It’s probably better this way. I don’t know if I can stand to hear what she thinks of me.
I do know I won’t be able to stand it when she tells me she’s leaving for good. I know I’ll beg. Fuck, I can already see it, me on my knees at the door, pathetic and broken—
“Are you hungry?”
Her soft question is so unexpected I don’t answer for a second. She trails her fingertips up and down my forearm, waiting for me to respond.
“I . . . I could eat.”
“I saw you got some spaghetti from the store. How about if I make that?”
She’s just hungry. She’s going to make some food, then pack her bags and leave. Don’t get your fucking hopes up, idiot.
“That would be fine.” My voice is thick. I turn my face to her hair and inhale. She always smells so good. Fresh. Warm. Clean. I guess that’s because she’s all of those things.
How the fuck is she still here?
She makes a move to get up, but I pull her back against me so quickly I think I scare her a little bit. Her big blue eyes get even bigger, and don’t blink. I loosen my grip on her arms; the last thing I want is for her to be scared of me.
“I’d never hurt you.” Now my voice sounds like a growl, low and harsh in my throat.
“I know.”
She looks sincere, and a little confused. Maybe I didn’t scare her. Now that I think about it, she’s never been scared of me. Even at the beginning when I was such a gigantic, snarling prick, the kind of prick who makes armed police officers take an intimidated step back, she’s never been afraid.
Even after the story I told her.
I say abruptly, “You don’t have to cook for me.”
Her eyebrows draw together. She shakes her head, like I’m making no sense. “I know. I want to.”
My chest feels like there’s a thousand-pound weight on it. Jesus Christ, hope is fucking terrifying.
“And . . . you don’t have to stay with me now . . . I won’t try to stop you from leaving.”
I specifically don’t say I won’t beg. There will definitely be begging and pleading, but I won’t try to stop her. She’ll just have to listen to me crying like a goddamn infant while she walks out the door.
She touches my face. Her eyes are soft. “So you’d let me go, just like that? You think it’s fair to introduce me to the best pancakes on earth and then expect me to live without them?”
Do I hear a chiding tone in her voice? Is she . . . teasing me?
The faintest smile touches her lips. “You used to have such a good poker face, sweetie. And now look at you. You might as well have that Jumbotron from Times Square on your forehead.”
Everything inside me comes to a screeching, rubber-burning stop.
Sweetie. She just called me sweetie.
I can feel my face doing something strange. Watching it, Chloe’s eyes get even softer.
“Don’t get all mushy on me now, rock star, you’ve got a bad reputation to uphold. How are we going to keep convincing everyone you’re such a grouchy dick if you go around with that face from now on?”
I can barely speak, such is my burning, agonizing hope. “Which face is that?”
She leans in and kisses me softly on the mouth. “Your madly-in-love, glowingly happy, finally-sprung-from-hell face.” She purses her lips and looks at the top of my head. “We’ll have to do something about that black cloud that’s missing, too. Everyone’s going to wonder what’s happened to that.”
I grab her, roll her onto her back, and stare down at her. Hope and love and anguish and pain and a million different emotions bang around the inside of my chest, bursting inside my skull. “What are you saying? What are you telling me? Just say it!”
I’m panting and shaking. My face is hot. My throat is tight. I might be having a heart attack.
But my angel is calm as a buddha. She reaches up and cups my face. “I’m saying that I’m going to make us some spaghetti, A.J. Everything else you need to know I told you just a little while ago after you carried me in from the rain.”
It can’t be. I can’t be hearing this right. I whisper, “You said you belonged to me.”
When she nods, it feels like a light blinks on inside me. Somewhere in the blackest, loneliest pit of my soul, someone has flipped a switch, and there is light.
I’m staring down at that someone.
She’s staring back at me, and she’s smiling.
I swallow around the rock in my throat. “And you said . . . you said . . .”
“Hmm?” She gently pushes my hair off my face, calmly waiting for me to get my shit together and speak.
“You said you loved me.” It’s a gasp, like I’m out of air. Because I am out of air. I’m breathing underwater. None of this is real.
Chloe winds my hair around her wrist and uses it like a leash to pull me down, until my body is fully against hers. Her breasts are so soft against my chest. I want to bury my face between them.
Against my lips, she murmurs, “Not loved, A.J. Love. Present tense.”
She kisses me. That light inside me gets brighter and brighter. It gets so blindingly bright it blocks out everything else, even the clock in my head that’s been steadily ticking down to zero all along, and still is.
We make love again. A.J. handles me like I’m made of the most fragile porcelain: breakable, irreplaceable, and rare. All his walls have crumbled, all his defenses are stripped bare. He’s totally open to me, vulnerable and emotional, and the feelings I see in his eyes as he gently thrusts into me are blowing my mind.
He looks at me like I’m a miracle. Like I’m his savior. But it’s really he who’s saved me.
Every breath I’ve ever taken has been leading me to this.
We spend the rest of the afternoon talking. I make the spaghetti, we eat it in bed, sitting cross-legged on the mattress, and then talk far into the night.
He tells me about the train he took from Saint Petersburg to the Netherlands, two days of rocking cars and clattering tracks and nightmares so bad he’d wake screaming. From Rotterdam he took a cruise ship to New York—on the train, he’d stolen the passport of a man who looked like him—and arrived in the US with the cash he’d saved from his fights, rolled in fist-sized wads wrapped with a rubber band, stuffed inside a backpack. He lived for a while in a youth hostel, whose manager was a drummer in a local band. When the manager was killed crossing the street by a taxi driver, A.J. asked his widow if he could buy the drum set. She gave it to him with a “good riddance,” convinced the drums had brought her husband nothing but bad luck.
“A toy drum was the last thing my mother ever gave me,” A.J. says, staring out the windows at the midnight sky. It’s clear now; the rain clouds have disappeared, and the sky twinkles with stars. “I loved the sound it made, the harshness of it. The colors it made when I banged on it were so raw. Is it the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ that goes, ‘And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air’?”
I nod.
“Its colors were like that. And the kit I got from the hostel manager’s widow was the same, all angry and brassy and loud. I loved it. I’d thrash on those drums all night sometimes.” He laughs. “And nobody ever had the balls to tell me to stop.”
“Why New York?”
He looks at me. He’s lying on his back with his arms under his head, his feet crossed at the ankles. I’m sitting up beside him with my arms wrapped around my knees, listening raptly to every word.
“Sayori once told me there are only two cities in the world where a person can really disappear. Where someone can go and become anyone else he wants to be, arrive invisible and stay that way, no matter how long he lives there. New York and Las Vegas.” He looks out the windows again. “At least New York has a soul. It’s a tough soul, pretty unforgiving, but it has one. Vegas is where souls go to die. It’s a fucking graveyard of souls, that city.”
I remember all those “facts” I read about him on Wikipedia. “So all that stuff about you on the
internet, your bio and everything, that’s all made up.”
He glances at me, amusement in his eyes. “You Googled me?”
I blush. “Don’t judge. I had to know who I was dealing with. The internet’s the best place to start.”
“The internet’s full of shit,” he says, holding my gaze.
He has a point. Perfect example: anyone with a computer can edit a Wikipedia entry. For many pages, you don’t even need a user account to do it.
He reaches out and grasps my ankle, as if he just needs to be touching me somewhere, and continues to talk. “I was in New York for less than a year. The winter reminded me too much of Saint Petersburg, that fucking merciless cold that ices your bones. So I moved to sunny, soulless Vegas. Pretty soon after, I ran out of money. I couldn’t get a real job because I didn’t have a Social Security card, plus I was paranoid about anyone finding out about my past, so I washed dishes at a restaurant for cash under the table, then got a job as a bouncer at a strip club. That paid a lot better than dish washing. I was sixteen, but I was big, and rough-looking, and could get away with saying I was anywhere from twenty-one to twenty-five.”
As he speaks, he rubs his thumb absentmindedly over my anklebone. I find it comforting.
“Then one night I got into a fight. In Saint Petersburg, we fought with our fists, sometimes with knives, but the hardware was usually only if you were in a gang. And there were rarely guns. They were just too expensive. But in Vegas, everybody had money. And guns were cheap. So everybody had a gun.”
He lifts his arm and shows me a tattoo on the side of his ribs. Faith is being sure of what we hope for, and certain of what we do not see.
“Is that scripture?”
He nods. “Hebrews. You see the three scars, inside the F in faith?”
There’s a trio of almost identical puckered scars, lighter in color than the surrounding skin, inside the wide flourish of the first letter where the tattoo starts.
“I was shot three times that night. Never even had a chance to throw a punch. Some dirtbag with a Glock semiauto who was high on coke didn’t like it that I told him not to touch the girls. He left me flat on my back on the sidewalk, bleeding out. I was sure I was going to die.
“But I woke up in the hospital after surgery with some guy in a cardigan holding a Bible sitting in a chair next to my bed. I have no fucking idea where he came from, he was just there. When I looked at him, he said that line from scripture. I called him a name and threatened to rip off his head. He smiled at me and said he’d been told I was coming, and he was glad I was finally there. I thought he was a complete lunatic. Then his wife shows up, all Mrs. Ingalls in Little House on The Prairie—”
“You watched that show, too?” I find it impossible to imagine.
He says solemnly, “There’s a lot of waiting around in brothels, angel. You watch a lot of TV.”
“American TV?”
“You ever watch socialist TV?”
“No.”
“Neither did we. Watching paint dry would be time better spent. And even in the slums we had this thing called satellite.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Anyway, his wife. She’s as batshit as he is, at least that’s what I think. At first. I’m in the hospital for two weeks, recovering, and every day these two crazy fuckers show up with homemade muffins and brownies and a shit ton of talk about the Lord and his plans for me, and I’m convinced they’re trying to recruit me for a cult.”
I’m hooked. “So what happened?”
“So when I was well enough to leave the hospital, they asked me to come and live with them.”
“And did you?”
He snorts. “No. I went right back to my old life, working as a bouncer. But every fucking night at some point during my shift, this crazy pastor would show up, smiling like he’s got some freaky secret, talking about the Lord. I can’t tell you how many times I threatened to kick his ass just to get him to shut the fuck up.”
“But eventually you moved in with them.”
He nods, smiling faintly. “I think I did it just to get him off my back. Like, ‘Here I am, you got your wish, sucks to be you, motherfucker,’ but somehow . . . it worked out. They were actually just nice. I never woke up in the middle of the night with his dick up my ass like I was expecting.”
I can’t help it; I laugh. I drop my head to my knees and dissolve into laughter. A.J. laughs along with me.
“I know, right? Insane. Even more insane was how they encouraged me to play drums, take music lessons, join a band, read books . . . those people were ridiculously supportive. They only wanted the best for me. They were proud of me; they told everyone I was their son who’d been away on a mission.”
“And no one questioned your sudden appearance? This unknown sixteen-year-old son shows up out of the blue and it’s business as usual?”
He gives me a look. “You ever spend much time around really religious folks, Chloe?”
I shake my head. “My family’s Protestant. That’s about as non-religious as you can get without being atheist.”
“Yeah, well, it’s called faith for a reason. Total suspension of disbelief is pretty much the only requirement. Matthew’s congregation was small, but they were super-religious. In other words, they were all allergic to anything that resembled logic. He said I was their son, and it might as well have been carved on a stone tablet for all the questions those people didn’t ask. Plus my chromesthesia helped; they thought I was gifted, specially blessed by God. I got the feeling more than once that people were expecting me to walk on water, or turn a fish and a loaf of bread into Sunday brunch.
“Anyway, after I moved in with them, they set me up with all the right paperwork: birth certificate, Social Security card, everything. So Alexei Janic, fatherless bastard of a Russian whore, became Alex James, beloved son of an American pastor and his wife.”
“What about that whole not bearing false witness thing? How could a pastor not have a problem with lying?”
A.J. smiles. “Funny thing about the Bible; people glean from it what they need to hear. Maybe that’s its whole reason for existence. For Matthew and Marjorie, lying about who I was didn’t technically count because it didn’t hurt anyone, and because God Himself had told them to take care of me. The faith thing again. They basically got a holy hall pass.”
“Wow.” I stare again at the scripture tattoo. Then I look at all the other tattoos on his chest, abdomen, and arms, and feel overwhelmed by the weight of the stories that I sense behind them.
“I never shared any of their religious convictions, because I thought if God did exist, he was a serious fucking douche bag with a crap sense of humor who in no way deserved to be worshipped by anyone, but it got to the point where I respected their beliefs. So when they died, I got the tattoo in honor of them. Because of all they’d done for me; it was the least I could do in remembrance.”
“What happened to them?”
He sighs. “The stupidest thing in the world: carbon monoxide poisoning. They had an ancient propane space heater in their bedroom that leaked, filled up the room with gas one night. That was it.”
I reach out and take his hand. As I thread my fingers through his, he watches with a strange, dreamy expression on his face, almost as if he can’t believe what he’s seeing. His eyes flash up to meet mine. His dreamy gaze turns melancholy.
“Death follows me, Chloe,” he murmurs. “It’s always been all around me, ever since I was born. It’s a part of me. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t want to get close to you. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to you. I didn’t want to stain you with my bad luck.”
I unfold my legs and stretch out beside him, snuggling tight against his warm solidity. “Now who’s not being logical?”
He wraps both arms around me and squeezes me tight. “It has nothing to do with logic. Bad luck is a real thing. Just ask any gambler.”
“You’re just looking at it all wrong.”
He lifts his head and s
tares at me, brows raised.
“How many of your friends made it out of Saint Petersburg alive?”
His eyes darken.
“And what if you hadn’t been big? When you were six years old, if you couldn’t fight, what would’ve happened to you?”
His eyes get darker and darker.
“Exactly. And how many orphan slum boys are taught to read and to appreciate music and art by a kind, intelligent stranger? And if you weren’t there to help Sayori at the end, what would’ve happened to her?”
He’s perfectly still and silent, his normally bright amber eyes the color of dusk.
“So then you emigrate to a foreign country with a stolen passport—without getting caught for theft, or followed by any authorities who might be interested in the arson of a local house of ill repute—and find a place to live. You’re not murdered in your sleep. You’re not mugged by a gang of thugs. Even after all you’ve seen and experienced, you don’t develop a life-threatening drug addiction. You do inherit a drum kit—”
“From a dead man.”
“And no one around you tells you to stop playing, even though, as you said, you ‘thrash’ on it. From what I know of New Yorkers, they aren’t exactly shy about speaking their minds.”
He looks as if he’s considering what I’m saying. His brows have lowered, and drawn together.
“From there you move to another city, and just as your money runs out, you meet a man who thinks God has sent you to him.”
“Because he was insane. And I was shot, remember?”
“Yes, and when you wake up after being shot, there’s a pastor sitting in a chair beside your bed who’s convinced you’re a gift from the heavens above. And he and his wife adopt you, and furnish you with a loving home and all the necessary documentation to cover your past. I mean, really A.J., that’s a movie-of-the-week special right there.”
“They died,” he says flatly.
“As everyone does eventually,” I respond, my voice very soft. “And through no fault of your own. Wouldn’t they have had that space heater on in their room, even if you weren’t living with them?”
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