Scar Flowers (28 page)

One of hers.

“Why are you talking to me then?”

“It’s not my idea.” Faith blew air at the ceiling. As she slouched in her seat, her knee
rested against his.

“What’s so secret that you’re not supposed to tell me?”

“I can’t give you a lot of details. If she figured it out, she’d make me tell her everything . . . I only have two days a week I can leave the house on my own as it is.”

“She. You mean Leah?”

Faith nodded. Wings of black hair swung and grazed her jaw.

“How long have you been there?”

“Two years. Angel’s been there six months, but I don’t know much about him. I’m not supposed to speak unless spoken to and especially not to him. She thinks I’ll try to seduce him. She’s not big on het sex going down in her house.”

Now it was his turn to raise his eyebrows at her.

“If you’re thinking about ol’ Tractor Pull Angel, forget it. And guys don’t get anything but a hard-on from Leah.” She laughed and shrugged out of her leather jacket as the bartender walked by. “Miss, may I have a glass of ice water?”

He thought back to Angel putting a fist through the dry
-wall. Men saved reactions like that for women they slept with, not ones they’d only been teased by.

Then again, here he was. Leaving his career to rot while he pursued a woman who didn’t want him. Was that any less inexplic
-able than punching walls over a tease?

As for Faith, she reminded him of the street kids he
had interviewed for
Poppies Are Red
, of the people who stood at stop-lights and freeway entrances holding homemade cardboard signs. It was anyone’s guess as to how much of their presentation was true, but they clearly needed something.

“What about you?” he asked.

She drained half of her water, paused for breath, then tilted the glass to drink again, but before it met her lips a splash landed on her white tank top.

“Damn. It’s cold.” Faith dabbed at the spreading moisture on her left breast with a paper napkin. Her nipples stood out under the tight cotton.

“What about you?” he repeated, a note of irritation in his voice. He suspected that the spilled ice water was no accident and yet it worked on him. The memory of how she had raised her shift, during his first visit to the house, to model the scratches and bruises on her naked body. The dimple above and crease below each of her buttocks. Simon moved his knee away from Faith’s and turned his gaze up at the antique wooden bar, which featured back-lit images of the entwined marble lovers in Rodin’s
The Kiss
.

“What do I get? From her?” Faith probed an ice cube with her finger. “Jealousy. She’s afraid to let me out into the vanilla world without her anymore.”

Simon took a gulp of beer. Bubbles rose from the bottom of the pint and trapped themselves in a froth at the surface.

“Vanilla?”

“You know. Normal. Missionary-position sex. Marriage and kids and church on Sundays. Not like our life, where cruel Mommy sends little Faith to the salon every three weeks for a full Brazilian bikini wax.” She quirked one side of her mouth.

“Why do you stay with her?” he asked.

She shrugged and drew her finger through the puddled rings from her water glass.

“Because I want to. You wouldn’t understand.” Faith lifted her mug to drink. Her wrists were smooth and pale with angular knobs on the outsides.

Little Miss Innocent.

“Let me get this straight. The only reason you stay at the house is because you enjoy living like a prisoner. And
yet you went through the trouble to find me . . . why?”

Faith picked up a knife and consulted her reflection in it as she touched up her lipstick, then set it down neatly. “You’ve got a sweet”—she glanced down, as if she could see straight through the table and into his lap—“
personality, Mr. Director, and I’m sure you’re used to getting what you want. But Leah’s my lover, and she’s not interested in you.”

The urge to lunge across the table and grab her throat twitched in his limbs.

“Is that so?”

“Yes. That means no phone calls, no coming by the house. Forget about her.” Faith snaked her arms into her jacket and shrugged it on, then tossed a wad of dollar bills on the table.

“That’s it? The important message you hunted me down to tell me?”

Faith pressed her lips together and stared at the wooden wainscoting. He tried several times to get her to speak, but she would not answer him.

“Fine,” he said at last. “Do you need a ride home?”

S
he nodded. Here he was following her again, only this time hair covered her small ears, and her jacket concealed the scars on her shoulder blades. Outside, the sun had sunk, and a golden glow bathed the tops of the buildings. Shadows of trees and small stones clung to the ground.

Another ride followed, the two of them crouched together like wrestlers. He kept expecting a car next to them in traffic to contain a redhead in dark glasses who would roll down the window and say,
Get in. Leave the girl
. Pathetic, to waste time dreaming up things like that.

As they approached Leah’s neighborhood
, the air became thick with flower petals and pollen, and he grew drunk on acceleration and a sort of hopeless anger. These streets had become familiar to him, but no one cared that he was here except for this girl, who clung to him as they moved.

Near Leah’s house, as he slowed for a turn
, she said, “Drop me off anywhere.”

The wistful note in her voice and the way she kept her cheek pressed to his back were at odds with her apparent anger at him in the restaurant.

He pulled off to the side of the road and balanced the rumbling bike. “The place I’m staying is just around the corner.”

“Yes,” she said after a moment. Whether she meant it as simple agreement or as consent, he did not give her a chance to elucidate. In minutes
, they arrived at the cottage.

It was dark inside. The rhododendrons pressed at the windows like prowlers, their spiky silhouettes black against a lavender-
gray sky. The place smelled as if it had been sealed for years, with clumps of dust along the baseboards, a straggling black cord from an unplugged clock. He hunted for the switch on the lamp, almost knocking the shade off, while she sat on the couch, the only seat.

“
Just a glass of water,” she said, and wouldn’t take off her coat.

Because Faith was here
, he expected Leah herself to be in the next room, listening. Smiling at his confusion. But he was alone with Faith. Leah’s lover.

It could be true. Faith had been reluctant to tell him why she lived at Leah’s house and only revealed her true status in a burst of emotion afterward. As if she were protecting something. Or someone.

The girl’s features were softer in the crescent of lamplight, shadowed under the improbable wealth of black hair. She fell silent, absorbed in chipping a patch of polish off her fingernail, until the sound of moving air molecules was as loud as a shout.

“You said you
’re afraid Leah will find out you talked to me.”

“Not
that we talked. She sent me. I meant
what
we talked about. If I told you too much about her. About us.”

“How would she know?”

“There are peepholes in every room. I know she watched us when we were together in the bath, and she might have been able to tell that . . .” Faith chewed her lip. “She always knows where the clients are and what they’re doing. It’s stupid, but sometimes I think she knows what I’m doing, even when I’m outside like this.”

“Clients.”

“Yes. Those are the only other people I see there, except for the gardener. The guy who checks the fish pond, things like that. She keeps files on the clients, and sometimes she reads them to me. Some of them are pretty pathetic.”

The folder Leah wrote in as he watched her through the grill of the confessional after his first session, one of perhaps a hundred in her office
. . . had that been his file?

Some of them are pretty pathetic.
Yeah. Good for a laugh between lovers.

“Is that all?”

“I need to know you’re not angry. I know she was unfair to you, but I hope you’ll leave us in peace now.” Faith stared down at her lap. She shrank under her heavy jacket, as if a gust of wind could blow her away, trembling, like bird’s down caught on a twig.

Maybe her brazen attitude earlier had been a defense. She was protecting her own interests, but she had no bargaining power and had to plead with him. Was that it?

“Why should I?”

“I’ve watched you. You
. . .” She picked at a nub of thread in the couch, twisted it between her fingers. The movement brought her closer to him, and he found himself trying to catch the scent of Leah’s house on her clothing, but there was only a hint of Faith’s sweat, which registered sharply in his brain. Sourdough and fresh-cut grass. “I’m at the house because I’m precious there. Something valuable that’s cared for. I’ve always thought that suffering was noble, a noble word. You have to be strong. Like how the hero always suffers . . .” She drew her eyebrows together, then closed her eyes. “I’m not explaining it very well. But I thought you might understand.”

Understand? Understand what it meant to be Leah’s creature, to be afraid to make a move without her approval?

“Being someone’s secret is the loneliest thing,” whispered Faith.

“What?”

She did not seem to hear him. Her eyes welled up, like brimming cups that might spill. “She says things that I can’t forget.”

“Like what?”

“Never mind. It won’t make sense.”

“You brought it up.”

Faith gazed at the floor, then said, “The first time you came to the house. She said, ‘Simon reminds you of Angel, doesn’t he?’ Then she asked if she should give me to one of you, and if so, which one.”

That afternoon at Leah’s house, the sunlight had strained to reach them through the walls of distorted glass, as the girl modeled her bruises from the other side of the wrought
-iron gate. What had made Leah lock that gate? What had she wanted him to stay away from—Faith? Everything related to Leah boiled down to the same things: a tease, a promise, a dismissal.

“What did you mean when you talked about us being alone together at the house and that she might be able to tell something? What might she have figured out?”

She shrugged, intent on her fingernails. The tip of her nose flushed as if she might cry. “It doesn’t matter. Whatever I say, you’ll do what Leah wants. And so will I. I’ve tried to leave her, but I can’t.”

An idea of what was behind her words came to him,
something to do with how she watched him at the house, how she cradled his body in the bath. She thought she wanted him. Simon pushed the idea away. But everything that had happened at Leah’s still tingled in his blood. He was back under the shower with Leah leaning in close, her tongue a print of heat on his, the damp ends of her hair sculpted against his skin. With the memory of Faith’s hands on him, her mouth.

Mermaids
. . . Don’t touch . . . I’m not for you.

Whose rule
s, whose voice, was that? Telling him what to do.

It would be best if you didn’t come here again.

He was bound to no one. Certainly not to Leah, who would laugh at the idea. Under the lamplight, Faith’s lips gleamed smooth as marble. She moved to get up, and he took her hand. Because she wanted him to. Because he wanted to. It was the first solid thing he had felt for days, drifting through questions of who he was.

U
nder the rings her fingers were long and slender, the skin soft. Her hand was cold. Here was something of Leah’s, something forbidden, and it had chosen him.

“I have to go,” Faith said. She didn’t move, didn’t resist when he turned her face toward him. “I have to go. I belong to her.”

“No you don’t. Not here.” Some things were still simple. Faith’s eyes were enormous. Her collarbone protruded from where he could feel her pulse, warm and racing. She raised her hand to his as if to fend him off, but their fingers ended up laced together, their faces an inch apart.

Just
a kiss and tell her she’s beautiful. To keep her talking, that’s all. Don’t ruin it. Don’t give in and involve her more than you have to.

By the time he had thought of what to say, Faith’s lips were already against his mouth, her hands on his face. He felt her as a wordless message, a network of veins, full
of hope. The ride from this afternoon still throbbed in him, the sunlight that blanketed his shoulders, the torque of small accelerations and the giddy swing and deep tilt of taking the turns. After not having ridden for months, his muscles had lagged, his reactions smeared across too many seconds. He may have half-forgotten how to ride, but this, the ritual courting and merging of flesh, this he knew how to do, even if everything else fell apart, riddled with questions. Why shouldn’t he accept this, when it was offered?