The NBA bite was inside my mouth. She had kissed me to put it there. Afterward she stood close, breathing through her nose, waiting for me to swallow. We stood behind the betting bleachers beneath all those loose skirts. Her hand supported the back of my head with such practiced tenderness that I swallowed twice. Something hard went down the second time. She felt it pass beneath her thumb and let me go.
I could still feel the shape of her smile against my teeth when I got home. Now I was sitting on the kitchen floor with a live game streaming through the nba bite on my arm connected to the faucet app on my phone. The screen’s cracked glass divided the court diagonally. Players disappeared into the fracture and emerged slightly smaller. There were too many on the far side. I had counted seven white jerseys beneath the basket, although two were very small and could have been children.
The Bite Had Sealed
My tongue kept finding the seam. NBA Bite, she had written on the back of a receipt. Underneath: Don’t sleep through the second half. I unfolded it again. Her handwriting had soaked through the paper onto my palm. The letters moved when I tried to read them, crowding toward the soft skin between my fingers, where they settled and began laying eggs.
The refrigerator motor hummed and whined, and with it the crowd: thousands of fans sitting in the feverish darkness among my teeth. I knew that if I opened the refrigerator door they would see me. The light would come on. Someone would recognize the man whose money had built the place.
On the screen a player bent over, hands on knees, waiting for a free throw. I could see down his shirt. On his skin were stairs cascading down his spine. Concrete stairs with yellow edges, descending past a concession stand where a woman in a hairnet pushed her fingers into a tray of warm salt. Behind her hung long translucent bags of something that shifted its weight from one foot to the other. I understood they were keeping the reserves warm.
My NBA Bite Needed One More Point to Pay Off
I had placed the bet before the bite, or the bite during the bet it. I couldn’t remember. Betting a -1.5 spread always seared a hole in my memory. The money had come frfom the box buried out back. Save for savings, it said. I could remember earning it: dark hours, sour sweat, the smell of burning hair in the kitchen. Now it lived inside a number beside a green arrow. All that time reduced to something my thumb could cover. The shooter straightened.
A thread dangled from the seam of the ball. He wound it around his forefinger without looking. My tongue worried a thread that had been stuck halfway down my throat for the three playoff seasons. I pulled at the thread with my tongue and the shooter’s finger tightened. There was resistance deep in my throat, a feverish reluctance. I stopped pulling and the player relaxed his hand. Across the bottom of the screen an offer appeared to cash out. The amount was enough to bite a good bit off of. I bit. The fever burned.