Read The Dark Space for Free Online Page B

two.”
    Okay, yeah, two times was more like it. Two times was exactly like it. I had the occasional fond jerkoff session, still, to the moment that second time when I squeezed her hip and she turned over onto her belly, flipped like a pancake and shoved her round ass up in the air, wiggling it at me.
    She was wearing leather pants, shoved down, and those pants and that ass, her pussy spread open and glistening . . . Jesus God.
    Sometimes I can’t believe the things girls will let me have. I want to stop and ask them, Me? Have you seen me? Are we operating in the same dimension here?
    Sarah avoided me after, and there have been times I wanted to stop her and tell her, Look, I don’t know if you feel guilty or what, but I’m holding no grudges over here. I’m pasting your ass into an album and keeping it there for the rest of my days.
    So, yeah. I wasn’t sure how much of that it was cool to tell Winnie. Or how much I had to tell her, since it was pretty clear she could read my mind. Sometimes.
    I was trying not to think too hard about it.
    Winnie linked her arm with Sarah’s. They were new best friends, apparently. I spent ninety minutes saying The stage is big and The walls are tall with hipster muttonchops Jason, and Winnie had some kind of transcendental experience.
    “Was he good?” she asked Sarah.
    Sarah gave me a considering look. “He was better than I expected.”
    “So why just two times?”
    She twisted her mouth into a sly little smile. “I met this girl.”
    Winnie smiled, too — a big, open smile that I’d never seen before. One of her top front teeth is darker than the other, more opaque, but only so you’d notice it in full sunlight.
    I saw it for the first time, and I wanted to throw myself on the ground at her feet. Roll around there like a dog.
    I mean, honestly. What the fucking fuck?
    There was a sound then, like fingers snapping in my consciousness, and I thought about taking both of them to the coffee shop to tell them the story about my mom.
    I wanted to ask them, What’s happening to me? Is it magic? Am I nuts?
    Why does it feel so fucking good?
    We could have had one of those throwdown moments then, if we’d done it. We’d have been like the Scooby-Doo gang, where ten different creepy things are happening to them separately, and then they all come together in the van and figure out, cripes, this is a thing going on here. This is fucking crazysauce .
    Maybe we would’ve gone to talk to Maggie, laid it all out for her.
    Everything would’ve been different if we had, I’m sure of it. That morning — that cold February morning when the sky was overcast but the light so clear, like the gray was a filter that kept all but the purest rays out — it was a turning point.
    We turned it when Winnie reached for my elbow. Even through her mitten, through my coat, I could feel her smile all up and down my arm, soaking into my side. I could feel that darker tooth vibrating on its own frequency, not quite the same as the others, setting up its own assonance and dissonance.
    I could feel the piece of my future that was shaped like LA — a rumbling and a fracture, and that whole continent of myself shearing off. Floating away.
    “Let’s go back to my room,” Winnie said. “The three of us.”
    And there was just no question in my mind.
    Wherever Winnie went was where I was supposed to go.
    I hung back, walked behind them, which seemed right. I liked looking at them together. Sarah had nearly a foot on Winnie, and dozens of inches everyplace else. Winnie’s black winter hat completely covered her head, and it matched her knee-length black coat. That brown scarf. Her laced boots. Sarah’s coat went nearly to her ankles, was ten different colors, and had some kind of inexplicable llama or alpaca tableau worked into the back. Her dark hair was loose, and there were pieces in it that were bright pink.
    It was like, between them, I could imagine the entire possible spectrum of women. All the