Something was Wrong

Her fingers still tasted like the night before as she pulled at my lower lip in the shadowy haze of dawn light breaking. She was asleep, or only just, and slowly turned into a stranger once again as the drugs wore off. Nothing hard. Nothing shocking. Just a little Stella Blue bought off a fleece behind the pool hall the night before. It was a cold buzz that swept over us slowly and married nicely with the rounds of shots she ordered one after the other. Something was wrong.

There was a moment or two when I wanted to stop. That pesky voice of chivalry, not quite drowned yet, holding me to my “principles.” It was then that she’d lean in and our foreheads met like sapling poles, holding us up. She leaned to me and I to her. I threw my arm around her back and we were a tipi in the middle of a crowded bar. The marks on her arm were brightly colored sun gods emblazoned across the tanned bison canvas of our embrace. She tugged at my cheek with her dry lips and whispered into my ear.

“Let’s get out of here.”

It was twenty minutes to last call when I held the car door open for her. She stumbled towards it and then stopped dead in her tracks, staring at my small gesture in disbelief. Kindness was alien to her, or so it would seem, and my mannered ways might well have been a herd of elephant tearing down 38th street.

“Where’s my bag? I need my fucking...”
“I have it right here.”

She fell towards me and reached out to touch my cheek.

As we drove through the winding course of side streets I thought about all the things I didn’t know about her.  Her name was at the top of the list. She gave me “a” name, Jennifer, but that wasn’t the girl wrenching away at my unyielding seatbelt with her manicured fists. Jennifer was just the singer of the song that played when I first sat to her right.  For all her luck she could have wound up a Loretta or one thirds of Wilson and Phillips.

We passed the small cemetery at O’Brian and Lockwood and she held her breath. The orange glow of a neon sign was caught in the single tear that rolled down the side of her face, tracing the pronounced jaw line of a high school cheerleader ten years down the road. I wanted to stop for the both of us, and I like to think I would have if she hadn’t turn to me and laughed.

“What day is it?”
“It’s Saturday by now.”
“No, what’s the…”
“The sixteenth.”
“Oh.”

We didn’t talk after that.

She lost her ID. That’s the excuse I gave myself as I drove her back to my place, nearly unconscious, and having forgotten her new address. It was near the University, she said beneath her breath. On Clark or Erickson or Eastwick or Manor Way. She laid her hand upon my right knee and squeezed those small pink nails in deep. She smiled.

I walked her across the courtyard and past the honeycomb of mailboxes to the cramped efficiency with the stolen six. I laid her carefully down on the couch, holding the back of her head in my hand like an infant, and placed her honey red pumps by the door. Toes pointing East.  I washed my face and poured myself a small glass of iced tea.

The kitchen looked out upon the living room through a vented space above the serving counter.  I stood there for what might have been an hour, watching her turn and adjust on my mother’s old sleeper.  I held a puff or two in and timed their release with her slow melodious breath.  She looked to be twenty-four or so in the giving light the bathroom fixtures bounced off my faux-stucco divider.  She looked twenty in the bar and thirty-five beneath the flashing red stop light on the drive home.  The thought to give her a small kiss on her pale cheek did not escape me.

A whispered “good night” and I crawled into my bed alone and incapable of sleeping. I watched the sedated progress of traffic as it rolled out of my view through the open blinds. I listened to a couple joyfully singing as they passed my window. I noticed a crack in the plaster as my ceiling met the off-white wall. I took a sip and a drag and closed my eyes for a moment.

I opened them as bare feet tiptoed down the hallway.  A hand grazed the wall for balance and she whispered for me in the distance.  Weary of conversation I closed my eyes again and pretended I was asleep.  She entered the room and studied me for only a moment before climbing in at my side.  She placed a hand on my chest and laid her head down across the divot of my collar bone.

“I miss you.”

She pulled my arm down from behind my pillow, rested it across the small of her back, and slipped away.