Steal Away

STEAL AWAX/Willa Rabinovitch BENNY PADILLA WASN'T Marty's first one. The first one was a big-toothed boy with fingers like sausages he pistoned inside her until both of them fell away aching. This on the afternoon couch in the boy's living room, the parents at work. Marty not at her dance lessons and not expected home until dinner. Only once the boy folded back the covers of the guest room bed, his own room too full of high school paraphernalia to be the place for their first time ever. When they were done they found the sheets and also the unwashable coverlet streaked with blood and smells. All of this obviously Marty's fault, the boy's own jism caught inside the condom it had taken him clownish minutes to install. Marty cleaned herself behind the bathroom door with a washcloth she hid in the bottom of the hamper. Leaving the boy with the pile of indefensible laundry, she rode her bike home through the rush hour, the smell of herself rising up from between her legs when she stopped at crossings. The difference between the boy and what they had done together the last time was too much for Marty. Afterwards, she avoided him in the hallways and trained her girlfriends not to greet him. Three weeks later, she went with Benny Padilla to the room he had upstairs on Shattuck Avenue. The room was a long walk from the pizza place where she bought slices from him and allowed him to eye her over the counter. He had long black hair combed straight back into a ponytail, and he kept a book open on the counter to read during his breaks. He had a high-bridged Mayan nose and spoke a formal, complicated English with a broad-vowelled accent. The other girls competed for his attention, but Marty hung back, watching, because she knew she had him from the beginning. Walking up the broad sidewalk to his apartment, Benny kept his arm slung over her shoulders, leaning his head toward her and making compliments. She was truly beautiful, he said. She carried herself with grace and style. None of these observations was within the means of the boys she went to school with, nor was the mustache he touched repeatedly. His room was full of traffic noise and sunlight. He had a mattress on the floor covered with a bright woven blanket laid smoothly across it. A row of books stood on the floor along one side of the room, and he had a table by the window strewn with papers from which he read The Missouri Review · 19 poems to her, his own poems, written in a loose, sloping hand. He had dark brown skin, the same color all over, and his hair, when he released it from the band at the back of his neck, was heavy and strong. She went there almost every day, always in the daytime. He worked until eleven most nights, and she was not allowed out past ten. She waited through the first three classes of the day and then she left the high school and rode her bike to his building. He had to come downstairs to open the door for her when she rang the bell; through the glass she could see him descending, still soft from sleep, shirtless, his feet bare. He was lightly, carefully muscled, his chest and shoulders wide. His waist and hips, where her arms often rested, were fine. The sight of this much of him through the glass door, his body which was now somehow hers, caused her to smile up at him. Ascending, Benny carried her bike on his left shoulder while with his right arm he had her tight up against his side, so that the climb to the third floor was slow and ragged. On the mattress, he knelt over her and looked down her length to where it was caught with his. He narrated what he saw, her ivory skin reflecting his brown skin. Other white girls, he said, did not have her cream-colored body, or her seriousness, or her willingness to lay revealed in...