by Maria Vale
Then she relaxes against my teeth, and all I can do is hold on, keeping her in that tight balance between pleasure and pain. She shudders as my fingers explore, making sure she’s ready for me. And then big and heavy and hard and near breaking, I take her.
Shattered, I watch Thea fall asleep, watch her kick off the blankets in this overheated apartment, leaving just a corner of the sheet covering her waist. On her side, her legs drawn up, revealing the seam of her body, which seems so inexcusably strong and terrifyingly vulnerable.
Is that what love is for humans? Is that where it lives? At the juncture of strength and vulnerability? Wolves don’t think that way. We join strength to strength. We have no room for weakness.
But here—I lie down next to Thea, my chest tight against her back, my thighs around hers, my arm over her waist and bent up across her torso—I understand that there is enormous strength in vulnerability.
When Thea wakes up, I am still watching her, my head propped on my crooked elbow. She smiles at me, and I know I have lost all hand.
Chapter 21
I use unscented shaving foam made “for sensitive skin,” not because my skin is sensitive, but because I have enough trouble with skeptical wolves without coming home stinking of amber and oud.
“I hope you’re hungry?”
“Starving,” she calls back from the bedroom. “What do you have?”
I lift my chin and stare down my nose, carefully pulling the razor along my neck. The rough glide of the blade against my stubble echoes the sound of her legs sliding into her jeans.
“Three-day-old falafel, a bottle of vodka, and a reservation at a place a few blocks from here.”
The door is angled so that I can shave and still watch her in the full-length mirror. Watch the soft fold at her belly as she bends over for her bra. Watch the way she gently cups her hand under her breast before nicking the bra closed.
Watch the way she threads her arms through her black sweater, pulling it over her head. She slips her hand under the hair trapped in her turtleneck and picks up the frame from my bedside table.
I stick my head out from my bathroom, my mouth full of mint. She pushes her hair behind her ear, looking at the picture of the 9th.
“You look very happy here.”
I rinse and spit. I join her, wiping my face with the towel. I don’t say anything until I’m sure that my voice won’t catch. “That was taken at home. I mean, my old home. I was very happy. And I am. Here. Very happy.”
She looks at me oddly. “If you say so.”
“Of course I am.” Grateful for the change of subject, my eyes light on the wrinkled, heavy-stock invitation with the embossed black snowflake that Janine threw at me before she stomped off. “Hey, do you want to go to a party on the twenty-fifth?”
“No.”
“Maybe you want to find out what it is before you say no?”
“Can I wear what I’m wearing?”
“Hmm, it’s black tie. But I’d—”
“Will it have lots of people?”
“It is a party.”
“Will there be lots of chatting?”
“Ditto.”
“Networking?”
“Ditto.”
“Posturing?”
“God, yes.”
She swipes her lips with something that makes them look soft and slightly ruddy.
“Now I know what it is,” she says, “and oddly, the answer is still no.” Then she kisses me with a mouth that smells like cherries.
• • •
I have second thoughts about my reservations the moment I come through the revolving doors at CU. It’s supposed to be cute, like See You? but also CU like the copper that lines everything from the beaten sconces and pendant lights to the mottled copper bar top to the dining-room chairs, sharp and folded like mean-spirited origami.
This was all explained to me by Alia, the maître d’, who I’d cultivated from an earlier trending, now-failed restaurant, Faux, which itself was a play on pho, the chef’s signature dish.
One has to know these things to stay ahead of the game.
Thea refuses to relinquish her coat or her backpack, which the coat-check girl takes as either a personal slight or at very least a sign of cheapness. When I hand her my own coat, I include twenty dollars as an initial goodwill gesture.
Thea drapes her pack over the back of her chair and spreads her coat over the front, sitting on it. It gives her some slight reprieve, I suppose, from the mean origami, but also detracts from the clean line.
The waiter stands at attention, the smile hardening on his face as she orders salad and soup and a beer from Brooklyn.
I lean over, my hand on hers. “My treat. Order whatever you want.”
“I did,” she says.
The unhappy waiter suggests the venison noisette.
“No, thanks.”
The yarn at the left shoulder of her turtleneck is pilling.
I order the oysters with bottarga and coffee oil. Venison noisette with quince au jus and a side of purple potato chips with burgundy truffle. I don’t want any of it. What I do want is for the waiter to stop the disapproving tick-tick-ticking of his pencil on the order pad.
I order a bottle of Achaval Ferrerra Finca Altamira.
Thea says a few words to the busboy in Spanish. He brightens and smiles sweetly. Despite the venison and wine, the waiter continues to make his disdain clear, but I have never been so generously supplied with water and clean cutlery.
She won’t try my venison because she doesn’t eat meat. She does not, of course, understand the riotous irony that she—a human—isn’t eating carrion while I am. She swipes her bread through the remains of her soup.
This really was a mistake, I think as the coffee appears. CU is a place in the neighborhood, but not really a neighborhood place.
“Sorensson, is that you?” calls a hopped-up voice behind me.
“Dean.” I smile tightly, readjusting my cuffs, my fingers checking the platinum links on both. I don’t feel like dealing with Dean Latham (international commerce, Sarnath & Keene) right now.
But I have no choice. He’s right here, sniffing around, taking Thea in. Her face, her hair, her pilling sweater, her mud-spattered boots, her anorak and worn backpack absolutely ruining the spare grace of the chair.
“Thea Villalobos,” she says, extending her hand when it becomes clear that I’m not making any introductions.
When she smiles, the copper-tinted lights overhead pick out the fine lines at the corners of her eyes.
“Dean Latham. The pleasure,” he says, smiling a smile that tells me he’s seen everything, “is all mine.”
I can almost hear what he’s going to say to the boys at Sarnath & Keene. Guess who I saw at CU? Elijah Sorensson. Not a client, a woman. Let’s just say his standards are slipping.
It’s like Pack. Always looking at the higher ranks to see if they’re getting sloppy or slack or stupid, and it might be the right time to take them down.
“We should make a squash time,” he says, finally dragging his eyes back to me.
Thea puts her hand on my hand, whispering that she’ll be right back.
I swish the thin, tan foam of the coffee around in my copper-glazed cup. I’m going to have to purge soon, get rid of all the alcohol and carrion before it gets into my system and makes the Pack shy away from me.
Dean watches Thea walk away. Then he turns back to me.
“So…squash?”
I hate squash. Dean loves it because he is a thin man with long arms and a small turn radius and doesn’t have so far to go to get the damn ball when it bobbles along the floor. He knows he will win. But I have to deal with him on the Jaxed contract, so we set up a date for two weeks from Tuesday.
“I presume I’ll be seeing you at L-Cubed?”
&nb
sp; “Of course.”
“With…” He nods to Thea’s empty chair, his eyebrows up and inquisitive.
“With her? Nooo.” I hear a disdainful voice that can’t be mine but is say, “She’s just a friend.”
And, of course, because fate won’t let me get away with being a shit in private, I smell the fragrance of cold earth and loam, and Thea’s soft cheek slides next to mine, and her whispered voice cuts sharply through all the babble in the restaurant.
“You did what you needed to, Elijah. Trust me to take care of myself.”
As she picks up her coat and her backpack from her chair and heads toward the door, my mind slows, as if it’s just along for the ride and has no responsibility for the mess it’s gotten me into. The only thing it seems to notice is that once again, one leg of her jeans is stuck in her mud-spattered boot.
The revolving door turns, and when a laughing group comes in, I don’t see her anymore.
My hand slides along the cheek where she touched me.
“Hmm,” someone says with a derisive snort. “Not sure she knew she was just a friend.”
Who are you?
Blood starts to rush back into my brain, and I jump up, the origami chair skidding like shrapnel across the floor. I push Dean out of my way.
The coat-check girl blocks the door. Trying to be helpful, she doesn’t toss me my overcoat as she would to a normal patron. Because I am a Big Swinging Dick, she holds it up, fitting one sleeve over the hand outstretched for the revolving door. I keep pushing through, and the rest of my coat trailing behind me jams the edge, trapping me in a glass cage.
Then, with one furious push, I shred the coat and break the hinges.
“THEA!”
I don’t see her anywhere.
Pushing the door backward and breaking it again, I scream at the blank faces around me, begging them to tell me where the woman I was with went. The coat-check girl shakes her head frantically, holding out the tattered, filth-stained half of my coat from the floor.
Unthinking, I shrug out of the other half and hand it to her.
The little humans are all pressed against the copper cladding like paper silhouettes. Alia looks at me apprehensively; the manager hides behind her, his phone at the ready.
“Mr. Sorensson?” Alia asks, plucking at my sleeve. “Is there anything we can do to help?”
I turn on her, and she flinches. But then I do what I always do when dealing with humans: I fumble for my wallet. “Put the cost of repairs on that when they come in.” I hand Alia the black card with the subtle platinum writing. “And dinner, of course.”
“Mr. Sorensson, thank you. But your friend already paid and left a generous 15 percent tip.”
How human. To say “a generous 15 percent tip” when you mean exactly the opposite. When you mean that in a place like this, 15 percent is an insult. That 15 percent might fly at, say, Applebee’s, but not here.
“Then put an additional three hundred on and distribute it however you see fit. And I can’t tell you how sorry I am…for everything.”
Leaning out the broken door, I search for the tall woman with the hair streaming down her back like flames.
“Excuse me?” Alia stands at my elbow with my card in one hand and a copper-clad tablet awaiting my signature in the other. I scribble an approximation of my mark with my finger.
“Thank you, Mr. Sorensson.” Alia leans against me, her tight breast against the back of my hand. “We’re always happy to see you here. You’ve always been one of my personal…”
I head outside to wait for the HST car service and call Thea, but it goes directly to her voicemail. “You have reached Thea Villalobos’s personal number. If this is an emergency, please call…”
It is a fucking emergency. I need to tell you something. You were open to me, vulnerable, and I betrayed you. But how…how do I explain to the only person I care about in the chaos of Offland that I said what I said because, for one stupid minute, I was worried about what Dean Latham, international commerce at Sarnath & Keene, thought about the pilling at the shoulder of your turtleneck?
I lean over the gutter, fighting the need to purge.
The driver waited patiently as I ran coatless through the cold, first to Penn Station. Port Authority. Grand Central. The place near Javits where the blue buses gather.
Then my big Pack-size hands tremble and hit those tiny human-size buttons. With a sound like a breath exhaled, the message is sent into the ether.
Please, Thea.
Leaning forward to the front seat, I ask the driver how much time he has.
“Excuse me?”
“Do you have someone waiting for you at home? Another pickup?”
“Not if you book me.”
“Then go north on 87 until I tell you to turn.”
The driver dials someone and starts talking. Because it’s not in a language I understand, I don’t know if it’s his wife, his child, or his dispatcher.
Twice a month, every month, I have driven through the Bronx and Yonkers, rattling along next to the concrete barrier, lulled by the seams of the road. Past sound walls and billboards and retail centers and office complexes. I do it again now, listening but not watching.
Why didn’t I just say No, I’m not going with Thea because she turned me down?
Or No, I’m not going with Thea because she recognizes this shiny shit show for what it is?
Or just simply No?
But instead, I had to say With her? Nooo, lengthening the o like I was offended by the suggestion. She’s just a friend.
The phone buzzes against my sternum.
“Thea? Thank God. I’ll be there in two hours. I need to explain—”
“Sorry, Sorensson. I was calling about that squash game. It turns out I—”
Without a word, I hang up on Dean Latham (international commerce, Sarnath & Keene) and text Thea again to tell her I’m on my way to the cabin.
I stare out the window.
She never comes. I sit there for three hours in the damn car, but she never comes.
The phone in my hand slumps heavily onto my lap.
“You can head back.”
The driver takes out his earbuds. “Excuse me?”
“You can turn around. I’m not going anywhere.”
When we drive past CU, the door has already been repaired, though there is some blue tape at the top of the glass. The last of the clients are leaving. Men in suits hold the side door open for women in high heels with red lacquered soles and lacquered nails and lacquered faces.
At the apartment, I open up the medicine chest, taking out the bottle of ipecac. I lean my head back, gulp down a big swig, and wait.
A few minutes later, my stomach starts to rumble, and I lurch over to the toilet, vomiting up nothing but a foamy, pale-yellow liquid.
It’s too late.
The carrion is part of me now.
Chapter 22
Hāmweard, ðu londadl hǽðstapa, in 18 days
Homeward, you landsick heath-wanderer, in 18 days
“You’ve got to pull yourself together, Elijah,” Max hisses, carefully patting the wisps of hair to cover his bald spot. “Jesus. This whole evening, you’ve just been sitting there like you don’t care.”
He shakes his hand, and one furtive strand makes a bid for freedom and falls to the floor of the steel-clad bathroom of the trending midtown branch of Roan.
He’s right. I don’t care. I didn’t want to be here. I brought the plastics industry to HST. I came up with their new branding: Americans for Progressive Packaging. I should not have to be here for this. I don’t care that they like me and admire me. This is like watching sausage being made, and I don’t have the stomach for it.
I don’t want to watch HST’s lobbying arm decide where to place advertising. How to distribute campaign
contributions. Which laws to block and how to slip their agenda through local and national legislatures like a virus. Which nonprofits might give APP moral credibility in return for cold, hard cash.
It’s all so that no one will question the extravagantly disposable status quo.
The Pack would be appalled if they knew I’d had anything to do with this.
Shoving the cuff links into my jacket, I hang my jacket over a coat hook and roll up my shirtsleeves.
“Well, Elijah?” he snaps. “Do I have to remind you who these people are?”
“No, I know perfectly well.” I put my hand on the latch to the stall. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to vomit.”
• • •
I’ve lost all hand in my frantic attempts to contact Thea. She’s put me on her call block list.
In the dull light of the taxi, I lift my chin, checking what is left of my injuries. We heal quickly, and the swelling is gone—the bruising too—and as I move my face from side to side, all that’s left of the hole made by Tiberius’s canine is a slight indentation below the inner corner of my eye. The cab stops and I untangle my legs, dropping my feet heavily to the street in front of Testa’s dark-green door.
On second thought, I adjust my tie, loosening it so that I look more like a busy, serious man taking some well-deserved time off, rather than a desperate, lonely wolf, trying to pretend that the only woman who has ever mattered to him doesn’t matter anymore.
“Excuse me?” A woman looks at my hand on the knob. She turns her head up and to the side, as women often do when they’re about to take a selfie. She is perfectly beautiful. Brown hair dyed with reddish-purple stripes curls in layers around an oval face of fine symmetry. She has a tight ass that yields almost indistinguishably into her finely chiseled waist before finally conceding to a slight curve at her pert breasts. “Will you be my escort?” She looks at me from under her lowered lids. Then she bites her lower lip.
I try to imagine taking her to the hotel and closing my eyes and feeling her hands roam across my skin, loving my body. Her ironwood eyes not coy or dissembling, just fierce and joyous. Her long, black hair creating a cocoon of silence that only ends when she makes that sound deep in her chest, a sound that tears through me with something between ecstasy and despair. And when our bodies finally unwind, my soul is left twined around hers like ivy around an oak as she lies next to me, her hand on my gentled cock, and lets me breathe in the smell of cold earth.