by Kristen Mae
She stalked off to the bedroom, and I followed hesitantly. My insides were splintering apart—I couldn’t lose her like this, over a few careless words and a jumbled knot of my own insecurities. I went to her where she sat on the edge of the bed and hugged her to me. She wrapped her arms around my hips and sighed with her cheek resting against my stomach.
“God, Hazel.” She lifted my shirt so she could kiss the skin underneath, her hands groping all over me, massaging my back, my buttocks, my thighs, kneading me like dough. I had that thought again, of her manipulating me, wanting me only because she was flattered by my desire for her, and decided I did not care. I let myself melt into her, let her pull my clothes off and lower me onto the bed. “I don’t understand you,” she said as her mouth moved over my bare breasts and down my stomach. Broken, broken, broken. The words came at me, and I chewed them, swallowed them, digested them. Claire was on me with her tongue and fingers, and I felt her, felt my blood rush and my skin heat up, but as if from far away, a dream, a fantasy. She tried and tried to make me erupt, and I tried to bring myself back, but I couldn’t come for her.
At last, she pulled away from me. She was out of breath. “I don’t understand,” she said again, and she disappeared into the bathroom to take a shower while I cried into a pillow.
I heard the water stop, and after another minute she came back and curled herself around me. “Don’t worry,” she whispered, and her skin was still wet, like she hadn’t bothered to dry off.
I woke to a presence hovering over me, weighty and ominous and dark. Thick bands of some strong and serpentine thing coiled around my wrists, ankles, neck. My covers had been scraped down around my feet and my body lay naked and exposed. I tried to call out to Claire next to me, but the thing had squeezed my neck too tight for me to speak. A hiss ruptured the quiet: “You’ll like it,” and something pushed my legs apart. I panicked, bucked and heaved, flailed my arms and legs trying to throw the thing off me, but it had too good a grip. “Please,” I tried to say, but the word choked out like a gurgle. Claire slept on peacefully beside me. The presence thrust itself inside me, sullying me, draping its dark satisfaction over me like a death shroud. The coil around my neck loosened enough for me to squeak, “Help me” before it tightened its grip around my neck again so that no other sound could escape. “Hazel,” it growled, its voice grainy and lecherous. “Hazel…”
“Hazel!” And now the thing was gone and Claire had taken its place, and she was fighting off my clawing hands, trying to defend herself and grab hold of me all at once. “Hazel! It’s just a dream!”
I dropped my arms. She saw the recognition in my eyes and collapsed onto me, resting her head on my chest. “It’s just a dream, you’re okay. You’re okay, you’re okay,” she whispered, but the frantic way she breathed almost made it sound like she was trying to convince herself.
“Please cover me.” The words croaked out of me, frail and desperate. I reached around her to grab the blanket so I could have some thin layer of protection against that hurtful thing, its presence still heavy in the room, as if it could somehow pass from the unconscious world to this one.
Claire snagged the cover and pulled it up to our necks, then nuzzled in close, arms and legs hugged tight around me. “Tell me.”
And I did. I told her about the presence, how I’d tried to shout for help but couldn’t, how the invisible thing kept coiling tighter and tighter around me, how I couldn’t fight it.
She smoothed my hair from my forehead while I told her the dream, and when I finished, she said, “I get it. He’s always there, even though you can’t see him. It’s like…like he’s left an imprint of fear on you, and you feel trapped and suffocated by him, like he’s taken away your very voice. I get it.”
She put a hand on my cheek and moved like she wanted to kiss me, but I flinched from her, a tear escaping down my cheek at how perfectly she’d understood. “Please don’t. Please…don’t fix me.”
She went still. “What?”
“You like me because I’m broken. You think you can fix me.” The words spilled out, exposing me, unintentional outpourings of a sleepy, surreal moment. I immediately wanted to take them back.
She was quiet for a moment, then said, “Is that what you think? Because of what I said last night? Is that why you’ve been so distant all day?”
I couldn’t answer her.
Suddenly, she pushed away from me and sat up. “Fuck you, Hazel.”
I cringed like she’d slapped me.
“You have got it so very, very wrong. You are tearing me the fuck apart. You think I’m here because I see you as some kind of charity case? Hazel, for god’s sake, me feeling like I’m helping you somehow—that is just icing. Didn’t I say I almost lost my mind when you kissed me? Did you not hear that?”
I remembered her saying that, but only vaguely. I’d clung to the negative, analyzed and obsessed over her words until I’d managed to convince myself I was nothing to her.
She was out of the bed now, pacing naked in the moonlight, an exquisite marble statue come to life. “And do you not see me falling to pieces with you? Do you not feel what you do to my body? Me fixing you. Ha!”
I pulled the covers tighter around my chin. “I’m sorry.”
She plunked her fists on her hips, delicate in her frustration in a way only she could manage. “Is this too much? Have we gone too far? You said you’d tell me.”
I stared at her. I’d already behaved in a way that made it abundantly clear that we’d gone too far. “Please Claire, please don’t make us stop,” I said. Tears welled up in my eyes. God, I was begging her. I would get down on my knees on the hard wooden floor, wrap my arms around her ankles like a needy child and grovel at her feet. She’d stripped me bare.
She made a growling noise. “Fuck you, Hazel. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” and then she was back under the covers with me, desperate roving hands and mouth proving to me what I meant to her, turning my insides to lava.
TWENTY-FOUR
Over the next few days, I breathed Claire in and held my breath. I consumed her and fed myself to her. At night I drank her sweat. During our rehearsals, I stood on the other side of our group of students and forced myself to pay attention to their sound, intonation, bow technique; but I stood apart from myself, a ghost, besieged with memories of scraping my teeth along Claire’s neck, licking her thighs, sliding a finger up into her wet heat. “Falling to pieces,” she’d said. God. We were so fucked.
We ate lunches together, walked the shops together, and practiced our Italian with the locals, all the while engaged in the game of Not Touching, which turned out to be a quite challenging game to play. But behind a rack of designer jeans where no one would see, hands were quick to slide under each other’s clothes. If ever we found ourselves alone in an alley, we flew at each other, kissed and groped and pressed our bodies together, thighs rubbing crotches, mouths nipping necks, devouring every second we could.
Through all this, the burden of brevity hung thick over us like a fog. But I didn’t dwell on that; I couldn’t allow myself to acknowledge that in just over a week, we would be back in the United States and everything would be real again. I refused to picture what it would be like not to be able to touch her anymore. My only thought was of taking every bit of her that I could.
Saturday, at our usual lunch spot, Claire stopped eating and chewed her lip at me long enough that I finally had to say, “What?”
“I told Mike.”
My fork slipped from my fingers and clattered loudly against my ceramic plate.
Half of her mouth turned up in a smile, like a fox’s. “He thinks it’s great.”
“Pfft. Then you didn’t tell him everything.” I picked up my fork again. He should have been jealous. The thing between Claire and me, it was something to envy. She’d fucked all my doubts away.
She shrugged. “Maybe not. He suggested we swing together, all of us.” She took a bite of food and flicked her eyes up at mine.
> A furious blush washed over me. “That will never, ever happen.”
She did not offer to tell me what her response to Mike had been, and I did not ask.
Later that afternoon, I video chatted with Oren and pitied his knowing look so badly that after I closed my laptop I curled up on the bed and sobbed for an hour. I’d fill myself up with Claire, I told myself, then go back to Oren and learn how to be me again.
If I even knew who I was anymore.
The students’ concert Saturday night was better attended than the one the week before since word had spread about the quality of the performances. Afterward, the students invited the faculty out to a posh club on the outskirts of town. They acted like they were doing us a favor, as if we were too old and feeble to locate fun on our own. While the students preened like peacocks, Claire and I exchanged secret looks.
Katrina wore a modest, silver shift dress, her dark hair slicked back to highlight her high cheekbones. Frank came along dressed all in black. Raymond looked like one of the announcers at a football game, in a black turtleneck T-shirt that hugged his thick biceps, and green alligator shoes that Claire said were for pimps. She wore a black sleeveless dress with a flared, swinging skirt, and a pair of flesh-colored fuck-me heels I hadn’t seen on her before. Her hair tumbled over her bare shoulders in golden ringlets. I had to force myself not to stare at her in front of the others.
I’d let her dress me in a white pencil skirt with a red silk spaghetti-strap top and matching red lipstick, none of which I ever would have chosen for myself. But she’d straddled my lap and painted the lipstick on me while staring at me and biting her bottom lip, and dammit, I let her.
Claire used her Italian skills to call us a few cabs, though many of the students rode with locals they’d befriended. That made me a little nervous, them riding off with strangers like that, even though I kept reminding myself that these “kids” were all at least twenty, full-grown adults who had every right to make their own choices. But I thought of what had happened to Iris, and my concern persisted. I relaxed a little when I saw her get into one of the cabs with a pair of girls from the festival.
After a twenty-minute ride, we pulled up to a white stucco monolith sitting on a hilltop at the end of a winding drive. I’d never seen anything like it back in the States. Colored lights danced on the outside walls, making the white building flux with color from blue to pink to yellow. A long line of people stretched around the front, where two severe-looking bouncers blocked the entrance. “Maybe they won’t let us in,” I said.
Claire turned and looked me up and down. “You obviously have no fucking idea what you look like.” I shuddered, half sure Katrina’s curious eyes were boring into me on my other side, but when I sneaked a peek at her, she was busy digging in her purse for something. When we got to the front of the line, one of the bouncers raked his eyes over me with unguarded interest, and Claire turned and cocked an I-told-you-so eyebrow at me. “See?”
Inside, the music thumped with Italian techno, which sounded the same as American techno except the vocals were in a different language.
“You want to get a table?” Katrina shouted over the music.
We found a place to sit along the back wall, a waning-moon-shaped couch with a low table at the center of the crescent. I took one end of the couch and Katrina and Frank the other, with Claire in the middle of everyone and Raymond’s giant defensive-end body blocking me from her.
A waitress came by with drinks. The others shouted conversation over the booming music while I sat on my end of the couch and sipped my mojito and tried hard not to be annoyed at Raymond for inserting himself between Claire and me.
The dance floor below us was sunk to about hip-deep, giving those in the seating area around it a clear view of the gyrating sea of people. Amid the chaos of moving bodies, I caught the gleam of Iris’s hair. She was dancing with a few locals and two other students from the festival, and she seemed happy now, flippant, even. One of the guys handed her a shot, and she tossed it back, then tottered and fell against him, laughing. He caught her. The hairs on the back of my neck rose.
Raymond ordered another round of drinks for our table, and the four of them continued their chatter, oblivious to the dancers below. Claire reached her arm across Raymond’s lap several times to try to include me in the conversation, but I couldn’t even hear them much less pretend to be interested enough to shout over the music. I downed my second drink and welcomed the warm fuzz of inebriation as it swept through my veins.
Iris’s group had moved up to the bar to down another round of shots, Iris still hanging on the same guy, a college-aged kid with chin-length, sandy hair. He didn’t intimidate me like the guy with the motorcycle had; it was Iris who scared me with her drunken stagger, the way she kept flinging her arms around his neck.
Claire stood, interrupting my thoughts. “Let’s dance!”
“I’m going to finish my drink,” shouted Katrina from across the table. Frank smiled blandly and plunked his arm on the back of the couch behind her.
Raymond rose and held out his hand to me. “Come on, Hazel,” he shouted, “I know you’ve got a secret wild side hidden beneath that shy facade!”
For a second I feared Claire had told him about us, but when I looked past him and saw her neutral look, I realized he only meant dance moves. God, I needed to relax.
I gave him my hand and walked with him and Claire down the steps to the dance floor, trying to let the bump of the music seep into my bones. It was not an unfamiliar scene. My heart fluttered at the memories of similar nights, many years ago, when I’d set out on the offense, looking for some lucky schmuck to seduce. I’d walk home the next morning overflowing with an indefinable sense of loss, like I was an empty vessel with a hole in the bottom, impossible to fill. Like Iris, I thought. I searched again for her, but now I was surrounded by people and couldn’t see.
Raymond squeezed through the crowd, clearing a path for us as we made our way to the middle of the dance floor. Claire bounced beside me in her bold black dress, grinning and looking an ordinary sort of happy—a look that was foreign to me after what I’d seen from her during our nights together. With her wild curls like a halo around her pale face, glowing and shifting colors against the club’s flashing neon lights, she looked like a fallen angel. How easily I’d fallen with her.
Someone bumped into me on my right and I lost my equilibrium for a moment, an image of those early, off-balance days in Florida flashing through my mind. Vertigo. Raymond caught me by the elbow and positioned himself between me and the offending individual. I wavered, trying to center myself, trying to make my muscles remember how to dance. I must have been drunker than I realized.
Claire put her mouth to my ear. “Are you okay?”
I nodded, but the club felt like it was tipping over and trying to dump me out of it.
A mischievous smile spread over her face. “I want to lick your lipstick off.”
I stole a panicked glance at Raymond. He had his eyes closed, bouncing to the thumping music and waving his hands around his face in a tremendously awful attempt at “vogueing.” I looked back at Claire and saw she was laughing at how I’d almost had a heart attack over nothing. I couldn’t laugh. I hated being here where I couldn’t touch her. We were wasting time.
She lifted my hand and spun me around, and I let her turn me, aching to be touched by her in some small way. Raymond offered me his hand too, then alternated between Claire and me, spinning us in turn. I played along, fake-smiling until I saw Raymond drag his hand along Claire’s waist mid-turn, and then I swelled with rage at seeing his terrible, giant hands on her. Idiot. Get ahold of yourself—it’s not like she’s yours. Someone jostled me from behind, and although I didn’t lose my balance this time, the pressing crowd was suddenly too much for me. Electric panic crept up my spine.
“Bathroom!” I shouted at the two of them.
I pushed and shoved my way off the dance floor, every shoulder bump with a stranger sendin
g waves of tremors through me. After a few steps, Claire’s hand appeared in mine, and I clutched it to steady myself as I escaped the crowd.
A set of double doors led to a significantly quieter, less-crowded outside patio. On the other side of the patio was a bar and another small outbuilding with a hallway marked bagnos. The bathroom was occupied, so we waited in the hallway. I paced and wrung my hands and ignored Claire’s scrutiny until I caught her half smiling at me.
“I’m not big on crowds,” I said.
“Oh, is that it?” She leaned one bare shoulder against the wall and glowered at me like she was trying to read my mind, or maybe she already knew I wanted to get out of there so I could fuck her. Her shoulder was so pretty I wanted to bite it.
On my way out of the bathroom, I checked my reflection in the mirror. Claire had drawn my lips poutier than they normally looked without lipstick, and my hair, hanging straight and shiny along my cheeks, was made more auburn by the contrasting red of my lips. I was hot. In the mirror, my reflection wrinkled her forehead in bewilderment.
I thought of Claire outside waiting, separated from me by only a door, and my chest seized. If that tiny, brief separation was enough to make me lose my breath, how would I ever survive when we returned home? How could I ever go back to normal? I flung open the door, wanting to pull her into the bathroom with me and throw her against that door, have my way with her, not waste this opportunity—but there were two other women waiting outside in the hallway.
I swallowed hard. Claire and I started to return to the main club together but, before we went through the doors, she grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me back. “I think we need to do a shot.”
I raised an eyebrow at her, trying to play it cool. “Are you trying to take advantage of me?”
She snorted. “As if I need to.”
My chest seized all over again. She led me back to the outdoor bar and waved the bartender over. “Just one. To loosen you up. If you keep wringing your hands like that you’re going to pull your fingers off.”