If Jacob thought I was making excuses, he didn’t show it. He held up a bottle of gemstone chips to the light, turned it this way and that, then read the hand-lettered card attached with twine.
“It’s a shame to have it all going to waste,” I added.
He picked up a charm bag. “May I?”
“Knock yourself out.”
He unknotted the tie and tipped the contents into his palm. What had been kitschy and fun at my CUTTERZ station seemed pathetic now as he scrutinized it. Iron filings. Quartz flakes. Myrrh nuggets. Burdock twigs.
I said, “It might look like a jumble of sticks and stones, but it’s more than just floor sweepings. Everything’s got a traditional meaning associated with it.”
He scrutinized it harder.
“I mean…actual thought and effort went into these things.”
He looked up from the bag. “Obviously.”
Did he mean that, or was he just humoring me so I’d stop defending the charms he’d never actually impugned? I didn’t know him well enough to say.
“You can sell these from a website?” he asked.
“That’s the plan.”
He tipped the mojo back into the muslin bag. “Well…I’ll buy this one.”
“Oh, please.” I rolled my eyes. “You brought takeout. That’s all the sympathy I can stomach.”
“But I’ve handled it. You can’t sell it now.”
“I doubt anyone but you has the wherewithal to dust it for prints.”
“My energy’s all over it.”
Guess I kept forgetting true believers didn’t all wear dreamcatcher pendants and organic cotton underpants. “Look, I can’t charge you for it. You don’t see anyone else helping me set up my online storefront, do you? Consider it a token of my appreciation.”
“You worked these into a haircut? How?”
“Simple.” I rounded the couch and grabbed him by the head. “Sit back. Relax. And enjoy the ride.” Mostly I was itching to fix that frumpy angle on his sides, but I quelled that impulse and pretended we were back in my rented station, and I’d just given him a wash and an ultra flattering cut. I mapped the plates of his skull. The brainpan isn’t round, like most folks imagine. It’s full of planes and ridges and curves. I mapped the topography with my fingertips and learned the lay of the land, and said, “Okay, suppose I just picked out that charm for you. Which one is it?”
He checked the bag. “Grounding.”
“Right. So let’s say you told me you’re having crazy dreams, and you feel spaced out all the time, and you’re having trouble focusing.” I walked my fingers to the hairline and began massaging tiny circles at his temple. His body shifted—relax, relax, relax—and he eased into my sofa. “So think about the burdock. The way it smells, the way it feels. Imagine you’re falling into it, getting smaller and smaller while the herb looks like it’s growing. Think about the iron filings getting bigger and bigger, forming themselves into a strong, protective gate, keeping out all the freaky vibes you want to deflect. The quartz and the myrrh, they’re boulder-sized now, grounded, vibrating with the energy from the earth. You get even smaller. Pretty soon you can see the cells and molecules, you’re in a forest of burdock, great big thistles, and all the vibrations coming at you bounce off the fence. Whatever’s left inside, anything boiling under your skin that’s making you edgy and weird, all of it gets vibrated away by the circle of boulders, carried down into the earth, where it breaks up and dissipates until it’s nothing but harmless, neutral energy.”
My hands trailed down to his shoulders and I quelled an embarrassed laugh. “Anyway. That’s the type of spiel I would do.”
“That was amazing.” He caught me by the wrist and turned to face me, and lo and behold, the Vibe couldn’t possibly have been more obvious. “I’m tingling all over.”
“Is that so?”
He turned and grappled me across the sofa back, and dragged me into a sloppy, needy kiss. We tumbled through various pieces of furniture as we shed our clothes, knocked over an end table and nearly destroyed my favorite lamp, but thankfully my bed was only a few steps away.
We were both dewy and panting by the time he mashed his sticky forehead to mine and gasped, “Can you tell me those things again? Inside me?”
Just when I thought I’d heard every fantasy under the sun. I pawed another condom out of the nightstand. “Prepare to have your mind blown.”
And so we got down to business. We weren’t swinging from the chandeliers; there were no silicone aids or vibrating toys. In fact, I didn’t even say anything provocative. Even so, Jacob wasn’t the only one to end up with a blown mind.
I’ve ad-libbed some crazy sex fantasies in my time—just ask the guy from the car wash who insisted he wanted to be cannibalized, then ended up getting sick in my wastebasket when I told him exactly what I was gonna do to him. This was different. Not because it was any more realistic, since I was waxing eloquent about chakras and vibrational fields, but because this persona Jacob wanted me to wear while I plowed him? It wasn’t some construct he’d been carrying around in the dirtiest folds of his brain, a role in which any warm body would suffice. It was me. Or at least some version of me, a rendition I’d trooped out and introduced to him while we were playing with some charm bags.
Suggestion is a powerful thing. Despite the fact that I knew we were just a couple of rutting animals, I got caught up in the fantasy that we were made of stardust and magic, and it wasn’t just Jacob’s prostate I was bumping up against, but his soul. I came so hard my head spun. When I rolled off, I left him splayed out on the bed like every last bit of his juice was wrung dry. We lay there together, staring up at the cracks on the ceiling and re-learning how to breathe. Normally, after such a spectacular performance, I’d give props where props were due. But it would’ve been a shame to mar the occasion with something as common as words.
Eventually, though, our flesh could no longer be transcended by the bliss of our minds. My arm fell asleep, and when I rolled away, Jacob pried himself off the mattress to visit the bathroom. He came back with a towel to throw over the wet spot he’d been stewing in, then settled on his side with his head propped on his fist, facing me. Ever the gentleman, he asked, “Can I stay over?” Then he cemented the deal by adding, “I don’t want the night to end.”
By that point, even though my post-coital endorphin rush was technically history, I teetered on the brink of saying, “Sure, baby.” Since I couldn’t trust myself not to reply with anything schmaltzy, I nodded instead.
Usually after I shoot my load, I can’t wait to jump up and have a smoke, but this time a heavy lassitude kept me in bed. Not unpleasant, not by any means. It wasn’t all that late, though, and I was stone cold sober. Jacob traced the mehndi inked up the side of my thigh like he found every last inch of me fascinating. And as naive as it might be, I ate the attention right up.
He mapped all the tattoos he could reach—without insulting the Mattie, thank you very much—ending with the thorny swirl up the side of my neck. His fingertips then lit on my cheek. With utter sincerity, he said, “I hope you know how special you are.”
Even though I was firmly in bed, with those words, everything dropped right out from under me, and I realized what it truly meant to fall for someone.
Chapter 24
So lightning didn’t strike me dead when I decided that, yes, I was willing to own the b-word. You know the one: boyfriend. Unfortunately, the real world had this annoying habit of intruding on my love life. Even without the expense of owning a car, there were more bills to pay than reserves to pay them with. And Jacob’s not an idiot. No matter how cool I tried to play it, he could tell the contents of my mailbox were causing me undue distress.
“It’s the plastic,” I groaned. “I’m paying more in interest now than I make in a week.”
“Let me help.”
“I’m not taking your money.” Bad enough he insisted on “treating” for dinner, drinks, or any other incidental expenses that
cropped up while we were together.
“I know a way you could eliminate a major monthly expense,” he said, only half-teasingly.
“While the sordidness of shacking up with someone I’ve only been seeing for a few weeks does appeal to me, I think not.” Plenty of guys joke about needing a sugar daddy, but the prospect of actually having one left me cold. Swapping fluids was one thing. Without equal footing, I’d never dream of mingling our households. “Besides, where would all my boxes live?”
While I changed out of my appalling checkered smock, Jacob settled himself on the couch, cracked open the laptop and checked up on our Craftacular store. Customers get snippy if you don’t ship their order the nanosecond they hit the buy button, I learned that the hard way. And a single one-star review carries a hell of a lot of weight when it’s the only review you have.
“Anything?” I asked.
“One.” He jotted down two items, a bottle of pink rocks and magnet filings, and a love mojo bag, then handed the note to me. While I poked through boxes and gathered up the stuff, he addressed the padded mailer. I wrote up a thank-you by hand, slipped it into the envelope, and leaned it against the door so he’d remember to drop it at the post office in the morning. As second jobs went, not too demanding.
Unfortunately, I suspected it wasn’t particularly lucrative, either.
I poured myself onto the couch and he slung an arm around me. “How’s the store doing, anyway?” I asked. Jacob brought up the account page. I scanned it, and scanned it again, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. “Wait a sec, that’s the profit for the month?”
He moused to the date range field and held it down. Yep. We were looking at the month.
“Fifty bucks? We’ve been babysitting this thing every night for a measly fifty bucks—and we pay out half of that in shipping.” By that point I wasn’t snuggling anymore, I was sitting up ramrod straight. I commandeered the laptop and scrolled down to the reviews.
** (2) Smells nice but I thought it would be bigger.
* (1) Worthless crap!!! Returning!!!
*** (3) as ordered
* (1) package arrived beat up and dirty
“My average star rating is 1.75?” I snapped. “What the fuck is wrong with people?”
Jacob made a dismissive gesture. “Don’t take it personally. It’s the internet.”
“Yeah, well…fuck the internet.” I shoved the laptop onto the coffee table, jumped up and started pacing, then planted my hands on my hips and huffed out a sigh. “I’ve seen people react to this stuff, Jacob. In person, they fucking love it.”
“In person,” he echoed.
“In person.” I spotted my old percolator over in the corner, looking all dry and forlorn. Next Saturday I wasn’t scheduled at ClipLand until six. There was time enough to take down that thankless online store and put together another Sticks and Stones Soiree. The whole robbery experience had soured me on the thought of having strangers in my home. But I was on to that asshole who ripped me off, so if he had any more funny ideas, I was ready for him.
While he didn’t come right out and say it, Jacob obviously got off on the idea of throwing a party for all my psychic-wannabe friends. Once I sent out the invite, he came up with all kinds of useful odds and ends to contribute, from a stereo to replace the one I’d sold, to a scrap of drywall to patch the gaping hole where the shampoo station used to be. Bright and early Saturday morning, he helped me rearrange the furniture. We took apart my bed and stashed the mattress in a dinky back room where a tower of boxes used to live, upright against the wall. Amazing how commercial the apartment looked without a queen sized mattress smack dab in the middle.
I texted Lydia to come up and see what she thought—and really, I was trolling for her opinion of the party setup, and not Jacob. She ogled him shamelessly anyway. In fact, she was all over him. At least until she asked him what he did for a living and he said he was a detective.
“Like the Rockford Files?” Lydia suggested.
“Not exactly. Rockford was more of a P.I.”
Lydia’s eyes narrowed. “So…you’re a cop.” And with that, an appointment for a tarot reading suddenly materialized, and she fled downstairs to her curtain-draped warren.
My old clientele hadn’t forgotten about me while I was earning minimum wage in my checkered smock. Foot traffic was steady, and some folks even brought along a friend or two. With tunes going in the background and the goods so generously arrayed, sales were surprisingly vigorous. Especially once Jacob figured out that we could accept credit cards on his laptop.
I was sorely tempted to call ClipLand and tell whichever manager was on duty that something had come up. Not only would I make more money hawking charm bags, but it was way more fun. Send Jacob out for a few boxes of wine, extend the party…. But no one wanted to work Saturday night at ClipLand, and if I bailed, someone else would need to fill that spot. Damn my overdeveloped sense of fair play—I couldn’t bring myself to blow off the obligation.
Still, I was in the midst of trying to convince myself that my ClipLand coworkers wouldn’t hesitate to saddle me with a crappy shift when one of my party guests caught my eye. I’d just finished setting out a fresh array of incense: pungent, oily, slightly misshapen hand-made cones that smoldered fitfully and left an exotic pall behind if you felt brave enough to actually burn one. My fingertips came away stained chartreuse, and reeking of something that smelled like a mixture of pine needles, weed, and cheap mango ice cream. The guy wasn’t staring at me, like the two chicks who giggled and looked away every time I noticed them. He wasn’t making a spectacle of himself, like the overcompensating guy who couldn’t stop showing off the new tattoo on his ass. He wasn’t really doing much of anything, just sitting quietly on the couch and flipping through one of the psychic pseudo-science periodicals Jacob had fanned across the coffee table.
Flipping through, I immediately saw, but not reading.
His body language screamed discomfort. Not any one particular detail, but a combination of things: the angle of his knees, his distance from the arm rest, and the way his eyes sort-of tracked across the page. He was young, maybe eighteen, smallish and kind of dumpy. White. Ghetto. And judging by the state of his lank, greasy hair, none too clean.
There was something wrong with him. Something very wrong.
Jacob was on the other side of the room, engaged in an earnest conversation about crystals with a dreadlocked, braless neo-hippy in toe shoes and hemp cargo shorts.
“Hey, babe,” I murmured. “C’mere a second.” I walked him over to an unoccupied corner, one that afforded a really good view of the back of the kid’s head, and said, “Something’s up with that guy on the couch.”
One of the things I dug about Jacob was the way he treated whatever I said like gospel, and this was no exception. While, like Lydia, I had no great love of cops, it was a thing of beauty to see him deploy and scope out the scumbag who thought he was hiding in plain sight. Jacob circled the room, took him in from a few different angles, then eased his way back around to me. Lips against my ear, he said, “Do you want me to get rid of him?”
What I wanted was my stolen stuff. “Remember how I said my laptop got swiped? I don’t have shit for proof, but I know that’s the creep who took it. I’m positive.”
And then I braced myself, because at that point any sane person would have told me I didn’t have a leg to stand on, and to stop being such a drama queen. But not Jacob. He just pulled out his phone, hit a number, and said, “Carolyn? I need your help.”
I knew Carolyn well enough to know she wouldn’t be comfortable around the two of us as a couple. And I knew Jacob well enough to know he didn’t care. But it’s a free country, at least on paper, and apparently she’d chosen to get involved.
“Heads up.” Jacob nudged me with his elbow. My robber was on his feet with his eye on the door, ready to make a break for it. “Can you stall him?”
By “stall,” I was guessing he didn’t mean knocking the guy
down and wrapping him in a clothesline, preferably while I called him a few choice names. But I had years of experience making small talk with miserable folks I’d just as soon slap upside the head. Smooth as can be, I insinuated myself between the kid and the door, and exclaimed, “Say, don’t I know you?”
The guy flinched and cowered. “No. I…no, I don’t think so.”
“Sure I do. You hang out at Magic Brew, right?”
He tried to step around me but I matched the move before it got him anywhere. “Never been there.”
“Oh, I know. You’re a cashier at the gas station.”
“No.”
“I’ll bet you get that all the time, people who know you from somewhere but can’t quite put their finger on it.”
“Look, I gotta go.”
“Hold on, hold on, it’ll come to me.” I looped my arm through his and walked him toward the snack table and away from the door. Tension sang through his body like an electrical current. “Why don’t you try a pecan sandy while I figure out how I know you. Crumbly, but surprisingly good.”
Eager to appease me so I’d back off and allow him to make his escape, he grabbed a cookie and shoved it in his mouth. Chewed. Didn’t quite manage to swallow, though his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in a gratifying display of nervousness. Even fear.
“Now I know where I’ve seen you before,” I said while his throat convulsed. “You were at my last party.”
Maybe I should’ve put a damper on my satisfaction, because the jig was up. I knew. And he knew I knew. And so he did what any guilty-assed tweaker would do in that situation—he threw a platter of cookies on the floor between us, and he ran.
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