The Perils of Intimacy

by Rick R. Reed

  But she’s too far away for me to hear her sobbing.

  I slow down, and then I spy the opening to the alley, about six or so feet ahead of me. Right in front of my eyes, in fact.

  I rub my head, thinking of simply ignoring the sound. Belltown, my neighborhood, is a curious mix of the rich and the poor. Amazon and Microsoft executives and homeless heroin addicts mingle on its streets. The litter in the gutter contains everything from PBR cans, tiny glassine bags, and syringes to Starbucks cups and ticket stubs from the Moore Theatre.

  That sound? It could be a ploy. Probably is a ploy to entice me into the alley. I know; I’ve been the one setting a trap. Because of its mix of the desperate and the overfed, Belltown is an area ripe for crime, for setting traps for the unwary, for the bleeding heart wanting only to help.

  I approach the alley warily, thinking I can dash away if need be.

  It takes a couple of minutes even for my dark-adapted eyes to adjust to the shadows in the alley.

  But when they do adjust, I see a form huddled near the dumpster. Knees curled up, almost fetal position. It’s too dark to tell much more about this person crying on the filthy and cold ground.

  I move closer.

  He looks up.

  And for a moment the wind rushes out of me. For a moment I’m not sure I can believe my eyes.

  It’s Marc.

  I rush over to him, kneel beside him. I peer into his face, his wild, wet, and red-rimmed eyes. I do a quick scan, as best I can, of the rest of him. He appears to be okay—physically, at least. There’s no blood, no obvious signs of trauma, save for his dirty clothes, his ripped jacket, his shivering.

  “Hey, what happened? Are you okay?”

  He looks up at me, confused, like I fell out of the sky.

  “How did you know I was here?”

  “I didn’t. I just, I just….” My voice trails off. I have an odd feeling, one I don’t want to trust but one I can’t deny. I did know he was there. I did know he needed help. I don’t know how. I don’t know why.

  But why are those questions even important? If there’s one thing I’ve learned in being sober, it’s that we have inexplicable feelings about stuff, and those feelings are seldom wrong.

  “What difference does that make?” I gather him up in my arms and hold him, right here on the bricked surface of the alley, heedless of the cold, the damp, and the grit.

  Marc clings to me. “I guess it doesn’t. I’m just glad you found me,” he mumbles into my shoulder. I squeeze him harder.

  We’re like that for a while, just two men clinging to one another the way a drowning man might hang on to something that floats. Except I don’t know which of us is the drowning man and just what exactly it is that floats.

  Hope?

  Again, does it matter? We’re here for each other when it counts.

  After a while, I ask again, “Are you okay? Can you stand up?”

  He gives out a snotty snort of laughter. “Nothing’s hurt. Physically, at least. Save for my pride.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was robbed. He had a knife, but he just used it to scare me.” He laughs again, and it ends in a spasm of coughs. Or are they sobs? “Boy, he succeeded.”

  “What did he take?”

  “Wallet, watch.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He waves me away. He scoots a bit over so we’re no longer connected. “What are you sorry for? You robbed me two years ago. And you had the decency to be sneaky about it so I wouldn’t be scared while I was getting fleeced.” He laughs again. “You’re a considerate bandit.”

  I can’t join him—what he says isn’t funny. I feel a little sick inside.

  “At least you weren’t mean about it. At least I forgive you.”

  It takes a minute for the words to sink in. When they do, I seek out his eyes in the darkness. “You do?”

  He nods. “You said it. You’re not that same person.”

  And just like that, my spirit’s lifted. There’s a lightening, as though a weight I didn’t know I was carrying around got removed. I don’t want to press. I don’t want to ask him to repeat himself, just so I can make sure of what I heard. I’m afraid that if I do, he’ll recant. Tell me I heard him wrong.

  So I help him to his feet. Brush what grit and dirt I can off him. He’s still shaking, and I take him in my arms again, squeeze. “I’m gonna squeeze those shakes right out of you, man.”

  Marc leans back a little. Smiles.

  “What do you wanna do?” I ask. “Want me to call the cops?”

  He shakes his head. “Nah. Maybe later. I doubt that there’s much they can do.”

  “You should still file a report.”

  “Like I said, maybe later.” A sob erupts out of him like a hiccup. “I just wanna go home!”

  I nod. “Sure. Sure you do.”

  “Let’s go find a cab,” he says. “I’m in no state for the bus. Not tonight.”

  We emerge from the alley. The streetlights seem unnaturally bright. Marc stops, pats his pockets. “Shit.”

  “What?” I ask, although then the answer comes to me before he even says it.

  “No wallet.” He shrugs. “Guess we can walk. It’s not that far.” He shivers.

  I pull out my own wallet and look inside. There’s a sad single twenty in there. It’s all I have until payday next week. I stuff the wallet back in my jeans. “I’ve got enough for a cab,” I tell him, hoping like hell I’m right.

  “I’ll pay you back.”

  “Don’t you even think about it. It’s my treat. I owe you.”

  He snorts again. I’m not sure if he’s laughing or crying. “You certainly do.”

  We both look as we see a Yellow Cab coming down the street toward us. “Here you go,” I say. “You just want some cash? Or you want me to come with you?” I want, more than I’ve ever wanted anything, for him to say “Come with me,” but I would understand if he didn’t.

  He doesn’t say, and we stand at the curb, waiting for the cab to glide up beside us. I look over at Marc.

  “Get in the damn cab,” he says.

  Chapter 18

  MARC

  THE INTERIOR of the cab smells damp. Or maybe it’s just us. Jimmy sits pressed close to me, heedless of the disapproving stare of the swarthy cab driver in the rearview mirror. I don’t care. Let him look. We’re paying him to drive us, not judge us. Just to spite him, I lay my head on Jimmy’s shoulder and grab one of his hands and intertwine my fingers with his.

  I’m still shaking. But the warmth emanating from Jimmy is going a long way to quiet the trembling. I close my eyes.

  Darkness. Rough brick walls and the squat shape of a dumpster in the shadows. The guy with the knife rises up before me, terrifying, but then he quickly morphs into Jimmy. I feel my lips curl up in a smile. My heart rate slows. Instead of a knife, Jimmy holds out a big serving spoon. On it, piled high, is a huge scoop of mashed potatoes.

  I start to giggle.

  Jimmy nudges me. I stir, wondering how I could have fallen asleep so quickly, so completely. “Hey, you. This the right place?”

  I feel disoriented, like I slept a lot longer than the few minutes I must have. I look up at the building to our right, and even though logically I know it’s home, it doesn’t look familiar. It’s just a three-story red brick apartment house, rectangular, built in the 1990s. Is it mine? Why isn’t it ringing a bell? Do I need to click my heels together or something?

  I shake my head. “Yeah, that’s it.” It’s got to be, right? I’m probably in a bit of shock from the mugging. I’ve heard feeling disoriented is part of the package.

  “Course it is, silly.”

  That’s right. Jimmy has been here before.

  I sit silently, trying to get my brain in gear as Jimmy pays the driver. He gets his change and opens the door.

  I just sit there. There’s this feeling of numbness. This mundane scene has all the earmarks of the surreal.

  He smiles. “You rea
dy?”

  I nod and lean into him. He takes my hand and pulls me from the cab.

  “Good night,” he leans in to tell the cabbie.

  And what the cabbie says surprises me. I had him all wrong. “You two take care. Get him to bed!”

  “We will. And I will. Thanks.”

  Before I know it, we’re cutting across the parking lot at the front of the building. “I don’t remember which one is yours,” Jimmy says.

  I laugh. “Neither do I.” I plop down on one of the little concrete things they have in front to stop parking cars from running into the building. Do they have a name? Should I know it? I laugh again. It would probably be better to remember which apartment is mine. More useful.

  Jimmy sits beside me. “Are you kidding?”

  “I wish I was.” I twist to look up at the building over my shoulder. There’s a staircase leading up to a narrow walkway that fronts the upstairs units. That same staircase, at ground level, heads downward to a patio. Yes, okay. A little bit of certainty filters in. I know the building is built into a bluff above a greenbelt. It overlooks Lake Union.

  “My apartment’s on the second floor.” I grope in my pockets for my keys. When my hand doesn’t immediately land on them, my heart starts to hammer, acid rises up in my throat, and beads of cold sweat break out on my forehead. Oh God, did he take my keys too? Is he up there now? Waiting with his damned knife?

  I feel like my legs are turning liquid, and I hold on to Jimmy for support.

  “What?”

  “He took my keys!” I gasp, just as my fingers close around them. “Sorry.” I peer into Jimmy’s eyes. I lift the keys out and jingle them. “They’re right here.”

  “Is there an apartment number on them?” He reaches for my key ring, and I let him take it.

  “I’m in 202.” Just like that, my brain fills in the missing piece. Where it came from, I can’t say. But I know it for sure. How weird. Forgetting my own address.

  “Let’s go.” Jimmy takes my hand, giving me a slight tug.

  We head up the stairs.

  Inside, Jimmy tells me to sit on the couch. He busies himself turning on lights. He finds the remote for the TV and flips it on. American Horror Story. He immediately mutes the sound. “Don’t look!” he cautions me. “You have cable, right?”

  I nod. “I think so.”

  I watch as he changes the channel. I recognize one of the music channel screens. He un-mutes the sound. Soft new age music filters out of my sound bar. I breathe in, out. The music has what I assume is its desired effect—it calms me.

  “Thanks,” I say softly.

  “No worries.” Jimmy heads into the kitchen. “I’m gonna make you some tea. Okay if I rummage around out here?”

  I throw my head back on the couch. “Knock yourself out. There’s a canister on the counter with a bunch of different kinds. Chamomile, Darjeeling, English breakfast, green, mint.” Amazing what your memory chooses to retain.

  “You got a request?”

  I snort. “Yeah. Don’t steal my teakettle.”

  He comes back out from the kitchen and stands in front of me. He looks so worried and hurt. It’s kind of cute.

  “I’m kidding,” I say. I wonder where the mental energy to joke about something so traumatic came from. “The green tea would be nice. With a little honey, honey.” I smile.

  He pulls the throw at one end of the couch over me before returning to the kitchen.

  LATER.

  “Why did you have me over?” Jimmy asks as he tucks me into bed. There’s something tender in his face—and caring. It makes me feel all warm. I simply want to snuggle down beneath my quilt with the image of that face imprinted in my head.

  Sweet dreams, for sure.

  “Hmm?” he urges.

  Sleepily, I say, “What? Tonight?” I turn on my side, but I still face him. “You had cab fare.”

  He pokes me. “Don’t be stupid. I’m serious. That night. You weren’t my typical hookup. And I have a feeling I wasn’t your usual choice from the menu either.”

  I sit up a little, my head just above the pillows, and look over at him. “Sit down,” I say.

  He does, and the bed creaks as he settles his weight on it.

  “You know you’re asking me a very deep question when I’m vulnerable. Is that fair?”

  “I don’t know about fair. But I want to know what you’d say.”

  I let my head sink down farther into the two pillows under me. I close my eyes, trying to transport myself back to that night. Why did I ask him over? I remember his profile and how rough-edged it was—with all the leather, the piercings. Another detail flashes into my head. In all his pics, he wore mirrored aviator sunglasses, so his eyes couldn’t be seen.

  A shame, because his blue eyes are amazing, kind of crystalline, paradoxically icy and warm. I open my own eyes to look into them now.

  Despite my trying to grasp for an answer to his question, the words come to me effortlessly, as though someone else implanted them in my brain.

  Or in my heart.

  “I was hoping for a miracle.” The words slip out without analysis, and I’m left a little in awe at their truth and yet a little confused by what their full meaning is.

  “A miracle?” Jimmy stretches out on the bed beside me, hands clasped behind his head and staring up at the ceiling. “I don’t think ‘miracle’ and me have ever been uttered in the same sentence.” He laughs a little, but there’s a tinge of sadness to his chuckles.

  “I didn’t say you were a miracle. I said I was hoping for one.”

  Jimmy sighs. “Point taken.”

  I need to expound on this, as much for Jimmy’s benefit as for my own. “Back then, I did tons of hooking up. Too much, even the most jaded among us will concede that.” I think of Don and what he does and doesn’t know. Although I’ve revealed myself to him as a play-the-field type of guy, I have never gone into the extent I played it and how many positions I assumed.

  I’m too ashamed.

  “And I think every time I hooked up, I was hoping for a miracle.” I close my eyes and feel a rapidly expanding lump in my throat. I swallow hard in a wasted effort to diminish it. “Hoping that some man would come over and save me. Save me from myself.” I pause, the wheels turning. “Or make me someone else that I’d see through their eyes.”

  I stop. I don’t want this to turn into a pity party, yet the truth’s the truth. “I can still feel that anticipation, in the shower, getting ready, knowing my prince was on his way. But what happened in the fairy tales always worked in reverse for me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I would kiss the prince, they’d always turn into a frog.”

  I expect Jimmy to laugh, but he doesn’t. I turn on my side, snuggling into his warmth. “You should have been the biggest frog of all. But through all this time, through all the men that came after you, I could never quite get you out of my head. I told myself it was because you ripped me off, and there was that, but there was more too.” I throw one arm over Jimmy’s chest.

  “There was this,” I squeeze him, holding him. “Remember?”

  He nods. “Oh, sure. And I never forgot you because there was no one I was with back then that I wanted to cuddle with, for Christ’s sake, but I wanted to with you. And that hit me from out of left field. That penetrated right down into my tweaked-out brain. I hated you and loved you at the same time.”

  “Why hate?”

  “Because you showed me something I didn’t believe I could have. Because you made me feel things I didn’t want to feel. That made me mad. And it made me want to be with you like no one else I’d ever met. Weird, huh?”

  “Not weird,” I tell him. “Human.” I lean forward and kiss him very lightly on the lips. With my hand, I close his eyes and tenderly kiss each lid. “You’re just one of us, buddy. You want someone there for you. You want someone to touch. I think that’s all any of us wants.” I sigh.

  Jimmy picks up on what the sigh is
saying. “But?”

  “But I don’t know. Maybe we both had strange ways of trying to find that someone to touch us.”

  “Oh, I think we could have lived without all that shit!” Jimmy laughs.

  “No, no. Hear me out. Saying tonight that I was hoping for a miracle was kind of a wake-up call—for me. I didn’t know until those words tumbled from my lips what I’d been looking for. A miracle?” I make a little snorting sound.

  “The miracle wasn’t you, Jimmy, although I wish I could say it was. It wasn’t any man. It wasn’t my first boyfriend or my second. It wasn’t the cross-country track coach I had a crush on in high school. It wasn’t the dad whose affection I always craved and never got because I could never be good enough—or should I say manly enough—for him.

  “No, the miracle I was waiting for was me.” I touch my chest. “Right here in my heart. To know I could not only love but forgive. And see people in my life as the flawed, broken, and beautiful things they are. Just like me.”

  I go quiet with the feeling I have more to say. I just don’t know that I have the words right now to express the emotions. It’s like some kind of weird pain has been expressed, and now—freedom.

  Jimmy says nothing. He raises up to kiss me. And then he simply peers down at me, stroking my face. A little smile plays about his lips.

  I feel warm. At home.

  I touch his face, revel in the roughness of his stubble beneath my fingertips. “Should we?” I ask. I raise an eyebrow. His lips look so tempting, so delectable, mere inches away.

  He chuckles. “Should we what? Go to sleep?” He nods. “Yeah, I think so. After what you’ve been through tonight—hell, after what I’ve been through tonight—we both need some rest. And I can’t imagine anything better than actually falling asleep next to you.” He lays his head back down on the pillow.

  “And then?” I ask.

  “And then we’ll see what the morning brings. We don’t need to plan a thing. Let’s just be.”

  “Right here? Right now?” I ask.

  “Right here. Right now,” he responds, and he wraps himself around me, one leg thrown over mine.