by Jessica Pine
At first I wasn't really aware that the stares were anything other than the ones I was accustomed to. Feeling only slightly self-conscious I wandered into the bookstore and set about browsing the shelves for classic novels, the ones I should have read the previous summer; Justin had put kind of a dent in my GPA. It was only when I was paying for the books that I saw a glint of hostility in the cashier's eyes, and as I walked away I heard someone whisper, "Yeah - that's her."
I was rattled, but I headed to the coffee shop to meet Everglade, only to find Justin holding court there. He wore dark glasses and was moping into a mocha latte. He was sitting on his own, but his magnetism was only dimmed rather than neutralized; I could see how half the girls in the shop turned subtly towards him every time he sighed.
"Amber," he said, removing his glasses. His eyes were red and puffy. "How are you doing?"
"Fine," I said. Trust him to act like a sane human being now. It had the desired effect too; I started to feel like shit. After all, I'd never given him a chance to explain himself after the annulment - just stormed off like the spoilt, dramatic little brat I was. "How about you?" I asked.
He gave me a wan, beautiful smile.
"Oh, you know," he said. "Getting there."
I was about to ask if I could join him, when a girl pushed past me, almost spilling my coffee. She was blonde and slim - pretty, but her eyes were angry. And it was with a strange, sick shock that I realized she looked like me. She sat down at the table next to Justin. He looked me in the eye for a moment, turned to her and then kissed her, deep and slow and hard.
"Asshole," said Everglade, when I told her. "What does he expect? You're going to get jealous of Suzy Substitute and take him back?"
"I don't know," I said. "I don't know if I can go out there again - I felt like everyone was staring at me."
She shrugged.
"You're paranoid. God's way of telling you to lay off the bong."
"I'm not. I swear. I was in the bookstore and someone said 'Yeah, that's her.'" She shook her head and I could hear myself begin to babble. "No, it wasn't like that...not like usual. This had malice to it, Everglade. Real spite. What the hell have people been saying about me?"
"Lots," she said. "Probably. And you're never going to stop them, so you'd better stop giving a shit."
That was around the time I started getting mad at her. She knew you couldn't stop people talking shit, any more than you could fix a lost cause like Justin, but he managed to make me hate myself every time I saw him - red-eyed, dragging his feet, clinging to another identikit blonde like she was a security blanket. Then one night I got a call from a girl named Andrea, saying Justin was in the hospital and asking for me.
"I don't see what I can do," I said, determined to keep my distance. "We broke up. Over two months ago."
"Please," she said. "He took pills - it's too late to pump his stomach. I think he's dying."
When I got to the hospital the wretched Andrea had been thrown out, exiled for the cardinal sin of not being me. Justin was pale and greasy haired, but very much alive.
"You came. You came," he said, grabbing my hands and kissing them. I started to cry, relieved to find he was okay. While I was furious at him for pulling this shit, I crushed down my anger, conscious that he was fragile.
"Nothing's been the same since you left," he said. "It's like the whole world's gone dull and gray."
My heart flipped over and I wanted to tell him it had been just like that for me too, that this proved we were two halves of a whole. But I didn't. I stayed strong. At first, anyway.
"They made me sign," he said. "Your Daddy - he had these casino heavies standing over me. Left me in no doubt that they'd break my legs and cut my dick off if I didn't sign the papers. I never wanted to do it, Amber. I loved you. You know I love you. I will always love you."
I had a whole speech in my head, one that I'd been rehearsing over and over, based on this very fantasy coming true. If he told me he loved me and needed me I was going to be brave, and honest. I was going to tell him that it was over and yes, it hurt right now but heartbreak sucks - them's the breaks, kid.
Except he turned his head into the pillow and tears slid down his cheeks. And I was so fucking relieved he wasn't dead that I started to cry along with him. I thought I was good, but he was so much better. When they discharged him I took him back to his place, with a mind to hiding all the knives and pills in the house. His apartment was a wreck - broken mirrors, smashed TV. His roommate had moved out in disgust and he was weeks behind on the rent. Like a sucker I wrote him a check - I figured he didn't need anything more to worry about.
There were no sheets on his bed and slashes all over the mattress. I patched up the worst of the damage with electrical tape and made up the bed for him. He kept begging me not to leave and pulled me down onto the bed. I panicked but when I tumbled over onto my back I understood what it was he wanted me to see.
He'd painted me on the ceiling. It was a life-size nude, me in the pose of Botticelli's Venus, clamshell and all. Only the angels and devils from Justin’s shoulder tatts had replaced the cherubs from the original painting. For a while I just lay there thunderstruck, while he explained that he'd done it by building a platform on top of several stepladders and painted it while lying on his back. "...just like Michaelangelo, only less gay."
I'd never understood the meaning of the phrase 'walk of shame' until I headed home. Everglade took one look at my face and groaned.
"Tell me you didn't," she said, but I just shook my head.
Maybe that's why, when it got really bad, a little part of me believed that I deserved it. You don't play footsies with emotionally unstable exes, not if you're smart. But I wasn't smart, not when I was with him.
He called me five times that afternoon. The first couple of times it was sweet. Then it started to get scary, even worse than the times he'd have me backed into a corner. "I've never hit a woman," he used to say. "But don't make me start, Amber. Don't you dare turn me into that person."
"Aren't you coming over?" he said, at nightfall the next day. "Come on, cher. Don't you want to come admire my work of art?"
I said I was tired, which was true. I'd spent one night in hospital and the next night making the worst mistake of my life.
"Fine," he said, after a long, stony silence. "Just remember that I asked you and you said no."
"Okay," I said, stifling a yawn. I didn't think much of it at the time - I was far too sleepy. I figured out what he meant some four hours later when he was standing outside on the sidewalk giving it the full Stanley Kowalski routine.
"STELLLLLLLAAAAAAAA!!! STELLLLLLLLLLLAAAAAAAA!!!"
I staggered out onto the balcony. He yelled again, so hard that he started to cough. "Hey baby," he said, when he could speak again. "You miss me?"
"Justin, what are you doing?"
"A Streetcar Named Desire," he said, and filled his lungs for another blast. I could see lights coming on in the windows left and right and across the street.
Something flew past my shoulder and it was only when I saw its exploded remains on the sidewalk that I realized it was a cantaloupe - one that had been sitting in our fridge for too many weeks before Everglade fished it out and put it to good use. She'd thrown long but had missed Justin by a couple of feet.
"Stanley Kowalski was a fucking rapist," she yelled over the railing. "Did you even read the play, you poser?"
He started to laugh and screamed all the louder.
"Fuck him," said Everglade. "I'm calling the cops."
"No!"
"Why?" she said. "Someone's gonna. May as well be me."
I could hear raised voices above his - "Some of us have to work tomorrow, asshole!" - and knew she was right, but deep down I knew this was my fault. I should never have let him think he had a second chance.
He did a whole bunch of stupid shit after that. He called me constantly, sent me flowers, wrote me long love letters whose tone turned threatening when I didn't answer
them. "What's your problem, Amber? You think yours is the only cunt in the world?"
"Call the cops," Everglade said, time and time again. "If you don't, I will."
"And then what?" I said. "They'll know it was my fault. I slept with him, didn't I? That night after he got out of the hospital."
"They're not gonna blame you for that," she said. "Seriously - fucking lawyer up already. This is starting to give me the creeps. He reminds me of that stalker who used to send me letters talking about how he fucked my mom and was really my Dad."
Justin's next act was a dozen white roses dipped in stage-blood, followed by a sketch of me as Venus, only this time the cherubs were real devils - dripping fangs and cruel claws - and he'd drawn me with my eyes gouged out, my lips sewn shut and my breasts cut off, the skin crudely stapled over the bleeding gashes. Everglade took one look at it and called the police.
Two of them showed up - a man and a woman, him short and white and her tall and black. I was babbling and half out of my mind with fear, but then the male cop said the thing I'd dreaded - "And did you give Mr. Theroux any kind of encouragement?" His partner gave him a look that could strip paint and she later came back to tell me that it wasn't my fault, but the damage had already been done. They'd seen through me. She gave me the number for a rape crisis line and asked me if I had a gun. To this day I don't know if she should have done that or not, but I guess she wasn't talking to me as a cop - this was just woman-to-woman.
They told me to get a restraining order, but the thought of the thing getting bigger and official scared the shit out of me. I didn't want my Dad to find out. He was mad enough at me for Vegas - how mad would he be if he knew I'd slept with Justin again?
And then there was Justin. Even when he terrorized me I felt sorry for him. I knew he was hurt. I imagined he was buckling under the weight of his own talent. "You don't understand," I'd say. "His mother rejected him. He has abandonment issues."
"Babycakes, I don't care if his father was Darth fucking Vader," said Everglade. "Or if his mother sucked every dick in the Delta while cramming live hedgehogs up her snatch - nobody gets to behave like that. Nobody."
I went out less frequently. I knew from Everglade that Justin was sleeping around again, and I guessed he'd be pouring poison into various ears about what a bitch I was. One of the last times I went out in San Diego was to a bar a few doors down from where I met him. It was crowded and I felt everyone was whispering about me, and I wound up on my knees on the sidewalk, gasping for breath. Everyone thought I was fucked up and someone called an ambulance, so that I had to fend off a bunch of paramedics who wanted to know how much I'd drank and what I'd taken. I was actually stone cold sober and it was only after this one girl paramedic (she looked about fourteen) correctly diagnosed me with a panic attack that they agreed not to take me to the hospital.
My grades were in the toilet. Justin kept calling me day and night - sometimes tender, other times vicious. I was starting to get scared of my own shadow, and even Everglade was beginning to lose patience with me. When my Dad came down to see me he was convinced I had an eating disorder and wanted to take me back to L.A., but I was in too much of a mess. I was in this tangle of worry and fear and self-blame and there was no yanking me out of it.
"I don't get it," said Everglade. "Why can't you go back? All you're doing here is sitting around flunking anyway. One more semester like the last and they'll kick you out."
I shook my head. All I knew is I didn't want to go back. I didn't want to go back to being John Gillespie's daughter. People would look at me, take pictures of me, gossip about me.
"Amber, this is fucking stupid," she said. "What do you think is going to happen?"
"What if he kills himself?" I said.
"Um...like, I dunno?" said Everglade, doing the Valley Girl voice she often did when she was being sarcastic. "If he kills himself he'll be, like, dead? I guess?" She sighed. "You are not responsible for his fucking damage," she said, in her normal voice. "How many times do I have to explain this to you? It's not your fault when he punches a wall and breaks his knuckles - you didn't do that to him. He did that to him. Just like it's not your fault that he sends you serial killer doodles from the twisted depths of his asshole mind."
"But I slept with him!" I yelled.
"Yes, because he knew you would!" she yelled back. "Oh my God, Amber - how fucking stupid are you? I know you're not a moron, but are you so blind to his bullshit that you can't see through him? The girls who all looked like you - the 'suicide attempt'. It was all so you'd feel sorry for him and take him back. There is not a single thing he's said or done that wasn't about manipulating you in some way, shape or form. He's a sociopath - and I know sociopaths - he's ticking so many boxes on the Hare checklist that he makes Tony Soprano look like Mr. Rodgers. You're not a person to him - not really. You're the leading lady to the starring role he's playing in his own life - and that's all you are. He has to get the girl, because that's how the script plays out in his fucked up little head. You're a reward. An objective."
I stared at the floor. I couldn't keep listening to this. She'd hated him from the start and never understood him.
"I'm not surprised your Dad was worried," she continued. "Have you looked in a mirror lately? You look sick - you look gray. Do you even have enough body fat to ovulate any more? There's a box of tampons collecting dust in the bathroom..."
"I was on birth control."
"Was?" Her raised eyebrow said it all, and I slammed out of the room as if she was my mother. I'd stopped taking the pill when Justin and I broke up – they gave me moodswings and I was relieved to stop taking them. I'd had condoms with me the night after the hospital - I remember because he'd bitched about wearing one. He'd promised he wouldn't come inside me, but I'd stood my ground, thinking of all the girls he'd probably said that to in the last couple of months. Was it possible that he'd taken it off without me knowing?
I don't know how I knew he’d done that, but I did. Like I’d always had a sixth sense for his crap right from the beginning. Just like I knew I was pregnant.
Chapter Fifteen
Amber
If I believed in ghosts, this house would be haunted.
I need to pee, but my muscles are still tight and twitchy from my last orgasm, and it takes forever to go. I sit and shiver and stare at the tiles – the grout between them is remarkably clean and I wonder who cleaned the bathroom. And what did they use? One of those miracle infomerical products that Billy Mays use to yell about? Shazam – and the evidence is gone! Clean enough even for Lady Macbeth!
Then I see it – a darker spot where the floor tiles meet the tiling on the side of the tub. It’s an indistinct color and could just be the beginnings of mold, but I know it’s not. His? Or mine?
“Are you done?” Jaime’s voice floats in from the bedroom.
“In a second.” I get up, unsatisfied – open the door and dive back into the bed just as he jumps out, taking my place. I stretch into the warm spot he’s left behind.
Maybe I should give him more than the edited highlights. It’s not like he couldn’t find out everything for himself, but that’s the deal between us – he doesn’t want to do that; he’d prefer to hear it from me.
I just don’t know how you even say those words to someone you want to stick around.
When Jaime comes back out of the bathroom I stare shamelessly. He has the most beautiful body I've ever seen on a man. No tattoos - how I grew to hate those, those quotations that Justin misappropriated and had scrawled all over his skin. Nietzsche's 'God is dead' across his knuckles, parts of Hamlet's soliloquy up his thigh.
Jaime’s skin is brown and unblemished, smooth but for his legs and a tidy little tangle of black hair at his crotch. He's not bulky but he's hard when I touch him. His hips are narrow and agile; the last time we fucked he made me hold perfectly still, so that he could rock and grind into me in the hope of persuading me that sometimes slow was better. It wasn't an unqualified success - I'm
far too impatient.
"Enjoying the view?" he says, sticking his hip out like a pin-up girl.
"God, yes." Once again I feel the thrum between my thighs. I'm close to sore but I could still go again. Last night I made him touch himself so I could watch - tit for tat. Then I sucked him off. Then he returned the favor, groaning all the while like I was the most delicious thing he'd ever tasted. He did it again when I went out for a smoke, kneeling between my thighs with his back to the railings. The night air was cold between my legs, making his tongue feel even hotter.
"Get back here," I say, holding out the covers. I like the hunger in his eyes when he looks at me; he's already half-standing to attention.
His kiss tastes of mint and I frown.
"Mouthwash," he says. "At some point I'm really gonna need to lay hands on a toothbrush."
"We'll get one. And groceries." I want to get some nicotine patches; for the first time in ages I have reason to care how my breath smells.
"You mean get out of bed?"
"Yeah."
"And put clothes on?"
I nod.
"To go grocery shopping? Probably a good idea." The tip of his cock nudges between my open legs. I add more condoms to my mental inventory. He lowers his head and traces the edge of my nipple with his tongue, wetting it before blowing softly on it. I watch my nipples crease under his touch. Justin never paid much attention to my breasts and it caught me unawares last night when Jaime sucked at them and set off a bunch of nerves I never knew I had. Just the touch of his breath makes me shiver, thinking of how his mouth felt.
"Can't we just go as we are?" he murmurs, his hand on my hip.
"It'd be kind of cold."
"Counting on it. We'd have to huddle together for warmth."