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Mason
It was getting late. I’d had a long day. A new client. And a talker at that. Of course, he wanted a giant-ass tattoo across his shoulders. It took the whole afternoon. My brain was dead. My ears were bleeding. I was hardly paying attention to what I was doing as I barged into the bathroom up in my room.
It wasn’t my fault.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry!” I said quickly as I jumped back from the bathroom as if the tiles had scalded my feet, the light had burned my eyes, and the person in there had exhaled fire from his mouth. “Shite, sorry!”
From the bathroom came a muffled laughter. As I finished dragging my hands over my face, I saw a toothbrush with a dollop of toothpaste atop it extend out into the bedroom. When I didn’t immediately take it from the delicate fingers, it wiggled at me.
Rachel leaned back, her own toothbrush sticking out of her mouth. White foam giving her a little moustache. She had a raised eyebrow. An amused grin.
“It won’t bite,” she said out the corner of her mouth, jabbing my toothbrush at me.
I took the toothbrush slowly. I kept my eyes on her the whole time. Rachel stepped aside to make room for me to slip inside the little bathroom along with her.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
Rachel took the toothbrush from her mouth and said, “Am I sure that I want you to brush your teeth? Um, yeah, I think I am.”
“No,” I said, glancing into the tightness of the bathroom. The narrowness of the space between the tub and the radiator. The smallness of the pedestal sink. “No, I mean, are you sure you want me in there with you.”
Rachel blinked at me.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, glancing down at the toothpaste she’d obviously put out just for me. Probably done it when she’d done hers. Maybe even hadn’t thought about it. “I just…brushing your teeth together is like…”
Rachel laughed and guessed, “Scary?”
“Normal,” I said, scratching nervously at the back of my neck. “I mean normal for a couple. Normal for like…committed people.”
Rachel laughed again.
“Let me guess,” she said, “you never let your Miss Last Nights brush their teeth?”
“How did you—”
“You hide your toothbrush,” she answered. “You weirdo.”
I laughed myself. For some reason that was the line for me: brushing your teeth together. That meant something even more than fucking meant something. I could circle my tongue around a girl’s clit while she moaned my name, and that was less intimate than circling my toothbrush around my mouth while she did the same. With her toothbrush. With her mouth. In my bathroom. Together. Side by side.
“Get in here,” Rachel said and stepped back up to the sink.
She spit some of the foam down the drain as I inched hesitantly inside.
“Boo!” she suddenly shouted, and my back collided painfully with the towel rack inside the bathroom.
“That’s not funny,” I said, slowly inserting the toothbrush into my mouth.
Had she poisoned it? Was that what this was? Had Rachel spiked my toothpaste? With what? Probably not with anything deadly, I didn’t think. She needed me alive to sign the divorce papers she still didn’t know were already signed, all ready to go just inches from where she laid her head to sleep at night. No, not anything like arsenic. Probably. Maybe a relaxing agent. Something to make me pliable to her will. Something that would kill any resistance to signing…
Rachel watched me in the mirror as she scrubbed at her tongue. Her hair was drawn up into a bun atop her head with a neon scrunchy. On the little shelf above the sink was a bottle of her makeup remover. I could point it out in the shop now, when I walked down that aisle. It was Rachel’s makeup remover now. If she one day asked me to pick some up, she wouldn’t even have to tell me which one. Because I knew.
I kind of liked that. Being the one who knew her.
I began to brush my teeth and Rachel grinned.
“See? Not so bad, huh?” Rachel leaned back over to wash out her mouth.
