-3-
A lot has changed. A lot. I find it hard to believe myself. Where did it all go wrong? Did it go wrong? Did I make the wrong decisions? Should I have lived with who he was? What he did? Where he went? Should I have skipped my music career? Should he have skipped his football career? Because we both gained our careers by losing each other. Did it not work out for the best?
I find it hard to accept that it did.
I’m older now, twenty-six. Not much older, but older. Four years older (well, technically I’m five “years” older in age—from twenty-one to twenty-six—but the actual time is four years and two-months older. Because my birthday’s in October.) You grow up a lot in four years. I was wilder in some ways back then. If we go by appearance only, I’m a saint now. My hair’s no longer shaved on one side, and the side which was long before, the right side, is now shorter. I have a pixie-cut, all equal length. When I DJ I spike it up and put on garish lipstick, maybe even some that glows in the dark. “It’s all about the image!” Randy Dhawan always tells me. He’s now technically my manager. I decided to stick with the House Market music label, as well as have Randy manage all my international and local gigs. I trust him, and I like his views about music, keeping it pure and all that jazz. I’m not looking for fame, not looking for that Number One record. I just want to mix and make a living out of it. And I want to enjoy the music. Working with Randy gives that to me.
I never realized that you don’t need a hit single to make more than a decent living from music. When I look at my bank account these days and think back to the times when I was struggling for rent, getting ready to be kicked out of my loft out on Bogart Street in Bushwick, I can’t believe that I own my own little Toyota hatchback now, that I travel across the world making music, and that I could get an apartment in the higher market ranges of Brooklyn if I wanted to. (Vikki won’t let me get one. She says when she gets married she’ll “consider” letting me out into the world “on my own.” We’re eternal roommates, it seems.)
I saw Randy yesterday. We caught up on business and he skillfully avoided the subject of Declan Cox. Randy lived through that shit with me. Another reason I stay with the label. Because Randy’s become more of a friend than a manager. And I need friends. Friends have gotten me through things.
My hair is also straight blond now, my natural color. No more of those pink and green highlights in it. I like to believe I was wild-looking back then to protect the fragility I held within. But that fragility is gone now. And, like the bright colors of insects, my outer covering was merely a warning of the venom I hoped to hold inside. But I had no venom in me in those days. I guess I dressed up freakishly on the outside and made myself look bad and hard and in-your-face to protect myself in a way, to scare people off. It had been a lie, a semi-truthful lie. Because I guess I was tough in a way back then as well, I just didn’t know it.
But I’m tougher now for sure. Love calloused me, hardened my resolve. So I don’t need the bright warning colors anymore. I no longer need to pretend to have thicker skin. I actually do now.
Of course, the riot of colorful tattoos on my left arm, shoulder to wrist, will never go away. I don’t want them to. They’re a part of me, and they’re what keeps Savva always with me. The rose at the top, blood falling from its stem, the hungry wolf at the bottom, the dead tree—they remind me of how hard it was to lose her. They remind me of the mistakes I made, the crowd I got involved with. I need those reminders. We all need reminders of painful pasts. How else would we avoid the same mistakes again?
After Deck and I split up, I got his name forever imprinted just above my waistline, on my right, in tiny blue script. That I loved—love—him, is not in question. I want to remember that. I want to remember the mistakes. If I can’t have him because of how I acted, because of how I closed the door on our love, I want to at least keep a bit of what we once were, with me. And that is the ink, the name: DECLAN.
Besides, it took me three years to realize I’d made a mistake, a grave mistake. And that’s when I got the ink. I don’t regret the ink. It’s a reminder of true love. Because it was true love. It always will be.
It just wasn’t meant to be. Wasn’t meant to last.
So it didn’t.
Our love was a shooting star, and it burned out fast, taking things with it. It ran through our lives like a virus out of control, leaving bodies behind and tears being cried.
It was unhealthy. So it ended. The bastid which was love, won.
I never want to make that mistake with anyone else again. If there ever will be anyone else.
I don’t think there will be. Not like Deck. And that’s something I have to live with. I try and live with it every day.
Let’s go back...
TWO
OVER FOUR-AND-A-HALF YEARS EARLIER
~ MARCH, YEAR ZERO ~
-1-
Blaze Ryleigh
Back in the day...
We’d just made love. Deck had ridden me and I’d ridden him and we’d soared and flown and lost ourselves while the world fell away, confetti in a hurricane, and all our problems had disappeared while we drank of each other and simply...forgot.
That’s how it was, making love to Declan. It was a drug, the highest H there ever was. Maybe that’s what caused the problem, because no drug is ever good for you.
It was March. We were in my loft, four months left to go on my lease. He and I had been “dating” since early January. It had been almost two months since Declan and I had made love. Way back in January I’d received photos from a certain Tatiana Watkins—rich Desperate Housewife living it up in Brooklyn Heights in a condo so expensive they’d charge you just to look at it. The photos had been of Declan, surrounded by three naked and highly seductive women. One was red all over—that’s all I remember about her. Red all over—fuzzy red. Not even red, really. More like an orange haze. She’d had a smile, and a glint that had made her seem...hungry perhaps.
I never asked Deck what that particular woman’s name had been, the redhead. I didn’t want to ask. I wanted to put the incident behind me. Deck had gone to her place—Tatiana Watkins’s place, not the redhead’s—and she’d paid him and Trev to move stuff around there all afternoon. A grand an hour, for each of them! Deck had jumped at the opportunity, albeit, with concerns. He’ity, albeit, with concerns. He', place. , with concerns. He;d told me about those concerns earlier before going to Blonde Tatiad told me about those concerns earlier before going to Blond Tatiana’s place. I’d been nervous, so had he. She caught him in a room, with all her nude friends, and they maneuvered him into incriminating photos that were hard to think innocently of.
She sent me the photos.
And I believed them.
The photos: Deck, the three gorgeous women, his hand on one of their breasts (our redhead friend), and several other incriminating positions. It was the man over the corpse with a bloody knife in his hands. It was Guilty and Case-Closed for me. It was all these things, except for a few minor incongruities. Vikki spotted them—good and kind and caring Viktoriya Golovkina, my new best friend at the time. She’d pointed out how Deck had been dressed throughout the show, and the ladies had been naked. She’d made other points. Eventually, I decided to hear him out.
So he told me about how Tatiana had tried to seduce him, and how he’d held his ground, how the three of them had almost sacked him like a quarterback, hungry wolves headed for him like bloody meat on a stick.
He’d stood firm, he said. He wasn’t going to let them play him like that. He was going to show the women just what kind of man he was! So he’d stood there, gazed at their frizzy furs and poky pointers and done nothing about it. And then he’d left.
But before that, they’d surrounded him, he’d fallen, his hand had landed on...unlikely...body parts. And Tatiana had taken advantage of it. It was a truthful lie—he had been in a room with three naked women, but not for the reasons Tatiana had wanted me to believe.
I didn’t believe him when
he told me about it. I listened to him. And when he was done, I asked him to leave. He did. Days went by. Weeks went by, Vikki always by my side, always sowing the seed of reason in my head, telling me to consider it carefully, to hear his side, to put my own fears aside.
At twenty-one, back then, I had already known fear. I was well acquainted with it. I’d learned of fear the day Tolek Two-Face Thomas had pumped seven Es down my throat and then slid his slimy hand under my blouse, easing it up, crawling, like insects with fretting legs, up, and up, and up to my soft breast. I’d learned it when, moments later, Xavier Lopez, Good Ole Xavier who is no longer with us, brother of my also-dead best-friend Savva, thrust his Ruger six-shot so far up Tolek’s neck that Tolek’s hand thrust way far back down my blouse, skipping the jackpot between my legs, and then quivered spasmodically just over his chin, waiting for the inevitable bullet from Xavier’s gun to splatter his jaw and gray matter over the Dance Club’s chill-couch we were all sitting back on.
I’d been high, but I’d known what I was seeing: The terror of my then-boyfriend’s dark blue eyes as he’d stared at Xavier’s golden ones, gun crunching up his jaw. And the expectant moment of red, red all over, red everywhere, red on me and Tolek and the couch and even on Xavier as he had stood there, lips curled into a snarl, gun twitching under Tolek’s throat.
The red, thankfully, never came. And neither did what Tolek had been planning before the gat was thrust up into his jowl.
I had also known fear a week later, when Tolek lingered one time after dark, Savva’s joyful arm looped in my own while we’d skipped playfully home after a night of too much drinking. Tolek had stood in the shadows, smoking a Marlboro, nothing visible but the glow of orange at the end of his cigarette and the puff of white smoke while he’d stood in a recess and simply...watched us.
I’d known fear, again, later, when my nose had bled after my second (and last) time on Big C. We’d been at an all-night party. Savva had suggested I try myself an “upper.” “Just some nose-candy,” she’d said.
“I don’t like coke, Sav. Makes my skin crawl.”
She’d rolled her eyes, huffed out, exasperated.
I snorted it.
My nose bled.
I howled.
People at the party had eased away from me like I’d contracted AIDS. Someone screamed out, “GET THAT FUCKING BITCH’S NOSE UNDER CONTROL BEFORE THE PIGS GET HERE!”
Blood poured, wouldn’t stop pouring. My heart skipped beats, most literally, and each time it did, I felt I couldn’t get any air. Savva screamed next to me. Finally, a guy I never knew and would never come to discover the name of, helped me, gave me something to chill me out. “I’m a doctor,” he’d said. I rested on his arm and lay there the rest of the night, house music thumping and bumping in my head while the Doc Man held my right hand and Savva held my left. I lay on the couch, looking up, feeling the downer of whatever he’d given me seep into every limb and bone and tissue in my body. I remember thinking, Thank God Savva’s here, because I think this dude just gave me roofies.
The party had scrambled on. More powder was sniffed and breasts were uncovered, licked, touched. Clothes were removed and sex was had, in front of me, around me, just not—thankfully—with me. Again: Thank God Savva’s here...
I knew fear again two hours later, when someone else’s heart skipped three or four too many beats (also literally), and he’d fallen on the glass table in front of me, his blood, from his nose, falling and intermingling with mine which had fallen there earlier onto the same rug but which no one had yet bothered to clean. People high on coke tend to miss these little details. Not even the supposed roofies were enough to keep me calm after that, because I screeched! The dude’s shaved head touched my toe as it had slapped the ground, shattered glass shards poking from his brow and temples. Someone howled, “OH MOTHERFUCK GET THAT FUCKEN DUDE OUT OF MY PENTHOUSE!!!” (Probably from the same dude who’d shouted to “get that bitch out” earlier.)
I knew fear on the way down the stairs, not seeing the floor straight while I was half-carried by Savva—still holding my left hand—and Doc Man, still holding the right. I knew fear as we made it out onto the street and heard sirens. I knew fear when I fell on the sidewalk, scraping my hands and knees, and Doc Man and golden-skinned Savva thrust me into an alley, waiting for NYPD to fly past. I knew fear. I knew fear when I got home. I knew fear the next day, when the after-effects of the C and the maybe-it-was-or-wasn’t-roofies hit me: That suicidal riptide that snakes into your life after putting anything so foreign and powerful into your body.
I knew fear, as I looked at that razorblade, and fought the thoughts which writhed unwelcomed into my fragile-from-the-drugs state of mind.
I knew fear when Mamah left for Poland, leaving me behind because I didn’t want to live in a country where I didn’t speak the language and couldn’t understand the culture. I knew fear when a window smashed, a mere day after Mamah had left, across the street, and the cops were on our road within minutes, asking us all questions “about the girl who was...assaulted next door.” The euphemistic assault was actually a rape, and the apartment was the one next to Savva’s. I’d known fear when I hadn’t yet discovered that fact, and when I’d thought Savva had been the one who’d been “assaulted.”
I knew fear when I couldn’t pay my rent, then eventually stopped knowing it when Mr. Bernstein, lion-hearted Mr. Bernstein, let it slide. And then let the next month slide, and let so many months slide after that I eventually lost count.
I sensed a little fear when I knew he could throw me out on the street, leave me cold and hungry, but lost that fear when he visited me, spoke to me about Mamah and how he missed her, how he was now somehow responsible for me in a way.
Around Mr. Bernstein, I noticed, finally, and with inexplicable relief, that I knew a little less fear than usual.
But the fear I had come to meet by the time I received those photos from Tatiana in January of Year Zero, when I was twenty-one, a mere two weeks after having met Declan Cox, the fear I’d come to be acquainted with so deeply—best-buds, BFFs, chummy-chums—had somehow now become a part of me, a seed planted.
Or a tumor started.
It had grown. It never left me, never stopped showing me the smashed glass or the intermingling of the man’s blood with mine, the roofies feeling, the Ruger up Tolek’s throat, the “assault” across the road, the leaving of Mamah. In my dreams I had seen these things. To make them go away, I had drunk CC whiskey. To bury them further, I’d smoked up on Jane Green. To stick it so far out of sight that I never even knew it existed anymore, I had dropped Es.
And Savva dropped Es. And then Savva shot the dragon—big H, George Smack. Heroin.
And by then I thought I really did know fear. But I didn’t. Not yet. That would come later. Real Fear. The kind made of spiders under your skin, the stuff of nightmares, dark faces hovering over a mist of bleeding bones in a desert. That Fear I only discovered later. I met that Fear on a cold January afternoon when snow had just fallen and my best friend, Savannah—Savva—Lopez, sister of the Ruger Man—The Man with the Gun, The Man with The Goods, The Candyman, her brother Xavier Lopez who would meet his own fate over a year later—spiked her final needle of saddening joy up a diligently pumping artery. The hazy poison had made a straight bee-line up her arm, over her throat and into her brain, finally stabbing her heart.
She’d fallen, she’d gurgled (I imagine), her head hit the ground. She’d groaned.
And she’d died.
Fear appeared...
It seeped under my door like black infested smoke, noxious and thick, putrid and dying, lingering, floating, ever there. Waiting. The room never to be free of its toxic effects again.
Worst of all, the thing that made me break into cold sweats at night, the kind where you’re actually hot but your arms still ache from a frigid freeze in the air, the thing that brought Old Man Fear into my soul and gave him permit, residence, and ownership of all the land within it, was not the f
all, the gurgle, the groan, or even the death.
It was her smile.
Savva’s smile had lingered on her mouth while the last vestiges of life had left her drowning lungs and floated up into the heavens above.
Or Hell below.
She’d been smiling when I’d seen her dead on the ground, smiling at leaving this world, smiling on the floor while the rest of her face was doing something so far from smiling that, no matter how hard I try today, I still cannot shake the image of that smile.
That smile has found its way into my dreams, my nightmares, my mornings, my lonely nights. I’ve faced all the rest of it, all the gruesomeness of everything related to her death. I can deal with the excretions a body produces when it finally expires, what happens to its capillaries, its color, lividity. I can deal with all these things. Because these are the things of expiration, of sadness, of unhappiness, and all the things that are horrible in life. Because Death is horrible. It is all those other things.
So I can deal.
But not the smile. Not the smile. I couldn’t deal with that final smile she’d had on her face as she’d lain on the ground, note clasped in her rigid hand, the note which said, I’ll be looking out for you from below.
She’d had no right to smile. No right.
At twenty-one, the age I was when Deck had stood in my loft in the latter part of January, eyes glowing with uncried tears, and told me about Tatiana the Titty Toter and her Coven of Clutching Cocksuckers, I had already known Fear. I knew Him well. I had known him maybe a little too long by then. And I think that’s probably where things started going wrong. Because He clouded my thinking, and muddied up my mind.
Fear tricked me. He lied to me. And I made the mistakes I made because of Him.
I’d known Deck for only about two weeks at that time. We’d made love a mere week after knowing each other. He’d looked deeper into me than anyone I’d ever known, except for Savva herself. He’d shattered every defense I’d worked so hard to erect ever since she’d...left. Ever since Fear had walked into my life.
Need Me (Truthful Lies Trilogy Book Three) Page 3