I'm excited about this new bit I've just written, mostly because I changed a lot of things about Kyle Kane that I didn't like, made him into a character I could actually imagine Fiona being attracted to, instead of some stupid stereo-typical, flat character, y'know? I've been having a lot of novelistic breakthroughs this last semester. Maybe because Joe Meno is pushing me to not be a wuss? How great is it that one of my favorite writers is also my teacher right now, huh?
OK, killing the tangent. Here's part of Chapter 1 of my novel, tentatively called "We Shadows." I think I've put bits and pieces up before, but I can't remember...
Everyone Looks.
Everyone looks. When they know something bad happened over the summer, everyone looks. It’s like that stuff I thought only happened in bad movies; the camera gliding down the middle of the hallway and the extras playing students all starting and whispering. But those bad movies, they’re right, because the second I walked into the school, this weird tremor of quiet pulsed down the hall and everyone turned and just stared.
They stared at me because they know about you. The whole freaking school knows you slit your wrists and bled to death in the bathtub while your mom made a spaghetti dinner below you. The whole freaking school knows that your dad found you, kicked the door in and saw you there in your jeans, eyes unfocused and blank. The whole freaking school knows you’re dead.
Some of them leaned out from the ranks, touched my arm or my shoulder and said, “I’m so sorry,” or “Are you OK?” It was weird. I never liked being the center of attention. I just wanted to sneak through high school with you and Jackson and the guys and just not ever have anyone stare at me. This was worse than the time you dropped that thermometer on the tile floor in Science class and everyone called you “Mercury Rising” for the next month. This was worse than the time, freshmen year, where I got period on my jeans and Melissa Thompson told everyone about it. This was worse than the time Danny Brenner and Jackson got into a fistfight with Marcus Bradley in the hallway because he called them fags and I got elbowed in the face trying to break them up. This was so much worse than that.
But at least they didn’t ask questions about you.
Or, I should say, at least it took a week for any of them to ask about you.
It happened in Biology. Mr. Fagan always just puts on episodes of BBC’s “Planet Earth” if he doesn’t feel like teaching (which is most of the time, which is also why you and I signed up for his class at registration last year), so we were watching the “Deep Sea” episode with the shades down and the lights off and I was leaning on my lab table, my arms pressed flat on the cold marble top, trying really hard not to notice that the stool beside me, your stool, was empty. And Stephen Weleski leaned across the isle and tapped my shoulder.
“Yo, Fiona,” he whispered, tapping me until I slowly, so slowly turned my head and look at him.
“What?” I mumbled, blinking.
His face was looming pale like he didn’t get any sun at all this summer, like he worked under a rock for three months, and his eyes were wide under his buzzed hair when he asked, “Did you see it?”
“See what?”
“Did you see his body? Y’know, after he…?” He raised his eyebrows at me.
My throat closed up, tighter than a pinhole, and my mouth dried, all the saliva evaporating instantly. I just stared back at him.
From the lab table behind Stephen, Kyle Kane’s voice came quietly hissing, “Fuck you, Weleski. Why would you even ask her that? What fucking planet are you from, you shit?”
Stephen glanced back at Kyle, who was glaring at him through the black-rimmed rectangles of his glasses, then hunched his shoulders and slithered his torso back into his own space.
“Fucking apologize, asshole,” Kyle whispered, leaning over the front of his lab desk so Stephen could hear him loud and clear.
“Sorry Fiona,” Stephen mumbled without looking at me. He crossed his arms and slumped forward onto the surface of his desk.
“What’s going on back there?” Mr. Fagan asked over “Planet Earth.”
“I was just wondering,” Kyle Kane said, covering quickly and smoothly, “if I could move over to Fiona’s lab desk? We were lab partners last year…?”
Mr. Fagan nodded. “Sure, sure, sure. Just be quiet about it, yeah?”
Kyle grabbed his messenger bag and slipped across the isle and onto your empty stool beside me. “Hey partner,” he whispered, grinning at me. His blue eyes wrinkled behind his glasses and I noticed, probably for the first time without you taking up all my attention, that he is so damn cute. He’s got dimples, little parentheses around his smile. Who knew dimples were so cute?
“Thanks,” I said.
He shrugged and settled in beside me, leaning back against the lab desk behind us, tipping his stool a little. “Don’t sweat it,” he said.
You always said Kyle wears too much plaid, especially in the winter, but that day he was wearing a faded “The Damned” t-shirt, faded and worn thin with use, and a pair of black jeans. His ratty black Vans slip-ons were almost more hole than shoe—regular skateboarding wear and tear—and his ever-present black beanie was pulled down over his ears. I could see tips of his dark blonde hair poking out from underneath, though, and his cheeks and chin were scruffy, dusted with white-blonde shadow. He’s always been skinny, and not much taller than my 5’6” but right then, he was waxing Knight-In-Shining-Armor and even though I could still—can still—feel your touch everywhere on my skin when I sleep at night, I was definitely noticing his cute, cute, cuteness.
I kept glancing back over my left shoulder at him, kind of wanting to catch him looking at me, but every time he was just watching the projector screen play “Planet Earth,” elbows on the table behind us, legs swinging lazily around the rungs of his stool.
After “Planet Earth,” Mr. Fagan gave us some stupid homework assignment that, of course, required us to meet up with our lab partners outside of class. In the loud shuffle of papers, notebooks and textbooks slamming, Kyle asked, “Hey, can I get your number?”
He stood, phone at the ready, head cocked to the right a little, half grin hooked on his face, just one dimple that time.
I stared at him, frozen, trying to figure out how to tell him that I’m not really ready to start dating quite yet.
He seemed to pick up on my near-panic. “Y’know. For our homework assignment?” he clarified quickly. “So we can find some time to meet up?”
Relief and disappointment rushed, hot and red to my cheeks. “Oh, oh yeah. Sure. Maybe I should get yours, too.”
We traded numbers, a little awkwardly because I couldn’t stop blushing and people kept pushing past us, bumping into our shoulders, making us edge closer to each other to avoid the rushed battering of students desperately pouring out of the classroom.
“So…I’ll call you or something. Like, tonight?”
I nodded. “Yeah, sure.” Then I turned to my backpack, distracting myself by rearranging my books inside the bag. When I looked up, he was gone, a flash of gray and black at the doorframe and then nothing.
I kind of feel guilty. Guilty for liking his dimples and the fit of his jeans and the curve of his spine as he leaned back against the desk. Guilty because you are gone and I love you forever but I can’t help it if sometimes I get mad about how you treated me at the end or distracted by other cute skater boys who remind me of you the way a lingering scent brings someone to mind after they’ve left the room, or the way rumpled sheets mean someone has just been lying in them.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
More Like A Song, Less Like It's Math
After Conor, I started dating a guy, a nice guy who wore lots of t-shirts and knit hats and black frame glasses, who slept curled around me and who was masterful with his tongue and who liked to read books and who made tea. We did crossword puzzles together in the mornings, sitting at the sunny kitchen table and discussing our English professors. My friends called him “sensitive” and “loving.” They crossed their legs and smiled and said, “He’s good for you, Elle.” The Nice Guy said he loved me. I said I loved him, too, but what I didn’t say was that really, I wasn’t sure. The Nice Guy was writing a novel and liked to take black and white pictures with an old manual Nikon FG. He would pull my shirt up, lightly kiss the skin of my back, snap a picture of me pulling my shirt back down and laughing in the kitchen, my hair falling over my face. He would focus the lens on my hands wrapped around a teacup, morning sun angling in, bright and clear. He would lie back, naked beneath me, and let me capture him, eyes focused on mine through the lens. The Nice Guy moved in, slept on sheets where Conor and I had slept, read in chairs where Conor and I had kissed, leaned against doorframes where Conor and I had fought, kissed me against walls where Conor and I had fucked. The Nice Guy moved in and watered the plants when I forgot and made dinner if he got home before me and cleaned the bathroom—all things Conor never did. The Nice Guy moved in and we stopped going to parties—it just wasn’t Our Style, The Nice Guy’s and mine, so we went to shows instead. The Nice Guy usually bought the tickets and the beer and then carefully kissed me to sleep afterwards when we were tired and still vibrating with music.
We were at a My Morning Jacket show a few months after The Nice Guy moved in when I fucked everything up. Beside me in the crowd, The Nice Guy rocked back and forth, nodding his head, eyes trained on the stage. The blue and red of the lights swung madly across his face, reflecting in the lenses of his glasses, turning his skin red, blue, red, redder, blue. And there, on the stage in front of us, the whole reason we were there: Jim James and his thick beard, lost and wailing over his flying-V guitar. Everyone around us rocked and writhed and crunched closer together. A girl in only leggings and a childishly iridescent bathing suit wriggled by us, her ponytail bobbing; she smelled like sweat and beer, her skin glistened with sparkles and wet. Everything was hot and close and The Nice Guy stood there, still in his sweatshirt—that fucking sweatshirt. I hated it, the way it was really too small for him, the sleeves stopping halfway down his forearms. And so red. That sweatshirt was bright damn red, with a coffee stain on the chest and when I looked over at him, my head feeling heavy in all that heat, I could see his t-shirt sticking out of the sweatshirt, wrinkled, at the collar and the waist. His hair stuck out like blonde straw from underneath his black-knit hat, still straight despite the thick heat, but his face, his beautiful, sharp-jawed face was smooth and scruff-less. He looked like he hadn’t changed clothes since he was ten and his growth spurt started, like he had just shot up without time to find new clothes. And he looked hot, roasting with that sweatshirt and hat, and I couldn’t look at him for longer than a glance or I started feeling hotter and sweatier and closer and I couldn’t stand it. Aren’t you HOT? I wanted to ask him. Because I am. I am sweaty and you are close and I am still not sure if I meant it when I said, “I love you, too.”
Finally, trying not to touch him incase his heat caught me on fire, I leaned over and yelled into his ear, “I gotta find the bathroom!” Not because I had to pee, but because everything was so crushing and close and I couldn’t handle the heat anymore.
The Nice Guy looked at me, nodded quickly, shoved his straw hair out of his eyes, then turned back to the pounding guitar riff he and his red sweatshirt were so into.
I slipped away from him, sliding through the sweaty crowd, pushing past bodies squirming and full of music. I wanted to be like them, taken up and into the music as much as The Nice Guy, but all I could think about in that heat were the things I didn’t like, the things I didn’t like about him, the reasons I shouldn’t have said, “I love you, too” and let him move in. I kept thinking about that stupid fucking sweatshirt and the smell of his breath in the morning and the way he brushed his teeth until foaming toothpaste ran looping around his wrist but he would just keep going.
And right as I wrinkled my face into a scowl at the thought of toothpaste rushing in rivers down The Nice Guy’s arm, I looked up and everything stopped, slowed down, sharpened. The sound shut off, all the lights dimmed except one, one right there ten feet from me against the brick wall at the back of the room; that light, there, brightened until the shadows were gone. Because there He was; Conor, tall and curved like a bow over the shiny bathing suit girl, his arm the arrow straight to the wall beside her head, and he was laughing and leaning and she was laughing and spilling her beer.
Everything about him was like a favorite book I knew by heart but couldn’t stop turning the pages anyway; the slope of his back and his wide shoulders under the worn flannel of his shirt, the angle of his hips in his old jeans, the mess of his dark hair, grown out but still short enough that I could see the knobs of his spine pushing against the skin of his neck.
Conor and The Nice Guy were like negative images of each other, the same but different. The Nice Guy’s blonde straw hair, Conor’s dark curls, both eternally disheveled, the mess helped along by my fingers frequently finding their way along the scalp, tangling locks around my knuckles. The Nice Guy’s novel, Conor’s biology papers, both of their backs bent over the computer for hours, fingers clicking keys while I buried my nose in books behind them. The Nice Guy’s early rising, Conor’s sleepless nights, both of them interrupting my own sleep cycle to tangle our bodies in the sheets, naked and full up of each other. The Nice Guy’s soft touch, gentle kisses, Conor’s roughness. Conor’s shoving and pushing and Conor’s scratching and squeezing, grabbing and holding and Conor’s pressing mouth and firm grip on my wrists and Conor’s everything that lit me up like a building burning.
I needed to walk past him, needed him not to be there at all, but he saw me and stopped laughing; arm still extended, palm still flat against the wall, he looked at me over his wrinkled sleeve while the shiny bathing suit girl giggled at the beer she’d just sloshed onto the floor. And I looked back. I shouldn’t have, but I did and my eyes were stuck on his, neither of us blinking or moving or breathing, everything slow and impossibly quiet.
But then, thank god, someone drunk and sloppy bumped into me and the music snapped back in my ears and everything moved like normal and I took a huge, gasping breath and looked away from him, bolted not for the bathroom, but for any way out of this hot box full of too many people. In the flashing lights, blues and reds purpling on the walls, EXIT glowed bright in neon and I made straight for it, weaving in and out, avoiding carelessly waved beers or flailing limbs, but as I pushed through the door, I felt Conor behind me, his big hand splayed firm across the small of my back, following me. I could feel the pressure of each of his fingers holding my t-shirt against my skin, boring heat and electricity through my muscles and down deep into my bones. The motion sensor light outside of the door clicked on as we burst outside, dimly illuminating dark shapes and empty boxes against the walls. The music faded slowly as the door swung shut behind us.
I stood quaking and electric in the fall air, not facing him, staring at the pavement under my feet and he stood there behind me, close but without touching. We were frozen, standing still for…hours? Days? Everything seemed silent like winter snow, like it was hiding from us, from me. It had been so long since either of us moved that the motion sensor light switched off and we were in the dark again. I could hear him breathing, feel his breath curving around the back of my ear.
He took a step closer to me and the light flashed on, circling us, cutting us out of the blackness. I jerked away from him.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. My voice puffed out, misty, into the dark around us.
“What the fuck kind of question is that?” He growled, his breath in my hair, so close I could smell him, soap and smoke.
His voice sunk into my skin, shooting waves of electricity through my muscles, raising tiny hairs all over my body. I felt myself swinging back toward him like a wrecking ball, rolling my shoulders into his chest, aligning my spine with his sternum, tilting my head so his mouth could close around my earlobe.
He pulled me into the darkness, outside the sharp edge of the light, trapped me between his body and the wall. The brick scraped my shoulder blades through my t-shirt, his mouth opened against mine, with a traitorous reflexivity my fingers pushed his shirt up his stomach, curled around his belt buckle, pulled his hips toward mine, both of us gasping. He lifted me, I wrapped my legs around his waist, felt the rough bricks tear through my t-shirt. I wound my fingers in his hair, dug them into his shoulders, bit his lower lip. He pressed into me, squeezing my right leg tight in his hand. The bricks rubbed his right hand raw.
We were silent but for our gasping; frantic breaths growing faster and faster, mine becoming louder and open-mouthed, Conor’s rushing angry in my ear through clenched teeth. The veins in his neck hardened and streamlined, full of pulsing blood, reddened skin laying tight over them. I pressed my hand against his heated skin, feeling muscles move, and when I took it away, buried it in his hair again, glowing imprints of my fingers stayed, white and cool.
And then my back was arching away from the wall, spine curving me toward him. I tore my right hand from his hair. With eyes wide open, staring at him staring at me, I slapped him across the face, letting my nails catch in the skin of his scruffy cheek. He roared, his voice exploding from his throat angrily but at the same time full of something else, something curling and writhing and liking it. He shoved me back into the wall, pinned my right hand against the brick with his left, used his right hand, clenching my ass, to pull me closer to him, to pull himself deeper. I tightened my legs around him, looked right at him as he leaned toward me and then I was looking past him, through his dark curls, and he was whispering, “Fuck you,” and we came together, pulling and pushing and sweating.
He re-threaded his belt, buckle clinking, long fingers flicking in and out of shadow as I leaned against the wall, panting. I bent to retrieve my underwear, trying not to smell him even though he was everywhere, standing so close to me.
“Your back,” he said softly, his voice rumbling above me. “It’s bleeding.”
I balled my cotton panties in my hand, used them to wipe his come from my thighs as I said, “I know.” I could feel the sweat trickling into the scrapes, stinging, and the night air sliding across my skin through the rips in my t-shirt. “Bet your hands are, too.”
I glanced up to see him, studying his palms in the semidarkness, raising an eyebrow. “Huh. Didn’t even feel that.” The light by the back door illuminated half of him, half of his dark hair hanging in half of his face—the left side, short red lines on his cheek from my nails, and half of his neck, already bruising in the shape of my mouth, and half of him turning toward me as I stood up, adjusted my skirt, half of him watching me erase the evidence of all of him.
“You’re here with that guy, aren’t you?”
“You already knew that. He lives with me.”
“In our apartment.”
“Conor, don’t do this right now.”
“What? All I’m saying is my name’s on that lease, too.”
“Not anymore. I renewed it. In only my name. It’s my apartment, now.”
“Wow. It’s been that long since we lived together, huh?” He sighed, looked away, tugged on his shirt, ran his fingers over the buttons to make sure they were still aligned correctly. I noticed a hole in the fabric a few inches below his armpit—not a big one, but large enough to see the smooth pale of his skin, maybe the suggestion of a rib or two.
“You know, he loves me,” I told the hole in his shirt, told his skin and bones.
“And you don’t love him.” It wasn’t a question. He knew. Because he had known me for so long, because we had gone through every single fucking moment of our lives in the same place—even, most of the time, in the same house, Conor knew what I hadn’t even been able to admit to myself: I didn’t love The Nice Guy, but I would pretend I did. Because he was nice and I liked the idea of him and his novel and his tea and his glasses, I would pretend I loved him until he left. It would take him realizing I didn’t mean it and leaving me to stop the charade. And Conor knew this.
And I hated him for it.
“I love him,” I lied. “I do.”
Conor shook his head. “Elle, you suck at lying.”
“Fuck you.”
“You already did.”
I shoved him, angrily, against the wall. He laughed, grabbing my arm, holding me there against him. “You don’t love him and you know I know.”
I wrenched my arm away from him; he let go easily—too easily, and I stumbled backward, catching myself against a stack of wooden crates. He leaned, smirking, in the shadows, faded flannel arms folded over his chest, ankles crossed to match. “Careful there,” he sneered, using a tone I remembered from grade school, it was so deeply embedded in him.
“Asshole,” I hissed, and stomped away from him, yanking the side door open. Music exploded, rumbling and wailing, out the door—I could almost feel the gust of it hit my face, slide across my skin, blow my hair back from my face. I slipped into the room, pulling the door shut behind me, leaving Conor in the darkness by himself.
“Rough time?” The Nice Guy asked when I finally came back to him, still wet, still weak in the knees, even though I’d tried to clean up a little in the bathroom, tried to get the smell of Conor off of my skin, out of my hair, out of my blood.
“What?!!?”I shouted, heart pounding with panic.
“Rough time in the bathroom?” He shouted over the music, leaning closer, handing me the jacket he’d been holding for me.
“Oh,” I nodded. “Oh yeah. Long line.” I slipped my jacket on quickly, hoping he hadn’t noticed the rips in my t-shirt, the red scrapes showing through.
The Nice Guy put his arm around my shoulders, pulled me against him, kissed my forehead. “Wanna get out of here?” he asked, keeping his mouth close to my ear, letting his lips brush against my skin. His eyes were heavy, clouded, the way they looked in the morning when he woke me up to have sex.
When you’re in love, you say yes to that kind of stuff, right? You say yes to leaving in the middle of a good show, even if it’s one of your favorite bands, and you go home and have really great, amazing sex because you’re in love and you love him, and he loves you and isn’t it so great? When you’re in love, you say yes.
So I said, “Yeah, let’s go,” because I wanted to love him and I grabbed his hand and pulled him through the crowd. Near the door, I saw Conor, leaning alone against the wall, the light catching three red lines on his left cheek. The corner of his mouth curled into a gloating half-smile as we passed and I swore I could hear him laughing, even when I moved between the sheets with The Nice Guy, pushing and gasping until he came quietly with his face pressed in my hair.
We were at a My Morning Jacket show a few months after The Nice Guy moved in when I fucked everything up. Beside me in the crowd, The Nice Guy rocked back and forth, nodding his head, eyes trained on the stage. The blue and red of the lights swung madly across his face, reflecting in the lenses of his glasses, turning his skin red, blue, red, redder, blue. And there, on the stage in front of us, the whole reason we were there: Jim James and his thick beard, lost and wailing over his flying-V guitar. Everyone around us rocked and writhed and crunched closer together. A girl in only leggings and a childishly iridescent bathing suit wriggled by us, her ponytail bobbing; she smelled like sweat and beer, her skin glistened with sparkles and wet. Everything was hot and close and The Nice Guy stood there, still in his sweatshirt—that fucking sweatshirt. I hated it, the way it was really too small for him, the sleeves stopping halfway down his forearms. And so red. That sweatshirt was bright damn red, with a coffee stain on the chest and when I looked over at him, my head feeling heavy in all that heat, I could see his t-shirt sticking out of the sweatshirt, wrinkled, at the collar and the waist. His hair stuck out like blonde straw from underneath his black-knit hat, still straight despite the thick heat, but his face, his beautiful, sharp-jawed face was smooth and scruff-less. He looked like he hadn’t changed clothes since he was ten and his growth spurt started, like he had just shot up without time to find new clothes. And he looked hot, roasting with that sweatshirt and hat, and I couldn’t look at him for longer than a glance or I started feeling hotter and sweatier and closer and I couldn’t stand it. Aren’t you HOT? I wanted to ask him. Because I am. I am sweaty and you are close and I am still not sure if I meant it when I said, “I love you, too.”
Finally, trying not to touch him incase his heat caught me on fire, I leaned over and yelled into his ear, “I gotta find the bathroom!” Not because I had to pee, but because everything was so crushing and close and I couldn’t handle the heat anymore.
The Nice Guy looked at me, nodded quickly, shoved his straw hair out of his eyes, then turned back to the pounding guitar riff he and his red sweatshirt were so into.
I slipped away from him, sliding through the sweaty crowd, pushing past bodies squirming and full of music. I wanted to be like them, taken up and into the music as much as The Nice Guy, but all I could think about in that heat were the things I didn’t like, the things I didn’t like about him, the reasons I shouldn’t have said, “I love you, too” and let him move in. I kept thinking about that stupid fucking sweatshirt and the smell of his breath in the morning and the way he brushed his teeth until foaming toothpaste ran looping around his wrist but he would just keep going.
And right as I wrinkled my face into a scowl at the thought of toothpaste rushing in rivers down The Nice Guy’s arm, I looked up and everything stopped, slowed down, sharpened. The sound shut off, all the lights dimmed except one, one right there ten feet from me against the brick wall at the back of the room; that light, there, brightened until the shadows were gone. Because there He was; Conor, tall and curved like a bow over the shiny bathing suit girl, his arm the arrow straight to the wall beside her head, and he was laughing and leaning and she was laughing and spilling her beer.
Everything about him was like a favorite book I knew by heart but couldn’t stop turning the pages anyway; the slope of his back and his wide shoulders under the worn flannel of his shirt, the angle of his hips in his old jeans, the mess of his dark hair, grown out but still short enough that I could see the knobs of his spine pushing against the skin of his neck.
Conor and The Nice Guy were like negative images of each other, the same but different. The Nice Guy’s blonde straw hair, Conor’s dark curls, both eternally disheveled, the mess helped along by my fingers frequently finding their way along the scalp, tangling locks around my knuckles. The Nice Guy’s novel, Conor’s biology papers, both of their backs bent over the computer for hours, fingers clicking keys while I buried my nose in books behind them. The Nice Guy’s early rising, Conor’s sleepless nights, both of them interrupting my own sleep cycle to tangle our bodies in the sheets, naked and full up of each other. The Nice Guy’s soft touch, gentle kisses, Conor’s roughness. Conor’s shoving and pushing and Conor’s scratching and squeezing, grabbing and holding and Conor’s pressing mouth and firm grip on my wrists and Conor’s everything that lit me up like a building burning.
I needed to walk past him, needed him not to be there at all, but he saw me and stopped laughing; arm still extended, palm still flat against the wall, he looked at me over his wrinkled sleeve while the shiny bathing suit girl giggled at the beer she’d just sloshed onto the floor. And I looked back. I shouldn’t have, but I did and my eyes were stuck on his, neither of us blinking or moving or breathing, everything slow and impossibly quiet.
But then, thank god, someone drunk and sloppy bumped into me and the music snapped back in my ears and everything moved like normal and I took a huge, gasping breath and looked away from him, bolted not for the bathroom, but for any way out of this hot box full of too many people. In the flashing lights, blues and reds purpling on the walls, EXIT glowed bright in neon and I made straight for it, weaving in and out, avoiding carelessly waved beers or flailing limbs, but as I pushed through the door, I felt Conor behind me, his big hand splayed firm across the small of my back, following me. I could feel the pressure of each of his fingers holding my t-shirt against my skin, boring heat and electricity through my muscles and down deep into my bones. The motion sensor light outside of the door clicked on as we burst outside, dimly illuminating dark shapes and empty boxes against the walls. The music faded slowly as the door swung shut behind us.
I stood quaking and electric in the fall air, not facing him, staring at the pavement under my feet and he stood there behind me, close but without touching. We were frozen, standing still for…hours? Days? Everything seemed silent like winter snow, like it was hiding from us, from me. It had been so long since either of us moved that the motion sensor light switched off and we were in the dark again. I could hear him breathing, feel his breath curving around the back of my ear.
He took a step closer to me and the light flashed on, circling us, cutting us out of the blackness. I jerked away from him.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. My voice puffed out, misty, into the dark around us.
“What the fuck kind of question is that?” He growled, his breath in my hair, so close I could smell him, soap and smoke.
His voice sunk into my skin, shooting waves of electricity through my muscles, raising tiny hairs all over my body. I felt myself swinging back toward him like a wrecking ball, rolling my shoulders into his chest, aligning my spine with his sternum, tilting my head so his mouth could close around my earlobe.
He pulled me into the darkness, outside the sharp edge of the light, trapped me between his body and the wall. The brick scraped my shoulder blades through my t-shirt, his mouth opened against mine, with a traitorous reflexivity my fingers pushed his shirt up his stomach, curled around his belt buckle, pulled his hips toward mine, both of us gasping. He lifted me, I wrapped my legs around his waist, felt the rough bricks tear through my t-shirt. I wound my fingers in his hair, dug them into his shoulders, bit his lower lip. He pressed into me, squeezing my right leg tight in his hand. The bricks rubbed his right hand raw.
We were silent but for our gasping; frantic breaths growing faster and faster, mine becoming louder and open-mouthed, Conor’s rushing angry in my ear through clenched teeth. The veins in his neck hardened and streamlined, full of pulsing blood, reddened skin laying tight over them. I pressed my hand against his heated skin, feeling muscles move, and when I took it away, buried it in his hair again, glowing imprints of my fingers stayed, white and cool.
And then my back was arching away from the wall, spine curving me toward him. I tore my right hand from his hair. With eyes wide open, staring at him staring at me, I slapped him across the face, letting my nails catch in the skin of his scruffy cheek. He roared, his voice exploding from his throat angrily but at the same time full of something else, something curling and writhing and liking it. He shoved me back into the wall, pinned my right hand against the brick with his left, used his right hand, clenching my ass, to pull me closer to him, to pull himself deeper. I tightened my legs around him, looked right at him as he leaned toward me and then I was looking past him, through his dark curls, and he was whispering, “Fuck you,” and we came together, pulling and pushing and sweating.
He re-threaded his belt, buckle clinking, long fingers flicking in and out of shadow as I leaned against the wall, panting. I bent to retrieve my underwear, trying not to smell him even though he was everywhere, standing so close to me.
“Your back,” he said softly, his voice rumbling above me. “It’s bleeding.”
I balled my cotton panties in my hand, used them to wipe his come from my thighs as I said, “I know.” I could feel the sweat trickling into the scrapes, stinging, and the night air sliding across my skin through the rips in my t-shirt. “Bet your hands are, too.”
I glanced up to see him, studying his palms in the semidarkness, raising an eyebrow. “Huh. Didn’t even feel that.” The light by the back door illuminated half of him, half of his dark hair hanging in half of his face—the left side, short red lines on his cheek from my nails, and half of his neck, already bruising in the shape of my mouth, and half of him turning toward me as I stood up, adjusted my skirt, half of him watching me erase the evidence of all of him.
“You’re here with that guy, aren’t you?”
“You already knew that. He lives with me.”
“In our apartment.”
“Conor, don’t do this right now.”
“What? All I’m saying is my name’s on that lease, too.”
“Not anymore. I renewed it. In only my name. It’s my apartment, now.”
“Wow. It’s been that long since we lived together, huh?” He sighed, looked away, tugged on his shirt, ran his fingers over the buttons to make sure they were still aligned correctly. I noticed a hole in the fabric a few inches below his armpit—not a big one, but large enough to see the smooth pale of his skin, maybe the suggestion of a rib or two.
“You know, he loves me,” I told the hole in his shirt, told his skin and bones.
“And you don’t love him.” It wasn’t a question. He knew. Because he had known me for so long, because we had gone through every single fucking moment of our lives in the same place—even, most of the time, in the same house, Conor knew what I hadn’t even been able to admit to myself: I didn’t love The Nice Guy, but I would pretend I did. Because he was nice and I liked the idea of him and his novel and his tea and his glasses, I would pretend I loved him until he left. It would take him realizing I didn’t mean it and leaving me to stop the charade. And Conor knew this.
And I hated him for it.
“I love him,” I lied. “I do.”
Conor shook his head. “Elle, you suck at lying.”
“Fuck you.”
“You already did.”
I shoved him, angrily, against the wall. He laughed, grabbing my arm, holding me there against him. “You don’t love him and you know I know.”
I wrenched my arm away from him; he let go easily—too easily, and I stumbled backward, catching myself against a stack of wooden crates. He leaned, smirking, in the shadows, faded flannel arms folded over his chest, ankles crossed to match. “Careful there,” he sneered, using a tone I remembered from grade school, it was so deeply embedded in him.
“Asshole,” I hissed, and stomped away from him, yanking the side door open. Music exploded, rumbling and wailing, out the door—I could almost feel the gust of it hit my face, slide across my skin, blow my hair back from my face. I slipped into the room, pulling the door shut behind me, leaving Conor in the darkness by himself.
“Rough time?” The Nice Guy asked when I finally came back to him, still wet, still weak in the knees, even though I’d tried to clean up a little in the bathroom, tried to get the smell of Conor off of my skin, out of my hair, out of my blood.
“What?!!?”I shouted, heart pounding with panic.
“Rough time in the bathroom?” He shouted over the music, leaning closer, handing me the jacket he’d been holding for me.
“Oh,” I nodded. “Oh yeah. Long line.” I slipped my jacket on quickly, hoping he hadn’t noticed the rips in my t-shirt, the red scrapes showing through.
The Nice Guy put his arm around my shoulders, pulled me against him, kissed my forehead. “Wanna get out of here?” he asked, keeping his mouth close to my ear, letting his lips brush against my skin. His eyes were heavy, clouded, the way they looked in the morning when he woke me up to have sex.
When you’re in love, you say yes to that kind of stuff, right? You say yes to leaving in the middle of a good show, even if it’s one of your favorite bands, and you go home and have really great, amazing sex because you’re in love and you love him, and he loves you and isn’t it so great? When you’re in love, you say yes.
So I said, “Yeah, let’s go,” because I wanted to love him and I grabbed his hand and pulled him through the crowd. Near the door, I saw Conor, leaning alone against the wall, the light catching three red lines on his left cheek. The corner of his mouth curled into a gloating half-smile as we passed and I swore I could hear him laughing, even when I moved between the sheets with The Nice Guy, pushing and gasping until he came quietly with his face pressed in my hair.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Sunday, February 22, 2009
XVI (from Chimneys: Sonnets--Actualities) - e.e. cummings
i have found what you are like
the rain,
(Who feathers frightened fields
with superior dust-of-sleep. wields
easily the pale club of the wind
and swirled justly souls of flower strike
the air in utterable coolness
deeds of green thrilling light
with thinned
newfragile yellows
lurch and.press
--in the woods
which
stutter
and
sing
And the coolness of your smile is
stirringofbirds between my arms;but
i should rather than anything
have(almost when hugeness will shut
quietly)almost,
your kiss
the rain,
(Who feathers frightened fields
with superior dust-of-sleep. wields
easily the pale club of the wind
and swirled justly souls of flower strike
the air in utterable coolness
deeds of green thrilling light
with thinned
newfragile yellows
lurch and.press
--in the woods
which
stutter
and
sing
And the coolness of your smile is
stirringofbirds between my arms;but
i should rather than anything
have(almost when hugeness will shut
quietly)almost,
your kiss
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Re: The Bad Idea, Once Again.
brain stuck on kb even though he is not going to call. brain won't stop making his face fade in behind eyelids, the set of his chin, the half smile of his mouth. brain keeps seeing that mouth and that half smile when he said, "you can use your words." yes, yes, kb, brain knows all about words, but brain turns into something like the consistency of oatmeal when your eyes are focused on face and then it is hard for brain to remember any word, even though it knows thousands. brain gets stupid around you, kb, especially when free drink tickets are involved. brain still hasn't recovered from the mixed messages, and brain gets all confused when eyes read your book because it keeps picturing you, kb, and the truth is your words all right there in a real published novel combined with brain's images of you and brain's thoughts about what it would like you to do to body make for a very toe-curling read. don't worry, kb. brain will get you out of our system in a couple days. unless you and body keep running into each other, in which case it might be a few weeks. but do not fret, kb, you will be just a hiccup in the long run. do not fret, kb, because brain is not anywhere near the word "love" or even "relationship." brain is in the same place hands were when we gave you our number: dinner, dinner and drinks, drinks and more drinks, drinks and kissing, kissing and fucking, fucking, fucking, fuckingfuckingfucking. brain is there, kb, not at "relationship." because we are no good at those. now that brain thinks about it, maybe we could get good at "relationship," but brain does not have a specific person in mind to practice with, so you still do not have to worry, kb. for a little, brain was worried that you said you probably would not all because of body (body feels fat a lot these days, especially when eyes see bad pictures of chin), but brain does not think you are that kind of guy. but, truly, how would brain know? we don't know you very well, kb, so you could indeed be the type of guy who would not call because body does not look like a toothpick and chin sometimes brings friends. but brain hopes you are not that kind of guy. brain admits to jumping the gun with the number thing, and would not have done it if there had not been so many free drink tickets, and if we were not so impatient (and horny, a little). brain would have made us bide our time and waited for you to make the first move, but brain must admit that we are not very good at waiting, especially when you are so damn cute and you make body heat up and skin get prickly. brain may decide to blame this on you, kb, but we will have to see.
The Benefits of Lying With Your Friends
When you’re confessing your undying love to your best friend, you probably should not do it while he is ten feet above you, cleaning his gutters on a rusting aluminum ladder.
You probably should not do it while he is elbow deep in slimy, phlegmy leaves and already scowling, and you have emptied half your flask and already smoked nine cigarettes and it’s only 10:00 in the morning.
You probably should be holding the ladder, like you said you would, not watching his black Labrador, Nemo, chew up one of your gloves, bright blue yarn coated in drool, unraveled and stuck between his teeth.
You probably should not have started the conversation with, “Sorry I’m late, I didn’t get much sleep last night,” because you knew he would ask you why and that you would have to tell him you were up all night fucking Justin again, but only because it took your mind off of how miserably in love you are with someone else. You should not have said that, because of course, he would ask, “Who?”
And because you are already at least five sheets to the wind, of course you will let it slip. Of course you will let go of the ladder and say, “You.”
And because your voice is loud, has always been loud, he will hear you, hear you perfectly, and jerk his body upright with surprise.
And because you are not holding the ladder, it will wobble and lean away from the house and before you can blink, you’re feeling cold, dripping leaves oozing down the back of your neck and the ladder is rattling on the driveway and your best friend is groaning from the depths of the holly bush in front of you, and Nemo is barking because he can’t get your bright blue glove out of his mouth and it’s so loud, your ears are stinging.
“Shut up shut up shut up!” you shout.
“Nemo! Shut up!” Your best friend yells, and the dog stops mid-yowl and stares into the holly bush, head cocked, bright blue yarn in tangles from his teeth to his paws.
Your best friend groans. “Get me OUT of here,” he wails in a very unmanly way only unleashed when extreme pain is involved (the unmanly kind of way he wailed when he jumped off the Jim Thorpe National Park Bridge and never stopped flailing his arms, so he dislocated his shoulder and tore his rotator cuff when he hit the water and you had to drive him to the hospital in your bathing suit and the whole time he just lay there in the back seat, gray-faced and moaning).
You can barely see him through all the holly branches, but if you squint hard enough and push that branch out of the way, there he is, dark hair sticking out in every direction with wet leaves clinging. And there’s his back, exposed, cold and scratched raw because there is his jacket, stuck in the branches above him, empty sleeves hanging limp as if they were wishing they had hands to point with. And there are his legs, tangled in branches, and his arms, tangled in other branches, and his big brown eyes looking out at you from all that tangled, up-side-down mess.
“Um,” you say. Um? UM? You probably should have said something a little more eloquent. Something comforting, maybe? But you definitely should not have said “um.”
“Justfuckinggetmeoutofthisfuckinghollybush!” He tries to move, but you probably should have told him not to do that, because it looks like it only hurts him more.
“How?” you want to ask. How do you reach in there, through all that prickly, pointy, nasty, mean holly and pull him out when you have just stupidly—so stupidly—told him that you love him and the only rational way he could find to respond was to FALL OFF A LADDER and land in said holly bush? HOW?
But because you are actively learning from your mistakes, you do not say everything that comes to mind. Instead, you take a step back and analyze the situation like the college-graduate you paid lots of money to become.
“Fuckfuckfuck,” comes streaming from inside the holly bush, mixed with grunts and groans and more swearing.
You reach into the bush and hand your flask to your best friend. If you can’t think of a way to get him out just yet, at least the whiskey will make him a bit more comfortable.
He grabs it from you and you hear metal swinging around metal as he unscrews the cap and he didn’t even say thank you.
HE DIDN’T EVEN SAY THANK YOU, the ungrateful sonofabitch. Maybe you WON’T help him out of there. Maybe you will just LEAVE him all tangled in pointy leaves and pokey branches because FUCK, you just confessed your love to him and he hasn’t said anything about whether or not he loves you, too. He probably should have said something already. AND he probably should have kissed you last month when you were drunk at Jared’s New Years party and it was midnight and you were standing there right in front of him in your silver sequin dress and everyone around you was leaning over and kissing each other but you two were just standing there frozen staring and he just hugged you instead. And you probably should have said something earlier and he probably should be in love with you. He should, because you KNOW him. You know that he likes hot peppers on his pizza and he gets nervous around ladies (but not you—he’s never been nervous around you) and you know that his favorite movie EVER is “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” and that he hasn’t read a whole book since he graduated college and that if he were stranded on a desert island with Nemo he would let himself starve to death so Nemo had something to eat and—STOP. Now you are starting to sound like a Best Friend Fan Club. Ew.
“Are you maybe gonna help me?” your best friend asks. The holly bush is shaking as he moves around, trying to un-stick himself, and you are still standing there frozen and drunk and pissed.
“No,” you say.
“What?” You hear him drop the flask, empty metal thudding on packed dirt and now you can see one of his eyes, wide and brown and looking right at you in disbelief.
“No,” you say again. “You can do it yourself.”
You probably should not do it while he is elbow deep in slimy, phlegmy leaves and already scowling, and you have emptied half your flask and already smoked nine cigarettes and it’s only 10:00 in the morning.
You probably should be holding the ladder, like you said you would, not watching his black Labrador, Nemo, chew up one of your gloves, bright blue yarn coated in drool, unraveled and stuck between his teeth.
You probably should not have started the conversation with, “Sorry I’m late, I didn’t get much sleep last night,” because you knew he would ask you why and that you would have to tell him you were up all night fucking Justin again, but only because it took your mind off of how miserably in love you are with someone else. You should not have said that, because of course, he would ask, “Who?”
And because you are already at least five sheets to the wind, of course you will let it slip. Of course you will let go of the ladder and say, “You.”
And because your voice is loud, has always been loud, he will hear you, hear you perfectly, and jerk his body upright with surprise.
And because you are not holding the ladder, it will wobble and lean away from the house and before you can blink, you’re feeling cold, dripping leaves oozing down the back of your neck and the ladder is rattling on the driveway and your best friend is groaning from the depths of the holly bush in front of you, and Nemo is barking because he can’t get your bright blue glove out of his mouth and it’s so loud, your ears are stinging.
“Shut up shut up shut up!” you shout.
“Nemo! Shut up!” Your best friend yells, and the dog stops mid-yowl and stares into the holly bush, head cocked, bright blue yarn in tangles from his teeth to his paws.
Your best friend groans. “Get me OUT of here,” he wails in a very unmanly way only unleashed when extreme pain is involved (the unmanly kind of way he wailed when he jumped off the Jim Thorpe National Park Bridge and never stopped flailing his arms, so he dislocated his shoulder and tore his rotator cuff when he hit the water and you had to drive him to the hospital in your bathing suit and the whole time he just lay there in the back seat, gray-faced and moaning).
You can barely see him through all the holly branches, but if you squint hard enough and push that branch out of the way, there he is, dark hair sticking out in every direction with wet leaves clinging. And there’s his back, exposed, cold and scratched raw because there is his jacket, stuck in the branches above him, empty sleeves hanging limp as if they were wishing they had hands to point with. And there are his legs, tangled in branches, and his arms, tangled in other branches, and his big brown eyes looking out at you from all that tangled, up-side-down mess.
“Um,” you say. Um? UM? You probably should have said something a little more eloquent. Something comforting, maybe? But you definitely should not have said “um.”
“Justfuckinggetmeoutofthisfuckinghollybush!” He tries to move, but you probably should have told him not to do that, because it looks like it only hurts him more.
“How?” you want to ask. How do you reach in there, through all that prickly, pointy, nasty, mean holly and pull him out when you have just stupidly—so stupidly—told him that you love him and the only rational way he could find to respond was to FALL OFF A LADDER and land in said holly bush? HOW?
But because you are actively learning from your mistakes, you do not say everything that comes to mind. Instead, you take a step back and analyze the situation like the college-graduate you paid lots of money to become.
“Fuckfuckfuck,” comes streaming from inside the holly bush, mixed with grunts and groans and more swearing.
You reach into the bush and hand your flask to your best friend. If you can’t think of a way to get him out just yet, at least the whiskey will make him a bit more comfortable.
He grabs it from you and you hear metal swinging around metal as he unscrews the cap and he didn’t even say thank you.
HE DIDN’T EVEN SAY THANK YOU, the ungrateful sonofabitch. Maybe you WON’T help him out of there. Maybe you will just LEAVE him all tangled in pointy leaves and pokey branches because FUCK, you just confessed your love to him and he hasn’t said anything about whether or not he loves you, too. He probably should have said something already. AND he probably should have kissed you last month when you were drunk at Jared’s New Years party and it was midnight and you were standing there right in front of him in your silver sequin dress and everyone around you was leaning over and kissing each other but you two were just standing there frozen staring and he just hugged you instead. And you probably should have said something earlier and he probably should be in love with you. He should, because you KNOW him. You know that he likes hot peppers on his pizza and he gets nervous around ladies (but not you—he’s never been nervous around you) and you know that his favorite movie EVER is “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” and that he hasn’t read a whole book since he graduated college and that if he were stranded on a desert island with Nemo he would let himself starve to death so Nemo had something to eat and—STOP. Now you are starting to sound like a Best Friend Fan Club. Ew.
“Are you maybe gonna help me?” your best friend asks. The holly bush is shaking as he moves around, trying to un-stick himself, and you are still standing there frozen and drunk and pissed.
“No,” you say.
“What?” You hear him drop the flask, empty metal thudding on packed dirt and now you can see one of his eyes, wide and brown and looking right at you in disbelief.
“No,” you say again. “You can do it yourself.”
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