamber, lined with anechoic foam, its peaks and valleys reminiscent of dripping water; it lent the room a high-tech appearance, very NASA. It was littered with Ben’s nursery of instruments: his grand piano; a rack of electric guitars and basses, hung like ties; an eight-piece drum kit smothered by cymbals and microphones. It all remained in situ from six months ago, like the armaments of some past war. In one corner was a round table topped with notebooks, one of them open. He sat down.
    The notebook was filled with lyrics from the preceding year, before the accident. He flipped through, watching them become progressively darker in reflection of his struggles in the music world. The later entries dealt with rejection and the discord of life’s circumstance, where diligence and talent by no means equate to success. He could remember who he’d been then, writing these things, and despite that old self having his own garden to tend, it was nothing compared to now, to the post-accident Ben. You don’t know what you had, he thought to that dead shard of himself, and tossed the notebook flippantly to the other end of the table. He would have to write new lyrics.
    He took a fresh notebook from a stack, uncapped a pen ... and then stared at a blank page for no less than fifteen minutes. He felt stonewalled, no different than his failed phone call. There was just nothing there, not even a diatribe regarding the burden of testicles. He slapped down the pen and instead went to his rack of guitars, thinking he’d just do some instrumental work.
    He took his favorite from its rung — a ‘67, all original Stratocaster — jacked it into a tweed Fender amp of matching vintage ... and then stood in that same blank haze, the amp hissing impatiently. He fingered a G chord, raked the pick down the strings ... then all at once tore off the guitar and shoved it back to the rack, the tumult burping through the amp. It was hopeless.
    He killed the amp and the lights and stomped back upstairs, to his wonted couch. Maybe the music was a bit much, too. Maybe he needed to end it with Teresa before he tackled anything else. She was, after all, draining him, with her sexual gymnastics and her weird head games.
    The poison voice spoke up then: If you backed down from the job and the music, what makes you think you won’t back down from her?
    The thought jarred him: he had no real answer. He’d flip-flopped so many times, a psychic scar had formed over his will, leaving it numb and dysfunctional. By day he would be steel in his resolve, vowing to send her away when she came calling that night. But when the time came and she crept into his bedroom, wearing nothing but a lacy thong, imploring his touch ... his plans would go out the window, his body itching for another dose of bad medicine. Every repetition thickened that mental scar of his, to the point that it seemed absurd to even try.
    “But not tonight,” he said aloud, to the empty house. “Not tonight.”
    The voice started to object, and he choked it off.

***


    Ben lay in bed, the sheet at his waist, the room dark save for a nightlight leftover from childhood. His bedroom was spartanly bare, just the double bed he’d had since forever, a writing desk, a dresser, and a couple cheap lamps. He used to have an acoustic guitar set out, but he’d put it away last winter. There was a foreboding to the room tonight, as if he were awaiting execution. He kept seeing Teresa making her entrance, ready to fuck him to sleep, only to blow up in disappointment upon being denied. What do you mean, no? she would spit, assuming the traditionally male role of aggressor. He could see her doing that; she had a dominant, masculine streak in her, especially in bed, which Ben liked (though he would never admit this, even to himself). He scratched his face though it didn’t itch.
    It was late and she was due. He passed timid looks between his alarm clock and the door, worrying a handful of sheet. She had called him after completing her shower, like always, and she’d been her usual rosewater self when she came out (after that first night, they’d relegated their flings to Ben’s bedroom; Teresa had a bad back). But who knew what lurked inside such a woman? Thanks to their dismal communication, he didn’t really know Teresa Milton at all, not so much as her maiden name, or if she’d reverted to it after Jim’s passing. The woman was a throbbing question mark, and he dreaded having to find out what was in that close-cropped head of hers.
    He endured another ten minutes, then heard footsteps. His body replied to this, all his blood going south in a kind of Pavlonian reaction, and he thought a stout NO! to his penis. It worked a little, turning off the faucet, as it were, but then she came in, and the faucet opened full throttle.
    She whispered inside, ghostly in the nightlight’s small glow. “Hey,” she said quietly, and Ben at once caught something in her voice — uncertainty?
    “Hey. Something wrong?” he asked, responding to that tentative note he’d heard.
    “You mind if I turn on the light?” she replied, not nearing.
    “No, go ahead.”
    She hit a switch, and that’s when Ben saw she was clothed — in a sheer negligee that left little to the imagination, but still a far cry from the dental-floss thongs she fancied. Then she lit over the bedside instead of pouncing him, and Ben sat up straight — something was definitely afoot. He didn’t know if this was good or bad.
    She fixed him with a tender look that was unlike her. “Can we talk, Benny?”
    “Yeah, sure,” Ben said, searching her for some hint of where this was going.
    “I’ve been thinking about ... us, and what we’ve been up to,” she said, a little ambiguously. Then, after a heavy pause: “I want to call it off.”
    Ben’s brow lightened, and he blinked several times — he felt to have been sprayed with cold water. “Call it off?” he said, not quite containing his surprise.
    Teresa sighed and looked away, her face hardening. “Please, let me explain,” she said, sounding harried.
    Ben realized she had mistaken his incredulity for disapproval. “Wait, hold up,” he interrupted. “I was about to tell you the same.” He sent her a smile.
    She brightened, making herself younger. “You don’t say?” Her accent pronounced itself in her relief, waxing cockney. She pointed at him. “You were going to ... tonight?”
    “Yeah,” he said, reflecting her repose. “It’s ...” He started to explain, and realized he’d made no preparations to do so.
    “It’s wrong, yeah?” she supplied, sounding the most candid he’d ever heard her. “I mean, it’s not like you’re my boy — mine, you know — but it’s still just ... wrong.”
    Ben nodded understanding.
    Another pause followed, and she interested herself in the floor, hardening again. “You probably think me some kind of whore, baiting you into rogering your stepmum.” Neither a question nor an accusation.
    “Not at all,” Ben said, and meant it. “I’m as guilty as you are. Everything’s been so upside down since the accident. I just kind of ...”
    “Lost your compass?”
    He refreshed his nod. “My words exactly.”
    “Yeah, same here,” she said, now appearing stupendously at ease. “I’ve never done anything like this before. I’d like you to know that.”
    “Me either,” Ben said. He’d been with three women in his life, and she was the third.
    “It’s just like you said,” she went on, looking pensively about the room. “I loved your Dad, very much, and when he died it sent me spiraling out into space. I went through this ... desperation, I guess you’d call it, where I started grasping for something — something, you know?” She made quotation marks with her fingers. “I tried the money at first, buying all those clothes and shite, and that worked a wee bit, but it was empty. Stupid. A Band-Aid over a bullet-hole, I thought it. So then I considered finding a new bloke, remarrying and all, but I wasn’t ready. Yet, at the same time, I still had this hole inside me, and I wanted so much to fill it — with anything, if you follow ...” She raised her head, appealing him with her eyes.
    “I understand completely,” Ben said, and he did. He then related his own private downward spiral, all the way from his climbing onto the wagon, to his failed aspirations as a singer/songwriter, to Jim’s death. He left nothing out, including things he’d only told his father. Only afterward did he realize he was having a real conversation with another human being, and Teresa, of all people, who had until then been little more than a cardboard cutout in his life. It changed his perception of her, much like when he saw her nude for the first time, except now she was a living, breathing person instead of a mere sexual receptacle. It was something like magic.
    “Oh, Benny,” she said when he was finished, and took his hand in a way that struck him as sincere. “Life is strange, idn’t it?”
    Ben had to laugh out loud. “I thought the same thing just this morning.”
    She joined him with a flutter of laughter, then said, “So we’re in agreement, then? No more naughty business?”
    “I think we are.”
    Smiling, she leaned in and printed a kiss over his cheek — their first, as it were. “Friends?” she said afterward.
    “Friends,” Ben agreed.
    She patted his hand and let it fall, then stood from the bed. “Goodnight, Benny,” she said, regarding him warmly.
    He returned her goodnight and she left the room, her negligee billowing against her. And with that, it was over. It hadn’t taken five minutes.
    Ben laid awake for a long time after, unsure if he had just imagined the whole thing.

***


    He awoke refreshed, a state alien to him these sordid six months. For a second he thought his and Teresa’s tête-à-tête was just a dream, as any significant event does in the twilight that precedes full wakefulness. Then he noted the marked lack of guilt staining his mind, and he knew it was real. He rolled out of bed and dressed, with a vigor almost childlike.
    He and Teresa took a hearty breakfast, and they actually talked, demonstrating that same old-friend interplay from last night. She hadn’t been bluffing, Ben thought; she really seemed to him a friend, as though their shared flirtation with deviance had formed a bond. It was surreally pleasant, something he thought he could get used to.
    They chatted long after breakfast was over, even while Teresa took her turn at the dishes. Then she left to do some errands and Ben was again alone. He was, remarkably, sad to see her go.
    He started for the couch afterward, purely by routine, but then caught himself and made for the basement, filled with stirrings of music where there’d been none before. His prized ‘67 Strat hung crookedly on its rack, still plugged in from yesterday’s disaster. He assumed it and cranked the amp, and within an hour, he’d written his first song in over 180 days.
    A bittersweet three-four ballad, it was about friendship achieved by the most unlikely of avenues, once-lovers come clean, discovery through loss and the comedy therein. After some deliberation, he called it “Roommates”.



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