by Gabi Moore
“But baby, did you move it or something?” Sophia yelled again, but this time I could hear her voice getting louder as she approached the bedroom.
“Baby…?”
“Fine, I’ll do whatever you want, just don’t ever fucking call me again, I’ll call you,” I spat and hung up, then tossed the phone onto the bed.
I stepped back from the door and she opened it.
“Who …who were you talking to?” she asked, cocking her head to one side.
“Nobody,” I said and gave her a kiss. “The cats. I was talking to the cats. I saw that vase under the sink, it’s right at the back,” I said, and walked off to the kitchen before she could see how shaken I was.
Chapter 4 - Sophia
I lit some incense, blew at the band of fragrant smoke a little till it wobbled in the air, and then gently placed the burner off to the side. I shook my hands, and cracked my neck. I walked over to the stereo and adjusted the volume of the music - or “space whale music”, as Leo liked to call it - and took a deep, cleansing breath, feeling my ribcage open slowly and then knot back closed.
Good.
The body is a temple, you see. An arena where we play out the dramas of our existence, an altar where all the magic unfolds. For the first half of my life, my body had been nothing but a dumping ground. A trash can. And it never stops seeming like a miracle to me how it still works today, even after all the damage I’ve inflicted on it.
I slid open the Japanese paper doors and poked my head into the waiting room.
“Emily?”
A pert girl with a blonde ponytail looked up at me and smiled. It’s important to make sure the first client of the day is one you really enjoy. I waved her in and she came into the massage room. She had a strong, lean body, but she was riddled with pain and had been since the first day I met her.
She would come in some days and tell me that she finally understood that the crunchy knots she felt in her neck were the crystalized words of criticism from her mother when she was growing up. Or she’d tell me about a dream she had while I worked on the pressure points all up and down her outer leg. Or sometimes we’d work on opening up her breathing a bit more, making sure that she was sending oxygen to her legs, which were now healing and functional even after dozens of doctors told her she’d never walk again.
Emily settled onto the table and I began to work on the muscles around her flanks and spine.
“You’re feeling really fluid today,” I said, and marveled at how she seemed to be melting under my very fingertips, a far cry from the usual ten minutes we’d have to spend to get her to loosen up.
She giggled. “Well, let’s just say I’ve met another ‘bodyworker’ recently.”
My hands paused on her skin.
“You’ve…?”
“I know, it’s a bit sudden, and I’m feeling really giddy about the whole thing, but remember that guy I mentioned? Andrew?”
“The programmer guy?”
“Yeah, him! Well, it’s going really well, actually…” she giggled again. I could almost feel her blushing.
“Emily, that’s amazing.”
“I know …he’s just so …so…”
It was like her body actually shivered and pulsed underneath my fingertips as she struggled to find the right words.
“He just …touches me, you know? I can’t really describe it. It’s so much more than sexy. He just …he has this way of setting me completely on fire.”
I smiled and continued rolling and stroking my hands over her body, working more deeply into her tissues.
“Well, it sounds like it’s working for you, you have almost no tension back here!”
She laughed.
“Honestly, at the rate we’re going he’s going to paralyze me again or something, I swear… Maybe I should forget about appointments with you and just make sure he’s regularly working the tension out, if you know what I mean.”
I winced.
“Oh, don’t worry, I’m just joking. I’ll always keep coming back to you. You’re the expert on these things, after all. But you said it once before, sensuality is important in life…”
I tried to pretend that she hadn’t hurt my feelings. I rolled and kneaded further, letting the conversation drop.
“Ouch!”
I pulled my hands back.
“You’re …you’re being a little rough,” she said and laughed nervously.
She was right.
I was relieved when our session was over and I waved her goodbye. I blew out the incense, turned off those godawful screeching whales and tried to gather myself for a second. I had never hurt a client before. Ever. Not in my training, not in the few years I had run this center. Never. I was the girl with the golden hands, the little lost waif who took a vicious past of addiction and poverty and turned it all around with nothing but patchouli massage oil and a clear mind.
So what the hell was going on with me?
I exhaled loudly and checked my watch. I was probably just tired. Leo had been acting weird, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was exactly. And why was I jealous of some girl who was in the throes of new lust …didn’t I already have the jackpot with Leo? Still, it nagged at me as I stripped the bed and started to prepare for the next client. Sure, Leo made me feel good. But did he make me feel that good? Like, so good I wanted to giggle and gush to strangers about it?
That was the real problem right there.
The last time we had sex, it was just weird. Not boring exactly but …I tossed the sheets aside and took another deep breath. No, no I had to be honest. Sex with my six foot two, insanely muscled, intelligent, emotionally aware and devoted boyfriend was boring.
I absentmindedly changed the music – or ‘hippie forest jams’, according to Leo - and chewed my nails a bit.
I would never admit it to a soul, but years ago I actually had felt that crazy sexual energy, that touch from another human that seemed to almost literally set me on fire. Too bad it was from the long-forgotten string of abusive boyfriends that carouselled in and out of my life when I was at my absolute lowest.
I shook the thought out of my mind and went to look at my phone.
Huh. A message from him.
Something very important I want to discuss with you tonight. Come home early if you can. I’m making us dinner.
I must have been crazy to doubt him. How the hell could I have an issue with the best partner I’d ever had, with the first guy in my world who offered to treat me like more than just something to take advantage of? I felt a pang of guilt for reminiscing about a past I had sworn to never go back to.
I was lucky to have Leo. And I would do whatever it took to make sure that he never understood quite how broken I was before I met him. I replied to the message and started to unfold another sheet for the bed.
Growing up in foster homes, getting lost in the system, I was surrounded on all sides by people addicted to one drug or other. But as far as I can see, the most dangerous drugs are those that are a little harder to see, hard to even think about clearly. The truth? It wasn’t all that difficult to drop my raging heroin addiction. And sure, it was tricky to find work and get back on my feet, but not impossible. The greatest challenge of my life wasn’t cutting my addiction to helplessness or the junk food I funneled in every day or the booze or the painkillers. Relatively speaking, that was all easy to shirk off, when I wanted to.
The difficult addiction, the really evil drug, was invisible for the most part. My caseworker wrinkled her top lip and called it a ‘sex addiction’. And maybe it was. But it was something else. Things I could swallow, and smoke tweaked the molecules in my brain and body till I felt good. Alcohol numbed, cigarettes soothed. Four big macs in a row was my equivalent of a warm hug from someone who gave a shit about me. But sex? I never really understood why I was as drawn to it as I was.
Sex was the one addiction I had never truly triumphed over because, frankly, I was never really sure what it did to me. On a molecular level.
On a spiritual level. I never understood its hold on me. Taking drugs is one thing. I know how to take them, and I know how to quit them – after all, I’ve done it often enough! But sex? The things I’ve done? They’re a different kettle of fish.
I’ve been out of control on this substance or that pill. I’ve blacked out. I’ve forgotten things, and I’ve been desperate and made every poor decision you could dream of. But with sex …well, sex was the one demon I still hadn’t completely exorcized. It still hovered around the edges of my nightmares. Still clung all sticky and seductive in my daydreams sometimes, and now it was threatening to take the first real relationship I had and tear it to pieces.
But I wouldn’t let it. Leo was far too important to me. I hadn’t come all this way to gripe about a slightly less than ecstatic sex life. This was the real world, and I wasn’t done pulling myself up my bootstraps just yet.
I carried on down the appointment list. Luckily, my last client for the day cancelled at the last minute, leaving me to head home early and see about this ‘very important’ something that Leo wanted to discuss. When you’re a couple, you have to have ‘chats’. You have to get in touch with your feelings, to express them. For someone like me, you can’t overdo this kind of thing, obviously. So, fine.
But on the drive back home a strange memory popped into my mind. I thought of Rhonda, a woman I had met the very first time I went to rehab. She had been clean for more than five years and fancied herself something of a cheerleader, playing mother hen to all the wayward kids in the center who couldn’t make it to next Friday, nevermind five years.
I remembered her kind yet grizzled face, and the way she pursed her lips tight and stared right at you, right through you. And I’ll never forget what she said to the group one afternoon. She sighed and said, “Nobody else will tell you this, but you need to hear it. Addictive substances are good. Real good. If they weren’t, would any of you be here now? The world after drug addiction is safer. It’s more sane. It’s stable. But it’ll never be as good as being high, not even close. That’s the truth. The sooner you can mourn that and let it go, the better. If you don’t, you’ll always keep coming back to it.”
Chapter 5 - Leo
I didn’t know it at the time – I couldn’t have known it at the time – but it was the turning point of my life. The day on which my whole being swiveled and changed direction, forever. That day, the day I ran so hard I felt my whole world would burst open, was the skinny, malnourished line between one era of my life and another…
The longest up until that time had been three days. Three and a half depending on how you count it. The sun rose like a little ball of syrup freeing itself from the horizon and I thought calmly: today will be the day that I die.
I felt that kind of cold you get after you’ve been really cold for a long time already. The kind of cold that happens when you think something awful’s definitely starting to happen to your body, and all you can think of is meat in a freezer, and how you’re finished, you’re really done for …well, I felt the kind of cold that happens to you three hours after that feeling.
I walked up and down the backstreets for a bit, found nothing there. So I decided, I had to do it. There was no other way. I kicked a can up and down the tarmac for a while to get my nerve up and then found a house that looked broke enough that I knew there wouldn’t be too much security going on inside. I wiped my nose on my sleeve and double checked that nobody was around.
I busted into a rundown apartment that opened back onto a dim alleyway. It was cold enough that I didn’t feel the broken glass scratch me as I slunk inside.
I could feel my heart in my ears, and thought how funny it was to have my heart there, and not in my chest, like normal. It was an old lady’s house, kind of nasty, but I was surprised to find a ton of jewelry and shit in her dresser drawers. I ripped it all out, stuffed it in my pockets, and hauled some food from the kitchen and got out of there.
I turned to run and that’s when I heard it: kind of like an animal. Someone breathing hard. My eye catched a weird shape in the shadows a few yards into the alley. Two shapes. Some guy and a …woman. I stopped and stared. She was twisted all strange, folded over and kind of huffing and puffing, and the guy was behind her, slapping his hips against hers. It made me feel strange, watching them like that.
The guy turned and saw me standing there, stolen old lady jewels dangling out my pockets, and two hands full of stolen bread. Shit. And then I saw who it was.
Vito Roselli.
I knew the face instantly. Everyone knew Vito. That face that you can’t be sure if it’s laughing or angry or crazy or just nothing. I knew some kids who knew some kids who worked for him. I heard people say things. ‘Uncle Vito’ was a well-known name around here. But well-known like a disease is well-known, or a famous war is well-known. His was the kind of name that grown-ups hated having to say, hated having to pretend they recognized.
“What you looking at? Huh?” he yelled at me, and I felt like my legs had turned to jelly and I couldn’t move. He stopped making those gross movements. Now the woman was looking at me, too.
“What you got there? Give it to me. You a thief? Huh? You stealing shit?”
He took a step back, zipped up and pushed the woman aside. I knew I should run but I couldn’t.
“Give me what you got or I’ll call the police, huh, how about that?” He gave me this sneer like he’s disgusted by his own words, but also kind of foiund it all funny.
The woman started laughing and pulled down her skirt. I felt a rush of hate in me. I can’t explain it, but suddenly, the cold inside me was getting very, very warm. The cold that had been in me for four days suddenly felt icy hot. The heartbeat in my ears became louder.
“You dumb or something? I said give it to me,” he said and took a step toward me, holding his hand out to my loot.
“No.” I said.
The cold was thawing. He laughed and looked behind him at the woman and then back at me. My mind raced. Throat dry. He lunged at me and grabbed my arm, twisting it hard so I couldn’t get away. He was twice my size. My feet nearly come off the ground.
“Little shit. You thieving round here? Give me what you got or I’m calling the police.”
“No,” I said again, almost biting down on the word to get it out.
He wasn’t laughing anymore.
“I won’t give you anything,” I said. “And if you don’t let me go, I’m going to tell everyone what I saw you doing.” The words felt like they came from somewhere else. Not from me, but from a stronger, better boy that somehow existed just a few inches in front of me, like a photo negative. A stronger, braver photo negative.
“I know you’re supposed to be married soon,” I continued. “I’ll tell your girl. I’ll tell her everything.”
He flung me aside like it burned his hands to hold me, and sneered that sneer at me again. Then he laughed.
“Little fucker. What’s your name anyway, kid?”
“Leo.”
“Leo what?”
“Leo Bianchi.”
He looked me over. This time his face is different, like he was thinking of something.
“You got some nerve talking to me like that, you know that?”
“I know.”
“Bianchi, huh?”
I nodded.
“All right, kid. We have a deal, you keep your mouth shut and I keep my mouth shut, OK?”
I took a long look at him and then nodded.
“Now beat it,” he said, and turned to the woman, who was laughing again.
I ran so hard it was like my feet were on fireLike I had firecrackers under my heels. I ran so hard the old grandma’s trinkets went mad in my pocket. I didn’t even care about the food anymore. I didn’t care about the cold. I had just spoken to Vito Roselli. In person. And I had told him “no”. I didn’t know how, I didn’t know why, but I had said “no”, and at that moment, a little flame took hold and started burning inside me, and I ran and ran as fast
as I could, till my lungs burnt and I gulped for air so hard it stung my nostrils.
I might have been some loser orphan nobody. I might have been seventy pounds soaking wet and good for nothing, but I had told Vito Roselli himself to stick it, and he did, because we had made a deal, me and him.
I snapped back to attention and noticed my hands were shaking.
That was the past.
This was now.
Today, I was a man who could not only afford to buy my own trinkets and jewelry, but I had a beautiful woman to give them all to. And today, today I was going to give her something truly special.
I ran the pad of my thumb over the stubby velvet of the ring box I held in my hand. Stroking it over and over, my mind wandered. I had already lied to her about the stupid flowers that came that morning. I had lied to her about what had happened with Vito after that fateful day in the alleyway, years ago. And I was busy lying to her right now about allowing myself to be a pawn in a game played by the region’s most brutal mob family since the 1900s.
But no more.
I had met with a shady looking kid at the Westgate parking lot a day earlier and arranged to hold a sealed, 48-foot intermodal container in my freshly built warehouse for two nights. No documents, no questions, no nothing. I didn’t want to do it. But I also didn’t want them to even mention Sophia to me again. I didn’t even want her name dragged into a sentence these boneheads would ever utter. Hell, I didn’t want them to even think about her. And the fucking flowers? Creepy. Already a step too far.
I would take care of it myself. Sophia had endured enough in life already. She could live to a hundred and five, perfect days every day, and still have had more than her fair share of shit in life. So I was no way in hell going to be responsible for giving her any more.
I reluctantly shook the parking lot kid’s dirty hand and told him to scram. I’d hold the container for a few nights, but that was it. And then on my way home I stopped at a ring store.
I heard the front door open.
“Leo? Baby?” she said. Her voice was like a miracle. I ran over to her, swooped her up in my arms before she could close the door and spun her round quickly, getting lost in the curtain of long brown hair.