Black Iris (22 page)

We stumbled from the hall into a bedroom. Wasn’t sure whose. She pulled the camisole over my head and when she kissed my breasts I cried out. Blythe grasped my face in one hand.

“You are the most perfect little thing. Let me hear that lovely voice again.”

“Make me,” I said.

She did. She took my breast in her mouth, that kiss undoing me, a line of muscle unlacing down my belly and all my limbs coming unraveled, and I thrust my hands into her hair and cried like she wanted, gave her my voice, my body, my control. I’d have given her anything she asked for.

We collapsed onto the bed. She pulled my lounge pants off and I her shirt and we rejoined, craving the opiate heat of each other. A second was too long a withdrawal. She lay between my legs, her hair a gold blur in my eyes.

“How do you want to be fucked?”

Those words unknit something in me.

“Use your hands.” I circled her waist, pulled her hips to mine. “I want to see your face.”

In a prism of streetlight I caught the edge of her smile.

But Blythe was never good at following rules. She used her mouth first.

Her lips marked every delicate place. Behind my ears, beneath my jaw, inside my elbows and wrists. My small breasts, the harpsichord of my ribs. I stared at the ceiling, at lilac shadows dappling the plaster. A jet passed and shook the sky like sheet metal. Her mouth moved down the hollow of my belly, over the yoke of my hips. Leaves drifted from a tree. Everything was coming undone, tearing itself into little piles of red and gold. The slow disintegration of summer. The slow
disintegration of my body as she pushed my legs apart, exhaled against me. I closed my eyes. For a while I felt only heat, liquid fire pouring through my belly, and then through the heat her tongue, running down one side of me slowly, so maddeningly slowly I felt every little grain in it, every flat stroke up the center, every brush of her lips as they met over my clit and her warm breath washed through me. Then the other side, lazily, unhurriedly. Torture. Her hair tumbled between my legs and I buried my hands in it. My tension was volcanic, rising higher, higher. I made some kind of noise and shaped it into words. Easy things at first, things like “Fuck me, Blythe, please, fuck me.” My voice could be so sweet sometimes, so girlish. I wondered how far I could push it. Wondered what it was doing to her. “God, I’m so fucking wet. Make me come in your mouth. Make me taste myself.”

She rose above me, breathless. “Dirty girl.”

I pulled her face down and kissed her. Smoke and a hint of something mineral, like saltpeter, or gunpowder. The taste of something about to explode.

Her thigh nestled between mine, one hand sliding down beside it. I could have come against that satin skin, but she slipped a finger inside and then another and my desire rose and kept rising. This. This was what I’d longed for. This fusion of soft bodies, this gorgeous sameness. These breathy voices merging in the darkness. This pretty girl all tangled up with me, our legs linked, breasts pressed together, my hands on her slim back pulling her closer, closer. “You’re so fucking tight,” she said in my ear. “You won’t let go.” Her fingers moved with murderous slowness and every time she stroked in deep I wanted to scream. Girls could fuck like this forever, hard and steady, never worrying about coming too soon, about going soft. We fucked like boys better than boys did. Her hair was in my face, smothering me, and I was so close to coming it was
agony, everything too intense, every shift of the sheet against my back a mauling, every skim of hair against my throat like being choked. When her thumb brushed my clit I shuddered, but she wouldn’t let me come. I fought for it, riding her hand harder. Put mine inside her panties. She grimaced. The inked shoulders above me heaved. Still she was brutally steady, slow. Misery and ecstasy at once.

“Beg me,” she said, her voice rough.

I pushed her hair out of her face and looked up at her. “Make me come. Please, make me come.”

We stayed like that, never breaking eye contact. She gave it to me all the way inside, her thumb hard on my clit, finally, finally letting the fire loose, letting it surge and spill through me. I fucked her with my fingers and she was already close herself and we both lost it, tangled up and frenzied and delirious, crying out one after another as our bodies twisted together, hair snarled, hands wet, hearts pounding violently as if to break through bone and reach each other.

In the aftermath I felt only warmth. Condensed heat. A wavelength of light temporarily coalescing into a girl.

We lay entwined and let our blood cool, our sweat dry. After a while Blythe put her arms all the way around me. She held so tightly I could barely move. I felt something building in her, a gathering of breath, and laid my head between her breasts to feel the words. My seashell ear filled with the tides of her heart.

“You are mine,” she said.

JANUARY, THIS YEAR

C
ORGAN QUARTERBACK BRUTALLY BEATEN. RISING STAR SNUFFED?

I aced my first semester at CU. Straight A’s, special permission to sit Professor Frawley’s Advanced Fiction course second term. Each day I had a breakfast smoothie of oxy, vodka, and OJ and then staggered onto the L. Each night I went home to my condo in the South Loop, a beautifully furnished prison cell overlooking the blue eternity of the lake. Life always provides apt emotional metaphors. I wrote alcohol-fueled essays I didn’t recognize in the morning. Adopted a ginger tabby and rechristened him Orion. I needed to feel another presence in the shadows, something to scare away my nightmares. To confirm whether the visions I saw were real or in my head. Each night I opened the Word document that contained half a crazed cat’s cradle of a novel, the story you’re reading now, and stared at the heartbeat of the cursor on a blank page, that small dark impulse against blinding white. The black seed struggling to sprout in snow. Each night I went to bed alone.

Orion gazed at me from the windowsill in my moments of sodden self-pity, my body numb, brain blown, and he looked so droll and wise it made me laugh. Everything is absurd, that face said. Stop being so serious.

He was so much like her.

VICTIM SPEAKS: DOESN’T REMEMBER ATTACK. RIVAL FANS SUSPECTED IN VICIOUS ASSAULT.

The news loved Zoeller. Nothing like a glowing golden boy torn from his Manifest Destiny to get their dicks hard.

The police interview was surprisingly mundane. Part of me had looked forward to it, misleading the cops, vibrating with expertly suppressed sins, but the reality was two hours in a drab waiting room with bad coffee and depressing celeb mags, then ten minutes at a table where real murderers and rapists had sat. I made my eyes big and said
No, Detective
and
Yes, Detective
, and the woman smiled sympathetically as if I were the victim.

I stumbled out of the station, sucking in sweet winter air. When I lit my cigarette I tasted hot saline. Depression checklist: inexplicable crying, realizing you’ve been awake for eight hours but can’t remember a thing, talking to cats.

(
I’ll tell you a love story in ten words
, I said to Orion.)

Some days I didn’t eat. I confused the gnawing in my belly for hunger and fed it, but it only made me sick. Strange how much missing someone feels like hunger. How the hole they leave behind is so much larger than they were. How it grows even bigger, feeding on you.

(
Girl meets girl.
)

Once, as I cleaned out my book bag, a fragment of paper fluttered to the floor like a lost fairy wing. On it, her manic handwriting:
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. Something beautiful but annihilating.
Her beloved Sylvia. I pressed the paper to my mouth, imagining the motions of her hand.

(
Girl falls for girl.
)

I had a short story due in Advanced Fiction but I opened and saved and closed a blank document for weeks. When I finally wrote, it was this:

I miss you. I miss you. I miss you. I miss you.

All the way down the page.

(
Girl loses girl.
)

I swallowed another pill. Before it had time to kick in, another.

Another. Another. Another. Another.

All the way down the bottle.

———

Armin and I met at a coffee shop in Evanston. Somewhere we didn’t know anybody, busy and anonymous. He wrapped me in his arms and for a moment it actually felt real.

“I’ve missed you,” he breathed against my hair, and kissed my ear.

His wool coat scratched my face. I sat down at the table.

“Are you all right?”

I gazed through the window at gray people on a gray street. Valentine’s was coming, everything festooned with hearts in panty pink and
Scarlet Letter
red, and I thought, What if they were real? What if they’d been ripped beating and raw from a thousand chests? Would you show them then?

“Laney.”

I looked at him.

“Are you high?”

“No.”

A hundred and twenty milligrams of oxycodone purred in my blood.

He leaned across the table, that handsome face creased with worry. “Sleeping poorly? You’ve got dark circles under your eyes.”

“Can you be my boyfriend for a minute and not my fucking doctor?”

Armin sat back as if he’d been punched.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

The shrieking and caterwauling of espresso machines seemed the perfect soundtrack to this moment. I closed my eyes, summoned my softness. Reached across the table and tried to look small and needy.

“It’s been really hard, not seeing you.”

He covered both my hands with one of his. “We’re together now.”

“Yes, we are. Together.”

He eyed me strangely. Maybe there was something in my voice.

“You look exhausted,” he said. “How are you really?”

He looked pretty scruffy himself. His stubble had become a light beard, that artful bedhead now unstyled, legit bedhead. He wore a dress shirt that was done up one button off. It warmed the ice around my heart a little.

“I’m the same old messed-up freak,” I said. “Have you seen the news?”

His eyes swept across the coffeehouse. We were well isolated by noise and space. “They bought the Kenosha story.”

“He’s lying to the cops. I know he remembers.”

Armin lifted his hand. Both of mine had become fists.

“Why would he lie?” he said.

“Because he’s Zoeller. He manipulates people because he can. He doesn’t need a reason—he gets off on control.”

Armin didn’t say,
Like you
, but I saw it in his eyes.

“All we can do is remain vigilant,” he said. “And go on with our lives. Because that’s what looks normal.”

“We fake it.” The way I’ve been faking with you.

He eyed me oddly again and I wondered if I’d said it out loud.

Get a fucking grip, Laney.

“How’s Blythe?” I said.

Armin glanced at the coffee bar. “Want something to drink?”

It was all I could do not to ask again while they prepped our order. I shifted weight from one foot to the other, paced a small circuit, bared my teeth at the Valentine’s mugs. When Armin asked about school I growled. Finally he said, “Why don’t you go for a cigarette or something?”

Because it reminds me of her. Because everything fucking reminds me of her.

“Sorry.” I put a hand on his chest, rested my head on him experimentally. “I’m so wound up. I shouldn’t take it out on you.”

He sighed into my hair. The heat made me aware of how cold I was. I shivered and his arms circled me, big and strong and supportive.

Everything a girl could want.

I watched him pay for our coffee, pulling out that silver money clip with the familiar symbol. Two discs. Eclipse.

Falls the Shadow.

At the table I cupped my hands around the mug, bathing my face in steam.

“Blythe’s scared,” Armin said finally. “The cops have been questioning her. A lot.” He spun his mug, frowning. “Zoeller won’t ID her but it doesn’t matter. She’s got a record. All petty stuff, misdemeanors, but it establishes a history of violence.”

“History of violence? What, they think she went from punching assholes at clubs to almost killing someone?”

“All I know is she’s a ‘person of interest.’ ”

My hands clenched scalding ceramic. The burn felt good. First real thing I’d felt in a while.

“They canvassed the neighborhood,” Armin went on. “Witnesses confirmed a gunshot. Blythe says the cops are pressing her for names, asking about ‘others.’ Seems their theory is that it was two unrelated crimes: vandalism and attempted robbery.”

“Shit.”

“And it gets worse. They keep mentioning her visa.”

My spine went straight as if a blade touched it. “They can’t.”

“I don’t know what they can do, exactly. But we need to be very cautious. We can’t do anything that links her to Zoeller, or you. I think it’s best if you refrain from contact with her until she graduates.”

It hit me in the chest like a Mack truck. “What?”

“It’s just a few more months.”

“It’s half a year.” It’s eternity. “This makes no sense. Why go after her if Z’s not pressing charges?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she’s a link between you and him.”

“But they don’t consider me a person of interest.”

“I don’t have all the answers, Laney.”

If I wasn’t gripping something I might’ve throttled him. “I can’t do it. I can’t wait that long.”

That strange look again. “Wait for what?”

Stay calm. Maintain eye contact. “She’s my best friend. I haven’t seen her in weeks. Now you’re saying I have to abandon her, after all of this? I can’t.”

“Well, you fucking dragged her into it,” he snapped, twisting his mug so hard hot coffee slopped over the rim.

We stared at each other.

“I’m sorry.” He rested his head in his palm. “I’m freaking out a bit, too.”

You’re freaking out, I thought. You’re telling me I have to cut contact with the girl I love for six months.

“I won’t let anything bad happen to her,” he said. “I’ll fight this. I’ll retain the best immigration lawyer money can buy. I’ll even marry her, if she wants. We talked about it a long time ago. A green card marriage. As a joke.”

Steam drifted into my mouth. I was gaping.

Joke. Right.

He touched my hand on the mug. “I love her like a friend, Laney. Like you do. Neither of us wants to lose her.”

You have no idea.

I didn’t know who I hated more at that moment: myself or him.

There was only one way to make myself feel better right now. To combat the powerlessness I felt. To feel closer to her, in some sick way.

“Armin.” I curled my fingers around his hand. “I hate when we’re apart. The three of us.”

“I do, too.”

“We need each other. I need you. I’m not whole without you.”

He looked into my eyes and spoke in that rasping voice. “Come home with me, Laney.”

Something dark in me smiled.

“Yes,” I said.

And I did.