Tonight wasn’t the night I would escape. The lights in the grove were turned off and I could only hear the sounds of the music of a distant party when the wind blew a certain way. It was a quiet evening, almost peaceful, and I was too tired to try anything anyway.

So I slept. At least until a deep, raspy voice awoke me. “Hey. You up?”

I groaned as I turned over in bed to face Pablo.

“Uhm, no,” I mumbled. “I’m in bed.”

He held up two shot glasses and an unopened bottle of tequila, as he sat down on the edge of the bed, which accidentally pulled down the sheets a little.

While I struggled to grab onto enough fabric to cover my bare chest, he said, “I couldn’t bring you to the party, so I brought the party to you. You down for a drink?”

His smile dug dimples into his cheeks and wrinkles in the corner of his eyes.

“Sure,” I answered as I returned him a smile. I took a deep breath. “Could you let me get dressed first?”

His eyes widened as he realized I wasn’t wearing anything. He nodded softly, and backed up slowly away from me. He apologized profusely, and his gaze scanned through the room for a place to hide while he very ostentatiously tried to avoid looking at me.

“Go in the bathroom,” I said, and he obliged immediately, just after setting down the glasses and bottle on the vanity.

I quickly jumped off the bed and picked up my satin bathrobe, which was the only article of clothing I had that wasn’t either encrusted with dry bodily fluids, or completely drenched in water and hanging from the shower curtain bar in the bathroom.

“You can come back in,” I announced as I finished tying my belt into a tight knot.

His head peeked through the door, and his smile came back, just as big and genuine as it was before. I scuttered over to the vanity.

“Shot contest!” he declared as he started pouring the drinks. “Since you’re a gringa and I’m a Latino, I’ll only give you half a shot and I’ll have a whole one. Just so we’re equal.”

“Nu-uh,” I disagreed, “You’re old and decrepit and I’m young and healthy. Pour us the same amount.”

He chuckled and raised his eyebrow defiantly. “Are you sure? I’m all for equality but this seems a little reckless, Gordita.”

“I’m certain,” I stated as I grabbed the small glass. “I have nothing to lose.”

“Well, salud to that,” he laughed before downing his drink.

I chucked the liquid down my throat, and it burned everything on its way down, from my chapped lips to my esophagus. It then hit me in the stomach like a sucker punch. My eyes started to water and my neck started to itch.

Before I could show any visible signs of weakness, I dared him with a raspy voice. “Second shot. Let’s go.”

“That’s my girl,” he cheered as he poured us a second one.

The second shot hit me in the head. I sat back in my chair as I struggled not to cough. He was unphased by the liquor, but seemed amused by my suffering. I wasn’t used to down tequila without any lime or salt, much less on an almost empty stomach, and especially not in a dark room with crazy criminals who had previously attempted to kill me. But Mama didn’t raise no bitch.

“Everything okay?” he asked with a mischievous grin.

I pushed my glass back to him and wiped my mouth as I concealed a hiccup. What was the worst that could happen if I got shit-faced drunk while locked in alone with a dangerous man?

“Repeat after me,” he said and lifted his glass up. “Pa’rriba.”

“Pariba,” I said with a broken accent. He nudged me a little so that I would follow his movement, and so I raised my glass.

“Pa’bajo,” he continued, lowering his glass.

“Pabaho,” I repeated.

“Pa’l centro.”

He moved his glass towards me, as if he was offering it to me. I instinctively grabbed it and gave him mine. He erupted in laughter and downed my shot.

I drank his, and once I was done wincing at the taste, I asked, “Is that it?”

“No, it’s not it,” he chuckled, “You’re supposed to keep your drink. Then you bring it towards you, say ′Pa’dentro’ and then you drink.”

“Why did you drink my shot then?” I whined, both amused and confused.

He smiled. “I like it more your way.”

“As you should,” I cackled. “Otherwise, it’s a boring way to toast.”

“It’s not! It’s cultural,” he protested. “Did Ana never show you?”

“Ana doesn’t drink. Anyways, I know better ways to toast. Stand up.”

He stood up, facing me, his chin up and ready for the fight. I don’t think I had stood this close to him yet. I realized he was a little bit taller than me–which was kind of uncommon, given that, standing at almost six feet tall, I was always a bit of a tall girl and an awkward crane myself.

“Well, what is it?” he asked, snapping me out of my thoughts.

“Right, you put your arm –the one that’s holding the drink– under mine.”

He obeyed, and slid closer to me as our arms interlocked. I wasn’t sure if this was the first time we touched, but it definitely felt like it. I could feel the heat of his skin. His chest hair tickled my collarbone, and his free hand hovered over my hip. I held my breath. It had been a while since I had been this close to a man, let alone one as daunting as Pablo.

“Now what?” he asked, his shot glass resting against his lip.

“Uh... well, now, you drink.”

We both gulped down our drinks and stepped away from each other. While I sat down in my chair to stop the room from turning too fast, Pablo stood unbothered. He wiped tequila off of his mustache and set his glass down on one of the dirty plates that had been left over after our dinner together.

“Should we keep going?” he asked, pointing at the bottle on the vanity.

“In a minute,” I pleaded softly. “I’m a bit dizzy.”

He smiled and leaned against the table. He poured himself a shot anyway, and drank it immediately. He undid a button of his already half-open shirt and ran his fingers through his hair.

“Do you think I’m handsome?” he asked me after a short silence.

“I thought it was obvious when you walked into the room that you blew me away,” I giggled.

He smiled and sat down. The more I looked at him, the more handsome he seemed. Not that I ever found him ugly–although the vintage mustache wasn’t really my style, and neither were the open shirts, cowboy boots, and flashy gold chains. He was a good-looking man, for his age.

He grew on me, like ivy on a tree. He mesmerized me, with the way he always seemed a little angry, except for when he stared right at me. How genuine his smile always seemed, and how intense and transparent each of his emotions appeared to be.

While I knew that he was probably the evilest, most immoral, and deranged human being I’d ever had the displeasure to meet, his face just seemed to attract a blind trust. He was a forbidden fruit, tantalizing yet deadly.

“Are you okay?” he said as he stared at me with his head tilted to one side.

“Just a little nauseous,” I answered.

“Care for a strategic vomit?” he suggested jokingly, pointing at the bathroom door behind him.

“What’s that?” I managed to ask in between two sour burps.

“It’s like a strategy to survive heavy drinking, you puke before your body absorbs the alcohol,” he said. “Although usually, people manage to drink a bit more than just five shots before they need it.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” I mumbled. “I’m okay, really.”

“Do you want another shot, then?”

It took only a single whiff of the tequila’s vapors to make me gag and bring the contents of my stomach back up into my throat. I clasped my hand onto my mouth, but it was too late. It was coming out of my nostrils. I barely had time to jump over to the bathroom before I puked it all out in the toilet bowl.

“You should have listened to me, Gordita” Pablo gasped sarcastically in the other room. “I told you a strategic vomit was a good idea.”

I crawled away from the toilet and over to the sink. As I tried to wash my face and teeth, I was forced to face my own reflection in the mirror. Were my cheeks blushing from the shame or from the strain? Were my eyes fighting back the tears or the droplets of stomach acid? Was I crying or was that just bile and tequila dribbling out of my left nostril? Never mind the answers. I was a mess and a disgrace.

“Well, that was embarrassing,” I said as I walked back into the bedroom.

“I’m sure you’ve done worse,” he answered with a smile.

I frowned in slight confusion. Not sure how that was supposed to make me feel better, or even if it was indeed supposed to. And then I felt it come up in my throat. Not the vomit, not again–but rather the urge to overshare details of my life with complete strangers.

“I puked in the pool at Jason McKinney’s birthday party,” I said, “But only Ana saw. She was holding my hair. And then she told Jason that his dog did it.”

Pablo stifled a laugh and poured himself another drink.

“I also puked on a Taco Bell parking lot,” I told him, words now flowing out my mouth like a strategic vomit of uninteresting anecdotes. “During a first date.”

He raised his eyebrows and nodded attentively–as if he wanted to hear more. Maybe I should have politely asked him not to push me, to just ignore me and please walk away before I make an even bigger fool out of myself. But the word salad spurted out like my dinner had just a minute or two ago:

“He was driving me home, and I’d had way too much to drink. I tried to calm my nerves, because I’m always super stressed on first dates. All I wanted was a quesadilla, to sponge up the vodka–so I didn’t really think of it. I should have, but I didn’t. Some asshole pulled out his parking spot as we were getting into the drive-thru and hit our car. Security came over, the guy got aggressive and I got so anxious that I opened my door and puked on the floor. Or rather, on top of the security guy’s shoes. That was worse.”

“Come on, Gordita, how did you not know about strategic vomits? They would have saved your ass so many times,” chortled Pablo. “Anyways, what did you do after that?”

“We didn’t go on a second date,” I giggled. “For some reason, he ghosted me.”

He grinned. “But did you get your quesadilla?”

“I did, actually. I called an Uber and got a quesadilla while I waited. I needed warmth and comfort so I hugged it as if it was a hot water bottle until I went to bed. I forgot to eat it. At least not until morning, and by then it was cold and all squashed.”

His dimples deepened as he laughed at my story. He then grabbed the bottle of tequila and poured us two shots.

“To shitty dates and emotional support quesadillas,” he cheered, raising his glass in the air.

“Last one,” I smiled, and squinted a little to stop the room from spinning. “I think I need to lay down.”

We both downed our drinks and I winced for a while, hoping and praying I wouldn’t spit mine right out. By some miracle, it stayed down long enough for me to shuffle over to the bed and throw myself on top of the mattress. I wiggled myself into a soft, comfortable nest of satin sheets, and turned over to take a look at Pablo, whose face was dimly lit by the small desk lamp on the vanity.

He sat on the chair, his arms hanging limp and his fingertips still gripping onto his empty shot glass. His head was thrown back and his eyes slightly closed. Perhaps he’d fallen asleep, or perhaps he was just thinking. It must have been his messy hair, his half-open shirt, and his faint grin, but for once he seemed so peaceful, so innocent.

“What about you?” I asked. He opened his eyes and blinked, and stared at me with a confused look on his face. “What was your most embarrassing moment?”

“Oh, I have tons,” he laughed softly as he sunk deeper into his chair and stared at the ceiling, searching for a good story buried somewhere in his memories, “Maybe, a few years ago, my brother bought some homemade liquor from a random old gringo who had retired in the area. So we got together with some friends and drank it all.”

He stared out the window, like he was watching the scene play across the night sky. “Now, I don’t know what that asshole had put in his bottles, but we hadn’t even gotten halfway through the stash and some of us were already knocked out. So since the old farmer called his liquor ‘moonshine’, and we were right next to a big cenote called the House of the Moon God, we decided to drive down and offer the good old Moon God a little bit of his divine nectar.”

I wasn’t usually a good listener, but somehow I hung onto his every word. He stared me right in the eye and harpooned me into his story. His calm, deep voice and the way he moved his hands to accentuate every other word kept me captivated, and I almost felt as if I was reliving it with him.

“So we snuck into the park, and it’s this magical place,” he continued, “Now I’m not that much of a nature guy, and I’m not into mystical stuff, but sometimes, in the right setting and with enough alcohol in the bloodstream, you just can’t resist it. I mean, picture this– we’re walking by the side of a small river, and even with just a few rays of the full moon’s silver light, you can tell the water is bright blue. You wouldn’t believe it unless you saw it, it’s like someone poured paint into the stream. But it’s all-natural.”

I rested my chin in the palm of my hand, relishing the soft sound of his voice. It was deep, and sweet, and kind of sticky, like dipped in a pot of honey.

“We’re alone in the jungle, and all you can hear are the birds, the bugs, and the stream bouncing off stones. We get to a small waterfall, and right behind it, tucked in under a huge cliff is the cenote–a deep hole of dark blue water, slowly filling with thousands of droplets that seep out the rocks above. In the middle of the night, the moonlight hits the surface so perfectly that it’s like the water’s glowing. And no matter which Gods you believe in, or even whether you believe in them at all–when you’re there, at full moon, with your brain clouded by the moonshine–it’s like the fucking Moon God is standing right behind you and holding your hand. And there’s only one thing you can do in that situation, and it’s switch to a full-on ‘hippie tripping on ayahuasca’ mode. So naturally, we’re just five big, Latin, hairy Christian men stripping down to our bare asses to go swim in the Moon God’s pond with our bottles in our hands.”

Pablo’s storytelling skills were amazing enough that I could clearly picture the cenote down to every droplet and every leaf. I could see every bump and every crack in the rocks of the cliff, and guess the exact shade of deep cerulean blue of the moonlit cenote. Sadly, this also meant I had to picture five grown men completely naked.

“Now what you have to know,” he added with a wide grin, “is that that place is sacred - it’s forbidden to even touch the water, let alone dive in and piss in it, as I was about to do. So, they have these guards doing rounds around the park day and night, and they must have noticed our car on the side of the road. Now, I’m standing there, waist-deep in the water, and two guards show up–and the fuckers are standing right on the ledge where we dropped all of our clothes. Us being dumb, drunk, and defenseless, we’re left with only one option: to run back to the car, butt-ass naked.”

His arms swung back and forth, motioning a crazed race, and Pablo kept going. “So the five of us, all slippery and wet, are trying our best to get the fuck out of the park without getting caught. We’re bolting down muddy paths, suspended bridges, jumping over tree trunks, with our pubes fluttering in the wind and our ballsacks swinging from side to side–and I shit you not, there were fucking campers in the park. I don’t know if it was a family reunion, some teens hanging out, or a group of boy scouts, but there’s some kids out there that will forever my face as one of the five fucking cavemen that crashed his midnight barbecue with their dicks out and flapping about.”

I pinched my nose and tried to muffle a bout of snorting laughter as I pictured the unfortunately hilarious scene. Pablo smiled uncontrollably as he reminisced his story, and wiped away a small tear from the corner of his eye.

“I was lucky though,” he managed to say in between two hiccuping laughs. “One of the other guys, well-endowed as he was, got his dick caught in a thorny bush. Slashed clean through his foreskin. He was covered in blood when he got to the car. Now we call him the Jungle Jew.”

I burst out in laughter–maybe a little too hard, for what the story was worth. But to be able to picture my captor as something else than a psycho, and to escape the dread, the fear, and the mind-numbing boredom of the last few days, even just for a while, felt euphoric.

I’d laughed for a little too long, and it was getting embarrassing. After I’d calmed down, I looked up at him, a little ashamed and red in the cheeks, fully expecting him to be cringing. But Pablo was staring right at me, with a large grin and glistening eyes, beaming with pride from his tale’s success. Our gazes only crossed for a second before he looked down, and shrugged with modesty:

“It’s a good story, I guess,” he said. “And all I lost was my favorite shirt and my dignity.”

I smiled at him. He sighed softly and turned to look at himself in the mirror, savoring his success. As he stared at the mirror, his lips pouted and his eyes squinted slightly. He ran his fingers through his hair, combing it into a sophisticated mess, and adjusted the collar of his shirt. It was clear that he loved himself, and thrived off of alcohol just as much as he did off of self-confidence.

“You know, Gordita,” he said as he turned back towards me, “I actually really like to have you around.”

What a surprisingly good choice of words to tell someone who, up to this day, had always felt like a burden. He’d managed to make my fretful heart melt a little. My own mother had never bothered to even pretend she enjoyed my visits. It was always “Did you bring something to drink?“, and “When are you leaving?“, and never “Thank you for coming”.

Even Ana hadn’t told me anything like this in years. She was always sorry she’d brought me somewhere, or explaining that she felt she needed to take me out for coffee because I didn’t sound great on the phone.

It was nice to feel wanted, for once. Too nice, even. So nice I started to doubt it. Maybe he’d just said it to make me like him. Maybe he was just manipulating me.

“Really?” I answered, perhaps a little too curtly.

“Yeah,” he said, still looking at the ceiling above him, “You’re like a breath of fresh air.”

I laughed–or at least, blew a little bit of air out of my nose, with a half-grin and an unimpressed look on my face.

“No really. Honestly,” he insisted as he turned his head towards me, showing off his glistening eyes and the two dimples that dug deep into his cheeks. “I’ve spent my life surrounded by fake people who do everything to try and impress me. All they want is my money, my business, my status, or even just to get invited to my fucking parties. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, I’ll admit I love the attention, but it just gets tiring after a while, you know?”

“I’m sure it does,” I replied sarcastically.

I would have killed just to ever feel envied and admired. The only emotion I had ever struck in people was pity. I didn’t inspire people, I humbled them. All they wanted from me was a comparison point to make them feel better about their own shitty lives. No matter how bad things were, at least they weren’t Sarah Kennedy.

“You’re just... more simple. More authentic,” he continued, “You’re nothing like the other women around me, you know, all those airheads with massive tits who pretend to like me just so I’ll buy them some tacky diamond earrings.”

“So you’re saying I have small tits?”

“See? That’s what I’m talking about,” he chuckled. “You’re funny.”

“Thank you for noticing. I try really hard,” I said jokingly.

“I can tell.”

“That’s not a compliment.”

“No, it is,” he answered. “It’s cute.”

I smiled back timidly, still unsure how to feel about his sudden display of affection–or even of how I felt about him.

“Anyways,” he sighed after a short silence, “I’ll let you sleep. You look tired. Although, your eye’s looking better. I think. Nevermind. Good night, Gordita.”

He stood up and walked out of the room in an awkward shuffle, just as fast as he’d barged in. He left behind him a growing pile of dirty dishes on my vanity, and a bittersweet taste in my mouth.

Kerning

Strategic Vomit

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