Aisle Ten

I knew that Gabe watched a lot of porn. Everyone knew. You couldn’t go a day without Gabe coming into the grocery store for his shift without him talking about people fucking.

     “Hey Jake!” he’d shout from across the store. I’d pretend like I didn’t hear him while I tagged boxes of cereal in aisle ten.

     He’d get real close to my ear, like what he had to say was somehow a secret now that he’d yelled across the entire store.

     “Did you see that new Playboy? They had a girl from Grand Rapids in there. She was lookin’ pret-ty good.”

     I always gave him a polite smile and a nod. Just something you pick up from your parents. Smile and nod. Gets you out of a lot of uncomfortable social stuff.

     But this week was different. This week things got a little out of hand.

I was halfway through the jumbo-sized boxes of Krunch Berries when Gabe walked into work. I tried to avoid eye contact by reading about the toy prize off the back of the box. I liked to read about them and think about how life was simpler before jobs and creepy coworkers.

     Before I can duck away, Gabe comes up to me and starts right into it as I open another container of Krunch Berries to load onto the shelf.

     “How you doin’, Jake?”

     “Fine,” I said. “Just trying to finish my last cart. I’ve got a date tonight with--“

     “Saw a really good one yesterday,” he said.

     The words came out before I could think. “A good what?”

     “They were by this pool, right? And the guy is wearing these board shorts and the girl has on this bikini, kind of like the 70s ones with the large bottom parts that cover the whole ass. You know what I’m saying?”

     People started filing into the grocery store. It was 6pm and the moms were taking their kids to buy all their food for the week. Their meats, their veggies, and their overpriced cereal with the toy at the bottom.

     “So the two of them start talking, right? And the guy puts lotion on her and accidentally knocks off her top. She laughs it off and then takes then strips like it’s no big deal. They start bantering while her tits are hanging out. And they’re quality, man. Like, big but not too big? Perfect teardrops.”

     A woman gave me a condescending look while she reached for a box of Froot Hoops a few shelves over. I gave her a polite smile and nod. She wasn’t having any of it.

     I kept working and Gabe kept on with his story.

     “This girl could suck a dick,” he says. “I’m not kidding, like a fucking vacuum cleaner. I was trying to enjoy it, but all I could think about was how jealous I was.”

     I started slapping labels on boxes as loud as I could. People passed by and pretended they weren’t listening, but you could practically see their ears perk up.

     “So they fuck, any which way they can on the pool furniture. But halfway through it, while he’s got her bent over the chair, I see this look on her face.”

     I set the gun down and pulled out my box cutter to open another case.

     “What look?” I said.

     “She’s got this little smile as they’re doing it,” he said. “This smile that I’d never seen before. It was so damn beautiful. Like everything she wanted for Christmas she got and everything she ever wanted for Christmas got delivered between her legs right there and then.”

     I pushed the blade up on my box cutter. I sliced open the case and started tagging the other boxes.

     “And then he came all over her chest, man. Like a fire hose. It was like--“

     “I’m all out of labels,” I said. I wasn’t. Everyone in the aisle was looking at us.

     My shoes squeaked as I ran for the back room. I was sure I was going to lose my stupid grocery store job. That I would spend senior year on an allowance instead of being able to pay for gas and to go out with the guys. I wouldn’t have even been able to take Claire out to dinner if it wasn’t for the stupid job.

     I couldn’t understand why anyone would talk about that stuff in public. Everyone knew that you weren’t supposed to talk about that, especially in front of women.

That night I took Claire out for ice cream. We were going to go see a movie, but she said she didn’t want to be around all those people. She wanted it to be just us. I got one of those ice cream shaped characters with gumball eyes and she got a vanilla soft serve in a waffle cone.

     We sat on a park bench by ourselves and we were making small talk until I worked up the courage to make a move. I leaned over to kiss her and the ice cream dripped on her shorts. The cream ran off the denim and down her bare leg. A hole had opened up in the bottom of the cone.

     She laughed and tried to catch the melting white ice cream from the cracked tip of the cone with her tongue. More of it slid off the top and hit her in the face. She laughed so hard I thought she was going to pee herself.

     “How do I look?” she said. She made a sexy face with the melted ice cream running down her chin.

     “You act like you’ve never finished on a girl’s face before,” she laughed.

     I just looked at her. I don’t know how long, but long enough that she stopped laughing.

     She tossed her ice cream cone in the garbage and I took her home.

The next day at work I tagged my boxes of cereal in the back room, covering the toy prize with big, white labels.