by Karen Runge
– TWENTY-FOUR –
Walking with you, by the trees. Willows growing in regimental lines along the paved riverside. That freshly laid path littered with trash, the soil crushed solid beneath. We walked with the highway just beyond the trees to our right, the stillness of water to our left. I walked beside the water, you walked beside the trees. I walked with you. Your leather jacket, your unshaved jaw, your fatalistic fancies. You walked with me.
“Whenever anything begins,” you said, “my first question always is to wonder how it’s going to end.”
Me too, I wanted to say but didn’t. Because maybe you wouldn’t have believed me—that I’d so often had the same thought. And then I said nothing for so long that you looked over at me, an edgy jerk of the head. Because you never did like to look at me directly. Not when we were outside together. Not when we were alone.
“What’s up?” you asked.
This churning in my belly, this sickness deep inside of me. I wanted you to touch me. Hold my hand. Something. I peeled a strand of hair out of my mouth.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Something’s happening to me. I feel different. Or like something wants to be different. I don’t know what it is.”
Struggling to articulate this sense, my shoulders so stiff the muscles ached, a throbbing behind my eyes like I wanted to cry, a shudder in my stomach like I wanted to laugh. Like I wanted to burst.
“You’re safe with me, you know.” You said it so softly the wind almost took the words away from me.
“I don’t need to be safe.” I didn’t know if this was a lie or not. Not when I said it, not then. “In some ways I’ve avoided safety as much as possible. Almost all my life. I’m not sure I even knew I was doing it.”
“Not even when you married Daniel?”
“Not even then. Maybe in some part of myself, I thought I’d be safest with him.”
“Even monsters can love,” you said.
And I didn’t know what you were talking about anymore. Or who. That churning in my belly rising into something not unlike rage. The frustration of this endless confusion. I wrapped my arms around myself. The heat within, the chill without.
“I love autumn,” you said, breathing in, opening your arms to the wind I closed myself against. “I’ve always loved this time of year.”
What a banal thing to say. What a pointless, meaningless platitude thrown out to fill the silence.
And right there, for a minute, I came very close to hating you.
“Let’s get a drink,” you said. “I’m buying.”
Knowing that I no longer had any money of my own. That I’d become a housewife. Which means a kept woman. Walking by the river with her fucker-never-lover while her husband slaved away in a glass tower. Making money for her.
“I have money,” I said.
You gave me another one of your glances, this time with a smile. You closed your hand around my elbow. A quick squeeze. You let go. Left my heart jumping, a smile shivering on my lips.
We cut up the path and back onto the road, walking close beside each other. Easy. I breathed in the smell of your leather along with the fresh chill of the cooling air.
And right there, for a minute, I was almost happy with you.
“Coffee, or something stronger?” you asked. An invitation in your tone. Pressing me.
“No, no,” I said, that sensation in my stomach ribboning to nausea. At the idea of…what? Getting drunk with you? Losing control with you? Fucking you? Or playing dead and letting you fuck me with your fingers in my mouth, my breath stopped in my throat? I didn’t want that. I didn’t want you. Not right then. “No. Just…coffee, I guess.”
Deflated. My energy changing again. Shape-shift. This time I listened. Stopped walking. You took three full steps before you turned to see what the matter was. Frowning, irritable. Glaring at me.
“Ada, what’s with you today?”
I shook my head. Feeling the need for tears again. Tears! Crying on the street while locals stared, fascinated, entertained by my emotions as if I were an exhibition piece. Unreal to them, as a foreigner in their city. An oddity. As if I was just flesh. Just that.
“I want to go home,” I said. “I’m sorry, I…it’s…”
I couldn’t. I turned and walked back to the river, to the path that would take me home. I walked fast. You didn’t follow. I knew you wouldn’t. Of course you wouldn’t.
When I got back to the apartment I closed the door and sat down in the hallway, hugging my legs. I couldn’t decide if I should go left or right. There wasn’t a single room in the place I wanted to be in. As though the entire space were poisoned. By what? By Daniel? By me?
We need to move, I thought. Daniel and me, we need to move. We need a change. We can rent one of the courtyard houses in the suburbs. Somewhere closer to nature. I’ll have a whole room to use a studio. We’ll have some outside space. We’ll grow things…
Ridiculous.
It was choking me, this helpless fury. I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. Needing a release I couldn’t name. Nothing I said to myself was comfort enough. I don’t know how long I sat there facing the front door, closed in on myself, gasping into my knees. No tears. I don’t know how long it was before you knocked on the door.
You’d never come here without me and Daniel. And even among the three of us, never without a fourth. I got to my feet. I opened the door. You’d never even seen the place in daylight. I’d never seen you in this doorway with the sun shining through the dusty stairwell windows. Shaping you in silhouette.
Your glare was hard. Blood-lit.
We didn’t speak.
You took a step forward. And I knew.
“No,” I said. One word. The only word. A sensation rolling through me like my bones were melting, my muscles unravelling like thread off a spool. I might’ve collapsed, but you caught me. Your arms around me, your mouth on my neck, my jaw, my mouth. Your tongue between my teeth, forceful, thick. Until I kissed you back. And the second I did you pulled away, kicked the front door shut behind you. It slammed. An echo that thundered down the stairwell. As if someone had just left in a rage. Me, maybe.
I turned my head as you yanked at your belt. I leaned back against the wall, clawing at its surface. Grains of cheap paint gathered in dust under my fingernails. You yanked at your jeans.
I moaned. The sound escaped my throat, slow and small. I slid to the floor again, wanting to put my hands up, wanting to shield myself. Dissolving instead. A ragdoll as you pulled at my clothes. I was dry as paper. I knew. You tore at my underwear. Elastic sting. You grabbed me between the legs, crushing your fingers into me. You drew your hand back. Considered. Then you spat. A thin mouthful of saliva to lubricate what I couldn’t moisten by will. Doing for me what my body now refused. Taking just a few bare seconds to work the wetness in with your thumb. Not enough. Rough on soft. Then.
Climbing over me and pinning me down, your forearms trapping my shoulders, your hands in my hair, your tongue in my mouth. Total, complete. Shoving into me, my body wrenched between agony and arousal—that poison cocktail we so desperately seek. It didn’t take long. Two minutes, less. Breath and motion, wordless gasps. You came so hard I felt it through your entire body. I felt it through mine.
We lay still, breathing against each other. Trembling, afraid to move. Your face pressed against my cheek.
And right there, for a minute, I thought maybe I loved you.
– TWENTY-FIVE –
Daniel rode the subway to work, his jacket folded in his lap, his arms wrapped around his case. Feet on the ground, the ground moving. Carrying him through darkness in a capsule of stuttering lights.
A few cars down, a child’s voice lifted and looped over the cacophony of voices and squealing wheels and rattling metal. Crying or laughing? He was never sure with small children. Or with women. In both cases the sounds were often so much the same. High-pitched shrieking, needles in his ears.
He clenched his jaw, grinding his teeth. Coffee.
He needed caffeine, or coke, or both. He’d slept seven hours the previous night, showered in the morning, shaved. His eyes in the misted mirror were unusually bright, alert, in spite of the dull throbs that rolled through his skull. Still, he was in better shape today than usual.
Handsome guy, he’d told himself, considering his face. And Ada came up behind him, her arms closing around his waist, kissing him between the shoulders. Her favourite place to be gentle when tenderness was what she sought.
“I’ll make us dinner tonight,” she said. “How’s cannelloni?”
There’d been changes in her since she’d stopped working. A voracious boredom trembling in her hands. She kept the apartment spotless; she was working on her culinary skills. Experimenting with sauces, expressing herself on his plate. Her paintbrushes were dry, though. Sometimes, when he remembered to check, he went out onto her balcony studio and examined her space. The blank easels still wrapped in cellophane, the contents of her supply cupboard neatly arranged. The shelves and windowsills clear of dust, the tiled floor polished. It used to be a mess—once a month she’d get down on all fours and scrape splattered paint off the floor with a pallet knife. Her hair tied up off her neck, braless under one of his worn old T-shirts.
“Artists work best in mess,” she said, laughing up at him.
His chaos girl, on her knees.
What had happened to that?
The train slowed toward the next station, brakes squealing, high enough to drown out the noise that kid was making. The train stopped, and people moved toward the doors. The baby’s voice, calmer now, came closer.
Daniel looked up and saw the child in the arms of an attractive young local woman. She stood opposite Daniel, tranquil, waiting for the crush to abate once the doors slid open—a space to move through in calm and dignity as the other passengers scrambled out and onto the busy platform. Her long dark hair was clean and loose, falling to her waist in a thick, straight shimmer. She wore chic black pumps, a black leather handbag to match. Her dress was red. The baby in her arms had wide, inky eyes and plump cheeks. He looked at Daniel and those cheeks dimpled as he smiled, revealing two stubby baby teeth. The trick of lunatics and very young children—to go from screams to laughter in the space of a single breath.
“Uncle!” the baby said, reaching a chubby arm out toward him. Delighted with Daniel, somehow.
The woman turned her head and looked to where her child gestured. When she met Daniel’s eyes, she smiled. A beautiful smile, perfect teeth, her elegantly made-up eyes dancing.
“Yes,” she said, not imagining Daniel could understand. “That’s a foreign uncle. Handsome, huh?”
She laughed and moved toward the doors, which were now open, which were now clear, her baby clasped firmly against her. She stepped off the train and sashayed into the crowd.
For a moment, Daniel couldn’t breathe. His heart hammering, high and light. It was minutes before he realised he was smiling.
– TWENTY-SIX –
That next girl we took. Heavy girl? Hefty girl? I’ve never been sure of the kinder expression. We chose her for her breasts. Or Daniel did. I think. They were large and taut, perfect pockets of fat and boneless flesh, soft and warm and wet within. She had curly blonde hair, shoulder length. Liquid blue eyes. There was something a little Shirley Temple about her, I thought. Something classic. Something beautiful. Weight can work on women sometimes. It worked on her. Her clothes were stylishly loose, her shirt folded shut and tied at the front, offering a blissful view of that gorgeous cleavage, a wonder. A sight.
That girl. Shirley Temple girl. Sensual beyond her limits.
“She’s going to be hell to carry back down the stairs,” you said, and you laughed. I hated you then. It sounded so much like a fat-girl joke.
And I remember thinking, You could at least respect her a little.
Hypocrite me, I know. But it was me and only me who saw what we did to these girls as sacrifice. Sometimes I saw it like that, I mean. Just sometimes, with the ones I might’ve liked. That they were offered to us, inferior beings let loose among us. Led by a rope, made holy with a slit throat. But sacrifice is a ceremony. It should’ve been a ceremony. Something sacred. At least with her.
“I’m going to hate leaving,” she said to me in the cab back to the apartment. “I’ve had so many wonderful experiences here.”
An optimist. A glowing soul. She’d spent three years in this godforsaken place, and it had never disturbed her balance. Not the staring from the locals, not the life we live skirting the periphery of an impenetrable culture that resents our presence. As I saw it. As I understood it.
“It wears me out,” I told her. “It’s too insular, and too crazy. Sometimes I think it’s driving me mad. Sometimes I can’t even leave the house for days.”
She put her hand on mine. She gave me a smile, soft with understanding. “I know,” she said. “I know what you mean. But it’s about how you look at it, you know? It doesn’t have to disturb you if you don’t let it.”
This last sentence she said. I clung to it.
She liked me, I knew. There was a spark between us. A sense that we might’ve been friends. Maybe even lovers? The consensual kind that meets on smoother ground. She kept her hand over mine, and our fingers locked together. A promise of love in the touch. Women sense these possibilities between each other sometimes. Something passes in the slant of an eye, the warmth of a gesture. Obscure signals translated by a shared code.
Or maybe I was just imagining it. I told myself I was just imagining it. She would fly back to England and forget me. I would vanish from her memory the second the plane’s wheels hit the runway on Anglo soil.
“I wish I’d met you sooner,” she said, and smiled.
And I wanted to say I felt the same. But I couldn’t.
Back at the apartment, she sat on our couch. I gave her a glass of wine. Rosé, lush pink leaning to red. A colour to absorb, to be absorbed by. A sweet thing with teeth. When she spotted Daniel’s vinyl collection her eyes lit up and she set the glass back down on the coffee table with a sharp tap. She went to the case and started flicking through it.
“Oh, wow,” she said. “Oh, wow, I didn’t know you could even buy these here.”
A woman after Daniel’s own heart. Which was good for him, and bad for her. And I stood. Watching.
“What bra size are you?” Daniel asked. Wanting to provoke her.
But she laughed. “The size you have no hope of buying here. Living in the land of tiny tits. That’s one reason why I have to go back to England, to buy new bras. The ones I brought with me are all worn out.”
“Can I see?” you asked her. Wolfish, grinning, stepping in.
That smile of yours, a smirk. That twinkling in your eye, a smoulder. Something sharper in you than there used to be. Did I put that there? Did Daniel? Did we?
She raised an eyebrow at you. “The tag?” she asked. Teasing. Sweet.
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. The way she was looping circles around you so effortlessly, turning that smirk into an awkward twitch.
And I saw blood behind your eyes. That dark cast in them, building. Terrible, beautiful. I put my arm around your waist. You hooked an arm over my shoulders.
“She’s all right,” I said. But Daniel had already vanished to the kitchen.
Was I trying to sway him? You? I don’t know. I had a vision of it being different this time. Of my mouth on hers. Of her lips moving on mine. Smooth and supple skinned. A woman’s mouth is so much softer than a man’s. Gentle when open, full lips and velvet tongue. In my mind’s eye I saw you and Daniel standing back while she and I undressed each other. Saw her and me lying together on the couch, tender touch and softer shiverings. And you could’ve watched. We’d have let you watch.
It might’ve happened like that. I think.
Daniel, back from his foray into the kitchen, came up behind her. She was bent over the records. He placed his hand on the wide arc of her back.
“You like
The Cure?” he asked.
She laughed a beautiful, oblivious laugh. “There hasn’t been a time in my life that The Cure hasn’t been around to help me ‘cure,’” she said.
Such words. She said.
And Daniel drew the needle out.
* * *
“Ada gets her first,” you said. “She’s been thinking about it all night.”
Your gaze, unflinching. Why this hardness in you? Making something inside of me break again. Shatter. Shift.
Then.
“These tits,” Daniel said. “These amazing tits. Take a look at these.” Untying that chic knot, unwrapping expensive fabric. Her bra was satin, cream-white. Bursting with gleam.
My breath caught. So tight I couldn’t quite snort the cocaine I’d lined up beneath my nose, where I kneeled at the coffee table. Powder drifting down to my lips like fairy dust. Something magical to help me taste. That I couldn’t taste. The magical, I mean.
Magic is for dumb little girls who dream of falling down holes and don’t know how deep they really go.
“Okay,” I said. And I breathed in deep.
Dizzy, drifting. To her side. Climbing astride her. My weight resting safe on the soft, thick slab of her hips. Bending to her. Her slack mouth, sour. I kissed her anyway. Pulling her bra straps down her shoulders because she was too heavy to lift, and there was no other way to get to her breasts. Peeling the cups back, folding them over. Her nipples were a blissful rosé shade, lush pink leaning to red. A colour to absorb, to be absorbed by. Sweet things. And me with teeth.
“Easy, easy,” Daniel said behind me. Watching, laughing.
The bite marks bloomed red, wet with my saliva, the marks of my teeth engraved in her skin in stuttering scarlet arcs. A torture to take pride in. I bent close to her ear.
“It doesn’t have to disturb you if you don’t let it,” I told her. Reminded her of her words. And maybe it was wrong to laugh. I’m not sure I even meant it. But I did it anyway.