The Girl On The Half Shell

by Susan Ward

  I don’t think Jack is right about this. I think the turn I make will be the one I can live with, and I don’t have a clue which one that will be.

  * * *

  I find Alan in the bedroom sitting in a chair at the far side of the room before a window, staring out at the city below. I lean quietly back against the door and just gaze at him. He is bathed in the glow of dawn and still dressed in the clothes from last night.

  The bed is exactly how I left it, his side perfectly tucked in and my side with twisted and scrunched up blankets. My side. His side. I fight back the tears. In such a short time, he’s become everything to me: the mirror I stare at myself in and the other perfect half of me.

  “You OK?” he whispers.

  I nod.

  “Jack still here?”

  I shake my head. “I sent him back to the apartment.”

  Jeez, why am I standing here like a fool against the door?

  “Everything OK between you and Jack?”

  I shrug. “Things are OK. Sort of good, actually. We’ve still got a lot to work through.”

  I wish I hadn’t said that Jack and I still have a lot to work through. For some reason I now know what I have to do. Taking in a deep breath, I move across the room until I’m sitting on my knees in the space between his legs.

  There is something on his face that makes me anxious and afraid. “Are you OK?” I ask.

  He runs a hand through his hair and he shrugs. “I thought I was going to go out there and just find that you’d gone. No goodbye. Just gone with Jack.”

  “I could never do that.”

  Suddenly he pulls me into his arms and he is kissing me, kissing me passionately, all across my face, across my tears and cheeks and lips. The fierceness hits me like a tsunami, because I can feel panic and need and love in how he kisses me.

  “I love you,” I whisper against the warm flesh of his neck.

  “Don’t leave,” he whispers against my lips as I am carried to the bed.

  I lock my mouth to his as we frantically shed our clothes, a desperate almost frenzied passion inside of me. Alan’s breath begins to quicken in response, but he tries to whisper something.

  I stop him with my kisses and the twisting urgency of my body. I don’t want to talk. I want to pull him inside of me and to feel that completeness, that total loss of emptiness that I only feel with Alan.

  “Love me and be good to me, Alan,” I murmur against his skin, and I know he understands what I am asking.

  He lifts me and slowly lowers me onto to him, filling me completely. I moan incoherently as I let him move and guide me.

  He tilts his pelvis, guiding my hips with his hands as he moves himself in and out of me. I can’t imagine not being here with Alan. We feel so right together.

  I want to consume this slowly, but I can feel my body building and building, climbing higher even as I resist it. I can’t stop myself and I explode around him. He cries out in turn.

  We lie as we finish, me draped across his flesh, neither of us saying anything. He holds me and I hold him, and I realize that the tears moistening my cheeks are not only from my eyes.

  “I don’t want to talk about anything,” I whisper.

  “Then we won’t talk.”

  I rub my cheek against his chest. I kiss the flesh above the pulse in his neck. I love him so.

  * * *

  You can’t hold the minutes back, no matter how hard you try to. The minutes go only faster when you do not want to let them go. I want to stay here in this perfect quiet with Alan, but Sunday morning is here and I can’t do a damn thing about it.

  I roll over in Alan’s arms. I look at the clock. 9 a.m. Jack and I settled on 10 a.m. after heated negations for the ritual of packing up Lena’s things and finally saying goodbye to Mom. I have a little time. Not much. I really should get moving. I can shower after the packing. It will save me a little time now, but not enough. No amount of time will ever be enough, and I still don’t know what I am going to do after saying goodbye to Lena.

  I turn my face into my pillow to hide my tears. I’m going to lose him. Alan won’t want to be with me if I go back to Santa Barbara. Oh, he’ll try. He’ll do all those be-kind-type of things. There will be the phone calls and maybe a letter or a present. But that won’t last long because the real world exists whether we want it to or not, and the real world made us over from the start.

  The bed shifts under his weight as Alan turns me slowly in his arms so I can face him. My head is nestled on his arm. His eyes are black and searching.

  I gaze at his beautiful face. It is emotionless, compassionately so, and I hate that he can give nothing away if he wants to. His eyes stare into mine, hardly blinking, calm and smiling, merely because he wants them to. Reaching up, I caress his cheek and run the tip of my fingers across the perfect structure of his jaw. I want to remember each line on his face exactly how he looks at this moment.

  Time moves in, hovers and slips away. I can’t stop it.

  I rummage on the floor for Alan’s shirt and pull it over my head. I climb from the bed. “I’ve got to go, Alan.”

  I start to gather my clothes, and carelessly I shove them into my duffel, carefully avoiding Alan’s eyes. I can feel him watching and I wish he’d just say something, because the faster I get through this the sooner the pain will go away.

  “Do you want me to go with you?” he asks.

  I shake my head. “No. I’m meeting Jack at the apartment. We’re packing up my mother’s things today.”

  Alan sits up. A torturous and heavy pause in the room hits me like a punch. “And then?”

  “I catch a plane and go home to Santa Barbara.”

  More heavy silence. The lump in my throat is strangling and I can’t look at him because if I do I don’t know what I will do.

  “You can’t be serious, Chrissie. You’re not leaving.”

  The room is filled with Alan’s panic and his need. It moves across my flesh like a chilled nightwalker.

  “I have to go, Alan. I’m not ready to be everything you want me to be.”

  “I don’t want you to be anything other than you are,” he whispers, his voice raw. He crosses the room and stops my hands in their frantic efforts of packing. “You’re not leaving, Chrissie.” His thumb traces my lower lip. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” I whisper, almost unable to push the words out of me. “But I have to go home.”

  I step away from him and gather my clothes to wear. I lift his shirt to my face and breathe it in deeply. “Can I keep this shirt?”

  “Why?”

  “I love the smell of you. I want to smell you until I can’t anymore. In a perfect movie lovers would never end they would slowly fade away. I want to smell you until I can’t smell you anymore.”

  He closes his eyes. Oh shit, that was a really shitty thing to say, but I didn’t mean it and I wish I hadn’t said it.

  “You can keep the fucking shirt, Chrissie.”

  My scalp prickles as every nerve in my body is suddenly blasted by a chill. The earth falls away beneath me. Oh no, this is not how I want this to go between us. What have I done? I don’t want us to part angry.

  Alan pulls on his jeans and crosses the room to light a cigarette. Finally, he runs a hand through his hair and doesn’t look at me. “I’m sorry. You may have the shirt, Chrissie. My reaction to the shirt thing has nothing to do with you. It is an enormous irritant. The shirt thing. But I shouldn’t be rude to you. Sorry.”

  My eyes open to their roundest and it takes everything I have not to cry. That was unkind, Alan. Why do you have to be such a shit at times? A shit who lets me know that girls taking souvenirs after climbing from your bed is a frequent event; a shit who on purpose reduces me to meaningless, when my words were only an accident; a shit because…

  “You can stay, Chrissie. You can stay with me in New York. We can get married. Whatever you want. I’ll quit now before the tour starts. I don’t want you to leave.”


  I have to get out of the room quickly. Anymore and I’m going to crumble and stay. “I can’t stay, Alan. And you don’t really want to marry me.”

  That spikes his anger. “Don’t tell me what I want.”

  Oh jeez, another stupid blunder. I’m going to ruin us if I don’t get out of here quickly. I sink my teeth into my lower lip and continue to dress. The words clog in my throat and they are too painful to speak. I hear them in my head: Oh Alan, I’ve got my own shit to fix.

  “I can’t stay,” I repeat.

  “If you leave we are over.”

  Oh god, I see it and I don’t want to. Alan loves me, but right now Alan loving me is more a thing about him than me. He doesn’t want me to leave because he’s afraid to be alone. That’s the fear and desperation I see in his eyes and it is the wrong reason to stay.

  We both have so much messed up shit we need to work through. It would be wrong for us both if I stayed. But I don’t remember me before Alan and I don’t know if I really want to.

  I reach for my purse. He flinches as though I hit him.

  “At least let me take you home,” he says in despair.

  “No. I think I want to walk today. Can you have Colin deliver my things to the apartment?”

  “You can’t walk home, Chrissie. There are at least two dozen photographers at the curb waiting to pounce on you. Don’t be unreasonable about this.”

  How could I have forgotten about the tabloids?

  “Then I’ll go with Colin alone. Can you call him for me? I want to go to the garage alone.”

  I rush quickly from the bedroom. I head for the foyer. I listen. I am so relieved that Alan doesn’t follow me. I press the elevator button and the doors open. I couldn’t leave if he followed me, but that he didn’t really hurts me.

  I lean back into the icy metal wall and stare at the square mirror images of myself. Oh, please doors close! Close quickly! Then I realize I haven’t pushed the garage button. I hit it and I am numb. The metal moves, taking me away.

  Oh god—I’ve left him. Alan Manzone asked me to marry him and I’ve walked away. The only guy I’ve ever loved. The only guy who will ever understand me. The second the door slammed closed I knew it with certainty: Alan is the love of my life. Crippling pain slices through me and I am not at all sure I’ve made the right decision.

  The love of my life…and I walked away. What have I done? The pain is indescribable, but I can’t surrender to my grief. I’ve got to pack up my mother’s things with Jack, catch a plane, and somehow return to Santa Barbara and fix my perfectly fucked up life.

  Deep down I know I’m doing the right thing. The right thing for Alan. The right thing for me. It just doesn’t feel that way today. Alan is right: I never know what I want, but I always know how I feel.

  * * *

  Everything seems longer and slower and harder. Usually any return home feels faster and easier because it’s familiar. There is nothing familiar today. It is just long and slow and hard.

  I have survived the first day without Alan and the trip to the airport with Jack. Internally I am still messy, but a different kind of messy. Parts of me have been quieted, new parts of me stirred awake, parts of me I leave behind, and parts of me I take.

  I repeat that last part in my head. I want to put it in my journal once we are aboard the plane. There should be something in my journal about Alan.

  We are ushered into the VIP wait lounge in the airport terminal, and for today that is more about me than Jack. The tabloids have been our crushing shadow all day. I don’t care. They don’t know what the last three weeks have been about, and they never will. Let them write what they want. No one other than Alan and I will ever know or understand it.

  It is too honest. Too human. Too real. I love Alan and he loves me. That’s it. End of story. And I leave New York for the simple reason that that is what girls like me do. We say goodbye. We board the plane. We go home and fix our own shit.

  Jack hasn’t said a word since we finished clearing out Mom’s personal things from the apartment. It never occurred to me until I came to New York that Mom’s things were exactly where she left them and Sammy’s room remains exactly the same as it was that day. Jack has lockboxes too. I am like him that way: keeping things in little boxes, hurting privately and slow to share my pain.

  Jack’s silence today is more about him than about me, and I am OK with that. I understand it because I said goodbye to Alan today.

  More airport security comes when it is time for us to board the plane, and by how everyone on the plane stares at us I can tell we are the last ones on the plane even though our seats are first class.

  I laugh. No proletarian seats today.

  We are in the air before Jack speaks.

  “It’s going to be OK, Chrissie. It will all blow over. It always does.”

  But I don’t want it to blow over. I am in love with Alan.

  I smile. “Why did Rene leave yesterday?”

  I was so consumed with Alan I didn’t stop yesterday to wonder why Rene left me.

  “The school is graduating you early, Chrissie. They remarked that they would prefer you clear out your things on Sunday so as not to disturb the returning students. Rene and Patty are packing up your things from your dorm room today.”

  Oh shit.

  “Are the Thompsons angry we’ve been kicked out of school? I know how Rene’s mom feels about never having the crap be public.”

  Jack gives me a small smile. “They didn’t kick out Rene. She left in solidarity and the Thompsons are cool with it.”

  It’s awful, but I start to laugh anyway. I can’t help it. I was kicked out of school before Rene. What were the odds of that? I laugh harder and Jack laughs, and suddenly we are laughing in a crazed way that doesn’t match any of this.

  When the laughter quiets, it is a comfortable thing. A comfortable thing, for the first time, in a very long time, between Jack and me.

  “I think tomorrow we should go buy you a new car,” Jack says somewhere over Colorado. “A Volvo. The safest car on the road, but not flashy. Hopefully, it won’t be something anyone wants to steal.”

  OK, what’s up with that? I expected to be dragged to an in-care lockdown therapy center. What’s with the car shopping, Jack? Things might be better between us, but it doesn’t make Jack’s parenting any less confusing.

  “Why are we buying me a Volvo?”

  “You’re out of school early, Chrissie. You were planning a road trip across country this summer with Rene. Leave early. Get lost for a while. Let it all go. Sometimes it’s the only way you can find yourself.”

  I smile and think of Alan. Jack is right, but I also think I might have already found myself, and that returning to Santa Barbara is a very big mistake.

  When Jack falls asleep, I pull out my journal and make my Alan entry. I stare at the newspaper photo I have tucked there. I love this photo of Alan and me. Us on the terrace, curled around each other, waiting for the sunrise. How did they get it? Telephoto lens? I wonder if you can ever get a real photo from a newspaper. It just seems to capture us, and everything that was us, through these unexpected weeks. I start to cry. The caption is cruel and wrong, those fuckers in the press never get anything right, but the photo is totally us.

  I wish I could see the future. I wish I knew with complete certainty if my decision were right. I wish I were older, looking back after having gotten through this.

  What if I’d stayed?

  I turn to stare out the window. I can’t see the earth and I can’t see the sun and I can’t see the journey ahead of me.

  ~THE END ~

  Previews

  Thank you for reading. You might enjoy a sneak peek into Chrissie and Alan’s future, with Rewind A Perfect Forever Novella. Available now on Amazon:

  He doesn’t laugh. Instead, his gaze sharpens on my face. “I am being nice, Kaley. I came to you. I got tired of waiting.”

  What? Did I just hear what I think I heard?

  Before I ca
n respond, he says, “How’s your afternoon looking? Do you have time to take off and come see something with me?”

  My afternoon? There is something. I’m sure of that, but I suddenly can’t remember a single thing.

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “I want to show you where I’ve been living. What’s I’ve been doing? I think you’ll find it interesting.”

  Interesting? Why would I find it interesting?

  “So, do you think you can cut out for a few hours?” he asks, watching me expectantly.

  I focus my gaze on the table, wondering if I should go, wondering why I debate this, and what the heck I have on calendar that I can’t remember. God this is weird, familiar and distant at once, and I haven’t a clue what I should do here.

  I stare at his hand, so close to mine, on the table. Whoever thought it would be so uncomfortable not to touch a guy? It doesn’t feel natural this space we hold between us, spiced with the kind of talk people have who know each other intimately. What would he do if I touched him…?

  His fingers cover mine and he gives me a friendly squeeze. The feel of him runs through my body with remember sweetness.

  Suddenly, nothing in my life is as important as spending the afternoon with Bobby and for the first time, in a very long time, I don’t feel like a disjointed collection of uncomfortably fitting parts. I feel at ease inside me being with Bobby.

  I stop trying to access my mental calendar. I smile up at Bobby. “I’ve got as much time as you need.”

  Bobby chuckles and his hand slips back from me. He rises and tosses some bills on the table. “Just a few hours, Kaley. I’ll have you back before the end of the day.”

  I rise from my chair and think not if I figure out fast how not to blow this.

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  She became aware all at once how utterly delightful it felt to be here with him, alone on the quay, with the erotic nearness of his body.

  She closed her eyes. “Listen to the quiet. There are times when I lie here and it feels like there is no one else in the world.”