“Yes,” Daisy said. “About two weeks before, James showed up at our apartment. In the middle of the night. Lucky saw him out in the backyard, staring up at the bedroom windows.”
“What did he want?”
“He wanted Will.” Daisy spread her hands. “You know I… I keep forgetting he was as young as us. I don’t know why my memory sometimes makes him much older than he was. He was twenty-one. He was Erik’s age. Just a kid who was in love.”
“Did Will go down and talk to him?”
“No. Erik did.”
“He wasn’t afraid?”
“Afraid? No…” Her voice trembled. Cold swept her limbs. “Nobody thought James was dangerous. Damaged, yes. Needy. An attention addict. But not a vengeful murderer. And not suicidal. Erik came back upstairs after a while and didn’t seem concerned for James’s safety. I asked what they’d talked about and he said he’d mostly listened. Tried to validate James’s feelings and get him back to a safe place for the night. He said, ‘Everything’s all right, Dais. Go back to sleep.’
“I remember curling up against his back and drifting off. Feeling so safe with him. Thinking about how he made everyone feel safe. And feeling a pride in him I’d never felt before. Proud of who he was and proud to be his. He was so good. He saw the best in people. He was pissed at James but something in his heart made him go down and talk to him anyway. What does that say?”
“That he had a big heart,” Rita said. “Where I come from, we’d call him a mensch.”
“But the next morning, they found James in the bathroom of his dorm. He’d overdosed on some pills his roommate had. They rushed him to the hospital. He survived. His parents came and got him, took him home to Pittsburgh. And it was the last we saw of him. Until April nineteenth.”
“Are you ready to tell me?” Rita said. “What happened that day?”
Daisy took a deep breath. “It started the night before…”
ERIK CAME HOME LATE from the shop. Finally the damn sets for Who Cares? were done and he was tired, stressed and so horny he couldn’t see straight.
“Say goodnight,” he said, as he pulled Daisy off the couch and slung her over his shoulder like a caveman.
“Goodnight,” she called to Will and Lucky. “Pray for me.”
“We got rehearsal tomorrow, Fish,” Will said. “Bring her back in one piece.”
“And if you can’t,” Lucky said, “bring back all the pieces.”
“You may want to leave,” Erik said from the stairs. “This could get loud.”
He kicked the bedroom door shut and pushed Daisy up against, it, kissing her with blunt, unapologetic greed.
She never loved him more than when he was like this. Always when he was in one of his moods, the air around him seemed to shimmer and press. If he wanted to make love, he put out a shining, warm aura, like twinkling starlight. But on a night like tonight, after long hours of working and keeping David focused and sweating a deadline, he was an impatient porcupine of need. His bristling, edgy mood piercing through his skin.
“Want you so bad,” he whispered with a shaking mouth, his voice caught tight in his throat. She pulled his shirt off, threw it aside. He was working out all the time that semester and his body was spectacular. Ripped and lean and sexy. His hands unbuckled and unzipped and he burst out of his pants, rock hard, worked up and dying for her.
“Jesus,” she said, closing him up in her fist.
“Tell me about it,” he said against her neck. “All goddamn day I’ve been hard for you.”
Her life was defined by the total and complete control she had over her body but that night she gave it over to him. Gave up as he turned her away from him, took her hands and put them flat on the bed. From behind he yanked her jeans open and pulled them down, like she was a bad girl who needed to bend over and be spanked. At the corner of the mattress, her jeans around her knees, he held her by the hips and groaned hard as he buried himself in her.
The noise she made that night. She who was usually rendered mute at the pinnacle of pleasure. Tonight she reversed her own polarity, opened her throat and let her voice turn itself inside-out. She spread her legs against the bind of her jeans, arched her back into his thrusts. Matched him moan for moan, sigh for sigh until she burrowed her face deep in the pillows and yelled her head off, not caring if Will and Lucky heard, not caring if the neighborhood heard.
“You feel so good,” he said into her hair. He curled over her and got his hand around her hip, down between her legs and started rubbing her. Rubbing it out of her.
“So tight and hot on my cock,” he said. “You have no idea…”
Her chest twisted around his words as his fingers locked in. She threw her head back and came, hard enough to make her vision double. And then came again. One orgasm linking to another. A chain of them. She couldn’t breathe. Her being teetered on the edge of unbeing. Her sanity dripped through her fingers like sand. She almost made him stop, almost reached out to take back the precious control of herself. But instead she put her trust into his hands, put her own hands behind her and let go.
Erik clasped her wrists, crossed them in the small of her back, pulled them up tight—not enough to hurt, but enough to hold her down. Enough torque on her shoulders to hold her still, hold her where he wanted her. He moved slowly, letting her feel every inch of him.
“Give it to me,” she said, breath hitching in her chest.
“You like that?” His voice curled around the dark and squeezed hard.
“I want it,” she said, somewhere beyond herself. “All night long. The rest of my life just keep… God, you fuck me so good.”
Fuck was a piece of candy in her mouth. A hot cinnamon fireball on her tongue, almost too intense to bear. She had to pull in air to cool it.
“You fuck me so good,” she said again, sucking on the night, feeling layers dissolve away, sugar under fire.
Over and over he slid into her, his strong quads battering her hamstrings. She writhed and came. Her body strained with wanting even as her hands stayed relaxed and open through the grip on her wrists. Both bound and free within his embrace.
“You’re beautiful,” he said.
“I’m so in love with you,” she said, lips moving weakly in the damp sheets by her mouth. “I’m so in love…”
He stopped. His fingers melted from her wrists and slid up her arms as he gently pulled out of her.
“Erik.”
“Shh…” He gathered her up against his body, letting her catch her breath. His chest hair soft on her back, his mouth running a tender line from her jaw to her shoulder.
“This,” he whispered. “All I want. The rest of my life, I just wanna make you come like this…”
She turned to liquid in his arms as he smoothed her hair, tilted her chin and kissed her. She could taste cinnamon and knew he was being pulled by a different gravity too. Orbiting a different dimension of his sexuality.
He helped her out of her shirt and bra, steadied her as she kicked her trembling legs free of her jeans. Her fingers pulled at her earrings and bracelets and rings. She wanted nothing between her body and his. She could feel his heart thudding against her back.
Me, it seemed to say. Only me. Only I see you this way. Hear and touch you this way. Fuck you this way.
“Erik.” She closed her mouth around his name, pressed it tight to the roof of her mouth.
“All right?” he said, his hands gliding over her naked skin.
She nodded, her mouth against his, her thoughts rolling and folding like a lazy syrup. I love you and only you and you have everything and nobody but you for me and you and I…
“More?”
“Please.” And she bent over for him again, put her hands behind her back and begged. More. More. An itch no amount of scratching could relieve. It was the scratching itself she craved.
An hour later, when they were sprawled in the sheets, slick with sweat and teetering on the edge of consciousness, Erik put her hand against his face,
his swollen candy mouth breathing into her palm.
“I love nobody and nothing,” he said, “the way I love you.”
“WHY DO YOU SAY it started then?” Rita asked
“Because the next day at rehearsal,” Daisy said. “I was…” Her face seized up, twisting with some unnamable emotion, wringing tears from her eyes and nose. “I was…”
“Stay with me, Daisy,” Rita said. “You’re safe here.”
“I was sitting on Erik’s lap in the lighting booth. We were talking about the night before. Laughing at ourselves. At how incredible it had been to fuck like that. Complete openness, complete trust to do anything and say anything. To show the sides of ourselves that were raw and…”
She stared, mouth parted in memory. Warm wet on her face and she touched it with her tongue, looking for cinnamon but finding only salt.
“To love like that,” she said. “Maybe you’re thinking, So what, you got spectacularly laid one night, big deal. But it was more. He and I were so attuned. It wasn’t two halves becoming a whole. It was two wholes becoming a greater thing. Erik called it a cathedral. It was like a giant structure we were continually building together.”
“You were in love,” Rita said. “And a love affair is never a finished thing.”
“No, it’s not. I think that night I finally understood what it meant. And the next day, in the lighting booth…”
“Tell me.”
“I wasn’t finished. I was joking with him about ditching rehearsal and going back to bed. Joking but not joking… I wanted him.”
“And then?”
A stab of anxiety pierced her chest. A wave of heat slid up her neck and reached sinister hands around her cheeks. Clapped invisible fingers over her mouth even as the bile rose up in the back of her throat.
“Oh, God,” she said, her voice nothing but an airless hiss.
Rita leaned forward a little. “Tell me what’s happening.”
“I don’t know…” She sucked air through her nose, fought the urge to flee the office and go running into the street. Her fingers clenched, desperate for a sharp edge to cut it out of her.
“What happened in the booth?” Rita aid.
“I can’t do this,” Daisy said, half-rising off the couch.
“Listen to my voice.” Rita leaned further into the space between their chairs, elbows on knees, hands clasped. “Stay with me, Daisy. You’re here with me and you are safe.”
Daisy sat back as the panic intensified. She’d never known such terror. Her heart strained and squealed, hammering fists against the wall of her chest. She had to get out or she was going to die here. Her feet beat against the floor, like a child having a tantrum. “I hate this,” she said through her teeth. “I hate it, I want to run, I want to cut it out of me.”
“I know. You are pure fight or flight right now. But listen to me, because you have a third option. You can stay still. Not flee. Not fight. Just stay here and let it come to you.”
“I can’t.”
“You can. You can let it come to you and go through you. Relax your jaw. Let go your hands. I’m right here with you, Daisy. Tell me as it happens.”
“I feel like I’m dying.”
“You are living right now. Don’t pull back away from it. Just hold still and live.”
Hold still, Daisy thought. I can do that. I’m good at that.
“That’s it,” Rita said. “Let it sit right in your lap. Bring it on. Deep breath. Let it come. Breathe and come out the other side.”
Daisy breathed, counting inhales and exhales. Calmness put a hand on her shoulder. Then yanked it away and the bottom of her stomach dropped out.
“Fuck, I hate this,” she said, torquing and twisting again. “I hate feeling like this.”
“I know but trust me, if you don’t fight it, if you let it come to you, it will leave faster. Deep breath now. Let it out.”
Daisy was starting to shiver. “My skin hurts.” Her teeth chattered so hard she could barely get the words through them. “It’s like nauseous in my head.”
“That’s it,” Rita said. “Tell me as it happens. Narrate it. You’re doing great.”
In spite of the violent trembling, a single wretched chuckle escaped. “You’re always praising my worst moments.”
“Who’s to say they’re not your finest moments?”
“I feel so stupid.”
“Then feel stupid. Feel afraid. Feel whatever you w—“
“I feel like such shit. I want this to stop.”
“And it is. It’s stopping. Every second you get through is a second closer to stopping. You’re going through it and you will come out the other side.”
“Promise?” Daisy said, the P catching between her shaking lips.
“I promise,” Rita said, and in two words she blew a bubble, a protective force field around the small office, enclosing Daisy in trust.
“I’m so scared,” Daisy said, putting the words inside the sphere.
“Then be scared and keep telling me about the day.”
“I can’t.”
“You’re going to feel like shit whether you tell me or not, Daisy. You may as well let it out, throw it on the pile.”
Her head teetered back and forth on her neck. “I can’t remember.”
“Try.”
Half a laugh mixed with half a sob. “You’re so mean to me.”
“I know, and you pay me to be. Drink some water.”
Teeth still clattering in her jaw, Daisy took a sloppy sip from her bottle. Her stomach agreed to keep it and even allowed another.
“You were in the booth with Erik,” Rita said. “Is it truly the last thing you remember?”
Daisy exhaled roughly and closed her eyes. “Marie called me to run ‘The Man I Love’ with Will,” she said, following the last thread of memory, a ball of yarn down to a few final loops.
“I left the booth. I walked down the aisle. And I turned back to wave at Erik. I remember looking back and wanting him more than I wanted to dance. God, I wanted him so bad.”
Despite anxiety’s relentless chokehold, she was deep in another moment now. A ribbon of remembered pleasure weaving through the angst. Her heart blazing with joy. Her belly filled with heat. Secure in her love and her talent and her passion. Her life bursting with accomplishment and contentment. Erik slowly shaking his head and smiling on the other side of the window.
“He was so beautiful right then,” she said. “And he was mine.”
Gorgeous, sexy and hers. Hers. His smile and his body and his love—ardent, raw, passionate or savage, all of it was hers. Through the glass she saw him coiled up with hot longing and not even trying to hide it. Chin on the heel of his hand, a thousand promises in his expression: Tonight, when I get you alone, I’m gonna make you forget your name.
“And then?” Rita said.
Daisy tried to rise above her stomach and follow the trail. Eyes still closed, she gently scratched her nails along the bottom of her memory’s barrel, making sure no scrap had gone undetected.
“I think I remember grabbing my dance skirt from my bag,” she said. “Tying it as I walked down the aisle. It seems like a real memory because I can feel it on my waist. But then… I don’t know, I have some little glimmers but I’m not sure if they happened or if I’m adopting other people’s experience and making it mine. Like I know where my friends were standing because I was told later.”
David with Neil behind the Manhattan skyline set, fiddling with cables and wires. Lucky in the stage right wing, rolling an ace bandage as she talked and laughed with John. Taylor in the opposite wings, her chin pushed out in concentration over her knitting. Near to her, the six-foot Aisha stretching with a hand on the diminutive Manuel’s shoulder.
And James, her broken little brother, who must have been a hundred yards from Mallory by then.
Daisy’s hands slowly pulled the curtain rope. But instead of lights coming up, they began to tunnel out.
“It becomes like a dream,”
she said, letting her mind ramble. “I can see the tall black shapes of the curtains and I can sense the stage lights and feel their heat. The lights are Erik. His hands make them go on and off and fade and brighten and turn different colors. I dance in the light he makes and the warm heat on my skin—that’s him. The lights are his love.
“Then noise. Noise and commotion and I’m lying on my back and… I don’t remember pain. Just confusion because Will was lying next to me and I could see all the blood but it wasn’t registering. I didn’t know what was going on. I pushed up on my elbow and tried to look around. And I saw a man in the aisle. He raised his arm and the windows of the booth started exploding and Erik was in there but I couldn’t see him anymore. He was gone.”
A long breath-held moment, so utterly still she could hear Rita’s wristwatch ticking. Before her remembering eyes the spotlight faded to a diamond star and winked into black.
“Then nothing,” Daisy said. “It all went dark. I woke up and I forgot what I saw. For a little while… I even forgot my name.”
SHE DREAMED BUT DIDN’T KNOW she was dreaming.
She half awoke and knew she’d been moved from one place to another place but the dreams that weren’t dreams came again and she was no place.
Her eyes were closed and she didn’t know she had eyes to open.
Sounds found her ears and waited to be recognized, and then fell out upon her shoulders and she slept again.
Smell sliced through the non-dreams like an organ pipe piercing the quiet of a church. Scent reached hands through the muck and mire of her tired brain. It wafted warm and cool at the same time, passing behind her fastened eyelids and loosening her tongue. The smell curled fingers around her jaw and drew her head over to the side, where it became stronger.
Her tongue fell free into her mouth. She became aware of breath in her nose and lungs. A high-pitched thrum in the center of her chest when she released air, an involuntary sound of recognition. She knew this warm-cool scent.
Awareness prickled from the center out. Nerves frantically stretched feelers across her brain, reaching for a matching set to make a handoff, hopefully a connection. Arm. Hand. Fingers. A quantum leap and she realized her hand was not alone. Another hand. Attached to the scent. Her fingers squeezed. She made the noise in her chest again. Turned her head further and met with a solid warmth.
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