Beef With Broccoli

The silhouetted figure pulls the poor girl's dismembered body inside. It pans into the door so the inside of the cabin is clear: the walls are completely covered with overlapping palm-sized printed pages spattered with red. He heaves the girl's body onto the table in the middle of the room and hangs the plow blade back on the wall with his other tools. "Swords into plowshares," he mutters. "Plowshares into swords."

The mechanical buzz makes me jump again. I go to the intercom. "Hello?"

"Hey, it's Jay. From Wong's Wok? When I got back in my car, I found a loose bag with eggrolls in it. Please tell me there were eggrolls in the bag I gave you."

I haven't even opened it yet. I dash to the coffee table and peek inside: two white paper cartons, two fortune cookies, and a big handful of plastic packets of hot mustard and nuclear-orange duck sauce. No eggrolls.

"Jay? Hey, don't worry about it," I tell him through the intercom, thinking of the nine flights of stairs between us. "It's not a big deal, I probably made you late to your other deliveries already."

"So that's a 'no' on the eggrolls, then."

"Jay, don't, it's nothing I'll..." I don't hear him anymore, but I do hear the building's front door opening and closing over the intercom. "...I'll just make you walk up nine flights of stairs for no goddamn good reason, I guess."

Well, if he's already on his way up and I have a few minutes, I might as well put on some mascara and sweep a little eye shadow on. I can probably forego the blush, I've got enough of the real thing to spare tonight. I find a single decent craft beer in the fridge and grab it the moment Jay knocks on my door. I open it for him and immediately begin apologizing.

"Shh. Don't." He's a little winded, like he's run up part of the stairs. I can't help but think how much I'd like to hear him really panting.

"But Jay, you really shouldn't have, I should have checked the bag before you left."

"And I still would have had to go down the stairs and back up to go get them."

"No, that's crazy. I would have just not-"

"Just not had eggrolls when they're your favorite? On Valentine's Day?" He presses the grease-spotted bag into my free hand. I realize how pathetic I must look to him, alone tonight with a terrible horror movie, pushing my cleavage in the delivery guy's face.

"Well, hell, at least take this beer for the road," I try to hand it to him but he refuses with an out-turned palm.

"Still working, Beef-with-Broccoli," he shakes his head in mock dejection, then leans in close enough that I can smell a fresh stick of spearmint gum on his breath. "But it's nice to know you're a good tipper." He bends down and brushes me with his lips, just a brief swipe from the middle of my mouth, dragging across to my right cheek. My stomach clenches and a tulip of fire opens in my panties. "Later."

I blink as he trots back down the steps. I don't care if these eggrolls taste like month-old cabbage wrapped in a paper plate, they are the best eggrolls I've ever ordered. I eat and continue watching the movie. It doesn't even matter to me that it was probably a pity kiss.

*****

Smart girl Jamie, who didn't think the time was right to lose her virginity to her boyfriend on their weekend camping out at the old farm, is hiding, crouched in a cupboard. Through the crack between the closed doors, she watches Cotton Matherson, psychopathic backwoods preacher, take his nail gun down off the gore-speckled wall of tools. Her stoner friend, Paul, is tied down to the dining room table, spread-eagle. They're the only teens left alive.

"God gave you his precious Word," the madman yells, brandishing the nail gun in one hand and a Bible in the other. "He gave you salvation and you used it for rolling papers!" His pupils are tiny dots in the pale pools of his eyes. Paul is sobbing. "It's time someone made you learn to respect these pages!"

Cotton sets the Bible down next to Paul's shoulder, opens it, and tears out a single page. He smooths it down across Paul's chest and positions the nail gun over the top of it. "In the beginning..."

He pulls the trigger. Paul screams.

I almost miss the buzz of the intercom because Paul is noisily working out how he feels about Biblical literalism on my TV. This time, I remember to pause the movie so I can answer without missing anything.

"Hi, it's Jay, from before? This is going to sound crazy, but I was wondering if you maybe wanted some company to watch-"

"Come on up." I buzz him in, then sprint to the bathroom to furiously brush my teeth. When I open the door for him a few minutes later, he's already taking off his coat and his hair is down loose across his shoulders. I was wrong before, it's not a Sleater-Kinney shirt, it's The Shins. I honestly think about just blowing him in the hallway because he's so perfect. At least then I'll know exactly what to do with my mouth.

"I, uh, I hope you don't mind. I finished my delivery shift and grabbed some dinner. I thought I might come by and see if the offer for that beer was still good." I glance over at the coffee table where my picked-over food containers and the empty beer bottle sit, accusing me of having no fun on a Friday night, not to mention the romantic holiday.

"I...think I may have mentioned before that there's vodka?"

"That sounds just fine." He steps closer. I hope it's to make good on the tease of his lips against mine before, but he hands me a white plastic bag, cold to the touch. "It's strawberry ice cream," he says with some pride, looking at me expectantly.

"Oh. That's great, I like strawberry." I motion him in. Sweet. Random, but sweet.

"And what's Scream Bloody Death without strawberry ice cream?" He raises his eyebrows. One of them has a silver ring through the apex of the arch. I want to feel it brushing against the inside of my thigh.

"Oh!" The realization hits me, "because they used strawberry ice cream for that scene with the brains!"

"Exactly," he walks into the apartment with me. "Unless you're all Scream Bloody Death-ed out."

"No, no," I set the ice cream down on my sliver of countertop and open the cabinet for a pair of bowls, "I was actually only partway through. Since you're a fan, too, I don't mind just restarting it from the beginning so we can watch the whole thing." Two hours on the couch with Jay and the way his band t-shirt stretches across his rangy shoulders instead of the twenty minutes or so left from where I'd stopped? Yes, please.

"No, that's okay," he's looking at the display of places the back of my bathroom door. "I wouldn't want to make you watch it again on my account. We can watch something else, if you want." He taps one of the post cards, "That's downtown St. Louis, the Arch. Have you been there?"

"A good friend of mine from college lives there," I say, thankful that his attention is elsewhere because I've just realized I don't have any clean spoons. I grab two from the sink and quickly scrub them with the corner of a dish towel, hoping he won't notice. "I went there to visit her two summers ago. It was a lot of fun."

"That's my home town," he reaches into the messenger bag slung to his hip and pulls out a Wong's Wok paper bag, then something square from it, wrapped in wax paper. "Your friend probably didn't take you anywhere that makes these, though."

He walks the short distance to my kitchenette and holds the waxy parcel out to me. I tip the paper open and see two slices of white bread clamped around something that looks like the crazypants in Scream Bloody Death tried to make an omelet.

"What is it?"

"That's my favorite Friday night movie-watching food. It's a Saint Paul sandwich. Go ahead, take a bite. I brought a whole bag."

I do. It tastes like a crazypants omelet, too, with lots of mayonnaise. Mayonnaise and crunchy bean sprouts. Aw, fuck, is this what he's going to taste like if we kiss again? It's not a deal breaker, but it's not a point in Jay's favor, for sure. I chew and swallow heavily.

"What do you think?" He unwraps one for himself and takes the kind of enthusiastic bite only men with fast metabolisms can manage. It's his favorite. He brought it to share with me. For all I know he made it at the restaurant, himself, after his shift was over. Am I going to lie to spare his feelings?

"It's horrible," I blurt out, pressing my fingers against my lips as if I can shove the unvarnished truth back in. "Jesus, I'm sorry, that was really rude."

He laughs. Not the self-aware, suave laugh that made my knees weak when he was flirting with me in the hallway, but a full one with an ugly snort tucked inside its rolling folds. "Well, I'm glad I brought the ice cream, then. Egg foo young on Wonderbread is an acquired taste."

"How long have you been here?" I ask, grateful to have some kind of out.

"Three months. I'm still learning my way around, which is a real problem when I'm driving delivery." He opens up my fridge and finds a can of High Life I'd missed on the door, hiding behind the mustard. "I'd be a disaster without GPS."

"And when you're not driving delivery?" I spoon big curls of red-flecked pink ice cream into the two bowls.

"I play a lot of Dragon Age." He opens the can and takes a long drink.

"And when you're not slinging dragons and Chinese food?" I go along with his teasing game. A shadow passes through his expression, a flicker of disappointment so fast I would have missed it melting into his half smile if I wasn't staring at his face and thinking about kissing him again.

"Right, right. This is where I tell you I'm working for my uncle to put myself through med school." He's not mean or sarcastic, but his voice makes clear that's not the real story.

"But you...aren't in med school?" I ask, testing as gently as skimming a flat pebble out onto the frozen pond in the park.

"Nope. Just a thirty year old delivery boy, sad to say," he searches my face for disapproval. My kitchenette is tiny, there can't be but two feet between where he leans against the closed refrigerator door and I stand at the counter, but he might as well still be in St. Louis for how far it feels. He shakes his head. "I can't believe I did this."

"What?"

"Barged into your apartment because I knew where it was. God, I'm a creep. You just wanted to watch a movie. Fuck." He looks around, as if he needs the door but has forgotten where it is. "Valentine's Day. What was I thinking? This was a mistake, I'm sorry."

He's going to leave. He's going to leave if I don't do something, and my feet are as rooted in place as one of the girls in my horror movies while I'm yelling at them to get out of the basement.

"No, don't," I step in front of him before he can move away from the fridge. I don't have a plan for what to say or what to do. I just can't imagine letting him leave, leave bad like this, without at least feeling the heat of his body through his t-shirt. I touch his chest with just the fingers of my right hand and trail them down across his flat stomach to his waistband, then push back up along the same path with the palm of my hand until it rests over his heart. His eyes are very dark, almost black. "I already scooped two bowls of ice cream."

We push toward each other to kiss, like something from a better movie than the one I've been watching. Our lips slot tentatively together, shift, contact again. His hand is on the small of my back. I suck that gorgeous, full lower lip of his into my mouth and run my tongue across it, graze it with my teeth. He tries my mouth with darting pushes of his tongue and I answer with mine. I'm glad he's a good kisser. I'm elated he doesn't taste like a Saint Paul sandwich.

Jay tilts my chin up with his cheek and kisses down my throat, across to the side of my neck. He sucks gently at the skin where my neck meets my shoulder, then moves back up to tease my ear with his tongue. I slide my hand up his chest to touch his hair. Jesus H. Christ, it is exactly as soft as it looks, winnowed between my fingers. I hear him set his beer down on the stove beside us to free up his other hand. It's cold, sliding up my arm from my elbow to hook a thumb under the strap of my tank top. He strokes the satin shoulder strap of my bra. He presses his forehead against mine.

"Do you have any idea how much I thought about this black bra of yours coming up those goddamn stairs?"

I can feel the bulge in his jeans, just over the drawstring knot in my plaid flannel pajama pants. If I don't slow this down, I'm going to be bent over the stove in ten minutes. I wouldn't mind that at all, but not just yet. I kiss him and cover his hand with mine to stop it from following the line of my bra strap any lower. "Our ice cream is melting."

He takes my cue to put on the brakes and goes to retrieve his beer. "We'd better eat it, then." We sit on the couch and I re-start Scream Bloody Death from the beginning, even though Jay insists we can watch something else. The strawberry ice cream is already soft and a little gloopy, so we eat it quickly before he puts one long arm around my shoulders.

The brunette is running, streaked with blood. Nothing is behind her. The lights of a house are visible. She staggers up the porch and pounds on the door. Motion behind the yellowed curtains. The hinges creak. Her mouth drops open in a scream. A rough, twisted plow blade. Scream. Bloody. Death.

Jay nudges my hair off my shoulder with his nose and peppers my neck with kisses, not looking at the screen.

The silhouetted figure pulls the dismembered body inside. He heaves the girl's body onto the table in the middle of the room and hangs the plow blade back on the wall. "Swords into plowshares. Plowshares into swords."

I feel him flinch against me when the violins shriek. I feel him jump a few times, when the movie hit its well-worn shocks.

Smart girl Jamie is hiding, crouched in a cupboard. Through the crack between the closed doors, she watches Cotton Matherson take his nail gun down.

"God gave you his precious Word. He gave you salvation and you used it for rolling papers! It's time someone made you learn to respect these pages!"

Jay is kissing my neck again, each hot exhalation sending a jolt straight down into my panties.

"In the beginning..."

"Jay?"

"Mmmm?"

"You're...hiding your eyes during the scary parts, aren't you?" His face is still pressed into the wide blonde waves of my hair.

"Mmmmaybe?"

I grab the remote and stop the movie, sitting back so I can look at him.

"Jay?"

"Yes?" He looks sheepish. Caught.

"You've never actually seen Scream Bloody Death before, have you?"

"I haven't," he confesses with a sigh. "I'm not really a big fan of horror movies."

"So, the strawberry ice cream...?"

"The wonders of Wikipedia. I just wanted an excuse to come inside."

"You ridiculous, beautiful man," I scoot over to kiss him. Tension in his shoulders flows out under my hands. "You're lucky I didn't club you over the head and drag you into the apartment to have my way with you when I first saw you. You could have told me before I made you sit through that terrible movie."

"It wasn't all bad," he kisses me, hard, his hands roaming up and down my sides, "I got to hold you when you were scared."

"When I was scared?" I tease.

"When you were apprehensive," he corrects. Jay repositions on the couch so he's pressing me into a reclining position. I toss some excess pillows off to make it easier for us both to fit, stretched out.

"Oh, right. When I was apprehensive about scary scenes in a movie I've seen two dozen times." His weight feels good on me and his hair is a black curtain to either side of our faces.

"I think this part's my favorite, though."

His lips and tongue are everywhere I need them to be against my mouth. He cups and gently squeezes one of my breasts over my tank top. I push my fingers under his t-shirt and scrape my nails lightly against his smooth back and ribs. He moves his kisses and bites to my neck and throat, his chest thrumming with satisfied noises when I squirm against him. I'm so hot between my legs that I wonder if he can feel it through his jeans when I grind up into his waist.

He kisses down my throat to my sternum, hooks his fingers under the edge of my top and one of the cups of my bra and pulls down until my nipple pops out. He pulls it immediately between his wet lips and liquid lust just pours down from his mouth along my spine and up to my clit. He sucks it gently between his teeth, testing my hardness. I'm being stitched all over with needles forged from pleasure. He shifts his weight so I'm still on my back and he's on his hip beside me, pulling at the drawstring on my pants.

"Can I touch you, Lindsay?" he slides his hand along my lower belly to the edge of my panties. "Can I feel how wet you are for me?"

"Please," I beg, arching my back. His fingers slip easily into my black lace panties and cup my sex, heat against heat.

"You shaved," he whispers, wiggling the tip of his middle finger in the tight crease of my outer lips. "Were you hoping for Valentine's Day company?"

"Against all odds," I sigh as he strokes through my inner lips. "Those stairs, though. They make it hard to...to..." He pushes one finger all the way inside me. I can't do anything but breathe and feel my walls close around him.

"Hard to have random delivery guys decide to drop by on the off chance you'd like to give them more than a generous tip?" He moves his finger in small circles inside me, feeling my interior walls before focusing on stroking the spot along the front that makes my whole pelvis feel full and tight.

"Two fingers," I moan. "Please, I want to feel you open me up."

He works a second finger inside me and continues rubbing my spot. He's not trying to get me locked into climax yet, only building excitement for now. He pulls his fingers halfway out of me and scissors them against each other to push and stretch my inner lips. He thrusts his fingers back in up to his knuckles and brushes my clit with his thumb. My temperature shoots up. I don't know why he can't see I'm boiling under my skin, the heat tingling in every follicle of every hair. My spine curls back on itself like a leaf before the flame and I arch harder into him as his fingers stoke and build the pressure inside my body until I'm surprised my lungs are still able to push any air in and out at all.

"That's it, you're so close," Jay rubs the tip of his nose against mine, then pulls back only a few inches. "Come for me. I want to watch it on your face."

I pant while he presses harder inside me, his thumb working furiously over my nub. I finally feel the fluttering edge of the unbearable tension and rush down the slope of release, my legs shaking and toes clenched. The wave of pleasure peaks inside me and washes down to his fingers, soaking my thighs. The contractions inside me are so strong he has to fight to keep his fingers there, no longer bearing down on my triggered G-spot but slowly massaging through my pulsing spasms.

"Keep going," I moan. "I do multiples. I'll come for you again if you keep going."

"I definitely want to see that," he keeps his rhythm inside me, long, slow strokes. "Help me out, though, get your pants and panties off." I grab at my waistband and lift my hips, expecting him to pull his hand away, but he penetrates me deeply with his fingers and holds them there while I kick my pants off my legs. I reach down to where his erection is digging into my hip and squeeze.

"Fuck," he sighs, then bites my shoulder. "Watching you come made me hard enough to hammer nails."

"You're real close to seeing it again." I unzip his fly and slip my hand inside his pants. I don't have to search for his cock, it springs into my palm. His shaft isn't much longer than my closed fist with the head poking out over the top of my fingers, but he's so thick I can't close my hand around him. His fingers continue, his rhythm like a resting heart rate. I kiss him, teasing my tongue deep into his mouth. His slick precum coats my fingers.