Juniper needs to look good but not too good. They figure some foundation, a little blush, and a touch of mascara will do the trick. Oh, and they need to take some scissors to those Eugene Levy eyebrows of theirs, not that they don’t like them but the husbands, well, not so much. Juniper has already attended several tanning sessions, dyed their hair blonde, and achieved the tousled beach look that the woman requested on behalf of her unsuspecting husband. Throughout their ten-year marriage, the woman had complained to Juniper on their initial phone consultation, he must have mentioned that blonde beachy hair was his favorite at least once a week. The woman, and here Juniper imagined her rolling her eyes, had dark hair so straight no curling iron in the world could conquer it.
“What else does he like?” Juniper had asked.
“Oh, this and that. You know, typical guy stuff.”
“No, honestly, I do not,” said Juniper, lifting their pen from her notebook where they kept their notes about each husband’s fantasies.
“Do you not like men?”
“Is that important to you, ma’am?” Juniper had intended to sound stern, but they were afraid, as always, that they’d conveyed actual concern. It was difficult, if not downright impossible, to shed the people-pleaser side of them. Maybe that was why they were so good at this job.
“Well, I just want to know if you can fake it is all,” said the woman. “You know, tell him he was the best you ever had. All that.”
“I’m a professional, ma’am.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Well, he likes The Last of Us, chunky peanut butter, never doing the dishes…”
“In a woman, ma’am. What does he like in a woman?” Juniper hated this part. They weren’t a woman, but people read them as one all the same. If they didn’t, Juniper wouldn’t have this job. The woman cleared her throat for a full seven seconds before answering.
“He gets, well,” she said, pausing, “turned on by watching a woman fall down the stairs.”
“Excuse me?” Juniper asked.
Once the initial shock wore off, Juniper wondered if they, too, had this fetish—after all, they’d recently gone to the trouble of starting a petition to bring back America’s Funniest Home Videos. They enjoyed watching people faceplant. They enjoyed the laugh track. They enjoyed the simplicity of human error. Only two people had signed the petition: their neighbor, Minnie, who likes to do shrooms in her front yard for all to see, and Juniper’s ex, Bandit, who comes over once a week to mix cocktails and record more film for her newest project. She sets up a camera in Juniper’s hallway, says, “Lights, camera, action,” then goes in the other room to give Juniper some privacy. Bandit’s goal is to recreate the confessional room from reality TV shows. Think The Real World, seasons one through three hundred. Think letting it all hang loose even though you know it’s going to be broadcasted to the world at a later date. For at least two hours, Juniper is supposed to confess what they really think about their time dating Bandit, and then it’s Bandit’s turn to eviscerate Juniper. The idea, Bandit had told Juniper at the start of the project, was that once it’s done, they can watch it together and finally discover all of the secrets they’ve been hiding because of distractions like social norms and politeness. And then, of course, everyone else will learn these secrets, too, when Bandit inevitably sets up the film as an exhibit at her next art show. Juniper spends a lot of time trying not to think about the project.
“He would never ever admit that to me, but I stalk his Porn Hub account—he has no idea—and every day it’s the same few videos of women tripping down the stairs.” Here, the woman paused, where so many women before her had when deciding just how much they wanted to disclose to this stranger. The decision was always the same: much more than planned. Juniper was used to it. “Sometimes I catch him standing behind me on the landing. He’s always pretending to do something else, like fix a crooked photo, vacuum the hallway rug, dust a fucking shelf. Ha, as if!”
For a moment, Juniper considered canceling the booking—this dude sounded like a creep, a dangerous one—but business had been a little, okay, more than a little slow as of late. People just didn’t have the money to spend on deceit like they used to. Ignoring the woman’s confession—and that’s just what it was, a confession that didn’t require Juniper’s participation—Juniper told the woman they were afraid nothing dangerous could be arranged; Juniper only made adjustments to their aesthetic. Hair color, make-up, freckles, moles, temporary tattoos, clothes, undergarments.
“For example,” Juniper said, “I could get professional make-up done and wear a red, tight fuck-em dress that shows a tasteful amount of ass cheek. I could get a temporary tramp stamp. The husbands tend to love that because then they get to think lesser of me, but your husband seems more into the cool surfer chick look.”
The woman hesitated, then said, “Of course, sorry for the confusion, surfer chick sounds perfect.” Then she promised to get him good and drunk, the type of drunk he thought he’d left behind at the frat house all those years ago. Juniper thought the woman sounded faraway, like she was an echo of an echo of herself. The two said their goodbyes and hung up, but Juniper couldn’t stop thinking about the woman and why she chose to stay, if there was a specific reason, like leftover love or children, or if she herself hadn’t the slightest idea as to why she stayed, only that she did.
Back in the early days of their business, Juniper had been worried not enough women would be able to coax their husbands into getting trashed in their living room, but it had turned out it was no problem at all, they were all extremely excited for their wives to let them finally have a little fun. Sometimes, Juniper thought, the wives seemed more upset by their husbands’ willingness to drink the thoughts right out of their heads than they did about them wanting a threesome. Are they happy? the women wondered, not wanting to finish the question—with me? The very thought made Juniper want to lie down flat in the middle of the road, all of the stars silent except for the red shine of Mars, blinking like the light on Bandit’s video camera.
After putting the finishing touches on their face and dressing in a bikini and board shorts, Juniper goes over the game plan, as they always do before a session with a client:
- Request a photo of the sleeping man (with a visible clock in the background)
- Text the woman when they’re on the doorstep
- Wait for her to let them in
- Tiptoe to their marital bed
- Remove their trench coat (they always wear a trench coat over their one-night-stand outfit; it makes them feel safe and unsexy)
- Nod for the woman to slide into bed next to the husband, after which Juniper will follow
It’s pertinent that Juniper follows the woman, who acts as a barrier between the drunk husband and Juniper. Juniper doesn’t want anything to do with the husband’s wandering hands in the night. A pinch here, a squeeze there. Fuck no, that’s not part of the order.
Early on, before Juniper was well-established and able to set boundaries. They had tried to enforce this rule but found that many of the women could be pushy—“I’m paying you good money, the least you can do is lie next to my husband, hell, I have to do it every night”—so in desperate need of good reviews, Juniper had, against Bandit’s wishes, climbed into bed next to hairy men, sweaty men, smelly men, and even the occasional sexy man, although not even a sexy man in this situation could arouse even the slightest of tingles in Juniper. And they all smelled like the floor of a college bar if their wives had held up their end of the bargain. And as such, they all had similar reactions in the morning upon waking—first, they were shocked, then confused, then elated, euphoric, practically orgasmic. They cycled through all of the possible emotions before finally settling on satisfied, smug even, wearing a look that says, I am a sex god.
Of course, there had been the one woman who, upon bringing her husband a glass of whiskey in the basement, found him already fast asleep sitting up with the remote in his hand. She’d simply transferred him to their bed and neglected to tell Juniper there’d been no blackout; he’d likely remember everything about his night. So, in the morning, when the man woke up spooning a trying-not-to-cringe Juniper, he’d jumped straight out of bed, practically panting with worry, and no amount of convincing on the wife or Juniper’s end could convince this man he’d just had the threesome of his dreams, the one he’d been bugging his wife about ever since Bill and Terry had told them about theirs at a Sunday barbecue (Terry had also been a client of Juniper’s, but Juniper didn’t deceive and tell). In fact, the man had actually accused his wife of cheating on him—“in our god damn bed,” he’d emphasized. That debacle was the reason Juniper now asks for the full payment upfront, as opposed to 50 percent down before and 50 percent after. There is no telling how shit will go down after Juniper’s job is complete.
But overall, it’s a sweet gig. Juniper doesn’t have to work their belittling start-up job anymore and they get to indulge in their love of acting. As a child, one could say Juniper had a certain flair for the dramatic. They’d never wanted to be themself. Why be me, they’d thought, when there were millions of other people I could be? More often than not, Juniper would sit down for breakfast before school and tell their mother, “I’m not your daughter, I’m a cyborg from Planet Leave Me Alone.” Sometimes, it was Planet I Can Lock My Bedroom Door If I Want. Now, upon reflection, Juniper understands it was because they never were a girl, never were a daughter at all, that acting had been their way of exploring the endless possibilities of the universe.
Imagine Juniper’s delight when their college softball teammate paid them $200 at the club to pretend to be her girlfriend for the night. She was tired of guys hitting on her, she said. To this day, Juniper is unsure as to why their teammate had paid them; Juniper would have happily done it for free. But anyway, that’s how they first realized there was a market for all things pretend. And, for many years, Juniper’s business had been so busy they’d been booked out at least six months in an advance, limited by the fact that they only had one body, could only be in one bed at a time. But all good things must come to an end, or more accurately, whimper out pathetically.
They examine this new person in the mirror, the one they must become for the night. The fake tan looks just that—fake, but the husband won’t mind; hell, he probably won’t even notice. All this effort and rarely do the men comment on Juniper’s hard work, not that the men know it’s hard work, of course—that would mean Juniper isn’t doing a good job. But, still, a little appreciation goes a long way. Everyone always says that people love newness—that’s why they stray—and yet, in Juniper’s experience, despite being the only new person in the room, the husbands rarely pay them any mind at all. Instead, the husbands focus on themselves and remove the personhood from Juniper, as if Juniper is just a mirror showing them everything they’ve ever wanted to see.
Juniper adjusts their too-small bikini top, but it’s no use, their pecs (they hate the word boobs, what a monstrous word) are too big for the triangles of fabric. Juniper has done this hundreds of times, but tonight is different. It strikes them that, for the first time, they wish they could become someone for the woman, not the man. Juniper has always viewed their job as just that—a job, nothing more. A job they don’t take home with them. A job that exists in a separate plane altogether, one they cannot access once it has been completed. But they don’t want to complete this job, which will very likely be their last. A`s Bandit had pointed out, it’s better to pull a Michael Jordan and retire early than be forced into retirement by external circumstances. Sure, they’re dreading their life after their business; they might even have to enter the dating pool again, having been out of it for over three years. But it’s this particular woman they are going to miss. The woman whose name they don’t even know. She won’t tell them. She thinks it will ruin it, and although Juniper wants to ask what exactly the it is she’s referring to, they don’t because they already know.
So, all dressed up and ready to go but with an hour left to kill, Juniper starts to feel uncharacteristically nervous. In fact, after pacing around the living room, they double back to the bedroom, having forgotten to spritz themselves with this awful strawberry scent the woman claimed her husband likes. The woman had thrown in that detail on their midnight call last night. Okay, so maybe they’ve been doing a bit more talking than was customary. Maybe the it is that Juniper hasn’t stuck to strict protocol, which is one phone call and done. Maybe the two have talked at least once a week for the eight weeks leading up to tonight. But the woman seems lonely, somehow even lonelier than the rest. And her voice is hot; it has a Gillian Anderson vibe to it. The calls are long and sad and full of want, and afterward, Juniper feels gutted but alive. Like an orange that has been peeled and ripped apart in a frenzy, juice and pulp splattering everywhere.
“Afterward, you promise he’ll be happy?” the woman had asked on their second call. “You promise he’ll want me again?”
What Juniper had wanted to say: “I do not have a satisfaction guarantee policy.” What Juniper said: “I promise.”
On the third call, the woman asked Juniper if it was possible to love one person for your whole life.
“Are you asking what I personally think or if it is, theoretically possible?”
“Are they not the same thing?” the woman whispered.
On the fourth call, or maybe it was the fifth—Juniper quickly lost track, having taken to drinking copious amounts of wine during the calls—the woman said Juniper was a godsend. They were providing a wonderful service to alleviate the stress of wives everywhere.
“Well, maybe just the tri-state area,” said Juniper.
“Why, then, do I still feel so stressed?”
“Maybe because you don’t live at the beach,” offered Juniper, thinking of the surfer hair they’d have to wear, but this only made the woman sob. “I’m sorry,” they said. “I’ve never been very good at talking. That’s why I, you know,” Juniper paused, gesturing to an empty room and spilling their wine, “do this.”
“But surely you’ll talk the morning after?” the woman said.
Perhaps, Juniper thought, suddenly struck by the idea that she’d have to tell a convincing story as to how a third ended up in their bed.
“Of course, but that’s a speech I more or less have memorized,” said Juniper. “You two went online and cruised the internet, searching for someone you both would agree on. You found my profile. I thought you both were super hot. Plus, I was down to come over right then and there. That’s always hard to find, someone who doesn’t dilly dally, a true go-getter.”
“Right, right.”
“He won’t ask further questions. He won’t want to ruin the fantasy.”
A pause. Long enough for Juniper to ask if the woman was still there.
“Do you really think I’m hot?” the woman asked, her voice small. It was a silly question to ask, the woman knew this, but still, for some reason, she wanted the speech to mean something. She wanted to know it was coming from a real human being.
Juniper wasn’t sure what to say. No wife had ever asked them this before. Early on, they’d thought maybe a few of the women would want to hook up for real while their husbands were knocked out but none of the women suggested sex, they were that straight. Which, Juniper should have figured, having been paid more than their whole month’s rent to lie in bed and play The Sims on their phone while they waited for the drunk men to stir. No, the women didn’t want sex with Juniper, or, if they did, they refused to admit it, not to themselves, not to anyone. Mostly, the wives treated Juniper like a maid, acknowledging that they were there providing a service, but still going about their business as usual.
But here was a woman asking Juniper to attend to her. Juniper assumed this was the part where they were supposed to perform for their audience. They were supposed to say, “Yes, yes, I think you’re extremely hot, I can hear it in your voice” (not a lie), but that felt too easy, too expected. Something was shifting in Juniper, they wanted to tell the truth for once, or rather, their own truth as opposed to their character’s truth. They so desperately wanted to grab the woman’s hand in the front row, drag her backstage, and close the curtain once and for all. Maybe they could make out on a ratty old couch or huff some glue and laugh at nothing.
“Yes, but anyone can be hot,” said Juniper. “I want to laugh with you. Would you do that for me? Could you laugh with me?” Now it was Juniper’s turn to feel foolish; they’d never behaved so unprofessionally before, but the request was out there, they couldn’t take it back, and for once, they felt stimulated, alive.
“Right now?” the woman asked, giving herself a hug, her fingernails digging into her shoulders.
“If you can.”
“Okay,” she said. Then she counted to three, slowly, as if she somehow knew that laughter wasn’t the only thing ahead of them.
When she reached three, the two began laughing, tentatively at first, but then it picked up speed and soon they were howling, Juniper leaning against their bedroom wall for support and the woman lying on her back on the reclining pool chair, kicking her legs in the air like a child being tickled by the moon. The woman had a high-pitched runaway laugh that took her air with it. Juniper’s was low and jaunty, rumbling throughout their body like an earthquake. And after a while, these two laughs met in the middle and fused into one long laugh that seemed to exist outside of either of their bodies.
The next week, the woman seemed different, moodier, less afraid. She didn’t mention the laughter, which was okay with Juniper. They were regretting it now, regretting lowering their defenses for someone they’d never met. Nevertheless, the intimacy remained. They were teenagers who’d almost been caught making out or huffing glue backstage. The almostness of consequence drawing them closer than ever. The woman joined Juniper in finishing off a bottle over the phone. She confided in them that the previous weeks she’d wished her husband cared enough to ask who she was on the phone with that she had to go outside and sit by the pool, but this week, she wasn’t thinking about him—she was thinking about Juniper. Only she didn’t call them that. She called them by the name they used for clients, the name that would piss off a particular someone if that particular someone knew Juniper used it.
“Bandit, Bandit, Bandit,” the woman whispered.
“Yes,” Juniper breathed.
“Tell me about the others.”
And so Juniper did. They told her about all the different ways a woman can shrink, how shrinking is worse than wilting because at least wilting means you’re on your way to dying. There is an end in sight. What Juniper didn’t tell her was that when Bandit broke up with them, she’d said it felt as if they’d grown apart but Juniper had since created a new narrative, one that involved Bandit having grown tired of Juniper’s ability to mold to any and all expectations, even anticipate them while they were still in their seed stage so that they could grow alongside the expectation, meeting it at its ripened stage. It can, after all, grow tiresome to get everything you want. Or so Juniper thought, never having given much thought as to what they themself wanted and how they would go about getting it, were they to pursue it.
Once Juniper was done talking, the woman asked something Juniper had never been asked before: “Who are you when you aren’t pretending, Bandit?” she asked.
Juniper reached into the far corners of their brain for an explanation, but all they found were cobwebs and a few old scripts. Maybe some string cheese wrappers leftover from the real Bandit, the monster that she was, who ate string cheese not by peeling it into the thing beautiful strings it deserved but in one large bite. She achieved this by stuffing the cheese stick in sideways so it looked like she had a crowbar between her cheeks. This was neither here nor there, yet that’s where Juniper’s mind went anyway. Not because they loved Bandit but because they knew who Bandit was. What exactly, was this woman looking for? Juniper’s real name? An overview of their interests? Or did she want the full who, what, when, where, why, and how of their life? All they had was the how—their parents had had a drunken one-night stand, and their mother had decided to keep them. That was the original version. The extended dance remix was that their parents had crossed paths twelve years later, didn’t recognize each other, and fell in love. Only later did their mother and father, separately, discover their true identities. But neither told the other that they knew—they only told Juniper. First, their mother, after she’d had a few too many drinks during movie night. Their father had been on a business trip, which meant that Juniper’s mother was feeling brave, like nothing she did counted when he was gone. A year later, Juniper father took them to the batting cages and told them while a machine hurled balls at them. Had this been news to Juniper, they’d probably have a crooked finger or two to show for it.
“Bandit? Are you still there?” the woman said, dipping her toe in the pool and drawing circles in the water’s surface. If Juniper had been there, they would have mirrored the woman, dipping their own toe in the pool. That was what Juniper did: mirror people to create an almost immediate connection, to make them like and trust them. Mirroring was sometimes referred to as “the chameleon effect,” according to Juniper’s father. “Being a chameleon isn’t always a bad thing,” he’d said, trying to comfort a crying Juniper who’d been called that for the third time that year, their seventh-grade class an exceptionally cruel class.
“I can’t hear you,” said Juniper, taking a drink. It sounded like a storm cloud was trying to fight its way through the phone.
The woman looked up and saw an airplane. It was flying so low overhead she thought she could climb a stairway to meet it. She wanted to know everything about the person she thought was named Bandit. What would happen when they met? Would they kiss her? Would they pretend they hadn’t spent hours on the phone together? Would they stay true to their name and run away with her finest belongings? When she hired Bandit, she’d decided she didn’t own anything she couldn’t bear to part with—it was a risk she was willing to take when inviting a stranger into her house, although the question of who the risk was benefitting had changed. At first, the risk, she thought, was necessary in order to fix her marriage. No, fix wasn’t the right word. It was far past fixing, but perhaps quieten, assuage her marriage. But now? She wasn’t sure who this was for. And that was okay. Bandit’s parents, she thought, returning to their peculiar name, must not believe in the power of prophecy. Not like the woman. She went by Jen but her real name was Jinx, as if her parents had wished this unfulfilling life upon her. It wasn’t the boredom that got to her so much as the emptiness. Boredom she could at least feel. It had a weight to it. A rough-to-the-touch texture. But when her husband kissed her, everything—hope, love, passion, joy, anger, even hatred—evacuated her body as if an alarm had been sounded.
“I said, who are you when you aren’t someone else?” Jinx tried again.
Juniper had heard the woman the first time, and they wished she would stop asking this question. The truth was, Juniper didn’t know, had never known, doubted they would ever know. They had chosen to date Bandit because Bandit was safe, Bandit was an artist, Bandit was always demanding performance—the confessional project was just the most recent in a long line of projects Bandit had wanted Juniper to participate in. And in the past, Juniper had been more than willing to play these roles for the sake of Bandit’s art. Anything to step outside of themself, to, in a way, dissociate on purpose, as opposed to all of the times in which Juniper had left their body unintentionally. They’d dated for ten years. Juniper didn’t know anything else. Juniper didn’t know you didn’t always have to be on display. That it wasn’t pretending if you were doing it all the time.
But this time, with the confessional, it was different—Bandit was asking Juniper to be Juniper, no one else. Juniper feared Bandit’s inevitable disappointment at the end of the two-year project when she discovered that Juniper hadn’t said one word in the confessional. That Juniper had viewed their silence as the greatest confession they could provide. They weren’t sure Bandit would see it that way but they hoped she would, they hoped Bandit would find value in showing the world two hundred hours of a silent Juniper, eyes staring directly into the camera so the audience knew they were the ones being watched.
“What are we doing? Why do you call me?” Juniper countered. They’d wanted to hear the woman say something surprising—something like, “You make me want to forward all the chain letters of the world.” Or, on second thought, having spent most of their adulthood accepting empty compliments from clients, they wanted the woman to call them ugly, to tell them they were the ugliest damn thing they’d ever seen. But Juniper’s first desire in recent memory was not fulfilled. The woman hung up on them, and Juniper spent the rest of the night watching The Real World re-runs and trying to extract any morsal of truth from them.
The next call went like this:
“I’ve been doing some research,” said the woman, her voice vibrating with excitement. “Don’t you want to know about what?” she prompted.
“I’d love to,” said Juniper, who surprised themself by actually meaning it. They did want to know what the woman had learned. The very thought disturbed them. This would all go away soon. And then what?
“The internet is a wonderful place.” Juniper thought they could hear the woman smiling. “I now believe in the power of scissoring.” She said this proudly, almost patriotically, as if she’d been inspired to read the Bill of Rights.
Juniper choked on their wine mid-laugh then recovered when they didn’t hear the woman laughing on the other end.
“I’m serious,” she said. “They don’t tell us straight women about it because it might destroy us.”
“Straight women have historically always been the ones who want me to scissor them,” said Juniper. “Not clients,” they clarified. “Real people.” As soon as Juniper said it, they realized what they’d said and tried to backpedal. “I mean, unpaying people—not customers.”
“Real people,” whispered the woman. Somehow, she made it sound like the worst words ever uttered.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” said Juniper.
“Of course not,” said Jinx, who was thinking of her packed bag, stowed away in the garage where her husband never goes. It hadn’t been hard to find a hiding place. Her husband spent most of his time locked away in his study doing lord knows what. Otherwise, he was on the couch, glassy-eyed and over-worked by gravity.
Juniper wasn’t sure what to say, how to fix the situation. This is a client, they thought. In a few days, I won’t ever have to see her again. All I have to do is get to Friday. But Friday was quickly approaching like a billboard on the highway you can’t read until the moment you’re already speeding by it. And, for once, Juniper wanted to read it. They wanted to read her.
The night before the faux threesome, the woman called again for the second time that week.
“I am suffering from what one might call performance anxiety,” said the woman.
“But you don’t actually have to do anything,” said Juniper. “That’s what’s beautiful about this whole arrangement, babe.” Babe? Why had they said that? What was happening to them? They’d never had slip-ups like this.
“What if I don’t want to be beautiful?” she asked. At the end of the sentence, she mouthed the word babe just to see how it felt on her lips: soft and steady.
“What do you want to be?”
“Someone who has epiphanies everywhere they go,” she said.
“What would your first epiphany be?” asked Juniper, jittery and fluttering about their apartment. The wine wasn’t working anymore.
“Well, isn’t that the point? I don’t know because I haven’t had one yet. Because I’m not someone who has epiphanies everywhere they go.”
“Don’t you think the epiphanies would lose meaning if you had them all the time?”
“Maybe,” said the woman. “Maybe so.”
Juniper didn’t respond. They were attempting to hold the phone between their ear and shoulder while applying lotion to their legs, paying special attention to the backs of their thighs. That damn tanning bed had dried them up. Because Juniper couldn’t help themself, because they’d grown fond of the woman, fond being the strongest word Juniper allowed themself to use. The following morning, they would take those thighs, along with the rest of their body, to a professional make-up artist, who would make it look as if Juniper were covered in bruises from an accident, say, a fall down the stairs. It was the only gift they knew how to give. “Don’t you remember last night?” Juniper would say to the husband, forcing their cheeks to blush, their voice soft and timid. “I liked it a little too much,” they might add, watching the realization erupt across his face, meanwhile hoping to feel the familiar glow of pleasure they felt from pleasing the woman in the arrangement, if only indirectly.
What Juniper couldn’t possibly know was that Jinx was filling up the tank on her 4Runner and planning what she would say to Juniper when they arrived. She was trying to find a beginning, middle, and end to a story that had felt like a series of beginnings, every phone call a conversation that rumbled on the runway but never took off.
On the night in question, Juniper leaves the house smelling of strawberries and Dove deodorant (they hate that shit but the husbands have never taken to their men’s deodorant so well), wearing a bikini and black and blue skin underneath a trench coat. On the walk to the clients’ place—the couple lives quite close to Juniper—Juniper sees an outdoor nativity scene on someone’s lawn, despite the summer having just begun. The statues are extremely life-like, as if they’d be better off in a museum. Even the lambs look real enough a border collie might try to herd them. Juniper wants to ask the wise men what they should do, what the wisest of the wise would do if they were in Juniper’s situation. For the first time since starting this business, Juniper wishes they could trick themself into believing they really had a threesome. They don’t even require the real thing—after all, believing you had sex was, at the end of the day, the same as having had sex, reality living between the folds of belief. Juniper wants the bliss of waking up and believing that they’d used their teeth for more than fake smiling. But they remind themself that this isn’t for them, it is for the woman, and they are, after all, doing some good in the world. A woman’s life made better by Juniper’s little contribution. Juniper will get in, get out, shake the woman’s hand, pleasure doing business with you, try to hide their own trembling, leave out the front door, and resist the urge to look back. They will, they expect, want to run far away from this life that’s become everyone’s but theirs, but they will resist the urge.
That isn’t how it’s going to go down, but Juniper doesn’t know that. Juniper thinks that tomorrow morning, after slinking out of the clients’ house, they will enter their apartment to find Bandit with the projector set up, a giddy look on her face, the one she always wears when a new project is about to be revealed. Juniper thinks Bandit will pat the couch next to her and Juniper will dutifully take a seat, squeezing their hands between their hot, sticky thighs while they wait to learn what Bandit really thinks of them. But Juniper will not make it home tomorrow. They will not witness the great reveal. They will not witness Bandit’s sick, sad face when she realizes that Juniper’s silence is a confession, that Juniper has nothing to share about Bandit since they see her as nothing more than a fixture of their life, as matter of fact, as the molding in the living room where Juniper practices living for other people. Juniper will not have to see Bandit’s face when she turns to them and says, “You don’t think of me? Not at all?”
As planned, Juniper texts the woman when she is on her doorstep and waits, her hands stuffed in the front pockets of her trench coat, feeling a bit like an old-timey sleuth hired off the record. They hope that all of their attraction will melt away when the woman answers, but it is a fruitless desire as the woman, whose face is deliciously chiseled, answers in baggy sweats and a zip-up hoodie that’s unzipped down to her navel. Instead of inviting Juniper in, she steps outside and closes the door behind her. Before the door shuts, Juniper peeks inside and spots three whiskey glasses and an empty bottle of Jack on the table.
“Nice stage you have in there,” says Juniper.
“My husband drank the entire bottle,” says the woman. “Listen,” she says, pointing to the cracked window nearest them, their bedroom window. Inside, a man snoring so aggressively it sounds like a goose honking. Then Juniper takes the whole house in. It is a ranch-style house, with just a single story. No stairs.
“I passed some wise men on the way here,” Juniper hears their voice say, still observing the house. They can feel the burn of the woman’s eyes on them.
“You’re right, I lied to you,” says the woman before Juniper can accuse her. “My husband doesn’t even watch porn, let alone violent porn. In fact, he’s a gentle man. Too gentle, if you ask me. To be honest, it was easier for me to pretend he was dangerous than to admit to you that he’s boring,” says the woman. “But what I don’t understand is, why you came here if you thought he might hurt you.”
“I don’t know why either,” says Juniper. It occurs to them that they are waiting for the woman to suggest a reason.
“My truck is all packed, by the way,” she says, grabbing Juniper’s hand and leading them to the black 4Runner in the driveway. “We can buy you all new stuff later on.”
Juniper opens their mouth to speak but the woman leans in and presses her lips against Juniper’s. It is a feral kiss, but it’s not selfish. There is no want and take, want and take, but rather, it is full of nourishment, a provision for their journey, a kiss unlike any Juniper has ever experienced.
“What do you want, Bandit? Tell me, what the fuck do you want?” The woman asks this without a hint of anger or frustration in her voice. She sounds almost bored, as if now that she’s made her decision to leave, she can’t understand how everyone else hasn’t followed suit.
“My real name is Juniper.”
The woman looks curiously at them then goes in for another kiss, the same kind. Juniper fills and fills. They recall their first date with Bandit, all those years ago. Bandit had taken them to an art show. “You must see this,” she said. “Oh, and you have to see this.” She guided Juniper around, taking pride in being the one to introduce Juniper to all of these beautiful, grotesque things that were created by people but lived outside of these people. Even the performance pieces, in which the artist was the art, were separate from their creators, according to Bandit. Only fools conflated the two. Bandit and Juniper, standing shoulder to shoulder, the backs of their hands pressed against each other, had watched a person sit on a stool while attendees shouted insults at them. The person never reacted, not with their body or face. They didn’t even slouch. “See?” Bandit had whispered. “Nothing can get to them. Nothing can hurt them. They will be beautiful forever.” At that moment, Bandit confirmed what Juniper had always suspected but never known for sure until then: that you cannot hurt someone who is anyone but themself.
“Ask me again,” says Juniper.
“What do you want? What do you want?” the woman says into their mouth.
“I want to hurt,” says Juniper between kisses.
The woman’s lips smile against theirs. She slowly falls backward, pulling Juniper on top of her. On the front lawn, under the moonlight, they scissor like a couple of teens in a bunk bed at sleepaway camp, knowing that soon a counselor will catch them and that the magic, the sweet, sick magic that ripped and tore at their pain, will disappear in the explosion of cabin light, the counselor’s make-up smeared from sleep, the rest of the cabin rubbing their eyes, adjusting to the lost magic before them, to the two people on the top bunk who refuse to come down from there, not for anyone, not for anyone else but them.