The Submission Gift

by Solace Ames

  Adriana.

  Falling, falling.

  There was a small pair of bolt cutters under his bed. Emergency handcuff removal. He’d never had to use them. They went into a suitcase.

  It only took a few minutes to find the address of Steve Pollard and study a satellite image of his Long Beach bungalow.

  Eating some breakfast before leaving seemed like the right thing to do, but his stomach clenched at the thought of food. He drank a glass of soy milk instead, brushed his teeth and left the studio.

  He drove a few miles to the Venice apartment where he’d had the spectacularly failed session. The door to the apartment was cracked open. He carried the suitcase up the stairs and resisted the urge to kick the door in again, just for the hell of it.

  The apartment was abandoned, like he’d expected. There was hardly any furniture: a mattress on the corner of the floor, folding chairs, a glass coffee table covered with dirty dishes and empty bottles. He combed through the closets looking for anything that was undoubtedly Marielena’s and not completely worthless.

  In the end, what he found only filled half the suitcase. An expensive-looking lipstick, cheap jewelry, an English as a Second Language textbook, some dresses and underwear and tracksuits. A book of Spanish poetry with photographs slipped between the pages. He didn’t look through them. He didn’t want his concern for Marielena to leave the abstract level. This was a favor for a stranger.

  He found the black duffel bag he’d left, checked to make sure all the contents were there, transferred the bolt cutters from the suitcase to the duffel bag, then took both bags back to his car.

  A strip mall several blocks away had a shipping store. He pulled up the Lima address in his phone, had the items repacked, and watched the smiling attendant take the box away to start its long journey south.

  Back in the car, he took a few minutes to rest with his eyes closed.

  A mistake.

  Joanna slid off the bed and got down on her knees, cupped her breasts in a pornographic offering, and arched toward him. She was a beautiful woman in a city of beautiful women, but more than beauty, more than sex, she was herself, the woman he loved, the only one in the world, and she wanted him.

  Deep down inside he knew that probably wasn’t true. Marc was the one she loved. Marc had sent her to other men before. Now, because of Paul’s doubts—every morning the financial news reduced him to a panicked wreck, every morning the cocaine line that eased the panic got a little longer—Marc had sent her to Paul.

  She was better than cocaine, he thought when he was deep inside her, making her clench around him and moan with an ecstasy that had to be real, at least on a physical level.

  And maybe this meant that Marc loved him, too. In an instrumental way, as he might love a particularly expensive and useful tool.

  He clawed himself away from the cliff of sleep, his heart beating like crazy. Gripping the steering wheel, he cursed himself until the panic faded, until he only felt like he was falling, falling slowly and gently and without any other choice.

  The route to Long Beach was snarled with traffic. He turned on the stereo at one point, but the salsa music was so exceptionally joyful that it depressed him.

  The bag sat on the passenger seat. He’d never tied anyone up who didn’t want to be tied up. This would be a first. He had a feeling he should be more horrified at the prospect. Maybe he really was a sociopath. Or he was right on the border, and he’d just tipped definitively to one side.

  The street was close to the freeway. Commercial buildings abruptly segued into apartments and tight-squeezed bungalow courts. His destination. He parked the car, not caring about cameras, shouldered the bag and walked down the sidewalk, past a gray apartment building, toward the court entrance. He could circle around to the back, break in, wait there if Steve wasn’t home—

  “Paul.”

  The sun flashed in his eyes as he turned. The world blanked out. When color and form came bleeding back, Jay was leaning against the side of the apartment building, in a sharp triangle of shadow. Jay, like Paul had never seen him before. Maybe it was just a trick of the strong winter sunlight, but his outline glowed for a second.

  Paul left the sidewalk and walked toward him, stopping where the shadow started. Arm’s length. Jay became less of a supernatural being, more of a very tired young man. Paul was tired too, way too tired to read Jay. Being here next to him was good, though. Calming. Something came flowing back to Paul—some vital nutrient whose unrealized absence had been making him sick. “Did you come here to stop me?” he asked Jay.

  “Well, duh. What’d you think?” Jay frowned, his eyebrows tilting in delicate confusion.

  “You might be here to cheerlead. Or tag along.” Paul sighed and let the bag fall from his shoulder to the ground. “I wouldn’t let that happen.”

  “I forgot my pom-poms. But yeah, I’m not down with anyone getting arrested for carrying out a revenge fantasy. I tried this too, when I was sixteen, except I didn’t have enough money for the gun, thank God, so I had a feeling even before I went to your place and saw the map on your laptop. So what’s in the bag?”

  “Rope and bolt cutters. I was thinking of taking at least one finger. And making sure he wasn’t going to charge Adriana. Obviously, that’s not going to happen now.”

  “Because I got involved. An accessory. I’d go down, too. I guess that still makes a difference to you.” Jay stepped forward into the sunlight. Even tired and sad, he was achingly beautiful, too much for this time—the prince of a thousand years ago. Or the starship pilot of a thousand years later.

  “Yes,” Paul said, and swallowed thickly. “It makes a difference. You win. I’m leaving.”

  “Winning, losing. Like this is a game and you’re running the odds. I never knew you at all, did I?”

  Paul tried to prepare for the severing. His body betrayed him, skin buzzing with adrenaline, but at least he kept all outward signs from showing. He’d make things simple for them. He could even give a reference for someone to replace him with Adriana. It would be a relief to hit solid ground again, to know the dream was over, that it was only ever a dream.

  Jay stepped back into the shadows and leaned against the wall again.

  It took a few seconds of stunned silence for Paul to realize that Jay wasn’t going to speak. Jay, at a loss for words. Unreal.

  “I drove here,” Jay said, out of nowhere. His voice sounded brittle.

  “Is it the first time since the accident?”

  “Yes.” Jay’s lips twisted in sarcasm or pain or maybe both, and his glance kept skittering away. “I should have taken a taxi. It was kind of nerve-racking. And now my back really hurts. I parked the car about five blocks away and Eduardo and Peter can pick it up later if you can take me home. Home, and then the hospital. Can you at least take me home, please?”

  The formality of the question hit Paul like a fist.

  “Of course. Anything you need.”

  “Yeah. That’s really all I need. Well, that and one other thing.”

  Paul nodded.

  And waited.

  Anything.

  “You have to say goodbye to Adriana,” Jay said.

  * * *

  She missed Jay. Where was Jay? Oh, she’d sent him away. Jay, away. To do something...to get something back.

  “I’m sedated,” she told the man in white pushing her down the hall. It was nice not having to walk—just lying down and being pushed. Floating with the tide.

  “You sure are, honey,” he said.

  Staring upward at the fluorescent panels hurt her eyes. She closed them for a moment of dark, soothing relief, then wrestled them halfway open and floated backward to a time when the light was less harsh. They’d drawn the curtains in that hotel room. No one could see them, not even the sun. They were safe.


  “Are we going backwards?” she asked, her throat too thick and her tongue too heavy to form a rising intonation.

  “No. We’re on our way to the operating room. You’ll be under by the time they start.”

  Something was missing.

  They’ll fix everything. They’ll sew it back on, so I can work again. It’ll be like I never lost it.

  Something was wrong.

  “Keep going. Bring him back.”

  “Sure, honey.”

  “Back.”

  “We’re not going back, honey.”

  She wanted to agree with him in principle, but her mouth didn’t seem to work at all anymore. So she closed her eyes for the last time.

  * * *

  Jay couldn’t help wondering if his own pain was anything near Adriana’s as he settled into the familiar couch.

  “Just one pill,” he said. “I can’t stress that enough. Only one.” He was arguing with himself as much as with Paul. The apartment felt dangerously empty, like he needed to fill it with words and meaning before the silence grew teeth and swallowed them whole.

  “Sure.” Paul dropped the second pill back into the bottle and placed the first into Jay’s waiting palm.

  Jay dry-swallowed it quickly and sighed. He wanted to talk but he didn’t know what to say. He was happy and miserable, proud and ashamed, exhausted but charged with a tingling nervous energy. “I’m a wreck,” he said, throwing scraps to the silence.

  “That’s driving in L.A. You’ll get used to it again.” Paul sat down only a cushion away from Jay, not side by side but not opposite either. Not close, not far.

  I should look at him.

  Really look at him.

  Jay reminded himself not to flinch. Flinching might hurt Paul, and the power to hurt Paul was terrifying and totally unwanted.

  So he looked, and kept his eyes steady. Which caused a problem of an entirely different nature, because Paul’s face in three-quarters profile made looking anywhere else unthinkable.

  I wanted to know you, and I can’t stop wanting to know you, and the wanting won’t ever stop, will it?

  He took one slow, deep breath and reminded himself why they were here. “Adriana—I went to find you for her.”

  “Not for yourself?” Paul didn’t use an accusing tone. He seemed at peace.

  “I love you. I think I can look at you again. But I don’t trust you anymore. That’s dead.”

  Paul rubbed his jawline, the line of his lips twisted, and the peace vanished. “I wouldn’t trust myself, either.”

  “It’s like you’re condemned or something,” Jay said, as he watched the changes pass over Paul’s face like ripples in water. “Wait—you just—you went back to smooth. Chameleon style.”

  “I learned that in Las Vegas.” The lines were even now, the peace returned.

  “But why?”

  “Money.”

  “Everyone wants money.”

  “It meant something else to me. It meant everything. I’ve grown away from that perspective. I had some bad company, but I deserved my sentence. I probably deserved a longer one. I’ll tell you everything you want to know.” He spread his hands as if opening a book. “My real name is Paul Zukowski-Quinn. You can look up the court case no problem, with a name like that.”

  “I have to go to the hospital soon,” Jay said. He thought about correcting the I to we, but he was too tired. Way too tired to consider opening the invisible book with Paul’s improbable, fantastically compromising name emblazoned on the cover. There was another story that he kept confusing Paul’s story with, a young couple who crossed the desert together, stood by each other, two against the world, until the man turned out to be someone entirely different and the woman had to lie and run away.

  Pilar and Arnulfo.

  Jay wanted Paul to be real.

  Paul kept his hands spread. “There was a day not too long before the crash—I thought we could keep the con going and make all the money back. I was sitting in the back of a Bentley, digging through stacks of bad loans spilling out all over the leather. I’d thought they were commercial, but some of them weren’t. And I blanked on the residential house numbers. I pretended I didn’t see them. I let something break down in my mind.”

  Jay nodded, understanding. “Selective editing.” He leaned over and touched Paul’s hand. His back hurt like hell, but the pain woke him up, made him feel lucid again, and the touch...God, the touch... Why had he touched Paul in the first place? He jerked his hand away.

  Paul stayed still, spoke quietly. “You’re wincing. You should lie down for a while.”

  Carry me. Paul could do it.

  “We have to go to the hospital. And I’m not going to let you face Adriana’s mother without any backup. You wouldn’t make it through.”

  “So I have a reprieve.” Anyone else would have made it a question; Paul announced it as a statement of fact.

  “We need to make things clear. All three of us. When we’re not on the edge.”

  “I don’t know if the not-on-the-edge part is ever going to happen. But you’re leading, this time.”

  It wasn’t fair to make Jay remember dancing, and how good they were together, and how easy. It wasn’t fair at all.

  * * *

  The hospital was every bit as chaotic as Paul had expected.

  Adriana’s mother, immaculately put together, might as well have stepped out of a high-end perfume ad in a glossy magazine, but her eyes sparkled with mania.

  “My baby’s going to die because of you,” she hissed at Jay.

  Paul wanted to step between them, at the very least. He hung back by the waiting room door, trusting in Jay. This wasn’t his territory. Not his place.

  “They gave her cephalosporin instead of penicillin and she had a cross-sensitivity reaction,” Jay said with formidable calm. “It’s a mild reaction and the rash is already going away. She’s not going to die, Rosa. If you don’t trust me, trust the doctors.”

  Rosa raged on. Eventually, a tiny woman came by and forced a cup into her hands. She sipped at it. Became distracted, and quieted.

  The tiny woman with the silver hair turned out to be Jay’s mother. She patted Paul’s hand, introduced herself in halting English, and promised to find him a sandwich.

  “I’m a friend,” Paul said. He hoped that would still be true, in time.

  “You’re a good friend. Yes. Bless you.”

  He couldn’t imagine two more different women.

  The harsh light and the cold air kept him more or less conscious, although staying on his feet seemed like the wisest option. If he sat down in one of the cushioned chairs, he’d go under in a matter of seconds and dream hellish dreams, maybe hallucinate the blood on his hands that Jay had kept him from spilling.

  Or worse. Driving out into the desert with Marc.

  Adriana lying in a coffin, hands folded over her chest.

  The wall against the nightmares had worn very thin, but Paul held on. He’d promised to follow, to wait, and he would. No more calculating the angles, no more twisting the space between them.

  When they wheeled Adriana out, she was red-eyed, dazed, disordered...and still miraculously beautiful.

  “You’re here,” she said, in a hoarse, cracked voice. “You’re all here.”

  Whatever happens... I was here.

  He couldn’t tell if her you included him.

  The family swirled around her.

  “I don’t think this is a good time,” Jay said quietly. “You should go. I’m supposed to decide, and I guess this is a kind of deciding, even if it doesn’t feel that way. The time isn’t right. Come back tomorrow?” The question was gentle but not particularly tentative.

  “I’ll go.” Even if Jay wasn’t right, Paul had promised. Bu
t Jay was right. Jay knew the truth of things. He had that power. Paul had never respected him more than in this moment. “I know you’ll take care of her. I’ll go, and I’ll come back tomorrow. And Jay?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Adriana knew she was in a nightmare, but she couldn’t break away. The gears of her own mind were grinding her down. Her dream-self stumbled down a hallway, deeper into the core of a dark twisty mansion. Paul had led her on, and now he was leaving her behind. He was only a shadow, and then he was gone. She screamed for him to come back.

  You took me here.

  You told me I’d be safe.

  The hallway let out into daylight. For a second the nightmare was over, until she looked down and saw that she was half-naked with her skirt hiked up, and she’d gone from a bondage party to a much more vicious place—high school, backed up against a row of lockers.

  The other students turned, pointed at her and laughed. Their eyes were dull and unforgiving.

  “This is a cliché,” she shouted by way of defending herself. “Everyone has this dream.”

  But she couldn’t wake up.

  There was a knife in her hand. She could wake up if she used it. On herself. Carve herself away, create an Adriana-sized hole in the universe. She raised the knife—

  Adriana.

  Jay. He hadn’t left her. Would never leave her.

  “Adriana. Adriana. Take this.”

  She blinked awake, gasping and moaning. Her panic drained away—the walls and the quilt were the bright colors of home, not bleached hospital white. Jay nudged her into a sitting position and pressed a pill onto her tongue.

  Gripping the glass of water—”Hurts,” she mumbled. She could feel it down to the raw bone. Jay had his fingers around the glass too, and guided it to her lips. Cold, sweet. The pain faded when she relaxed her hand. “I was having a really bad dream.”

  “Then I’m not sorry I woke you up. I figured it’s better to take these on schedule or you’ll wake up worse. And besides, you’ve got a visitor. Here, I got you your housedress.”