All I Want to Do is Make Love to You

a short story

In the dimming light of dusk, as dank as a wrung-out cum-rag, he had materialized. A lone silhouette, loitering near the corner by the Yamhill Pub. His only protection from the incessant downpour - a bloody grin that oozed gum disease. He hunkered beneath a skeletal tree, huddled with a battered backpack and wielding an impromptu cardboard roof that taunted “Bet you can't hit me with a quarter”. In an uncharacteristic display of horniness, she guided her piece-of-shit Chevrolet Cavalier towards him.

"Need a ride?" she had inquired, her voice echoing within the car's confines like a siren luring in unsuspecting prey.

His response was an expanded toothless grin that reflected her own hollow existence. Their voyage had stretched across what felt listening to Heart’s Brigade full album; but was probably closer to two Marlboros and a swig of Black Velvet she'd fished from her purse; just over the river into Southeast. Throughout this time, they had traded neither pleasantries nor introductions; merely contented sighs and intermittent squelching sounds of sodden shoes against floorboards. She'd busted-ass multiple times which he seemed to relish; greedily inhaling with his diseased tongue as if extracting vital sustenance.

“Egg McMuffin?” he’d asked.

“Hell yeah” she’d replied.

She found herself ensnared by this soaked mystery man. Was it love at first sight? Or perhaps his saturated charisma? Either way, she chose not to question fate's soggy gift.

"Stay with me tonight," she'd implored him.

His response was a nod - either in agreement or sleep-induced inertia; both were plausible given his booze-soaked aura.

They'd found themselves in the belly of the Snooz-Inn, a place that mirrored the grimy motels scattered like trash along Sandy Boulevard. He'd pulled out a bottle of Svedka from his ratty backpack and they'd drowned themselves in its fiery oblivion. Their night was filled with crude, fumbling attempts at intimacy; their performance more like bungled sleight-of-hand than any grand display of passion. His body was marked by homelessness but, in some twisted way, he'd hit all the right notes with his booze-riddled piccolo.

He had drawn forth her inner drunken slut – again and again with an ease that was unsettling. As dawn pushed through their haze of clumsy passion and alcohol-laden sweat, she left him with just a hastily written note using a Snooz-Inn pen: "I am the flower, you are the seed," it read. "We walked in the garden and planted a tree. Don't try to find me please don’t you dare. Just live in my memory, you’ll always be there."

Years later, their paths intertwined again near Skidmore Fountain's Max stop - that grimy underbelly beneath the Burnside Bridge - but not before he faltered at seeing his reflection mirrored in her child's face marred by fetal alcohol syndrome.

"Please, please understand," she begged, gripping his hands tightly. "I’m in love with another man. But what he couldn't give me was the one little thing that you can."

His eyes widened - comprehension or dread - either could have been responsible.

"All I want to do is to make love to you” she admitted, hoping he would remember their rain-soaked alcohol rendezvous as something other than a chapter from 'Tales of Roadside Romance: The Rainy Night Edition'.

"I fucked you?" He questioned incredulously?

"Yes,” she responded calmly. “Our fucked-up child with oversized eyes, constant drooling, and strange gagging noises is a daily reminder. She's a disaster but I'm committed elsewhere. I need you to know that our past matters to me."

He scrutinized her before finally speaking: "I have no idea who the fuck you are and given my alcohol soaked sperm, it’s miraculous that I could get anyone pregnant."

“Well it happened," she retorted.

"You look like Garth from Wayne's World midway through a sex change who swapped the bottle for a crack pipe,” he shot back.

A thick silence followed his words.

“All I wanted is for my daughter to know her father” she’d said.

Then, unexpectedly, he leaned in and pecked her cheek gently.

"Anyway, take care," he whispered before sauntering off.

He projectile vomited Svedka onto the pavement. And then she followed him into the Yamhill Pub, eager for their toddler daughter to have her first drink with her father because the child was literally shaking from withdrawal symptoms.