by Solace Ames
I already looked happier.
The human-shaped lump by the edge of the bed hadn’t changed position, reaffirming my good mood.
I closed the door softly behind me and walked downstairs. The sound of voices, a clink of glasses—I circled around to the back of the house, into the outdoor kitchen where long beams of light stretched in from the east.
“Good morning,” Emanuel said.
He was wearing a dress shirt and pants and round sunglasses that contrasted in fascinating ways with the bold angles of his face. He sounded relaxed. Pleased. I didn’t know I was still worried until that moment, mostly about leaving Miles alone. Hearing Emanuel’s approval, I relaxed as well, the remaining tension rolling out of me. The air was fresh and clear, scrubbed clean by the sea breeze, and I could hear the distant waves and crying of seagulls.
There were others with Emanuel. Three black people, all of them very dark. I recognized the man to his right: Fausto, the drummer for Avert, and Emanuel’s cousin. They had the same square jaws, high cheekbones, heavy-lidded eyes the shape of softened diamonds. The other man I guessed was another relative, even bigger than Emanuel and wearing an extraordinarily tacky tiger-print sport shirt. A young woman with long, straight auburn hair was pouring herself an orange juice at the bar.
“Would you like some?” she asked me. There was hardly a trace of Spanish in her accent.
“Yes, please, thank you.”
“Buenas,” Fausto and the stranger said to me.
I wished them good morning in my halting Spanish. They all embraced me solemnly in greeting—I was going to have to get used to the hugging-hello thing—and last of all was Emanuel, who guided me to a seat at the table with his palm against the back of my shoulder.
The woman was Isabel, Emanuel’s niece. She worked as a bookkeeper and paralegal for Emanuel’s studio business. The other man introduced himself, with a completely straight face, as El Tigre.
Isabel covered her face with her palm and giggled.
“He’s serious,” Emanuel said, with a crooked grin. “His real name is Fernando, but he tries to make everyone call him El Tigre. Humor him, if you can.”
“Okay, El Tigre,” I said.
El Tigre gave me a broad smile and a thumbs-up.
We all toasted each other with orange juice.
“Salud.”
“To the new album.”
Emanuel seemed much less foreign this morning surrounded by the people who moved like him, the same broad, expansive gestures alternating with an elegant stillness. Their motions were sudden, unpredictable to my eye, but never jerky or awkward. I was the one who didn’t belong. They made me welcome, though. Asked about my name and my family. Isabel complimented my hair.
“I need to get it cut, actually. It’s gotten too long.”
“I can tell you a good place,” she said.
I looked to Emanuel.
“I have the time to deal with Miles in the mornings,” he said. “He’s like a lizard, slow to wake. Go and surf. Do what you’d like. If you’re out in your car and running late, call me.”
“Of course,” I said.
Emanuel leaned back in his chair. His neatly pressed suit made crisp little noises as he laced his hands behind his head. The other three people all changed position subtly as well, and Fausto, the quiet one, nodded as if he’d just received a signal. I’d seen celebrity entourages in action before, but they didn’t hover like an entourage. The way they followed Emanuel’s lead was almost military.
Did that mean I could be his lieutenant?
I took another sip of orange juice to hide my grin at the thought. Whore patrol, reporting for duty.
I wished I had a friend like Chiho here to share the surreal wonder of it all, someone with a sense of humor as fucked up as mine.
“I’d better stay in, this morning,” I said. “But I’ll take you up on that offer, Isabel—thank you. Can you text me the number? I’ll try to set up an appointment soon.”
We talked about the house for a while, which bedroom was for whom and what and so on. Another band member was arriving today. There were ocelot logistics involved, and a discussion about who’d be shunted off to the ground-floor bedroom closest to the occasional screams.
“Tú,” Emanuel said, pointed to El Tigre, and followed up with something in Spanish that might have been a deadpan joke about feline compatibility. Everyone laughed, even me. It was a brilliant morning in a beautiful house, after all, and Emanuel was a million times more charming than I’d expected. I’d been trying so hard not to be intimidated that this other man, the one with the lighter touch, was the one who caught me off guard.
“I was thinking about taking Miles out on a shopping trip to buy some curtains, when he wakes up,” I said tentatively.
Emanuel gave me a nod of approval.
I could see myself getting addicted to those nods of approval. Even in shadow, I felt sun-warmed.
The talk turned to music business, in English, and El Tigre wandered off after a while. I excused myself and performed the culturally appropriate goodbye hugs. Fausto smelled like clove cigarettes, Isabel smelled like cocoa butter, and I didn’t smell Emanuel at all because I was nervous and held my breath, my heart already laboring.
“Come back at nine-thirty, for breakfast,” he said, neither an offer nor a command but something uniquely in-between.
I saluted him, and we shared a small smile that felt like ours alone, our first secret.
Chapter Five
“Nurse,” Miles Morrison groaned. “Nurse!”
“I’m not the nurse,” I said. And I definitely don’t have a shot for you, I almost added out loud.
He crawled from under the covers, rubbed his eyelids with his knuckles, and tried to crawl back underneath the covers.
I yanked them off. “It’s after one o’clock, Miles. Aren’t you hungry? You missed breakfast, but—”
“Just fuck the fuck off already.”
“Remember who I am? That’s the whole point of me. I don’t fuck off. I’m un-fuck-off-able.” I could hardly believe I was joking like this, but my amazing good humor from the morning was souring around the edges with boredom. I’d cleaned the room, checked my email and social media, read half a book about addiction that had fallen out of Miles’s duffel bag, and finally got tired of waiting for him to wake up. Which was when I started poking him with the feather duster.
“Oh yeah. I remember now.” He opened his eyes all the way. They were a rich hazel color, and I’d probably feel pierced by them in a terribly romantic way if they weren’t so bloodshot and unfocused. “Hi, I’m Miles Morrison. What’s your name?”
“Call me Amy. Nice to meet you, Miles.”
“We had sex.”
“Right.”
“Fuck, we had a lot of sex.”
I nodded.
“Did I make some kind of horrible mistake?”
I shook my head.
“Dropkick me, Jesus, through the goalposts of life.” He fell out of the side of the bed with an audible thud, slunk to his feet and stalked toward the bathroom.
There were gothic letters tattooed across his back. I AIN’T NO GODDAMN SON OF A BITCH, they read. The tattoo was so stupid that it actually sounded clever.
I’d already checked the toilet tank and the vents in the bathroom for drug stashes, so when he closed the door behind him, my peace of mind was undisturbed. The bathroom was safe.
I went back to the book.
Men relapsed more than women, the book said, because they tried to go it alone too much. Women, on the other hand, tended to reach out for group support. I tried to place Miles in that dynamic, but it was hard—had he ever really been alone? He was the kind of man who cast a light and drew in people like moths. We’d flitter around him an
d give him an eternity of second chances...as long as his flame burned, at least. He was a fortunate son, and I didn’t even resent him for it, now that I knew him.
After half an hour, Miles walked out from the bathroom stark naked with a towel wrapped around his head. Somehow, he pulled it off. I could imagine him walking onstage like that and getting pelted with flowers and lingerie and beer bottles by confused, horny fans.
“Amy, right?”
“Yes,” I said patiently. “Amy Mendoza.”
“I thought you were Japanese for some reason.” He unwrapped the towel, tousled his hair, threw the towel over his shoulder and started pulling on clothes.
“I am. My family is Japanese-Filipino. Some people use the word Japinoy, but I’d rather you not. There’s a lot of us over there. I used to have a Japanese last name, but I changed it.”
“Why?”
I’d told the story so many times, tracing the timeline didn’t really hurt anymore. “My family moved to San Diego from Manila before I was born. My dad was in charge of all the immigration paperwork, and we always thought everything was in order. When I was thirteen, my mom got pulled over for a broken taillight and it turned out her green card had expired a long time ago. They deported all of us, except me.”
“So he fucked up big time.” Miles pulled black jeans over his slim hips. I had no doubt he was an expert on the subject of fucking up.
“Yes, then it got worse. One of my older sisters has a heart condition. My dad went to Japan to work in a factory to make money for the bills, met a woman there and started another family. His paycheck never made it back to Manila. That killed any attachment I had to my old last name. I changed it to my mom’s family name and I haven’t talked to him since. Anyway, that’s my life, that and being a porn star. Got any other questions?”
“You’re a...”
I wondered what he was about to call me. Firecracker again? Hard-ass bitch?
But he never finished, just pulled on a T-shirt and kept his expressive face perfectly neutral. “Yeah, I have questions. What are the rules for this thing?”
“Sober companion plus sex. It’s pretty simple. I follow you around, keep you away from bad habits, try to encourage better ones. When it comes to sex, well, the limit is your imagination. Even if I’m not in the mood you can fuck me, as long as you use lube.”
“That sounds clinical,” he said, grinning. “But also kind of hot.”
“I can do naughty nurse if you’d like. I can do just about anything.” I put the book down and stared right into his eyes, those complicated hazel eyes that were sharpening up to piercing level even as I spoke. “We’ll talk about rules as they come up. The main one is, when I’m in the bathroom, that’s my alone time. You do not fuck with my skincare regimen.”
He laughed. I didn’t get the sense that he was laughing at me, so I smiled and basked in his light for a while.
Yes, we’d get along fine. We were broken in some of the same places.
“This is the easier than the first time,” he said, and ran his fingers through his wet, spiky hair. Drops ran from his fingers and hit the collar of his shirt, flattening the fabric over the pale skin of his unmarked collarbone. I was fascinated, even though I tried not to show it.
“The first time?”
“Emanuel found me in an alley next to the Port Authority bus station when I was eighteen, singing for money. So he took me to a warehouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, chained me to a radiator next to a bucket, had some of his people watch over me, feed me and clean me. I thrashed and screamed and puked my guts out for a week. Then I calmed down. He said he wanted to work with me, once I was clean from heroin. That’s how Avert got started.”
“Oh. Wow. That’s something. That’s really something.”
“We’re in his court now. The pale king.”
I took a deep breath and thought of Emanuel’s fingers forming a fist around a chain.
But that was a long time ago. And I’d signed a contract. I wasn’t going to turn back.
“Let’s go shopping for curtains,” I said to Miles. “I’ll drive. It’ll be fun.”
He turned toward the window, and I saw his pupils shrink down to tiny dots in the fierce light. When he turned back to me, it was like he didn’t see me at all. “Sure. Fine. Go ahead and give me a blowjob first, though.”
“Okay.” I got down from the bed and crawled toward him, my hands and knees sliding comfortably over the sun-warmed mahogany floorboards. “Slow or fast?”
“Fast. Fucking choke on it.”
I nodded and licked my lips. We had a plan. We were moving forward. I liked this feeling.
When he wrapped his hands around the sides of my head, I still couldn’t help thinking of other places, other times, other men.
The pale king.
I served both of them.
* * *
They didn’t sell black curtains, so we picked out some dark gray ones.
One of the checkout clerks at the home goods store turned out to be an Avert fan. Eyes gleaming with a starlust that was probably nonsexual, he made a move to follow us out to the parking lot, so Miles autographed our receipt for him, stuffed it in his shirt pocket, punched him lightly on the shoulder, sent him back to the register and probably saved the guy’s job.
“Does that happen to you a lot?” I asked.
“Yeah. It’s fairly random. I try not to be too much of a dick about it.”
“I bet some of them offer you drugs. You know, to try and connect.”
He shrugged, obviously not in a mood to talk. Well, there went my half-assed attempt at therapy. The rest of the ride back he listened to music on headphones and wrote into a miniature notebook, jotting the words down with such force he was practically stabbing at the pages.
I’d felt kind of invisible during the whole encounter with the fan. I didn’t mind. I used to think I wanted people to pay attention to me, to gasp when I entered a room. I made that happen fast, and then I got tired of it fast. My least favorite part of my career was the strip club appearances. It wasn’t enough to sell porn, though, I had to sell an interactive presence. You couldn’t pirate a presence.
Maybe they’d solve that problem in the future.
I entered the key code for the gate. Emanuel had trusted me with that. Miles didn’t pretend not to watch as I entered the numbers.
In daylight, the front courtyard had the look of luxury, lush with flowering shrubs and vines, colors of terra-cotta tile and white stucco and a dry fountain with tiles so bright blue they put the ocean to shame.
Three men stood in front of the fountain.
Avert.
Emanuel, Fausto and Juan Carlos, the band’s final member, walked up to the car and waited for Miles to step out. They stood in iconic order, Emanuel in the middle. There should have been music playing. Or maybe just one single power chord, resounding in the air.
Fausto had a grim, minimalist look, head shaved and dark Wayfarer sunglasses masking his eyes. Aside from his kinship with Emanuel and our brief introduction this morning, he was a mystery to me. Fausto wasn’t the stereotypical rock drummer and played his cards close to his chest, that was all I knew.
Juan Carlos played bass and dressed flashy. Today he wore a pale violet satin cowboy shirt. He came from Argentina, looked nearly white, and had spent the Avert hiatus doing something artistic and quasi-legal in the Czech Republic.
And Emanuel...A shiver curled up my spine, knowing what he’d done. How he’d brought them all together in the first place. Emanuel walked through the world and bent it around him as he passed. I felt as if I’d been in this courtyard before, not just yesterday but many, many times. Déjà vu. Like I was always coming back to him, because it was in my heart to always come back to him.
Miles stared at the three of them as if
they were the horsemen of the apocalypse.
“You wanted this, Miles,” I said quietly. “Don’t forget that. Just walk out there. Do the hugging thing. Deal. You can do it.” Ganbatte, I almost added.
I didn’t ask him what he was scared of. History, probably. A whole lot of history.
He opened the door and stepped out stiffly without a word to me. I watched through glass as they all embraced him in turn. Fausto, unsmiling and silent. Juan Carlos, with an “I missed you, motherfucker.” Emanuel, folding him in with a simple “Welcome back.” There was a lot of tension and testosterone swirling between them, along with all that history.
I backed the car up and parked it next to the garage on the left, the one that hadn’t been converted to a studio. I took my time getting out. Smoothed my hair back over my shoulders, clutched my purse like a magic shield, and went to hover at the edge of the group.
Emanuel drew me into their circle with an easy touch, his hand only brushing my wrist. His fingers were warm this time, but I still felt an electric shock that chased up the skin of my arm, all the way to my neck, even behind my ear. I shifted my weight, suddenly desperate to keep balance. “This is Amy Mendoza,” he said to Juan Carlos. “Our woman in charge of Miles.”
Juan Carlos, lanky and angular as Miles but much better dressed, leaned down to kiss my cheek, then fired off something in throaty, rumbling Spanish.
“I’m Filipina,” I said. “Spanish name, don’t speak Spanish. But I’m glad to meet you. Mucho gusto, right?”
“Exactamente.” Juan Carlos gestured at Miles. “He’s a son of a bitch in any language. But he sing good.”
“Time to put up,” Miles said. He held his little notebook like a shield too. “Let’s go.”
They headed into the garage-turned-studio.
Emanuel was the last in line. He looked me up and down and offered me a salute, the mirror of what I’d done to him, then closed the door and disappeared inside.
My face hurt. I wasn’t sure why. Oh wait, I was grinning like an idiot, that was why. I felt young in the best possible way, full of crazy stupid trust in the future. No idea whether my life was about to get easier or harder, but it was definitely about to get more interesting.