As I Die Lying (18 page)

"I got some wood for you," Loverboy said.

She laughed. And she was back on the couch,
the half-empty bottle in front of her, and I was close to her,
breathing her, kissing her, drawing in her warmth. It must have
been Loverboy's silver tongue that had first drawn her lips near
and then plumbed the soft mysteries of her mouth. Her body was
pliant and yielding under my hands, vibrant and alive, like a small
wren or else a mammal wrapped in synthetic down.

But then it was
me
locked in this
embrace. Then it was
my
passion swelling up in my chest and lower, driving
blood through my veins in rapid gushes. Then it was
my
loneliness driving my
hunger,
my
anguished years without human contact that now caused the ache
in my trembling limbs. Then it was
my
taste buds relishing her
wine-sweetened tongue.

“
My turn,” I whispered in
her tender ear, and she had no idea what I was talking
about.

And I was feeding on her, sucking her
affection like a vampire drew blood, cold and needy and vanished
with the dawn. I was a monster, a zombie pulled from a deep
grave.

I should have stayed undead.

Because Loverboy enjoyed the rigor mortis in
our pants.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Let’s pretend I was Bookworm.

Beth took my hand as I led her upstairs to my
bedroom. The night hung around us in soft folds, dressing itself in
darkness even as we shed each other's clothes. Our mouths joined,
lost for words, lost for useless language, aching for real art. We
shivered and incorporated.

Her skin was satin, and as our bodies came
together among the blankets, the bottom of everything autumned
away. My fingers flowed over her fine hair and the warm mounds of
her flesh, lifting her to the high, unseen clouds as smoke from
this burnt offering.

Our tongues danced like moist spirits,
frolicked about the cemeteries of our lips, laughing without sound.
A thick dew of passion rose on our skins and mingled. Our flesh
gave and took and joined, softened like blistering wax and hardened
like cold syrup. We leapt into pulsating oceans and climbed ashore
clean with languid pleasure.

I know, I know, you want the sex, the
blow-by-blow, clits and cocks, not poetic coyness.

You’re such a pervert.
Though I’m laying my whole story out here, some things are none of
your fucking business. Such as
my
fucking business.

I held her in my arms afterward, leaning
against the pillows with her sweet animal scent on me. The
starlight peeked through the window at her face, at her pale pink
smile and the shining pools of her eyes.

"Thank you," I said.

"My
pleasure
,
" she
whispered, blowing her breath on the small part of my
ear.

"I've never felt anything like that before."
Pleasant. Fucking pleasant.

"You mean, you've never..."

"Well, let's just say I'm new at this game."
Mother didn’t count, if indeed that ever happened, and I wouldn’t
dare write it if it had.

She giggled, her chest vibrating under my
embracing arm. "You acted like you knew what you were doing. Like
it was part of a play or something. And you said you weren't an
actor."

"Sometimes, it's all in the
script," I said.
They
were there, waiting in the wings, leering down from the cheap
seats, understudies plotting revolution. But I felt strong, revived
and vigilant, and I kept them off the stage. This spotlight
was
mine
, goddamn
it, and I was going to enjoy it while it lasted.

"And what role are you playing, you kissable
weirdo?"

"Othello without the guilt. Romeo without the
fatalism. Hamlet without the paranoia."

"Or maybe just a bad actor working with good
material?"

"You got it. Do you want me to feed you a
line now?"

"No. I want you to make me feel. I want you
to do things to me."

"Hey, that's what a bad actor does." Spiders
skittered across my gut, bats flapped in the rafters of the Bone
House. "Act badly."

"Well, maybe you need a rewrite. Because
you've got just about the worst pillow talk I've ever heard. How
come it took you so long to make a move on me?"

"I just wanted to be sure." Sure that you
wouldn’t sell me down the river for a dollar’s worth of candy or
make me cross my heart and hope to die.

"Oh, a sensitive modern guy? Or just afraid
of rejection?"

"I've never been afraid of you."

"Should I be afraid
of
you
,
Richard?"

She snuggled her head onto my shoulder. Her
hair spilled across my chest as soft as corn silks. I was reminded
of the cornfields of Iowa, of my youth. I buried the memory like
roadkill. Or maybe just kicked it in the ditch. "After that? I
could never hurt you."

"Mmm. Says the Big Bad Wolf. You forget that
I still don't know much about you.

Where you came from. Who you are."

"Maybe later. Maybe someday I can tell
you."

I opened the coffin of my vampire heart,
feeling something bright and broken and strange rising inside me.
Then I realized what it was, and I shivered. It was hope, hope that
life could be worth living after all, hope that there might
actually be a someday. That maybe there was more to me than Little
Hitler, Loverboy, Bookworm, and Mister Milktoast. That maybe
Richard Allen Coldiron could have feelings after all.

And hope was pleasant. Very fucking
pleasant.

I ran my hand over Beth's hair, over the
curve of her ear, down the swell of her cheek. She squirmed a
little, pressing closer against me. I wondered what she was
thinking, what kinds of secrets she would never tell, what was
hidden in her Bone House. From the briefly forgotten outside world
came the sweet tang of fallen apples. A bit of moon had risen
somewhere over the invisible horizon, making the room less
gray.

"Well, what does the critic have to say about
my performance?" Beth asked, her face turned to mine, her eyebrows
making dark merry arcs.

I searched for and found her
lips. "Thumbs definitely up."
All ten of
them
.

"And other things 'up' as well."

I laughed, and the sound was swallowed by the
walls. "Where do we go from here?"

"You mean, what happens next? Like the
future, with a capital F?"

"Well, Act Two, anyway. Getting to know each
other. Every story needs a middle."

Her body tensed under me.
"Richard, I feel really good. Don't think I'm easy or anything, I
just happen to like sex. And with you, I
really
like it. And I like spending
time with you. But as for other things, we'll just have to
see."

"But what if—"

"Shhh. No 'what ifs,' remember?"

"I can't help it, Beth. I think about you all
the time. All day at the bookstore, I'm thinking of ways to see
you, ways to be with you.”

"Don't think the L word, Richard. I've been
hurt too many times with that word as the justification. I'm not
being cold—because I'm really an eternal optimist—but I've learned
to be careful."

"I told you I'd never do anything to hurt
you, Beth."

"Neither would those others. But some things
are beyond our control."

"Waiting doesn't always work. Sometimes, you
don't get another chance."

"I'll take my chances, then. Good things are
worth waiting for."

She was just like Virginia. Ready to give
almost everything, wanting everything, taking it in her hands and
holding it to her breast as if it were a hyperventilating dove.
Then, just as it became tame and submissive and known, she would
throw it into the sky to its unwanted freedom. She wanted
everything just to give it all back.

But what did I know of love? All I knew was
what love wasn't. I learned from my father and his boots, from
Mother's strange bleary affections, from Sally Bakken's
manipulation, from Virginia’s madness, from Mister Milktoast and
his self-interested protections. Love was for other people, those
who weren't haunted by the ghosts in their own head.

The hope that had fluttered
in my chest wilted like black licorice on a sunroof. And the old
doubts rose, tarry waves in a turbulent
id
. Then I was sinking, being pulled
inside myself, into the place that had been a haven in my childhood
but was now a stone prison. The house of the Little People. The
house of hurt. The Bone House.

I reluctantly yielded my flesh and embraced
my victimhood. Oh, always the victim, a last-place loser in the
Blame Game.

"Absence makes the heart grow foundered,"
said Mister Milktoast.

"What do you mean by that?" Beth asked.

"I dig," said Loverboy. "Live for the moment
and take it as it comes. Heh heh."

I screamed at Loverboy to leave Beth alone,
shouted uselessly from behind the steel bars in my head, yelled
down the dead corridors at the people who were taking turns with my
body and the one who wanted to take a turn with hers.

I felt Beth kissing my neck,
knowing it was Loverboy's kiss,
his
tingle under her salt saliva,
his
smirking satisfaction at my
helpless distress,
his
hands that were cupping her perfect breasts. Not mine, never
mine.

"I'm glad you understand, Richard," Beth
said.

"Just don't say we can still be friends.
Don’t put the honeypot on a shelf now that I’ve had a taste. Or
some bread thing. Let’s see. Don’t plug your donut hole until I’ve
licked off the powdered sugar."

She giggled, and it made her body shake. "I
won't say it if you don't. Let's just see what happens."

"Whatever the bitch wants," whispered Little
Hitler.

Oh, God. Had
he
escaped? I thought his
room was locked and double bolted from the outside. I tried to warn
Beth, but I was buried too deeply inside my own head. Extreme home
makeover with a nail gun and duct tape. And the worst part was
feeling that I was not alone, that something new lurked in the
corners, something darker than dead shadows and colder than
graveyard snow.

I watched Little Hitler lift the strands of
her hair, golden under the starlight. He was imagining it a
scalp.

"So soft, so soft," Mister Milktoast said,
stealing my words, eager to try on her brown hat. "A cornsilk of
the heavens, a tassel for angels. Hair hassle."

Beth laughed. "Where do you come up with this
stuff?"

"Inside story. You know. Still waters run
deep like mixed metaphors in the night, as a friend of mine would
say. They used to call him ‘The Poet.’"

"You're a strange one, Mr. Coldiron. And
maybe that's what I like about you."

"Not so strange," said Bookworm, and I was
relieved, because Bookworm might save her from the others. He alone
might afford some tenderness and compassion, even though he’d
learned those qualities from works of fiction. Bookworm caressed
Beth's shoulders, and through him, I could feel the burning of her
skin, her blood hot from pleasure. At least I had given a gift of
pleasure, however fleeting.

That's what you
think
, Loverboy called from the front
porch.
Those squeals were all Loverboy.
While you were busy being pleasant, I was busy being
busy.

“
That was me, you bastard,”
I silently screamed.

Who do you think runs this little flesh
factory, you or us?

No, I
saw
, I felt her, I tasted, smelled. I
ran hands over her skin that was smooth as talcum. It was the drums
of my heart that pounded across the jungle of night. It was my joy
that rushed from my insides like an ice volcano. It was me,
me,
me
.

"Richard?" Beth asked, collecting her
breath.

"Hmm, Hostess Ho-Ho?" said Loverboy.

"You're being awfully quiet. What are you
thinking about?"

"Just remembering."

"Remembering what? Are you finally going to
tell me the great Coldiron secret, now that you've exposed me?"

"No secret, Dollface. Like I told you, what
you see is what you get," Loverboy said.

"What about in the dark, when you can’t see
anything?"

"Then you get whatever I give you."

Do her
again
, Little Hitler pleaded, anxious for
proxy pleasure, hoping it would hurt.

Shut your
piehole
, Loverboy grunted.
I didn't ask for an audience. Having Richard
along is plenty enough company. Don’t need nobody else playing
paddycake in my bakery.

"And what do you feel, Beth?" Loverboy said
in his false husky voice.

"I feel
something
." She laughed, her hands
quick as hummingbirds.

Little Hitler was ecstatic, brought to his
fullest life by someone else's passion and the unhappy ending sure
to follow. Mister Milktoast and Bookworm fluttered like trapped
birds against the glass windows of the Bone House. I watched alone,
absorbing sensations through the filter of my Little People. And I
felt my shadow behind me, floating up the back of my brain like a
manta ray, black wings wide, swimming from some forbidden and
forgotten abyss.

I knew instantly that it was
somehow drawn by pain.
My
pain. Not Loverboy's tawdry diversions, not Little
Hitler's sycophantic eavesdropping, not Mister Milktoast's polite
but gossipy interest, not Bookworm's intellectual curiosity. Only
my anguish and guilt from again being too weak to save the one I
thought I loved.