Air Mattress by Sophie Panzer

James Blann CC


Air Mattress

I am bleeding when we meet and I am bleeding when he leaves. One month. The sheer effort involved makes it feel like more.
    On the night of Emily and Kai’s party I wear a white lace crop top and a black mini skirt. When I arrive I fill a solo cup with cheap warm beer and find myself staring at a man sitting on the couch with Kai. I wait a few moments before making my way over to say hello, careful not to appear too interested.
    Kai introduces us. “This is my roommate,” he tells me, and we shake hands. He has full lips and dark eyes and glossy hair and a sturdy build, like it would take a lot to knock him over. Something primal twists in my stomach. It is as if my ovaries are saying this one could give you babies that would survive plagues and wars and wild beasts. I make a gentle joke about Kai’s new haircut and he laughs and I am mesmerized by the white glint of his teeth. My pulse pounds a single syllable of desire in my neck, my wrists, my thighs: Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
      Not tonight, though. I am not the kind of person to do anything without a plan.
    The rest of the party is an exercise in appearing effortlessly beautiful and charming and interesting, which involves controlling the energy of my gestures, the intensity of my eye contact, the tone of my words, the pitch of my laughter. It is exhausting. When I arrive home at midnight I fall into bed and sleep for ten hours.
    The next day I text Kai.

                                                                                                                                                                                                      Kai
                                                                                                                                                                                                      I don’t mean to alarm you
                                                                                                                                                                                                      But your roommate is very attractive

LOL
yeah he’s a good-looking guy
are you interested?

                                                                                                                                                                                                       Yes. Is he single?

Yep

His ex broke up with him like 3 months
ago so I don’t think he’s looking for anything
serious.

In fact I know he isn’t.

                                                                                                                                                                                                     lol that’s fine
                                                                                                                                                                                                     I’m in my last year so I’m not either

DOES THIS MEAN I’M YOUR WINGMAN??



    I laugh out loud in the café I’m working in, all exposed brick and overpriced scones. A hipster in a black turtleneck glares at me.


                                                                                                                                                                                                      Yes!
                                                                                                                                                                                                      And your first job as my wingman is
                                                                                                                                                                                                      to tell me if you have an air mattress

                                                     
I do
why?


                                                                                                                                                                                       because my friend is coming to visit next weekend
                                                                                                                                                                                                     and I need something for her to sleep on

oh ok yeah you can borrow ours

                                                                                                                                                                                                      I also need you to find out when
                                                                                                                                                                                                      Your roommate will be around
                                                                                                                                                                                                      Tell him I can only come by to
                                                                                                                                                                                                      pick up the air mattress
                                                                                                                                                                                                      at the exact time he is there.
                                                                                                                                                                                                      Can you do this?


Yeah!

    
   He tells me his roommate’s schedule and we settle on a time the following week. When I knock on the door of their apartment, the roommate answers.
   “Hey! Kai told me I could borrow the air mattress for the weekend.”
   He smiles. Those teeth. “Sure, come on in.”
   I step inside. The foyer is cool and damp, a relief from the late September sun. “Here it is,” he says, handing me a large bag that weighs much more than I expected. It must be king-sized. “Are you going camping?”
   I laugh, trying to maintain my composure while calculating how the fuck I am going to carry this mattress all the way back to my apartment. “No, I just have a friend coming to visit and I don’t want her to sleep on the floor.”
   “You’re a good friend.”
   “Yes, I’m great. When should I return this?”
   He tilts his head, considering. “Any time next week is fine, just message me and let me know.”
   I smile. Kai is no longer our go-between. This is promising.
   Less promising is the journey back to my apartment. I carry the mattress several blocks to the metro stop, onto the platform, through the station, and up the hill until I reach my building. By the time I get there, my back is damp with sweat and my arms are burning.
   But it doesn’t matter, because phase one is complete and my friend has somewhere to sleep. She arrives on an outrageously late Amtrak on Friday night. I meet her at the train station and we crash into each other when we embrace. Moments like these, when we physically occupy the same space, have become increasingly rare since we graduated from high school. Tiny details – the smell of her hair, the texture of her sweater, the exact timbre of her voice unadulterated by fizzy video chat connections – have become precious.
   We make our way to my apartment so she can drop off her backpack and then head to China Town for dinner, where we slick plump greasy dumplings with chili oil and soy sauce.
    “So do you know what you want to do when you graduate?” she asks around a mouthful of chicken and coriander.
    After spending the past summer angsting over this question, I am proud to finally have an answer. “I think I want to teach English abroad,” I say. “Somewhere is South America, maybe Chile or Colombia. I don’t want to lose my Spanish. What about you?”
    She beams. “That’s so cool! I have a few ideas, but I think I want to work for a TV studio out in LA. My school has connections out there, might just work the alumni network for all it’s worth.”
    My eyes widen. “That’s so far away!”
    She snorts. “You’re the one who’s moving to a different continent.”
    “But that’s only for a year or two,” I protest. “Until I figure out grad school stuff. That’s, like, an actual job that could lead to you settling there permanently.”
    She shrugs. “We’ll see what happens. My plans will probably change a million times before the year is over, anyway.”
    “True,” I concede. “Speaking of plans, have I told you about the man I’m chasing?”
     Her eyes light up, hungry for gossip. “No! Spill!”
    “I have a scheme,” I say. “It involves an air mattress and ice cream.”
    She eyes me suspiciously. “Are you going to lure him onto the air mattress with the ice cream?”
    “No,” I laugh. “I’m going to ask him out for ice cream when I return this air mattress.”
    “Just to be clear, no fucking has taken place on the air mattress I am using tonight. Like I won’t be sleeping on semen?”
    “Correct. For now,” I eye her mischievously and she makes a grab for my nose with her chopsticks.
    Then her expression changes, becomes serious. “So is this the first guy since……?” She trails off.
    I nod, grateful that my mouth is full and I don’t have to speak. I remember the last time we had a conversation like this, the way my lungs constricted and left me gasping for air as the words tumbled out and she looked on in helpless fury.
    “I hope it goes well. You deserve it.”
    I swallow. “Thanks. It’s just a casual thing, I don’t want to start a relationship in my last year of school.”
    She pinches a dumpling with her chopsticks. “If he hurts you, I’ll poke out his eyes and feed them to crows.”
    “How imaginative.”
    She pops the dumpling in her mouth, chews. “And then I’ll strangle him with his own intestines and hang him from a tree.”
    “You’re sweet.”

    The weekend is full of laughter and late nights. We go to bars and museums and bookstores and parks, stalk our old high school crushes on Facebook, complain about our parents. But Monday morning comes too soon and she is gone as quickly as she came.
    The next day, I call an Uber to take the air mattress back. My palms sweat as I walk up to the door of the apartment.
    He answers and I try not to get distracted by his teeth again. “Thanks for letting me borrow this,” I say, handing him the bag.
    “No problem. Did you have fun with your friend?”
    “I did! Also,” I take a deep breath. “Kai is really overinvested in your love life and when I told him I thought you were cute after Emily’s party he told me to ask you out.” I figure I can throw Kai under the bus for this one, since he volunteered to be my wingman in the first place.
    Two unbearable seconds.
    Then a smile. “Sure. What were you thinking?”
    I rattle off details immediately. “Ice cream? At Ripples. On Thursday. At seven.”
    If he is disturbed by the amount of thought I have put into this, he doesn’t show it. “Sounds great. I’ll see you there.”
    “See you!”
    I take the metro home and feel my heart pounding triumph and terror into my throat.

    Thursday evening arrives. I wear a denim jacket over a peach-colored dress that I found in a thrift store in New Orleans.
    He taps me on the shoulder outside the ice cream place, a tiny nondescript shopfront sporting a faded purple sign. We walk in and gaze at the creamy pinks and blues and greens.
    “What kind should I get?” he asks, eyes wide.
    I purse my lips, considering. “My favorite is rosewater. But the chocolate raspberry is amazing.”
    I get the former and he gets the latter and we sit down on a bench to eat.
    “I’m excited for Kai and Emily’s wedding,” I say around a mouthful. They are not engaged, but everyone expects them to be soon.
    “Same,” he says, wiping chocolate from his face. “I’m kind of relying on them to be the first of my friends to get married. You know they’ve been together for eight years?”
    I can’t imagine being with anyone for that long. But I don’t say this. “Wow. Their relationship is an elementary schooler. It should be playing jump-rope at recess and watching Phineas and Ferb.”
     “Hey,” he protests. “I still love Phineas and Ferb.”
     I raise my eyebrows. “But have you memorized all of the songs?”
     “Well, no.”
     I shake my head. “Fake fan.”
     We finish too quickly and decide to go for a walk. We pass greystone walkups and bright murals and trees that are just starting to change their leaves. We browse in a comic book shop and a record store, talk about our favorite books and songs. The conversations flows without pauses or awkwardness.
      We are still talking by the time we have come full circle and are back at the ice cream store, closed now, so we decide to go back to my place and watch Brooklyn 99.
       During the first episode, we lie next to each other on our stomachs.
       During the second episode, we lean back on my bed and he puts his arms around my shoulders.
      We are about to watch the third episode when I whisper, “We can either keep watching or start making out. Your pick.”
      He turns towards me. “Making out sounds nice.”
      His kisses are open and sloppy and too fast, but there is something endearing about his urgency. Like a puppy. We start undressing and he is quickly frustrated by the lacing of my dress, the tightness of my leggings.
     “Why is everything you’re wearing so hard to take off?” he asks.
     “You didn’t strike me as the kind of person who had sex on a first date!” Kai’s words, not mine.
     “I’m not,” he admits. “I never do this.”
     Soon I’m wearing nothing but a pair of black cotton boy shorts. Once he takes off his shirt I can see that he’s built like a teddy bear, warm and solid and broad-chested.
      He gazes in awe at me.
    “You have a really nice body,” he murmurs. We go back to kissing. He bites my neck and I moan and I feel him harden against my leg. I guide his hands over my breasts and he breathes how beautiful I am into my ear. It’s been a while since anyone has done that. Not since that guy last year who took me home from a bar, drunk, and did things to me as I drifted in and out of consciousness. I don’t remember much, but I remember the noise of his breath in my ear as pain stabbed under my skirt.
    “Should I get a condom?” I whisper.
     “Sure. But. Um. Before we go any further – “
     Oh god oh god you have herpes holy fuck how do I get you out of my house…….
     “I’ve never done this before. I’m a virgin.”
      I exhale so hard I collapse against him. “Didn’t you have a girlfriend?” I ask.
      He shrugs. “She wasn’t ready for sex. She’s a pretty religious Catholic.”
    Something about his use of the present tense makes me flinch. I don’t want to be reminded that this person still exists, not in this moment.  “So are you ok with us doing this?”
     “Oh, yeah. Here, lie down.”
     I lie back and he trails kisses down my throat, my collarbone, my stomach. A gentleman. He gives head like someone who has been honing his technique due to a lack of other options and I have very few complaints.
     The sex itself involves a lot of awkward thrusting and grunting. I feel some pleasure, but I spend most of those minutes stifling laughter at the ludicrousness of it all. After a while he’s worked up a sweat and still hasn’t finished so I stop him and ease myself down his stomach. I use my hands and my mouth and enjoy watching him writhe, loving the sound of his groans and the feel of his hands gripping my hair.
     “You’re really good at that,” he gasps when I finally come up for air.
      I stretch contentedly like a cat. “I know.”
     I curl up in his arms. My mind feels cloudy and electric, like the aftermath of a thunderstorm. I wonder if the oxytocin is going to make me say something I don’t mean, chase something I don’t want.
     “So how did things end? With your ex,” I ask casually.
     “We’re still friends. We play on a soccer team together.” Charming.
      He leaves at midnight and I jump into the shower. The next morning I rummage for a scarf to hide an enormous hickey.
     I tell myself I won’t stalk his ex. That I don’t care enough to stalk his ex. Then my friend Rebecca and I get drunk on Saturday night and stalk his ex. Rebecca wants to be a lawyer but I think she should join the FBI because she can find anything on anyone.
     The ex has beautiful smooth skin and long dark hair. We find her high school, a local paper’s take on one of her field hockey matches, a picture of her house with Japanese maples in the front yard on Google Maps. Her feminist blog is riddled with typos but I respect the righteous anger seething in her posts about sexual assaults and the intersections of racism and sexism she faces as a woman of color.
     “I think we could be friends,” I declare after we polish off the bottle of red wine.
      I message him about nothing for the next few days – funny gifs, pictures of cats – and he asks if I want to hang out again next Thursday.          We end up going to a dessert café and talking about the family reunion he went to over the weekend while Rebecca and I were internet-stalking.
     “I have this uncle who I hadn’t seen since I was seven and he got super drunk and kept telling me how handsome I was,” he relates over an oozing chocolate lava cake. “Definitely one of the most awkward family gatherings of all time.”
    I shake my head. “Amateur hour. My family reunions consist of my uncles telling me how much I look like a supermodel AND my grandmother trying to set me up with my step cousin.”
      He laughs. “Are you serious?”
     “Every. Damn. Time.”
     We lick chocolate sauce from our spoons and go back to my place again. We briefly consider starting Riverdale but decide it’s too much of a time commitment and opt for The Office episode where Michael and Dwight and Andy decide to do parkour. We barely make it through before our clothes start coming off.
     The breeze wafting through my open window is chilly, so I squirm out from under him to close it. I pause to take in the city illuminated against the night sky.
      “Nice view,” he says from the bed.
      “Right?” I turn around to look at him. “It’s beautiful. I love my room.”
       He gestures to the lacy pink underwear stretched over my ass. “I meant you.”
      I stick out my tongue. I like how easy it is to be naked in front of him, how he has no subtlety and so obviously doesn’t care about the knifelike edge of my nose or the bulge of my belly or the smallness of my breasts.
      I ride him so I can look down on him. This is what I love the most, watching their faces contort, hearing the yeah yeah yeah fucks. When we get tired we stop and cuddle for a while. Then I whisper some of the things I like, what I want him to do to me. He grabs my hands and pins them above my head, pulls my hair back so my throat is bared to his mouth. Then, when he hears me gasp, he releases me abruptly.               “That was a preview,” he whispers. “For next time.”
        I smile. There is going to be a next time.
       At two in the morning he starts putting his clothes back on. He kisses my hands, my nose, my cheek, and it does not occur to me to be anything but happy.
        I wrap a towel around my body and walk him to the door.
      “I have a crazy few days coming up,” he murmurs, pulling me towards him. “But I’ll message you at the end of the week.” I stumble, laughing, trying not to wake my roommates, and we kiss goodbye.
        On Monday, I buy a new box of condoms from the pharmacy.
        On Tuesday, I check my cycle tracking app to make sure I’m not ovulating.
        On Wednesday, I pretend to do my homework while idly Googling new sex positions.
        On Thursday, I do laundry so I have all my outfit options open.
        On Friday morning, I shave. Everywhere.
        On Friday night, I stare at my phone during a party, drumming my nails on a table top and thinking, Tick, tock, bastard.
        “How are things going with you guys?” Emily asks.
         I shrug, trying to seem nonchalant. “He said he would text me at the end of this week, but he hasn’t.”
        “I haven’t seen him all week,” Kai chimes in. “I don’t think he’s slept. Not at home, at least.”
         A few minutes later, my phone buzzes. He asks me if I want to get coffee over the weekend. “He just messaged me.”
        “Good,” says Emily. “I texted him to tell him he has to be nice to you because you’re my friend.”
        My stomach twists and I laugh mirthlessly. “Thanks, now I know he really wants to see me.”
       “Oh, no,” she stammers. “I didn’t mean – he probably – ”
       “Don’t worry,” I soothe. “It’s fine. Everything’s fine.”
        I finish my drink. And another. And another. Eventually I stop thinking.

      On Sunday morning I pull down my underwear in the bathroom and see red. Every part of my body feels swollen and sore. I worry about looking tired and bloated when I meet him at the coffee shop, but he looks worse – pale and drawn, with deep shadows under his eyes.
      I order a black coffee and sit at a table, reading a play for English. He joins me a few minutes later, holding something sweet and milky-looking.
       “Sorry it took me such a long time to get back to you,” he apologizes. “I think I’ve slept for a total of ten hours this week.”
       “Quit flexing,” I quip, but my voice cracks.
         He smiles and it doesn’t reach his eyes. “I wanted to tell you something.”
         I am outrageously proud of my ability to raise a single eyebrow and do so. “Ok.”
        “So I know we’ve just been seeing each other casually,” he begins. My stomach drops. “And it’s been really fun, but I’m still not over my ex.”
         I say nothing. I should have expected this; moving from dessert and sex to coffee is not an upgrade.
         "So I can’t do this anymore. I can’t do….what we’ve been doing.”
        Still nothing. I feel like I have been kicked in the stomach but it gives me grim pleasure to watch him squirm in his own awkward silence, a grub skewered on a fishing hook.
        “I’m sorry,” he stutters. “It’s just…… too many long hours in the library, you know? Alone, thinking about my relationship…….”
         Jesus.
         “I still love her. I can’t get her out of my head.”
          Does this man have an off button?
         “But we can still be friends.”
           My eyebrow is still raised.
         “I have to go, actually,” he blurts out. “I have a soccer game. Our team could be the second-worst in intramurals instead of the worst-worst if we win.”
         “Impressive,” I say coolly, willing my voice not to shake.  I take every book out of my bag and spread them over the tabletop, asserting my dominance over the space. I put my earbuds in and start reading the same line of my textbook over and over.
           I don’t see him leave, but when I look up he is gone.
           I count to thirty. Then I shove everything back in my bag and walk out the door, towards home.
          Even though I didn’t want to be his girlfriend or his lover or his anything, really, even though all I wanted was a next time, I find myself crying. I feel a cramp that is more than a cramp because suddenly my entire body remembers the compounded pains of the past few weeks: The throb in my arms from carrying that stupid air mattress all the way to my apartment from the metro stop. The burn in my thighs from riding him. The ache in my jaw from going down on him. The realization that I have spent an entire month working and hurting for something that was never going to be anything.  That I have spent the entire week being rejected without even knowing it.
         I spend most of the day in my room trying to work. Words swim across my gaze, meaningless. I make myself pasta for dinner and FaceTime my best friend.
          She takes one look at my swollen eyes and brandishes a pen menacingly at the camera. “What happened? Who am I murdering? Is it that guy?”
          I tell her what happened. When I get to the part about him saying he spent too much time in the library thinking about his feelings for his ex she actually shrieks. “I will mail bees to his house!”
          “You can’t, he’s my friend’s roommate.”
          “I will mail bees to just his room!
           “Fine.”
           She shakes her head vehemently. “That’s like the worst kind of fuckboy. The one who wants to believe he’s the ‘nice guy’ but who still acts like an emotional leech without any respect for other people’s feelings or time or anything.”
           “A softboy. He’s a softboy.”
           “Exactly. Fucker.” Her voice softens. “You deserve so much better. Even for just sex. Did he….?“
           I shake my head but something feels wrong, because even though it’s not the same thing as the guy who did things when I was drunk I feel the same way I felt then, like some kind of toy that’s been used and tossed aside and left to slump in a corner with all its seams unraveling.
           “Did you like him?”
          I shrug. “He just said there would be a next time and now there’s not going to be a next time and he sat there dumping all his emotions on me when he clearly didn’t care about mine and I feel like I’m not even allowed to be angry at him but I am just so sick of being treated like I don’t matter.” My voice trembles.
     “Hey,” she says sternly. “You matter to me. You matter to your friends and your family. And one day you will matter to someone romantically if that is what you want. You deserve to be treated like you matter all the time. Do you have to see him again?”
          I shake my head. “No. He said he wanted to be friends, but he’s not going to talk to me again.”
          “If he sees you again he’d better run the other fucking way,” she growls.
        I laugh at the bulldoggishness of her expression. It reminds me of the time Jessica Mason called her a bitch on the first day of middle school. Jessica left that encounter with a black eye and a bruised ego, too embarrassed to tell any adults who the culprit was.
         Together, we decide to erase him. I delete all his messages and unfriend him on Facebook and immediately feel lighter.
        We talk about her for a while, how her roommate tried to kick her out of their dorm so she could have phone sex with her boyfriend.             How her mother is going back to school now that she and her little brother are out of the house. How her dad is dating again for the first time since the divorce.
     “It’s weird to think of them starting over at that age, you know?” she muses. “I mean, people think you’re supposed to have it all figured out by then. With the house and the career and the kids and everything.”
     “Except for the midlife crisis,” I point out.
     “Fair. It definitely takes some of the pressure off, though. One mistake doesn’t mean the end of everything. And the world is just starting to open up to us, after all.”
      We talk about our favorite queens on Rupaul’s Drag Race for a while. By the time we say goodnight the moon is high in the sky outside my window.
     Before I shut my computer, I log onto Facebook for a final ex-stalking session. He is nowhere to be found on her timeline, at least nowhere publicly visible. I look through her summer vacation albums and old prom photos and feel oddly soothed by the sight of her face looking out across the ocean, the shimmering coral pink satin of her gown. By the knowledge that she is just a person, with a life and memories and friends of her own, not defined by her past or looming as an ominous symbol of my own inadequacy.


       Midterms hit, and I spend the next few weeks buried in papers and projects. The pain dims quickly from the distraction. I am sitting on a bench in a hallway charging my phone between classes when the face that I have seen so many times on my laptop screen drifts into my line of sight.
       “Hi!” the ex chirps nervously. “I’m running for VP Internal for the Arts Undergraduate Society and I need a hundred student signatures, would you mind signing my sheet?”
        She holds out a clipboard. Her big dark eyes are so apologetic, like she’s sorry for daring to enter my breathing space.
       “Sure!” I respond. I like your blog.
       She beams and points to where I should sign my name. “Sorry to take up your time, it’s just so they know you’re, like, a real person.”
       “No worries! Best to be on the safe side and make sure I’m not a bot.” I have Japanese maples in my yard at home too.
        I sign the paper with a flourish and hand it back to her. “Good luck!” Did you win your soccer game?
       She smiles as she takes the paper back. “Thank you, you’re so nice!”
     I want to call after her as she walks away, tell her not to be nervous, that nobody minds signing her sheet and anyone who does is obviously an ass. I catch myself preparing to shout at her retreating form and the words dissolve on my tongue like waves crashing against a shore. You can do so much better than him.

​

Sophie Panzer grew up in New Jersey, completed her BA at McGill University, and currently teaches English in Prague, Czech Republic. She is the author of the forthcoming chapbooks Survive July (Red Bird Chapbooks 2019) and Mothers of the Apocalypse (Ethel Press 2019). She has edited prose for Inklette and Scrivener Creative Review. Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Josephine Quarterly, Lavender Review, Gingerbread House, and Pulp Literature.

---