Black Iris

by Leah Raeder

  “That makes two of us.”

  Cool autumn air swept in, prickling our bare arms. Beneath the blanket her warmth seeped into my bones.

  “Why did you kiss me?” I said.

  It was impossible to catch her off guard. She was excruciatingly honest. Even a white lie was anathema to her. Her voice was calm, almost wistful.

  “I’d wanted to since the night we met.”

  All the weight went out of my chest. It was an empty cage full of the memory of wings.

  “You don’t know what you do to me, Laney. You have this dark energy, nocturnal and intense. It touched something inside me that I’ve been holding back. My essential fucked-upness. My own darkness.” I heard the smile in her words. “When you quoted Dickinson I knew we’d be friends. I never knew we’d get this close.”

  “Don’t try to sound romantic. Not when you bring guys home every night. Not when I have to go to sleep listening to you fuck them.”

  “You really don’t get it, do you?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “You know why I fuck boys?” Her fist balled in the blanket between us. “Because I can’t fall in love with them. It’s just sex. I don’t have to feel, I don’t have to think. It’s safe.”

  She can’t fall in love, Armin had said, and I can’t fall out.

  “I hate that you do it,” I said.

  “Good. I’m glad you hate it.”

  “Do you even care how much it hurts me?”

  “Hurts you?” She grabbed the cigarettes, tried to draw one with shaking hands. It broke and spilled tobacco everywhere and she flung the pack into the shadows. “You ever fucking consider how I feel, seeing you with him?”

  “It’s complicated. It’s not what you think.”

  Blythe kicked the blanket off and started to stand. I grabbed her wrist and she fought, raked red down my arm. Blood for blood. But when she broke free she just knelt there, her hair in her face.

  “It was never him.” My throat stung, my breath merely burnt fumes. It was a fire inside me, eating me away. “I only wanted you, Blythe.”

  Her hands ran through her hair, viciously. Like she wanted to tear herself apart.

  “I can’t do this again.”

  Then she was up, leaving. I sat alone on the freezing floor, incredibly small.

  This was never supposed to happen.

  I had a plan going in.

  You stick to the fucking plan.

  The cold, rational part of me said let her go. It was becoming too messy, too unpredictable. She’d ruin everything. Stay cold, Laney. Stay hard. Show them all.

  But a fire had awoken in me that could not be put out. And I wanted to give myself to it. Even if it destroyed me.

  I ran through the shadows. Halfway down the hall I collided with something warm. For a moment it was a jumble of limbs and resistance and then hands found my face.

  “I can’t lose you,” she said in a fierce whisper.

  “Then don’t let go.”

  I touched her cheek, her lips. We were both shivering.

  “I promised myself,” she said, her mouth moving against my fingertips. “I promised I wouldn’t do this again.”

  “Do what, Blythe?”

  “Fall in love.”

  I cupped both hands to her face and kissed her.

  The first time it happens, it can be explained. Accident. Experiment. Fluke. Everything was confusing. The lines blurred.

  The second time is when it really happens for the first time.

  I kissed Blythe the way I’d wanted to from the very beginning. Unrepentantly, unremittingly. Nothing held back. Our teeth tapped together, those charming canines scoring my tongue. Her mouth tasted like smoke and mint and I wanted every part of it to taste like me. I sucked her lower lip till I couldn’t resist the urge to bite, and she bit back. I wasn’t sure if it hurt or felt good or if maybe the hurting itself was what felt good. Each time one of us backed out for breath the other interrupted, needing to be connected as intensely as possible every single second. Not so much a kiss as a consumption. No girlish coyness now. We were wolves, wild and mean. Voracious.

  She shoved me against the wall, dominating with her height. I raised my face to the ceiling and she bit my neck, kissed a trail across the flute of my collarbone, bit me again. Her hands were hard on my breasts. God, this feeling. Giving myself up to boys had always felt like some kind of defeat, but when I gave myself to her, it felt completely right. I traced the sine curve of her spine, her ass, slid my thumbs inside the hem of her underwear to the velvet crease at the top of each thigh. She gasped and my head went fever white.

  “Talk to me,” I said.

  Hot breath on my ear. “I’m going to fuck you, sweet girl. Like I’ve wanted to since that first night.”

  Her voice. Pure heroin. The most beautiful warmth I’d ever felt inside me, her whisper turning liquid, rolling through my veins.

  “Why didn’t you? I wanted it, too.”

  “You were all over him.” One hand slipped under my shirt, cupping my breast. As she spoke her fingers tightened on the nipple. “Do you know how hard it was, holding back? How many nights I fucked some bloke on the other side of this wall and imagined it was you?”

  I closed my eyes, bit my lip in pain and want.

  “You are so pretty.” Her mouth grazed the corner of mine. So different, a girl’s face. Impossibly smooth. No friction, nothing to slow us down. “I want to be gentle, but you make me an animal.”

  “Don’t be gentle.”

  She kissed me again, deeply, made me take her tongue as she manacled my wrists to the wall. Her bare leg slid between mine. I was crazy fucking wet and she knew it. Made me feel my own wetness against her thigh, made every nerve fire, electricity webbing beneath my skin. Made me. Dominated me. Hers. I was all hers.

  We stumbled from the hall into a bedroom. Wasn’t sure whose. She pulled the camisole over my head and when she kissed my breasts I cried out. Blythe grasped my face in one hand.

  “You are the most perfect little thing. Let me hear that lovely voice again.”

  “Make me,” I said.

  She did. She took my breast in her mouth, that kiss undoing me, a line of muscle unlacing down my belly and all my limbs coming unraveled, and I thrust my hands into her hair and cried like she wanted, gave her my voice, my body, my control. I’d have given her anything she asked for.

  We collapsed onto the bed. She pulled my lounge pants off and I her shirt and we rejoined, craving the opiate heat of each other. A second was too long a withdrawal. She lay between my legs, her hair a gold blur in my eyes.

  “How do you want to be fucked?”

  Those words unknit something in me.

  “Use your hands.” I circled her waist, pulled her hips to mine. “I want to see your face.”

  In a prism of streetlight I caught the edge of her smile.

  But Blythe was never good at following rules. She used her mouth first.

  Her lips marked every delicate place. Behind my ears, beneath my jaw, inside my elbows and wrists. My small breasts, the harpsichord of my ribs. I stared at the ceiling, at lilac shadows dappling the plaster. A jet passed and shook the sky like sheet metal. Her mouth moved down the hollow of my belly, over the yoke of my hips. Leaves drifted from a tree. Everything was coming undone, tearing itself into little piles of red and gold. The slow disintegration of summer. The slow disintegration of my body as she pushed my legs apart, exhaled against me. I closed my eyes. For a while I felt only heat, liquid fire pouring through my belly, and then through the heat her tongue, running down one side of me slowly, so maddeningly slowly I felt every little grain in it, every flat stroke up the center, every brush of her lips as they met over my clit and her warm breath washed through me. Then the other side, lazily, unhurriedly. Torture. Her hair tumbled between
my legs and I buried my hands in it. My tension was volcanic, rising higher, higher. I made some kind of noise and shaped it into words. Easy things at first, things like “Fuck me, Blythe, please, fuck me.” My voice could be so sweet sometimes, so girlish. I wondered how far I could push it. Wondered what it was doing to her. “God, I’m so fucking wet. Make me come in your mouth. Make me taste myself.”

  She rose above me, breathless. “Dirty girl.”

  I pulled her face down and kissed her. Smoke and a hint of something mineral, like saltpeter, or gunpowder. The taste of something about to explode.

  Her thigh nestled between mine, one hand sliding down beside it. I could have come against that satin skin, but she slipped a finger inside and then another and my desire rose and kept rising. This. This was what I’d longed for. This fusion of soft bodies, this gorgeous sameness. These breathy voices merging in the darkness. This pretty girl all tangled up with me, our legs linked, breasts pressed together, my hands on her slim back pulling her closer, closer. “You’re so fucking tight,” she said in my ear. “You won’t let go.” Her fingers moved with murderous slowness and every time she stroked in deep I wanted to scream. Girls could fuck like this forever, hard and steady, never worrying about coming too soon, about going soft. We fucked like boys better than boys did. Her hair was in my face, smothering me, and I was so close to coming it was agony, everything too intense, every shift of the sheet against my back a mauling, every skim of hair against my throat like being choked. When her thumb brushed my clit I shuddered, but she wouldn’t let me come. I fought for it, riding her hand harder. Put mine inside her panties. She grimaced. The inked shoulders above me heaved. Still she was brutally steady, slow. Misery and ecstasy at once.

  “Beg me,” she said, her voice rough.

  I pushed her hair out of her face and looked up at her. “Make me come. Please, make me come.”

  We stayed like that, never breaking eye contact. She gave it to me all the way inside, her thumb hard on my clit, finally, finally letting the fire loose, letting it surge and spill through me. I fucked her with my fingers and she was already close herself and we both lost it, tangled up and frenzied and delirious, crying out one after another as our bodies twisted together, hair snarled, hands wet, hearts pounding violently as if to break through bone and reach each other.

  In the aftermath I felt only warmth. Condensed heat. A wavelength of light temporarily coalescing into a girl.

  We lay entwined and let our blood cool, our sweat dry. After a while Blythe put her arms all the way around me. She held so tightly I could barely move. I felt something building in her, a gathering of breath, and laid my head between her breasts to feel the words. My seashell ear filled with the tides of her heart.

  “You are mine,” she said.

  JANUARY, THIS YEAR

  CORGAN QUARTERBACK BRUTALLY BEATEN. RISING STAR SNUFFED?

  I aced my first semester at CU. Straight A’s, special permission to sit Professor Frawley’s Advanced Fiction course second term. Each day I had a breakfast smoothie of oxy, vodka, and OJ and then staggered onto the L. Each night I went home to my condo in the South Loop, a beautifully furnished prison cell overlooking the blue eternity of the lake. Life always provides apt emotional metaphors. I wrote alcohol-fueled essays I didn’t recognize in the morning. Adopted a ginger tabby and rechristened him Orion. I needed to feel another presence in the shadows, something to scare away my nightmares. To confirm whether the visions I saw were real or in my head. Each night I opened the Word document that contained half a crazed cat’s cradle of a novel, the story you’re reading now, and stared at the heartbeat of the cursor on a blank page, that small dark impulse against blinding white. The black seed struggling to sprout in snow. Each night I went to bed alone.

  Orion gazed at me from the windowsill in my moments of sodden self-pity, my body numb, brain blown, and he looked so droll and wise it made me laugh. Everything is absurd, that face said. Stop being so serious.

  He was so much like her.

  VICTIM SPEAKS: DOESN’T REMEMBER ATTACK. RIVAL FANS SUSPECTED IN VICIOUS ASSAULT.

  The news loved Zoeller. Nothing like a glowing golden boy torn from his Manifest Destiny to get their dicks hard.

  The police interview was surprisingly mundane. Part of me had looked forward to it, misleading the cops, vibrating with expertly suppressed sins, but the reality was two hours in a drab waiting room with bad coffee and depressing celeb mags, then ten minutes at a table where real murderers and rapists had sat. I made my eyes big and said No, Detective and Yes, Detective, and the woman smiled sympathetically as if I were the victim.

  I stumbled out of the station, sucking in sweet winter air. When I lit my cigarette I tasted hot saline. Depression checklist: inexplicable crying, realizing you’ve been awake for eight hours but can’t remember a thing, talking to cats.

  (I’ll tell you a love story in ten words, I said to Orion.)

  Some days I didn’t eat. I confused the gnawing in my belly for hunger and fed it, but it only made me sick. Strange how much missing someone feels like hunger. How the hole they leave behind is so much larger than they were. How it grows even bigger, feeding on you.

  (Girl meets girl.)

  Once, as I cleaned out my book bag, a fragment of paper fluttered to the floor like a lost fairy wing. On it, her manic handwriting: If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. Something beautiful but annihilating. Her beloved Sylvia. I pressed the paper to my mouth, imagining the motions of her hand.

  (Girl falls for girl.)

  I had a short story due in Advanced Fiction but I opened and saved and closed a blank document for weeks. When I finally wrote, it was this:

  I miss you. I miss you. I miss you. I miss you.

  All the way down the page.

  (Girl loses girl.)

  I swallowed another pill. Before it had time to kick in, another.

  Another. Another. Another. Another.

  All the way down the bottle.

  ———

  Armin and I met at a coffee shop in Evanston. Somewhere we didn’t know anybody, busy and anonymous. He wrapped me in his arms and for a moment it actually felt real.

  “I’ve missed you,” he breathed against my hair, and kissed my ear.

  His wool coat scratched my face. I sat down at the table.

  “Are you all right?”

  I gazed through the window at gray people on a gray street. Valentine’s was coming, everything festooned with hearts in panty pink and Scarlet Letter red, and I thought, What if they were real? What if they’d been ripped beating and raw from a thousand chests? Would you show them then?

  “Laney.”

  I looked at him.

  “Are you high?”

  “No.”

  A hundred and twenty milligrams of oxycodone purred in my blood.

  He leaned across the table, that handsome face creased with worry. “Sleeping poorly? You’ve got dark circles under your eyes.”

  “Can you be my boyfriend for a minute and not my fucking doctor?”

  Armin sat back as if he’d been punched.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  The shrieking and caterwauling of espresso machines seemed the perfect soundtrack to this moment. I closed my eyes, summoned my softness. Reached across the table and tried to look small and needy.

  “It’s been really hard, not seeing you.”

  He covered both my hands with one of his. “We’re together now.”

  “Yes, we are. Together.”

  He eyed me strangely. Maybe there was something in my voice.

  “You look exhausted,” he said. “How are you really?”

  He looked pretty scruffy himself. His stubble had become a light beard, that artful bedhead now unstyled, legit bedhead. He wore a dress shirt that was done up one button off. It warmed the ice around my
heart a little.

  “I’m the same old messed-up freak,” I said. “Have you seen the news?”

  His eyes swept across the coffeehouse. We were well isolated by noise and space. “They bought the Kenosha story.”

  “He’s lying to the cops. I know he remembers.”

  Armin lifted his hand. Both of mine had become fists.

  “Why would he lie?” he said.

  “Because he’s Zoeller. He manipulates people because he can. He doesn’t need a reason—he gets off on control.”

  Armin didn’t say, Like you, but I saw it in his eyes.

  “All we can do is remain vigilant,” he said. “And go on with our lives. Because that’s what looks normal.”

  “We fake it.” The way I’ve been faking with you.

  He eyed me oddly again and I wondered if I’d said it out loud.

  Get a fucking grip, Laney.

  “How’s Blythe?” I said.

  Armin glanced at the coffee bar. “Want something to drink?”

  It was all I could do not to ask again while they prepped our order. I shifted weight from one foot to the other, paced a small circuit, bared my teeth at the Valentine’s mugs. When Armin asked about school I growled. Finally he said, “Why don’t you go for a cigarette or something?”

  Because it reminds me of her. Because everything fucking reminds me of her.

  “Sorry.” I put a hand on his chest, rested my head on him experimentally. “I’m so wound up. I shouldn’t take it out on you.”

  He sighed into my hair. The heat made me aware of how cold I was. I shivered and his arms circled me, big and strong and supportive.

  Everything a girl could want.

  I watched him pay for our coffee, pulling out that silver money clip with the familiar symbol. Two discs. Eclipse.

  Falls the Shadow.

  At the table I cupped my hands around the mug, bathing my face in steam.

  “Blythe’s scared,” Armin said finally. “The cops have been questioning her. A lot.” He spun his mug, frowning. “Zoeller won’t ID her but it doesn’t matter. She’s got a record. All petty stuff, misdemeanors, but it establishes a history of violence.”