Tousle Me

by Lucy V. Morgan

  “Yeah. Totally lying.”

  “What?”

  “You said to please tell you that.” I pause. “So I did.”

  “Dang, Ginger. You are dumber than a stack of pancakes, you know that?”

  “With syrup? Or bacon, maybe? How do you like yours?” I swing my legs against the bed. “I’m a bacon fan, myself. Although sausage is meant to be good—”

  “Seriously. We’re about to face a von meltdown, and you’re asking how I like my pancakes?”

  “Yes. Unless it’s a euphemism, and then…no.”

  Behind me, Hunter whines as he inspects his crushed custard gun. Can’t be helping that I bit it just now, either. Guilt slithers in my elbow like a slug with a Cockney accent.

  “Also,” I add, “Hunter smashed his cock in the window. He could use some ice.”

  “Because I’m the help, right? I’m just going to do what you ask,” he snaps.

  “Well…yeah?”

  “Fine.” He sighs again, sharper this time. “Your wish is my motherfucking command.” And then he hangs up.

  I’m getting kind of used to Labron hanging up on me. It’s almost endearing. Heh.

  But now is not the time to be smug; my love’s life is literally imploding. Everything he knows is falling apart. This is my chance to show him how much he means to me, to be his rock. (Like solid as a rock. Not the actual Rock; I don’t really have the jawline). I know what it’s like to face darkness—not just from being in the cupboard, but metaphorically. And that kind is almost worse.

  I shuffle back to lean against his rocking form. We look kind of stupid, shifting back and forth together. Panic twerking. I guess I’m at least working off the scone.

  “Hunter?” I whisper. “Baby, it’s going to be okay. Labron’s bringing the ice, and no matter what happens, I’m here for you. Unless it’s X Factor night. Then we can Facebook each other or something.”

  He doesn’t answer. I’m losing him. Oh, God. First Rule, and now this?

  Seconds later, Labron barges into the room with a red bucket full of ice. He’s still wearing yesterday’s suit, now crumpled and dirty at the edges. He looks like he’s had about ten minutes of sleep.

  “Dude?” He spots Hunter, drops the ice, and rushes over to the bed. “Dang it. Hunter. You can’t let those douchebags get to you.”

  Hunter gulps, and stares up at his friend. “They’re saying that my band is back together. But Labron…I’m still here.”

  “I know, dude, I know. But they’re assholes. You don’t need them.”

  “I put everything into that band,” he utters. “My life. My soul. Way more sperm than was appropriate, but fucking hell, I did it anyway.”

  Just like when he saved Ryan Gosling. Just like when he saved me.

  “How are they even going to do it?” he goes on. “I mean, our music was exceptional, but they can’t just go out and play instrumentals like the bloody Shadows.”

  Labron and I fall quiet. The Darren Hayes thing is the ultimate knife, and if we don’t stick it in, somebody else will. Which will make a mess. As his Facebook-official girlfriend, if anyone gets to be splatted with Hunter’s mess, it’s me.

  I take a deep breath. “Hunter. They’ve hired a new singer.”

  His eyes darken beneath his curtain of tousled hair. “Excuse me?”

  “A new singer,” Labron repeats reluctantly. “They hired one.”

  “Who?” he spits. “Wait. Let me guess.”

  Labron and I exchange dubious glances.

  Hunter holds up an accusing finger. “Is it that fucking rent-a-gob, Pitbull?”

  Labron clears his throat. “It is not Pitbull.”

  “He doesn’t even speak German,” I muse. Though he’s certainly a fan of international love.

  “Well who is it, then?” Hunter presses. His voice drops. “Is it…Bowie?”

  “Eine Bowie does have a ring to it,” I say. “But no.”

  Labron puts his face in his hands and breathes hard through the gaps in his fingers. “I can’t bear to see this. I’m sorry—you’re on your own, Ginger.” And then he slides off the bed to scoot to the door, stumbling on the melting ice and swearing to himself as he leaves.

  Oh great. As if my inner cupboard wasn’t wide open and tender as it is—now I have to deliver the worst news of Hunter’s recent life, and all by myself. Does he look like the type to shoot the messenger, do you think? Where’s Oprah when you need her?

  “You know who it is,” Hunter croaks, his eyes bloodshot and desperate. “Tell me, gosling.”

  I’ve never struggled to speak before. Like Hunter says, I talk a lot. Not all of it makes a great deal of sense or is even very decent, but hey, a girl’s got to boost the word count, and this is me just doing my part. Waaaaffle waffle waffle. Also, it helps me remain in denial of the complete travesty at hand. I’m well aware that my passionate affair with Hunter may not survive this—a girl can’t date a heap of panic twerking, namely because it won’t sit still. And doesn’t buy her massive corporations or genetically engineered fantasy pets. I can try to nurse him, but—

  “For God’s sake!” he explodes. “Just tell me. Please.”

  Okay. I can do this. And Hunter deserves to know what his idol has done. “It’s Darren Hayes.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Silence. The only sound is the quiet chug of Ryan Gosling vomiting in his tank (he had like, five handfuls of popcorn last night). Cough. Retch. Jeez, Ryan—show some self-restraint!

  Eventually, Hunter speaks. “Like a guy called Darren Hayes? Not the inspiration for everything I’ve ever done, Darren Hayes.”

  “They’re calling themselves Savage Richtung.”

  “Savage Richtung. Oh, cruel irony.” He gives a bitter little laugh.

  I take a moment to put Richtung through Google Translate, just so I get what he’s on about. Ah, cruel irony indeed!

  Then Hunter leaps off the bed and it all goes a bit hazy. Here’s some of what I think is happening, you know, from behind my sheet:

  CRASH

  SMASH

  Ryan Gosling vomits some more

  Hunter slams his cock in another door like, “Eeeooooghooooh!”

  TV fizzles

  Is that an axe?

  Oh yes, an axe. In the TV. Well that’s a little over-dramatic

  Some blood on my sheet

  Quite a lot of blood, actually. Fuck me

  Hunter has carved WHY DARREN WHY into his own stomach with questionable finesse and speed

  Now he’s on his knees

  Ryan Gosling is STILL chundering. I didn’t even know snakes could chunder

  Anxiety forces my fart out

  Oh em gee

  It’s like a Dutch oven under this sheet, people. Enter at your own risk

  And now Hunter’s yanking the sheet off—

  No! STENCH!

  He doesn’t care. But his eyes water a bit

  Jesus Christ, Ryan Gosling’s still going

  The TV is throwing off some worrying electric sparks

  And Hunter is bleeding on the floor, whimpering and panting, a single tear trailing down his cheek. “Eine Richtung reforms,” he gasps. “And so the last…petal…has fallen.”

  Then he passes out.

  “Hunter!” I screech, careening off the bed and slamming my face into the wood floor. I tell you something, there is nothing worse than desperately needing to remove your face from the painful hard surface, but being afraid of rising into your own beast of a fart.

  But I’m a brave soul, so I soldier on into the vast tunnel of eau de hellspawn that is my personal brew, and grasp Hunter’s shoulders.

  “Wake up!” Nothing. Nada. So I do what they do in movies, and give him a good slap around the face.

  Jeez, that hurts your hand! I sit up, waving my hand around frantically to ease the sting, while Hunter coughs and grumbles as he blinks his eyes open.

  “Gosling.” He clutches his bloody stomach. A dark look of realisation floods hi
s gaze. “You have to stay away from me. It’s not safe.”

  “What do you mean?” Look at him—he wouldn’t harm a fly. Unless the fly is a television. Or a pervy frat boy. Or my gynaecologist.

  “I’ll only hurt you.” He winces as he talks. “I’ll only break your heart. There are things…things you don’t know about me…”

  “Oh, Hunter.” I scoot over to cradle his head in my lap. “Don’t you understand? Nothing you’ve done can shock me. Since I met you that night, everything you’ve done for me…and last night, when you tousled me…” I trail off, my voice cracking as tears well up. “I’m here for you. Right here. Please don’t push me away.”

  He looks so pained. Maybe it’s because of the secret he holds; maybe it’s because of the shallow but copiously weeping cuts right across his abs; maybe he’s just holding in his own fart.

  “Whatever it is,” I whisper, “it won’t matter. Is it to do with your magic metrosexual rose?”

  He makes a throaty little noise of panic. “It was, gosling. It was.”

  Petals falling…dark curse…huh. I guess the bits I pulled off it the other night probably haven’t helped the situation. Can I explain this and feign a cliché misunderstanding? I suspect not.

  “So tell me,” I urge, biting my lip. “Tell me.”

  “But if I tell you, I have to face up to it all myself. And I’ve been trying so hard to avoid it.”

  “Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt,” I say sagely, smiling bitterly through my tears. “It’s also a word that rhymes with defile.”

  “That’s so beautiful.” He coughs again. “But I can’t do it. I can’t reveal to you what I really am.”

  “But why?” I sob. “Hunter, I love you…I even farted in front of you. That’s how much I’m willing to share.”

  He joins me, crying too. “I noticed. It was disgusting. But gosling…you know, somebody once shared with me some wise, wise words.” He pauses, while I bite my lip. “Love, they said, is not the absence of logic, but logic chewed and digested, heated and concentrated to fit inside the contours of the fart.”

  We stay there for a moment, just a heap of sodden tears and blood and the remains of my lingering beef blast. I know Hunter’s trying to tell me that he loves me, but he’s all out of things to give. I mean, his erection has actually gone down.

  Finally, he rasps, “Gosling. Fetch me the rose.”

  I arrange the bed sheet around myself and hobble to the ornate door between his wardrobes, twisting the key with one hand and wiping my eyes with the other. The white fabric is dotted with Hunter’s blood now, like Desdemona’s handkerchief (obligatory English major fact drop HIGH FIVE). It’s weird seeing the rose room in the daylight—it looks a lot less like a dramatic room of dark pain, and more like an emo’s bedroom post-party. Tentatively, I tuck the sheet into some kind of tight contortion so it doesn’t fall down, and pick up the rose’s glass case. Then I take it back out to Hunter.

  He stands before the closed drapes. He’s also pulled on his ripped stonewashed jeans. His abs are a mess of sticky red and clumsily carved comic sans; his fudge sundae hair is so tousled that the sun shines through it in puddingy highlights. Not even writing of sub-par quality can dim his glory in this moment: Hunter, pissed and wasted and broken and twisted and wicked and gone too far, like an Abbi Glines title on crack. With a penis.

  If you learn one thing from me, fair reader, let it be this: a penis improves everything.

  “Let me see the rose,” Hunter says softly, though there’s a gravity to his tone.

  I hand him the remains of the rose in its cylindrical glass case, now withered to a stem with a dried, bulbous head. It’s a bit like I’m handing him my heart—if my heart looked like Squid Patrick Harris’s boner.

  “So it’s true,” he says hoarsely.

  “Looks like it.” I bite my lip.

  He swings his arm and launches the case at the wall, where it shatters into roughly four hundred and seventy two tiny pieces. Ryan Gosling gives a shocked little final chunder in the corner.

  Hunter lets off a primal howl. For a moment, I’m terrified that he’s turning into a werewolf, but then I remember that this isn’t that kind of book.

  “I should never have let you come here!” he yells.

  “But—but Hunter—”

  “Look at me! Don’t you know why the band fired me? Don’t you know what I am?”

  “I—I—I never knew you were fired. I thought you left of your own accord.”

  “Yeah, right!” He laughs bitterly. “I got close to those guys. They were my mates, my boys. Mein bruders. We’d been through sold out tours, paternity scandals, three number two albums. I felt like I could trust them with anything, and God, I needed to unload my burden.” He covers his eyes with one wide palm, like it hurts him just to be able to see. “So one night—just before our very own SNL spoof, when I thought, you know, this is really as good as it gets—I got a bit drunk and decided to let it all hang free.”

  “You told them your dark secret,” I whisper, my heart hammering in my knees.

  “Oh, I told them, all right! Do you have any idea what it’s like to lose your mother, gosling?”

  “Uh…well kind of. Mostly I just communicate with her on Facebook so she’s not all up in my grill.”

  “I loved my mummy, God dammit. I didn’t know she was still in that stable.” He pauses for breath, his voice turning raspy. “I didn’t know the horse was still…in…her.”

  My eyes dart back and forth. “Uh…what?”

  “Do you know what upper class English mothers do when they get bored?” he spits.

  “Crochet? Whiny blogs?” I put up a finger in epiphany. “Ooh! Go on British Bake Off?”

  “They get horses,” he sneers. “And before you know it…they’re…fucking the horses.”

  I bite my lip very, very hard. “That’s what you’re trying to tell me? That your mom was having sex with her, uh, stallion?” Which is weird, I’ll grant. And illegal. But I did think about Sparkles that one time…

  “I’m telling you I burned her down, right along with that fucking horse and the fucking stable!” he roars, shoving his foot into the still-sparking TV. It explodes on the floor in a blaze of blue lightening and smoking cables. “I murdered my own mother, gosling! As well as her bloody horse.” He coughs through the heavy air.

  Hunter’s a murderer. I stand there, frozen, letting this little factoid sink in.

  “I told them my most shameful secret,” he goes on in desperation, “and do you know what they said? They couldn’t work with a murderer. I said that was rich, coming from a bunch of Germans. And…they fired me.”

  Hunter’s a murderer. I roll the words around in my head, trying them out in different arrangements to see if they’re any less horrifying. A murderer Hunter. Murderer a Hunter. Hunter Murderer A. Hmm. No. This is pretty pointless, actually.

  Hunter staggers up to me, ripping my personal space open and taking it for his own. “See,” he seethes, “I warned you. I knew just how you’d react. You hate me. You’re repulsed. By. Me.”

  “I…I don’t know what I am,” I utter. I don’t really know what he is, either, aside from strangely alluring.

  “You should leave now,” he hisses, “and never come back. I wreck lives. I shred weasels. I’m a walking fucking disaster of epic prepositions.”

  “Proportions!” I erupt in his face. “PROPORTIONS!”

  “Well FINE!” he shouts into mine. “Now get the fuck out of my wing, and never come the fuck back!” Then he crumples into a heap again, watching me as I go.

  Each step is an effort. Each step is a miserable miracle. Each one is a small step for womankind, but one giant leap over smoking cables and a random axe. Ryan Gosling gives a melancholy hiss of farewell, and I ssssss right back at him as I choke down my sobs.

  Before I disappear, he whimpers, “Do me a favor, gosling. Check my heart at the door on your way out.”

  I stagger down the stairc
ase, which is still smothered in day-old bruised rose petals. It smells a bit like my granny’s bathroom. As I wade through the dark red sea still wrapped in my white, almost bridal bed sheet—and away from my monster of a boyfriend—it occurs to me that there’s some serious imagery up in hey-uh, yo. And that only makes me weep harder.

  “Labron,” I sob, crashing into the kitchen. I find him slumped over the marble and mahogany island, surrounded by empty glass bottles and cans of Red Bull. “Hunter’s von flipped his lid. Please take me home.”

  He lets out a loud hiccup. “Well sure thing, Cinderella. But you should know...” Then he lets off a burp. “I’ve been chugging this Courvoisier since, like, three in the morning.”

  My upper lip twitches in disgust. “Courvoisier and Red Bull?”

  “A brother’s gotta do what a brother’s gotta do.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “Anyway.” He burps again, adjusting his loose tie almost like he’s making room. “I am three sheets to the motherfuckin’ wind, let me tell you.” He rolls his shoulders and does a little dance. “Pass the Courvoisier,” he sings. “Man, that tune is a diamond in the rough.”

  “Labron?” I croak. “Do you know Hunter’s dark secret?”

  “You mean the one where his band gets him cursed by Nazi gypsies to repent for the sin of burning his mom to death by earning the love of an innocent young rose? That one?”

  “There’s another one?”

  “Probably.” He hoots with drunken laughter. “But hey, you won’t top that first one, right?”

  I think of the cupboard. “Right,” I manage.

  “Anyway.” He yanks the limo keys out of his pocket with a jingle. “Let’s get this show on the road!”

  “Are…are you sure you’re okay to drive? I mean, I could call Archer…” I could sure use an eighties power ballad right about now.

  “Ginger. Do I look like I’m okay to drive?” He stumbles over a bar stool and lands on the floor, groaning.

  “I guess.”

  He picks himself up, dusts himself down. Hiccups again. “Then let’s roll.”

  * * *

  Nothing can drag me out of this desolate black hole. I lie in bed for two days straight, not showering or eating, subsisting on glasses of filtered water and at times, my own tears. They taste like stale pretzels.