Flings by Justin Taylor Read Free Book Online

distance. We have a verbal agreement, a kind of off-the-books restraining order. I was going to make it a blood oath but didn’t want to mix my fluids with his. He’s still on thin ice with his family, but Sungold turns a profit so they’re provisionally impressed. The ice is thickening: going from something legitimately dangerous to something merely frozen to the core. If they’re still waiting for the other shoe to drop, they’re going to be waiting a long time because Polina and I manage Sungold as a team and it’s a tight operation. No more on-the-clock hummers in the walk-in freezer. No more Captain Morgan going missing by the case. Nobody robs Ethan except for us, and we keep things slow and steady—the goose will lay golden eggs until the day his heart bursts or his liver turns to foie gras. Then I guess I’ll have to meet his mom.
    One Melissa/Jessica who did not come back to work for us is the one who helped me out of the mushroom suit, the one who showed an interest in my slimed physique, not to mention a rare enthusiasm for putting up with my shit. At Polina’s encouragement I called her and asked her to dinner. It was supposed to be chaste, a proper thank-you for having saved me from brain death, but you know how these things go. Her name turns out to be Kaylee Boyd, peach-colored all-American Dave Matthews fan, but beyond that rife with specific attributes and qualities of all kinds. For example, she studies environmental science, is working on a model to predict the rate at which our landlocked town will become beachfront property, then a water park, then a coral reef—though of course, she’s quick to qualify, coral will be a history lesson by that point, so something else will take over our drowned houses, or nothing will. That part’s harder to guess about. It’s all terrifying. I mostly tune it out.
    Here’s what it comes down to. Kaylee is a woman who looks like a photograph of a woman. A photograph you look at and go, Oh come on that’s not real . And you’d think that because of this, being with her would feel like being in one of those photographs, but it doesn’t. It feels . . . different, somehow, not like that at all.
    â€œSo what does it feel like?” Polina asks me. It’s late. We’ve sent everyone home and are sitting at the bar, tired after a long night’s work but happy, relaxing in sconce light, drinking nightcaps of Ethan’s Macallan twelve-year while we finish up ripping him off. I’m not sure how to answer her question.
    â€œNormal, I guess. Or like, I don’t know, being alive.”

A TALKING CURE
    M y name is Lacey Anne Schmidt. My fiancé’s name—which I still haven’t decided whether I’ll take or not—is as or more plain. He is Zachary Davis, black-haired and lanky with a little beer belly that pooches over the waist of his slacks. If I take his name I will be Lacey Anne Davis, or Lacey Anne Schmidt-Davis, though I think Davis-Schmidt sounds better, though I’m pretty sure that’s not how it’s supposed to go. I mean in terms of the order of the names when a woman takes a man’s. Meanwhile there remains the problem of my first name. I can never decide if I hate “Lacey” because it’s so white trash or so country club, but one way or the other it sounds terribly unserious, and so when I publish it’s going to be as Anne Schmidt, or Anne Schmidt-Davis, which I think has a decent cadence to it, like Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick or Claude Lévi-Strauss.
    Forgive me if my references trend obscure. Zachary and I are both PhD candidates at UPenn. I’m New Media and he’s Comp Lit, which means, at the risk of totally overdetermining your reading of this story, that the common ground of our respective theoretical apparatuses starts and ends with Freud. Zachary’s dissertation is on ideations of Confederate masculinity in late