This Is Between Us by Kevin Sampsell Page A

maybe just smudge them a little so you couldn’t read them. One of the things you wrote was that I am too eager a lover. A couple of weeks after that, you wrote that I seemed nervous around Maxine and I might not be the best father figure for her.
    My questions at dinner probably seemed strange that week. “Do you think I’ve become a better lover than I was at the beginning?”
    You answered this question as I had hoped. “Yes, of course. I think you used to be kind of eager, but it’s very beautiful and natural now. We’ve learned each other’s bodies.” Your answer was sweet and reassuring, but the word eager jumped out at me most of all. It was like some secret hunchback who lived in the basement, who had always wanted to meet me and pat my back in a condescending manner. “Congratulations,” it might slobber. “You are not eager anymore.”
    “Do you think I’m becoming a good father figure for Maxine?” I asked the next night.
    “Maxine looks up to you,” you said. “She knows you more now and she trusts you. She loves you because she knows I love you.”
    A couple of days after that, the journal seemed to disappear. But I was glad to be free of it. I felt like my questions were getting annoying for you anyway, especially the desperate way I asked them, like a man trying to erase your memory of his past behavior. I was bringing my eager and nervous self back to life. I had thawed it out until it was finally ready to burn.
    …
    We were lying on the bed naked and you apologized about your pubic hair. “I keep forgetting to trim it,” you said. And then you handed me a pair of scissors.
    I scooted down and started running my fingers through it. “I like it this way,” I said, and formed a Mohawk shape.
    “Feel free to do whatever,” you said.
    I started trimming it down a little. I blew the tiny blonde specks of hair onto your belly. I made a face with them and then a circle. Then I slowly ushered them into your belly button like I was filling a hole.
    …
    You told me I was talking in my sleep and I wasn’t sure I believed you.
    “Most of it was just random shouting,” you said. “And then you just laughed this really fucked-up laugh.”
    “You don’t remember what I was shouting?”
    “You said, ‘Don’t touch that. Keep it over there!’ And I asked you what not to touch and you just grumbled.”
    I thought about this for a while and started to remember the dream. I was supposed to be guarding a giant sex toy. Some man had brought it into a McDonald’s and then asked me to watch it while he went to the bathroom. I was sitting at the table next to his eating an endless box of Chicken McNuggets. I told the man, who was old and hunched, that I would watch his toy. It looked like a dildo but there was something else attached to it. A circle of feathers and a metal thing that looked like a fingernail clipper. The man was in the bathroom for a long time and people kept walking over to look at the thing, so I kept telling people to get away. In the dream, I was using very colorful language. Riffing wildly like a stand-up comedian. The man finally came out and walked over to his table and said thanks . Then he picked up his hamburger and walked out without his sex toy. I didn’t stop him or call out to him. And then I thought I could make a lot of money on the sex toy, so I grabbed it off the table and ran out of there with it. A couple of people started chasing me but they were really small, like kids, and it was easy for me to break their tackles. I was like Barry Sanders or Adrian Peterson, knocking people over, juking them out of their shoes, or stiff-arming them. I knew the sex toy was mine and as soon as I got it to a pawn shop, I’d be rolling in the dough. That’s why I was laughing.
    But for some reason, I was a little disturbed by the sex toy, so instead I told you it was a golden box full of diamonds and heroin.
    “Your subconscious must be pretty active,” you said. “I hope